The Fixer

29

Alex Pappas hadn’t been fooled by the interview ruse, not for a moment. He seemed to know why Rick was there even before he arrived at his office. He was the sort of man who prided himself on always being a step ahead. And he had been.

Rick had the uneasy feeling that Pappas had agreed to the faux interview because he wanted to meet Rick. He wanted to sound Rick out, to find out what he could about what Rick knew and how he knew it.

And to manipulate him, to shame him if possible, to discourage him from probing any further and to try to buy him off. Pappas had done deep research into Rick, to a creepy extent, and he wanted to make sure Rick knew it.

But though Pappas had seen right through it, the meeting had been successful, from Rick’s point of view. For one thing, Rick had spotted Pappas’s business cards in a holder on his desk, facing the visitor on the outer edge of the desk, and he’d slipped one into his pocket. More important, he’d learned a number of useful things. He was now certain that Pappas was the “P” in his father’s appointment calendar. And he’d corroborated his theory that Pappas was connected to the “cash bank” Monica Kennedy had mentioned. Pappas’s behavior, his blatant attempts at manipulation, had confirmed it.

But all Pappas’s attempts at intimidation had failed. Rick didn’t much care for Pappas’s condescending attitude toward his father. Pappas had given him a warning, and Rick was never good with warnings. Warnings just egged him on. They awakened the long-dormant investigative journalist part of his brain. Pappas was afraid of something, and now Rick was determined to find out what.

In fact, the meeting with Pappas had emboldened Rick. He’d stuck his head into the lion’s mouth and pulled it back out without any visible bite marks on his neck. Five days had gone by without his being abducted again by the poetry-quoting Irishman with a butcher’s saw.

I’ll ask you again, the man had said. Who’ve you been talking to? A simple question, Mr. Hoffman. Because your father doesn’t speak. So it’s someone else.

Maybe the Irishman had gotten the answer he wanted. Or maybe he’d decided Rick didn’t know the answer.

Who’ve you been talking to?

The question wasn’t Where’s the money? It was Who have you been talking to? Who’d told him about the money?

The Irishman, and by implication Pappas-since they had to be a team-wanted to know who he’d been talking to.

You must have proof of some sort, Pappas had asked. Proof that Lenny had engaged in bribery.

The more I know, Rick, the more I can help you.

Pappas had wanted to know what Rick knew. Were there account books? Were there records? Was there proof?

Maybe Pappas had finally concluded that Rick knew next to nothing, that he hadn’t been talking to anyone, that he had no records, no proof.

Nothing that would cause Pappas any kind of problems.

If so, that would mean that Rick was no longer a threat to Pappas. Which meant that Pappas wasn’t a threat to Rick. And neither was the poetry-quoting Irishman.

That would mean it was safe for Rick to appear at the obvious, expected places. He needed to return to Clayton Street anyway, and it would be easier in the daytime.

On the way, he thought about what Pappas had said. Did I call your father? Of course. I called when I needed his help.

Rick had been bluffing, but the bluff had turned out to be the truth. Pappas had indeed called Lenny.

So maybe there were records of those calls. When you were doing investigative journalism, you amassed as many documents, files, records as you could, to try to spot the tiny anomalies that might reveal something unexpected. Investigative journalism wasn’t like meeting Deep Throat in a parking garage. It was like mining for gold. You dug and dug, past the topsoil, down to the mineral layer, then you blasted the rock apart using explosives, then you trucked the rocks somewhere else to crush and process, and for every ton of rocks you went through, you’d get maybe five grams of gold. If you were lucky.

He was still digging into the topsoil.

He called his sister, Wendy, spoke for just two minutes, and hung up. Then he parked and entered the house. The crew was hard at work, their music blasting, nail guns rat-a-tat-tatting, power screwdrivers whining and squawking.

Rick gave Jeff a wave. Jeff replied with a thumbs-up.

