The Fixer Page 22

  He stopped into the coffee shop, called Town Grounds, bought a cup of Sumatra—fancy artisanal coffee, even in rural New Hampshire!—and asked the young woman at the counter if she knew where Paul Clarke’s house was. She smiled apologetically and said she had no idea. When he came out of the coffee shop he saw, across the street, Town Pizza. It looked like the same one where they used to go for dinner when they visited Clarke, who was a bachelor and didn’t cook much.

  He crossed the street and entered the pizza parlor. Behind the counter, a middle-aged bald guy was sliding a pizza into an oven with a wooden peel. He looked as if he might be the owner.

  “Do you know Paul Clarke?”

  “Paul? Sure.”

  “Do you know where he lives? I’m an old friend.”

  “I think I have a pretty good idea,” he said, and he drew a map on a paper place mat.

  Rick got back into the Suburban, drove past a white-steepled church, then a small town hall building, then an off-brand gas station. There he turned left and continued on straight for a mile or so until he dead-ended at Chiswick Road. He turned right and drove along a tree-lined road with modest wooden houses set back from the street, every quarter mile or so. Then he came to a big, unpainted aluminum mailbox that said CLARKE in large stick-on letters.

  The mailbox stood at the mouth of a narrow unpaved road that disappeared into thick coniferous forest. But there were also plenty of maple trees, he knew. He saw the ruts of large tires in the dirt that looked fairly recent.

  After only a moment’s hesitation, he turned into the private road, which twisted through woods for what seemed close to half a mile and then opened out into a gravel drive bordering a scrubby lawn and then a sprawling white farmhouse. Stones popped under the Suburban’s big tires as he drove over gravel. A couple of well-worn vehicles were parked side by side, a Ford F-150 truck and a Subaru Outback.

  If nothing had changed in the years since the family had last visited, Clarke lived here alone. So the odds were good that he was at home.

  He parked and got out of the car.

  Suddenly he heard a gunshot, and a tree trunk just a few feet away exploded. Startled, he ducked. “What the hell?” he said aloud, realizing in a moment that a bullet had come close to hitting him.

  He rose slowly, hands up in the air. “I’m here to see Paul Clarke!” he shouted.

  A man was standing in front of the house, holding a shotgun pointed directly at him. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m Rick Hoffman. Lenny’s son.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” The man lowered the shotgun. He approached Rick. He was wearing a green-and-black plaid woolen shirt. “We’ve got a serious home invasion problem around here. Some meth heads live down the road, and they’ve got a black Suburban just like yours. Can’t be too careful. The downside of living way out in the boonies is nobody can hear you scream.”

  42

  Rick took a few steps and shook the old man’s hand.

  “Rick Hoffman. I know I should have called first, but I couldn’t find your phone number.”

  “Paul Clarke,” the old man said. “It’s been years, right? How’s Pop? Is he—?”

  “He’s okay,” Rick said. “You know he had a stroke, right?”

  Clarke nodded. “I can’t really visit him. I don’t know if your dad ever explained.”

  Rick shook his head. “I need to ask you some questions, if you don’t mind.”

  “Come on in.”

  * * *

  Clarke’s house was low-ceilinged and looked very old, with small windows and wide-board plank floors. It was dark and warrenlike and smelled everywhere of wood smoke. Clarke took him through a few sparsely furnished rooms to a room with a large fireplace and a couple of mismatched sofas and chairs, which looked like the place where Clarke spent most of his time. Rick remembered this room, the crackling fire, the comfortable sofas where they’d curl up and read while Clarke and his father talked in Clarke’s study.

  “Did you drive up from Boston?” Clarke asked as he knelt by the fireplace, balling up old newspaper.

  “I did. I had no way of reaching you first. Dad’s unable to speak, you might have heard—”

  Clarke turned around, nodded. “Awful thing.”

  “And the phone number he had from twenty years ago didn’t work.”

  “I understand. I’m not easy to find, and that’s no accident.”

