The Fixer (20 page)

L
eaving Charlestown, Rick had the uneasy sense he was being followed.

It wasn’t a certainty. A vehicle had been behind him all the way from the hospital parking garage to Storrow Drive. Not a black Escalade or Suburban but a gray GMC Yukon. Was it a tail, or just a coincidence, someone else traveling from Mass General to Boston?

Maybe it was nothing, but he had to be careful. Where he was going, it was crucial he not be followed.

He saw the exit for Copley Place and decided at the last minute to take the exit. When he turned off Storrow and the Yukon followed, he realized he wasn’t imagining things.

A quick left and straight down Arlington Street and a few blocks later he came to the Park Plaza Hotel. He remembered there was a gala being held there, the one Darren from the magazine wanted him to attend. It had probably started already. He’d had no intention of going, but his name was on the guest list. Which gave him an idea.

He pulled up to the valet and the Yukon double-parked across the street. He wondered whether they wanted him to notice the tail, as if that was part of a strategy to unnerve him, cause him to do something stupid.

Well, they could follow him into the hotel, but not into the gala.

He got out of the car, handed his keys to the valet, and entered the hotel without looking back.

It was easy to find the banquet room where the event was taking place. The usual crowd was gathering, bunched at the entrance by a sign for the
SCULLEY FOUNDATION LITERACY
INITIATIVE
, as attractive young women in headsets, holding iPads, checked off names.

He was wearing jeans and a fleece pullover and was seriously underdressed for the occasion. But they weren’t going to kick him out for not wearing a jacket and tie. All he needed to do was spend thirty, forty-five minutes here, long enough for his watchers to give up and leave. He’d pretend to be on assignment from
Back Bay
. Which shouldn’t be difficult, since he actually was.

Someone grabbed hold of his elbow. It was Mort Ostrow. “I like your idea of cocktail attire,” he said. “Didn’t I just see you at Marco?”

Rick shrugged. “Hello, Mort.”

“Sculley’s right over there. Isn’t he on your dance card this week?”

“That’s right.”

“Listen, Rick, I want you to give him the real Rick Hoffman treatment.”

He winced. “Sure.” The truth was, Rick could write the lede to the Q&A in his sleep:
He may own several of the most iconic buildings in the Boston skyline, but when you talk to the billionaire builder Thomas Sculley, he’ll tell you it’s people, not buildings, that he’s built his fortune on.

“Let me introduce you,” Ostrow said.

“Mort, how about we do this another time, I’m—”

“Two minutes.” Ostrow sidled in close and confided: “Sculley and I are in talks. I think he’s about to buy the magazine. Though I’m calling it a vertically integrated media company. I want him to experience the full Rick Hoffman treatment. There he is.”

Thomas Sculley was talking to an elegant fortyish blonde, but when he saw Ostrow, he turned. He had craggy, rough-hewn features and looked to be in his seventies.

“Thomas, I wanted you to meet one of our ace reporters, Rick Hoffman.”

Sculley gave him the big-man handshake-and-biceps grip-and-grin. “Oh, yes, Mr. Hoffman, why don’t we have our little talk right now?”

“I’d love that, but I don’t think these folks would forgive me if I took you away.” Rick gestured vaguely toward the throng. “Maybe you can find a few minutes next week?”

“Certainly,” the man said, crinkling his eyes.

A few minutes later Rick managed to escape Ostrow’s clutches. He walked around the perimeter of the ballroom, which was crowded with tables set for dinner, and exited via one of the doors at the far end. He emerged from the hotel at the cabstand and got into one of the waiting taxis. “Government Center, please,” he said.

R
ick had met FBI Special Agent Ernie Donovan a few times, but it hadn’t been for at least seven years. Donovan hadn’t changed. He was ex-Marine and took pride in maintaining the look, the high-and-tight hair and the physique. Donovan’s black hair was peppered with gray now. That was the main difference.

Eight years ago Rick had worked on a piece on interstate sex trafficking of minors and had, in the process, gotten to know Donovan. The FBI is always finicky in its dealings with journalists. It views them as unreliable, uncontrollable, publicity-seeking loose cannons, which is largely true. Journalists view the FBI as hidebound, bureaucratic, and legalistic, which is also largely true. But when their needs overlap—when the bureau wanted a story out—the relationship could be harmonious.

They met at a Starbucks across the street from the Boston field office. Donovan turned down Rick’s offer of a drink after work. He had four kids and had a long drive home from Boston.

Donovan met Rick in line. The agent’s grip was very ex-Marine. They made small talk until they were seated with their coffees at a table. Rick told him about what he was investigating, the covered-up accident. “Did that ever come across your radar screen?”

