Buried Secrets

51.



“Hi, Mr. Heller,” Jillian Alperin said as I entered the office. “Dorothy’s looking for you.”

“You’re allowed to call me Nick,” I said, for what must have been the twentieth time since she’d started working for me.

“Thank you, Mr. Heller, but I’m not comfortable with that.”

“Right,” I said. “Then just call me El Jefe.”

“Excuse me?”

I noticed the butterfly tattoo on her right shoulder. She was wearing some kind of lacy tank top that bared a few inches of her midriff. Her navel was pierced. “What does that mean, the butterfly?” I asked.

“It’s a symbol of freedom and metamorphosis. I got it when I stopped eating flesh.”

“You used to be a cannibal? I didn’t see that on your job application.”

“What? I mean, I used to eat meat. I have a ‘meat is murder’ tattoo on my lower back, want to see it?” She stood up and turned around.

Dorothy’s voice rang out as she approached. “Jillian, you can show your tramp stamps after work and on your own time. Also, you and I need to have a talk about appropriate office attire.”

“You said I didn’t have to wear high heels.”

Dorothy shook her head. “I got that picture you sent,” she said to me. “I’ve been Googling tattoos, but no luck so far.”

“My brother worked in a tattoo parlor in Saugus,” Jillian said.

“How about you replace the toner cartridge like I asked,” Dorothy said.

* * *



IN MY office, I said, “Remind me why you hired Jillian again.”

“She’s a very, very smart young woman.”

“That escaped me.”

“I admit she’s taking a little longer to catch on to the clerical stuff than I expected—”

“Isn’t her job all about the clerical stuff?”

“Give her a chance,” she told me sternly, “or you can hire her replacement. Now, if we can please move on. I found spyware on our network.”

“What kind of spyware?”

“Well, a molar virus. It burrowed into our intranet, injected code, and opened a back door. For a couple of days now it’s been scanning all volumes for protected files and then sending them out.”

“That’s how they got my security system codes,” I said. “Where did it send to?”

She shook her head. “Proxy servers so many times removed that it’s just about impossible to find. But I rooted it out. It should be gone.”

“How did it get onto our system in the first place?”

“I’m working on that. I—”

My intercom buzzed, and Jillian said, “You have a visitor.”

I looked at Dorothy, who shrugged. “Name?” I said.

“Belinda Marcus,” Jillian said.





52.



“I’m worried sick about Marshall,” Belinda said. “I think he’s going to have a heart attack.” She was wearing a light brown scoop-neck linen top with sequins around the neckline. It sort of belled out at the midriff. She threw out her thin arms and embraced me. Her perfume smelled like bathroom deodorizer.

“I’m sorry, Belinda, did we have an appointment?”

She sat and folded her legs. “No, we did not, Nick, but we need to talk.”

“Give me one quick second.” I turned my chair and typed out an instant message to Dorothy:



Need bkgd on Belinda Marcus ASAP.



How soon?



Immediately. Whatever you can get.



“I’m all yours,” I said. “Can I get you a Coke?”

“The only soda I drink is Diet Pepsi, but I don’t need the caffeine. Nick, I know I should have called first, but Marshall had to go in to the office, and I got a ride with him. I told him I wanted to meet a girlfriend for coffee in the Back Bay.”

“Why did he have to go to the office?”

She shook her head. “I’m sure it’s about Alexa. It has to be. Nick, I’ve been wanting to talk to y’all privately, without Marshall, since this whole nightmare began.”

I nodded.

“I feel like I’m being disloyal, and he’d probably kill me if he knew I was telling y’all this. But I—I’m just at my wit’s end, and someone needs to say something. I know Marshall’s your old and dear friend, and you barely know me, I understand that, but can you please promise me Marshall will never find out we spoke?” She bit her lower lip and held her breath and waited for my response.

I paused a moment. “Okay.”

She let out a sigh. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. Nick, you need to know that Marshall is … he’s under a great deal of pressure. All he wants is to get his beloved daughter back, but they … they won’t let him hand over what they want, and it’s tearing him up inside.”

“Who won’t let him?”

She looked at me anxiously. “David Schechter.”

“How do you know this? Does he talk to you about it?”

“Never. I’ve … just heard them arguing. I’ve heard Marshall pleading with him, it would break your heart.”

“So you must know what Mercury is?”

