The Fixer (27 page)

G
loria Antunes, executive director of the Hyde Square Community Partnership, was polite but firm.

“Mr. Hoffman, I’ve already told you I have nothing to contribute.” She wore a blue paisley scarf around her shoulders and the same large hoop earrings she’d been wearing the last time he saw her.

“Actually, you do,” he said. “You are already part of my article. The question is how big a role will you play in it. That’s up to you.” He held a DVD in its case from the video duplication place on Newbury Street. She wouldn’t know what was on that DVD—he’d had a copy made of the old VHS that Manuela Guzman, Graciela’s piano teacher, had played for him. But he waved it like a prosecutor wagging a piece of evidence in court.

“I don’t understand.”

“Give me five minutes of your time and you will.”

“I can give you two.”

Rick shrugged and entered her office. He sat in front of her desk, and when she had taken her place behind the desk he handed her the DVD.

She took it. “And?” She cocked her head.

“Play this in your computer.”

“What is it?”

But she inserted the DVD in the disk drive of her desktop.

When the video started to play, Rick narrated: “That’s the little girl. Graciela Cabrera.”

He saw it in her tear-flooded eyes. The tape had that effect on people. On him, on Lenny, and now on Gloria Antunes. The girl’s awkwardness and her endearing, pure sweetness.

Rick continued, speaking over the audio. “At first you called for an investigation into the accident that killed the Cabreras. After your organization received a sizable gift from the Donegall Charitable Trust, you suddenly zipped up. I know this because my father was the one who arranged it.”

That last sentence he was improvising, but he knew at once he’d guessed right. She had no idea what his father might have told Rick after all these years. And if she had been given a check by Pappas and not Lenny, she wouldn’t know what might have happened behind the scenes.

“You knew this family. This girl. Didn’t you?”

Gloria nodded. Her eyes looked red. She closed them. “A terrible thing.”

“It must be so difficult.”

“What must be so difficult?”

“To live with yourself. Knowing what happened to them.”

When her tears began to flow, Rick knew he had reached her.

*   *   *

Whether it was the videotape or Rick’s bluffing, his intimations that he knew for certain far more than he did, she finally broke down. She had lived with the guilt for eighteen years, the guilt of her silence. The Donegall Charitable Trust was still one of her main funders, but she had others now. That wasn’t the case when it was just Gloria Antunes, community activist, before the Donegall trust had offered to fund the launch of her own organization.

Legally, she’d committed no crimes. But she was haunted. The responsibility she felt was a moral one, the weight of all those years of keeping her silence about what had really happened to the Cabrera family one night in a tunnel in Boston.

Now, finally, she was willing to speak on the record.

I
’ve reconsidered your offer,” Rick said.

The sun was bright in Pappas’s office, glinting off the objects on his desk, the brass shade of his desk lamp, the buttery silver of the picture frames. In the bright light, Pappas gave off one single impression: red. His face was permanently flushed, the skin enraged with spider webs of capillaries.

“
Reconsidered
my offer?” He said it with amusement, as if Rick had told him he was taking up mime: with a heavy underlining of irony, in scare quotes.

“My father was able to talk at the end, and he told me an interesting story. And now that he’s gone I can safely write an article about it.”

Pappas looked at him for a very long time. Then he grinned broadly. “Okay, Rick, I’ll play. An article about what?”

“About how the Cabrera family was killed eighteen years ago.”

“The who?”

“The Cabrera family.”

He shrugged, shook his head. “And I’m supposed to know these people?”

“They were driving back from Logan Airport through the Ted Williams Tunnel in the middle of the night when something crashed down on their car. An eighty-pound light fixture, heavy enough to smash their windshield and temporarily blind them. And they were killed instantly.”

“That’s a sad story, Rick. But it’s a sad story that happened twenty years ago. You need a hook. Why do our readers care about it today?”

“I’m thinking it’ll be an interesting way to show how crisis management works. Because this was a crisis you ‘managed’ brilliantly. You managed it right into oblivion. You had to. Because if that story ever got out, your client, Donegall Construction, would have been destroyed. There would have been an enormous lawsuit. Criminal charges, too. And no more work for the city of Boston. A few million dollars was nothing to a construction company that could easily have faced a hundred million bucks in legal costs and maybe prison time for a couple of the players.”

Pappas laughed, long and loudly. “Spectacular. You have a talent for fiction, did anyone ever tell you that? Have you ever considered a career as a novelist, now that your career as a journalist is, sadly, over? Your father started talking to you, Rick? He couldn’t speak two goddamned words, the poor guy.”

