The Fixer

24

At two in the morning, Rick awoke, as if to an alarm, got dressed, and went down the dark stairs of the bed-and-breakfast to the empty street below. He’d parked on a side street a block away. The traffic lights were flashing yellow. The sidewalks were empty. The streets shone, slick after a late-night rain shower.

He took his keys to the house and the floppy disk from Joan’s basement and the Maglite he’d bought at Best Buy.

He drove over to Clayton Street, past the house, and around to Fayerweather. The neighborhood was dark. A few porch lights were on, and the widely spaced streetlamps. He parked and rounded the corner back onto Clayton and stood at a distance, looking at the house. He felt almost silly doing it. There was no one in the house, of course, and no one outside of it. No one waiting for his return. Not at 2:20 in the morning.

He unlocked the back door and quickly entered, navigating the interior blindly, by rote, a route he’d taken countless times in high school, also in the middle of the night in the dark, hoping not to wake his ever-vigilant father or his sister.

He had to use the flashlight to get down the basement stairs without stumbling over the brooms and mops that hung on the stairwell walls. In full daylight, with the overhead lights on, this staircase was a trip hazard.

Down here it smelled of mildew and laundry detergent and something loamy, fungal. The furniture from upstairs was stacked high and covered in clear plastic tarps-couches, chairs, the kitchen table. Along the cinder block walls were old plastic shelves from Bed Bath & Beyond, heaped with junk: old toys, a bread maker, a food dehydrator, a sewing machine that probably hadn’t been used since his mother was alive. Pots and pans and Igloo coolers and Tupperware containers. In the far corner was his father’s workbench, rarely ever used, in front of a pegboard mounted on the wall, which was hung with rusty old saws and hammers and mallets and screwdrivers, an orange extension cord, a DeWalt power drill. Another shelf held turpentine and spray paint and cans of paint and wood finish.

He found the section where the furniture from Lenny’s office had been relocated. His father’s desk had been thoughtfully covered with a clear plastic tarp, now coated with a fine layer of white plaster dust. The plaster dust seemed to be everywhere, even down in the basement where no destruction had taken place.

He lifted the plastic tarp, then took an extension cord from his father’s workbench and plugged in the old computer. He flipped the switch and was relieved to see it come to life, grunting and groaning. Green numbers and letters appeared on the monitor. It booted up slowly. As he waited for the computer to boot up, he looked around. There was all kinds of junk here on the plastic shelving-toys, appliances, old cell phone bills. His father never threw anything away.

He pulled a big box off the shelf that held stuff taken from Lenny’s desk. There was that antique brass paper clip in the shape of a hand, which once belonged to Lenny’s father. An envelope moistener, a blue plastic bottle whose yellow foam top had grown crusty with envelope glue and age. Did anyone use those anymore? A red heart-shaped glass paperweight, a gift from Rick’s mom. A Swingline stapler. An empty tin can with rotelle pasta glued onto the outside and painted all over with light blue tempera-a crappy arts-and-craft project Rick had brought home from fourth grade. His father had always kept his pencils in it, though he had far nicer things to hold pencils.

Then he pulled out a large piece of white foam core with a lot of small rocks affixed to it. Rick’s old, once cherished, rock collection. He was surprised to see it here. As a kid, Rick had for some reason collected rocks and minerals and had once painstakingly glued his best specimens to a poster board: rose quartz, obsidian, shale, mica schist… Then he’d carefully labeled everything with one of those old-fashioned Dymo label makers, the kind with the alphabet dial and the embossing tape. (Click, click, click, squeeze!) But Rick distinctly remembered tossing it when he entered high school, purging his room of childish things. Len must have rescued it from the trash and brought it into his office, holding on to it for all these decades like a curator of Rick’s childhood.

He found a silver desk clock, vaguely familiar. TIFFANY & CO., it said on the face. Then he noticed that its base was engraved:

FOR LEONARD HOFFMAN WITH THANKS FROM THE PAPPAS GROUP.

What was the Pappas Group, he wondered, that had given Lenny such an expensive gift?

He turned to the computer and saw the blinking prompt: C:>. Ready for him to type in text. My God, he’d forgotten about those days, when computers were first widely used. Rick had used a Macintosh for years and had gotten used to the ease, the friendly interface. Back in the day, you had to type in commands. He’d forgotten how.

But he knew how to insert a floppy disk. He pulled it out of its paper sleeve and slid it into the drive slot. The hard drive grunted some more, and after a few seconds some text appeared on the monitor.

