The Fixer

15

Her basement was neat and precise and orderly, more like a laboratory’s supply room than the sprawling junk heap that was the basement of the Clayton Street house. Gleaming stainless steel shelving units held blue plastic storage bins and immaculate rows of white cardboard banker’s boxes, everything neatly labeled in black Magic Marker, in architect’s lettering. There was a faint bleach smell.

“You saved all the office files?” Rick asked.

“Just the financial records. In case he got audited. The client files I shredded.”

“Shredded?”

“I asked you guys, don’t you remember? You and your sister? You said you didn’t want them.”

“So how would I find out who he met with on a particular day…?”

“The red book, I’d say. It’s like a client diary.” She pointed to a cardboard box, and he took it off the shelf-unexpectedly heavy-and set it on the high-gloss-painted cement floor. She bent over carefully, one hand splayed on her lower back, and lifted the box’s lid.

Inside were thick red hardcover books, each the size of the Manhattan phone book.

Each red book was titled Massachusetts Lawyers Diary and Manual. It was like a desk diary combined with reference book: municipal directories, statutes, directory of judges, all that kind of thing. Kind of like a farmer’s almanac for lawyers, only more boring. He picked one up for the year 1989, flipped through it. The parts that interested him were the daily diary and monthly planner. A page for each day. Clients’ names and times of meetings, written in what he assumed was Joan’s neat handwriting.

In another box he found the book for 1996. He turned to the page for May 27. A fairly light schedule, it appeared. Only three appointments for the day. One in the morning, one at noon, one late in the afternoon. He didn’t make the afternoon one, of course, since he had his stroke right after lunch. But the twelve noon appointment he presumably did. On the line for 12:00 it had no name, only an initial: “P-.”

Rick pointed at the entry, his eyebrows questioning. “That was his last appointment before his stroke. Who’s ‘P’?”

Joan took a pair of reading glasses hanging on a chain around her neck, put them on slowly, peered at the page. “Oh, I don’t know who that was, ‘P.’ That’s all he told me-someone he met with once in a while.” She pushed the glasses down her nose and turned to him. Stiffly she added: “I hope you don’t mind my saying, I always assumed it was a girlfriend.”

Rick smiled. “Did he always meet with ‘P’ at lunchtime?” A midday assignation at a cheap hotel-that sounded like Len. Patty, Penelope, Priscilla, Pam. He wouldn’t have been cheating on his wife, Rick’s mother: She’d died three years earlier, when Rick was fifteen and his father was forty-four. Not exactly an old man, and the guy had a sex drive, much as Rick didn’t like to think about it. There’d been a few girlfriends, but no one for very long. His parents’ marriage had always seemed contentious. Maybe being married once was enough for Len.

“Sometimes after work. But never at the office. That’s why I assumed…”

“He never asked you to order flowers for ‘P,’ did he?” He said it jokingly, but she took it seriously, frowning and shaking her head.

“But if ‘P’ was a client, there’d be bills and files and such, right?”

She nodded. “She wasn’t a client, honey.”

“You know this for a fact, or you’re guessing?”

“Woman’s intuition.”

“I see.” He hefted the big red book. “Mind if I borrow this?”

She hesitated. “Okay, I suppose.”

“The financial records are here?”

She tapped a box labeled CLIENT INVOICES 1969-1973. There was a row of six boxes of invoices covering the years 1969 to 1996, the years Len’s practice was active. “Have at it. Take whatever you want. Just tell me what you’ve taken, all right? Is there enough light for you here? I think Timmy has one of those clamp lamps on his workbench.”

“I should be okay, thanks.”

After Joan left, he took down the box labeled 1994-1996. It was organized not chronologically but by client, which was sort of annoying. He wanted to zoom in on the period right around May 1996 to see what kind of legal work his father was doing in the weeks before his stroke. But there was no easy way to do it. So he sat on the immaculate polished basement floor and began pawing through the folders of invoices.

Some of the clients were people, some were businesses. Most of the names he didn’t recognize. A few he did: notorious strip clubs and X-rated theaters whose flashing neon signs once lit up the night in the four-square-block sleaze district next to Chinatown. By 1996, most of the “adult entertainment” establishments had closed. But a few remained, some of them Len Hoffman clients. Their names were on folders here: the Emerald Lounge, Club Fifty-One, Pleasures, the Kitty Kat.

So what kind of legal work had his father done for them? He pulled out the Kitty Kat folder and found what looked like monthly invoices to the Kat typed on Leonard Hoffman letterhead (“Law Offices of Leonard Hoffman, P.C.” Offices plural. As if it were a multinational firm). A couple were for twenty thousand dollars, some for less. A few for twenty-five thousand, one as high as fifty thousand dollars. Some of them said simply “for services rendered.” Others said things like “Board of Health dispute” and “Liquor license suspension.”

Rick began to feel a prickle at the back of his head. It was as if the old investigative reporter juices, long dormant, were beginning to flow again. He knew he had a great head for investigative work, and he enjoyed it more than any other kind of journalism. There was something here he couldn’t quite figure out, some kind of story here, if he could only puzzle his way into it.

The way in, he was convinced, was to compile a list of all Len’s clients around the time of the stroke. If he dug in deeply enough, he might find the client-if indeed it was a client-who was the mysterious “P” that Len saw at noon that day.

Systematically, he plucked out all invoices dated May 1996, for all the client folders. Maybe one of them was this “P”-.

Then he reconsidered. Why not take the whole box with him and cross-check thoroughly? In the front of the box, he found a floppy disk marked BANK ACCOUNTS. It was an old computer disk 5 1/4 inches square. They were the latest technology in the 1980s, but was anyone using them in the 1990s? Maybe people who weren’t at the cutting edge of technology, like Len and Joan.

Maybe, just maybe, these files would solve the mystery of where all that money had come from.