The Fixer (18 page)

B
y ten o’clock the next morning, Rick was at the offices of
The
Boston Globe
, the time he knew Monica Kennedy usually got there. He stopped at security on the ground floor and called Monica’s desk. She told him to meet her at the top of the escalator.

He took the elevator up to the second floor, where the newsroom was located, and waited there for her. A sports reporter he knew from his time at the
Globe
gave him a wave and kept walking. Finally, Monica appeared, a brown folder in her left hand. She didn’t hand it to him. Instead, she said, “What do you want it for, Hoffman?”

He shrugged. “Personal curiosity.”

“You’re not working on a story. If you’ve got some angle on this, it’s my work.”

“Who would I be writing it for—
The
Shop ’n’ Save Gazette?
Come on, Monica.”

“You got something on Alex Pappas?”

He didn’t want to lie to her. And if he did lie, that wouldn’t be so easy. Investigative journalists are skilled at seeing through lies, especially ones as good as Monica Kennedy.

“It’s about my dad. Because I think he must have run into trouble on this.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“I don’t know. But in any case, this is personal. It’s about my dad and Alex Pappas. But look, if anything interesting happens to pan out on this, any live story, we can share.”

“Share?”

“It’s an old, dead story that you looked into and found nothing on. I’m not trying to show you up and I’m not trying to compete with you.”

“All right, all right,” Monica said, her suspicion momentarily allayed. Now she sounded only annoyed. She handed him the file folder and turned away to leave.

“So tell me something,” he said. “You know anything about any Irish gangs in Boston?”

“The Irish mob? In Boston? Not since Whitey Bulger’s heyday. Twenty, thirty years ago. Nothing on them in years. Why, you got something?”

He shook his head. “Could we talk about this story for a couple of minutes? You got time for a quick cup of coffee upstairs in the cafeteria?”

“No, sorry, I don’t.”

“Okay, two minutes, then.” He waited for a vaguely familiar-looking reporter to pass by, nodding at Monica. “What made you think there might be a Big Dig angle to it?”

“I don’t know, the Ted Williams Tunnel had just opened. I figured something might have happened. And look, ten years later something did happen, right?”

She was talking about an incident in July of 2006 when part of the ceiling of another new Big Dig tunnel collapsed, wounding the driver of a car and killing his wife. After a long investigation it turned out to be a problem with the epoxy used to fasten the panels to the ceiling.

“True,” he said.

“But when I talked to the cops, I figured it was probably a DUI. End of story.”

He nodded. “So what would Pappas have to do with a DUI? What would he care?”

“The rumor in the Dominican community was that something had gone wrong with the newly built tunnel, and that’s what caused the accident. I made some calls and got nothing on that, and then Pappas calls me. He’s working for some consortium of businesses called the Boston Common Alliance—the businesses involved in the Big Dig—and he wants to make sure this story doesn’t get misreported. Look, I knew what he was up to, and I approached him with the normal amount of skepticism, but he turned out to be a useful source. He got me the police report. He greased the wheels with Boston police, made sure I got callbacks right away. I wasn’t going to turn away help like that.”

“Okay.”

“You find out something, you make sure to loop me in, right?”

“Right. Will do.”

“I mean it.”

“I got it.”

He wondered if she could tell he was lying.

R
ick sat in his car—a Ford Taurus rented from Enterprise Rent-A-Car in Central Square—in the
Globe
parking lot and read through Monica’s file. It was thin, a collection of scrawled notes on scraps of yellow legal pad paper and pink While You Were Out phone message slips and photocopies of documents like the Boston police report on the accident. Her handwriting was atrocious. It took him a few minutes of studying the hieroglyphics before he was able to decrypt it. She’d done interviews with neighbors of the dead family, a schoolteacher who’d taught the fourteen-year-old daughter, and sources in the Boston police. Somehow she’d put together an article about the death of an immigrant family from the Dominican Republic in a terrible accident in the brand-new tunnel.

One of the clips in the file was a
Globe
Metro desk dispatch on the accident, the first report to hit the paper, a day after it happened. The article was only a paragraph long and was by a junior Metro desk correspondent Rick knew, a woman who’d accepted a buyout and left the
Globe
some years ago to write a novel but hadn’t met with much success.

JAMAICA PLAIN FAMILY DEAD IN TUNNEL CRASH

By Akila Subramanian

Globe Correspondent

A Jamaica Plain family of three was killed in a single-vehicle collision in the Ted Williams Tunnel at about 2:15 a.m. on Monday, according to police. The driver, Oscar Cabrera, 36, of Hyde Square in Boston, was killed along with his wife, Dolores, 35, and their 14-year-old daughter Graciela. The cause of the crash was not immediately released. Speed did not appear to be a factor in the accident, police said.

