The Fixer

21

It had been a mistake getting high. He felt a low-level paranoia starting to come on, like a migraine’s aura. The sky was iron gray and swollen. It was windy and cold and he felt disconnected from the world around him, the cars whooshing by, horns smearing the air. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling. A tractor-trailer blasted a cloud of diesel exhaust. A cold ocean breeze sliced through his jacket. He couldn’t find his car.

It took him several circuits around the condo building parking lot before he remembered he was driving not his red BMW but a rented Ford. He got in and turned the ignition and sat behind the wheel for a minute or so, gauging his ability to drive. Not good, he decided. He needed, at the very least, a cup of coffee before attempting the drive back to Boston. He got out, crossed the parking lot, and walked along the highway until he reached a Dunkin’ Donuts. There was another one directly across the street, too.

A sign at the counter announced they wouldn’t accept fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills “because of fraudulent activity.” He mostly had one-hundred-dollar bills, taken from one of the packets in his suitcase, and had to search his pockets, and every compartment in his wallet, before he eventually found a crumpled ten-dollar bill.

He bought two large coffees and downed one of them sitting at a sticky, crumb-strewn table. He felt his heart rate start to accelerate. He was, if not sober, at least more attentive, in a thick sort of way. The donuts smelled good, and he had a bad case of the munchies, so he returned to the cash register and bought a half dozen and carried the box with him along the road back to the condo parking lot, devouring two, one after another, pausing only long enough to swallow. When he got to the car, he realized he needed a little more time to sober up, or at least try to.

So he crossed the street-it took a couple of minutes to find a gap in the traffic-and sat on a wooden-slatted bench facing the ocean. He watched the waves churning, crashing into the narrow bar of sand. A seagull dive-bombed, then soared upward, cawing and shrieking triumphantly. A particularly big swell sent spray over the low concrete wall. He could feel the fine droplets of mist. After a while the surf’s white noise melted into the fizzy whoosh of the tires of the passing cars. A bicyclist came riding past, a big guy in a David Ortiz jersey and Red Sox cap.

And he thought about his father. He drank coffee and thought about Len’s aspirations, his broken dreams, which was news to Rick. There was another Leonard Hoffman, whom Rick didn’t know, had never known. A Leonard Hoffman who wanted to be something else besides what he ended up.

And then for a moment Rick was sixteen and bored out of his skull, trudging through the overpolished ceremonial halls of the Supreme Court on a family field trip to Washington, DC. His father’s idea, this family excursion, a way to put the pieces back together, to mend the torn fabric of their little family, six months after Ellen Hoffman had died of ovarian cancer. Mom had been the glue that kept the family together, Rick had come to realize. Then for five months it was her illness, then her death, and then everything seemed to fly apart. They each occupied their own separate sphere of solitude, barely talking to each other, knocking up against each other only when necessary. Rick was surly and unpleasant to be around, just by virtue of being a teenage boy. But his mother’s death had curdled something inside him, had given him permission to let the ugly fly.

It was also the last thing Rick wanted to do, spend a week of his spring break with his father and younger sister slogging through the monuments of our nation’s capital and admiring the cherry blossoms, when his prep school and neighborhood friends were staying at home sleeping late and watching TV and hanging out in Harvard Square.

The visit to the Supreme Court was the pièce de résistance of this sad little trip. Lenny hadn’t been able to get them into the courtroom itself, an actual argument session, a failing about which he seemed sort of annoyed and embarrassed. Apparently you had to know someone in Congress, or so he claimed. Anyway, he didn’t know anyone, so the family had to take what he called “the schmucks’ tour.”

Washington had been all of a piece with the Supreme Court-wide malls, wide avenues, wide marble hallways lined with statuary and plaques. History everywhere. Squirming fellow teenage hostages with their families reading plaques and listening to tour guides drone on. The Lincoln Memorial was crowded, and the Washington Monument was crowded and stupid. Only the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum was cool, because of the space suits and stuff.

