The Fixer (9 page)

H
er basement was neat and precise and orderly, more like a laboratory’s supply room than the sprawling junk heap that was the basement of the Clayton Street house. Gleaming stainless steel shelving units held blue plastic storage bins and immaculate rows of white cardboard banker’s boxes, everything neatly labeled in black Magic Marker, in architect’s lettering. There was a faint bleach smell.

“You saved all the office files?” Rick asked.

“Just the financial records. In case he got audited. The client files I shredded.”

“Shredded?”

“I asked you guys, don’t you remember? You and your sister? You said you didn’t want them.”

“So how would I find out who he met with on a particular day . . . ?”

“The red book, I’d say. It’s like a client diary.” She pointed to a cardboard box, and he took it off the shelf—unexpectedly heavy—and set it on the high-gloss-painted cement floor. She bent over carefully, one hand splayed on her lower back, and lifted the box’s lid.

Inside were thick red hardcover books, each the size of the Manhattan phone book.

Each red book was titled
Massachusetts Lawyers Diary and Manual
. It was like a desk diary combined with reference book: municipal directories, statutes, directory of judges, all that kind of thing. Kind of like a farmer’s almanac for lawyers, only more boring. He picked one up for the year 1989, flipped through it. The parts that interested him were the daily diary and monthly planner. A page for each day. Clients’ names and times of meetings, written in what he assumed was Joan’s neat handwriting.

In another box he found the book for 1996. He turned to the page for May 27. A fairly light schedule, it appeared. Only three appointments for the day. One in the morning, one at noon, one late in the afternoon. He didn’t make the afternoon one, of course, since he had his stroke right after lunch. But the twelve noon appointment he presumably did. On the line for 12:00 it had no name, only an initial: “P—.”

Rick pointed at the entry, his eyebrows questioning. “That was his last appointment before his stroke. Who’s ‘P’?”

Joan took a pair of reading glasses hanging on a chain around her neck, put them on slowly, peered at the page. “Oh, I don’t know who that was, ‘P.’ That’s all he told me—someone he met with once in a while.” She pushed the glasses down her nose and turned to him. Stiffly she added: “I hope you don’t mind my saying, I always assumed it was a girlfriend.”

Rick smiled. “Did he always meet with ‘P’ at lunchtime?” A midday assignation at a cheap hotel—that sounded like Len. Patty, Penelope, Priscilla, Pam. He wouldn’t have been cheating on his wife, Rick’s mother: She’d died three years earlier, when Rick was fifteen and his father was forty-four. Not exactly an old man, and the guy had a sex drive, much as Rick didn’t like to think about it. There’d been a few girlfriends, but no one for very long. His parents’ marriage had always seemed contentious. Maybe being married once was enough for Len.

“Sometimes after work. But never at the office. That’s why I assumed . . .”

“He never asked you to order flowers for ‘P,’ did he?” He said it jokingly, but she took it seriously, frowning and shaking her head.

“But if ‘P’ was a client, there’d be bills and files and such, right?”

She nodded. “She wasn’t a client, honey.”

“You know this for a fact, or you’re guessing?”

“Woman’s intuition.”

“I see.” He hefted the big red book. “Mind if I borrow this?”

She hesitated. “Okay, I suppose.”

“The financial records are here?”

She tapped a box labeled
CLIENT INVOICES 1969–1973
. There was a row of six boxes of invoices covering the years 1969 to 1996, the years Len’s practice was active. “Have at it. Take whatever you want. Just tell me what you’ve taken, all right? Is there enough light for you here? I think Timmy has one of those clamp lamps on his workbench.”

“I should be okay, thanks.”

After Joan left, he took down the box labeled 1994–1996. It was organized not chronologically but by client, which was sort of annoying. He wanted to zoom in on the period right around May 1996 to see what kind of legal work his father was doing in the weeks before his stroke. But there was no easy way to do it. So he sat on the immaculate polished basement floor and began pawing through the folders of invoices.

Some of the clients were people, some were businesses. Most of the names he didn’t recognize. A few he did: notorious strip clubs and X-rated theaters whose flashing neon signs once lit up the night in the four-square-block sleaze district next to Chinatown. By 1996, most of the “adult entertainment” establishments had closed. But a few remained, some of them Len Hoffman clients. Their names were on folders here: the Emerald Lounge, Club Fifty-One, Pleasures, the Kitty Kat.

So what kind of legal work had his father done for them? He pulled out the Kitty Kat folder and found what looked like monthly invoices to the Kat typed on Leonard Hoffman letterhead (“Law Offices of Leonard Hoffman, P.C.” Offices plural. As if it were a multinational firm). A couple were for twenty thousand dollars, some for less. A few for twenty-five thousand, one as high as fifty thousand dollars. Some of them said simply “for services rendered.” Others said things like “Board of Health dispute” and “Liquor license suspension.”