“You’re talking about the Big Dig. The radar screen got awfully crowded those days.”

“So nothing about this accident in particular? A cover-up?”

“I don’t have anything for you, Rick.”

“Meaning you can’t tell me, or you don’t have anything to tell?”

Donovan smiled. “If I had anything, I couldn’t tell you.”

“You’d know if an investigation was ever opened.”

“And officially I’m not supposed to tell you that no investigation was ever opened.”

“Got it. Thanks.”

“I remember the accident well. Off the record, it always troubled me.”

“But not enough to open an investigation.”

“A lot was going on back then. Whitey Bulger had just vanished in Boston the year before. A lot of fingers were being pointed. But if you find something, let me have a look.”

“Maybe I will.”

“Listen, Rick. You’re digging in a swamp. It’s Boston and the Big Dig and corrupt contractors and a lot of people don’t want the muck raked. Be careful out there, okay?”

Y
ou’re right on time,” Joan Breslin said as she opened the door. “I’ve just baked some scones.”

Lenny’s secretary had been surprised to hear from Rick again, but she agreed, though sounding somewhat reluctant, to meet with him again. She was dressed more casually this time, in a gray cardigan over a pink button-down shirt.

The house smelled deliciously of her fresh-baked scones. She led him into her kitchen, which was wallpapered in a turquoise paper with a white trellis pattern. The kitchen table, set with two plates and butter and jam, was turquoise-painted wood, the chairs painted turquoise as well. She lifted several scones with a spatula off a wire rack on top of the oven and slid them onto a serving platter. Then she served one to Rick and one for herself.

“Please,” she said, indicating the scones. “Tell me how I can help you.”

“It’s about my dad, obviously. When you found him, right after his stroke—is it possible he was beaten?”

“Beaten? For heaven’s sake, why would you ask that?”

“Because his doctor had a new set of MRIs done and found unmistakable evidence of traumatic brain injury. He thinks that’s what caused the stroke.”

Her eyes widened and she shook her head. “He was slumped on the floor when I found him. A bunch of things from his desk were on the floor. I always assumed he fell and hit his desk on his way down.”

Rick hesitated a moment. “You never said anything about that.”

“I told the doctor.”

“Is there anything else you can remember? Did he look like he might have been beaten?”

Her eyes searched the ceiling. “It’s been so long. How long has it been, twenty years?”

“Just about. So no blood or other signs that he might have been attacked?”

“No, nothing. Who would attack Len?”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you. Whether he had enemies you might have known about. You said he did business with sketchy people from the old Combat Zone, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know as any of them were violent, really.”

He took a bite of the scone. It was still warm from the oven. Then he almost choked. It was as dry as a mouthful of sand. It took a good slug of coffee to get it down. “Mmm,” he said. “Delicious.”

“Oh, good. It’s my mother’s recipe. Irish soda bread scones. Please help yourself to more. Timothy doesn’t care for them.” She took a dainty bite and apparently had no problem swallowing it.

“I’m good,” he said, and he took another gulp of coffee.

“But some of your father’s clients from the old days—well, I just kept my mouth shut, since it wasn’t my business, but before he started, um, working in the Combat Zone, he had quite a few of what I call the shaggy-haired America-bashers, you know. I imagine some of them might have been dangerous.”

“America-bashers?” He took another long swig of coffee.

She pursed her lips. “Those students who wanted to overthrow the government. With their long hair and their ‘power to the people’ and their demonstrations.” She made a fist and wagged it in the air. “The less said about those clients, the better. Your father and I agreed to disagree.”

“What do you mean, Joan? Were there disagreements? Any threats?”

“Who knows with those people.”

“You don’t remember whether he had any enemies? Did he confide in you about any people he might have been afraid of?”

“I told you, your father didn’t really confide much in me. He had a lot of secrets but not many people he confided in. I don’t know as he had many friends, to tell you the truth.”

That was true, Rick reflected. His father had his work, his clients, and then he’d come home and sit in his study. He seemed to have no social life.

“I don’t think he had a lot of friends,” Rick said. There were none that Rick could think of.

“There was that odd fellow in New Hampshire. He used to call from time to time.”

“New Hampshire?”

“One of those scruffy people. A short name? Kent or Jones? He drove up to New Hampshire a week or so before his stroke. I think he was visiting this friend. Clark?”

“Clarke, right!” Rick said. “Paul Clarke.”

“Clarke. I think he was a friend.”