That was all at first. The plain facts, but not too many of them.

Then Rick could see in Monica’s notes her attempts to come up with some sort of investigative angle.

CRASH HOW??
was written in big letters on a yellow lined page ripped from a legal pad covered with doodles (mostly bad drawings of horses) and various phone numbers and phrases like
traffic signals?
and
Lane markings???
Next to that:
SINGLE CAR COLLISION—wall? Drunk?
Scrawled in her crabbed script on a While You Were Out message was
suspected DUI pending BAC.
That meant that the police were speculating the accident had been caused by drunk driving but they’d know for sure when the blood alcohol levels came back in the pathology report.

As he parsed her other scribblings, it became evident that Monica was stumped trying to figure out how a car could have crashed in the tunnel without hitting another vehicle. Was the accident caused by something in the tunnel? Some problem with the lane markings or the traffic patterns? A concrete stanchion placed where it shouldn’t have been? But her interviews had apparently turned up nothing.

Her piece—the other clip in the folder—was a longer article that ran two days later. The coauthor was the reporter who originally caught the story, normal newspaper etiquette. There was no investigative angle to it, but you could tell Monica wanted one. The story, instead, was framed as one of those unfathomable tragedies that just happen from time to time.

TRAGEDY STRIKES IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY

By Monica Kennedy and Akila Subramanian

Globe Correspondents

She was a graceful dancer and talented beginning pianist with a quick smile who loved to help her mother cook.

Family and friends wept openly as they recalled Graciela Cabrera, the 14-year-old Hyde Square resident who was killed in the early hours of Monday morning along with both of her parents when the 1989 Toyota RAV4 driven by her father, Oscar Cabrera, 36, crashed in the Ted Williams Tunnel.

Oscar Cabrera, who worked as an engineer at the Colonnade Hotel in Boston, was remembered as a modest, self-effacing man always quick to volunteer to shovel snow or carry packages for friends and neighbors here in the close-knit Dominican community. Dolores, 35, was recalled as a loving wife and mother and a skilled beautician at Hair Again, a hair salon in Hyde Square. The young family had emigrated from the Dominican Republic 8 years previously.

The outpouring of grief in this working-class neighborhood was matched only by the puzzlement among friends and loved ones as to how this tragedy could have happened.

Authorities are trying to determine what caused Monday’s accident, which closed westbound tunnel traffic for hours until the mangled vehicle could be towed away. Preliminary investigations indicated that Cabrera’s Toyota sustained major damage in the tunnel, but that no other vehicle was involved.

“This is a great loss to the Dominican community,” said civic leader Gloria Antunes of the Hyde Square Community Partnership. “There are no words to express how sorry we are.”

Rick decided to drive over to Hyde Square in the Boston suburb of Jamaica Plain and just start asking questions. Sometimes you could pick up details on the ground. His old boss at the
Globe,
a gruff editor who favored bow ties and boldly striped shirts with white contrasting collars, was always ordering his reporters to get out of their cubicles and get off their phones and their butts and start poking around. “Just showing up,” he liked to say, “is half of good reporting.”

It was time to show up.

T
he area around Hyde Square in Jamaica Plain was Boston’s Latin quarter, with bodegas that sold mango puree and plantains, and shops advertising paycheck cashing and money orders. This stretch of Jamaica Plain had been largely German and Irish until the 1960s, when the Cubans and the Puerto Ricans and the Dominicans settled there and transformed it into Boston’s Hispanic area.

His first stop was the office of the Hyde Square Community Partnership, an organization, according to its website, dedicated to creating a safe and strong community, “the beating heart of Latino life in Boston.” It brought together local merchants and politicians and community leaders. Its founder and leader was Gloria Antunes. He’d underlined her name in the printout of Monica’s article. He figured that Antunes would be his best way into the neighborhood. The HSCP was located on the second floor of a building on the first floor of which was a
variedades
store. He went up the stairs and found a door marked with a
HYDE SQUARE CO
MMUNITY PARTNERSHIP
sign and a sunburst logo. The door was unlocked.

Inside, sitting at a receptionist’s desk, was a large woman wearing oversize tinted glasses. Behind her an open door revealed an inner office where someone—presumably Gloria Antunes herself—sat behind a bigger desk, talking on the phone.

“May I help you, sir?” the receptionist said.

“I’m looking for Gloria Antunes.”

“Gloria?” she said, smiling broadly. “Of course. May I tell her what this is in reference to?”

He handed her one of his
Back Bay
magazine business cards. “My name is Rick Hoffman, and I wanted to talk to her about the Cabrera family.”

She was jotting down notes on a pad. “The Cabrera family . . . Will she know what this is about?”

