The Fixer Page 3

  Ten minutes later, Rick had rented the smallest storage unit available. It was located on an upper level, like all the smallest units, reachable only by means of a rolling steel ladder.

  Motion-sensor lights came on as he went down the aisle looking for the locker. He found number 322 and pulled the ladder over to it, climbed to the top platform, and tried his key. The lock came open, but it took him a while to figure out how to open the roll-up steel door. Calm down, man, he told himself. He took a deep breath, then surveyed the space. The unit was maybe four feet wide by five feet high by six feet deep. More than enough space. Its interior was clean and dry.

  It would do just fine. An anonymous locker in a building where no one seemed to be paying much attention to anyone.

  He rolled a dolly out to the parking lot and unloaded the trunk.

  Ten minutes later he’d moved all six black trash bags into the storage unit. Even though there didn’t seem to be anyone else loading or retrieving stuff, no one here but the guy with the big holes in his earlobes, Rick still was careful not to open the bags until he was crouched down inside the unit. Not that he needed to. He just wanted to see if the money was still there, if it was still real. He resisted the urge to count it again. Looking around—the coast was clear—he reached into one of the bags and pulled out a few packets and slid them into the inside zippered pocket of his Mountain Hardwear down jacket. Then he grabbed more packets, stuffing one into each of the four pockets. His ski parka was now worth a hundred thousand dollars.

  A little spending money.

  When he was finished, he rolled down the steel door and locked the Master Lock and glanced around, his heart pounding, sweat droplets breaking out on his forehead. He tugged at the lock a few times to make sure it was secure.

  There was probably only one person who would know how the hell all that cash ended up in the house on Clayton Street, walled up in the crawl space. How it got there and what it was doing there.

  Only one person.

  And that guy—Rick’s dad—couldn’t speak.

  4

  The whiteboard sign mounted outside Leonard Hoffman’s room said, in big flowery purple letters:

  A sign like that hung outside every resident’s room at the Alfred Becker Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. It was meant to remind the nursing staff that their charges were real people with real families and lives, give them something to chat about.

  All the nurses and health care aides acted as if they liked Len a lot, probably because that was part of their job, to make visiting family members think that each Dad or Grandma was their very favorite. Which had a certain piquancy to it. Because if Leonard Hoffman did have the power of speech, they’d all love him for real.

  He’d had what people called an outsize personality. He was endearing, funny, corny. He loved women, flirted with them in a way that was flattering, that didn’t seem at all icky, especially coming from an older guy. Women were always “girls” to him. They were “honey” and “sweetheart” and “doll.” If a massive stroke hadn’t robbed him of his ability to wheedle and charm, he’d have the nurses glowing around him, wagging their index fingers, mock chiding. He could never resist a pun or a groaner. Leonard, in full command of his speech, would have asked the squat dark-haired nurse Carolyn, with a wink, “You sure you’re not Greek? ’Cause you look like a goddess to me!” He would have told the sloe-eyed nurse Jewel, the Saint Lucian beauty, “You must be Jamaican—Jamaican me crazy!”

  And they would have loved it.

  He’d been something of a lady’s man, in his day. He was always a flamboyant dresser, favoring bold striped shirts and double-breasted pinstriped suits like Al Capone might have worn and bright ties with matching pocket squares.

  Now he wore drawstring pants and a pajama top.

  But life wasn’t like To Kill a Mockingbird. Lenny wasn’t exactly Atticus Finch, and Rick wasn’t Scout. There was nothing soft-focus about their relationship. It was tense, distant, frustrating.

  “You haven’t touched your lunch,” Rick said.

  The meat loaf was a revolting beige, the peas a hideous electric green. Len, pre-stroke, would have patted his food with his fingertips in response and said, “There, I’m touching it.”

  But Len now just looked at Rick balefully. His expression rarely changed. He had a penetrating, almost horrified stare, as if he’d just glimpsed something blood-curdling. Rick visited his father almost every Sunday, had done so as often as possible since the stroke, but he still couldn’t get used to his father’s harrowed expression.

