The Fixer (13 page)

She hung up.

Monica wasn’t a bad sort. Like most newspaper reporters, she didn’t waste any charm on anyone who wasn’t a potential source.

He didn’t want to sit in the parking lot. He just needed to find some coffee shop with Wi-Fi nearby and do some online research. Then he realized he wasn’t far from Dorchester, where Andrea’s nonprofit, Geometry Partners, was based. Maybe she was there. She wasn’t returning his calls, and he owed her an apology.

More than that, he owed her a do-over, another date, if she’d agree to it. He owed her another Rick, the real Rick, not the poser and fop and idiot with bundles of hundreds burning a hole in his pocket.

Ten minutes later he found the crumbling street off Dorchester Avenue and an old brick warehouse that had been converted cheaply into offices. The paneled door looked as though it belonged not on a warehouse but on a split-level ranch house in the suburbs.

Hardware-store stick-on numbers on the door said 14. A sheet of paper that said
GEOMETRY PARTNE
RS
in big computer-printed letters was taped just below the numbers. He suddenly had to pee. A lot of coffee had flushed through his digestive system and wanted out.

He knocked on the door awhile, then gave up waiting for someone to answer and just pulled it open. Inside was a small office crowded with two metal desks and a few people, looking like parents and kids, black and Hispanic. He approached one of the desks and asked the woman seated behind it, “Is Andrea Messina here?”

“She is, but she’s tied up in meetings all afternoon. I’m sorry. It’s nonstop.”

He took one of Andrea’s business cards from a tray on the desktop. It had her name and
FOUNDER/CEO
and the name
GEOM
ETRY PARTNERS
fashioned into a kind of colorful diagram, angles intersecting circles and dotted lines and points. He put it in his jacket pocket. Then he took another card and wrote on the back, “One more chance? Please?” and signed it “Rick.”

“Could you give this to her when you see her?”

“Certainly, sir.”

“One more thing. Could I use your restroom?”

“First door on the right.”

A guy who looked like a gangbanger with sleeve tattoos down both arms, wearing a soiled white tank top, a so-called wifebeater, entered, holding a little girl by the hand. Father and daughter, presumably. He looked at once fierce and tender.

Rick found the bathroom and took a long, relieving piss. When he came out he bumped into Andrea. She was wearing a black pantsuit and a white blouse with a V-neck. The blouse wasn’t cut particularly deep, but he could make out the cleft between the swell of her breasts. She was dressed conservatively but somehow looked sexy at the same time. Her hair was glossy and full and tumbled down to her shoulders.

“Oh, Rick,” she said. “What—what are you doing here?”

She gave him a quick, chaste kiss on the cheek.

“I was in the neighborhood and just wanted to say hi. And apologize. And beg for a second chance. I left you a note to that effect.”

“I’m sorry, it’s been crazy,” she said. She didn’t sound convincing.

“I understand.”

“Look, Rick”—she backed up into a tiny office, no bigger than a storage closet, which he could tell immediately, from the photos, was hers. “I wanted to thank you for dinner. It was . . .” Her nostrils flared as if she’d detected a bad smell. She peered suspiciously into his bloodshot, bleary eyes and asked, “Are you wasted?”

N
ot far from Geometry Partners was the Three Lyres.
The
Boston Globe
reporters and photographers and editors who frequented the place called it, simply, Liars. The Liars Pub. The Liars Club. The walls were paneled in dark wood and the lighting was low. There were a lot of old pub signs mounted on the walls. The room was dominated by a big, welcoming U-shaped bar.

Monica Kennedy was waiting for him in one of the booths that lined the perimeter of the room. On the wall above the table hung an old Guinness sign of a toucan with a pint balanced on his beak. She had a beer in front of her in a pint glass, some brown ale with a round creamy head. Also an immense blooming onion, deep-fried to a perfect tan, as big and frightening as a sea creature, giving off a slightly rancid aroma.

“You hungry?” she said as Rick slid into the booth. “I’m starved. Missed lunch.”

“I thought you ate at your desk.”

“A yogurt doesn’t count. Flag down the waitress and get yourself a beer.”

