Buried Secrets

3.



“Here’s the thing,” the short guy said. “I always like to know who I’m doing business with.”

I nodded, smiled.

What a jerk.

If Short Man’s Disease were recognized by modern medicine as the serious syndrome it is, all the textbooks would use Philip Curtis’s picture, along with those of Mussolini, Stalin, Attila the Hun, and of course the patron saint of all miniature tyrants, Napoléon Bonaparte. Granted, I’m over six feet, but I know tall guys with Short Man’s Disease too.

Philip Curtis, as he called himself, was so small and compact that I was convinced I could pick him up in one hand and hurl him through my office window, and by now I was sorely tempted to. He was maybe an inch or two above five feet, shiny bald, and wore enormous black-framed glasses, which he probably thought made him look more imposing, instead of like a turtle who’d lost his shell and was pissed off about it.

The vintage Patek Philippe watch on his wrist had to be sixty years old. That told me a lot. It was the only flashy object he wore, and it said “inherited money.” His Patek Philippe had been passed down, probably from his dad.

“I checked you out.” His brow arched significantly. “Did the whole due-diligence thing. Gotta say, you don’t leave a lot of tracks.”

“So I’m told.”

“You don’t have a website.”

“Don’t need one.”

“You’re not on Facebook.”

“My teenage nephew’s on it. Does that count?”

“Barely anything turned up on Google. So I asked around. Seems you’ve got an unusual background. Went to Yale but never graduated. Did a couple of summer internships at McKinsey, huh?”

“I was young. I didn’t know any better.”

His smile was reptilian. But a small reptile. A gecko, maybe. “I worked there myself.”

“And I was almost starting to respect you,” I said.

“The part I don’t get is, you dropped out of Yale to join the army. What was that all about? Guys like us don’t do that.”

“Go to Yale?”

He shook his head, annoyed. “You know, I thought the name ‘Heller’ sounded familiar. Your dad’s Victor Heller, right?”

I shrugged as if to say, You got me.

“Your father was a true legend.”

“Is,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“Is,” I repeated. “He’s still alive. Doing twenty-some years in prison.”

“Right, right. Well, he sure got the shaft, didn’t he?”

“So he tells people.” My father, Victor Heller, the so-called Dark Prince of Wall Street, was currently serving a twenty-eight-year sentence for securities fraud. “Legend” was a polite way of referring to him.

“I was always a big admirer of your dad’s. He was a real pioneer. Then again, I bet some potential clients, they hear you’re Victor Heller’s son, they’re gonna think twice about hiring you, huh?”

“You think?”

“You know what I mean, the whole…” He faltered, then probably decided he didn’t have to. He figured he’d made his point.

But I wasn’t going to let him off so easily. “You mean the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, right? Like father, like son?”

“Well, yeah, sort of. That might bother some guys, but not me. Uh-uh. Way I figure it, that means you’re probably not going to be too finicky about the gray areas.”

“The gray areas.”

“All the fussy legal stuff, know what I’m saying?”

“Ah, gotcha,” I said. For a long moment I found myself looking out the window. I’d been doing that a lot lately. I liked the view. You could see right down High Street to the ocean, the waterfront at Rowes Wharf framed by a grand Italianate marble arch.

I’d moved to Boston from Washington a few months ago and was lucky enough to find an office in an old brick-and-beam building in the financial district, a rehabbed nineteenth-century lead-pipe factory. From the outside it looked like a Victorian poorhouse out of Dickens. But on the inside, with its bare brick walls and tall arched windows and exposed ductwork and factory-floor open spaces, you couldn’t forget it was a place where they used to actually make stuff. And I liked that. It had a sort of steampunk vibe. The other tenants in the building were consulting firms, an accounting firm, and several small real-estate offices. On the first floor was an “exotic sushi and tapas” place that had gone out of business, and the showroom for Derderian Fine Oriental Rugs.

My office had belonged to some high-flying dot-com that made nothing, including money. They’d gone bust suddenly, so I caught a nice break on the price. They’d absconded so quickly they left all their fancy hanging metal-and-glass light fixtures and even some very expensive office chairs.

“So you say someone on your board of directors is leaking derogatory information about your company,” I said, turning around slowly, “and you want us to—how’d you put it?—‘plug the leak.’ Right?”

