The Fixer (25 page)

I
’d offer you some wine,” Andrea said a few minutes later, after Evan had gone back to his room to do his homework, “but I don’t think it goes well with Vicodin.”

“Probably not.”

She sat on the bed. “Also, I don’t think you’d be satisfied with this. It’s not exactly DRC.”

He looked at her, saw the barest trace of a smile. It took him a moment to remember the nickname for Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. “Why do I get the feeling you’re giving me a hard time?”

She grinned. “I know, no fair with you in that condition.”

She was as brimming with confidence as once she’d been insecure. She’d grown up. Maybe the years she spent in the blast furnace that was Goldman Sachs had annealed her. But all that newfound confidence didn’t make her arrogant or obnoxious; it burnished her, gave her a glow, a vivacity she’d never had before. Or at least not that Rick had noticed.

“I deserve it.” Consigning their grotesquely bad date to the realm of mockery felt like progress. He tried to get up off the carpet. “Could you give me a hand?” He reached out his left hand, then remembered and put out his right. She pulled, and he groaned as he got to his feet, his broken clavicle shimmering with pain. He sat on the edge of the bed next to her. “How’d it go with the big funder?”

“Could not have gone better. I think they’re going to come through big-time. It’s going to let us hire a bunch of new tutors and get iPads for all the kids, and . . . Hey, thanks for being so sweet to Evan.”

“No problem. Seems like a cool kid.”

“He is. He really is. Are you still in terrible pain?”

“I’m better,” he lied. Even taking a breath hurt.

It had been a mistake to come home with her. But the painkillers had screwed up his judgment, sapped his will, made him far more compliant than usual. He hadn’t been thinking clearly. For him to stay at Andrea’s house was just putting her and her son at risk.

And since he’d recently taken another couple oxycodone tablets, everything was starting to slow down just a bit.

“Good. Listen. When we talked on the way home you said you got mugged and you tried to fight the attacker off.”

“Right.”

“Problem is, I don’t believe that. You weren’t mugged on the street in Marblehead. Sorry. You should have said Central Square. Dorchester, Roxbury maybe. Just not Marblehead.”

He looked away.

“What really happened?”

He hesitated, then told her.

It took almost fifteen minutes, with Andrea breaking in several times for clarification. He spoke slowly because of the drugs he was on. When he was finished, she had tears in her eyes and she seemed angry. Neither of which he had expected.

“You don’t think he meant to kill you, did he?”

“No more than they meant to kill my dad twenty years ago.”

“Meaning—what? They wanted to leave you maimed?”

“Maybe they wanted to know where the money is. Also, I think it was meant to be a warning. He could easily have killed me if he’d wanted to.”

“A warning.” Her eyes flashed. “Warning you what?”

“To stop digging. To stop trying to uncover something they want to keep covered.”

“And are you going to obey their warning?”

Rick exhaled slowly and was silent for a long while. “I don’t know,” he said truthfully.

“Do you know anybody in the police?”

He nodded. “I had a pretty good source at the FBI who’s still there. But I don’t have enough to take to the FBI. Not yet anyway.”

“Okay. You said the guy who attacked you was the bouncer from that strip club.”

“Right.”

“The strip-club owner—you don’t think he was behind the attack, do you?”

“No. The bouncer and the guys who abducted me, the guy with the shamrock tattoo—they’re all part of the same gang. I think he gets assigned these guys as muscle.”

“By who?”

“By what he calls ‘the powers that be.’ I think he’s an old stoner who does what he’s told. I don’t think he knows who’s pulling the strings.”

“So who
is
pulling the strings? Who are the powers that be?”

“It’s whoever’s behind a defunct construction company called Donegall. And whoever’s behind the Donegall Charitable Trust. But it’s a dead end. And you can bet I looked. Remember, I used to be an investigative reporter.”

“What do you mean, a dead end?”

“Donegall Construction is out of business. Went bankrupt.”

“But bankrupt doesn’t necessarily mean a dead end. Remember, I used to do troubled assets. There’s tons of corporate records filed in a bankruptcy. There’s a trustee and an agent of record—”

“From the stuff I’ve seen online, the agent of record is a shell company.”

“Huh. Weird. What about the charity? Nonprofits have to file tax returns and such.”

“I pulled up nothing on the Donegall Charitable Trust.”

“Well, that I can help you with. I run a nonprofit. I know how these things work. Hold on.”

She returned a few minutes later with a Dell laptop under her arm. She opened the laptop, wiped a few tendrils of hair back from her forehead, tucked them behind her right ear. He was beginning to float away, making it increasingly difficult to understand what she was saying.