She shook her head violently. “I don’t. I really don’t. I mean, it’s a file of some sort, but I have no idea what it’s about. I don’t care if it’s the answers to next Sunday’s New York Times crossword puzzle or the nuclear codes. We’ve got to give it to them. We’ve got to get that girl free.”

“So why are you telling me?”

She studied her fingernails. It looked like a brand-new manicure. The polish matched her blouse. “Marshall is so deep in some kind of trouble, and I don’t know who to turn to.”

I looked at my computer screen. An instant message had popped up from Dorothy. A few lines of text.

“I’m sure he trusts you,” I said. “You’ve been married for, what, three years, right?”

She nodded.

“You were a flight attendant when you met Marshall?”

She nodded, smiled. Her smile was abashed and ruefully embarrassed and pleased, all at once. “He saved me,” she said. “I’ve always hated flying.”

“That’s got to be a Georgia accent.”

“Very good,” she said. “A little town called Barnesville.”

“Are you serious? Barnesville, Georgia? I love Barnesville!”

“Have you been there? Really?”

“Are you kidding, I dated a girl from Barnesville. Went down there a bunch, met her parents and her brothers and sisters.”

Belinda didn’t look terribly interested. “What’s her name? Everyone knows everyone down there.”

“Purcell. Cindy Purcell?”

Belinda shook her head. “She must be a lot younger.”

“But I’m sure you’ve eaten at her parents’ restaurant, Brownie’s.”

“Oh, sure. But Nick—”

“I’ve never had anything like their low-country boil.”

“Never had that dish, but I’m sure it’s good. Southern cooking is the best, isn’t it? I miss it so.”

“Well,” I said, standing. “I’m glad you came in. I’m sure it wasn’t easy, but it sure was helpful.”

She remained seated. “I know what people call me. I know some people think I’m a gold digger because I happened to marry a wealthy man. But I didn’t marry Marshall for his money. I just want what’s best for him. And I want that girl back, Nick. Whatever it takes.”

* * *



AFTER SHE’D left, I called Dorothy in.

“You ever meet a Georgian who preferred Pepsi to Coke?” I said.

“I’m sure they exist. But no, I haven’t. And I’ve certainly never met a Georgian who uses the word ‘soda.’ Every soft drink is always ‘Coke.’ You didn’t really date a woman from Barnesville, did you?”

“No. And there’s no Brownie’s.”

“A good one about the low-country boil, Nick. If you’ve never had that, you’re not from Georgia. What tipped you off in the first place?”

“Her accent’s wrong. Words like ‘square’ and ‘here,’ she drops her R’s. Georgians don’t talk like that. And then there’s the way she keeps calling me ‘y’all.’”

“Good point. ‘Y’all’ is always plural. She’s not from Georgia, is she?”

“I don’t even think she’s southern.”

“Then why’s she faking it?”

“That’s what I want to find out. Can you do a little digging—?”

“Already started,” Dorothy said. “As soon as she said ‘Pepsi.’”





53.



Unlike Belinda Marcus, Francine Heller never wanted to be a rich man’s wife.

My mother had gone to the same small-town high school in upstate New York as my father. She was the class beauty. In her old photos she looked like Grace Kelly. Whereas my father, to put it delicately, was no Gregory Peck.

From the moment Victor Heller saw her, he launched an all-out campaign to win her over. My father was a live wire, a charmer, a wheedler. He was a force of nature. And when he wanted something he invariably got it.

Eventually he got Francine, of course, then kept her in a gilded cage for decades.

It was pretty clear what he saw in her—that sylphlike grace and almost regal presence, accompanied by an appealing frankness—but it was less clear what she saw in him besides the fact that he wanted her with a relentless, outsize ambition. Maybe that was all it took to win over an insecure girl. She needed to be needed. Her parents were divorced—her mother had moved to the Boston area, and the girls stayed behind with Dad, not wanting to change schools. They shuttled between parents. Maybe she craved stability.

Money certainly wasn’t part of the bargain, and I don’t think she ever fully understood Victor’s hunger for it. Her father, a lawyer for the State of New York, would reuse teabags to save a dime.

It was hardly a match made in heaven. Being married to the Dark Prince of Wall Street turned out to be a full-time job. She had to attend endless galas and cocktail parties. At every charity event the names of Mr. and Mrs. Heller invariably appeared in the printed program, in the shortest list of the biggest donors. Not merely the Patrons or Sponsors or, God forbid, the coupon-clipping Friends. Always the Benefactors, the President’s Circle, the Chairman’s Council, the Century Society.

