The Fixer

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.

He thought about his father’s reproach when he published the plagiarism exposé in the high school newspaper: You didn’t play by the rules, Rick.

What were the rules that Lenny was playing by?

She hesitated. “That’s how it started. Money went to the liquor board, public health, fire department, all that…”

“We’re talking maybe a couple of hundred bucks here and there, I’m guessing.”

She nodded. “Or more in some cases. With the bigger strip clubs. Lenny just sometimes had to go in and grease the wheels. I guess he came to be known as-well, as a guy who got things done. He was really good at sorting out disputes. Private arbitration, you might call it. He was what you’d call a fixer.”

“Was it mostly city officials he paid off?”

“Not just. If someone wanted to build a nightclub and the owner of the neighboring building was being difficult, he’d, you know…”

“Pay off the owner.”

A shrug. “He handled cash transactions between businesses, too. He’d meet clients for lunch at Locke-Ober’s or Union Oyster House and they’d give him envelopes or brown bags, and…” She closed her eyes, kneaded them as if she had a headache.

“The day of his stroke,” Rick said. “May twenty-seventh. Do you remember if he was supposed to deliver a payment to someone?”

She looked at Rick, squinting a you can’t be serious scowl. “May 27, 1996? You really think I can remember what he was doing on May 27, 1996? Do you remember what you were doing on May 27, 1996?”

“The day of his stroke. When you found him-that day, was he about to make a large cash delivery to someone?”

She looked away slowly now, but not evasively, as far as he could tell. She appeared to be searching her memory. A long moment went by.

Finally she shook her head. “I’m sorry. I can’t remember. It’s possible.”

Rick waited. The mantel clock ticked.

She scratched an itch on her left shoulder. “I have some of the old office files in the basement. The old datebooks and such. Do you think those might help?”