The Fixer Page 17

  Rick took out the June bill, detailing May’s calls, and moved right to May 27, the day of the stroke. He immediately saw a lineup of three calls, all to the same 617 area code number. He pulled out Alex Pappas’s business card and confirmed that it was Pappas’s mobile number. The day before, there were five calls to that same number. Six the day before that. None for the two weeks previous.

  So why all the calls to and from Alex Pappas on those three days between May 25 and May 27?

  Something must have happened that required Lenny’s services. Pappas had wanted something from Lenny. So what had happened on those three days?

  He couldn’t ask his father. He needed some other way. The simplest solution was to look through a newspaper from those days, an online archive. That meant returning to his B&B and getting back online. Taking not just the one phone bill but all his dad’s Cell One phone bills back to the hotel and poring through them.

  Still, Rick would take precautions, as usual, to avoid being tailed. He carried the four phone records boxes to the foot of the basement stairs and climbed the stairs, passed through the cloud of noise and plaster dust and back-and-forth chat and angry hip-hop—What you know about thumbing through them hunnits, twenties, and them fifties?—to the windows at the front of the house, and there he froze.

  Across the street a car was idling.

  Hear the twenties, fifties, hundreds, the money machine clickin’.

  He’d noticed it an hour or so ago, a white sedan, an Audi, nothing out of place for the neighborhood. But there it still was, the driver texting on a smartphone, a plume of exhaust snaking around from the rear. Rick backed away from the window until he was out of the direct line of sight but could still see the Audi.

  It was waiting for him, he somehow knew. Something about the way the driver was studiously avoiding looking out the window, or the way the car was parked just far enough down the street so as not to be too obvious, or the way the car hadn’t moved in over an hour.

  But he knew it was watching the house.

  Theoretically he knew the neighborhood well enough, better than any watcher, to lose anyone trying to follow him in a car. He knew which backyards led to which streets and which houses had toolsheds in their backyards. He knew places to hide better than anyone who hadn’t grown up in this part of Cambridge.

  But maybe there was a better way to evade detection. He tapped Jeff on the shoulder, then asked him if it was okay if he hired Marlon and Santiago for a brief errand. Jeff shrugged. “Be my guest,” he said.

  “Guys,” he said when Marlon and Santiago were standing around the file cartons, Marlon wiping his plaster-dusted brow with the back of a large hand. He gave Santiago the key to his latest Zipcar. “You guys mind carrying these boxes out to my car? It’s a blue Prius, parked a couple blocks away, right in front of 39 Fayerweather.”

  Both of them seemed to hesitate a moment or two. Marlon glanced over at Jeff, who shrugged again, giving his permission. They clearly didn’t want to do it, saw no reason to do it. They didn’t have to brownnose the owner of the house, because they didn’t work for the owner. They worked for Jeff. Rick pulled out a couple of hundred-dollar bills, one new, one not so new, and handed one to each of them. Their faces lit up like kids being handed chocolate. Marlon had a full silver grill. Rick hadn’t noticed before. He was overpaying them for a simple errand, but he figured it might buy some goodwill. There was more where that came from.

  “Just these right here?” Santiago asked, suspicious there had to be a catch.

  “That’s all. And one more thing.”

  Santiago looked at Marlon: Knew it was too good to be true.

  “Could one of you move my car to that little lot next to Hi-Rise? The bakery?”

  “On Concord right near where Huron comes in?” Marlon said.

  “Exactly.” He didn’t bother to explain; he didn’t need an explanation. He just wanted his car moved, for some idiotic reason, to another spot a few blocks away.

  Marlon looked at Jeff. “Cool, we take a break now?”

  “Don’t take too long,” Jeff said.