  Clarke seemed to be implying something, but Rick didn’t probe. In a few minutes, Clarke had lit the newspaper, and the kindling had caught fire, and before long a fire was roaring.

  “What can I get you to drink?” Clarke said. “Coffee? Tea? Scotch?”

  “Scotch would be good.” He wanted Clarke lubricated and voluble.

  Clarke nodded and left the room, and then Rick heard the sound of water running from the nearby kitchen. He returned with two freshly washed tumblers of Scotch over ice. Clarke handed one to Rick. “I should have asked, you prefer it neat?”

  “This is fine, thanks.” It was not long after noon. He’d have to drive back this afternoon, which would now entail stopping at the Town Grounds and getting a couple of hits of caffeine to help him through the drive home. “I have some good memories of visiting you here when Dad took us. Do you still make maple syrup?”

  “Oh, yes. Still a sugar maker. I’ve still got the old sugar shack. It’s gotten a little fancier than it was when you kids used to come here, I’m sure—tubing and reverse osmosis and such. I only have about fifty acres here, so I’m a small-time producer. But it pays the bills, which aren’t big.”

  Rick sat at one end of a sofa, and Clarke sat in an overstuffed armchair next to the sofa. The chair’s upholstery was shabby and threadbare, and tufts of white stuffing stuck out of the holes in the arms. Clarke had taken off his green plaid overshirt. He was wearing green wide-wale corduroy pants and a muted brown plaid flannel shirt, and his silver hair looked freshly barbered.

  “Were you aiming at me?” Rick said as he took a sip of Scotch.

  “If I were aiming at you, Rick, I would have hit you. No, I was aiming for just over your head and a few inches to the right. Close enough to put the fear of God into you. And again, I’m sorry about that. I was too impulsive.”

  Rick smiled. “My fault for showing up unannounced. But I need to talk to you. You were, I think, one of Dad’s closest friends. Maybe the closest. And I know he came to see you the week before his stroke.”

  Clarke nodded. Joan had called him “one of the scruffy people,” but he could hardly have been less scruffy. He could have been a country gentleman in a Ralph Lauren magazine ad.

  “His doctors now think he was hit—beaten, badly. They suspect his stroke was likely brought on by traumatic brain injury.”

  Clarke winced, ducked his head, then put a hand over his eyes. “Oh, dear. I’m not surprised. I’m just surprised they let him live. He expected to be killed.”

  “He did? Why?”

  “Because your father had had a crisis of conscience. He wanted out of the life he’d fallen into. He couldn’t go on anymore.”

  You didn’t play by the rules . . .

  “Why not?”

  “Something disturbed him deeply. Something he was told to do.”

  “What was that?”

  Clarke shook his head slowly. “He wanted to protect me. Keep me ignorant of the details. He thought the less I knew, the safer I’d be. He was a thoughtful man, your father was. All he’d say was that some people had been killed and he’d been ordered to cover something up about their deaths.”

  Rick thought of the little girl at the piano recital and knew his father had been moved as much as he had. Lenny had been told to pay off the surviving family members. It must have been part of a cover-up.

  “Why did he drive up here? Did he come to talk it over with you, was that why he came?”
>
  “I think that was part of it, yes. But I think it was mostly to get my help.”

  “In what?”

  “He wanted my help in doing what he helped me do, back in the day.” Clarke gave him an intent look.

  Rick shook his head. “To do what?”

  “He never told you . . . about me?”

  “What about you?”

  “Oh, Lordy. He wanted to disappear. Same way I did.”

  43

  Lenny was ordered to cover something up, and he couldn’t go through with it. So he knew he had no choice but to get out, to quit his life and set up a new one. I’m sorry, I thought he’d told you and your sister. He was planning to. Maybe he never got a chance.”

  “How was he planning to ‘quit’ his life? What does that mean, exactly?”

  “He’d begun to accumulate his assets—to gather cash, enough to buy him a new identity and a new life, and leave some for you and—your sister’s name was Wendy, perhaps?”