Then Rick headed down to the basement, where it was quieter, and cool, and peaceful. He pulled the cord on the bare overhead bulb in the back part of the basement where the old files and records were kept. Within a few minutes he’d located the cardboard boxes from Staples in which Wendy had boxed up all the old files and papers left around the house after their father’s stroke.

He found the box marked PHONE BILLS and took it down from the shelf. He took out a few bills and opened them.

They were useless. Each bill listed the menu of “services” the phone company had provided for the month as well as whatever long-distance calls Lenny had made. But local calls weren’t listed. They never were. There was nothing here.

Then Rick found a thick envelope that changed everything. It was a bill from Cellular One, for Lenny’s cell phone. Rick had forgotten that his father had a cell phone fairly early on. By 1996 cell phones were starting to become popular, especially among businesspeople and lawyers.

And in the early days of cell phones, the wireless providers were still sending thick bills detailing every single call placed.

He pulled out all the Cell One phone bills for 1996. He couldn’t find any after August, but then he remembered that Joan Breslin had canceled his father’s phone after a few months, when it became apparent that he wasn’t going to recover. He opened the envelope for the February bill, which covered all calls for a month starting from the beginning of January.

And he began going through the statement, his eyes running down the lists of phone numbers, of calls placed and calls received. He was looking for patterns, particularly repeated calls to and from any phone number. The number listed most often by far was the number of Lenny’s office, which was no surprise: Lenny would have called the office to talk to Joan multiple times when he was out and on his mobile. Then there was the family home number, showing calls between Rick and Wendy and their father at work.

Rick took out the June bill, detailing May’s calls, and moved right to May 27, the day of the stroke. He immediately saw a lineup of three calls, all to the same 617 area code number. He pulled out Alex Pappas’s business card and confirmed that it was Pappas’s mobile number. The day before, there were five calls to that same number. Six the day before that. None for the two weeks previous.

So why all the calls to and from Alex Pappas on those three days between May 25 and May 27?

Something must have happened that required Lenny’s services. Pappas had wanted something from Lenny. So what had happened on those three days?

He couldn’t ask his father. He needed some other way. The simplest solution was to look through a newspaper from those days, an online archive. That meant returning to his B &B and getting back online. Taking not just the one phone bill but all his dad’s Cell One phone bills back to the hotel and poring through them.

Still, Rick would take precautions, as usual, to avoid being tailed. He carried the four phone records boxes to the foot of the basement stairs and climbed the stairs, passed through the cloud of noise and plaster dust and back-and-forth chat and angry hip-hop-What you know about thumbing through them hunnits, twenties, and them fifties?-to the windows at the front of the house, and there he froze.

Across the street a car was idling.

Hear the twenties, fifties, hundreds, the money machine clickin’.

He’d noticed it an hour or so ago, a white sedan, an Audi, nothing out of place for the neighborhood. But there it still was, the driver texting on a smartphone, a plume of exhaust snaking around from the rear. Rick backed away from the window until he was out of the direct line of sight but could still see the Audi.

It was waiting for him, he somehow knew. Something about the way the driver was studiously avoiding looking out the window, or the way the car was parked just far enough down the street so as not to be too obvious, or the way the car hadn’t moved in over an hour.

But he knew it was watching the house.

Theoretically he knew the neighborhood well enough, better than any watcher, to lose anyone trying to follow him in a car. He knew which backyards led to which streets and which houses had toolsheds in their backyards. He knew places to hide better than anyone who hadn’t grown up in this part of Cambridge.

But maybe there was a better way to evade detection. He tapped Jeff on the shoulder, then asked him if it was okay if he hired Marlon and Santiago for a brief errand. Jeff shrugged. “Be my guest,” he said.

“Guys,” he said when Marlon and Santiago were standing around the file cartons, Marlon wiping his plaster-dusted brow with the back of a large hand. He gave Santiago the key to his latest Zipcar. “You guys mind carrying these boxes out to my car? It’s a blue Prius, parked a couple blocks away, right in front of 39 Fayerweather.”

