The Fixer

36

Driving to the Charlestown Navy Yard to meet Dr. Girona, he thought about his father. About the mystery of Leonard Hoffman. The more Rick learned, it seemed, the less he knew.

His father was beaten? This didn’t gibe at all with Leonard’s secretary’s account. She had found Len slumped on the floor and called 911. Not lying in a pool of blood.

His entire understanding of the last two decades had tipped to one side. His father had placed a bunch of cell phone calls to Alex Pappas over a period of three days before… before he was beaten. Rick imagined a baseball bat to the side of his father’s head. One blow and his father slumped to the floor, immediately suffering a stroke. Maybe not what the attacker had intended.

So who could have attacked Leonard, if indeed he was attacked? And what was going on during those three days?

Rick now knew that his father had come to pay off the Cabrera family survivors for some reason and then had seen the same videotape that Rick had just seen, and cried seeing the little girl, just as Rick had done. Rick now knew that at some point shortly after that, Leonard had been beaten, badly enough to bring on a stroke.

But who had done it? And why?

Rick wondered whether his father’s secretary, Joan, might have some idea.

And he thought about the cash hidden in the house, the three million dollars now in storage. If that was money Lenny had bought from places in the Combat Zone to use for bribes, then it was money he hadn’t yet paid out. He must have given money to the Cabrera family-

Unless he hadn’t.

Unless for some reason his father had held on to the money, not paid it out, and maybe that was why he was beaten.

At a stoplight, Rick glanced at his watch. His father would just be starting his treatment about now. A nursing home aide had begun driving Lenny to Charlestown for the daily treatments in a nursing home van. This was the way they preferred to do it.

Rick reflected that the more he dug, the more rot he was exposing. He couldn’t help but think of the work that Jeff and his crew were doing on the old house, ripping out the decayed wood and plaster.

As Rick drove, his mind wandered, but he kept coming back to one question: Why did his father offer to pay off the Cabrera family? What was it about the accident that required silence? He thought and thought and kept coming up empty. Finally he called Monica Kennedy at the Globe. She answered after one ring, with her customary bark: “Kennedy.”

“It’s Hoffman,” he said. Without checking first whether she had time to talk, he plunged ahead. “You’ve got a note in your file about a DUI. You wrote ‘pending BAC,’ which I assume means you were waiting to see when the blood alcohol concentration results came in from the toxicology reports. So what made you suspect drunk driving?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. ‘Pending BAC’… Okay, right. That must have come from the cops.”

“Not from Pappas?”

“Probably from him first, yeah.”

“So why didn’t you run with that? You don’t mention it in your piece.”

She sighed. “Because toxicology reports take sixty days to come in.”

“You could have reported it anyway.”

“No Afrin in the bottle.”

“No confirmation.”

“You don’t report that about a father who’s just died with his wife and teenage daughter unless you have the facts, and I didn’t.”

“Nice,” he said.

“Come on, man,” she said. “Even I have standards.”

“I heard something about an investigation? A community leader talking about stirring up an investigation into what really caused the accident?”

“So did I, which was why Pappas was all over this. Look, believe me, the city and the state and every single company involved in building that tunnel were deathly afraid of a lawsuit. Everyone was afraid of community pressure for an investigation.”

“But you didn’t report anything about an investigation.”

“Because there wasn’t one! There was nothing to report. Pappas was making sure I didn’t report something I wasn’t going to report anyway.”

“So who was he working for?”

“Something called the Boston Common Alliance, or like that. Didn’t I tell you that?”

“You said it was a coalition of firms involved in constructing the Big Dig. You happen to know which ones?”

“I don’t think it exists anymore, but I’m sure you could find out. Look, Hoffman, I gotta go.”

“Thanks,” he said, but she’d already hung up.

His father was still undergoing TMS treatment by the time Rick arrived.

He was escorted by a lab assistant into the darkened room where Lenny sat upright in what looked like a dental chair, canted back a bit.

A white cloth cap had been placed over his head, which was nestled within the arms of a tall contraption. “He has a few more minutes left,” said a doctor or lab tech who seemed to be running the procedure. His father’s eyes slid toward Rick, who gave him a wave. A loud rat-a-tat sounded, like the muted sound of a machine gun firing. Rick waited. After a pause, the machine gun sound went off again. Lenny didn’t appear to be in pain. He looked straight ahead, occasionally glancing over at Rick. He looked somehow more engaged, more present.

After another few minutes, the noise stopped. The lab tech or doctor lifted the arms of the contraption up and away from his father’s head. “Everything all right, Mr. Hoffman?” she said.

Lenny raised his left hand, his thumb sticking up in a sign of agreement.

Rick stared in amazement. His father hadn’t done that in almost two decades.

The door to the room opened and Dr. Girona entered. He nodded at Rick. They would talk in private.

As he shook the doctor’s hand, Rick couldn’t help blabbering, “He just gave a thumbs-up! I don’t think I’ve seen him do that since his stroke.”

“He’s been doing that for a couple of days now.”

The woman who’d been in charge of the treatment said, “I’m Rachel. I’m the clinical research coordinator.”

“Rachel, nice to meet you,” Rick said, extending his hand.

