The Fixer Read online

  Rick unloosed a torrent of obscenity.

  An adenoidal laugh, a smoker’s cough. “The lip on this one! But you’ll want to answer me, because I’m giving you a choice this time. It’s your choice. It’s up to you. Which one’s your better hand, Mr. Hoffman? Left or right? I’ll only take the one this time.”

  Suddenly, Rick found it hard to catch his breath. Panic flooded his body. The power saw whined shrilly maybe twelve inches from where his cheek rested on cold metal. He tried to wrench his hands free, but the grip was too strong. He smelled rancid meat again, and the dark odor of motor oil.

  “He’s right-handed,” the Irishman said. “Let’s do him a kindness and take the left. Leave him his right.”

  “No!” Rick shouted. “God, no!”

  His hands were yanked across the hard metal surface, the saw shrilling just inches away. “No!” he said, unable to jerk his hands free, and then something cold and sharp sliced through the puffy parka sleeve and into his wrist—and the saw’s whine became a shriek, and then there was silence, except for the echo of Rick’s own screams.

  His left wrist was hot and sticky with blood.

  “Mr. Hoffman,” came the voice, “my father used to tell us kids, ‘The first time you get a talking to. The second time it’ll be the strap.’ Well, you’ll wish it was the strap, Mr. Hoffman. So I want you to think very hard because we will speak anon. Anon we will speak, Mr. Hoffman. And if we find you’ve held out on us, next time I won’t be asking ‘left or right.’”

  Rick was drenched with sweat, his heart galloping, and all of a sudden he was grabbed by the knees and the hands again and dumped back into the trunk.

  He heard the engine’s dull roar and the car was moving. With the fingers of his right hand he felt the cut on his left wrist. There was a lot of blood but the cut seemed superficial. The blade had cut through the sleeve of his parka. He could feel the tufts of down spilling out of the slash. Then he noticed that the saw blade had nipped partway through the plastic flex-cuff restraint. He twisted his hands around in opposite directions and yanked them back and forth and finally the plastic broke through and the cuff came apart.

  Now that his hands were free, he tugged at the hood and managed finally to get it off. He jerked at the restraints securing his ankles, but what he needed was something sharp, and he succeeded only in tightening the cuff still more.

  Sometime later—he could no longer keep track of time—the trunk lid was popped open and he heard the roar of traffic close by. He bucked, thrusting his feet first in one direction, then the other. It was dark, and he couldn’t see well, but two bulky men, both with shaven heads, were grabbing him. One got hold of his left ankle and the other grabbed his right wrist, then his left, and he was swung into the air and was dropped hard onto grass.

  He could hear car doors open and slam and heard the gunning of a car’s engine. He scrambled to his knees, stumbled and tipped to one side, keeling over into the soft turf. He took a gulp of air and saw that he was sitting on the grassy median of a busy highway—he didn’t immediately recognize his whereabouts—and that his BMW was parked partly on the shoulder, partly on the grass, nearby.

  13

  With the notched side of one of his house keys, he was finally able to saw through the plastic flex-cuffs binding his ankles. He stumbled into his car, found the keyless remote, which had been left on the driver’s seat. He felt his left wrist, noticed that the bleeding had stopped.

  He drove back to the Charles Hotel, but he knew he had to move. He’d been abducted in its parking garage, after all, which meant he’d been followed, which was how they knew he was staying there. And they’d be back. In forty-eight hours, if the Irishman was telling the truth.

  If he’d been followed to the hotel, they’d probably follow him from the hotel, too. He had to be mindful of that. He had to find someplace else to stay but take care not to be followed, to the best of his ability.

  He bought some bandages at the hotel gift shop and, back in the room, applied a few to his cut wrist. Then he took the elevator down to the lobby, then switched to the separate bank of elevators down to the parking garage.