Both of them seemed to hesitate a moment or two. Marlon glanced over at Jeff, who shrugged again, giving his permission. They clearly didn’t want to do it, saw no reason to do it. They didn’t have to brownnose the owner of the house, because they didn’t work for the owner. They worked for Jeff. Rick pulled out a couple of hundred-dollar bills, one new, one not so new, and handed one to each of them. Their faces lit up like kids being handed chocolate. Marlon had a full silver grill. Rick hadn’t noticed before. He was overpaying them for a simple errand, but he figured it might buy some goodwill. There was more where that came from.

“Just these right here?” Santiago asked, suspicious there had to be a catch.

“That’s all. And one more thing.”

Santiago looked at Marlon: Knew it was too good to be true.

“Could one of you move my car to that little lot next to Hi-Rise? The bakery?”

“On Concord right near where Huron comes in?” Marlon said.

“Exactly.” He didn’t bother to explain; he didn’t need an explanation. He just wanted his car moved, for some idiotic reason, to another spot a few blocks away.

Marlon looked at Jeff. “Cool, we take a break now?”

“Don’t take too long,” Jeff said.

Ten minutes after the two guys set off bearing cardboard boxes, Rick left the house. He walked up Huron Avenue toward Fresh Pond, the opposite direction from which the two workers had gone. He clocked something moving in his peripheral vision behind him, behind him and to his left, and tried not to look to confirm it was the white Audi. But it was. The driver in the Audi had waited until he’d reached the end of Clayton and turned right on Huron, when he’d be out of range. The last possible moment, so he wouldn’t be detected. Rick kept going up Huron Ave, studiously not noticing the car. Not until he reached the busy intersection of Huron and Fresh Pond Parkway did he have the chance to turn sideways, as if watching for oncoming traffic, and then he saw the Audi double-parked half a block down, waiting.

It was following him. But he was walking nowhere, with great purpose. He crossed Fresh Pond and headed into the park, where he and his friends had ridden their bikes, where he’d walked their black Lab, who’d been killed running out into traffic the same year his mother had died, the year from hell.

He walked around the reservoir. A few joggers ran past, talking. In here, within the wooded enclave of Fresh Pond Reservation, the Audi was at a disadvantage: unable to see, unable to enter. He had lost them. There were dozens of exits from the park. He chose one on the far end of the park, on Concord Avenue, flagged a passing cab.

Then he walked a few blocks down Concord Avenue to Hi-Rise bakery and looked in the small lot next door and didn’t see his Zipcar. He turned, looked around Concord. Maybe the guys couldn’t find a space next to Hi-Rise and just parked it where they could. But no Sea Glass Pearl Toyota Prius in sight. He rounded the corner onto Huron Avenue, still looking. Maybe they’d parked it as close to the lot as they could, and… But no Prius, not here.

It didn’t seem at all likely that Jeff’s crew would have stolen his car. Not a Toyota Prius, in any case. But it wasn’t here, and neither was Marlon nor Santiago. He debated heading back over to Clayton Street and was in fact on his way over ten minutes later when a Prius pulled over to the side of Concord, horn blaring.

“There you guys are,” Rick said. “What took you so long?”

Marlon, in the passenger’s seat, smiled and said, “Homey had to do an errand.”

Santiago got out of the driver’s seat and came around to hand Rick the keys. “Sorry about that, bro,” he said. “Had to pick something up.”

He knew then what had taken so long. They searched the car for cash. They thought Rick had hidden some or all the cash in the Prius, under the seats or in the glove compartment or in the trunk. They’d taken the car somewhere and pulled it apart. They’d probably searched the file boxes, too. But they’d found nothing. That didn’t mean they’d stop looking, though. The question was how far would they go. He’d thought that slipping them each a Benjamin would buy them off, neutralize their greed, but it had done the opposite. It had goaded them on. Like the mechanical rabbit at the dog track. Like giving a bloodhound an article of clothing, a scent: ready, go!

It had been a mistake he wouldn’t make again. Jeff wouldn’t do anything.

But these guys very well might.