House on Fire

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“So how are you going to do it?” the guy asked me.

“‘Do it’?”

He paused, glanced around — there was no one else in my office — and muttered, barely audible, the words he didn’t want to say aloud. “Kill him. How are you going to kill him?”

“The less you know,” I said, “the better. For both of us. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”

He didn’t answer me. “It has to look like an accident,” he said. “Or a random... whatever.”

I gave him a long, direct look, blinked once. He’d told me that three times already.

Mort Vallison was sixty, but he looked ten years older. He was a once-handsome man under a lifetime of stress. He had short gray hair, neatly parted, and sincere brown eyes, but they were haunted. Hollow. He wore an expensive-looking navy-blue blazer and pricy shoes. He was not born to wealth, which was probably why he always dressed expensively.

He looked away. Vallison had insisted on coming to my office rather than have me come to his company headquarters. My firm, Heller Associates, is located in an old brick building in Boston’s financial district, a renovated nineteenth-century lead-pipe factory with a steampunk look to it: the bare brick walls, the exposed ductwork, the big factory windows. The office used to belong to a dot-com that sailed high and crashed and left behind their Humanscale chairs.

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