Wendy, a seventh grader, had brought along her best friend, Peg. The two girls did everything together and giggled at Rick and the exhibits and exchanged private jokes. The two of them shared a room at their cheap hotel off Dupont Circle, and both were vegetarians, which complicated meal issues.

A docent had given a canned lecture about America’s Temple of Justice, which was in fact a Mausoleum of Tedium. From its marble walls and floors seeped chloroform. Even the gift shop, normally the one reliable fallback, had nothing Rick was remotely interested in buying. (Pewter baby mug! Supreme Court coffee mug! Why not Pez dispenser versions of the justices, he wondered. Or action figures, at least?)

They all stood around the John Marshall statue, a bronze figure of an arrogant guy in a bathrobe, or so it appeared, while Len went on at length about how important John Marshall was. Rick, burping up egg from the immense breakfast he’d eaten at the hotel, tried not to fall asleep standing up.

“The point,” his father said, “is you can be anything you want! This guy was born in a log cabin on the Virginia frontier, the oldest of fifteen kids. Point is, if you can conceive it and you can believe it, you can achieve it!”

Wendy and Peg lurked at a distance while Len talked. They giggled and rolled their eyes at Lenny’s earnestness. Len was so awkward at playing parent. He had no game. He didn’t even know how to hug the kids. Rick could feel his father’s self-consciousness: one hand or two, and do you do the back-clap thing? Len was like a skater who stumbles when he starts to overthink how he could stay up on his skates. And Rick found himself rooting for the old man: C’mon, Dad, you can do this. C’mon, Dad. Be a dad, Dad!

After Mom’s death, the guy was trying so hard to be a father, to reach out to his two kids, to be the center of things, to replace Mom now that she was gone. He’d schlepped his kids to DC to fill up some space he’d seen in their lives, the Mom space that he could never occupy. But dammit, he was going to try. This field trip to DC was all part of that campaign. Neither of his kids wanted to be here, and he knew that, but he wasn’t giving up yet.

An important-looking man in a gray suit came striding past and stopped. “Lenny? My God! Is that you?”

“David Rosenthal,” his father had said, stopping midsentence. “Are you arguing before the court?”

The man nodded. “Just finished. My heart’s still pounding.” A few other men in suits stood back, waiting. “So what are you up to these days? Since New Haven?”

Len flashed his rabbity smile. “Oh, a little of this, a little of that.” He looked strange, as if he was pleased to be recognized by this big-deal lawyer who had just emerged from the courtroom they hadn’t been able to get inside. But at the same time, he looked as if he wanted to drill a hole into the marble floor and disappear.

Wendy imitated Len’s aw-shucks mannerism with perfect vicious accuracy, mouthed the words Oh, a little of this, a little of that, but Rick refused to make eye contact with her. She wanted her older brother to roll eyes together with her, but he was having no part of her conspiracy of derision. He was caught by a feeling of almost parental protectiveness toward his father, though he knew it was topsy-turvy for a kid to feel that way, and, when he thought about it, that was probably more insulting to Len than his sister’s snark.

The important guy gave Len a strange look. Rick was too young to identify that look: pity mixed with contempt. His father looked sheepish and queasily embarrassed by something. Maybe by who he was, or who he wasn’t. Somehow Rick felt the embarrassment, too, mixed with a flash of irritation, and the fleeting moment of tenderness had evaporated.

He could see his sister’s mockery out of the corner of his eye but didn’t give her the satisfaction of acknowledgment.

Finally, he sidled right up to her and let fly the burp he’d been suppressing for a minute or so, right into Wendy’s airspace, which led her to squawk vehemently. “Yuck!” she protested, theatrically loud, and Len’s brow scrunched with the fleeting look of dark annoyance, and Rick could see him decide, no, he wasn’t going to hold an inquiry into the incident; Len didn’t want to know. He seemed almost relieved by the distraction.