“They’re the family that was killed in the Ted Williams Tunnel almost twenty years ago.”

“Yes, sir, one moment, please.”

The receptionist got up from her desk and went over to the inner office and knocked on the open door. Then she went inside. A moment later she emerged. “I’m sorry, sir, Gloria is tied up with appointments. Is there something I can help you with?”

“Not really, thanks. I just need to talk with her. It shouldn’t take more than a minute or two. May I—” and he approached Gloria Antunes’s office door.

“Sir, please wait here,” the receptionist protested.

“Ms. Antunes,” Rick said, “I just wanted to talk with you briefly about the Cabreras.” Doorstepping her this way was an aggressive—some would say obnoxious—move, but he knew when he was getting the runaround. Opportunity doesn’t knock, an old saying went; it shows up only when you beat down the door.

Gloria Antunes was a slim, elegant woman with short, curly salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a colorful silk scarf around her shoulders and large hoop earrings. She rose from her desk and said, “Yes, Mr. Hoffman, I got the message but I’m sorry, I have a full plate here. I just don’t have time to talk.”

“Understood. Can I grab five minutes of your time today or tomorrow? Shouldn’t take any more than that.”

She replied in an imperious tone, “Mr. Hoffman, what happened to the Cabreras was a terrible, heartbreaking thing, but I have nothing to contribute.”

“Would you be able to guide me toward any of their survivors?”

“Mr. Hoffman, I told you, I don’t have time to talk. Now, good day.”

Gloria Antunes’s hostility was puzzling. He’d expected a community leader like her to be welcoming, wanting to remember the dead. There was some reason she didn’t want to talk, and he needed to get to the bottom of it.

*   *   *

Within an hour Rick had located the rundown triple-decker house, not far from a behemoth brick housing project, where Oscar Cabrera and his wife and daughter had once lived on the second floor, according to the police report. He sat in his car outside the house, painted olive green, missing shingles, its cement porch steps crumbling. “Now what?” he said out loud to himself.

The family had died eighteen years ago. Maybe someone was around who remembered them and knew something about how they’d been killed. Dolores had worked at a hair salon that was located on Centre Street. He drove around, past a butcher shop called, cleverly, Meatland, an off-brand mobile phone store, and a Latino restaurant whose sign featured a palm tree and a cooked lobster. He found Hair Again salon. It was a “beauty center,” according to a sign in the window, “especializing in” perms, extensions, and highlights.

He asked the young woman at the front desk if anyone there remembered Dolores Cabrera. It took a while for him to be understood. Besides the language barrier, there was the strangeness of the query. But eventually the manager of the salon, an older woman with glossy black hair and high arched eyebrows, came out from the back. “Why you asking about Dolores Cabrera?” she demanded.

“I’m writing an article. Remembering them.”

The woman seemed to soften at once. “She was a sweet girl.”

“Did she or her husband leave any family?”

“Family? Yes, of course. Why?”

Five minutes later, Rick left the salon with one useful piece of information: Oscar Cabrera’s relatives still lived in the triple-decker where the young family had lived. He drove back there and rang the bell.

For a long moment nothing happened. From behind the door he could hear a cacophony of voices, shouts muffled and shrill. Then there were footsteps and a couple of women’s voices. The door opened a crack and a woman looked out. She wore green hospital scrubs and curlers in her hair.

“
Sí?
”

“Do you speak English?”

“Em, a little. Yes?”

She was a
tía,
she said, Oscar Cabrera’s sister. The hubbub behind her, which had abated when she opened the door, resumed. Rick could hear water running and dishes clinking and at least one baby crying and screaming.

He gave her a version of the pretext he’d given the woman at the beauty salon, that he was a journalist writing a story on the deaths of the Cabrera family. He didn’t explain why he was writing it, eighteen years later.

“No!” she suddenly said, waving a hand back and forth. “No! No talk about this!” She pushed the door closed.

Baffled, Rick rang the doorbell again. Had she misunderstood? The door opened again, just a crack.

“
No, yo no quiero hablar! Por favor, vete! Déjanos en paz! Por favor, vaya lejos!
”

Then she closed the door again.

He understood most of what she’d said. She didn’t want to talk. She wanted him to go away. Obviously something had gone very wrong in the translation between Spanish and English. He turned to leave and saw an elderly woman standing at the foot of the concrete steps.

“You want to talk about the Cabrera family,” she said. She was stooped, with steel-gray hair in a tight bun, a very wrinkled face. She must have been in her late eighties. “They won’t talk to you. Come with me.”

She told him she’d heard from someone who’d been at the beauty salon that he was asking about the family. She knew them, she said. Her name was Manuela Guzman and she knew them from church. She had also been the daughter’s piano teacher.