“You’re Mr. Hoffman’s son, is that right?”

He nodded.

“Well, Mr. Hoffman is a great patient. He’s got a session now with the speech pathologist. Were you planning to join him?”

“Is that okay, Dad?” he said.

Lenny gave the thumbs-up as he was helped into his wheelchair.

“Dr. Girona,” Rick said, “do you have a minute?”

Girona nodded. “Of course,” he said, escorting Rick into his office across the hall from the treatment room.

“You think my father was beaten, and that was the cause of his stroke?”

“He suffered traumatic brain injury, that much I can say for certain. He appears to have been struck with something on the left side of his skull. There’s evidence of bone fractures precisely where the blood vessel burst. The only explanation I can think of is that he suffered a blow to his head, which triggered the hemorrhagic stroke.”

“But how come no one noticed that in ’96?”

“The scans back then weren’t of nearly as high a resolution as they are nowadays. I’m sure they found evidence of a stroke and left it there. He didn’t present with external signs of trauma-no blood, for instance. Right?”

“Right.”

“So there would have been no reason to look further. The stroke was apparent.”

“He could have had an accident, right?”

Dr. Girona shrugged. “Certainly a possibility. There might not have been external signs like blood or bruising. But in one way or another, he suffered cerebrovascular damage to his head, to his brain.”

“He never indicated anything about it.”

“Maybe he will now,” Dr. Girona said.

A few minutes later, Lenny was seated at a table by a wall-mounted whiteboard in a small room. Rick sat across the table, and the speech-and-language therapist, an Asian woman in her midthirties, sat next to Lenny.

“Do you think I could have a few minutes alone with my dad?”

“Sure, of course!” the therapist said. She immediately rose from her chair and left the room, closing the door behind her.

“Dad, I need to ask you something,” Rick said.

His father turned to look at him.

“I need you to help me out. Maybe save my life, okay?”

Leonard turned and looked directly into his eyes. He was listening.

Rick pondered for a moment. He could ask yes or no questions. But based on what the therapist had just done, he also knew he might be able to ask open-ended questions, too, as long as Lenny could answer with the letter board.

“I figured out about the cash you hid in the house. I know you were in charge of collecting it for the cash bank. To pay people off for Pappas. Dad, this happened almost twenty years ago, but now there are people out there who are trying to hurt me. May be trying to kill me now, I don’t know. Okay? So I need you to talk. To help me out. Okay?”

His father was still looking him in the eyes, and there seemed to be something in his glance, something besides fear. Maybe it was dread, or something like that. At least a great reluctance. He didn’t turn his thumb up or down, but he was watching and waiting. His left hand rested in front of him on the table. His right hand was curled uselessly on the arm of his wheelchair.

“You’re afraid of Alex Pappas, aren’t you?”

Lenny slowly turned his left thumb up.

“Did he beat you?”

The thumb turned down.

Rick thought a moment. “Did he… have you beaten?”

Lenny’s thumb slowly, hesitantly, turned up. Then he tucked his thumb back in and placed his hand flat on the table.

“Who did it?”

Lenny’s left hand remained flat on the table.

“Who beat you?” Rick said.

Lenny’s left hand slid across the table for the letter board. Rick moved around the table in his chair until he was next to the whiteboard. He picked up a green marker and prepared to write down letters as Len pointed to them.

Len curled his left hand with his index finger stuck out, a pointing pose. He slid his finger across the row of letters and stopped on D. Rick wrote the letter D in green marker on the whiteboard. Then he moved down to O, and Rick wrote O on the board. Then N. Then T.

The word on the whiteboard was DON’T.

Lenny made a slicing motion with his fingers, which Rick assumed meant “end of word.”

Then Lenny touched R, and Rick wrote an R, and then E and within a minute the phrase on the whiteboard spelled out DON’T REMEMBER.

“You don’t remember,” Rick said.

Lenny slowly raised his thumb.

He didn’t remember. That wasn’t surprising, if he was telling the truth. A bad beating to the head, bad enough to induce a stroke-no wonder his memory was faulty.

He tried another question. “Dad, who was all that cash for? I need to know this.”

For a long while his father didn’t move. Rick wasn’t sure whether Lenny understood, so he repeated the question: “Who was all that cash for?”

Another long pause. Then his father slid his left hand across the letter board, his index finger landing on the letter I.

Rick erased “I don’t remember” on the whiteboard and in its place wrote an I.

His father’s finger moved to W, and then A, and then N. A few seconds later his index finger moved to the T.

Rick wrote the letters on the board. IWANT. Realizing that these were two words, not one, he erased them and wrote them again with a space between the I and want.

Slowly picking up speed, Len’s index finger moved to T and then O.

Rick had written on the whiteboard, I WANT TO.

Rick spoke the words aloud: “I want to… What do you want, Dad?”

His father’s index finger moved up the letter board to D and then I, and then Rick realized what his father was saying and tears came into his eyes as he finished the phrase:

I WANT TO DIE.

Rick put his hand over his father’s useless right hand and tried to look into Len’s eyes again, but his father was pointedly looking away, a tear coursing down his left cheek.