Rick wondered about the regret or bitterness Len must have felt over the career he ended up with, as a bag man and a fixer, about as far removed from the legal heroics he’d once envisioned as you could get. He wondered if his father thought about such things anymore. If he thought about anything anymore. He wondered whether the stroke had wiped out his ability to think, along with his speech.

He didn’t think Joel Rubin was lying when he insisted he didn’t know who Len bought cash for. It made sense that his father would have protected his clients’ identity, not just because of attorney-client confidentiality, but because his clients were almost certainly involved in something criminal. Joel had claimed he didn’t have any idea who this mysterious “P” was, and Rick believed him.

But there had to be a way to figure out who “P” was, who he worked for. No one would know like a newspaper reporter. A real old-school journalist. Luckily, Rick still had contacts from his reporter days. A lot of them had accepted buyouts from TheBoston Globe as the paper downsized and were now freelancing, just skating by, but at least one remained at the paper. Monica Kennedy was one of their star investigative reporters, a hard-bitten woman in her late forties with unkempt steel-gray hair and thick smudged aviator glasses. She’d won a George Polk Award for her series on sexual abuse in Boston’s Catholic archdiocese, a lot of attention for exposing a state crime lab tech who’d faked hundreds of drug test results. Back in the 1990s, she’d done a whole series on cost overruns in the Big Dig.

He was still high, though less high than he’d been in Joel Rubin’s apartment, and his thoughts were muddled. He wasn’t thinking clearly. It took a great effort, but he scrolled through the contacts on his phone and eventually found it. Monica Kennedy.

He hadn’t talked to Monica in probably ten years. The only number he had was her work phone number. But that was unlikely to have changed. He called it, let it ring. On the fifth ring he got her voice mail. He left a message, asking her to call him back.

Then he drained his coffee, tossed the cup into a trash can, crossed the street, and got into his car. By now he felt confident enough to brave the traffic. Maybe it was an illusory confidence, but after all, driving around Boston required far more guts than skill.

He inspected his face in the rearview mirror. His eyes were bloodshot, droopy, and glazed. His clothes reeked of marijuana. He wouldn’t be fooling anybody. But he could always stop into a CVS, if he passed one, and buy some Visine. Maybe that would help.

He put the car in drive and turned right onto the Lynnway, past Meineke Muffler, a U-Haul, another Dunkin’ Donuts, and then car dealerships, one after another. He drove slowly, cautiously, braking at yellow lights, infuriating the drivers behind him. Not the way he normally drove, and not the way you drive in the Boston area. But despite the big hit of caffeine, the marijuana’s effects hadn’t yet gone away. Everything around him seemed to be going fast, jittery and choppy.

He took his cell phone from the passenger’s seat and glanced at it. He knew he shouldn’t be using his cell phone while he drove. He pulled into a Shell station, filled up the tank, then parked in the side lot. He found “Recents” on his phone and redialed Monica Kennedy’s number and got her voice mail again. He didn’t leave a second message.

He continued on the Lynnway, eventually getting onto VFW Parkway, past the old greyhound track in Revere, Wonderland, now a shopping plaza. Soon the city of Boston loomed into view, its handsome glinting skyscrapers reminding him of the magical first time you glimpse the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.

Within a few minutes he was navigating a newly built series of roads, broad thoroughfares and rotaries built during the Big Dig. Then he entered the Ted Williams Tunnel, zipped through it. Everything did move faster around Boston now. Boondoggle or not, you had to give it that much: The Big Dig really had made the trains run on time.

He passed the airport, and the cargo terminal, and he continued on more new roads to TheBoston Globe’s headquarters, a sprawling midcentury building on sixteen acres on Morrissey Boulevard, a no-man’s-land south of downtown. Then he pulled into a visitor parking space and hit redial on his phone.

This time Monica answered.

“Kennedy,” she snapped, the warning bark of a junkyard dog.