It was a financial program called Quicken, and it was really nothing more than a record of deposits made into, and withdrawals from, two different Fleet Bank accounts. Fleet Bank hadn’t existed in years, having been swallowed up by a bigger bank that was in turn swallowed up by an even bigger bank.

One was a regular business account, recording checks written to the electric company and other utilities, to the real estate company for the office rent, to Staples, that sort of thing. The other one was apparently a client fund account, a record of the checks Lenny had received from his clients.

All pretty standard and all pretty unremarkable. Rick wasn’t sure if any of this would help him, but just in case it might, he plugged in the dot matrix printer, heard it clatter noisily to life, and made sure its cable was connected to the computer. It was. He clicked Print, and a minute or so later a long spool of perforated computer paper with little tractor-feed holes on either side came spewing out of the printer.

Sitting on the side of the desk he studied the sheaf of computer paper. It showed deposits and withdrawals for the last three years of his father’s practice. He found the entries for the year 1996 and began scanning the columns slowly for deposits.

He found various deposits, in amounts ranging from fifty to thirty-two hundred dollars. Nothing bigger.

This just compounded the mystery. According to Lenny’s office files, he’d billed eight of his clients 295,000 dollars in the month of May 1996. Yet according to the city archives, he hadn’t done any of the work he’d billed for. And now he’d found that his father hadn’t gotten paid for any of the work he’d billed for. Work he apparently hadn’t done. So the bills were fraudulent.

He heard a noise from upstairs, a thump, and he froze.

He clicked off the flashlight and, in the pale moonlight, wove a path through the piles of chairs and the tarp-covered coffee tables toward the stairs. There he stood and listened again for the thump, and after another minute it came again, and he realized it was coming from the refrigerator in the kitchen directly above, cycling noisily on or off. He’d turned it on to use for cooling water and beer.

Keeping the flashlight off, he returned to his father’s desk, grabbed the printout, and headed back up the stairs and out of the house.

Back in his room at the B &B, Rick Googled the Pappas Group.

It seemed to be some sort of public relations firm. Its website showed a bright photo of the gold dome of the Massachusetts State House, which was probably meant to symbolize power and access, the way a DC-based firm’s website would probably show the Capitol. It disclosed little. There was language about “our expert tacticians” and “high-profile clients” and “discreet representation” and “reputation management.” One page featured the logos of some of their clients-banks, restaurant groups, universities, shopping malls, radio stations, health clubs, and high-end retailers. All Rick gleaned from the website was that Pappas’s firm was deeply entrenched and well connected.

The founder and CEO was Alex Pappas. His biography was spare: “For almost thirty years Mr. Pappas has brought his unique media savvy and political acumen to bear in investigations, high-profile celebrity clients, and strategic advice on dealing with corporate communications challenges.”

A Google search on Alex Pappas pulled up very little. A few passing mentions in the Globe, a blip in Boston Magazine. Everything was cursory and vague. Pappas had been a press secretary to a Democratic governor of Massachusetts years ago, ran the governor’s successful reelection campaign, then left the public sector in a blaze of glory to start his own “strategic and crisis communications firm.” It was as if he then decided to fly under the radar. You almost never saw mentions of him in the press. He’d all but gone into the witness protection program.

A search for the “Pappas Group” yielded more results. The firm was leading the public relations campaign on behalf of the Olympian Tower, a planned skyscraper in Boston that was sort of controversial, since it threatened to cast a long shadow over the Boston Public Garden. That was about all Rick was able to pull up.

What in the world was Lenny Hoffman, solo lawyer, doing with a Tiffany clock from such a high-powered firm?

In the morning Rick waited till ten before he called Monica Kennedy at the newspaper.

“What do you know about a guy named Alex Pappas?” he said.

“You’re still on this cash bank thing?”

“Pappas is… the cash bank?” he said, surprised.

“Isn’t that why you’re asking about him?”

“Who is he?”

“I guess you’d call him a publicist.”

“I’d never heard of him.”

“Sure. He’s so high-profile you’ve never heard of him. See, Rick, there’s two kinds of publicists. The kind who gets your name in the paper, and the kind who keeps it out.”

“What does he do? I mean, besides keep your name out of the paper?”

“Reputation management, crisis management, introductions.”

“Introductions?”

“Back in the Big Dig days, Pappas was the guy to know if you wanted to land a contract. He introduced construction companies that wanted work to the people who hired. Let’s just say he made a lot of state workers rich.”

“You never did any reporting on him, did you?”

She sighed heavily. “To be honest, that guy was always too slippery for me to get a grasp on. Like nailing Jell-O to the wall.”

And only then did it occur to Rick that Pappas began with the letter P.