The Fixer

6

He walked to Harvard Square, limping slightly, his head pounding, and into the Charles Hotel. The pain had subsided considerably. He’d been kicked, or hit, or walloped with something. His abdomen was tender and bruised. His rib cage hurt, mostly when he breathed. He’d bit his lip, hard, when he fell. Other than that, he was unharmed. By the time he’d gotten to his feet and gone downstairs, his attacker was gone.

He had no idea how the man-he’d assumed it was a man-had gotten in. But he had no doubt the man was after the cash. The house wasn’t safe.

“I have a deluxe king for three ninety-nine,” the clerk-midtwenties, neatly trimmed beard, tweezed brows-said.

“I’ll take it.” He hesitated. “You take cash, right?”

“Of course, sir, but I’ll need to take an imprint of your card for incidentals.”

He handed over one of his useless credit cards and hoped the clerk wouldn’t run it.

It occurred to him that he could in fact take the Presidential Suite, if the Charles had one. The most expensive suite in the hotel. But for now, just staying in a nice hotel room felt like an outrageous splurge. At least until he determined who this money belonged to, he’d be… prudent, as he liked to think of it.

He went to his room and felt relieved to bolt the door behind him. He felt safe. Later he’d bring a suitcase over. He took the packets of money out of his ski parka and locked them in the hotel safe. He took his MacBook Air out of his shoulder bag and did some quick research.

His father’s secretary-she’d been more than that, actually; she was his adviser and traffic cop and praetorian guard and personal assistant-was a woman named Joan Breslin. A no-nonsense platinum-haired woman with a South Boston accent, a brusque manner, a tart tongue. And clearly the patience of Job, having put up with Len’s shenanigans for all those years. As far as Rick could recall, she had retired after his father’s stroke. She was living in Melrose or Malden or Medford, one of the M-towns north of Boston.

He had her phone number but didn’t remember where she lived. Switchboard.com was no help. There was a long column of Breslins in Melrose and Malden, none of them Joan. She was married, Rick was fairly sure, or widowed, and she was of the generation of women who usually listed themselves under their husbands’ names. So she’d be under John or Frank or whatever, probably not Joan. ZabaSearch.com was more helpful, since it listed ages. Eventually he found a Joan Breslin, age seventy-two, in Melrose, listed under her husband, Timothy.

A woman answered the phone on the fifth ring. He imagined a tan wall phone in the kitchen, a long gnarled coiled cord.

“Is this Joan?”

“Who’s calling?”

“It’s Rick Hoffman. Leonard Hoffman’s son.”

A pause. “Oh, my goodness, Rick, how are you?”

“I’m good. And… Tim?”

“Yeah, you know…” She suddenly sounded worried. “Oh, no, is it-Lenny?”

“Dad’s fine. I mean, he’s the same.”

“Oh, good. I paid him a visit a couple years ago, Rick, but it’s hard, you know. Seeing him like that.”

“I know.”

“I can’t. It-it tears me apart.”

“Me, too,” he said. “Me, too. Thanks for that.” He paused. “I haven’t heard from you in a while, so I assume everything’s okay with the insurance, right?” She’d set up long-term care insurance for Lenny and very generously volunteered to handle all the paperwork for him as long as he was alive.

“Everything’s fine, nothing to worry about.”

“Joan, I wonder, if it’s not too much of an inconvenience, whether I could come by and talk to you for a bit. I have some questions.”

An inconvenience. Like your schedule is crowded, Rick thought, between mah-jongg and trips to the supermarket and to the post office to buy stamps, one at a time.

“Talk? I don’t know what I-”

“Just some loose ends concerning my dad’s law practice. It’s about… Well, I don’t know anything about how law firms operate. Things like escrow accounts and how he dealt with cash and all that kind of thing.”

“Escrow? Is someone complaining they never got their retainer back? Because-”

“No, nothing like that. It’s a bit… involved. Could I drive out to, ah, Melrose, and maybe we could have a cup of coffee?”

“I’ve got houseguests,” she said. “Can this wait?”

Rick agreed to call her back in a couple of days, after her guests had left. But Rick wasn’t particularly optimistic. She hadn’t sounded defensive or squirrelly on the phone. If she knew something about a vast quantity of cash, she’d sound different, he decided. Evasive, maybe, if she’d been involved in covering something up. Or frightened. Or at least knowing, somehow.

