The Fixer

19

He arrived at the offices of Back Bay magazine with scuffed jeans and a big rip at the knee. He’d torn his jeans in the alley and didn’t feel like going back to the B &B to change. He didn’t particularly care. He wasn’t going for a job interview.

Rick was still officially on the staff of Back Bay. Shortly after Mort Ostrow had fired Rick, after the shock had worn off, he’d swallowed his considerable pride and accepted Ostrow’s offhanded offer: If Rick agreed to post at least one piece a week, he’d get to keep access to the usual databases and receive a salary of sorts. A pittance. Next to nothing, but not nothing. It was useful to have access to the databases and be able to say he was calling from Back Bay magazine. That might come in handy now, too. He didn’t have to come in to the office to post things, so he’d stayed away. In fact, only once since Mort Ostrow had delivered the bad news had he been in to the office, and that was to pack up his desk.

His stomach tightened as he approached the glass door to the office suite. He dreaded meeting up with his colleagues. Ostrow had let go all the editors over the age of thirty except Darren Overby, the new editor in chief, and Karen, the managing editor, but she’d been part-time since the birth of her son, four years ago. They might still be here, though, slaving away on freelance pieces, taking advantage of the free office space to work until the magazine, which was really just a website now, downsized to whatever minuscule closet it was moving to and then disappeared altogether, like a wisp of smoke. Rick didn’t look forward to making small talk (The job search is going great, thanks! Updating my LinkedIn page as we speak!).

Then he remembered the pile of cash in his storage unit and he immediately felt better about everything. The money was like a suit of armor. It protected him against insults and indignities. Yes, he didn’t have a real job, but no longer did he have to worry about money. Except, he reminded himself, for worrying about protecting it. Keeping it safe from whoever knew he had it. Keeping himself safe, too.

Nine people were seated around the big cherrywood conference table. Rick recognized only two of them, the remaining two editors, Karen and Darren-so perfect a team they even rhymed! The other seven were a fresh-faced assortment, all in their early to mid twenties, hipster lumberjacks dressed so similarly they might have been wearing uniforms: bulky cable-knit sweaters or checked flannel shirts, a few of them wearing big chunky eyeglasses. They had to be freelance writers, here for a story meeting. All of them looked hopeful and optimistic. They weren’t yet cynics. They weren’t writers, really, either. They were contributors. They repurposed content from blogs and websites, and they were paid by the click.

But more than that, they were survivors. Looking around the conference table, Rick couldn’t help but think of a painting he’d once seen in the Louvre called The Raft of the Medusa. It depicted a small gang of desperate, dying people clinging to a raft in a turbulent ocean. The painting was based on a real historical event, a French naval ship that had run aground, leaving a couple hundred survivors hanging on a raft, enduring weeks of starvation and thirst and savagery, the stronger killing the weaker, throwing each other off to the sharks, and eventually resorting to cannibalism, until only a dozen or so were left to rescue.

The survivors of Back Bay magazine were clinging to the raft in their fashionable cable-knit sweaters.

Darren, in his heavy black glasses, was holding forth at the head of the table, drinking a stevia-sweetened green apple soda. “We’re not getting the uniques, people,” he said. “Every time you turn in a piece I want you to come up with twenty-five possible headlines. Then we’re going to A/B test the best ones. The headline is an itch the reader has to scratch. I want superlatives, okay? I want, I don’t know, ‘What This Chef Does with Lamb Is Amazeballs!’”

“What about ‘… Will Change Your Life’ instead?” suggested an earnest bearded guy in red-and-black buffalo plaid.

“Sure,” Darren said. “Or ‘Rock Your World.’ With me, people? Hit them right in the feels.”

“Numbers are always good,” Karen put in.

“Numbers!” Darren said. “‘Seven Facts about Wellesley That Will Blow Your Mind.’ ‘The Five Best Power Breakfasts in Boston.’”

“For the one about the Fall River city administrator’s resignation, how about this: ‘Her First Sentence Was Moving. Her Second Sentence Brought Me to Tears.’”

“Excellent!” Darren barked. “I love it. Do we have any photos of puppies from the animal shelter? Or GIFs? Any GIFs?” He noticed Rick slipping quietly into the room. “Rick Hoffman!” he sang out with false joviality. “Welcome! Joining us?”

He shook his head. “Doing a little research.”

“Research!” Darren said it as if research were something exotic that most people didn’t actually do themselves, like baking croissants or overhauling their car’s transmission. “Can’t wait to hear the juicy details! Oh, Rick, your piece on craft beers, we’re going to post that tomorrow morning. But you know, there’s going to be that groundbreaking for the Olympian Tower in a couple of weeks, and we’d really like you to do a Q &A with Thomas Sculley; could you do that?”

Rick shrugged. “What are we talking about?”

“Just fifteen hundred words. You know, give him the full Rick Hoffman treatment?”

“Sure, uh, fine.”

The Rick Hoffman treatment: Man, was that an expression Rick had come to detest. It meant an adoring, adulatory profile. The sort of mindlessly positive piece-usually a Q &A-that its subject, usually someone rich, powerful, or famous, could only love. Nothing hard-hitting, honest, or blunt. In other words, just the sort of article Rick had once promised himself he’d never do. At Back Bay, it had become his skill set. Thomas Sculley was one of those Boston billionaires the magazine made a specialty of covering with wet kisses.

“Excellent,” said Darren. “Also, Mark Wahlberg’s new movie starts filming at Fenway next month, so there’s that. And apparently the new dean of Harvard Law School, Ronald Proskin, has a twenty-thousand-bottle wine collection-David Geffen offered to buy the whole thing outright.”

“Great,” Rick said. “Lots of possibilities.” He excused himself and walked past his old office, which was still empty, just a desk and a credenza and power cables and snowdrifts of dust. The company computer had been removed. The desk and the credenza and the fancy Humanscale office chair all had SOLD tags on them.

The hall outside was lined with cardboard boxes. The lease on the Harrison Avenue space was up in a few weeks. He found a cubicle that looked unused-there were a lot of them-and signed on to the magazine’s intranet. His user ID and password still worked. That was something, at least.

He overheard Darren saying, “Everyone loves chocolate-chip cookies! The ten best chocolate-chip cookies!”

First he pulled up a half-written plug that had been moldering on his hard drive about an artisanal cheese maker who had a shop on Tremont Street. He came up with a line-“Rumor has it that the good stuff-the raw stuff-is hidden away in the back, like the hard cider in Prohibition days”-and zipped it off to a mellow snowboarder on the copy desk named Dylan Scardino. Dylan also served as “web producer,” which meant he was the guy who uploaded the files and put them up on the Internet.

Then he took out the cable company bill he’d filched from the strip club. The bill was for high-speed Internet and a generous cable package for their wall-mounted TV sets. It was made out to “Jugs DBA Citadel LaGrange Entertainment.” No wonder he hadn’t pulled up any corporate records on LaGrange Entertainment. The name had been changed. There was any number of reasons why it might have been done. A change in ownership, maybe, or an attempt to duck a lawsuit.

Darren’s voice: “Is it awesome? That’s the only criterion-it has to be awesome!”

He entered “Citadel LaGrange Entertainment” in one of the corporate records databases and pulled up exactly… nothing. A P.O. box was listed, but no names.

The story meeting broke up and the freelancers scattered. The bearded guy in buffalo plaid sat down at the cubicle next to Rick’s.

Rick looked up the phone number online for the Massachusetts attorney general’s office and called the number. “I’m looking for some records on a business that’s incorporated in Massachusetts.”

“What sort of records, sir?”

“Corporate filings. Ownership records.”

“You might want to try the Division of Professional Licensure.”

“Could you transfer me?”

A click. “Licensure, Reilly.”

“Yes, Mr. Reilly, I have a client, an exotic dancer, who’s looking to sue a strip club in Boston called Jugs for wrongful termination. I’ve been searching high and low for ownership information, but I’m stumped. I’m wondering if you could be so kind as to pull the records.”

“You said Jugs?”

“That’s right. Maybe the name of the president…?”

Tappa tappa tappa tappa tap.

“I don’t have a Jugs, sir.”

“You might want to try their corporate entity, Citadel LaGrange Entertainment.”

Tappa tappa tappa tappa.

“I’m sorry, sir, I don’t have anything on that.”

“Thanks for trying.” Rick hung up, then rested his chin on his palm and looked at the monitor.

The bearded freelancer’s head popped up over the partition. “So, you’re working the telephone, huh?” he said with a derisive smile. “Like, an actual telephone. With the curly cord and everything. That’s so, I don’t know, normcore.”

“Normcore,” Rick said. “That’s a new one.”

Then he had an idea and started going through corporate records for past years. When he got to Citadel LaGrange’s filing for 2007, he found a name. Just one: that of a corporate secretary, Patricia Rubin. She was listed in 2006 as well, and for years going back. After 2007, no one was listed.

But “corporate secretary” didn’t mean owner. At least he had a name. That didn’t mean she’d know the real story, why Leonard Hoffman had billed Jugs for thirty thousand dollars’ worth of legal work he hadn’t done. If he could find her, though, she’d certainly know the name of the owner. If she was still living, anyway. He entered her name in the LexisNexis Public Records search database, clicked dutifully through the legal disclaimer about the electronic communications privacy act, and came up with a phone number and address in Acton, Massachusetts.

So she was alive.

Rick stared at the computer monitor and thought. He could just call Patricia Rubin and ask who owned Jugs, but that was a risk. There was probably a reason the owner’s name wasn’t listed. Maybe the owner of a strip bar just preferred to keep a low profile. Maybe he didn’t want to be sued. Whatever the reason his name wasn’t public, Ms. Rubin probably wasn’t going to give it up readily.

Not unless she had a good reason to.

He thought some more, then did some quick Googling and found the right website. He entered a credit card number, the Citicard MasterCard he’d just paid down, and bought a subscription. Then he looked up the telephone number of the Internal Revenue Service’s office in Andover, Mass. He knew that was one of their big offices because he’d been ignoring numerous mailings from the IRS with an Andover return address. Their phone number was an 800 number that ended in “1040,” which was probably supposed to be clever. Tax humor.

Then, on an outside phone line, he punched in the number of the phone-number-spoofing website he’d just subscribed to, and after the tone he entered the IRS number. When the call went through, the phone number that would show up on the caller ID would be the IRS’s.

“Ms. Rubin, please? Patricia Rubin?”

A woman’s voice. “Who should I say is calling?”

“This is Joseph Bodoni from the Internal Revenue Service in Andover. I’d like to speak with a Patricia Rubin.”

A pause. The same voice. “Speaking.”

“Ms. Rubin, I have your name down here as corporate secretary of the Citadel LaGrange Entertainment company; is that correct?”

“What? No! I haven’t been connected with that place for years!”

“I’m sorry, you’re no longer the corporate secretary?”

“Not for years! Not since I got divorced from that jerk.”

“‘That jerk’ is the owner of the business?”

“Yeah. Joel Rubin. So?”

“Well, we need to reach your ex-husband, then. We have a refund of thirty thousand dollars that needs to be personally signed for by the president of the Citadel LaGrange Entertainment company. I’m going to need a name and a telephone number.”

“Yeah, great,” she said bitterly. “Give that asshole even more cash to squirrel away from me. Just what he needs.”

Rick paused for a few seconds. He realized he’d just screwed up. She wasn’t going to give up her ex-husband’s phone number if she thought it meant he’d get a chunk of money. “Huh. Busted. Okay, Ms. Rubin, I gotta come clean. I’m not with the IRS. I’m a process server, and I’ve got a summons to serve your ex-husband. He’s being sued for a lot of money in Suffolk County court.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, am I ever sorry to hear that!” She cackled. “Call me Patty. You want his home number or his cell?”

After Rick hung up the phone, the bearded freelancer’s head once again rose from behind the partition.

“Were you just pretending to be from the IRS?”

Rick shrugged.

“You can do that? That’s not… illegal or something?”

“It’s not illegal as long as you don’t do it for the purpose of defrauding someone. But most newspapers or magazines would fire you for doing it, so don’t try this one at home, kids.”

“She gave up the name and phone number?”

Rick nodded as he got to his feet.

“Huh,” he said. “Cool.”

“It’s just reporting.”

“That’s so retro, you know?” the guy said. “Like out of a noir film? I didn’t know people still did that kind of stuff anymore.”