“Is,” I corrected him.
4.
“You don’t tap phones,” Dorothy said, arms folded, moving into my office.
I smiled, shrugged. “I always forget you can hear. Someday that’s gonna get me in trouble.” Our standard arrangement was for her to listen in on all client meetings via the IP video camera built into the huge desktop monitor on my desk.
“You don’t tap phones,” she said again. Her lips were pressed into a smirk. “Mm-hmm.”
“As a general rule,” I said.
“Please,” she said. “You hire guys to do it.”
“Exactly.”
“What the hell was that all about?” she snapped with a fierce glare.
Dorothy and I had worked together at Stoddard Associates in D.C. before I moved to Boston and stole her away. She wasn’t really a computer genius-there were certainly more knowledgeable ones around-but she knew digital forensics inside and out. She’d worked at the National Security Agency for nine years, and they don’t hire just anyone. As much as she detested working there, they’d trained her well. More important, no one was as stubborn as Dorothy. She simply did not give up. And there was no one more loyal.
She was feisty and blunt-spoken and didn’t play well with others, which was why she and the NSA were a lousy fit, but it was one of the things I liked about her. She never held back. She loved telling me off and showing me up and proving me wrong, and I enjoyed that too. You did not want to mess with her.
“You heard me. I don’t like liars.”
“Get over it. We need the business, and you’ve turned down more work than you’ve taken on.”
“I appreciate your concern,” I said, “but you don’t need to worry about the firm’s cash flow. Your salary’s guaranteed.”
“Until Heller Associates goes bust because the overhead’s too high and you got no income. I am not slinking back to Jay Stoddard, and I am not moving back to Washington.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
I’d worked closely with Dorothy, even intimately, but I knew almost nothing about her. She never talked about her love life, and I never asked. I wasn’t even sure whether she preferred men or women. Everyone’s entitled to their zone of privacy.
She was an attractive, striking woman with mocha skin, liquid brown eyes, and an incandescent smile. She always dressed elegantly, even though she didn’t need to, since she rarely met with clients. Today she was wearing a shimmering lilac silk blouse and a black pencil skirt and some kind of strappy heels. She wore her hair extremely short-almost bald, in fact. On most women that might look bizarre, but on her it somehow worked. Attached to her earlobes were turquoise copper-enamel discs the size of Frisbees.
Dorothy was a mass of contradictions, which was another thing I liked about her. She was a regular churchgoer-even before she’d found an apartment, she’d joined an AME Zion church in the South End-but she was no church lady. The opposite, in fact: She had an almost profane sense of humor about her faith. She’d put a plaque on her cubicle wall that said JESUS LOVES YOU-EVERYONE ELSE THINKS YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE, right next to one that said I LOVE MARY’S BABYDADDY.
“I think we need to have regular status-update meetings like we used to do at Stoddard,” she said. “I want to go over the Entronics case and the Garrison case.”
“I need coffee first,” I said. “And not that swill that Jillian makes.”
Jillian Alperin, our receptionist and office manager, was a strict vegan. (Veganism is apparently the paramilitary wing of vegetarianism.) She had multiple piercings, including one on her lip, and several tattoos. One was of a butterfly, on her right shoulder. I’d caught a glimpse of another one on her lower back too one day.
She was also a “green” fanatic who had banned all foam and paper cups in the office. Everything had to be organic, ethical, free-range, fair-trade, and cruelty-free. The coffee she ordered for the office machine was organic fair-trade ethical beans shade-grown using sustainable cultivation methods by a small co-op of indigenous peasant farmers in resistance in Chiapas, Mexico. It cost as much as Bolivian cocaine and probably would have been rejected by a death-row inmate.
“Well, aren’t you fussy,” Dorothy said. “There’s a Starbucks across the street.”
“There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts down the block,” I said.
“That better not be a hint. I don’t do coffee.”
“I know better than to ask,” I said, getting up.
The phone rang: the muted internal ringtone. Jillian’s voice came over the intercom: “A Marshall Marcus for you?”
“The Marshall Marcus?” Dorothy said. “As in the richest guy in Boston?”
I nodded.
“You turn this one down, Nick, and I’m gonna whip your butt.”
“I doubt it’s a job,” I said. “Probably personal.” I picked up and said, “Marshall. Long time.”
“Nick,” he said. “I need your help. Alexa’s gone.”
5.
Marshall Marcus lived on the North Shore, about a forty-minute drive from Boston, in the impossibly quaint town of Manchester-by-the-Sea, once a summer colony for rich Bostonians. His house was enormous and handsome, a rambling shingle-and-stone residence perched on a promontory above the jagged coastline. It had a wraparound porch and too many rooms to count. There were probably rooms seen only by a maid. Marcus lived there with his fourth wife, Belinda. His only child, a daughter named Alexa, was away at boarding school, would soon be away at college, and-from what she’d once told me about her home life-wasn’t likely to be around much after that.
Even after you’d pulled off the main road and could see Marcus’s house off in the distance, it took a good ten minutes to get there, winding your way along a twisting narrow coastal lane, past immense “cottages” and modest suburban houses built in the last half-century on small lots sold off by old-money Brahmins whose fortunes had dwindled away. A few of the grand old homes remained in the hands of the shabby gentry, the descendants of proper Bostonians, but they’d mostly fallen into disrepair. Many of the big houses had been snatched up by the hedge-fund honchos and the titans of tech.
Marshall Marcus was the richest of the nouveau riche, though not the most nouveau. He’d grown up poor on Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan, in the old Jewish working-class enclave. Apparently his uncle owned a casino out west and Marshall had learned to play blackjack as a kid. He figured out pretty early that the house always has an advantage, so he started coming up with all sorts of card-counting schemes. He got a full scholarship to MIT, where he taught himself Fortran on those big old IBM 704 mainframes the size of ranch houses. He came up with a clever way to use Big Iron, as they called the early computers, to improve his odds at blackjack.
According to legend, one weekend he won ten thousand bucks in Reno. It didn’t take him long to see that if he put this to use in the financial markets he could really clean up. So he opened a brokerage account with his tuition money and was a millionaire by the time he graduated, having devised some immensely complicated investment formula involving options arbitrage and derivatives. Eventually he perfected this proprietary algorithm and started a hedge fund and became a billionaire many times over.
My mother, who worked for him for years, once tried to explain it to me, but I didn’t quite get it. I was never good at math. All I needed to know about Marshall Marcus was that he was good to my mother when things were bad.
When we moved to Boston after my father disappeared-Dad had gotten tipped off that he was about to be arrested, and he chose to go fugitive instead-we had no money, no house, nothing. We had to move in with my grandmother, Mom’s mother, in Malden, outside of Boston. Mom, desperate for money, took a job as an office manager to Marshall Marcus, who was a friend of my father’s. She ended up becoming his personal assistant. She loved working for him, and he always treated her well. He paid her a lot. Even after she retired, he continued to send her extremely generous Christmas presents.