The Fixer Page 18

  When the car finally stopped moving, he heard the front door open. Someone got out. Then he heard the clatter of a steel overhead door rolling up on its tracks, the whine of a motor. A roll-up warehouse or loading dock door. Thirty seconds later the car door slammed and the car was driven forward a bit. Into a loading bay, he supposed.

  Then the backseat car door was opened and he was grabbed by the shoulder and pulled into the night air. At once he smelled that slightly rancid, rotting smell he remembered from last time. The smell of decomposition. The smell of meat. He heard footsteps echoing in a cavernous, high-ceilinged space.

  He heard cars whizzing by, the wheezing brakes of an old van or truck, the screech of a gull. “Walk straight ahead.”

  He walked but didn’t know what direction he was going and he found it hard to keep his balance. He gestured toward the hood. “Is this really necessary?”

  “Shut your bake, you fecking eejit.” He was yanked even harder and almost stumbled. He resumed walking, his hands stretched in front of him.

  “He’s not here,” one of the men said.

  “Tie him up,” the other said. “The pole over there.”

  The other one said something inaudible ending in “Get me something.”

  The steel overhead door rattled closed and the outside sounds grew muted. More echoing footsteps, the sound of metal scraping against metal. The blat of a motorcycle racing past outside far away.

  He was grabbed and jerked a few feet to his left. Did they keep him hooded so he wouldn’t know where he was, or how he got here? Both, maybe.

  A mobile phone rang, a burst of tinny music.

  “Yes, sir? . . . Okay, right, then.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Awwright, this one’s gonna have to wait here while we go get the man.”

  “You go, I’ll watch this bowsie.”

  “Man wants both of us there.”

  “We just leave him here? This gobshite? He’ll do a legger.”

  “Tie him up to that and tie him up good. Check his pockets for knives or anything.”

  “Stick your hands out,” said the voice nearest him, punching him on the shoulder.

  He stuck out his hands, then felt something being wound around his wrists, something coarse and prickly, maybe rope. Then something was wound around his ankles and around his legs and he realized he’d been bound to a stout steel pole.

  He wondered what the hell they were doing to him now. All he could tell was that he was being tied up in order to wait for someone, presumably someone senior. Their boss. Whoever it was they called Sir.

  Neither of his abductors spoke to him. They spoke to each other quietly, at the far end of the cavernous space they were in. After a few minutes he didn’t hear their voices anymore. He heard footsteps in the distance. A door opening and closing.

  He waited.

  Another few minutes went by. He heard the distant buzz of traffic.

  “Hello?” he called out.

  The rope was uncomfortable at his wrists and ankles. He was restrained in a position that forced him to remain standing. If he tried to sit, the ropes on his legs tightened painfully. He tried to untie the ropes that wound around his wrists, but gave up after a few agonizing moments. His legs began to cramp.

  “What the hell’s going on?” he said, louder.

  No reply.

  He had no idea how much time had passed since he’d been carjacked. An hour, maybe? Two? He knew he was somewhere within the city limits, or just outside. In a meat-packing plant or food-processing place of some kind, near a busy road.

  And he waited.

  And the notion occurred to him suddenly that he was not powerless, not as helpless as he felt. “Hey,” he said. “If you get me out of here, I can make you rich.”

  There was silence.

  “Hey!” he said louder. “You know I have a lot of money, it’s why I’m here, and if you cut me loose, I’ll make you rich.”

  Silence.

  Louder still, he said, “Hello? You hear me? Let’s make a deal.”

  Silence.

  “Hello?” He waited five, ten seconds more. “You hear me?”

  But no reply. Either they were gone or they were untemptable.

  He heard the squeal of brakes close by. Voices. Then the motorized whir and the metallic rattle of the overhead door opening. A rush of cold air.

  “That’s the car, man.” A voice, no Irish accent.

  Another voice: “Jesús Cristo! Mira! Look at the guy!”

  “Shit!”

  These weren’t the guys with the Irish accents, not the ones who’d brought him here. Then who were they? The voices were vaguely familiar.

  “Can somebody help me?” Rick said. “Get this hood off me?”

  “The hell’s going on here?” the first voice said, getting closer. “Look at this!”

  “All tied up and shit. Jesús Cristo.”

  Then, abruptly, the hood came off and Rick was momentarily disoriented, but a few seconds later he realized he was looking at two familiar faces. It took him another second to remember who they were.

  The guys from Jeff’s construction crew. Santiago and Marlon.

  “Thank you,” Rick said, gulping fresh air. “What—what’re you guys doing here?”

  “What happened to him?” said Marlon. “You’re bleeding.” He touched his own neck. “On your throat, like.”

  “Can you guys untie me?”

  “You got a knife on you?” Marlon said. “Maybe a box cutter?”

  “What happened to you, man? Who did this to you?”

  “Hurry, could you?” Rick said. “They could be back here at any minute.”

  Marlon produced a utility knife and slashed at the ropes around Rick’s wrists while Santiago untied the knots at his ankles, and within five minutes the three of them were crowded into the front seat of the Demo King Trash-a-Way pickup truck and on their way from South Boston to Cambridge.