Rick had a sudden recollection of driving up to New Hampshire when he and Wendy were kids, visiting an old friend of Lenny’s who had a maple syrup farm. Paul Clarke, the name was. He lived in an old farmhouse with a barn. Rick remembered playing with a Victrola with a magnificent horn that was kept in the barn, playing 78 rpm records. Lenny and Paul used to disappear into Paul’s study and have long, deep talks for hours at a time, while Wendy and Rick and their mother explored the house and played in the barn or outside in the snow. Or they’d check out the sugar house where Paul made the syrup. They’d go sledding down a steep hill.

“Do you have his phone number by any chance?”

“It would probably be in the old Rolodex. Let me go down and see if I can dig it up. You help yourself to another scone, why don’t you.”

“I’m still working on this one. I’m trying not to be a pig.”

While she went down to the basement, Rick looked around the kitchen. He noticed a framed needlepoint sampler on the wall that said
ERIN GO BRAGH
in yellow letters against a green background. The words were surrounded by sprigs of shamrocks. Rick didn’t remember what
Erin go Bragh
meant, just that it was an Anglicization of some Irish expression. He thought of the “666” shamrocks on the wrist of one of his attackers.

Boston was, in a lot of ways, an Irish town. There were more Asians and Hispanics in Boston, by percentage, but the Irish had dominated Boston for more than a century. They came over in the mid-nineteenth century to escape famine and found themselves an oppressed minority. Old-line Bostonians hired the Irish immigrants as their servants, paying slave wages. The Irish did all the jobs no one else would do, mopping the gutters and scrubbing the laundry and butchering the hogs and taking care of the babies. They could get no other work. Signs in shop windows said
NO IRIS
H NEED APPLY
. But by the late nineteenth century the Irish had begun to organize and get elected to political office, and for a hundred years, most of the mayors of Boston were Irishmen.

“Here we go,” Joan said when she returned. “A 603 area code; that’s New Hampshire.” She was carrying a big Rolodex wheel that must have held a thousand cards. The cards looked yellowed. She set it down on the kitchen table, open to a card with “CLARKE, Paul” typed in the typescript of an old manual typewriter. The
e
’s were filled in. The card had a 603 phone number and a post office box address in Redding, New Hampshire.

“Could I take this?” Rick said.

After a moment’s hesitation, Joan said, sitting down, “I suppose so,” and she detached the card from the wheel and handed it to him.

“Thanks,” he said. “Let me run another name by you. I think he’s the mysterious ‘P’ that Dad was scheduled to have lunch with on the day of his stroke. Alex Pappas?”

She blinked once. “Alex Pappas. Sure.” She looked as if she didn’t want to say anything further.

“You know him?”

She shrugged. “Through your father.”

Strange, he thought, that she never suggested his name when he’d asked who “P” might have been.

“I wonder whether Pappas, or people working for him, came to the office. Maybe they threatened him. Maybe someone hit him. I know that Lenny’s afraid of Pappas.”

Joan gave a sharp, mirthless laugh. “
Afraid
of him? You don’t know anything, do you? Who do you think’s been taking care of him all these years?”

“What do you mean? I thought it was Medicare . . . no?”

“The Donegall Charitable Trust,” she said. “They’ve been paying all of his expenses since his stroke.”

“Donegall Charitable . . . Whose money is that?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that Alex Pappas made the arrangements. So before you accuse Alex of having your father beaten, put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

Donegall was probably a place in Ireland, Rick thought. “I don’t understand . . . Why did Alex Pappas arrange to pay for his care?” Pappas had never said anything about that.

“Because Alex Pappas is a loyal man. Your father did a lot of business for Alex, and Alex took care of him when he needed help.”

“The . . . cash-bank business, you mean. Collecting cash and giving out bribes and such.”

She shrugged. “I suppose I made deposits of cash in the bank when I was asked to. Sometimes I put cash in the safe. But the whole business didn’t concern me, and I asked no questions,” she said with an almost prudish, defiant air. “Your father protected me.”

“What do you know about the Donegall Charitable Trust? Do you have an address or a contact name?” Rick recalled the late-model Audi in Joan’s driveway and wondered whether the Donegall Charitable Trust was taking care of her as well.

“It all happens with wire transfers and such, and I don’t concern myself with the details. They’ve never been late with a payment, and there’s never been a problem.”

“So you don’t have a name?”

“You’re a persistent one, aren’t you?”

“I never give up. Like father, like son, right?”

“I wouldn’t say so.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“Wasn’t your job all about uncovering secrets?”

“It was.”

“Well, your father was all about keeping them.”