  “Actually,” he said, “I don’t know how they expect you to eat that shit. But they’re not going to let me give you any ice cream if you don’t eat your meat loaf.”

  His father turned his head toward the window and watched the Brookline traffic, a gob of spittle on the left side of his mouth. Rick took the napkin from his lunch tray and daubed the spit away.

  It had been a bumpy ride since Len’s long-suffering, loyal secretary, Joan, had discovered him sprawled out on the floor in his office after lunch one day eighteen years ago. An ambulance had rushed him to Mass General, where they determined he’d had what they called a “left-side blowout.” His left internal carotid artery, stiffened and gummed up from seven decades of steaks and ice cream, had burst, cutting off blood flow to most of the left hemisphere of his brain. He had a huge lesion in the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes.

  They put him on a ventilator, explained that he was likely now a global aphasic—meaning he couldn’t speak, probably couldn’t read or write, and they didn’t know how much he understood of what was said to him. Rick figured his father would be a vegetable. Wendy, being younger, deferred to her brother on all decisions.

  After a week, Leonard was shunted to a rehab facility, where he seemed to make progress for a while. An occupational therapist had taught him to walk again, which he did now in a frantic, staggering way, swinging his stiff right leg around in a circle. Most of the time he used a wheelchair. His right arm didn’t work anymore. The right side of his face drooped. A speech pathologist, a large black woman named Jocelyn, tried in vain to get him to communicate. It didn’t look good.

  Then one day, Jocelyn grabbed Rick in the hall outside his father’s room and said, “He understands. I know he does.”

  She pulled him into the room and demonstrated by putting some objects on the table in front of Len. A key ring, her watch, her glasses. “Leonard, would you please look at the watch?” she said.

  Len moved his eyes to the right and stared, unmistakably, at her pink Fossil.

  There was, Rick thought sadly, someone inside there.

  But apart from that one parlor trick, Len seemed to make no progress, and a month later he was moved to the nursing home to sit in a wheelchair all day in front of the TV. Rick still had no idea how much his father understood when you talked to him.

  He was unshaven this morning, or maybe just poorly shaven, clumps of gray beard scattered here and there like tumbleweed on his chin and his sunken cheeks. His fingernails were long and ridged and yellow, badly in need of clipping.

  “Hey, Dad, I’m having some work done to the house.”

  Len turned and looked in his direction. His expression was hostile, disdainful, the way he constantly looked these days.

  Talking to his father felt like talking to himself, except that Rick kept some topics—Holly and all that, the flaming wreck of his career—carefully off-limits.

  “You remember Jeff Hollenbeck next door? He’s a contractor now, and he’s going to give me a good price.”

  Len stared, blinked a few times.

  “Remember I said we’re going to sell the old place, now that no one’s living there anymore?” He sidestepped the fact that he was sleeping on Len’s couch. That was too depressing to talk about; Len didn’t need to know.

  “So I wanted to ask you someth
ing.” He watched Len’s eyes. “I found something inside . . . inside the house.” He waited a beat, glanced back at the door, then back at his father. “Inside the walls. Next to your study.”

  “I thought it was Rick!” a loud female voice exclaimed. Rick turned, saw the aide he liked the most out of all of them, a heavyset blonde named Brenda, swoop into the room. She was probably fifty and wore her thick glossy hair in a pageboy. She wore baby-blue scrubs and had rhinestone-speckled harlequin glasses, which seemed to be an artsy affectation. The rhinestones glittered in the light from the ceiling. She smiled her big gummy smile. “Wait, it’s not Sunday, is it?”

  “Nah, decided to shake things up a bit.”

  “Phew, I guess I’m not losing it after all.”

  “My dad treating you okay?”

