The Fixer

A
LSO BY
J
OSEPH
F
INDER

FIC
TION

The Moscow Club

Extraordinary Powers

The Zero Hour

High Crimes

Paranoia

Company Man

Killer Instinct

Power Play

Suspicion

NICK HELLER SE
RIES

Vanished

Buried Secrets

NONFICTION

Red Carpet: The Connection between the Kremlin and America’s

Most Powerful Businessmen

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

Copyright © 2015 by Joseph Finder

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN
-PUBLICATION DATA

Finder, Joseph.

The fixer / Joseph Finder.

pages ; cm

ISBN 978-0-698-19084-9

1. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 2. Life change events—Fiction. 3. Family secrets—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3556.I458F59 2015

813'.54—dc23

2015006982

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Henry

On a lovely West Cambridge street this 1903 Queen Anne home is on a large level lot with many mature trees. Graciously proportioned rooms and elegant millwork. Pocket doors and two working fireplaces with original ceramic tile. The house is in need of updating, please see attached home inspection report.

T
he house was a dump. There was no way around it. The listing had been online for seven months, and it had generated a flurry of interest at first and one offer so lowball that the real estate agent refused to dignify it with a reply. The agent had written the ad himself and was justifiably proud of it. It was a great ad. It was also a steaming pile of horseshit, as everyone eventually discovered when they got a look at the house. An absolute lie. The place was a disaster. A money pit. Potential buyers usually fled after spending a minute or two stumbling through the decaying interior.

So Rick Hoffman, who’d left the family house on Clayton Street in Cambridge seventeen years ago, solemnly vowing never to return, was now camping out in what used to be his father’s study, on the second floor. December in Boston could get awfully cold, but he’d turned off the heat, which was ridiculously expensive, so he was sleeping fully clothed in a sub-zero expedition sleeping bag on the old leather couch, next to a space heater. The study smelled vaguely of cat piss. Glassed-in legal bookcases lined the walls, tall and rickety. On his father’s desk was an ancient IBM PC, in early-computer ivory, that belonged in the Smithsonian, and an Oki Data dot-matrix printer. If the 1980s ever came back, he’d be all set. His old bedroom, where he’d lived until he went off to college, had become a storeroom for broken furniture and cardboard boxes of files. So he slept on the leather sofa in a room as cold as a meat locker with the faint aroma of cat urine in the air.

This was, he realized, the lowest point in his life.

He had nowhere else to live. A week earlier he’d been forced to move out of the Back Bay apartment he’d shared with his (now) ex-fiancée until Holly had announced she no longer wanted to marry him. He’d spent a few nights in a motel on Soldiers Field Road in Brighton, but his money was running out fast. He had no income anymore. He’d sent out his résumé to dozens of magazines and newspapers, with no reply. He’d sold his watch, a nice Baume & Mercier, on eBay and unloaded most of his fancy clothes on a website that let you buy or sell “gently used, high-end” clothing.

His money was almost gone. He was lucky he had a place to crash for free. But it didn’t feel so lucky, sleeping in the cold hovel on Clayton Street, the house he and his sister had grown up in.

Wendy, three years younger than Rick, was living in Bellingham, Washington, with her partner, Sarah, who owned a vegan restaurant. “Just sell the damned place,” she’d told Rick. “The house is shit, but the land’s got to be worth a couple hundred thousand bucks. That’s money I could use.”

Until Holly had broken off the engagement and kicked him out of their apartment on Beacon Street, that had seemed like a decent plan. But Rick needed a place to live, at least until he found another job, got back on his feet.

*   *   *

Two months ago, he’d been the executive editor of
Back Bay,
a glossy magazine devoted to the rich and the famous in Boston, the movers and shakers. It had just enough slavish coverage of celebrity chefs and posh weddings and best bartenders to ensure a nice, fat magazine, and just the right dash of snark—a knife-edge balance, really—to hook covetous and aspirational readers who considered themselves smart and sophisticated but actually weren’t.

Seven or eight years ago, a local private-equity maestro named Morton Ostrow took over the joint, infusing
Back Bay
with cash, made it slicker and glossier, a rich man’s plaything. He ushered in a golden age of big salaries and almost unlimited expense accounts. You had to spend money to make money! he liked to say. He moved the magazine’s offices from a cramped but elegant redbrick town house on Arlington Street in the Back Bay to a converted mill building on Harrison Avenue, in the newly desirable, artist-infested SoWa district in the South End. Brick and beam, huge nineteenth-century industrial windows, and polished concrete floors. Parties at dark, bunkerlike clubs no one could get into, sponsored by Ketel One or Stoli Elit.