Rick began to feel a prickle at the back of his head. It was as if the old investigative reporter juices, long dormant, were beginning to flow again. He knew he had a great head for investigative work, and he enjoyed it more than any other kind of journalism. There was something here he couldn’t quite figure out, some kind of story here, if he could only puzzle his way into it.

The way in, he was convinced, was to compile a list of all Len’s clients around the time of the stroke. If he dug in deeply enough, he might find the client—if indeed it was a client—who was the mysterious “P” that Len saw at noon that day.

Systematically, he plucked out all invoices dated May 1996, for all the client folders. Maybe one of them was this “P”—.

Then he reconsidered. Why not take the whole box with him and cross-check thoroughly? In the front of the box, he found a floppy disk marked
BANK ACCOUNTS
. It was an old computer disk 5 1/4 inches square. They were the latest technology in the 1980s, but was anyone using them in the 1990s? Maybe people who weren’t at the cutting edge of technology, like Len and Joan.

Maybe, just maybe, these files would solve the mystery of where all that money had come from.

T
he city of Boston kept all of its old records in a large, bunkerlike building in a remote part of the city called West Roxbury. Back in the day, when Rick had been an investigative reporter for
The
Boston Globe,
he’d had occasion to drive out to the City Archives. It was a giant warehouse that wasn’t open to the public. You didn’t just show up; you had to make an appointment. Pretty much every historical document or transcript or filing was here, going back to before the city was founded by the Puritans in 1630. Rick had no idea who frequented City Archives apart from historians. Some newspaper reporters didn’t even know about the place.

As he drove back to Boston, he called City Archives and asked for Marie. Marie Gamache had been there forever and had a buoyant good nature that distinguished her from her more introverted colleagues. She also had a tenacity that Rick admired. She could find anything, any scrap of paper, in the sprawling warehouse. She took on every search like a personal challenge, refusing to give up. Very few of the city’s documents before the year 2000 were available online. They were stored in gray archive boxes on shelves that went on for miles. You couldn’t do a computer search. The only search engine was in the heads of the archivists, and none, in Rick’s experience, was better than Marie.

“Hey there,” he said. “Rick Hoffman.”

“Oh my God, Rick Hoffman! It’s so great to hear your sexy voice!”

“Well, you might not be so glad to hear from me once you hear what I want.”

“Uh-oh.”

“I’m going to need a bunch of records from 1996. Buildings Department, Board of Health, Licensing Board, Inspectional Services.”

“Hold on, let me get a fresh yellow pad.”

“You’re still not using computers?”

“Oh, hush. Nothing’s better than a pad and a pencil, and you know I’m right.”

He pulled over to the side of the road and read off to her a list he’d scrawled down in Joan Breslin’s basement.

When he finished, she said, “And I suppose you want them all first thing tomorrow morning.”

“What about this afternoon?”

“I hope that’s a joke.”

“I’m serious. Possible?”

“I think the mayor’s office is ahead of you in line, and they’ve got me pulling registry records for days.”

“Who’s more important, me or the mayor?”

She laughed. “You have a point. Give me three hours.”

“You’re a doll.” As he spoke, he winced. He could hear his father speaking the exact same words. Charming women the same way. He was indeed Lenny Hoffman’s son, for better or for worse.

His next stop was a computer repair shop on a quiet side street in Allston. He knew he’d be laughed out of the sleek Apple Store if he went in with a floppy disk from the 1980s. But the Computer Loft had repaired Rick’s computers for years and they seemed to be able to fix anything fixable, and it was at least worth a try.

A rotund young man, probably in his midtwenties, emerged from the back. He had mouse-brown hair down to his collar, a full reddish beard, and a small hoop in his septum.

“Help you?”

Rick held up the disk. “You have a computer around that can read this?”

“What is it?”

Rick sighed. “Is Scott around?”

The bearded man ducked his head and returned to the back of the shop, and a minute later the owner, Scott, emerged. He was tall and bald and wore a black-and-white bowling shirt that said
HOLY ROLLERS
.

“Well, look at that,” Scott said. “A real, honest-to-God floppy disk.”

“You got a machine that can read it?”

“Rick, there hasn’t been a machine made that can read them for twenty years at least. I mean, I think the Apple II used them, back in the early nineties.”

“Do you happen to have one of those around?”

