Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

She gave me a hard look, and finally she shrugged.

I had an instinct about Megan. Everyone else thought she was this hard-shelled corporate storm trooper. But I knew better. All the vilification and all the threats had to take a toll, even on her.

At the tiki-themed bar she ordered a Cosmo and I ordered a Buffalo Trace. The bar was empty — it was early — and the drinks arrived quickly.

I took a sip of the bourbon and said, “So I’m just a management consultant, but the way you restructured the Czech operation? Hats off.”

She turned to me, surprised, pleased. “I got a hell of a lot of pushback on that,” she said, and swigged some more of her Cosmo.

I said, “It’s like, you grab the wheel, you re-steer the boat, and everyone’s howling, You’re off course, you’re off course, you’re off course! And all you can say is, Did you notice I just steered us around a goddamned iceberg? You’re welcome. ”

Megan snorted delightedly. “You’re welcome, assholes, ” she added, setting down her drink a little harder than she probably meant to. “How long have you and Sukie been seeing each other?”

“Just a few weeks.”

“Are you the reason she’s been taking a sudden interest in the company?”

“Not at all.”

“Because you McKinsey types — you have a tendency to go from the hired hand to the boss. One day you’re a consultant, the next day you’re hiring consultants.”

“Nah, I’m here strictly for support. You heard about how she was attacked at her house in the city, right?”

“Of course. We all heard.”

“After what happened in Katonah, you have to take all these threats seriously. Margret Benson was a private investigator, I understand.” She knew I knew.

“She was.”

“And you hired her?”

She looked at me sharply, nodded.

“Where’d you find her?”

“She did some work for a friend. She came highly recommended.”

“Did she get what you wanted her to get?”

She drew herself up. “I’m sorry, that’s confidential.” She poked her index finger in the air so the waitress would know she wanted another round.

I thought of Maggie’s handwritten notes. The kind of information Megan had hired her to look for. “You must know your father well enough to know what he’s about to do, right?”

“At the family meeting, you mean?”

I nodded. “He’s going to declare bankruptcy, isn’t he? Isn’t the company in terrible financial shape?”

“Ha! Are you kidding?”

“Huh? Kimball Pharma has been losing money for years, hasn’t it?”

She chortled silently. She looked at me, then at her empty Cosmo glass, resentfully. Her next Cosmo, her third, came quickly. She took a big sip and then confided, “My father has been expecting a catastrophe for quite some time. The one thing you can say for him, he’s always a step ahead of everyone else.”

“A catastrophe?”

“All these lawsuits over Oxydone. He knew the day of reckoning was bound to come sooner or later.” She lowered her voice, stared at her glass. She sounded almost proud. “So he’s been sweeping cash aside. Squirreling it away. Into shell companies offshore. And categorizing all that cash as investments in research. So Kimball Pharma has been investing all of its profits into what we’re calling research. He started doing this eleven years ago.”

“Clever,” I said. “So when Kimball is forced to make huge legal settlements, it’ll have no assets to pay out. That actually works?”

“It’s not ethical, but it works. Not that ethics have ever stopped my father before. It’s a clever scam.”

I tried to probe further, but she got quiet. Gloomy, it seemed.

“What do you think happened to Maggie?” I said softly.

She tipped the nearly empty Cosmo glass to her lips and drained it. “Happened to her?” she murmured. “Got too close to the family. Too close to something she wasn’t s’pposed to know.”

“So you think she was murdered?”

She looked at me for a long time, then looked away. “Don’t you think so?” she said.

When I got back to our suite, I found Sukie on her computer doing edits on her film remotely, exchanging text messages with her editor. She looked up and said, “Did she confess?”

She was being arch, but I decided to take her seriously. “So do you think she did it?”

“What do you think?”

I’d considered it. I answered her evasive question with my own question. “Would Maggie have had a reason to meet with Megan outside the house that night?”

“If Megan asked her to, sure. To discuss the job she’d hired her to do. They might not want to talk about it inside the house.”

“And let’s say Megan caught her by surprise back there — a sudden shove from behind at the right place in the woods is all it would take. She’s a strong woman.”

“But why would she do it?”

“I don’t know. Unless Maggie turned up something she shouldn’t have and told her about it.”

She shook her head. “I don’t see it.”

I nodded slowly. When a private investigator works for an attorney, he or she is bound by confidentiality to the client. It’s like an extension of attorney-client privilege. Under some state laws, there are penalties for divulging information. She’d have every reason to observe confidentiality.

But say Maggie found the Tallinn file, full of evidence that the company knew how dangerous its flagship drug was and buried the warnings. I could see her refusing to observe client secrecy like she was supposed to. You keep your client’s secrets, yes — but she’d be outraged. Especially if Megan planned to keep the truth hidden. She’d do what she felt was the right thing, even if it caused her to lose a client and a payment. That was just who she was.

Sukie interrupted my thoughts. “You know, talking about the woods behind the house reminds me of something. I remember when I was maybe eleven or twelve, and there was a huge herd of deer, somewhere toward the back of the paddocks in Katonah. I ran at them, and of course, they scattered. As I knew they would. But there you had a couple thousand pounds of muscle, hoofs, and horns. And I was this shrimpy little thing. They could have charged me and trampled me to death.”

“Good point.”

“Well, my point is, there was some unwritten rule of nature saying which one of us was a danger to which. As long as everyone obeyed the rule, things would go on the way they always did. It’s like with my father. He’s a danger to us. He says what goes. He charges, we scatter. But maybe one day the script changes. We never know how much power we have until we use it. Who’s the dangerous one? Who’s the one in danger? It’s like a belief system. And beliefs can change.”

I nodded, smiled.

“What do you say we head out to the sales conference?” I said. “Establish our cover?”

She closed her laptop and got up to change. Since I didn’t have to change, I worked on locating Dr. Zubiri.

According to the program we’d been given at check-in, we’d missed his presentation. That had been the day before. But I was certain he hadn’t left. He’d want to enjoy a few days of ultra-luxury in the Caribbean. Anyone would.

The pre-dinner session was being held in an outdoor theater, open to the elements. It had squarish pillars and a swooping stone roof. This was not a thatched-roof kind of place. The theater’s sunken rows of seats were nearly filled, the theater dark. We found a couple of seats at the back.

A rap video was playing on a giant movie screen, and I’d never seen anything like it. A giant Oxydone inhaler with purple arms and legs was dancing with a pair of white guys in black hoodies and gold chains and dark sunglasses who were making elaborate gang signs. The giant inhaler was rapping about how he “got a lotta doctors on speed dial” and something about “the last mile” and “clinical trial.” We watched the screen, mesmerized.