He must have a source inside the nursing home, Rick thought. One of the nurses, at least, was on his payroll. “But not just my dad. There’s also a very brave woman, a community activist who’s agreed to speak on the record for the first time.”

“Rick, let me tell you a story. A Buddhist parable, actually.”

Rick smiled back. Another one of Pappas’s stories.

“Two traveling monks are about to cross a river. There’s a young woman on the bank who says, ‘Please, brother monks, can you carry me across? The river is too deep.’ The young monk turns away. See, they’re not allowed to touch a woman. But the older monk hoists her up on his shoulder and brings her over. The monks keep going, over hills and dales, and the whole time the younger monk is complaining, ‘Why’d you do that? You know we’re forbidden to touch a woman. What you did was a violation of our precepts.’ And on and on, mile after mile. Won’t shut up. Finally the older monk looks at him and says, ‘I left that woman at the riverbank. Seems to me you’re still carrying her?’”

Pappas’s expression was almost kindly. “My point is, Rick, you need to let this go. For your own sake. Leave it at the riverbank, and get on with your life. I’m telling you this because your father was a man I respected, and I figure I owe him this much. You want to martyr yourself because of what you
imagine
might have
possibly
happened two decades ago? Who are you really helping at this point? Whose life are you saving? What good do you think could possibly result from this?”

“It’s an important story,” Rick said blandly.

Pappas abandoned all benevolent pretense. “You’re not writing an article, Rick. I know you. You’re still the weasel who’ll sell out to the higher bidder. What are you angling for, Rick, a bigger payoff? You want another million so you can buy fancy duds and a fancy watch and you can impress another vacuous fashion model? And then why stop there? Why not keep coming back to the well, asking for more and more, right? Well, as I told you at your father’s funeral, this was a one-time-only offer.”

“And I’m turning it down. I’m going to publish this piece with or without your cooperation. But I’d rather have your side of it. I’ve already established that Donegall was a client of yours.”

“Donegall Construction filed for bankruptcy two decades ago!”

“Accounting trickery. They’re more active than ever.” This last part, he knew, was just speculation. That was the part he needed Pappas to reveal, what Donegall Construction had become. “We know you were in contact with
The
Boston Globe
after the accident. If there’s anything about my account that’s inaccurate, I’d like to hear it now. This is your chance.”

For a moment Pappas looked as if he was seriously considering the proposition.

Then he spoke, shaking his head sorrowfully. “I gave you the golden ticket, my friend. I gave you my personal guarantee that all will be good. And now you come with this? You sit there in front of me, beat up and bloodied and bruised and hobbling like an old lady, and you tell me you want back in the game?”

“There’s no game,” Rick said. “I’m giving you an opportunity to go on the record. You can confirm or deny. What you tell me can affect what I write.”

Pappas’s smile was wide and bright. “This is my big chance, huh? No, actually, this is all history, and as the saying goes, history is written by the winners. And you, sir, are no winner. If the Confederate army had won the Battle of Gettysburg, you think we’d be celebrating Lincoln’s birthday? Every event can be made to mean a dozen different things. But the ultimate reality is determined by the victor. Call it the reality principle. Your father—he had a healthy goddamned sense of reality. Shame you never learned anything from him.”

Rick closed his notebook. “Thanks for your time.” He got to his feet and went to the door.

“You know what your trouble is?” Pappas called out. “You never learned anything from your dad.”

“Yeah?” Rick said at the doorway. “Maybe I learned too much.”

H
ow’d it go?” asked Andrea. She was leaning back in an armchair in Rick’s suite at the DoubleTree. She wore black jeans and a crisp white shirt and a pair of gray TOMS. She had no makeup on. Her hair was up, held back with a band. Her attitude made it clear that this was a business meeting at Rick’s hotel, nothing more than that. But the way she was sitting in the chair was more casual than businesslike.

“About how I expected. He came back at me with threats and ridicule.”

“How did you react?”

“He probably thought he scared me off. He’s good at that. That’s his thing.”

“That’s fine. Let him think what he wants to think.”

He looked at his watch. “Probably a good time to get back there.”

“It’s been over an hour, right?”

He nodded and headed back out the door.

*   *   *

At the office tower where the Pappas Group was located, front-desk security wouldn’t let Rick back into the elevator banks. They insisted on calling up to get verbal approval. Rick got on the phone.

“Alex Pappas, please. It’s Rick Hoffman.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Pappas is out of the office.”

“That’s all right. I think I left something in his office. I’m right downstairs.”