  “So how’d you guys end up here?” Rick asked. “I don’t get it.”

  The two were silent.

  “Were you following me in the car?”

  Silence.

  “Did you put a GPS on my car?”

  Marlon said, “Tell him about your brother, Santiago.”

  Another pause, then Santiago said, “My brother works at the Chevy dealer in Arlington.”

  Rick remembered Santiago showing up late with his car, horn blasting. “You guys LoJacked my car! That’s what took you so long!”

  They both laughed uneasily.

  “Son of a bitch,” Rick said.

  “We wasn’t gonna rip you off,” said Santiago. “We just know you got all this money and shit.”

  “And you wanted to find out where I put it,” Rick said.

  The two were silent again. He didn’t know what to think about this. It was creepy, anxiety-provoking how easily they were able to find him, but he was hardly in a position to complain. They’d saved him from whatever the Irish gang intended.

  He owed them something.

  32

  By ten o’clock the next morning, Rick was at the offices of The Boston Globe, the time he knew Monica Kennedy usually got there. He stopped at security on the ground floor and called Monica’s desk. She told him to meet her at the top of the escalator.

  He took the elevator up to the second floor, where the newsroom was located, and waited there for her. A sports reporter he knew from his time at the Globe gave him a wave and kept walking. Finally, Monica appeared, a brown folder in her left hand. She didn’t hand it to him. Instead, she said, “What do you want it for, Hoffman?”

  He shrugged. “Personal curiosity.”

  “You’re not working on a story. If you’ve got some angle on this, it’s my work.”

  “Who would I be writ
ing it for—The Shop ’n’ Save Gazette? Come on, Monica.”

  “You got something on Alex Pappas?”

  He didn’t want to lie to her. And if he did lie, that wouldn’t be so easy. Investigative journalists are skilled at seeing through lies, especially ones as good as Monica Kennedy.

  “It’s about my dad. Because I think he must have run into trouble on this.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “I don’t know. But in any case, this is personal. It’s about my dad and Alex Pappas. But look, if anything interesting happens to pan out on this, any live story, we can share.”

  “Share?”

  “It’s an old, dead story that you looked into and found nothing on. I’m not trying to show you up and I’m not trying to compete with you.”

  “All right, all right,” Monica said, her suspicion momentarily allayed. Now she sounded only annoyed. She handed him the file folder and turned away to leave.

  “So tell me something,” he said. “You know anything about any Irish gangs in Boston?”

  “The Irish mob? In Boston? Not since Whitey Bulger’s heyday. Twenty, thirty years ago. Nothing on them in years. Why, you got something?”

  He shook his head. “Could we talk about this story for a couple of minutes? You got time for a quick cup of coffee upstairs in the cafeteria?”

  “No, sorry, I don’t.”

  “Okay, two minutes, then.” He waited for a vaguely familiar-looking reporter to pass by, nodding at Monica. “What made you think there might be a Big Dig angle to it?”

  “I don’t know, the Ted Williams Tunnel had just opened. I figured something might have happened. And look, ten years later something did happen, right?”

  She was talking about an incident in July of 2006 when part of the ceiling of another new Big Dig tunnel collapsed, wounding the driver of a car and killing his wife. After a long investigation it turned out to be a problem with the epoxy used to fasten the panels to the ceiling.

  “True,” he said.

  “But when I talked to the cops, I figured it was probably a DUI. End of story.”

  He nodded. “So what would Pappas have to do with a DUI? What would he care?”

  “The rumor in the Dominican community was that something had gone wrong with the newly built tunnel, and that’s what caused the accident. I made some calls and got nothing on that, and then Pappas calls me. He’s working for some consortium of businesses called the Boston Common Alliance—the businesses involved in the Big Dig—and he wants to make sure this story doesn’t get misreported. Look, I knew what he was up to, and I approached him with the normal amount of skepticism, but he turned out to be a useful source. He got me the police report. He greased the wheels with Boston police, made sure I got callbacks right away. I wasn’t going to turn away help like that.”

  “Okay.”

  “You find out something, you make sure to loop me in, right?”

  “Right. Will do.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I got it.”

  He wondered if she could tell he was lying.

  33

  Rick sat in his car—a Ford Taurus rented from Enterprise Rent-A-Car in Central Square—in the Globe parking lot and read through Monica’s file. It was thin, a collection of scrawled notes on scraps of yellow legal pad paper and pink While You Were Out phone message slips and photocopies of documents like the Boston police report on the accident. Her handwriting was atrocious. It took him a few minutes of studying the hieroglyphics before he was able to decrypt it. She’d done interviews with neighbors of the dead family, a schoolteacher who’d taught the fourteen-year-old daughter, and sources in the Boston police. Somehow she’d put together an article about the death of an immigrant family from the Dominican Republic in a terrible accident in the brand-new tunnel.

  One of the clips in the file was a Globe Metro desk dispatch on the accident, the first report to hit the paper, a day after it happened. The article was only a paragraph long and was by a junior Metro desk correspondent Rick knew, a woman who’d accepted a buyout and left the Globe some years ago to write a novel but hadn’t met with much success.