Scott shook his head. “Maybe at the Computer Museum. Isn’t there still a computer museum somewhere? Otherwise, I think you’re going to have to look on eBay. Look for one of those old IBM PCs, a 286 or whatever. You might get lucky. People sell all kinds of shit.”

Rick suddenly remembered the IBM computer on his father’s desk. “Actually, I think I know where I can find one.”

On the way to his father’s house he made a stop at Tastee Donuts, an old-fashioned place that served up hand-cut donuts that were still warm when you got them, and bought a box of a dozen assorted.

He noticed a black Escalade idling double-parked outside Tastee Donuts, halfway down the block. He couldn’t see inside; its windows were tinted. He thought he might have noticed a similar black Escalade behind him on the expressway. But such vehicles were common. There was no reason to believe this was the same one.

By the time he got back to his car, the Escalade was gone.

C
ity Archives was a half-hour drive away along the winding Riverway that went from the Fenway section of Boston past Jamaica Plain and ended in West Roxbury. He parked in the visitor lot, was buzzed into the main entrance, and followed the signs to the reading room.

Marie Gamache was behind the counter: short, plump, her short brown hair in a pixie cut. She was talking to a slim man with black curly hair and thick wire-rimmed glasses. She beamed when she saw Rick. “I’ve still got some more to bring out, but you can get started right now if you’re ready.”

He turned in the direction she was pointing and saw a long blond-wood library table covered with gray archival boxes.

“Oh, boy,” he said tonelessly. “Well, first things first.” He handed her the box of donuts. “For you.”

“From the Tastee? God, I haven’t had one of those for years! But I’m gluten-intolerant now. I can’t. Oh, this is torture!”

“I’m not,” her curly-haired colleague said, taking the box from her. He opened the box and pulled out a glazed donut.

“God, I miss bread,” Marie said. “And pizza. And donuts. But I do feel so much
cleaner
without wheat.”

It was mind-numbingly tedious work, going through the minutes of the Boston Licensing Board for 1996, scanning through hundreds of filings. His father had billed Club Fifty-One twenty-five thousand dollars for legal work connected to a “liquor license suspension.” It was probably pretty routine work. Maybe the place got caught serving minors or just serving after the legal hours. The club’s license would be revoked or suspended. A lawyer—in this case, Len—would go before the board and appeal to get the license reinstated.

But after an hour of combing through the records for 1996, he didn’t find a single mention of Club Fifty-One. He went back to the invoice. Sure enough, it was dated May 1996. But there was nothing about it in the files. Which was bizarre. He wondered whether something in the archives was missing.

He moved on to another invoice, this one made out to “Jugs DBA LaGrange Entertainment” in the amount of thirty thousand dollars for a “Board of Health matter.” Jugs was a strip bar, a popular place for bachelor parties, or it used to be. He had no idea if it was still in business. The city had all sorts of intricate laws regarding strip clubs, such as requiring there always be a three-foot gap between performer and customer. No touching allowed. Even if you paid extra for a private dance in the Champagne room. Sometimes undercover officers would go into the clubs, pretending to be customers, to make sure the laws were being followed. If not, they’d slap a fine on the club or suspend their license for a day or two, which meant closing down briefly.

Rick pored through the archives, looking for “LaGrange Entertainment” or “Jugs” or “Leonard Hoffman,” but there was nothing in April or May. This was beginning to bother him. He went back to the counter. “Can I get the Licensing Board records for all of 1995 and 1996?”

Marie groaned. “Really?”

“Really.”

Half an hour later she rolled a library cart stacked with twenty more archive boxes up to his table. “Go crazy,” she said.

Two hours later he’d gone through all the board of licensing records and still hadn’t found any mention of his father making an appearance or filing a plea. He’d billed eight separate clients a total of 295,000 dollars in May 1996. This was big money for a small-time lawyer. Yet nowhere was there a record of Len actually doing the work he’d billed his clients for. Board of Health appearances, zoning variances, liquor license suspensions . . . all those jobs billed for—but none of it, apparently, done.

Sherlock Holmes had once deduced the identity of a thief from the fact that a dog didn’t bark. Sometimes the thing that
doesn’t
happen is more important than the thing that does.

Leonard Hoffman had billed almost three hundred thousand dollars for work that he apparently didn’t do.

So what did that mean? Either his father had been a master scammer and his clients had been dupes—not likely—or something else was going on. Some kind of tricky arrangement involving large sums of money.

So did this mean that his father had not only billed for work he didn’t do—but he then hadn’t gotten paid for it?

It was time for some good old-fashioned gumshoe work. It was time to go to the old Combat Zone and find out which, if any, of his father’s clients, the strip clubs and adult bookstores and such, still existed.

And start asking questions.