  “Your dad’s a sweetie,” she said. “We all love Leonard.” They both knew that Brenda had no idea what Len was like, whether he was a sweetie or an ogre. The man didn’t talk, didn’t even react. But Rick appreciated her saying it just the same.

  She glanced at her watch. “It’s almost time for Judge Judy, and I know he doesn’t like to miss that.”

  “Dad and I are going to talk just a little more.” His father had never watched Judge Judy or any other court show, back when he was able to voice his opinion; he doubted Len liked it now. And if he did, he had no way of letting anybody know.

  “Leonard, what about your lunch, honey?” she said. “Not hungry today?”

  “I don’t think he’s a big meat loaf fan.”

  As Brenda began to leave, Rick asked, “Do you have a pair of nail clippers?”

  “Of course.” She swiveled to one side and plucked a pair of clippers out of a dresser drawer, handing them to Rick with a flourish.

  “Let’s see your hands, Dad.” He took hold of Len’s left hand and began to clip his father’s thick, grooved nails, and Brenda drifted out of the room.

  Rick clipped slowly. His father held out each hand, one at a time. It felt oddly intimate. It was like taking care of a small child. He thought about how everything sooner or later comes back around. He realized with a jolt that his eyes had teared up.

  He stopped clipping. “Jeff and I were doing some exploratory demolition,” he said quietly, “and we opened up the wall next to your study, at the back of the closet.” Len’s mouth was frozen in that haughty expression, but his watery eyes seemed anxious. They followed Rick’s. “There was money back there. A huge amount of money. Millions of dollars. How did it get there, any idea?” Rick swallowed, waited. “Is it yours?”

  Len’s restless eyes came to a stop, looked directly into Rick’s.

  “Is it?”

  The old man’s eyes bore into his. Then he began to blink rapidly, three or four times. Nervously, maybe.

  “Are you signaling me, Dad?” His father was able, at times, to blink: once for yes, twice for no. But not always, and not consistently. Did he sometimes lose the ability; did it wax and wane? Or did he grow weary of trying? Rick had no idea.

  The blinks stopped, then resumed after a few seconds.

  “How about you blink once for yes and twice for no. This cash I found—is it yours? Once for yes, twice for no.”

  Len looked straight, unblinking, into Rick’s eyes, held his gaze for a few seconds.

  Then blinked twice.

  “No,” Rick said. “It’s not yours, correct?”

  Nothing. Then one blink.

  Yes.

  “Okay, we’re getting somewhere.” Rick’s heart rate began to accelerate. “Do you—do you know whose cash it is?”

  Nothing. Five, ten seconds went by, and Len didn’t blink. He looked away, then blinked a few times, but it didn’t seem to mean anything.

  “Dad, who does it belong to?” Rick asked, before remembering he couldn’t ask a question that didn’t have a yes or no answer. “Let me try again: Do you know whose cash it is?”

  Now Len blinked rapidly, not just once or twice. Many times, too many to count.

  It was hard to tell, but he looked frightened.

  5

  He had a hundred thousand dollars in cash burning holes in his down parka and no room on his credit cards. His Citicard MasterCard, his Bank of America Visa, his Capital One MasterCard—all maxed out, all as worthless as Confederate dollars.

  He was carrying around an insane amount of cash, with many times that sitting in a storage locker, in a world where fewer and fewer people took cash anymore. Who used cash in any serious quantity? Drug kingpins and Mafiosi. Criminals. The infamous Boston mobster Whitey Bulger, hiding out in Santa Monica, paid his rent in cash, Rick had read somewhere. Sure, you tip bellhops and parking valets with real money. But buy an airplane ticket with cash and you’ll have Homeland Security crawling up your ass.

  He drove to Harvard Square and circled around for ten minutes, looking for a parking spot, before he realized he could now afford to park in that damned overpriced parking lot on Church Street. At the Bank of America branch next to the Harvard Coop, he deposited nine thousand dollars into his checking account. Then he opened an account at Cambridge Trust bank, across the street, and deposited nine thousand five hundred dollars into it. As long as he kept deposits under ten thousand bucks, he’d be fine. He saw a sign for Citizens Bank on JFK Street and stopped in there.