  That brief moment, those twenty seconds when he was changing elevator banks was a time of potential exposure. He assumed there were people watching him at the hotel. How else could they have known that he’d parked in the underground garage? He had to assume there was still someone, or several someones, watching him. Probably watching the front desk. He hadn’t noticed anyone, but then again, he hadn’t been looking for anyone.

  As far as he could tell, he hadn’t been followed into the garage. No one had jumped into the elevator cab after him. Just to be safe, he’d pushed the buttons for both garage levels. In case someone was watching the lobby elevator banks to see which level he chose.

  He remembered there was an Avis desk inside the hotel. But it was in the lobby. If anyone was waiting in the lobby to watch his comings and goings, they’d see him talking to the Avis desk and immediately figure out what he was up to. So he left the hotel through the garage exit and took a roundabout path to the nearby Hertz. There he rented a gray Ford Focus, the most anonymous-looking vehicle in their fleet. Then he drove through Harvard Square and up and down Mass Ave in Cambridge, looking for a place to stay, and soon found a bed-and-breakfast on Mass Ave a few blocks out of Harvard Square called the Eustace House. It was an old gray Victorian converted into jaggedly shaped guest rooms; it had creaky floors and the pervasive sweet floral smell, lilies and chrysanthemums, of a funeral home. He checked in under a false name: Jacob Clayton. He wasn’t sure why he used an alias. Maybe because it made him feel safer. He had no luggage.

  Then he took a taxi back to the Charles Hotel and asked the cab driver to enter the garage. He returned to his room, retrieved the packets of cash from the safe, and packed it in his suitcase. He called for the bellhop and asked him to take the suitcase down to garage level 2, where the taxi was waiting, while he checked out. Then he headed back to the B&B. Once in his room, he took off all his clothes and climbed into the creaky bed and fell asleep for hours, a clammy, feverish sleep. His nerves were jangled. In his sleep he relived the abduction, over and over, in jolting fragments, a grim slideshow. He awoke at around midnight, then again at four in the morning, at which point he couldn’t sleep anymore. He switched on the bedside lamp.

  He ached all over. His knees were bruised and tender. The bleeding from the gash on his wrist had stopped. Only the psychological terror had remained, the feeling of powerlessness. Of not knowing whether he was about to be dismembered, or killed, at any moment. The hood over his head. The icy charm of his unseen interrogator, the poetry-loving man with the Irish accent.

  He knew he was in this thing deep and that now everything had changed for him. His abductors had somehow found out about the money. But how?

  All he knew for certain was that he was no longer safe, and what had happened to him in that warehouse or butcher shop or whatever it was could easily happen again, but with a much worse outcome. It seemed more important than ever to find out where the cash had come from, whom it actually belonged to.

  And that search started with the money itself.

  He took the packets of banknotes from his suitcase and set them down on the quilted coverlet of the bed. Some of the bills were old, a few were new. He slid one of the new hundred-dollar bills from a packet and for the first time looked at it closely. Printed to the left of Ben Franklin’s big head were the words SERIES 1996.

  He pulled out his MacBook Air and searched for a wireless signal. Eventually he connected with a fairly weak Eustace House Guest signal, which got stronger the closer he got to the door of his room. He sat on the edge of the bed and Googled US currency redesigns. In 1996, he discovered, the hundred-dollar bill was redesigned for the first time since 1929. Various anticounterfeiting measures were added: a watermark of Franklin, a security thread that glowed red u
nder ultraviolet light, color-shifting ink.

  The newest of the bills in the stash was dated 1996. The redesigned hundred-dollar bill had come out in March of 1996. Lenny had had his stroke in May. Which meant that the money could have been stashed in the house any time after March, and as late as May 27, the day of his stroke. That was a window of three months. So who was his father doing business with between March and May 1996? Who were his clients?

  His secretary would know that. Twenty years later she might not remember all the names, but she’d know some. He’d have to push her to recall whatever she could.

