The Fixer Page 27

  Though who “they” were was still a mystery. “They” were whomever Pappas was working for. As long as they weren’t coming after Rick, he didn’t need to know who they were.

  No longer did he need to keep moving from hotel to hotel. Then again, he had no home anyway. A hotel was the best he was going to do for a while. Maybe someday he’d get back together with Andrea, this time as two equals who’d each been through some hard times and emerged in the light. Maybe they’d buy a big-boned, rambling house together on Francis Ave in Cambridge.

  Maybe not.

  The point was, he had money now. No doubt three-million-plus dollars was pocket change to a rich person, to some hedge fund titan, but by Rick’s lights it was a lot. If he shared it with his sister, which seemed only fair, that was still 1.7 million dollars. Maybe not a fortune, but it was enough to buy a future. And it took some of the sting out of that handshake with Pappas.

  Anyway, it was all in how you looked at it, right? Maybe Pappas was right and Rick had won. The money was his to hold on to now, whosever it originally was, whether it was clean or dirty or clean and dirty. The war was over. Lenny was dead, and there was no more reason to fight on.

  Rick was feeling better, physically. It still hurt when he moved, or when he coughed, but not as acutely. His bruises were purpling. He did some errands. His replacement credit cards arrived. He went to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get a replacement driver’s license. He thought briefly about checking out of the DoubleTree and into the Mandarin, or the Four Seasons, in the Back Bay. After all, he had more than three million bucks in storage. Why not live it up?

  But that felt wasteful. The DoubleTree was perfectly fine.

  He drove over to the storage unit. He was sure he was no longer being followed, but he couldn’t give up the ingrained habit of scoping out the parking garage, looking in the rearview. No one, as far as he could tell, was following him. He unlocked the unit and took a few wads of cash, then he drove over to the old house. He had some debts to pay.

  No one grabbed him, no one followed him. No one was there.

  He was safe.

  * * *

  He took Marlon and Santiago aside, one by one, and handed each of them a thousand dollars in DoubleTree envelopes. “Thank you,” he said. Was a thousand dollars too little? They’d saved his life after all. He owed them a lot more than that. True, they’d saved his life by accident; they were really intending to grab his money. But no matter how they came to it, they’d saved his life. That was the important thing.

  Staring him up and down, Marlon said, “Somebody beat the shit out you. They finally catch up with you?”

  “It had to happen eventually,” Rick said.

  “Yeah? Tell us who did it.”

  Rick shook his head. “It’s over,” he said.

  They were hanging drywall. Marlon was measuring eight-by-four-foot sheets of drywall with a T-square, scoring them with a utility knife. Jeff was fastening the large cut squares of Sheetrock to the bare studs using a screw gun.

  Rick waited for Jeff to finish screw-gunning a cut of Sheetrock. “You guys are really making progress.”

  “We should be wrapped up within the week,” Jeff said. “There’s this and some skim coating and painting and then the floors, and that’s all she wrote.”

  “That’s excellent,” Rick said. He had no plans to ever move back in. As soon as it was finished, it would go on the market.

  Before it sold, though, he’d have to go through it and remove any personal objects, anything of value. By now there couldn’t be much left. Wendy had come with a moving van some years ago. He’d taken whatever was important to him, mostly some books from childhood and school. But Lenny’s stuff remained. That was the most of it. There was clothing to give away, a couple of file cabinets to go through and mostly discard. He had a lot of old LPs, mostly sixties folk singers like Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Judy Collins. Hipsters collected LPs these days. He could probably unload some boxes at the Back Bay office in a matter of minutes. Though he’d probably hold on to the Judy Collins. Then there were his father’s books, from his study, all of which had been moved down to the basement in boxes.

  “Hey, Jeff, got a second?” Rick said.

  “What’s up?” Jeff said. “You okay?”

  “Not as bad as it looks.”

  “You know who did it, don’t you?”

  Rick nodded. “Yeah, and that’s why I wanted to tell you—forget what I told you about asking questions.”

  Jeff looked puzzled.

  “About the Big Dig. I asked you to see if you might know someone . . . I’m just saying, don’t.”

  “Okay, whatever you say,” Jeff said. “Let me ask you something. How much you have this place insured for?”

  Rick shook his head. “I don’t know, maybe three hundred thousand?”

  “It’s already worth a lot more. You should boost the insurance to a million five.”

  “That much, huh? Wow.”

  “Do it right away, man.”

  “Okay, Jeff, thanks—I will.”

  He went downstairs to do a quick survey of possessions. On the way he passed through the kitchen. All the old pots and pans were still hanging on their hooks on the pegboard, coated with plaster dust like snow. He ran a finger over the cast-iron skillet. The plaster dust was stuck to the oil residue. That was the pan Lenny used to make salami and eggs for Rick’s breakfast, several times a week, after Mom had died. Rick didn’t particularly like salami and eggs, but he’d once made the mistake of praising it and Lenny kept making it for him.

  The basement was filled with crap, with old toys Rick had once begged Lenny to buy for him, he just had to have. Things that were once of paramount importance, used once or twice, then discarded. Castaways of abandoned passions. Snowshoes. A mountain bike. The electric guitar, the drum set, the oil paints, the chemistry set. Rick didn’t remember whether he ever thanked him.