  Now he had 28,500 dollars in three separate bank accounts, with temporary checkbooks to go with them. It seemed like a small fortune.

  By the late afternoon he was back at the house. The side door off the driveway, which opened into the kitchen, was unlocked. Strange. He didn’t remember leaving it unlocked. He wondered if Jeff had.

  When he opened it, he noticed a file folder that had been shoved under the door. He picked it up and flipped it open. It contained a stapled thatch of papers on Hollenbeck Construction letterhead.

  It was a construction proposal, clearly done on some template, listing the scope of work. Demolition and renovation, the dates when work was to begin (tomorrow!) and completed (the end of March). A lot of legal gobbledygook.

  And a standard payment schedule, including deposit. The cost was reasonable, but there was no mention of any sort of barter deal. Nothing about his doing the work and getting paid from the proceeds of selling the house.

  All payments to be made in cash, starting with “Deposit: $8,000.”

  If there was any doubt about whether Jeff had seen the cash, there wasn’t any longer.

  He hesitated, thought about arguing with Jeff, then decided it wasn’t worth it. He pulled out a pen and signed each copy of the agreement. Then he stepped outside. Jeff’s house had been unimproved for decades, except for an exterior paint job not that long ago. The side door to his house also opened into the kitchen. Jeff’s kitchen, with its sheer curtains on the door and yellow wallpaper patterned with miscellaneous fruits, its Kenmore range and refrigerator, looked perfectly preserved, identical to the way it had looked when Rick and Jeff were kids. Rick slipped the copies of the contract under the door, along with a check written on one of the new bank accounts. He thought about knocking on the window and asking about the change, the money terms they hadn’t agreed to, but decided it was better not to get into it. Jeff had seen something; he’d seen the money, that was obvious. But it was only a glimpse. He had no idea how much there was.

  Rick was already zipping up his sleeping bag and arranging himself uncomfortably on the couch when the realization hit him, like a clap of thunder: He didn’t have to stay here anymore. He didn’t have to live like the impoverished, scraping person he used to be. He could stay in a hotel. He could stay in the Four Seasons if he wanted to.

  Tomorrow he’d find someplace decent to stay. Tonight he’d relish his last night in the sleeping bag on the leather sofa in his father’s office. Now that he had a choice whether to sleep here or not, he could think of it as slumming, as camping out.
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br />   He got back off the couch and walked through the rooms on the ground floor. It smelled faintly of natural gas down here—not squirrel piss—but not alarmingly so. An odor put out by the gas stove, maybe a minuscule leak from the pilot. Behind the stove, the wallpaper was scorched where there’d been a cooking accident years ago. A grease fire from when Wendy had experimented with deep-frying a turkey.

  He found the place outside the kitchen pantry where his and his sister’s growth was recorded in horizontal lines made with pen or marker. They’d stopped measuring by the time he and Wendy got to high school. Maybe he and his sister had refused to submit to the indignity any longer, the ruler on top of the head, all that. He didn’t remember anymore.

  He had no nostalgia for the house but couldn’t help feeling a slight pang when he saw those lines. RICK—MARCH 2 ’85—50" . . . RICK—NOV. 14 ’92—64" . . . Between the ages of seven and fourteen he’d had his major growth spurt. The marker on the pantry wall showed it. Soon that would be gone, the wallpaper stripped off, the walls repainted, along with the scorch mark in the kitchen and the divots and dings and scrapes of a house where two kids had grown up.

  He went back upstairs, turning off the lights behind him. He cranked up the space heater and settled down to sleep on the leather sofa.

  In the middle of the night a creaking noise woke him up.

  He opened his eyes. The only light in the room came from the streetlight on Clayton Street. The noise had sounded as if it came from inside the house, maybe down one flight.