“Monica, it’s Rick Hoffman.”

“Oh… Hoffman, hey.” She sounded distracted, unenthusiastic. “Yeah, I was about to call.”

“Can I take you out to lunch?”

“Already ate at my desk.”

“I mean, can I have half an hour of your time?”

An annoyed sigh. “You still at that crappy magazine?”

“Sort of.”

“Heard you got canned.”

“That would be more accurate.”

“Hope you’re not looking for something here. Globe’s not hiring.”

“Nope.”

“Does it have to be today?”

“I’d prefer it.”

Another sigh. “After I file my column. Four, four thirty.”

“Meet you at the Globe?”

“Liars.” He knew she meant the Three Lyres, the official after-work bar for Globe reporters and editors and staff.

She hung up.

Monica wasn’t a bad sort. Like most newspaper reporters, she didn’t waste any charm on anyone who wasn’t a potential source.

He didn’t want to sit in the parking lot. He just needed to find some coffee shop with Wi-Fi nearby and do some online research. Then he realized he wasn’t far from Dorchester, where Andrea’s nonprofit, Geometry Partners, was based. Maybe she was there. She wasn’t returning his calls, and he owed her an apology.

More than that, he owed her a do-over, another date, if she’d agree to it. He owed her another Rick, the real Rick, not the poser and fop and idiot with bundles of hundreds burning a hole in his pocket.

Ten minutes later he found the crumbling street off Dorchester Avenue and an old brick warehouse that had been converted cheaply into offices. The paneled door looked as though it belonged not on a warehouse but on a split-level ranch house in the suburbs.

Hardware-store stick-on numbers on the door said 14. A sheet of paper that said GEOMETRY PARTNERS in big computer-printed letters was taped just below the numbers. He suddenly had to pee. A lot of coffee had flushed through his digestive system and wanted out.

He knocked on the door awhile, then gave up waiting for someone to answer and just pulled it open. Inside was a small office crowded with two metal desks and a few people, looking like parents and kids, black and Hispanic. He approached one of the desks and asked the woman seated behind it, “Is Andrea Messina here?”

“She is, but she’s tied up in meetings all afternoon. I’m sorry. It’s nonstop.”

He took one of Andrea’s business cards from a tray on the desktop. It had her name and FOUNDER/CEO and the name GEOMETRY PARTNERS fashioned into a kind of colorful diagram, angles intersecting circles and dotted lines and points. He put it in his jacket pocket. Then he took another card and wrote on the back, “One more chance? Please?” and signed it “Rick.”

“Could you give this to her when you see her?”

“Certainly, sir.”

“One more thing. Could I use your restroom?”

“First door on the right.”

A guy who looked like a gangbanger with sleeve tattoos down both arms, wearing a soiled white tank top, a so-called wifebeater, entered, holding a little girl by the hand. Father and daughter, presumably. He looked at once fierce and tender.

Rick found the bathroom and took a long, relieving piss. When he came out he bumped into Andrea. She was wearing a black pantsuit and a white blouse with a V-neck. The blouse wasn’t cut particularly deep, but he could make out the cleft between the swell of her breasts. She was dressed conservatively but somehow looked sexy at the same time. Her hair was glossy and full and tumbled down to her shoulders.

“Oh, Rick,” she said. “What-what are you doing here?”

She gave him a quick, chaste kiss on the cheek.

“I was in the neighborhood and just wanted to say hi. And apologize. And beg for a second chance. I left you a note to that effect.”

“I’m sorry, it’s been crazy,” she said. She didn’t sound convincing.

“I understand.”

“Look, Rick”-she backed up into a tiny office, no bigger than a storage closet, which he could tell immediately, from the photos, was hers. “I wanted to thank you for dinner. It was…” Her nostrils flared as if she’d detected a bad smell. She peered suspiciously into his bloodshot, bleary eyes and asked, “Are you wasted?”