When all she really wanted to do was stay home with her two little boys, me and Roger.

My father vanished when I was thirteen, a fugitive from justice with thirty-seven charges of financial misconduct trailing him like a pack of hounds. He traveled around Europe, eventually landing in Switzerland. All of his assets were frozen, and our family went from high-living to hardscrabble. The loss of security, combined with the humiliation, was traumatic for her, as it was for the rest of us. But I always wondered whether, on some level, she wasn’t relieved.

Relieved to be out of the golden bubble. Relieved to be free of command-performance hostess duties. Relieved to be away from his soul-destroying, oxygen-depleting narcissism.

When she’d found work as a personal assistant to Marshall Marcus, it was a lifesaver for her and for all of us. I guess it could have been demeaning—one day the guy’s a guest at your dinner table, the next you’re keeping his call list—but Marshall somehow made sure the situation didn’t feel that way. He didn’t make it feel like charity, either, though I suppose that’s what it was. Instead, she once explained to me, he made it seem like he was running a family business, and she was family.

Eventually she moved on, got a job teaching in a local elementary school. Now she was ostensibly retired, but she kept busy as a volunteer school librarian. She also took care of the old ladies in her condo complex. Need a ride to your eye doctor’s appointment? Call Frankie. Confused by the fine print of your prescription-drug benefit? Ask Frankie. She knew everything or knew how to find it out. I don’t know why she pretended to be retired, when she was busier than any medical resident.

And ever since she’d been liberated from the gilded cage, she spoke her mind. She took no crap from anybody. My sweet, soft-spoken mom had evolved into a plainspoken, peppery older woman.

It was delightful.

She lived on the bottom half of a “townhome” in a retirement community in Newton overlooking the reservoir. All the townhomes, set among winding paths and landscaped gardens, were identical. I could never tell them apart; I always got lost. It was like the Village in that old TV show The Prisoner, only with bingo.

The door flew open almost as soon as I pushed the buzzer. My mother was wearing turquoise pants and a white top under a flowing knitted caftan of rainbow hues and a necklace of big jade-colored glass beads. A few minimum touches of makeup, but she’d never needed much. In her sixties she was a gorgeous woman, with sapphire blue eyes and dark eyelashes and a milky complexion, which she really shouldn’t have had, given how much she smoked. When my father first met her she must have been a knockout.

She was holding a cigarette, as always. A nimbus of smoke swirled around her. Even before she had a chance to say hello, a large dark projectile launched itself at me from behind her like a cruise missile.

I tried to sidestep, but her dog was on me, baring its glistening fangs, snarling and barking in a rabid frenzy, its sharp toenails raking my chest and arms through my pullover. I tried to knee it down, but the hound from hell was far too wiry and nimble and that only made it come at me more furiously.

“Down, Lilly,” my mother said in a matter-of-fact tone. Her voice had gotten lower and huskier from decades of smoking. The beast promptly dropped to the tiled entry hall, head resting on its paws. But it continued staring at me menacingly, growling softly.

“I’m glad she obeys you,” I said. “I think I was about to lose an eye.”

“Nah, she’s a love pooch, aren’t you, Lilly-willie? Come here.” She reached out one arm to hug me. The other one she kept splayed backward, daintily holding her cigarette away from me in two long curved fingers as if she were channeling Bette Davis.

As I entered, the beast got up to follow us, nails clacking on the wooden floor. It stayed so close it kept bumping against my legs. This seemed deliberate, a warning: It could rip out my throat at any time. It was just waiting for its Master to leave the room for a few seconds.

“Gabe here?” I said.

“In his room playing some computer game where you’re a soldier and you kill a lot of people. There’s a lot of bombs and explosions. I told him to put on his headphones. The noise was starting to bug me.”

That was just as well. I didn’t want him overhearing what I had to say. “Do you really want Gabe breathing all this secondhand smoke?” I said.

She squinted at me through slitted eyes as a plume of smoke snaked around between us. “Have you ever seen Call of Duty: Modern Warfare? I think cigarette smoke is the least of his problems.”

“Fair enough.” I tried never to argue with my mother.