  Rick nodded. He wondered how much Clarke knew about the cash, how much there was. “But where’d he get the cash?”

  “He was paid very well by one of his clients—the one he’d become fearful of—and he always lived modestly. And on top of that, to be honest, I think he skimmed money off of the cash he’d amassed for this client. He wasn’t troubled by the morality of it, I have to say. He called it ‘stealing from thieves.’”

  “How could he disappear?”

  “The same way I did. You do know that Clarke isn’t my real name, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “So you don’t know . . . Your dad stood by me when no one else would.”

  “Stood by you how?”

  “Lenny was a hero. Back in the day, he’d take cases no other lawyer would take. Like mine. My real name is Herbert Antholis. You might have heard the name . . . ?”

  Rick shook his head. “I don’t think so. Should I know who you are?”

  Clarke—Antholis?—tipped his head and gave that crooked half smile that Rick remembered well. “Those days are long gone, I guess, and just as well. I used to be a member of the Weather Underground. Back in the days before that was a weather website. We were student radicals. We all had copies of Mao’s little red book, and we were convinced that old Chairman Mao was right, that political power grows out of a gun.

  “Well, we were protesting the US bombing of Hanoi in 1972—we were planning to break into an army recruiting center in downtown Boston and steal records. But I was the low man on the totem pole, and what I didn’t know, what they didn’t tell me, was that my comrades were actually planning to set off a pipe bomb there. I was driving the car, and my job was to wait for my comrades to come back and then hightail it out of there. Only later did I find out that an army sergeant, the guy who ran the recruiting center, was killed when the bomb went off. A father of four kids. That wasn’t part of the plan at all. No one told me. But after we were arrested and charged, it didn’t make a difference that I was at the bottom of the totem pole. A grand jury indicted me, and the district attorney was going for the maximum sentence he could get—life in prison. I mean, I drove the getaway car, so I knew I was culpable. I deserved some kind of prison sentence. But not life. Your father took my case and he believed in me. He worked his butt off. But he knew I could never get a fair trial. I said to your dad, ‘What are my odds?’ and he said, ‘Frankly, they’re bad.’ I told him I’d have to make a run for it, go underground like some of my Weather Underground comrades did. He said, ‘Do you know what kind of position that puts me in?’ But he helped me anyway. It was a lot easier to disappear back in the early seventies. I got some fake papers made and moved to rural New Hampshire and set up a new life. No one knows, not my neighbors or my friends in town. They just know me as a sugar maker.”

  “I had no idea about any of this.”

  “It was a lot more complicated for your father to disappear back in—1995, was it? ’96?”

  “’96.” Rick was astonished at Antholis’s account. This was a Lenny Hoffman he didn’t recognize.

  “He had to set up a ghost address, and I think he was working on getting a driver’s license in another name. But mostly, the thing is, you have to live on cash. Which is surprisingly not all that hard to do.”

  “Who did he tell? Just you? Or did he tell Joan as well?”

  “Joan, his secretary? No way. Joan was always a problem for him. I don’t know why he never fired her.”

  “What? She seems as loyal as they come.”

  “He never told you? Remember during the busing crisis in Boston when there was all that violence? The courts ordered that black kids be bused to white schools and white kids be bused to black schools. . . . There was this black teenager who was charged with stoning cars. Lenny represented him pro bono. He didn’t think the kid was guilty. Well, Joan’s uncle was badly hurt during all that madness—he was hit with a cinder block or some such outside a housing project in Roxbury. Wielded by another black teenager. I think Joan never forgave him for agreeing to represent that black kid.”

  “But I don’t understand,” he said. “I thought Dad represented strip clubs and such. His clients all came out of the Combat Zone.”

  “That’s how he ended up, sure. But that wasn’t how he started. That wasn’t what Lenny wanted to be. Your father saw himself as a First Amendment lawyer. That was something he deeply cared about. I mean, this wasn’t the sort of pro bono work that partners at big law firms get points for taking on. This was a cause for him. A life. But then he had kids and he knew he needed a reliable way to make a living.”

