The Fixer

by Joseph Finder

  “Huh.” He’d never thought about Jeff as a serious adult, let alone a successful builder.

  “You wouldn’t believe what houses on this block are selling for, man. It’s crazy. It’s like—you know the D’Agostino place across the street?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think they got one-point-five mil for that place, and it’s not nearly as nice as this . . . could be, I mean.”

  “A million and a half bucks? For that dump?”

  “I know, it’s crazy. I mean, you put some good work into this place, you could get two mil easy. More, even.”

  “I don’t really have the . . . liquidity, I gotta be honest with you.”

  Jeff nodded. “We could do a deal, maybe. Like, my company does the work and I get a cut of the sale. Work out something that’s good for both of us.” He took out a pack of Marlboros and a Zippo. “Mind?”

  “You kidding? Anything to get that cat piss smell out of my nostrils.”

  Jeff chuckled as he lit a cigarette. “Luckily I don’t smell it.”

  “Upstairs in my dad’s office, that’s where it’s bad. Plus, we’ve got critters living inside the walls.”

  Jeff exhaled twin plumes of smoke. “So what do you think?”

  Rick was quiet for a long moment. He thought, What the hell. This could be fairly painless. “When could you start?”

  “Anytime. Like now.”

  “Business slow?”

  “Always slows down in the winter. I mean, I’ve got a couple of big jobs lined up starting March or April. . . .”

  “It’s an interesting idea. If we can work it out, I mean.”

  “Well, so think about it. Meanwhile, let me check out what that smell is upstairs. I got a pretty good idea I know.”

  Jeff followed Rick up the stairs. “Jeez,” he said, toeing the condom wrapper. “Can’t even clean up their own shit.”

  When they got to the study, Jeff said, “So that was the crash I heard.” He snorted. “Oh yeah, I smell it now. That’s nasty. Hold on, I’ll be right back.”

  He galumphed down the staircase. Rick was picking up the larger pieces of glass when Jeff appeared in the doorway, a shop broom and dustpan in one hand and a crowbar in the other.

  “Thought you could use this.” He handed Rick the broom and dustpan. Then, waggling the crowbar, he said, “If you’re serious about doing work on the place, I can open up the wall and see what the problem is.”

  Rick shrugged. “Go for it, why not.”

  Jeff walked carefully to the middle of the room, weaving around and through the broken glass. Then he stood, head cocked, listening. A moment later, the rustling started up again. Jeff followed the sound to the back wall, then stood still for a few seconds more. He opened the closet door, heavy and paneled, with an ornamented brass knob. He noticed the dangling string, the pull cord, and tugged it to switch on the bare bulb mounted on the canted ceiling.

  Jeff nodded, smiled. “They’re in the crawl space. Squirrels, I betcha. They get in through roof vents or they chew holes in the soffit. Evil little buggers.”

  He hoisted the crowbar and slammed its hooked end into the back wall of the closet. A chunk of the wall came away with a screech. It wasn’t plaster and lath, Rick saw, but a flat piece of plywood, ten or twelve inches across, a couple of feet long.

  “Here she comes,” Jeff said. “Easy.”

  Jeff stepped aside as the long board toppled to the closet floor in a cloud of plaster. A tall hole had opened in the back wall of the closet, too narrow to get through, but enough to glimpse the dim interior. There was a scree sound and a quick pitter-patter, like rain on the ceiling, the mad scrambling of small creatures.

  “Squirrels,” Jeff announced. “Knew it.” He coughed. “Whoa. Gross.”

  Rick stepped closer to get a look.

  “Hate squirrels,” Jeff said. “Nothing more than furry-tailed rats.”

  Then he jammed the crowbar into the wall once more and ripped out the adjoining board. It squealed as it came out, nails screeching against wood, and clattered to the floor.

  “No plasterboard here,” Jeff said. “Strange. Like they just painted over this plywood.”

  “What is it, a nest?” Rick asked. “I don’t want the goddamned squirrels running around inside the house.”

  “Nah, if there’s a nest, it’s probably on the other side of the house. This right here is their latrine.”

  “Latrine?”

  “Squirrels don’t soil their own nests usually.”

  “Think they’re still in there?” Rick asked.

  “Maybe, maybe not. If they’ve got babies in the nest, they’re not leaving.”

  “So now what?”

  “Trap ’em, that’s the best way. Or chase ’em out of here. Then seal up the holes with hardware cloth or steel mesh.”

  Rick could now see into the crawl space a little more clearly. In the faint, dappled light—from a lot of little holes in the roof, he guessed—a pile of some sort was silhouetted, a heap a few feet tall.

  “Careful where you walk, there, dude,” Jeff said.

  Rick took a few more steps, through the opening, into the crawl space. He hunched over—because of the steeply pitched roof, there wasn’t enough room to stand.

  “You know,” Jeff said, “if you want to open up some of these walls up here, we can get some more square footage on this floor. Bedroom nook, a kid’s room, whatever. Could even put in skylights—that would be nice. I’ve had good luck with Velux Cabrio balcony roof windows.”