Rick, who’d rented the movie
All the President’s Men
at an impressionable age and had been obsessed with it, had always wanted to be Woodward or Bernstein, an intrepid reporter who specialized in ferreting out high-level government fraud and conspiracy. He went to work for
The
Boston Globe
in the Metro section and got a lot of attention for an exposé he did on private, for-profit prisons. He did an article about corruption in the city’s taxi business and a series on how easy it was to get out of drunk-driving charges in the state. He might, he told himself, have been on the upward trajectory toward Woodward-and-Bernsteinism if he hadn’t met Mort Ostrow at a book party in Cambridge. Ostrow, a short, squat frog of a man, liked Rick right away. He was hired away from the
Globe
at a ridiculous salary to beef up
Back Bay
’s coverage of the “power elite”—scandals at Harvard, intrigue at the State House, gossip among the pashas of the hedge funds. He was given license to puncture and skewer.

He acquired a big apartment on Beacon Street and a beautiful blond girlfriend to go with it. He and Holly went out to parties or dinner almost nightly. He could get a table at the tiniest, most exclusive restaurant, the kind that’s booked months in advance (not years; this was Boston, after all), at half an hour’s notice. When he wore suits, they were made by Ostrow’s tailor (working buttonholes on the cuffs, Super 130s, fully canvassed), at the friends-and-family rate. He had a weekly breakfast with Mort Ostrow at Mort’s regular table at the Bristol Lounge at the Four Seasons.

While it lasted, it was a pretty nice life.

*   *   *

The space heater buzzed and snarled. He heard something . . .
scurrying
somewhere within the walls nearby. A soft commotion, a rodent scrabbling. Mice? Rats? Squirrels? Anything could have gotten in through the chimneys or vents in the long years the house had stood unoccupied. Rodents or birds could be living in the walls. He got up from the couch, listened in silence for a moment, heard the muted scrabbling sound from inside the study’s back wall—then slammed the wall with his fist.

There was a great crash as one of the bookcases toppled, hurtling its contents to the floor, its glass front shattering.

“Shit,” he said. At least the scrabbling sound had stopped.

Broken glass was scattered everywhere, jagged shards twinkling in the morning light. Red bound volumes of
The
Massachusetts Law Reporter
were arrayed on the floor. Rick’s father, Leonard, had been an attorney, a solo practitioner whose clientele included some sketchy characters: strippers, porn purveyors, club owners. He’d rented an office on Washington Street in downtown Boston. But he’d always kept a duplicate set of his law books in his home study.

Rick went to fetch a broom and a dustpan to sweep up the broken glass. The broom closet was off the kitchen, down one floor.

A thick blanket of dust and debris had collected on the wooden stairs, including some crumpled Narragansett beer cans and a discarded foil condom wrapper. Teenagers had gotten into the house—hence the broken window—but probably not squatters. No long-term residents. The house had been rented for most of the eighteen years since Len’s stroke. But as the place slowly deteriorated and repairs were left undone, the quality of the renters deteriorated along with it. The last ones were so rowdy and degenerate that the neighbors started complaining. Three years ago Rick had given up renting the house altogether.

The hallway was dark—the lightbulbs in the ceiling fixture were burned out—but he knew the way by heart. He could navigate the house blindfolded. He found the broom closet and located a tangle of plastic shopping bags but no brooms. And an old carpet sweeper that, even if it still worked, wouldn’t pick up most of the shards of glass anyway. He looked around the kitchen. More beer cans here, and beer bottles, and discarded Big Mac cartons.

“Don’t move, asshole!” someone shouted.

Rick jumped, startled. He spun around, saw a tall, skinny, balding man in a barn coat, jeans, and boots.

“Oh, it’s you,” the man said. “Hey, man, good to see you, Rick!”

“Oh, hey, Jeff.” He smiled with relief. “Been a while.”

“Sorry, dude, didn’t mean to scare you. I thought it was those damned Rindge and Latin kids again.” He held up a key ring and jingled it. “Wendy gave me a set of keys a couple, three years back and asked me to keep an eye on the place.”

“No problem.” Rick shook his head. “And listen, I really appreciate it.”