  Rick couldn’t help but marvel at the old Leonard Hoffman, the man he never knew. “So what changed?” he said. “How could someone like that become someone like, well, my dad?” But he knew what Antholis was going to say, and he dreaded it.

  “Look in the mirror, Rick,” Antholis said.

  44

  By the time he arrived at his latest hotel, the DoubleTree Suites on Soldiers Field Road in Boston, he was exhausted. It was dark and cold and he’d had to battle rush-hour traffic getting back to the city from New Hampshire. Yet he was too keyed up to sleep. He poured a Scotch from the minibar and tried watching television for a while, but nothing held his interest.

  He could think of nothing else besides what he’d learned in New Hampshire, from his father’s old friend. He was still stunned.

  His father had been planning to disappear, to become a fugitive, and only a stroke had interfered with his plan. He wanted out of the life he’d made for himself, a life of deceit and payoffs and bribes—a life that had become dangerous and repulsive to him.

  The Lenny Hoffman that Herbert Antholis knew was a hero, plain and simple. He’d defended outcasts and rejects; he’d defended people who had no one else to defend them. Yes, he’d taken on work he disliked in order to support a family. He’d sold out. But in the end he did the right thing—the brave thing. He refused to cover up the cause of the accident that killed a family.

  He marveled at the deception that was “Paul Clarke,” a.k.a. Herbert Antholis. Rick wanted to call his sister and tell her what he’d discovered about the mysterious man who’d introduced them to maple syrup on snow—she’d be equally blown away—but he couldn’t risk being distracted now.

  He was tired, not just from the long day, the booze, and all that driving, but from having to run and hide. He was tired of his desperate, nomadic existence, having to change hotels every other night, always having to look behind him. The fortune he’d uncovered—or, was it, more accurately, the misfortune?—had plunged him into a world of danger similar to what his father must have confronted. Part of him was tempted to give up, to throw in the towel, to stop running. But what would that entail, exactly? Was it even possible?

  The people who’d been coming after him showed no signs of stopping. At least now he had some idea why. If Herbert Antholis
was right, a part of that 3.4 million was skimmed—stolen, to put it simply—from Alex Pappas or from whoever his clients were.

  Who was Pappas’s client? Maybe the solution, the thing that would make him safe, was as simple as figuring out who the client was and making a deal, giving back part of the cash. That was one approach. Figure out what they wanted and give it to them.

  But there was another approach. Call it the confrontation option. Investigate, figure out who the client or clients were, and confront them with proof of their crime, of their role in covering up the real cause of the accident that killed the Cabreras. Maybe confronting them would flush them out, keep them at bay.

  Maybe.

  He opened his laptop. The problem was, he knew very little. He had only a few threads to pull at. Start with the meat-packing plant in South Boston where he’d been taken to be tortured—and would certainly have been, would have been maimed or worse, had the guys from the demo crew not tracked him there.

  Who owned the place?

  The sign on the front of the warehouse where he’d been taken had said B&H PACKING, 36 NEWMARKET SQ.

  Newmarket Square was an area where a lot of wholesalers were located—seafood dealers, fruit-and-vegetable vendors, and the like—just off the Southeast Expressway and near the Mass Turnpike. He Googled B&H Packing on Newmarket Square and came up with only a rudimentary, temporary website. There was a slogan—“Quality purveyors to fine restaurants in the Greater Boston area”—and then just a line: “New website coming.” A few more Google attempts yielded not much more. It was a low-profile wholesale meat-packing company, that was all. No owner listed anywhere. Whoever owned the place had to be directly connected to the Irish gang that had abducted him twice.

  But that seemed to be a dead end.

  Then what about Donegall Charitable Trust, which, according to Joan Breslin, paid for his father’s nursing home? That was, he knew, more than 120,000 dollars a year. Not cheap. This was another dangling thread. He Googled it, as he’d done before, only to have Google reply: