The Fixer

20

Joel Rubin, the owner of Jugs, lived in a condo in Lynn, an unlovely town ten miles north of Boston. The condo building was a tall, ugly blond-brick structure with jutting balconies on Lynn Shore Drive near Nahant Beach. It looked like something you might see in the old East Berlin. The Atlantic was right across the busy street.

Rick parked in one of the numbered spaces in the parking lot, probably taking some resident’s space. When he got out of the car, he could smell the ocean, the seaweed and the salt. The waves crashed rhythmically. He could hear the squawk of a seagull. A plane flew by low overhead. Logan Airport was close.

Inside the narrow lobby was a call box. He scrolled through a seemingly endless list of residents’ names, found Joel Rubin, then pressed his four-digit unit number.

A full minute later a man’s voice said, “Yeah?”

“Rick Hoffman.”

Another long minute, then the plate-glass inner door buzzed open. He took an elevator to the tenth floor.

Rick was expecting some degree of hostility. On the phone, Rubin had barked at him, “Do I know you?”

“You knew my dad, Leonard Hoffman.”

There was a long silence. Then, slightly less hostile: “Where’d you get my number?”

“Patty.”

A sigh. “Figures. There some kind of problem?”

“No, not at all. There’s something I need your help with. It would be a lot easier if we talked in person. I’ll explain.”

Rubin was willing to meet, though grudgingly. Rick made a mental note not to start out asking about the bouncer at Jugs. That would certainly make the guy retract like a terrapin on high alert. He rang the doorbell. A shadow darkened the peephole and the door came open quickly.

Rubin looked to be in his sixties. He was bald on top with a cascade of gray-blond ringlets behind that reached his shoulders. He was skinny and had a small potbelly like a spare tire. He wore a bright orange African dashiki and scruffy faded jeans with new bright white sneakers. There were big dark circles under his eyes. He stuck out his hand and gave Rick a limp moist handshake.

“Sorry, I was doing dishes. Come on in.” He stopped short. “Jesus, you look just like your dad! It’s amazing.” He put a hand on each of Rick’s shoulders and squinted, tipping his head from one side to another. For a long moment, he didn’t speak. His eyes were bloodshot. He looked like he might be buzzed. “Yeah, you know, I thought you were just yanking my chain, but you’re Lenny’s son, all right. It’s written all over your face.”

The apartment was brightly lit. A set of glass slider doors looked out onto the shore road and the ocean. There was light blue wall-to-wall carpeting and a set of furniture-sectional couch and matching chairs-that looked as if they’d all been purchased on the same shopping trip to a low-end home store. The whole place smelled of rotting fruit and old bong water.

He offered Rick coffee, but Rick shook his head. “How’d you get to Patty, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I found her number in some of my dad’s old papers,” Rick lied. He didn’t want to provoke any more suspicious hostility by telling him about searching old city archives.

“You saw what that bitch looks like, right? Would you believe she was, like, a zipper-ripper when I first met her? I hired her as a bookkeeper, but I kept telling her she shoulda been a dancer. That girl had a body as hard as Chinese arithmetic, I kid you not.”

“We just talked on the phone.”

“What’s this about? Isn’t your dad… I mean, I heard he’s in rough shape.”

“He had a stroke like twenty years ago, yeah. Lost the ability to speak.”

“Yeah, you know, what happened to him-man, that sucked. Nobody should have that happen to him.”

“Well, he really left his financial affairs in a mess. He owes people money, he has clients who owe him money-”

“Hey, I don’t owe him a dime.”

“I know you don’t,” Rick said quickly. “I know you were one of his biggest clients, and I need some help unwinding his business affairs. What kind of work did he do for you?”

“We did business together.” There was a petulant, evasive note in his words. His eyes narrowed in a cartoon gesture of suspicion.

“What do you mean?”

“I think you know.”

“I wish I did.”

“Seriously?”

“What kind of business? I know he billed you for a bunch of jobs.”

Joel looked away. “Yeah, well, that was twenty years ago and I was doing a lot of coke at the time, okay? It’s all kind of a blur.”

“I know he billed you, and it doesn’t look like he got paid.”

“Huh? Oh, he got paid, believe me.”

“I believe you. But from what I can tell, he never did the work. I mean, I’m asking you because I can’t ask him: He billed you for thirty thousand dollars’ worth of legal work in a month. Sure seems like he was scamming you.”

Joel was quiet for a long moment. A motorcycle ripped by on Shore Road, ten stories below. He clenched and unclenched his jaw, then shook his head. His voice trembled. “What your dad was into, it was kind of complicated, but there was nobody-nobody-people trusted more than him. Or respected. Your dad was the salt of the earth. You dig?”

“Then maybe you can explain to me what kind of business you and he were doing.”

Joel gave an odd-looking smile. “You don’t want to know.”

“I do.”

“You think you want to know, but you don’t, I promise you. You really don’t.”

“Tell me what I’m missing here.”

Joel shook his head. “Your dad was so… Hey, listen-do you get high?”

“Uh, sure.” Rick hadn’t smoked marijuana in a long time. He didn’t like it, what it did to him. It made him jittery, sort of paranoid. But he had a feeling, just based on the rhythm of the conversation, that this was his best way in, maybe his only way in. That if he got high with Joel, he’d talk. It was a kind of barter.

Joel brought out a sleek piece of machinery with a conical base that looked like a high-tech Waring blender. Not the bong he’d expected based on the swampy smell in the apartment. It was a vaporizer. Rick had heard about such things but had never used one.

“I liked your dad a lot,” Joel said as he busied himself breaking up a ball of weed into small buds on top of a CD case, then tipped the buds into a small stainless steel manual grinder. “He was a cool dude. Worst sense of humor in the world, but…”

“That’s for sure,” Rick said, laughing ruefully.

“But I felt for the guy.” He turned the grinder to pulverize the buds, then dumped the powder onto a folded dollar bill and used it to slide the herb into a filling chamber. He put that piece on the vaporizer base and then what looked like a limp plastic sandwich bag on top of it. The whole process was as elaborate as a Japanese tea ceremony.

“You felt for him…?” Rick prompted.

“The way he ended up.” The plastic bag began slowly to fill up with white smoke like an oblong balloon.

“You mean his stroke?”

Joel shook his head, took the inflated balloon off the vaporizer base and attached a mouthpiece, then handed it to Rick.

“Nah, nah. I mean his broken dreams, you know? Kind of sad.”

“Broken dreams?” Rick drew in a shallow breath. He couldn’t fake it, not with Joel watching. He had to make a dent in the balloon. Then he handed the balloon back to Joel, who sucked in a lungful of smoke.

“Yeah, you know, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, all that?”

Rick kept the smoke in his lungs and managed not to cough before exhaling.

“Black Panthers…? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“He never told you about that?” Joel said in a little strangled voice through a mouthful of smoke.

“You sure we’re talking about the same Leonard Hoffman?”

“He didn’t tell you about his badass civil liberties days?”

Rick shook his head.

“Oh, man. I can’t believe he never told you about it. He defended Bobby Seale, back in the day. The Black Panther trial in New Haven. The New Haven Nine, right?”

“My dad?”

Joel let his breath out slowly, reluctantly. “Yeah. Yeah. That was what he was gonna do, fight the Establishment. He was a total idealist. I mean, that’s what he really wanted to do in life, stick it to the Man. Change the world. But it never happened for him. He had to give it up.”

“How come?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“He had kids. He needed a job that paid the bills. You get it?” Joel took another lungful of smoke, depleting the balloon.

Rick nodded slowly, distracted. He began to feel the first rush of the marijuana. He felt dizzy, vertiginous, disoriented. He was surprised, and unexpectedly saddened, to hear this. That his father had had a whole life he’d never talked about. Leonard Hoffman aspired to be a very different kind of lawyer than he turned out to be. The kind who fought for civil liberties, who argued before the Supreme Court. A hero who defended the downtrodden. An idealist, as Joel had said. Not a vaguely disreputable small-time lawyer who defended strip clubs and porn shops.

“Wow,” Rick said, more to himself than to Rubin. “That’s… heartbreaking.”

“Right?” Joel said. He was already beavering away at another fist-size hunk of marijuana, plucking apart the buds, crunching it up onto the CD case. His bright orange dashiki began to vibrate. Rick studied the ornate pattern that made a V at the neckline of the dashiki, mesmerized by its paisley whorls and squiggles. This ganja was definitely stronger than whatever he’d occasionally smoked in college. “I mean, I get it. I totally get it. This is just, like, what happens when you grow up. You never end up where you thought you would. You think I wanted to be sixty-three and the owner of a titty bar? You think that was my dream in life?”

The paisley pattern in Joel Rubin’s dashiki had begun to squirm like a nest of snakes. It was fascinating but also repellent. Rick realized that Joel was waiting for him to say something, so he said thickly, “What was it? Your dream, I mean.” An ambulance raced by down below, its siren crescendoing and Dopplering before it faded away, leaving a slug trail of sound shimmering in the air.

“I was, like, reviewing concerts for TheReal Paper when I was at Brandeis, you know. I was a concert promoter. When I wasn’t turning on, I mean.” Joel chuckled. He tipped out the ashes from the filling chamber and filled it up with new, freshly ground weed, then put it expertly on top of the vaporizer. “I was selling dope. The kind of crap we were peddling back then, you couldn’t even sell it today. I was gonna be, like, the next… who’s that guy who’s the big concert promoter?”

Rick shook his head. The dashiki was starting to gross him out, so he was forcing himself to look away, to stare outside through the glass sliders, at the metallic sky and the very blue ocean, which was actually kind of beautiful.

“Know who I’m talking about? That big concert promoter guy? You’d definitely know his name!”

Rick shook his head again, slowly. “Don’t know.”

The balloon inflated with white smoke, and Joel took it off and put on the mouthpiece. He passed it to Rick, who shook his head. “I gotta take a break,” Rick said.

A pigeon landed on the railing of Joel’s narrow balcony. It was strutting, bobbing its head in a regular, steady beat, as if to an internal metronome.

Joel inhaled greedily. Then, through a mouthful of smoke, he said in a fuzzy voice, “Man, I can’t… it’ll come to me…”

“Anyway, you were going to be a concert promoter,” Rick reminded him.

Joel nodded, held a forefinger in the air, telling Rick to wait. He expelled the smoke after holding it in for ten seconds. “I was like-” Then Joel raised his arm and stuck out his middle finger. “Stick it to Tricky Dick.”

“Tricky Dick?”

“Tricky Dick Nixon. You’re either on the bus or off the bus, dig? I got a job in the old Combat Zone working at a newsstand, you know, selling Screw and Hustler and Swank, right… it was a gas. Then the opportunity came up to buy the place. And one thing leads to another and all of a sudden I own a couple of titty bars in downtown Boston. And now it’s down to just the one.”

“You were about to tell me about the business you did with my dad.” Rick’s brain had slowed down to a crawl. He was fighting to maintain a grasp on the conversational thread.

“Jugs was mostly a cash business. Guys don’t want wifey back home in Newton looking at the credit card bills and figuring out hubby wasn’t at a client dinner, you dig? I had tons of it coming in, and I guess your dad knew someone who wanted cash and was willing to pay a premium for it.”

“You sold him cash?”

Joel grinned. “Capitalism, man. That’s capitalism reduced to its essence, you know? Distilled to its purest form. Like”-his eyes lit up-“a paradigm. A beautiful thing.”

“So he gave you bills you could write off as legal expenses and you paid him in cash,” Rick said, realizing all of a sudden how it worked. Finally he understood the big-ticket invoices without commensurate bank deposits. His father was buying, and probably selling, cash. Most of Len’s clients were cash-rich businesses. Now it made sense.

“Who was he doing it for?” Rick asked. His mouth had dried out. His tongue was cleaving to the roof of his mouth.

“How would I know? He wanted cash, I had cash, everyone’s happy. The circle of life. I must have given him half a million bucks over the years. A lot of other guys in the Zone got in on the party, too. I wasn’t the only one.”

“He never told you who it was for?”

“What kinda lawyer would he be if he revealed his client’s name? Anyway, you didn’t ask. You didn’t look too close.”

“You don’t have a guess? That’s a lot of cash.”

“When was this, back in the 1990s?”

Rick nodded.

“You remember what it was like back then, back in the nineties? You grew up in Boston, right? You remember the Big Dig?”

Rick nodded again. “Of course.”

“I mean-you’ve never seen such a swamp of graft and corruption. It was like pigs at the trough. The greatest boondoggle of the twentieth century! Wasn’t it like forty billion dollars, all told? I mean, you could have a couple of wars for money like that.”

The Big Dig was an immense, infamous construction job that transformed the city of Boston. Back in the bad old days, a highway called the Central Artery had slashed through the middle of downtown. As the city grew, the traffic jams became ridiculous, hours-long. Then in 1991 a massive project began to sink the Central Artery deep under the city, in tunnels through Boston Harbor, beneath the towering skyscrapers. It was supposed to cost 2.6 billion dollars but ended up costing more than 24 billion. It was supposed to be finished in ten years but ended up taking twenty. The Big Dig was bigger than the Panama Canal, bigger than the Hoover Dam or the Alaska Pipeline or the pyramids.

Len’s secretary had said Len was a “fixer,” that he knew the right people to pay off to get things done.

But who was he fixing for? Not for the strip clubs and the massage parlors and such. Those places, which brought in a lot of cash and knew who to pay off themselves-the cops threatening to arrest a dancer for getting too close to a patron, the health inspector who wanted an extra payday-those places didn’t need a lawyer to do that.

But the Big Dig…

Now, that was interesting.

“He handled payouts for, what, contractors bidding on jobs in the Big Dig?” Rick said.

“If you were a big construction company and you wanted in on the Big Dig, you either had to know the right decision makers in the city or the state… or know whose palms to grease. Though why palms get greased, I never understood. A really strange expression, that one.”

Three and a half million dollars in cash had been hidden inside the walls of the house on Clayton Street, and now at least Rick knew where it had come from: from cash-intensive, high-liquidity businesses like Jugs, most of them in the old Combat Zone.

So… whose cash was it?

Someone who’d resort to violence to get it back, that was for sure.

“Man, there was so much cash washing around in those days, it was like Iraq after Saddam Hussein. It was like the fall of the Roman Empire. I mean, there were contractors and subcontractors and sub-subcontractors and sub-sub-subcontractors…”

“Joel?”

“Right. Right. So anyway, yeah. I don’t know who it was for, but Lenny must have had someone going through cash like veggies through a Vitamix.”

“He had a client, I think-I don’t know the name, just an initial. P. You have any idea who that ‘P’ might have been?”

Joel laughed. “I told you, I had a drug problem in those days. Half the time I was wasted.” He went to work crunching up some more marijuana on the CD case. “I could barely remember my wife’s name. Now I wish I could forget it.”

Something was tickling at the back of Rick’s brain, something niggling and uncomfortable, something unpleasant. His thoughts were floating and drifting like clouds. But then he remembered the shamrock tattoo and it all came rushing back to him. The terror of the hood being slipped over his head, the quiet insistent voice. And then the remembered fear became something much closer to anger.

“Hey, so your bouncer gave me a hard time,” Rick said, trying for a casual tone.

“Who, Padraig? Yeah, he’s a hothead.”

“He’s Irish?”

“As Irish as Paddy’s pig.”

“I think I’ve seen him around before.” Rick wondered if Joel was trying to maintain a poker face. But Rick’s perceptions were off. Joel might not be.

“Yeah?” Joel didn’t seem much interested. He slid the herb into the grinder and turned it a few times.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I recognize that tattoo.”

“What, the shamrock?”

“Right. With the 666.”

“You see it here and there. Bouncers and other tough guys in the clubs downtown. Those are the guys you hire. Kind of like the Teamsters, you know? Don’t have a choice. I think someone high up in the state has the power to get those guys visas and stuff. Anyway, you want to stay in business, you hire the guys you’re told to.”

“Told to by who?”

“The PTB, man.”

“PTB?”

“The powers that be.”

“Like… who?”

Joel tamped down the powder. “You know what?” he said. “Almost thirty years in this business and I’ve learned two things. You can’t fight the powers that be, and you don’t ask questions.”