He went out to get some supplies for the next few days.

Half an hour later, in line at a supermarket on Mount Auburn Street, pushing a cart full of cold cereal and milk and yogurt, plus some junk food, SunChips and Tostitos Hint of Lime, he heard someone call his name. He turned around.

“Rick? That is you. Oh my God.”

“Andrea.” His face lit up.

He’d barely noticed the woman in line behind him, wearing sweatpants and a long puffy white down coat, scraggly hair pulled back in a kerchief. At first glance she looked like some overscheduled Cambridge mom racing through her checklist of errands.

Andrea Messina had been his girlfriend senior year at Linwood. They’d gone out starting with the winter semiformal, continuing into the summer after graduation, when he’d broken things off before heading to college. He hadn’t seen her since. Just seeing her now gave him an uneasy pang of guilt. He’d been an asshole and had never paid the bill.

He hugged her, gave her a kiss on the cheek. She kissed the air. She smelled of a new, different perfume than he remembered, something more sophisticated, but after two decades a woman had the right to change perfumes.

On second glance, he realized that despite her general dishevelment, she was attractive, strikingly so. Even more than in high school. She’d always been cute, doe-eyed, winsome, graceful. A dancer. Her brown hair had honey highlights. Now her face was thinner, more contoured. She still had creamy skin; she’d always had, but in a woman in her midthirties it was particularly noticeable. She’d grown into her beauty.

“Great,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in like forever and I look like a bag lady.” She adjusted her kerchief and finger-combed a few tendrils of hair behind her ears. He noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

“Not even close,” Rick said. “You look terrific. You live around here?”

“Off Fresh Pond, yeah. Don’t you live in Boston? Not around here…?”

“I’m doing some work on the old house on Clayton Street.”

“Is your dad still…”

“He’s still alive, yeah. In a nursing home.”

“I heard he had a terrible stroke.”

He nodded. “It sucks, but it is what it is.” He hated that empty phrase-what did that mean, anyway, it is what it is?-but it had just slipped out. It was what it was. He’d once done an interview for Back Bay with a local hip-hop celebrity who kept saying It is what it is and haters gonna hate and I just want to live my life. “Your mom and dad okay?” he asked.

“Charlie and Dora are still Charlie and Dora, so… yeah.”

He looked at her grocery cart full of Goldfish and graham crackers, juice boxes and applesauce, peanut butter and Fruit Roll-Ups. “Crazy guess here, but you’ve got a kid?” He bypassed the question of whether she was married or not; the absence of a wedding ring seemed conclusive. “Or maybe you’ve just gotten into snack foods in a big way.”

“Evan is seven.” She smiled. “It even rhymes. But not much longer-he’s about to turn eight.”

“Evan eats a lot of Goldfish, I see. The five-gallon carton.”

“He’s having a birthday party. And you’re still a health-food nut.”

“You mean Tostitos aren’t a basic food group?”

“It’s got the hint of lime, so you’re getting your vitamin C.”

He squinted, tilted his head. “Why did I think you were in New York?”

He remembered she’d gone off to the University of Michigan but lost track of her after that. He thought she might have made the obligatory postcollege migration to Manhattan.

“Yeah, I was with Goldman Sachs for about like two seconds.”

“Goldman Sachs?” Not what he’d expected. He’d pegged her for a more modest career track, working for the state or an insurance company. Less high-powered, anyway. Goldman Sachs seemed pretty high-test for the Andrea he knew.

“Yep. How’s the magazine business?”

“Eh, I’ve moved on, I guess you’d say.”

“Oh yeah? What are you doing?”

“Bit of this, bit of that.” He put his Golden Grahams and Cheerios and Tostitos on the conveyor belt and put the green plastic divider bar at the end of his items like a punctuation mark. He glanced back at her again and smiled. “Hey, are you ever free for dinner? Like maybe tonight?”

“Tonight? I mean… no way I could get a babysitter last-minute.” She blushed. He remembered now: Whenever she was embarrassed or excited, she blushed. Her translucent skin displayed her discomfort like a beacon. She could never hide it.

“Tomorrow night, then?”

“I could… I could ask my sister… but the thing is, I can’t stay out too late. My day starts ridiculously early.” She fingered a tendril of hair. “How about I let you know?”

Usually, he knew, that formula meant no. But something about her told him that this time it meant yes.