“I can’t do this right now, Jesse,” Hillary said. “I need some space and some time to process this.”
“We actually are going to do this right now,” Jesse said, making it sound as if she had no choice, even though she did. “There are things we need to discuss, and there is no point in putting them off.”
She said she had gotten a call from one of her top managers and driven up from Boston. Jesse didn’t ask her where she’d been. He knew where she had been.
Due time.
She sat back in her chair, resigned if not relaxed.
“My face must be a fright.”
“It’s not.”
“Thank you for that, at least.”
He asked if she wanted something to drink. She said no, let’s get this over with.
“You said ‘He did this,’ ” Jesse said. “Who’s ‘he’?”
“You’ll figure it out eventually,” she said. “Maybe you already have.”
Jesse waited.
Nobody better at waiting.
“Liam Roarke,” she said.
“Why would Liam Roarke burn down your company?” Jesse asked her. “The part of it that’s here, anyway.”
He tried to read her face and could not. In the moment, he believed that what she was really trying to process wasn’t just the fire down the street, but how much to tell him. And how much he knew.
“It’s not my company,” she said.
Boom.
“It’s his,” she said.
Hillary More paused and then said, “Or was.”
Seventy-Five
Jesse felt his phone buzzing a couple times, ignored it. For now, even with the fire, Hillary More was the main event.
Charlie had been murdered. It had something to do with scam calls, Jesse had been sure of that, almost from the start. At least one of those calls had come from More Chocolate. The money man for which, she had just told him, was none other than Liam Roarke.
A small light went on at the very back of his brain.
Steve Marin. Worked for Roarke when he was a kid. And one of the things Marin had gone down for was arson, when he wasn’t busting heads.
Jesse sat at his desk, across from Hillary, and wondered if Marin had busted in Charlie Farrell’s head.
“I swear I didn’t know what Liam did when I first started going around with him,” she said.
Going around with.
Maybe not the dumbest expression for what she was really talking about.
But one of them.
“You have to believe me,” she said, as earnest as if she were on a sales call.
“About that? Sure, why not.”
“I’m not going to sit here and lie to you,” she said.
“Let’s hope not.” Then he added, “For both of our sakes.”
He let her tell it.
She had been thinking about starting her own chocolate company for years after her husband died, she said. It was because of a happy experience at Hershey. She’d made some money there, invested it well, then made more from insurance when her husband died in the accident. A few years ago, everything in place, she made the decision to buy the old firehouse at a very fair price from the town, bought a factory in New Hampshire that had shut down back in the nineties.
“Were you and Roarke still a couple then?”
“No.”
She rubbed the back of her neck.
“I was going to be one of those small-business success stories,” she said. “Then came COVID.”
“And you went to Roarke for help.”
“We’d stayed in touch.”
Jesse smiled. “But by now you had to be aware that he was a fucking gangster, right?”
She flinched, almost involuntarily.
“I swear, I didn’t know the extent of his business,” she said. “I knew a lot of it was outside the law. Maybe I didn’t know how far outside because I chose not to know.” She took in air through her nose, out through her mouth. Calming exercise. Probably learned it when she was killing it at yoga. “But he had never been anything other than kind to me.”
“And he offered to front you the money you needed.”
“A lot of money,” she said. “Like an interest-free loan, he told me at the time. He said I could pay it back over time, if the business became as profitable as I told him it was going to be.”
“No strings attached?”
“One,” she said. “I was never to say anything about where the money was coming from.”
“And you never questioned why someone like him would want to be in business with someone like you.”
“Not until it was too late,” she said, “when I realized that they were selling more than chocolate on the second floor.”
“Who hired those people?”
“He did,” she said. “He told me he was an expert at that as he diversified into legitimate businesses.”
“And you are now sitting here and telling me that you didn’t know what was going on up there.”
She leaned back in the chair. Looked up at the ceiling.
“It always seemed quite normal when I would go up and visit the troops,” she said. “I think they had some system, one I found out about later, when I’d check up there. But our profits were steady. The business was thriving. Supply was meeting demand up in New Hampshire. And, as I said, the second-floor people reported to Liam.”
“Madoff’s investors never seemed to question why their profits were so steady,” Jesse said. “And while all this was going on, what were you focusing on?”
“National branding,” she said. “I told Liam I wanted to go public, and he told me if I thought it was best. But it turned out that was never going to happen. He was just waiting to close everything down, the way he’d begun to close down his other businesses.”
“Because of the Feds.”
“He portrayed himself as a victim,” Hillary More said. “Said he was being persecuted.”
“More like prosecuted,” Jesse said. “But you were still going along to get along.” He shook his head. “Because he’d always been so kind.”
“You’re mocking me.”
“Or just being shocked at how naïve you were,” Jesse said. “Or maybe just being a fool who couldn’t see past her own ambition.”
“I guess I deserve that.”
“Fuck, yes.”
He leaned forward and clasped his hands together.
“When exactly did you realize you were just a tool?”
“When Sam Waterfield died,” she said. “I told Liam what you said, that it was like somebody was sending a message.”
“What did he say to that?”
“He said the boy probably killed himself, he was so overcome with grief.”
“Grief about what?”
“He smiled at me and said, ‘Stealing.’
“I asked him, ‘Stealing from whom?’
“ ‘Me,’ ” he said. “Then he told me about the scam calls, some of them coming from up there, some of them farmed out remotely. He said I wasn’t going to tell anybody, because nothing that was going on up there would ever be traced back to anybody but me. And he was right about that, of course. Then he told me that Waterfield had gotten careless, trying to make money on the side, and called the wrong guy.”
“The wrong guy being Charlie Farrell?”
“He didn’t mention a name.”
Now Jesse took in a lot of air, and let it out. Because he was the one trying to calm himself.
“Maybe he didn’t have to,” he said. “Waterfield and Marin were probably in it together, making some on the side. You ever ask him what happened to Steve Marin?”
“I did,” she said. “Liam told me he still had some use, or maybe he would have been overcome with grief and killed himself.”