  JAMAICA PLAIN FAMILY DEAD IN TUNNEL CRASH

  By Akila Subramanian

  Globe Correspondent

  A Jamaica Plain family of three was killed in a single-vehicle collision in the Ted Williams Tunnel at about 2:15 a.m. on Monday, according to police. The driver, Oscar Cabrera, 36, of Hyde Square in Boston, was killed along with his wife, Dolores, 35, and their 14-year-old daughter Graciela. The cause of the crash was not immediately released. Speed did not appear to be a factor in the accident, police said.

  That was all at first. The plain facts, but not too many of them.

  Then Rick could see in Monica’s notes her attempts to come up with some sort of investigative angle.

  CRASH HOW?? was written in big letters on a yellow lined page ripped from a legal pad covered with doodles (mostly bad drawings of horses) and various phone numbers and phrases like traffic signals? and Lane markings??? Next to that: SINGLE CAR COLLISION—wall? Drunk? Scrawled in her crabbed script on a While You Were Out message was suspected DUI pending BAC. That meant that the police were speculating the accident had been caused by drunk driving but they’d know for sure when the blood alcohol levels came back in the pathology report.

  As he parsed her other scribblings, it became evident that Monica was stumped trying to figure out how a car could have crashed in the tunnel without hitting another vehicle. Was the accident caused by something in the tunnel? Some problem with the lane markings or the traffic patterns? A concrete stanchion placed where it shouldn’t have been? But her interviews had apparently turned up nothing.

  Her piece—the other clip in the folder—was a longer article that ran two days later. The coauthor was the reporter who originally caught the story, normal newspaper etiquette. There was no investigative angle to it, but you could tell Monica wanted one. The story, instead, was framed as one of those unfathomable tragedies that just happen from time to time.

  TRAGEDY STRIKES IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY

  By Monica Kennedy and Akila Subramanian

  Globe Correspondents

  She was a graceful dancer and talented beginning pianist with a quick smile who loved to help her mother cook.

  Family and friends wept openly as they recalled Graciela Cabrera, the 14-year-old Hyde Square resident who was killed in the early hours of Monday morning along with both of her parents when the 1989 Toyota RAV4 driven by her father, Oscar Cabrera, 36, crashed in the Ted Williams Tunnel.

  Oscar Cabrera, who worked as an engineer at the Colonnade Hotel in Boston, was remembered as a modest, self-effacing man always quick to volunteer to shovel snow or carry packages for friends and neighbors here in the close-knit Dominican community. Dolores, 35, was recalled as a loving wife and mother and a skilled beautician at Hair Again, a hair salon in Hyde Square. The young family had emigrated from the Dominican Republic 8 years previously.

  The outpouring of grief in this working-class neighborhood was matched only by the puzzlement among friends and loved ones as to how this tragedy could have happened.

  Authorities are trying to determine what caused Monday’s accident, which closed westbound tunnel traffic for hours until the mangled vehicle could be towed away. Preliminary investigations indicated that Cabrera’s Toyota sustained major damage in the tunnel, but that no other vehicle was involved.

  “This is a great loss to the Dominican community,” said civic leader Gloria Antunes of the Hyde Square Community Partnership. “There are no words to express how sorry we are.”

  Rick decided to drive over to Hyde Square in the Boston suburb of Jamaica Plain and just start asking questions. Sometimes you could pick up details on the ground. His old boss at the Globe, a gruff editor who favored bow ties and boldly striped shirts with wh
ite contrasting collars, was always ordering his reporters to get out of their cubicles and get off their phones and their butts and start poking around. “Just showing up,” he liked to say, “is half of good reporting.”

  It was time to show up.

  34

  The area around Hyde Square in Jamaica Plain was Boston’s Latin quarter, with bodegas that sold mango puree and plantains, and shops advertising paycheck cashing and money orders. This stretch of Jamaica Plain had been largely German and Irish until the 1960s, when the Cubans and the Puerto Ricans and the Dominicans settled there and transformed it into Boston’s Hispanic area.

  His first stop was the office of the Hyde Square Community Partnership, an organization, according to its website, dedicated to creating a safe and strong community, “the beating heart of Latino life in Boston.” It brought together local merchants and politicians and community leaders. Its founder and leader was Gloria Antunes. He’d underlined her name in the printout of Monica’s article. He figured that Antunes would be his best way into the neighborhood. The HSCP was located on the second floor of a building on the first floor of which was a variedades store. He went up the stairs and found a door marked with a HYDE SQUARE COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIP sign and a sunburst logo. The door was unlocked.

  Inside, sitting at a receptionist’s desk, was a large woman wearing oversize tinted glasses. Behind her an open door revealed an inner office where someone—presumably Gloria Antunes herself—sat behind a bigger desk, talking on the phone.

  “May I help you, sir?” the receptionist said.

  “I’m looking for Gloria Antunes.”

  “Gloria?” she said, smiling broadly. “Of course. May I tell her what this is in reference to?”

  He handed her one of his Back Bay magazine business cards. “My name is Rick Hoffman, and I wanted to talk to her about the Cabrera family.”