  When the sun came up and he began to hear creaks and low mumbling from the floor above, he went downstairs and got coffee from a thermal carafe in the front sitting room, near where an elderly couple were eating breakfast and reading tourist guides to Boston. He half expected to see someone waiting for him in the sitting room, someone muscular and formidable. But there were only the elderly couple and another old codger reading a Lee Child novel in a wing chair.

  Rick hadn’t been followed to the B&B, he was still sure. Then he went back to his room and called Joan Breslin. He left the B&B, down the front steps, saw a few passersby, but no one seemed to be looking in his direction. The rented Ford was parked halfway down the block.

  An hour later he was pulling into the driveway of Joan Breslin’s house in Melrose.

  14

  Rick took a left into the housing development and, to be sure he hadn’t been followed, circled around the block. Maybe the rent-a-car tactic had worked. For now, at least. Though soon enough his watchers would discover that he was no longer a guest at the Charles Hotel.

  Joan’s house was a tidy split-level ranch painted an unexpected turquoise. To the left of its pristine driveway, recently reblacktopped, was an immaculate patch of brown lawn, dormant for the winter. A welcome mat made of coco brush the same color as the lawn said THE BRESLINS. The doorbell chimed like church bells in a town square. This was the residence of a couple who took pleasure in order and neatness and routine.

  “Rick Hoffman,” she said, smiling, her hands out in a gesture of welcome. “Were the directions okay?”

  “Perfect,” Rick said. “Thanks so much for seeing me.”

  “I’ve been trying to guess what the questions are you want to ask me. You’ve got me in suspense.”

  Joan Breslin’s lipstick was ever so slightly off the outline of her lips. It looked as if she’d applied rouge to her cheeks, though Rick wasn’t sure if women actually used rouge anymore. Her hair was shorter than Rick remembered. Instead of platinum blond, it was now a snowy white.

  She was wearing a brilliant emerald caftan. Rick had a sense that she rarely had visitors and had gotten dressed up for this meeting. A special occasion, maybe the high point of her week. He smelled freshly perked coffee.

  He hadn’t seen her for eighteen years, since a few weeks after Len’s stroke, when he’d had to sign various legal forms closing down the law practice. Years earlier, Len had drawn up a Durable General Power of Attorney and Designation of Pre-need Guardian, documents that designated Rick as his guardian in the event of his father’s incompetence or incapacity. That meant that it was Rick’s job to dissolve the firm and close the checking account and all the other annoying little details he’d never imagined actually having to do. Joan had been cooperative and efficient, and she’d seemed nice, and that was about all he recalled.

  The house was just as immaculate inside as out, almost oppressively so. Not a single piece of mail on the demilune mail table in the hall. Turquoise was the color scheme: everywhere, the walls, even the wall-to-wall carpet, which showed the fresh tracks of a vacuum cleaner.

  She poured him weak coffee in a mug that said GATE OF HEAVEN PARISH. She asked again if Len were “all right,” which probably meant whether he was still alive.

  “It’s funny,” she said. “You look so much like him. The way he looked when I first started working for him.”

  “He’s lucky you didn’t quit on sight.”

  They both laughed. “No, no,” she said. “He was a handsome man back then.”

  Rick eased into a conversation about the nursing home and how nice the nurses were, how sometimes Rick thought his father could understand what people said to him and sometimes didn’t.

  “Your dad was one of a kind,” she said. “They broke the mold when they made him, that’s for sure.” She had a smoker’s raspy voice, but he didn’t smell any smoke. She’d probably quit some time ago.

  “For sure. So I found some records in Dad’s study at home that I wish I could ask him about. Notes about quantities of cash he was given to hold on to, something like that.”

  “Cash?”

  “I figured if anyone knew what my dad was up to, you would.” He found himself going right into investigative reporter mode, an old groove but comfortable. His reporter’s instincts told him to come in at a slant. To be oblique in his questions. This was a lot of money he was asking about, and money like that did funny things to people. It could make them greedy and uncooperative. He remembered that line, a classic, from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: “I know what gold does to men’s souls,” says the old prospector.

