The Fixer

57

Gloria Antunes, executive director of the Hyde Square Community Partnership, was polite but firm.

“Mr. Hoffman, I’ve already told you I have nothing to contribute.” She wore a blue paisley scarf around her shoulders and the same large hoop earrings she’d been wearing the last time he saw her.

“Actually, you do,” he said. “You are already part of my article. The question is how big a role will you play in it. That’s up to you.” He held a DVD in its case from the video duplication place on Newbury Street. She wouldn’t know what was on that DVD-he’d had a copy made of the old VHS that Manuela Guzman, Graciela’s piano teacher, had played for him. But he waved it like a prosecutor wagging a piece of evidence in court.

“I don’t understand.”

“Give me five minutes of your time and you will.”

“I can give you two.”

Rick shrugged and entered her office. He sat in front of her desk, and when she had taken her place behind the desk he handed her the DVD.

She took it. “And?” She cocked her head.

“Play this in your computer.”

“What is it?”

But she inserted the DVD in the disk drive of her desktop.

When the video started to play, Rick narrated: “That’s the little girl. Graciela Cabrera.”

He saw it in her tear-flooded eyes. The tape had that effect on people. On him, on Lenny, and now on Gloria Antunes. The girl’s awkwardness and her endearing, pure sweetness.

Rick continued, speaking over the audio. “At first you called for an investigation into the accident that killed the Cabreras. After your organization received a sizable gift from the Donegall Charitable Trust, you suddenly zipped up. I know this because my father was the one who arranged it.”

That last sentence he was improvising, but he knew at once he’d guessed right. She had no idea what his father might have told Rick after all these years. And if she had been given a check by Pappas and not Lenny, she wouldn’t know what might have happened behind the scenes.

“You knew this family. This girl. Didn’t you?”

Gloria nodded. Her eyes looked red. She closed them. “A terrible thing.”

“It must be so difficult.”

“What must be so difficult?”

“To live with yourself. Knowing what happened to them.”

When her tears began to flow, Rick knew he had reached her.

Whether it was the videotape or Rick’s bluffing, his intimations that he knew for certain far more than he did, she finally broke down. She had lived with the guilt for eighteen years, the guilt of her silence. The Donegall Charitable Trust was still one of her main funders, but she had others now. That wasn’t the case when it was just Gloria Antunes, community activist, before the Donegall trust had offered to fund the launch of her own organization.

Legally, she’d committed no crimes. But she was haunted. The responsibility she felt was a moral one, the weight of all those years of keeping her silence about what had really happened to the Cabrera family one night in a tunnel in Boston.

Now, finally, she was willing to speak on the record.