She was hunched over the blooming onion, plucking out leaves like a surgeon. Her glasses were smudged, as always. Rick wondered if it ever bothered her, peering through clouded glasses, or if she got used to it, if she preferred it that way. She was wearing a grimy-looking maroon crewneck sweater over an ivory shirt with long collar points that stuck out like a nun’s habit.

“Thanks for meeting me.”

“Are they shutting it down totally?”

“What?”

“Your crappy magazine.”

“Oh. Mostly. It’s going to be online only.”

“Sometimes they say that just to peel off staff.” She produced a small squeeze bottle of nasal decongestant and squirted some into each nostril. Then she sniffed loudly. She was still an Afrin addict, apparently. “I still don’t know why in the hell you quit real reporting to go to that rag.”

“Money, why else?”

She looked up from the onion. She looked surprisingly, touchingly hurt. “But you were good.”

He smiled, shrugged. “Apparently not good enough.”

“What did you think, the
Globe
could match Mort Ostrow’s offer? Not possible. You were the rising star here. I thought you wanted to be the next Sy Hersh.” She meant the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who reported for
The New Yorker,
a legend in investigative journalism.

“Anyway, it was time for a change.”

She shook her head, disgusted. “Have some onion.”

“Maybe later.” He managed to get the waitress’s attention and asked for a Sam Adams.

He remembered a time when an ambitious editor had assigned him and a couple of other junior reporters to work with Monica on a team-written Pulitzer-fodder piece about a big chemical company that had been dumping a toxic pesticide, causing a cluster of birth defects in Western Massachusetts. Monica, competitive to the bone, was grudging and ungracious about having to be a “goddamn dog walker.” But when Rick handed her his reporting file, she said, “Huh. Doesn’t entirely suck.” And Rick, realizing this was the highest praise from Monica, glowed.

“So what do you want?” she said.

“You ever come across my dad’s name when you were reporting on the Big Dig?”

“I don’t even know who your dad is.”

“Leonard Hoffman. He was a lawyer.”

She shrugged.

“He had a lot of clients in the Combat Zone.”

She shook her head, turned her palms up.

“He represented strip clubs and various other establishments of the sort.”

“Hey, someone’s gotta do it.”

“Apparently he bought cash from some of them. A lot of cash.”

Her eyes widened and she smiled. Now he had her attention. “Really?”

“You know about this?”

She kept smiling. Her cheeks bunched up and lifted her glasses. She took a long sip of her Guinness. She set it down. “In theory. Wow.”

“What?”

“It’s like you just told me you saw the Loch Ness monster.”

“Meaning what? You don’t believe me?”

“Meaning it’s something I’ve heard of for years and never could prove.”

“Prove what?”

“The cash bank. Long rumored. Never spotted in the wild.”

He raised his eyebrows. “The cash bank?”

“You need cash to pay bribes. No paper trail. But it’s always a problem, how to get your hands on enough cash.” She was nodding quickly, reflexively, examining the head on her beer. She never looked at you when she was thinking hard. She’d look at the floor or the cubicle wall or her (usually chewed) fingernails. “If you’re not a cash business, and who is, anymore?” She made a tally on her fingers. “Convenience stores, restaurants, liquor stores. Parking garages. Nail salons. Back in the heyday of the Combat Zone, strip clubs and adult bookstores, places like that—I mean, talk about cash-intensive businesses. Any idea what quantity we’re talking about?”

At least three point four million,
he thought. “I have a feeling it was a lot. You never wrote anything about the cash bank.”

“Look, it’s like this.” She pulled out her Afrin bottle, held it up. “What I
know
is this.” She shook the bottle, which sounded mostly full. “But what I can
print
 . . . is this much.” She squeezed a dose into each nostril, snorted. “You remember, or maybe you don’t. Maybe it was too long ago. But you always know a whole hell of a lot more than you can publish. Always. It’s the hellish part of my job.”

“So it’s called the cash bank, huh?”

“Now, that would be a story, Hoffman. If you survived to publish it. Which you might not.”

“‘Survived’?”

“You write about that, you’re messing with some heavy hitters who wouldn’t want it out. You piss them off . . .” She shook her head.

“What?”

“Put it this way. You piss them off, they’re not just gonna write angry letters to the editor.”

