The Fixer

44

By the time he arrived at his latest hotel, the DoubleTree Suites on Soldiers Field Road in Boston, he was exhausted. It was dark and cold and he’d had to battle rush-hour traffic getting back to the city from New Hampshire. Yet he was too keyed up to sleep. He poured a Scotch from the minibar and tried watching television for a while, but nothing held his interest.

He could think of nothing else besides what he’d learned in New Hampshire, from his father’s old friend. He was still stunned.

His father had been planning to disappear, to become a fugitive, and only a stroke had interfered with his plan. He wanted out of the life he’d made for himself, a life of deceit and payoffs and bribes-a life that had become dangerous and repulsive to him.

The Lenny Hoffman that Herbert Antholis knew was a hero, plain and simple. He’d defended outcasts and rejects; he’d defended people who had no one else to defend them. Yes, he’d taken on work he disliked in order to support a family. He’d sold out. But in the end he did the right thing-the brave thing. He refused to cover up the cause of the accident that killed a family.

He marveled at the deception that was “Paul Clarke,” a.k.a. Herbert Antholis. Rick wanted to call his sister and tell her what he’d discovered about the mysterious man who’d introduced them to maple syrup on snow-she’d be equally blown away-but he couldn’t risk being distracted now.

He was tired, not just from the long day, the booze, and all that driving, but from having to run and hide. He was tired of his desperate, nomadic existence, having to change hotels every other night, always having to look behind him. The fortune he’d uncovered-or, was it, more accurately, the misfortune?-had plunged him into a world of danger similar to what his father must have confronted. Part of him was tempted to give up, to throw in the towel, to stop running. But what would that entail, exactly? Was it even possible?

The people who’d been coming after him showed no signs of stopping. At least now he had some idea why. If Herbert Antholis was right, a part of that 3.4 million was skimmed-stolen, to put it simply-from Alex Pappas or from whoever his clients were.

Who was Pappas’s client? Maybe the solution, the thing that would make him safe, was as simple as figuring out who the client was and making a deal, giving back part of the cash. That was one approach. Figure out what they wanted and give it to them.

But there was another approach. Call it the confrontation option. Investigate, figure out who the client or clients were, and confront them with proof of their crime, of their role in covering up the real cause of the accident that killed the Cabreras. Maybe confronting them would flush them out, keep them at bay.

Maybe.

He opened his laptop. The problem was, he knew very little. He had only a few threads to pull at. Start with the meat-packing plant in South Boston where he’d been taken to be tortured-and would certainly have been, would have been maimed or worse, had the guys from the demo crew not tracked him there.

Who owned the place?

The sign on the front of the warehouse where he’d been taken had said B &H PACKING, 36 NEWMARKET SQ.

Newmarket Square was an area where a lot of wholesalers were located-seafood dealers, fruit-and-vegetable vendors, and the like-just off the Southeast Expressway and near the Mass Turnpike. He Googled B &H Packing on Newmarket Square and came up with only a rudimentary, temporary website. There was a slogan-“Quality purveyors to fine restaurants in the Greater Boston area”-and then just a line: “New website coming.” A few more Google attempts yielded not much more. It was a low-profile wholesale meat-packing company, that was all. No owner listed anywhere. Whoever owned the place had to be directly connected to the Irish gang that had abducted him twice.

But that seemed to be a dead end.

Then what about Donegall Charitable Trust, which, according to Joan Breslin, paid for his father’s nursing home? That was, he knew, more than 120,000 dollars a year. Not cheap. This was another dangling thread. He Googled it, as he’d done before, only to have Google reply:

No results found for “Donegall Charitable Trust”

Charities, he knew, had to file with the Internal Revenue Service. There had to be some information to dig up. But unless Joan Breslin had lied about the name-which was a possibility-it didn’t seem to exist.

A dead end.

So then there was the biggest, fattest target: Who built the Ted Williams Tunnel? That was easy. Google yielded a number of companies. The project manager was the mammoth construction firm Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff. But then a name jumped out at him: Donegall Construction Company.

That was the link. Donegall Construction.

It didn’t take long to determine that Donegall Construction was out of business.

So what did that mean?

Two points determined a line. Never mind if both points remained out of focus. An out-of-business construction company and a below-the-radar charitable trust. With enough digging, he would connect the two. He was confident in his ability to do just that.

But there was an easier way in. A name in the file of notes Monica had given him.

The name of the cop who had signed the accident report. If there had been a cover-up, the police officer who’d been on the scene would know the truth. He had a name-Police Sergeant Walter Conklin. He’d been a police sergeant twenty years ago. Odds were, he was still alive. Also that he was retired.

There was a handful of Walter Conklins in the country. In Massachusetts, only one. But he lived in Marblehead, which was a wealthy town full of yacht clubs. Not a place where cops lived. A Google search for that Walter Conklin pulled up a few articles about some local controversy over a windmill off the Marblehead coast. There’d been a public hearing at Marblehead city hall, standing room only, at which local residents voiced their opinions on putting a nearly four-hundred-foot wind turbine off Tinker’s Island, within view of Marblehead. “Over my dead body,” said local resident Walter Conklin.

When Rick went on Google Maps, he did a double take. Conklin’s house was not just in Marblehead but on Marblehead Neck, a peninsula where some of the town’s biggest houses were located. His house was directly on the water. No wonder he didn’t want his view marred by a few giant windmills. Rick shifted to Google Street View and found a sprawling shingle-style house on Ocean Avenue. He went on Zillow.com and pulled up Conklin’s house. It was valued at 2.9 million dollars.

A retired Boston policeman living in a three-million-dollar house on Marblehead Neck?

Something was very wrong.

He checked his watch. It wasn’t too late to make a call.

“Walter Conklin?”

“Who’s asking?” a gruff voice answered.

“Rick Hoffman with Back Bay magazine in Boston. I’m doing a piece on the windmill controversy up in Marblehead. Looks like they want to put some awfully big, butt-ugly windmill right in your front yard. I was wondering whether you might be willing to talk a bit about it.”

“Hell, yeah, I want to talk about it. If the board of selectmen thinks-”

“I’ll be in Marblehead tomorrow midday and would love to come by and see your view and do an interview.”

“Absolutely,” Conklin said. “It would be my pleasure.”