“Okay, there’s a couple of websites for nonprofits . . . one called GuideStar . . . and the Donegall Charitable . . . Oh, now, this is bizarre.”

“What?”

She said something about “form 990” and “the IRS,” then he subsided back into a black fog of exhaustion and opiates.

“Rick?” she said.

“I’m here.”

“It’s registered in Reno, Nevada. The address is a law firm I recognize. It’s used as a home to millions of corporate addresses, limited liability corporations that want to disguise ownership. It’s basically a post office box. A dead drop.”

He didn’t understand what she was getting at. A thought glimmered and vanished, like one of those transparent fish you can see only when it catches the light.

She said, “I’ve never heard of a nonprofit going under the radar like that. Someone’s got something to hide and they’re serious about it. What about this guy Alex Pappas?”

“Pappas?” he said thickly, and he tried hard to focus.

“He knows who’s calling the shots.”

“Pappas isn’t . . . he won’t . . .”

“There must be some way to get it out of him. Or to find out from him. He’s our best way in.”

He noticed that
our
but said nothing. His tentative grasp on what she was saying was slackening, and she began to speak nonsense. “Alex Pappas” and “meeting” and something else.

“Rick?”

He opened his eyes. “I’m here.”

But when he opened his eyes again, she was gone.

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them once again, he looked at his watch. It took him some time to understand what time it was—his watch said nearly three o’clock, but was that in the afternoon? The shades in his room had been drawn, but he could see the darkness around their edges and he realized it was the middle of the night.

With some effort he managed to sit up in bed, and he reached over to the bedside table for his phone. It showed 19 percent battery life remaining. Slowly and deliberately he opened the Uber application and set the pickup location.

Fifteen minutes later he was in a cab, and on the way he got the phone call he’d long been dreading.

C
hange of plans,” Rick told the cab driver. “I’d like to go to the Alfred Becker nursing home in Brookline.”

“Where?” The driver pulled over to the side and entered the Becker home in his smartphone’s GPS.

Rick felt his heartbeat slow as he watched the traffic, the buildings they passed, and everything seemed remote and miniature. He was lost in thought. Twenty minutes later, though it seemed to be two or three, the cab pulled up to the circular drive in front of the Alfred Becker.

He got out gingerly and limped to the entrance, pushed the glass doors open with his right hand. The woman sitting at the front desk ignored him, as she ignored everybody. He signed in and walked down the broad main corridor, past the elevator, everything slower and unreal, as if in a dream.

When he reached his father’s wing, he passed one of the nurses, Carolyn, who just looked at him with surprise as he passed. For a moment he forgot why, then he remembered what his face must look like. The beautiful Saint Lucian nurse, Jewel, with the fawnlike eyes, was lingering in front of the closed door to Lenny’s room. “What happened to you, Mr. Rick?”

“I was in an accident, but I’m okay.”

“It looks—very bad.”

“It’s not as bad as it looks.”

She touched his arm and said, “I’m sorry about your father.”

She opened the door. He was lying on his back. When Rick saw him, his stomach took a deep dive. He couldn’t stop himself from exclaiming, in a small strangled voice, “Oh.”

He hadn’t expected Lenny’s expression to be so serene, but it was. That angry expression seemed to have dissolved in death. His mouth gaped, just a little. His cataract-clouded eyes looked at nothing. Rick reached up with his good hand and pulled Lenny’s eyelids closed. The skin was pale and waxy, translucent, and it felt slightly cool to the touch.

“Dad,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“He die in his sleep, your father,” Jewel said. “I come by and see him when my shift start, at midnight, and he was watching the TV. I come by again and ask him if he want to turn off the TV because it’s so late and he didn’t say nothin’ but he was alive. I turn off the TV and his lamp and tuck him in and everything. When I look in at three tirty, he gone.”

“He died in his sleep,” Rick echoed, just to say something. “That’s nice.”

“I pronounce and tell doctor by phone. But we wait till you get here to call funeral home. Do you have funeral home to call?”

“Funeral home? Oh. Yeah, no. What’s that big one, Orlonsky and Sons?” The big funeral home on Beacon Street in Brookline. He remembered driving past the Grecian columns,
ORLONSKY & SONS MEMORIAL CHAPEL
in black letters.

She nodded. “Orlonsky, yes, we call them. Your father—he was a very nice man, your father was.”

“He was. What was—the cause of death?”

“I think the doctor will say cardiac failure. Maybe he was leaving here too much.” It took him a while to understand what she meant. Finally he understood: Lenny’s traveling to Charlestown and back as often as he did must have been stressful for him.

