The Fixer (22 page)

L
enny was ordered to cover something up, and he couldn’t go through with it. So he knew he had no choice but to get out, to quit his life and set up a new one. I’m sorry, I thought he’d told you and your sister. He was planning to. Maybe he never got a chance.”

“How was he planning to ‘quit’ his life? What does that mean, exactly?”

“He’d begun to accumulate his assets—to gather cash, enough to buy him a new identity and a new life, and leave some for you and—your sister’s name was Wendy, perhaps?”

Rick nodded. He wondered how much Clarke knew about the cash, how much there was. “But where’d he get the cash?”

“He was paid very well by one of his clients—the one he’d become fearful of—and he always lived modestly. And on top of that, to be honest, I think he skimmed money off of the cash he’d amassed for this client. He wasn’t troubled by the morality of it, I have to say. He called it ‘stealing from thieves.’”

“How could he disappear?”

“The same way I did. You do know that Clarke isn’t my real name, don’t you?”

“No.”

“So you don’t know . . . Your dad stood by me when no one else would.”

“Stood by you how?”

“Lenny was a hero. Back in the day, he’d take cases no other lawyer would take. Like mine. My real name is Herbert Antholis. You might have heard the name . . . ?”

Rick shook his head. “I don’t think so. Should I know who you are?”

Clarke—Antholis?—tipped his head and gave that crooked half smile that Rick remembered well. “Those days are long gone, I guess, and just as well. I used to be a member of the Weather Underground. Back in the days before that was a weather website. We were student radicals. We all had copies of Mao’s little red book, and we were convinced that old Chairman Mao was right, that political power grows out of a gun.

“Well, we were protesting the US bombing of Hanoi in 1972—we were planning to break into an army recruiting center in downtown Boston and steal records. But I was the low man on the totem pole, and what I didn’t know, what they didn’t tell me, was that my comrades were actually planning to set off a pipe bomb there. I was driving the car, and my job was to wait for my comrades to come back and then hightail it out of there. Only later did I find out that an army sergeant, the guy who ran the recruiting center, was killed when the bomb went off. A father of four kids. That wasn’t part of the plan at all. No one told me. But after we were arrested and charged, it didn’t make a difference that I was at the bottom of the totem pole. A grand jury indicted me, and the district attorney was going for the maximum sentence he could get—life in prison. I mean, I drove the getaway car, so I knew I was culpable. I deserved some kind of prison sentence. But not life. Your father took my case and he believed in me. He worked his butt off. But he knew I could never get a fair trial. I said to your dad, ‘What are my odds?’ and he said, ‘Frankly, they’re bad.’ I told him I’d have to make a run for it, go underground like some of my Weather Underground comrades did. He said, ‘Do you know what kind of position that puts me in?’ But he helped me anyway. It was a lot easier to disappear back in the early seventies. I got some fake papers made and moved to rural New Hampshire and set up a new life. No one knows, not my neighbors or my friends in town. They just know me as a sugar maker.”

“I had no idea about any of this.”

“It was a lot more complicated for your father to disappear back in—1995, was it? ’96?”

“’96.” Rick was astonished at Antholis’s account. This was a Lenny Hoffman he didn’t recognize.

“He had to set up a ghost address, and I think he was working on getting a driver’s license in another name. But mostly, the thing is, you have to live on cash. Which is surprisingly not all that hard to do.”

“Who did he tell? Just you? Or did he tell Joan as well?”

“Joan, his secretary? No way. Joan was always a problem for him. I don’t know why he never fired her.”

“What? She seems as loyal as they come.”

“He never told you? Remember during the busing crisis in Boston when there was all that violence? The courts ordered that black kids be bused to white schools and white kids be bused to black schools. . . . There was this black teenager who was charged with stoning cars. Lenny represented him pro bono. He didn’t think the kid was guilty. Well, Joan’s uncle was badly hurt during all that madness—he was hit with a cinder block or some such outside a housing project in Roxbury. Wielded by another black teenager. I think Joan never forgave him for agreeing to represent that black kid.”

“But I don’t understand,” he said. “I thought Dad represented strip clubs and such. His clients all came out of the Combat Zone.”

“That’s how he ended up, sure. But that wasn’t how he started. That wasn’t what Lenny wanted to be. Your father saw himself as a First Amendment lawyer. That was something he deeply cared about. I mean, this wasn’t the sort of pro bono work that partners at big law firms get points for taking on. This was a cause for him. A life. But then he had kids and he knew he needed a reliable way to make a living.”

Rick couldn’t help but marvel at the old Leonard Hoffman, the man he never knew. “So what changed?” he said. “How could someone like that become someone like, well, my dad?” But he knew what Antholis was going to say, and he dreaded it.

“Look in the mirror, Rick,” Antholis said.

B
y the time he arrived at his latest hotel, the DoubleTree Suites on Soldiers Field Road in Boston, he was exhausted. It was dark and cold and he’d had to battle rush-hour traffic getting back to the city from New Hampshire. Yet he was too keyed up to sleep. He poured a Scotch from the minibar and tried watching television for a while, but nothing held his interest.