“Exactly.”

I gave him my finest conspiratorial grin. “Meaning you want their phones tapped and their e-mails accessed.”

“Hey, you’re a pro,” he said with a quick, smarmy wink. “I’d never tell you how to do your job.”

“Better not to know the details, right? How we work our magic?”

He nodded, a couple of sharp up-and-downs. “Plausible deniability and all that. You got it.”

“Of course. Obviously you know that what you’re asking me to do is basically illegal.”

“We’re both big boys,” he said.

I had to bite my lip. One of us was, anyway.

Just then my phone buzzed—an internal line—and I picked it up. “Yeah?”

“Okay, you were right.” The smoky voice of my forensic data tech, Dorothy Duval. “His name isn’t Philip Curtis.”

“Of course,” I said.

“Don’t rub it in.”

“Not at all,” I said. “It’s a teachable moment. You should know by now not to question me.”

“Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m stuck. If you have any ideas, just IM me, and I’ll check them out.”

“Thanks,” I said, and I hung up.

The man who wasn’t Philip Curtis had a strong Chicago accent. Wherever he lived now, he was raised in Chicago. He had a rich dad: The hand-me-down Patek Philippe confirmed that.

Then there was the black luggage tag on his Louis Vuitton briefcase. A fractional jet card. He leased a private jet for some limited number of hours per year. Which meant he wanted a private jet but couldn’t afford one.

I had a vague recollection of an item I’d seen on BizWire about troubles in a family-held business in Chicago. “Will you excuse me for just one more minute?” I said. “I have to put out a fire.” Then I typed out an instant message and sent it to Dorothy.

The answer came back less than a minute later: a Wall Street Journal article she’d pulled up on ProQuest. I skimmed it, and I knew I’d guessed right. I remembered hearing the whole sordid story not too long ago.

Then I leaned back in my chair. “So here’s the problem,” I said.

“Problem?”

“I’m not interested in your business.”

Stunned, he whirled around to look at me. “What did you just say?”

“If you really did your homework, you’d know that I do intelligence work for private clients. I’m not a private investigator, I don’t tap phones, and I don’t do divorces. And I’m sure as hell not a family therapist.”

“Family…?”

“This is clearly a family squabble, Sam.”

Small round pink spots had formed high on his cheeks. “I told you my name is—”

“Don’t even bother,” I said wearily. “This has nothing to do with plugging a leak. Your family troubles aren’t exactly a secret. You were supposed to take over Daddy’s company until he heard you were talking to the private equity guys about taking Richter private and cashing out.”

“I have no idea what you’re referring to.”

His father, Jacob Richter, had gone from owning a parking lot in Chicago to creating the largest luxury hotel chain in the world. Over a hundred five-star hotels in forty countries, plus a couple of cruise lines, shopping malls, office buildings, and a hell of a lot of real estate. A company valued at ten billion dollars.

“So Dad gets pissed off,” I went on, “and squeezes you out and appoints Big Sis chief executive officer and heir apparent instead of you. Didn’t expect that, did you? You figured you were a shoo-in. But you’re not gonna put up with that, are you? Since you know all of Dad’s dirty laundry, you figure you’ll get him on tape making one of his shady real estate deals, offering kickbacks and bribes, and you’ll be able to blackmail your way back in. I guess that’s called winning ugly, right?”

Sam Richter’s face had gone dark red, almost purple. A couple of bulging veins on top of his scalp were throbbing so hard I thought he was going to have a coronary right in the middle of my office. “Who did you talk to?” he demanded.

“Nobody. Just did the whole due-diligence thing. I always like to know who I’m doing business with. And I really don’t like being lied to.”

As Richter lurched to his feet, he shoved the chair—one of the expensive Humanscale office chairs left by the dot-com—and it crashed to the floor, leaving a visible dent in the old wood. From the doorway, he said, “You know, for a guy whose father’s in prison for fraud, you sure act all high and mighty.”

“You’ve got a point,” I conceded. “Sorry to waste your time. Mind showing yourself out?” Behind him Dorothy was standing, arms folded.

“Victor Heller was … the scum of the earth!” he sputtered.

“Is,” I corrected him.