The woman invited him into her apartment, in the basement of a triple-decker across the street and down the block. It was a small but neatly kept space fragrant of recent cooking, of onions and garlic and wood fires, and dominated by a grand piano.

She beckoned him over to a large wing chair and sat next to him on a couch that was protected with plastic sheeting.

“The family, they will never talk about the accident,” she said in a near whisper. “But if you are writing something about them, I want to remember them for you the way they were, not what everyone says.”

“Thank you,” Rick said, uncomfortably. He didn’t like lying to this sincere and very kindly seeming old woman. “But why don’t they want to talk about it?”

“I will explain for you.”

“Okay, thanks.” He took out his reporter’s notebook to make it look as if he were taking notes for an article.

“Graciela was my piano student. She was so talented. A sweet girl she was. She was working, trying to learn Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ when she . . .”

She fell silent. He heard the faint ticking of a clock somewhere nearby.

“Tell me the story,” Rick said. He was still grappling with how everything fit together. Why was Pappas so interested in this accident that he repeatedly called Monica Kennedy at the
Globe
—and persistently called Lenny Hoffman as well?

“There is no story,” she shot back. “There is only sadness. Sadness and lies.”

“Lies,” Rick prompted.

“After they were killed, there was talk that Oscar was drunk.” She pantomimed drinking from a glass. Then she waved a hand dismissively and frowned. “But I know this is not true. He did not drink.”

“Then what happened?”

“Graciela was so excited about going to Santo Domingo with her mother to visit her
abuela
and
abuelo
. Oscar went to the airport to pick up his wife and daughter, but their flight was late . . . delayed. In the middle of the night they are driving through this Williams tunnel and then suddenly they were all killed.”

“But . . . Oscar wasn’t drunk.”

She held up a crooked finger. “Never.”

“And the car crashed. How?”

“But you see, nobody knows. There is only stories and rumor.”

“Such as?”

She shook her head.

“Was there, you know, grease on the pavement?” Rick asked. “Was there something wrong with the car? Something went wrong, that’s for sure.” Monica Kennedy’s article didn’t mention anything like that. Her notes indicated that she suspected drunk driving, but obviously that hadn’t panned out or it would have been in her story. “Don’t you think the newspaper would have reported something about this?”

“The newspapers didn’t know the truth. But when people say Oscar was drinking, I tell them I know better.”

“But I still don’t understand why the family won’t talk to me.”

She leaned forward and held up an index finger and bounced it in the air. “Because they get paid.”

“They get paid.”

“They got money. To buy their silence. To say nothing and ask nothing. So they live in their house on the money they got.”

“Money—from what? From whom?”

She frowned and shook her head. “Maybe even they don’t know. But no one will talk about what happened in the tunnel. No one will say the truth about what killed Graciela. I want to show you something. Please?”

Rick’s mind was reeling. Things were becoming murkier. Was the truth somehow concealed that night—and if so, was Pappas part of the concealment?

And Lenny Hoffman?

The old woman opened an armoire inside of which was an old TV and assorted other electronic components and then found a videotape cassette, which she put into a VCR. She fussed with a remote control, and the TV came on, blaring a Dr. Phil show. “Can you help me?” she said.

Rick came over and tried a couple more remote controls and eventually the video was playing on the TV screen.

“She’s the first one,” the woman said, taking one of the remote controls.

It was a tape of a piano recital, Rick realized, showing each of her students. It took place in what could have been a room in a church or school. Manuela Guzman, looking considerably younger and peppier, wearing a high-necked blue dress, with black hair in a bouffant, made some remarks to the audience members, who seemed to be mostly parents and family.

There was a round of applause and then an awkward girl in pigtails, dressed in a gauzy white dress with a big pink bow at the waist, came to the front of the room and sat down at the piano. She played energetically, moving her head a lot, emoting. Whatever piece she was playing she seemed to be playing it well. She made just a few mistakes. When she finished, there was enthusiastic applause, and she got up and bowed and curtsied again, but this time she gave a big gap-toothed smile.

Something about that smile, earnest and uncertain, achingly beautiful, made Rick’s throat tight. He turned and saw that tears were running down the old woman’s cheeks. There were tears on his own cheeks as well. She was smiling back at Graciela, and she hit the Pause button.

“When you write your article,” she said, “I want you to remember Graciela.”

“I will,” he said, and he cleared his throat because it was getting hoarse.

“This is sad about Graciela, isn’t it?”

Rick nodded. “It’s a tragedy. It’s unspeakably sad.”

“Tragedy, yes. It’s funny, he say the same thing when I show him this.”

“Who did?”

“Your father.”