  Ten minutes after the two guys set off bearing cardboard boxes, Rick left the house. He walked up Huron Avenue toward Fresh Pond, the opposite direction from which the two workers had gone. He clocked something moving in his peripheral vision behind him, behind him and to his left, and tried not to look to confirm it was the white Audi. But it was. The driver in the Audi had waited until he’d reached the end of Clayton and turned right on Huron, when he’d be out of range. The last possible moment, so he wouldn’t be detected. Rick kept going up Huron Ave, studiously not noticing the car. Not until he reached the busy intersection of Huron and Fresh Pond Parkway did he have the chance to turn sideways, as if watching for oncoming traffic, and then he saw the Audi double-parked half a block down, waiting.

  It was following him. But he was walking nowhere, with great purpose. He crossed Fresh Pond and headed into the park, where he and his friends had ridden their bikes, where he’d walked their black Lab, who’d been killed running out into traffic the same year his mother had died, the year from hell.

  He walked around the reservoir. A few joggers ran past, talking. In here, within the wooded enclave of Fresh Pond Reservation, the Audi was at a disadvantage: unable to see, unable to enter. He had lost them. There were dozens of exits from the park. He chose one on the far end of the park, on Concord Avenue, flagged a passing cab.

  Then he walked a few blocks down Concord Avenue to Hi-Rise bakery and looked in the small lot next door and didn’t see his Zipcar. He turned, looked around Concord. Maybe the guys couldn’t find a space next to Hi-Rise and just parked it where they could. But no Sea Glass Pearl Toyota Prius in sight. He rounded the corner onto Huron Avenue, still looking. Maybe they’d parked it as close to the lot as they could, and . . . But no Prius, not here.

  It didn’t seem at all likely that Jeff’s crew would have stolen his car. Not a Toyota Prius, in any case. But it wasn’t here, and neither was Marlon nor Santiago. He debated heading back over to Clayton Street and was in fact on his way over ten minutes later when a Prius pulled over to the side of Concord, horn blaring.

  “There you guys are,” Rick said. “What took you so long?”

  Marlon, in the passenger’s seat, smiled and said, “Homey had to do an errand.”

  Santiago got out of the driver’s seat and came around to hand Rick the keys. “Sorry about that, bro,” he said. “Had to pick something up.”

  He knew then what had taken so long. They searched the car for cash. They thought Rick had hidden some or all the cash in the Prius, under the seats or in the glove compartment or in the trunk. They’d taken the car somewhere and pulled it apart. They’d probably searched the file boxes, too. But they’d found nothing. That didn’t mean they’d stop looking, though. The question was how far would they go. He’d thought that slipping them each a Benjamin would buy them off, neutralize their greed, but it had done the opposite. It had goaded them on. Like the mechanical rabbit at the dog track. Like giving a bloodhound an article of clothing, a scent: ready, go!

  It had been a mistake he wouldn’t make again. Jeff wouldn’t do anything.

  But these guys very well might.

  30

  He pulled into traffic and was at the offices of Back Bay magazine fifteen minutes later. He was taking a risk, appearing for a second time at the magazine. But the kind of search he had to do could be done only at the office. He needed to do an advanced search of LexisNexis by date. A conventional Internet search would take forever. You can search The New York Times or The Boston Globe or The Wall Street Journal for incidents or names but not by what happened during three days in May in 1996. For that he needed to use LexisNexis on site.

  The office was empty when he arrived. His badge got him in the door, though, and he flipped on the overhead lights, jittery fluorescents. He log
ged into the magazine’s intranet and found a nagging e-mail from Darren. How’s the Sculley Q&A coming? he wanted to know. He’ll be at the gala at the Park Plaza on Wednesday—maybe a good chance to sit down with him?

  Rick didn’t bother to reply. The best strategy with Darren was just to ignore him. Rick pulled up LexisNexis. He typed in the date range, which yielded hundreds of headlines.

  He groaned. He was looking at everything that had happened in Boston and Massachusetts over those three days. Politicians in trouble in the State House, town officials accused of graft . . . CAMBRIDGE MAN HELD IN STABBING. A guy was stabbed in the neck and chest at the Portuguese Football Club. 86-YEAR-OLD MALDEN WOMAN SUFFERS SEVERE BURNS IN APARTMENT FIRE. A sprinkling of obituaries, minor sports and medical news, the Indy 500 winner, the Fire Department’s annual ball at the Sheraton.