*   *   *

When Jewel left, Rick sat in the chair beside the bed and thought for a moment. He felt heavy-limbed and achy. The pain had come back. It was time for another pain pill, but he needed to stay alert a while longer.

Then he took out his phone and stepped into the hallway. On the West Coast it was three hours earlier: one in the morning. She might still be awake, but more likely she was asleep.

The phone rang six times before she answered.

“Wendy,” he said. “How soon can you get back to Boston?”

*   *   *

Half an hour later—surprisingly quickly—someone from the funeral home came, a young guy in a dark crewneck sweater. He went to work at once, lowering the bed expertly, transferring the body to a rolling cot, covering the body with a quilt he had brought.

Rick didn’t cry.

He’d been meaning to tell his dad how much he admired him, but it was too late.

B
y the time he was finished signing forms and doing paperwork for the death certificate and composing the death notice for the newspapers, it was five thirty in the morning. Lenny wasn’t an organ donor. He believed that if the doctors found an organ donor card in your wallet, they didn’t try as hard to save you. There was not much to sign.

Rick got a cab and went back to the DoubleTree. He was hobbling slowly. His pain had come roaring back. But he couldn’t take a pill, not until he was settled someplace else.

He had one suitcase and a few clothes to pack, some toiletries in the bathroom, not much else.

He thought about his father’s funeral. Who were Lenny’s friends anymore? For almost twenty years he’d lived in a nursing home, unable to communicate. Most of his friends stopped coming by after a few months. There was Mr. Clarke/Herbert Antholis, but he couldn’t appear in public. Lenny’s secretary, Joan, whom his father had reason to distrust. Who else was there?

At a few minutes after six in the morning, his phone rang.

It was Andrea. “Rick, are you all right? Where’d you go? Was it something I said?”

He’d rehearsed a few answers but nothing seemed right.
I didn’t want to trouble you
made him sound like a martyr.
I’m all recovered
sounded delusional.

“I’m okay,” he said. “I thought it was better for you and Evan if I wasn’t there.”

“That’s ridiculous. You’re going to stay at some hotel—?”

“My father died.”

“Ohh, Rick, I’m sorry. When did this—?”

“I got a call in the middle of the night. Heart failure.”

“So that’s why . . . What can I do?”

He didn’t correct her. No reason for her to know he’d left before getting the call from the nursing home. “Nothing. Apologize to Evan for me. He was going to show me how to play
Minecraft
. Tell him another time.”

*   *   *

Rick wanted to change hotels, because that had become his routine, but he couldn’t. Since his wallet had been taken, he had no credit cards, no driver’s license. The DoubleTree had his card on file, so he was okay until he checked out. By tomorrow he’d have replacement credit cards he could use.

He had around ten thousand dollars in cash left and was in no condition to go back to the storage unit for more, not until he felt stronger. Fortunately, he’d paid off all his credit cards, so after a few hours on the phone he had new credit card numbers he could use once they arrived.

He took a pain pill and slept for five hours.

By the time he’d awakened, the funeral home was open. He surveyed himself in the bathroom mirror as he washed up. The bruises on his face were starting to look less acute, less well defined, with green and yellow tints seeping around the edges. His left eye was still swollen, but much less than it had been. He no longer had a constant headache. He was starting to heal. But every time he moved, even to lift a cup of coffee, he felt the pain. It hurt when he coughed, grunted, or laughed. It was as if he were made of broken glass in a bag.

He took a cab to the funeral home and picked out a plain wooden casket, and still he didn’t cry. The funeral director offered to bring in a rabbi to conduct the service the following day. Neither Rick nor his father was observant, but in the end, Rick decided that was what his father would have wanted. Better safe than sorry.

He went back to the hotel and slept some more until his cell phone ringing woke him up. He looked at the time on the phone. He’d been asleep for seven hours.

It was Wendy. She’d just arrived in Boston. She’d caught an Alaska Airlines flight from Bellingham—her least favorite airline, she made a point of saying—with a brief layover in Seattle. Rick told her he’d had a car accident a few days ago, was fine now, but needed his rest. He’d see her at the funeral tomorrow.

“Is Sarah with you?”

“No. She can’t leave the restaurant.” Rick had met Sarah exactly once, a couple of years ago, at their wedding.

“Hey, Rick? How’d he die?”

“They’re saying cardiac failure.”

“Maybe it’s just as well. Ever since his stroke, his quality of life was pretty lousy.”

“I guess.”

He gave her the address of the funeral home and told her to be there at ten o’clock. The funeral started at eleven.

“Hey, Rick?”

“Yeah?”

“Know something weird?” Wendy said. “We’re orphans now.”