“Listen, honey, I know you’re awfully busy, but do you think you could make some time to teach him to drive?”

“He wants to drive?”

“He just got his learner’s permit.”

“What about driving school?”

She scowled at me. “Oh, for God’s sake, Nick, you’re the only father figure in the kid’s life. You’re his godfather. Don’t you remember how disappointed you were when you had to learn from me because your father was gone?”

“I wasn’t disappointed.”

“Lord knows he doesn’t want me to teach him.”

“You’re absolutely right. I’ll do it. Though the thought of Gabe on the Beltway…”

“And what kind of foolishness are you putting in his head about how he shouldn’t look in Lilly’s eyes or he’ll drop dead?”

I shrugged. “Busted. You can also blame me for that vegetarian kick he’s on now. He picked that up from my new office manager.” I smiled, shook my head. “I think he’s trying to impress her.”

“Honey, as long as he’s eating, what do I care. You want me to remind you of some of the things you did to impress girls? How about when you tried to grow a goatee when you were fourteen so Jennie Watson would think you were manly?”

I groaned.

“Are you getting any sleep?”

“I had to work late last night.”

Her condo was very IKEA: comfortable but unstylish. Plexiglas stools around the apartment’s “kitchen nook.” An armchair in some sort of maroon chintz floral pattern next to a matching couch. On the counter was a Boston Globe folded to the crossword puzzle, and a copy of Modern Maturity that looked like she’d actually read it.

I sat in the chintz armchair and she sat at the end of the couch, put out her cigarette in an immaculate stone ashtray.

“Nicky, my book group is meeting in a few minutes, so can we make this quick?”

“Just a couple of questions. When was the last time you talked to Alexa?”

She lighted another cigarette with a cheap Bic lighter and inhaled deeply. “Couple, three days ago. Yesterday Marshall called me to ask if she was here. She’s acting up again, isn’t she?”

I shook my head.

“Gabe tells me she spent the night at her friend Taylor’s house on Beacon Hill—you know her father’s Dick Armstrong, the senator?—but I think we know what that really means. She’s a beautiful girl, and—”

“It’s nothing like that.”

She looked up. “Did she run away?”

“No.”

She studied my face. “Something happened to her,” she said.

I hesitated.

“Tell me what happened to her, Nick.”

I did.





54.



I expected her to be upset.

But I wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of her reaction.

She seemed to crumple, to collapse in on herself in a way I’d never seen before. She gave a terrible anguished cry, and tears spilled from her eyes. I hugged her, and it was several minutes before she was able to talk.

“I know you care for her—”

“Care for her? Oh, honey, I love that girl.” Her voice trembled.

“I know.”

She couldn’t talk for a while. Then she said, “How much are they demanding?”

“They must have given her a script. She said they want something called Mercury. Marshall says he has no idea what that referred to.”

“Mercury?”

“You worked for him for years. You must have come across that name in a file or a letter or something.”

“My memory’s still sharp, thank God. That doesn’t ring any bells. But if Marshall has the slightest idea what Mercury is, he’ll give it to them in a heartbeat. He’d give up his fortune to get his daughter back.”

“If he had a fortune left.”

“I never heard anything about this. He didn’t mention his troubles at all. But he and I don’t talk much anymore. How widely known is it that he’s … what?”

“Ruined. So far he’s somehow managed to contain it. But I’m sure the word will get out any day now. He doesn’t confide in you?”

“Not since Belinda moved in.”

“That’s quite a change.”

“Honey, Marshall used to check in with me before he used the john. That’s the difference between him and your father. One of the many differences. Marshall actually respected my judgment.” This was painful to hear, but my mother was always allergic to self-pity, and she said it lightly.

“You think she’s deliberately cutting you off from him?”

She inhaled deeply. The red ember at the tip of the cigarette flared and crackled and hissed. “They’ve had me over to dinner twice, and she’s always hugging me and telling me in that Georgia peach accent that ‘We just have to go shopping on Newbury Street, me and you,’ and ‘Why don’t we see more of you?’ But whenever I call Marshall at home, she answers the phone and says she’ll pass along a message, and I doubt he ever gets it.”

“What about e-mail?”

“She changed his e-mail address, and I never got the new one. She says he has to be much more careful, much less accessible. So I have to e-mail Belinda, and she actually answers for him.”

“Well, Alexa doesn’t get along with her either.”