  Nothing seemed to fit the profile: something that would require the services of a PR guy like Pappas. After a few hours of searching, his eyes were weary and his head had begun to ache. Then he noticed a story with Monica Kennedy’s byline, The Boston Globe’s investigative ace.

  JAMAICA PLAIN FAMILY KILLED IN TUNNEL ACCIDENT. A terrible story about a young mother and father and their fourteen-year-old daughter killed when their car hit the wall of the brand-new Ted Williams Tunnel. Rick knew the tunnel was part of the Big Dig, so he lingered on the article for a moment. A tragedy, but not something that would in any way involve his father or Alex Pappas.

  So why was Monica Kennedy writing about a car accident of all things?

  He looked at his watch. It was a bit after 7:00 P.M. Back Bay had cleared out, but Monica worked long hours. If she wasn’t at her desk, she was on her way home. She was disturbable.

  “Kennedy,” she barked after one ring.

  “Monica, it’s Rick.” He paused. “Hoffman.”

  There was a lot of background hubbub punctuated by the clinking of glasses or silverware. “Rick Hoffman! Coming back like a bad penny.” Her words were garbled by a mouthful of food. “What the hell you want now?” She said it jokingly, but Rick knew there was a sharp edge of truth in there.

  “The Cabrera family mean anything to you?”

  “The who?”

  “A family from the Dominican Republic who lived in Jamaica Plain, Hyde Square. Daddy, mommy, teenage daughter killed in a traffic accident.”

  “I don’t know what . . .”

  “This is back in ’96.”

  “Are you still playing investigative reporter for the Shop ’n’ Save Gazette or whatever you call that piece-of-shit supermarket circular you write for?”

  “The Ted Williams Tunnel—?”

  “Oh, that, sure, sure. Awful story. Family of three wiped out in a car crash.”

  “But why were you on a traffic story?”

  “Yeah, hold on a second.” She chewed, then took a big swallow. “You know, I never got the goods on that one. As I recall, it went like: This guy and his pregnant wife and young daughter are driving through the Ted Williams Tunnel in the middle of the night—this is right after it first opened—and the guy drives his car into the tunnel wall and they’re all killed immediately.”

  “Got that. What I don’t get is what put you on the story.”

  “The Ted Williams Tunnel. The spanking-new, just finished Ted Williams Tunnel, man. The Big Dig, what do you think? Started out I thought I had something about shoddy construction on the Big Dig and it turned out to be just a plain-vanilla accident. Nothing there. Like my Afrin bottle. Wait a second, now I remember! Alex Pappas!”

  “Pappas? What about Pappas?”

  “For some reason he was all over the story, playing zone defense. He called me a couple times. Yeah, Pappas was doing reputation management for one of the construction firms that built the tunnel, and he was making sure the company’s name didn’t get dragged into it. But like I said, he had nothing to worry about, ’cause it was just driver negligence or whatever. The driver was drunk, I always figured. Nothing there.”

  Pappas, he thought. Reputation management. If Pappas was talking to a reporter for the Globe and also talking to Lenny Hoffman . . .

  Was it so farfetched? Pappas wanted Lenny’s legal help, maybe.

  “You think you still have the file?”

  “Somewhere. Somewhere. I don’t throw anything away. When was that again?”

  “Ninety-six.”

  “Probably in the file drawer at work. Now can I get back to my dinner, please?”

  “I’ll come by tomorrow.”

  Rick had parked his Zipcar in the big parking lot on Washington Street behind the building where Back Bay’s offices were, a lot that faced a sports club and the off-street patio of an Italian bistro. In the daytime the lot was always full, but now it was half empty. He pressed the Unlock button on the remote to pulse the car’s flashers and remind him where he’d parked.

  He got in the car and pushed the ignition button and drove toward the exit, when he felt something whispering across his neck, maybe an insect, a fly, and he reached to scratch it and felt something grab his left shoulder and heard a man’s voice immediately behind him, from the backseat.