Jeff Hollenbeck lived next door, had grown up there and inherited the house after his parents’ death. He was a year or so younger than Rick. He and Rick weren’t friends, exactly, but used to play a lot of one-on-one basketball in Jeff’s parents’ driveway using the hoop mounted to their garage. Jeff, always tall and skinny and athletic, usually won. When Jeff went to Rindge and Latin, the local public high school, Rick had gone off to the Linwood Academy, a private school, so their already minimal friendship had been attenuated further. Also, Jeff began to make fun of Rick’s “faggoty uniform”—the blue blazer, white shirt, and striped crimson-and-gray repp tie. All legitimate grounds for ruthless teenage mockery, but not great for their friendship either.

Apparently, Jeff had gone through a druggy phase in high school, came close to being expelled once, but straightened up in time to go to Bunker Hill Community College. Rick didn’t remember what Jeff did for a living—something in the construction trade, maybe? His balding head was close-cropped on the sides. As a teenager he’d worn it down to his shoulders. Now, as if to compensate for the hairlessness up top, he had a goatee, wiry, gray-flecked. His eyes were a watery blue-gray.

“I think the word got around the high school that the house is empty, and there’s this gang of kids who use it for partying and screwing and whatever whatever. If I ever hear them, I show up and shoo ’em away. How’s your dad doing?”

Rick smiled sadly, shook his head. “Same.”

“Same, yeah? I guess he’s—still in that nursing home?”

Rick nodded. “He eats and gets parked in front of the TV all day and that’s his life, you know . . . ?” It was beyond sad, actually. It was heartbreaking the way his father had ended up.

“Wendy still out in Oregon?”

“Washington, but yeah.”

“And you’re the grand pooh-bah of
Boston
Magazine?
”

Rick shrugged, too weary to correct Jeff on the name of the magazine, which would also mean setting him straight on Rick’s job title, which was no longer any title at all. Plus, there was something enjoyable about being out in the real world, where the news of his firing actually hadn’t made it. It was refreshing to visit a place where no one could hear the low beating of the tom-toms.

Which he himself hadn’t heard until it was too late.

He was the last person to figure out he was going to get sacked. His numbers—subscriptions and newsstand sales, anyway—were looking great. He’d told Holly he was expecting a raise. There was even talk of end-of-the-year bonuses if the magazine was “ahead of plan.”

Later, of course, he found out that the gossip that his days were numbered had been burning up the wires for weeks. Mort had made a couple of disastrous market calls. He’d lost a big bet on a gold mining company and a Chinese timber firm. His fortune had gone poof, just like that. Or so the rumors had it.

Rick found out over breakfast at the Four Seasons, after he’d ordered, before he’d finished his first cup of coffee.

It wasn’t that he was being fired, that wasn’t it at all;
his job was being eliminated.
Mort was discontinuing the print edition. He could no longer afford the fat salaries and the expense accounts. Anyway, the luxe strategy wasn’t working. The ad guys were always having to discount to fill the pages, too obviously stuffing the remnant space with house ads. Time for some disruptive innovation! He was slashing the payroll, letting his overpaid editors go. Staffers were getting converted to freelance, paid by the piece, meaning by the post. Rick was certainly free to pitch stories to the new editor/publisher, a loathsome little squirrel in Chuck Taylors and Ben Sherman and ironic Buddy Holly glasses whom Rick had hired as a web editor a year earlier.

By the time his prosciutto-and-roasted-asparagus omelet had arrived, Rick had lost his appetite.

*   *   *

“Still living across the river?” Jeff said.

“Nah, I’m moving out.” Rick didn’t want to get into the gory details. Not with Jeff Hollenbeck, anyway.

An arched brow. “Moving in here?”

Rick shook his head. “I mean, for a little while, yeah, but it’s time to sell.”

“They’ve been showing it for a while now. I guess no bites, huh?”

Rick spread out his hands. “We got one lowball offer. Place is a shithole.”

“Definitely needs work. But it’s got good bones. Someone wanted to invest some time and money into it, it could be sweet.”

“That’s sorta what I’m thinking. Maybe get a carpenter in here, a plasterer, sand the floors, new paint. . . .”

“You’re not thinking of doing it yourself, are you?”

“No way. Not my skill set.”

“You hire someone yet?”

He shook his head again. “Bank account’s a little light. Maybe a couple of months down the road.” He said it in an offhand way, as if it was only a matter of time before a tsunami of money started pouring in.

Jeff shifted his weight from foot to foot. “I wouldn’t mind taking a crack at it. You know that’s what I do, right?”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Builder, carpentry, gut renovations, the whole nine yards.” He pulled a business card from the front pocket of his barn coat and handed it to Rick. It said
JEFF HOLLENBECK BUILDERS
. “Got a couple guys working for me now. I don’t know what kind of quotes you’re getting, but I don’t mind giving you a break, you know—childhood friends, all that.”