Three minutes later he was standing in the reception area of the Pappas Group. A woman in her fifties, thick at the waist, with coppery hair, came out and introduced herself as Pappas’s administrative assistant, Barbara. He walked with her back to Pappas’s office. “He just left for a meeting out of the office,” Barbara said.

“This shouldn’t take a minute,” Rick said. “I’m pretty sure I left my phone there.”

“I didn’t see anything left behind.”

He went to the overstuffed armchair where he’d been sitting. Sure enough, there it was, wedged between the seat cushion and the arm of the chair: Rick’s iPhone.

“Oh, good,” Barbara said, sounding relieved.

“This is something you hate to lose,” Rick said, pocketing it.

“Oh, tell me about it,” said Barbara. “I’d be totally sunk.”

“Well, all’s well that ends well,” said Rick.

Not until he got to the elevator did he take out his phone and hit Stop on the recorder app. It said one hour and forty-six minutes. Then he opened the submenu that listed “voice memos,” and he selected the most recent one. He hit Play and put it to his ear. He could hear Pappas’s voice, distant but still audible.

“
Yeah, Barbara,
” Pappas said on the recording, “
I need to speak to Thomas Sculley. Can you get him on the phone?”

A few seconds later his secretary’s voice came on. “
Mr. Sculley, line one.
”

A moment later: “
Thomas,
” Pappas said. “
We’ve got a problem.
”

A
ndrea paled when she heard the first words of the recording.

“Thomas Sculley,” she said. “My God.”

Rick looked at her.

“You know the funder I had lunch with the other day, and I didn’t want to jinx by naming?” she said. “That was Thomas Sculley.”

Thomas Sculley was a major figure in Boston, a developer and builder whose Bay Group had transformed the Boston skyline. He was also a major philanthropist whose name was on several hospital wings and was a part owner of the Boston Red Sox. When Lenny had received TMS treatment, it had been at the Sculley Pavilion of Mass General Hospital. Rick had read all the Sculley profiles. He knew the basic outline of the story. Sculley had come to America from Ireland decades earlier
with just a shovel and a wheelbarrow,
as every single profile seemed to put it. And went from being a small-time house builder to one of the preeminent developers in the country. Sculley’s firm was about to build the tallest skyscraper in Boston, on the site of the old Combat Zone.

“How long have you been in talks with them?”

“It’s been super fast. Their foundation director contacted us, I don’t know, two or three weeks ago.”

“After our famous dinner at Madrigal?”

“A couple days after. You’re thinking . . . ?” She tilted her head. “I don’t know. It’s a real coincidence, if not.”

“Somehow I don’t think that was a coincidence,” Rick said.

She nodded, looking despondent. She was quiet for ten, twenty seconds. Then she took a breath. She nodded again, but this time she looked different. Resolved.

They listened to the recording a couple of times. The iPhone’s battery was at zero, so they plugged it in to charge while they used it. They couldn’t hear everything Pappas said. Only when he raised his voice for emphasis did his words become clear. But in truth they had all they needed. A name: Thomas Sculley.

The billionaire builder and philanthropist he was supposed to be writing about.

The conversation, conducted over speakerphone, went on for just a few minutes. Pappas arranged to meet Sculley at his State Street office. Then Pappas spoke to his admin on speaker and asked her to cancel his next two meetings.

“Are you serious about writing an article?” Andrea asked.

“Deadly.”

She smiled. “This is the old Rick Hoffman,” she said. “Fearless. I like it.”

“It only looks that way.”

“Then we need to prove that Sculley was connected to Donegall Construction. From what I’ve found, Sculley grew up in Belfast, Ireland, on a street named Donegall.”

“So can you connect him to Donegall?”

“Well, look—locating hidden assets and liabilities is what I used to do. But it’s a hell of a lot easier finding connections between two known entities than trying to find out what happened to one small firm like Donegall eighteen years ago. At least now I know how and where to start.”

“Can you do it now?”

“You got it.”

As she typed on her laptop, she called her son to say good night. Then Rick’s phone rang. He recognized Jeff’s number. He glanced at his watch: almost eight o’clock
P.M
.

“Jeff?”

“Yeah, Rick, listen. I’m still at your house. I—I got something for you.”

“You’ve got something?” Rick wasn’t sure what Jeff was talking about.

“About that thing you wanted me to look into. I’ll be here for another half hour.” There was a click and the line was dead.

Andrea was asking Evan whether he’d finished his homework, telling him he could stay up a little bit longer if he wanted to read some more of his Mike Lupica book.

When she hung up, Rick said, “I need to head over to the house.”