  “Pull over, Mr. Hoffman, but gently, please, sir. What you feel against your carotid artery is a seven-inch Japanese santoku, a chef’s knife made of molybdenum vanadium stainless steel. Ice-tempered and hollow ground and probably the finest chef’s knife in the world.”

  Rick froze, his heart fluttering wildly.

  “It slices with very little pressure. So bring your chariot to a stop gently, Mr. Hoffman. This is a rental vehicle, and it’s damnably hard to get blood out of the upholstery.”

  31

  His body jerked slightly, he couldn’t help it, as he eased his foot down on the brake and guided the car to a stop. “Jesus,” he said. He felt the blade hot against his throat, gasped involuntarily as it broke skin.

  “How much do you want?” he said.

  He felt the warm wetness, the prickle of blood, and at the same time felt an icy clutch deep within his bowels.

  He didn’t dare raise his hands, do anything to cause his attacker to pull the knife in any harder. He smelled that barbershop smell again and the odor of stale cigarette smoke. He sensed that his attacker was alone in the backseat of his car, and he sized up his chances for escape. They were limited. If only he could reach up and grab the wrist that squeezed hard against his neck, tight as a hug. But the blade would sink in a beat faster, he had no doubt of that. He inhaled deeply and felt the bite of the blade on his larynx and tears of pain came into his eyes. He would have to lull his attacker into momentary complacency and then move suddenly. But that sounded workable in theory; in practice, it seemed impossible.

  “You want me to talk to you, it’s a lot easier if you take the goddamned knife off my throat.”

  He knew what they were planning to do to him, and he knew he had to do everything in his power to get away.

  In his peripheral vision he saw someone approach the driver’s-side door and the door came open and a pair of hands thrust inside, grappling with a piece of cloth. The moment had passed. The hood went over his head and everything was dark. The knife edge remained poised against his throat. It smelled of burlap and was coarse against his skin.

  “But I have information for you,” Rick attempted.

  “We’re not talking,” a voice finally said. Not the voice of the poetry lover. This was higher, raspier. In just a few words he could detect an Irish accent. “Now move over.”

  “I can’t,” Rick said. He gestured with his hands at the console that separated the driver’s from the passenger’s seat.

  A pause. “All right. Get out.”

  The knife came away from his throat.

  He did. Someone grabbed his elbow; the second man. He couldn’t see anything but was pushed and yanked into the backseat of the Prius. He wondered if anyone
in the dark parking lot could see what was happening. He hadn’t seen anyone in the lot when he unlocked the car a few minutes earlier. If someone did see, would he or she get involved, say something, or not. In a city like New York, people didn’t get involved, as a rule. But Boston was a smaller city, in some ways like an overgrown town. Maybe someone who saw something suspicious would call the cops.

  If he yelled, would that make a difference? He thought about it and decided no. It would just provoke the knife. One of the men got in the back of the car next to him, and the other must have gotten into the front, because the car began to move.

  “To the plant?” the driver said.

  “Yeah,” said the man next to him.

  “Goddamned underpowered sardine can,” the driver said.

  The man next to him muttered something inaudible in reply.

  “The man’s gonna meet us there?” said the driver.

  “Yeah.”

  Both had Irish accents.

  He tried to listen to the traffic patterns to determine which way they were heading, but it wasn’t as easy as he’d hoped. They were in traffic; that was all he knew. The Prius was quiet. They were going someplace where someone else, the man, would meet them.

  The man would ask the questions. That was why they didn’t want him to talk. Their job, maybe, was just to bring him to the man who asked the questions.

  So what did they want? Information, it seemed—not necessarily the cash. Maybe not the cash at all. Last time they’d wanted to know who he’d talked to—who had told him about the money.

  He wondered where they were going.

  A plant, the man had said. He wondered if it were a meat-packing plant. Maybe that was where they’d taken him the last time. There was an area in the city—in Roxbury, actually, on Newmarket Square—where a number of wholesale meat processing plants were located. They butchered and packed meat for food service accounts, schools and institutions and restaurants. Maybe it was one of those plants.