The Fixer (4 page)

H
e 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
.

R
ick’s ex-fiancée, Holly, had a small studio apartment on Marlborough Street in the Back Bay. She’d moved back into it once their engagement was broken. He should have realized from the glaringly obvious fact that she insisted on holding on to it even after they got engaged that she’d always had one foot out the door. She’d claimed one day they’d be glad “they” had the extra space, for storage and such. Maybe an office.

They’d lived together in a spacious three-bedroom condo on Beacon Street, in the same building where Tom Brady, the Boston quarterback, had once lived with
his
fashion-model partner. When Rick and Holly broke up, neither of them could afford it. They could scarcely afford it even when Rick had a job.

Holly’s tiny apartment was lovely, elegant, and jewel-like, like the woman herself, though also a bit cramped and impractical, like the woman herself. Or so he thought when she opened the door in a toxic cloud of recently reapplied Chanel No. 5. He was not in a forgiving mood.

She’d insisted he come over and take away his Wilson Audio floorstanders or else she’d sell them to the building super. She didn’t want those giant loudspeakers, and she was in a hurry. The movers were coming tomorrow to pack and move her out. She was moving to Miami. She worked in the fashion division of a luxury branding agency, and they’d offered her a promotion and a big raise, and besides, her mother and sister lived in South Florida.

“Oh, hi,” she said as if she didn’t expect him. As though he were a salesman, a nuisance interrupting her day. “Come on in.”

She’d taken her lunch hour to meet him here and didn’t look pleased about it either. She was dressed for work: a black leather motorcycle jacket over a white top that draped at the neck, skinny black jeans and studded black leather booties. Her ass was perfect.

She’d also recently reapplied her lipstick, so clearly she cared what she looked like to him, even though she had pointedly not kissed him. In her business, everyone was always kissing each other’s cheeks, even strangers’.

“I’ve got plenty of bubble wrap if you need it.” She waved vaguely toward a few big rolls in the corner next to her vanity. Her nails were painted ruby red. He rolled in the hand truck he’d borrowed from Jeff, navigating a fjord between cliffs of neatly packed and labeled boxes.

“Also, Rick, I’m sorry to have to ask, but you owe me like a thousand bucks.”

“For what?”

“The Amex bill. Remember, we had to use mine because your cards were full up?”

“Oh, right.”

“I’m sorry it’s come down to this. You can give it to me when you’ve got it. It’s not due until next week.”

He took out his wallet. “
Like
a thousand?”

“Eleven twenty-five, to be exact. One thousand, one hundred twenty—”

“I can do math.” He shucked out eleven hundred-dollar bills, searched for a twenty, found a fifty instead, and handed her the sheaf.

“Whoa, someone’s flush all of a sudden.” She smiled, displaying her perfectly upturned upper lip, her perfect teeth. Her parents had not stinted on their two beautiful daughters’ orthodontia.

“Sold some of my dad’s stuff.” He began wrapping each speaker in bubble wrap and then fiddled with a complicated packing-tape dispenser, gave up trying to make it work, and scratched the end up from the roll of tape. “Congrats on the promotion,” he said.
Doing whatever it is you do, but for more money.
“What’s the new gig?”

She did something involving “brand positioning,” developed “brand voices” for her clients, doing image and messaging revamps for fashion designers. Solving for a brand’s “challenge,” delivering an “impactful” message, working on the engagement strategy and developing actionable plans to deliver agreed-upon goals.

Or some such mumbo jumbo. It was all just verbal Styrofoam anyway. Packing peanuts of meaninglessness. It was a job, something that paid the rent between modeling gigs, which weren’t all that plentiful in the Boston market. Her company’s motto was brilliantly stupid: “Simplify.” Maybe he should have paid more attention: When it came to their relationship, her “engagement strategy” had been to simplify him out of her life.

“I’ll be—” she started. Then: “Like you’re actually interested.”

“Of course I’m interested.” A car alarm went off somewhere nearby.

“Anyway,” she said, “it’s a lot more responsibility and a thirty percent bump in pay, and I get to move back to Miami so I can be there to help out Mom.”

“How is Jackie doing? Is the lupus flaring up again?”

“Rick, okay, you can stop now.”

“Stop what?” He slid the hand truck’s nose plate under one bubble-swathed speaker and realized this was going to take two trips out to the car.

“Pretending you ever gave a shit.”

“Not this again,” he said with a groan.

“I’m sorry, Rick, but you were so not ready for marriage. I have no idea why you even proposed.” She’d sold the diamond engagement ring for not much money to a jeweler downtown. He thought they should have at least split the proceeds, but he was too demoralized to wage battle over it.

“Because I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you. Which, by the way, you were totally into until the paychecks stopped.”

“Oh, please.” She put one hand on her slender waist. She was in even better shape than when they lived together. Mourning their engagement obviously hadn’t kept her from Pilates. “You couldn’t have been less interested in my inner life. I was an . . . accessory. Every time we walked into a party or a fund-raiser it was so clear I was just your arm candy. You were so into the way other people were looking at me. You showed me off like I was your goddamned fire engine–red midlife-crisis Ferrari Testarossa.
Eat your heart out, look who I’m tapping
.”

He bristled a bit. “You just didn’t want to live in poverty, and you finally figured that out.”

“No, Rick, I figured
you
out. You were always clocking who’s up and who’s down. I was that tall blonde who looks great in tennis whites. You loved the idea of making other people jealous.”

“That’s not true. I loved you.”

“No, Rick. You loved
that
.”

He shook his head and scowled, but something acid at the back of his throat told Rick she might have a point.