  He found the boxes labeled STUDY. Most of them contained law books. He had no idea whether they were dross or might have value. In one of the boxes he found a familiar-looking book: Walden and Other Writings by Henry David Thoreau, with a very sixties dust jacket, a curvy, groovy Peter Max–like font. Rick had often seen that book on his father’s desk, open to one of Thoreau’s little essays. Sometimes Lenny would read from it at night. He had loved Thoreau. He liked to quote one of Thoreau’s maxims: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Rick wondered whether his father had lived a life of quiet desperation. Probably so. At least he heard the beat of a different drummer, that was for sure.

  Rick had once said something snotty, some kind of hurtful thing to Lenny, he didn’t remember what he’d said, and he waited to see how his father would respond. Instead, Lenny seemed to will himself into silence. There was the intake of breath, then the pursed lips. The small shake of the head. Dad disliked conflict.

  The weight of things unsaid: At first, it was light, like a dusting of snowflakes. In time, it grew heavy, like six feet of hard pack.

  That Thoreau book Rick would hold on to, even though he never shared his father’s enthusiasm for Thoreau. It was important to Lenny, so it was important to Rick.

  He noticed his father’s old computer and removed its cover. This he’d have to throw away. He plugged it in and started it up. It crunched and grunted and eventually the green letters appeared on the screen. He took one of the 5 1/4-inch floppies from a box and inserted it into the disk drive and waited for the directory to load up.

  CORRESPONDENCE/BUSINESS one folder was labeled.

  CORRESPONDENCE/PERSONAL was another.

  He opened Correspondence/Personal. He felt strange doing this. He was rifling through his father’s private letters. Did his death make that okay? Did you lose the right to privacy when you died?

  Maybe. But still it felt like a violation. There were all sort
s of letters to friends, from the days when people still wrote letters instead of dashing off e-mails. Most of the names he didn’t know, or knew only vaguely.

  Then his eye was drawn to one file name: Warren_Hinckley_letter .doc.

  Warren Hinckley was the headmaster of the Linwood Academy. Why in the world had his father written to Headmaster Hinckley? Rick couldn’t resist opening the file.

  A document came up, green letters against the gray-black monitor.

  Dear Mr. Hinckley:

  I was dismayed to learn from our telephone conversation today that you are considering expelling my son from the Linwood Academy.

  Rick stared in disbelief. He was almost expelled? That he’d never heard before. His father must have fought this battle without telling him. Heart pounding, he kept reading:

  I am enormously proud of my son. What he did in publishing that article about Dr. Kirby’s plagiarism took genuine courage. He didn’t “play by the rules,” as most people would have done. That much is true. Yes, he is required to submit each issue of the school newspaper to your office for pro forma approval. By not doing so—by publishing an article that exposed an egregious instance of plagiarism by a member of your faculty without running it by you first—he knowingly broke a minor school regulation and thereby put his future at risk. Publishing this article would get him in trouble and he knew it. But instead of being expelled, he should be commended for his adroit scholarship and his bravery.

  Violating school protocol pales in importance next to the plagiarism carried out by an esteemed member of your faculty—who also happens to be your friend. In a school whose mission is to teach its students the right way to live, plagiarism is by far the graver offense.

  My son broke the rules to achieve a greater good. He demonstrated a courage most people lack. He is a braver man than either of us. If the Linwood Academy expels my son, you can expect a lawsuit and all the attendant publicity that will not put the school in a flattering light.

  Please do not teach your students to play by the rules when there are important principles at stake.

  Sincerely,

  Leonard J. Hoffman

  Attorney at Law

  Rick read the letter three times through, astonished. His father had gone to battle for him. Rick could feel a wetness on his face, and he tried to blink away the tears. How he’d misunderstood his father!

  And as he thought about the father he never really knew, something inside him gave way, and finally he wept.

  He wept for the man he’d lost. For the man he was only now beginning to know.

  * * *

  Rick went over to the Charles Hotel and retrieved his BMW from the parking garage. On his way back to the house something came over him and he deliberately made a wrong turn and soon he was on Mass Ave heading south through Boston. He drove aimlessly. He just wanted to drive. He found himself drawn, like iron filings to a magnet, to Geometry Partners, in Dorchester. The subconscious mind has aims of its own.

  He was in front of the old brick warehouse that housed the Geometry Partners offices. A young Latino-looking teenage girl was coming down the front stairs of the main entrance.

  The girl had pigtails and was talking excitedly to a boy around her age, which was probably fourteen. She grinned and he could see her big gap-toothed smile, and for an instant he thought she was Graciela Cabrera, the pianist in that old videotape.

  The dead girl.

  She looked just like Graciela.

  Graciela, who had been killed along with her parents in that terrible accident in the Ted Williams Tunnel eighteen years ago. Graciela, whose death was the fault of sloppy construction and was covered up. Graciela, whose tragic, altogether unnecessary death had haunted Lenny Hoffman and caused him finally to rebel, to refuse to make a payoff. Lenny had refused to sell out. He couldn’t do it.

  Unlike Rick.

  Of course, this young girl wasn’t Graciela. Graciela would have now been thirty-two. A woman. Maybe a mother herself.

  He felt his stomach turn to ice.

  He wanted to keep all that money and just live his life. I just want to live my life, he thought, that glorious cliché.

  But part of him was a mule-headed goddamn fool.

  Stand down: That was the smart move. Live your life. Move on. He knew what the smart move was.

  Suddenly, though, Rick wasn’t feeling very smart.

  57

  Gloria 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.

  58

  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. Hi
s 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.”