He could think of nothing else besides what he’d learned in New Hampshire, from his father’s old friend. He was still stunned.

His father had been planning to disappear, to become a fugitive, and only a stroke had interfered with his plan. He wanted out of the life he’d made for himself, a life of deceit and payoffs and bribes—a life that had become dangerous and repulsive to him.

The Lenny Hoffman that Herbert Antholis knew was a hero, plain and simple. He’d defended outcasts and rejects; he’d defended people who had no one else to defend them. Yes, he’d taken on work he disliked in order to support a family. He’d sold out. But in the end he did the right thing—the brave thing. He refused to cover up the cause of the accident that killed a family.

He marveled at the deception that was “Paul Clarke,” a.k.a. Herbert Antholis. Rick wanted to call his sister and tell her what he’d discovered about the mysterious man who’d introduced them to maple syrup on snow—she’d be equally blown away—but he couldn’t risk being distracted now.

He was tired, not just from the long day, the booze, and all that driving, but from having to run and hide. He was tired of his desperate, nomadic existence, having to change hotels every other night, always having to look behind him. The fortune he’d uncovered—or, was it, more accurately, the
mis
fortune?—had plunged him into a world of danger similar to what his father must have confronted. Part of him was tempted to give up, to throw in the towel, to stop running. But what would that entail, exactly? Was it even possible?

The people who’d been coming after him showed no signs of stopping. At least now he had some idea why. If Herbert Antholis was right, a part of that 3.4 million was skimmed—stolen, to put it simply—from Alex Pappas or from whoever his clients were.

Who was Pappas’s client? Maybe the solution, the thing that would make him safe, was as simple as figuring out who the client was and making a deal, giving back part of the cash. That was one approach. Figure out what they wanted and give it to them.

But there was another approach. Call it the confrontation option. Investigate, figure out who the client or clients were, and confront them with proof of their crime, of their role in covering up the real cause of the accident that killed the Cabreras. Maybe confronting them would flush them out, keep them at bay.

Maybe.

He opened his laptop. The problem was, he knew very little. He had only a few threads to pull at. Start with the meat-packing plant in South Boston where he’d been taken to be tortured—and would certainly have been, would have been maimed or worse, had the guys from the demo crew not tracked him there.

Who owned the place?

The sign on the front of the warehouse where he’d been taken had said
B&H PACKING, 36 NEWMARKET SQ
.

Newmarket Square was an area where a lot of wholesalers were located—seafood dealers, fruit-and-vegetable vendors, and the like—just off the Southeast Expressway and near the Mass Turnpike. He Googled B&H Packing on Newmarket Square and came up with only a rudimentary, temporary website. There was a slogan—“Quality purveyors to fine restaurants in the Greater Boston area”—and then just a line: “New website coming.” A few more Google attempts yielded not much more. It was a low-profile wholesale meat-packing company, that was all. No owner listed anywhere. Whoever owned the place had to be directly connected to the Irish gang that had abducted him twice.

But that seemed to be a dead end.

Then what about Donegall Charitable Trust, which, according to Joan Breslin, paid for his father’s nursing home? That was, he knew, more than 120,000 dollars a year. Not cheap. This was another dangling thread. He Googled it, as he’d done before, only to have Google reply:

No results found for “Donegall Charitable Trust”

Charities, he knew, had to file with the Internal Revenue Service. There had to be some information to dig up. But unless Joan Breslin had lied about the name—which was a possibility—it didn’t seem to exist.

A dead end.

So then there was the biggest, fattest target: Who built the Ted Williams Tunnel? That was easy. Google yielded a number of companies. The project manager was the mammoth construction firm Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff. But then a name jumped out at him: Donegall Construction Company.

That was the link. Donegall Construction.

It didn’t take long to determine that Donegall Construction was out of business.

So what did that mean?

Two points determined a line. Never mind if both points remained out of focus. An out-of-business construction company and a below-the-radar charitable trust. With enough digging, he would connect the two. He was confident in his ability to do just that.

But there was an easier way in. A name in the file of notes Monica had given him.

The name of the cop who had signed the accident report. If there had been a cover-up, the police officer who’d been on the scene would know the truth. He had a name—Police Sergeant Walter Conklin. He’d been a police sergeant twenty years ago. Odds were, he was still alive. Also that he was retired.

There was a handful of Walter Conklins in the country. In Massachusetts, only one. But he lived in Marblehead, which was a wealthy town full of yacht clubs. Not a place where cops lived. A Google search for that Walter Conklin pulled up a few articles about some local controversy over a windmill off the Marblehead coast. There’d been a public hearing at Marblehead city hall, standing room only, at which local residents voiced their opinions on putting a nearly four-hundred-foot wind turbine off Tinker’s Island, within view of Marblehead. “Over my dead body,” said local resident Walter Conklin.

When Rick went on Google Maps, he did a double take. Conklin’s house was not just in Marblehead but on Marblehead Neck, a peninsula where some of the town’s biggest houses were located. His house was directly on the water. No wonder he didn’t want his view marred by a few giant windmills. Rick shifted to Google Street View and found a sprawling shingle-style house on Ocean Avenue. He went on Zillow.com and pulled up Conklin’s house. It was valued at 2.9 million dollars.