H
e took Mass Ave straight through Boston and into Cambridge, and by early evening he’d returned to the Eustace House and lucked out, finding a parking space on Mass Ave right in front. As he backed into the space, he glanced at the passing traffic and noticed a hulking black SUV pass by, then pull over fifty feet or so ahead.

It was an Escalade. From a distance, and in the darkness, he couldn’t tell whether its windows were tinted like the Escalade he’d seen earlier in the day, outside the donut shop. The odds of it being the same vehicle were small, he realized.

But if it was . . . He didn’t want to be tailed to the B&B. Best not to take a chance. Forget about parking. He had to make sure he hadn’t been followed.

He pulled out of the space, passed the Escalade, then signaled right. When he looked in his rearview he saw the Escalade moving back into traffic, behind him, and signaling right, too.

As if it were following him.

He turned right, and looked in his rearview, and the Escalade seemed to hang back. He caught part of its license plate: CYK-something. Then the vehicle made a right turn as well, and then Rick felt a prickle of anxiety.

He turned right again at the next block—and the Escalade didn’t, and for a moment, Rick relaxed. He’d probably just been paranoid. He completed the circle around the block, this time passing the Eustace House without stopping.

Then, as he kept going down Mass Ave, the realization settled on him that maybe he wasn’t in the clear at all. Maybe the Escalade had pulled away because its driver decided he’d been detected.

And as his stomach clenched, he tried to figure out how they’d found him, but he couldn’t. He’d rented a car to avoid being tracked, and he’d been careful when renting the car not to be spotted. Or so he thought.

The fact was, Rick was an amateur, and he was dealing with professionals. He was dealing with relentless, possibly cold-blooded people. People who threatened him with dismemberment, threats that seemed all too plausible.

He thought he’d lost them at the Charles, and he was wrong. Somehow they’d found him again.

He had to take more extensive measures. He had to make sure.

He drove straight through East Cambridge to a shopping mall, the CambridgeSide Galleria. It was a perfectly ordinary, semi-high-end mall with a J.Crew and an Old Navy, an Abercrombie & Fitch and a Body Shop and a California Pizza Kitchen.

And a Zipcar office.

He parked on the second level, got out, went into Macy’s and came right back out. He went down to the Apple Store and pretended to study the iPads. He went abruptly into Newbury Comics, where he acted as if he was browsing the DVD selections. He was anxious and trying hard not to let it show. No one seemed to be following him, but again, he couldn’t be sure. There was no way to know. He went into Best Buy on one level, bought a flashlight, and exited on another level.

After forty-five minutes of this he felt jittery and paranoid and still not one hundred percent sure he wasn’t being followed.

Then he rented another car at Zipcar. From the old car, he retrieved the file carton he’d taken from Joan Breslin’s basement. Then, leaving the old rental car in the parking mall garage, he drove the new car out of the mall and across the Mass Ave Bridge near MIT into Boston. He found a bed-and-breakfast on Beacon Street in Kenmore Square that he’d seen a few times before, on his way to or from watching the Red Sox play at Fenway Park, and paid for a night in advance. He called Hertz to let them know where he’d left the Ford Focus. There would be stiff penalties for failing to return the car to a Hertz desk, but money was one thing he was no longer short of.

He wondered whether he was indeed safe. There was no way to know.

And then he realized he had to go back to the house on Clayton Street. And soon.

A
t two in the morning, Rick awoke, as if to an alarm, got dressed, and went down the dark stairs of the bed-and-breakfast to the empty street below. He’d parked on a side street a block away. The traffic lights were flashing yellow. The sidewalks were empty. The streets shone, slick after a late-night rain shower.

He took his keys to the house and the floppy disk from Joan’s basement and the Maglite he’d bought at Best Buy.

He drove over to Clayton Street, past the house, and around to Fayerweather. The neighborhood was dark. A few porch lights were on, and the widely spaced streetlamps. He parked and rounded the corner back onto Clayton and stood at a distance, looking at the house. He felt almost silly doing it. There was no one in the house, of course, and no one outside of it. No one waiting for his return. Not at 2:20 in the morning.

He unlocked the back door and quickly entered, navigating the interior blindly, by rote, a route he’d taken countless times in high school, also in the middle of the night in the dark, hoping not to wake his ever-vigilant father or his sister.