She shook her head, blew out a lungful of smoke. “Oh, that woman is toxic. Alexa was always complaining about her, and I kept urging her to give Belinda a chance, it’s not easy being a stepmother. Until I met the woman and understood. I think Belinda actually hates her stepdaughter. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“She talks about how much she adores Alexa.”

“In front of others. With Alexa, she doesn’t bother concealing it.”

“Maybe that’s not the only thing she’s concealing. You haven’t complained to Marshall about being cut off?”

“Sure I did. At the beginning. He’d just shrug and say, ‘I’ve learned not to argue.’”

“Strange.”

“I see this sort of thing happen to a lot of married men as they get older. Their wives start taking charge of their social lives, then their friendships. The husbands abdicate all responsibility because they’re too busy or they’d just as soon not take the initiative, and before you know it they’re wholly owned subsidiaries of their ladies. Even rich and powerful men like Marshall … used to be. I think the only person he sees outside the office besides Belinda is David Schechter.”

“How long has Schechter been his lawyer?”

“Schecky? He’s not Marshall’s lawyer.”

“Then what is he?”

“You know how Mafia dons always have an adviser?”

“A consigliere?”

“That’s it. Schecky is Marshall’s consigliere.”

“Advising him on what?”

“I just think he’s someone whose judgment Marshall trusts.”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know him. But Marshall once told me he has the most extensive files he’s ever seen. Reminded him of J. Edgar Hoover.”

I nodded, thought for a moment. “Why did Marshall hire you in the first place?”

She smiled. “You mean, why would he hire a woman with no particular skills to run his office?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Yes, it is,” she said kindly. “You don’t want to hurt my feelings. That’s all right.” She smiled. “Marshall is a good man. A good person. He saw what had happened to us after your father left. How the government took everything. Was there a part of him that thought, There but for the grace of God go I? Sure, probably.”

“You always said that he was a friend of Dad’s, and that’s why he wanted to help.”

“That’s right.”

“But he didn’t know you, did he?”

“Not really. He knew your father much better. But that’s Marshall. He’s the most generous person I know. He just loves to help people. And that was a time when I needed help, desperately. I was a mother with two teenage sons and no house and no money. We’d gone from that house in Bedford to sharing Mom’s split-level ranch in Malden. I had no income and no foreseeable income. Imagine how I must have felt.”

In the scale of human misery, that barely registered, I knew. But at the same time I truly couldn’t conceive of what it must have been like to be Francine Heller, ripped untimely from her chrysalis of immense gilded wealth, naked and shivering, lost and vulnerable, not knowing who to turn to.

“I can’t,” I admitted. “But you were a hero. That much I do know.”

She gripped my hand in her small soft warm one. “Oh, for God’s sake, not even close. But you need to understand how much it meant to me to have this man step in, someone I barely knew, and offer me not just an income, a way to keep food on the table, but an actual job. A way for me to do something useful.”

She looked so uncomfortable that I felt bad I’d raised the subject. She shifted in her seat, blew out a puff of smoke, stubbed out her cigarette, her face turned away.

“I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors that Marshall secretly cooperated with the SEC when they were building their case against Dad. In effect helped turn Dad in.” If they were true, though, then Marcus would have hired my mother for one very simple reason: guilt.

“Never. Not Marshall.”

“Well, you know him as well as anyone.”

“I did, anyway. So let me ask you something.”

“Sure.”

“Do you think these kidnappers will let her go if they get what they want?” She asked this with such hushed desperation that I had no choice but to give her, dishonestly, the assurance that she, like Marcus, seemed to crave so badly.

“Yes.”

“Why are you saying that?”

“Why? Because the typical pattern in a kidnap-for-ransom situation—”

“That’s not what I’m asking. I mean, why do you think I can’t hear the truth? I know when you’re not being honest, Nick. I’m your mother.”

I’d always thought that I’d gotten my talent at reading people from her. She was, like me, what Sigmund Freud called a Menschenkenner. Loosely translated, that meant a “good judge of character.” But it went beyond that. She and I both had an unusual ability to read faces and expressions and intuit whether people were telling us the truth. It’s certainly not foolproof, and it’s not at all like being a human polygraph. It’s merely an innate talent, the way some people are natural painters or can tell stories or have perfect pitch. We were good at detecting lies. Though not perfect.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think they’re going to let her go.”