A retired Boston policeman living in a three-million-dollar house on Marblehead Neck?

Something was very wrong.

He checked his watch. It wasn’t too late to make a call.

“Walter Conklin?”

“Who’s asking?” a gruff voice answered.

“Rick Hoffman with
Back Bay
magazine in Boston. I’m doing a piece on the windmill controversy up in Marblehead. Looks like they want to put some awfully big, butt-ugly windmill right in your front yard. I was wondering whether you might be willing to talk a bit about it.”

“Hell, yeah, I want to talk about it. If the board of selectmen thinks—”

“I’ll be in Marblehead tomorrow midday and would love to come by and see your view and do an interview.”

“Absolutely,” Conklin said. “It would be my pleasure.”

H
e was at City Archives when they opened, holding a box from a high-end bakery in Harvard Square.

“I hope that’s not from the Tastee again,” Marie Gamache said. “Because that would be cruel and unusual.”

He handed her the box. “Raisin-pecan morning buns and carrot cake muffins. Both gluten-free.”

“Interesting,” she said. She opened the box. “Definitely promising. You are too nice to me.”

“Only when I’m being unreasonable.” He’d e-mailed her last night and asked for an appointment first thing in the morning. But that wasn’t the tough ask. He asked to see the city’s Transportation Department archives, specifically the repair records for a specific time period in 1996. Since 9/11, for some reason, these records weren’t open to the general public. But access could be arranged with special permission.

“It’s no big deal,” Marie said. She indicated a steel trolley that held gray file boxes. “If you know the right people. Have fun.”

Rick had a theory. Eighteen years ago there’d been an accident in the Ted Williams Tunnel. A bad accident, bad enough for three people to be killed. The tunnel was closed to traffic for at least part of the next day, according to the newspaper. Standard operating procedure: The damaged car would be left there long enough for an accident reconstruction team to map out what happened. Only then would the car be towed away and the tunnel reopened to traffic.

Both westbound lanes closed for a day or so. That was in the public record. A huge hassle for drivers.

But Rick was convinced there would be something else. There had to be some sort of record of the work done. He was hoping to find a document proving that there’d been a grease slick or a problem with the asphalt. Something. After two hours of searching through tedious files, his eyelids were like sandpaper. He was about to give up when something caught his eye.

It was a memorandum on Donegall Construction letterhead to the secretary of transportation. “Replace fallen NuArt fluorescent light fixture” was its subject line.

He read it over several times. A ceiling-mounted fluorescent light fixture in the Ted Williams Tunnel had fallen. It had been replaced the day after the accident that killed the Cabreras.

A light fixture?

He imagined a flimsy glass fluorescent tube dropping from the ceiling and couldn’t see what that had to do with causing an accident. He found a computer at one of the workstations provided for archives users, went online. Fairly quickly he discovered that the light fixtures used in the Ted Williams ranged from 80 pounds to 110 pounds. They were attached by means of bolts and epoxy adhesive.

Eighty pounds fell. On what? What if it fell on a car? He imagined the impact, the spider-webbed windshield. The blinded driver, the panic.

The car spinning out of control.

It was as simple as that. Now he understood what happened, what had caused the accident. Now it made sense. But nothing about a falling light fixture had been reported in the press. Somehow it had been covered up.

He had a pretty good idea how that might have happened.

He needed to take a few notes. He reached into his pockets. All he had was his wallet and, for some reason, Andrea Messina’s business card. He smiled. He’d been thinking about her and about how awful their dinner had been. Then remembered he’d brought one of his old reporter’s notebooks, long and thin and spiral-bound on the top, for his interview with Conklin later that morning. He wanted it to look like a real interview.

He opened the notebook and took notes. Now he knew exactly what he had to ask the ex-cop.

*   *   *

At the end of the afternoon he stopped by Clayton Street and found Jeff there, sweeping up with one hand. His other hand held his phone to his ear. “All right, cool,” he said. “Got it. That’s no problem. All right, later.”

Jeff flipped the phone closed, and it tumbled to the floor. “Shit,” he said, reaching over to retrieve it. He held it up in the air triumphantly. It was an old-model Nokia flip phone. “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.” He flipped it open and closed a few times. “Oldie but goodie. Doesn’t talk to you and tell you what time the movie starts, but drop it and the screen doesn’t shatter.”

“True.”

“What’s up, boss?”

“Got a minute?”

Jeff shrugged. “Sure.”

“I need your help on something. You know anybody who used to work on the Big Dig?”

“The Big Dig?” He chuckled. “Oh, sure. A lot.”

“Let me tell you a story.” He gave Jeff the briefest possible summary of what he’d been investigating. As he finished up, he said, “There must have been a dozen workers on site there to replace that light fixture. Subcontractors. Electricians and lighting specialists and epoxy guys and all that.”

“Boston’s a small town,” Jeff said. “I should at least know someone who knows someone. I got a couple ideas; let me ask around and get back to you.”

“Thanks. And do me a favor—be discreet about why you’re asking, okay?”

Jeff paused a moment. Warily, he said, “Do my best.”

“Some people out there don’t want anyone asking questions.”