He had to use the flashlight to get down the basement stairs without stumbling over the brooms and mops that hung on the stairwell walls. In full daylight, with the overhead lights on, this staircase was a trip hazard.

Down here it smelled of mildew and laundry detergent and something loamy, fungal. The furniture from upstairs was stacked high and covered in clear plastic tarps—couches, chairs, the kitchen table. Along the cinder block walls were old plastic shelves from Bed Bath & Beyond, heaped with junk: old toys, a bread maker, a food dehydrator, a sewing machine that probably hadn’t been used since his mother was alive. Pots and pans and Igloo coolers and Tupperware containers. In the far corner was his father’s workbench, rarely ever used, in front of a pegboard mounted on the wall, which was hung with rusty old saws and hammers and mallets and screwdrivers, an orange extension cord, a DeWalt power drill. Another shelf held turpentine and spray paint and cans of paint and wood finish.

He found the section where the furniture from Lenny’s office had been relocated. His father’s desk had been thoughtfully covered with a clear plastic tarp, now coated with a fine layer of white plaster dust. The plaster dust seemed to be everywhere, even down in the basement where no destruction had taken place.

He lifted the plastic tarp, then took an extension cord from his father’s workbench and plugged in the old computer. He flipped the switch and was relieved to see it come to life, grunting and groaning. Green numbers and letters appeared on the monitor. It booted up slowly. As he waited for the computer to boot up, he looked around. There was all kinds of junk here on the plastic shelving—toys, appliances, old cell phone bills. His father never threw anything away.

He pulled a big box off the shelf that held stuff taken from Lenny’s desk. There was that antique brass paper clip in the shape of a hand, which once belonged to Lenny’s father. An envelope moistener, a blue plastic bottle whose yellow foam top had grown crusty with envelope glue and age. Did anyone use those anymore? A red heart-shaped glass paperweight, a gift from Rick’s mom. A Swingline stapler. An empty tin can with rotelle pasta glued onto the outside and painted all over with light blue tempera—a crappy arts-and-craft project Rick had brought home from fourth grade. His father had always kept his pencils in it, though he had far nicer things to hold pencils.

Then he pulled out a large piece of white foam core with a lot of small rocks affixed to it. Rick’s old, once cherished, rock collection. He was surprised to see it here. As a kid, Rick had for some reason collected rocks and minerals and had once painstakingly glued his best specimens to a poster board: rose quartz, obsidian, shale, mica schist. . . . Then he’d carefully labeled everything with one of those old-fashioned Dymo label makers, the kind with the alphabet dial and the embossing tape. (Click, click, click,
squeeze!
) But Rick distinctly remembered tossing it when he entered high school, purging his room of childish things. Len must have rescued it from the trash and brought it into his office, holding on to it for all these decades like a curator of Rick’s childhood.

He found a silver desk clock, vaguely familiar.
TIFFANY & CO.
, it said on the face. Then he noticed that its base was engraved:

FOR LEONARD HOFFMAN WITH
THANKS FROM THE PAP
PAS GROUP.

What was the Pappas Group, he wondered, that had given Lenny such an expensive gift?

He turned to the computer and saw the blinking prompt: C:>. Ready for him to type in text. My God, he’d forgotten about those days, when computers were first widely used. Rick had used a Macintosh for years and had gotten used to the ease, the friendly interface. Back in the day, you had to type in commands. He’d forgotten how.

But he knew how to insert a floppy disk. He pulled it out of its paper sleeve and slid it into the drive slot. The hard drive grunted some more, and after a few seconds some text appeared on the monitor.

It was a financial program called Quicken, and it was really nothing more than a record of deposits made into, and withdrawals from, two different Fleet Bank accounts. Fleet Bank hadn’t existed in years, having been swallowed up by a bigger bank that was in turn swallowed up by an even bigger bank.

One was a regular business account, recording checks written to the electric company and other utilities, to the real estate company for the office rent, to Staples, that sort of thing. The other one was apparently a client fund account, a record of the checks Lenny had received from his clients.

