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