The Fixer

30

He pulled into traffic and was at the offices of Back Bay magazine fifteen minutes later. He was taking a risk, appearing for a second time at the magazine. But the kind of search he had to do could be done only at the office. He needed to do an advanced search of LexisNexis by date. A conventional Internet search would take forever. You can search TheNew York Times or TheBoston Globe or TheWall Street Journal for incidents or names but not by what happened during three days in May in 1996. For that he needed to use LexisNexis on site.

The office was empty when he arrived. His badge got him in the door, though, and he flipped on the overhead lights, jittery fluorescents. He logged into the magazine’s intranet and found a nagging e-mail from Darren. How’s the Sculley Q &A coming? he wanted to know. He’ll be at the gala at the Park Plaza on Wednesday-maybe a good chance to sit down with him?

Rick didn’t bother to reply. The best strategy with Darren was just to ignore him. Rick pulled up LexisNexis. He typed in the date range, which yielded hundreds of headlines.

He groaned. He was looking at everything that had happened in Boston and Massachusetts over those three days. Politicians in trouble in the State House, town officials accused of graft… CAMBRIDGE MAN HELD IN STABBING. A guy was stabbed in the neck and chest at the Portuguese Football Club. 86-YEAR-OLD MALDEN WOMAN SUFFERS SEVERE BURNS IN APARTMENT FIRE. A sprinkling of obituaries, minor sports and medical news, the Indy 500 winner, the Fire Department’s annual ball at the Sheraton.

Nothing seemed to fit the profile: something that would require the services of a PR guy like Pappas. After a few hours of searching, his eyes were weary and his head had begun to ache. Then he noticed a story with Monica Kennedy’s byline, TheBoston Globe’s investigative ace.

JAMAICA PLAIN FAMILY KILLED IN TUNNEL ACCIDENT. A terrible story about a young mother and father and their fourteen-year-old daughter killed when their car hit the wall of the brand-new Ted Williams Tunnel. Rick knew the tunnel was part of the Big Dig, so he lingered on the article for a moment. A tragedy, but not something that would in any way involve his father or Alex Pappas.

So why was Monica Kennedy writing about a car accident of all things?

He looked at his watch. It was a bit after 7:00 P.M. Back Bay had cleared out, but Monica worked long hours. If she wasn’t at her desk, she was on her way home. She was disturbable.

“Kennedy,” she barked after one ring.

“Monica, it’s Rick.” He paused. “Hoffman.”

There was a lot of background hubbub punctuated by the clinking of glasses or silverware. “Rick Hoffman! Coming back like a bad penny.” Her words were garbled by a mouthful of food. “What the hell you want now?” She said it jokingly, but Rick knew there was a sharp edge of truth in there.

“The Cabrera family mean anything to you?”

“The who?”

“A family from the Dominican Republic who lived in Jamaica Plain, Hyde Square. Daddy, mommy, teenage daughter killed in a traffic accident.”

“I don’t know what…”

“This is back in ’96.”

“Are you still playing investigative reporter for the Shop ’n’ Save Gazette or whatever you call that piece-of-shit supermarket circular you write for?”

“The Ted Williams Tunnel-?”

“Oh, that, sure, sure. Awful story. Family of three wiped out in a car crash.”

“But why were you on a traffic story?”

“Yeah, hold on a second.” She chewed, then took a big swallow. “You know, I never got the goods on that one. As I recall, it went like: This guy and his pregnant wife and young daughter are driving through the Ted Williams Tunnel in the middle of the night-this is right after it first opened-and the guy drives his car into the tunnel wall and they’re all killed immediately.”

“Got that. What I don’t get is what put you on the story.”

“The Ted Williams Tunnel. The spanking-new, just finished Ted Williams Tunnel, man. The Big Dig, what do you think? Started out I thought I had something about shoddy construction on the Big Dig and it turned out to be just a plain-vanilla accident. Nothing there. Like my Afrin bottle. Wait a second, now I remember! Alex Pappas!”

“Pappas? What about Pappas?”

“For some reason he was all over the story, playing zone defense. He called me a couple times. Yeah, Pappas was doing reputation management for one of the construction firms that built the tunnel, and he was making sure the company’s name didn’t get dragged into it. But like I said, he had nothing to worry about, ’cause it was just driver negligence or whatever. The driver was drunk, I always figured. Nothing there.”

Pappas, he thought. Reputation management. If Pappas was talking to a reporter for the Globe and also talking to Lenny Hoffman…

Was it so farfetched? Pappas wanted Lenny’s legal help, maybe.

“You think you still have the file?”

“Somewhere. Somewhere. I don’t throw anything away. When was that again?”

“Ninety-six.”

“Probably in the file drawer at work. Now can I get back to my dinner, please?”

“I’ll come by tomorrow.”

Rick had parked his Zipcar in the big parking lot on Washington Street behind the building where Back Bay’s offices were, a lot that faced a sports club and the off-street patio of an Italian bistro. In the daytime the lot was always full, but now it was half empty. He pressed the Unlock button on the remote to pulse the car’s flashers and remind him where he’d parked.

He got in the car and pushed the ignition button and drove toward the exit, when he felt something whispering across his neck, maybe an insect, a fly, and he reached to scratch it and felt something grab his left shoulder and heard a man’s voice immediately behind him, from the backseat.

“Pull over, Mr. Hoffman, but gently, please, sir. What you feel against your carotid artery is a seven-inch Japanese santoku, a chef’s knife made of molybdenum vanadium stainless steel. Ice-tempered and hollow ground and probably the finest chef’s knife in the world.”

Rick froze, his heart fluttering wildly.

“It slices with very little pressure. So bring your chariot to a stop gently, Mr. Hoffman. This is a rental vehicle, and it’s damnably hard to get blood out of the upholstery.”