  There was also the possibility—the likelihood, he thought—that the money was connected to something illegal. Maybe something she’d been involved in, too. Until it was proven otherwise, he knew he couldn’t trust her.

  “I don’t know how much I can help you,” she said. “We’re talking almost twenty years ago.”

  “If a client gave him cash, you’d be the one who’d handle it, right?”

  “Well, I was the one who made the bank deposits most of the time. And I had the combination to the safe.”

  “He obviously trusted you implicitly.”

  “He did. But I can’t speak for what he might have done, or gotten, outside the office, when I wasn’t around.”

  “Right, sure.” He gave a slow, easy grin. “Some of dad’s clients were kind of . . .”

  She raised her eyebrows. Pretending she had no idea. She wasn’t playing along.

  “. . . Sketchy,” he finished.

  “He defended a whole range of people. And yes, some of them were, well, unconventional. He certainly had his pet projects, your father did.”

  “Strip clubs, adult bookstores, that kind of thing.”

  “Our office was a few blocks from the old Combat Zone,” she said uncomfortably. The Combat Zone was Boston’s red-light district, an area of porn houses and hookers, that by the 1990s was mostly gone. “Your father was a strong believer in the First Amendment.”

  “I know.” Leonard Hoffman: the Clarence Darrow of pole dancing. “Those are cash businesses. I assume some of those clients preferred to pay him in cash, right?”

  She seemed to flinch and was now regarding him warily, as if she were a witness on the stand and he were a prosecutor. He wondered why she was being so defensive. She wasn’t just protecting his father’s image. It was something else.

  “It’s legal as long as you declare it as income,” she said. “You could get disbarred if you don’t report your income truthfully.”

  So maybe that was it. “I’m guessing he didn’t report all of his cash income.”

  “What does any of this have to do with—I mean, why are you asking?”

  “Joan, I’m not with the IRS. I have no interest in getting him, or you, in trouble.”

  “I always told him to make sure to report all the cash.”

  “I’m sure you’re the one who kept him in line. But some of his clients were drug dealers, maybe?”

  She shrugged. “As they say, everyone’s entitled to legal representation.” She said it as though she didn’t mean it.

  That sounded like a confirmation. “Joan, my father was in possession of a significant quantity of cash, and I’m trying to figure out where it might
have come from.”

  Her nostrils flared. “Are you asking if I held on to money I wasn’t entitled to? Because I resent the implication—”

  “Not at all. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m wondering whether he might have been given a lot of money to keep for someone else.”

  She looked away, peering off into the middle distance. She was silent for ten, fifteen seconds. She inhaled. For the first time, Rick became aware of the muted ticking of the mantel clock. Finally she said, “Your father was a wonderful man with a big heart.”

  “I know.”

  “You know, things . . . they don’t always turn out the way you want. He might have done some things he wasn’t proud of. Let’s leave it at that. There’s no use in rehashing the past. What’s done is done, and that was a long time ago.”

  “I’m only asking for his sake.”

  She shook her head slowly. “Your father always tried to protect me. He didn’t tell me everything.”

  “You were the one person he confided in.”

  She hesitated. “He never confided in me. And I’m sure there were some things he wouldn’t want you to know about either.”

  “You and I both want the same thing,” Rick said. “To protect Len. Because he’s not able to protect himself. But if I’m going to really protect him, I need to know what we’re dealing with.”

  She expelled a long, rattling sigh. “Look, it’s a dirty business, this—this world. The adult entertainment industry, I mean. You know, the police and the city inspectors, they were always shaking down those places for bribes. Massage parlors, you know—lot of times they had to give the cops . . . sexual favors to keep from getting hit with code violations. Sometimes just cash. Shakedowns, that’s all it was.” She rubbed her thumb and forefinger together in the universal sign of filthy lucre.

  “So I’m not sure I understand. Dad handed out payoffs to city officials and cops?” The term for that kind of thing was bag man, Rick thought. His father was a bag man.