All pretty standard and all pretty unremarkable. Rick wasn’t sure if any of this would help him, but just in case it might, he plugged in the dot matrix printer, heard it clatter noisily to life, and made sure its cable was connected to the computer. It was. He clicked Print, and a minute or so later a long spool of perforated computer paper with little tractor-feed holes on either side came spewing out of the printer.

Sitting on the side of the desk he studied the sheaf of computer paper. It showed deposits and withdrawals for the last three years of his father’s practice. He found the entries for the year 1996 and began scanning the columns slowly for deposits.

He found various deposits, in amounts ranging from fifty to thirty-two hundred dollars. Nothing bigger.

This just compounded the mystery. According to Lenny’s office files, he’d billed eight of his clients 295,000 dollars in the month of May 1996. Yet according to the city archives, he hadn’t done any of the work he’d billed for. And now he’d found that his father hadn’t gotten
paid
for any of the work he’d billed for. Work he apparently hadn’t done. So the bills were fraudulent.

He heard a noise from upstairs, a thump, and he froze.

He clicked off the flashlight and, in the pale moonlight, wove a path through the piles of chairs and the tarp-covered coffee tables toward the stairs. There he stood and listened again for the thump, and after another minute it came again, and he realized it was coming from the refrigerator in the kitchen directly above, cycling noisily on or off. He’d turned it on to use for cooling water and beer.

Keeping the flashlight off, he returned to his father’s desk, grabbed the printout, and headed back up the stairs and out of the house.

*   *   *

Back in his room at the B&B, Rick Googled the Pappas Group.

It seemed to be some sort of public relations firm. Its website showed a bright photo of the gold dome of the Massachusetts State House, which was probably meant to symbolize power and access, the way a DC-based firm’s website would probably show the Capitol. It disclosed little. There was language about “our expert tacticians” and “high-profile clients” and “discreet representation” and “reputation management.” One page featured the logos of some of their clients—banks, restaurant groups, universities, shopping malls, radio stations, health clubs, and high-end retailers. All Rick gleaned from the website was that Pappas’s firm was deeply entrenched and well connected.

The founder and CEO was Alex Pappas. His biography was spare: “For almost thirty years Mr. Pappas has brought his unique media savvy and political acumen to bear in investigations, high-profile celebrity clients, and strategic advice on dealing with corporate communications challenges.”

A Google search on Alex Pappas pulled up very little. A few passing mentions in the
Globe
, a blip in
Boston Magazine
. Everything was cursory and vague. Pappas had been a press secretary to a Democratic governor of Massachusetts years ago, ran the governor’s successful reelection campaign, then left the public sector in a blaze of glory to start his own “strategic and crisis communications firm.” It was as if he then decided to fly under the radar. You almost never saw mentions of him in the press. He’d all but gone into the witness protection program.

A search for the “Pappas Group” yielded more results. The firm was leading the public relations campaign on behalf of the Olympian Tower, a planned skyscraper in Boston that was sort of controversial, since it threatened to cast a long shadow over the Boston Public Garden. That was about all Rick was able to pull up.

What in the world was Lenny Hoffman, solo lawyer, doing with a Tiffany clock from such a high-powered firm?

*   *   *

In the morning Rick waited till ten before he called Monica Kennedy at the newspaper.

“What do you know about a guy named Alex Pappas?” he said.

“You’re still on this cash bank thing?”

“Pappas is . . . the cash bank?” he said, surprised.

“Isn’t that why you’re asking about him?”

“Who is he?”

“I guess you’d call him a publicist.”

“I’d never heard of him.”

“Sure. He’s so high-profile you’ve never heard of him. See, Rick, there’s two kinds of publicists. The kind who gets your name in the paper, and the kind who keeps it out.”

“What does he do? I mean, besides keep your name out of the paper?”

“Reputation management, crisis management, introductions.”

“Introductions?”

“Back in the Big Dig days, Pappas was the guy to know if you wanted to land a contract. He introduced construction companies that wanted work to the people who hired. Let’s just say he made a lot of state workers rich.”

“You never did any reporting on him, did you?”

She sighed heavily. “To be honest, that guy was always too slippery for me to get a grasp on. Like nailing Jell-O to the wall.”

And only then did it occur to Rick that Pappas began with the letter
P
.