  As Rick’s eyes adjusted to the dark, he moved closer to the pile. A black plastic tarp, on top of what were probably boxes. Now the boarded-up section of the closet wall made sense. At some point in the century or so of the house’s history, the crawl space, normally wasted space, was used for storage. Maybe it was accessed through the closet. A trapdoor, a removable panel, was put in. Maybe it was part of the original construction.

  “Careful in there,” Jeff said. “I’ve seen squirrels attack people, you know. They don’t even have to be rabid. You invade their nest . . .”

  Rick tugged at one corner of the tarp, but it wouldn’t lift up; it was stapled to another piece of tarp. He yanked harder this time, and a couple of staples popped and sprinkled to the floor, and now he could see inside.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  He looked again. What he saw didn’t register.

  “You get bit?” Jeff said with a cackle.

  The light in there was bad, but there was just enough to make out the engraved number 100 and Ben Franklin’s face. It seemed a mirage. He stuck his hand into the hole in the tarp and pulled at the first thing he could grasp.

  A wad of hundred-dollar bills, it looked like. A band bisecting the packet, printed twice with the number $10,000.

  His hand was actually trembling, he realized.

  “Dude, what is it?” Jeff said.

  “Nothing,” Rick said.

  2

  His first instinct was to conceal. Without even thinking about it, he swiveled, placing his body between Jeff and the tarp-covered heap, blocking Jeff’s view.

  . . . view of what?

  Whatever was in that hulking pile, a couple of feet high by maybe four feet wide, Rick knew what was on top of it: packets of money. Packets of hundred-dollar bills. Maybe not the whole pile; that would be crazy, flat-out inconceivable. Packets of money atop . . . what? A pile of papers, maybe files.

  The whole pile couldn’t be cash. That wasn’t possible. He tossed the packet back onto the heap.

  He couldn’t think clearly. He needed to look again, but without Jeff around. Because what he’d seen had blown his mind. He’d held, in his very own hand, ten thousand dollars. A hundred hundred-dollar bills. In one single packet. And that was just the top of the pile.

  Money that obviously wa
sn’t his father’s, because Len had no money.

  “Looked like cash you were holding there,” Jeff said. Something about his tone, lower and insinuating, had changed. He sounded more aggressive.

  A shadow obscured his face. Rick couldn’t see his eyes.

  Rick tried to give a dismissive chuckle, but his mouth was dry and it came out hah, more scornful than he intended. “I wish.” He clambered out of the opening in the wall, forcing Jeff to back up out of the way. “Bunch of old register receipts is what it is.”

  “Well, let’s drag it out here into the sunlight.”

  “Another time.” Rick sounded weary and bored. He glanced at his watch. “I’m going to need to get going.”

  “Well, now, hold on a sec—do we have a deal?”

  “In principle, yeah. But we’ve got to talk about what kind of work you’ll be doing, how long it’s going to take, all that.”

  “Well, sure.”

  “I’m not thinking a gut renovation, just so you know.” Rick put a hand on Jeff’s shoulder, on the coarse cotton duck of his barn coat, guiding him out of the room and toward the stairs. “Minimal destruction. Repairs and improvements, mostly. Second and third floors. Paper over the cracks.”

  “I don’t know as I agree about that, Rick. There’s rotten wood all down through the middle of the house. Serious water damage. Probably from a worn pipe boot—water’s been leaking into the ceiling for years. Or maybe it’s from stopped-up gutters or leaking chimney flashing. Rain’s been seeping down into the house for years, making wet spots. Causing wood rot and mold. Gonna have to cut out the rotten wood and plaster in some parts. Not everywhere. Just some parts.”

  Rick groaned. “You serious?”

  “I’ll take you through and show you.”

  Rick shook his head. “I believe you. But I’m gonna want you to draw up a plan. Put it down on paper so there’s no misunderstanding.”

  “Sure, sure.”

  “How soon could you do it?”

  “I could get started on it tonight. Like I said, it’s slow, this time of year.”

  “Sounds good,” Rick said.

  * * *

  As soon as he’d gotten Jeff out of the house, Rick rummaged in the kitchen drawers and found a flashlight. He clicked it on but its batteries were dead. He found a D cell battery nestled among an assortment of stray Ziploc sandwich bags and swapped it for one of the old ones, and that provided enough juice to generate a feeble light.

  He went back upstairs to his father’s study. Its window looked out onto the Hollenbecks’ yard, which meant that Jeff could see into the room. But pulling the venetian blinds closed would cast the study into darkness, and the overhead light was burned out here, too. It also would look strange for him to pull the blinds, as if he were trying to hide something from Jeff.

  He left them open and returned to the crawl space. It still smelled of squirrel urine, but now he barely minded. He directed the sputtering beam of watery light at the tarp-covered pile. He yanked at the tarp, hard, and popped some more of the staples. He pulled the flap back and shone the light to see what was there.

  It was a neat square stack about a foot and a half tall and maybe two or three feet per side. It gave off a musty odor. From what he could discern, by directing the failing light back and forth over the pile and lifting random packets, it was all banknotes. Top to bottom.

  He was able to count 398 packets before the flashlight died. Most of them—290 packets—were hundred-dollar bills; the rest—108 packets—were fifties. He found a dog-eared gas station receipt in his wallet and scrawled a calculation on it. The total was 3,440,000 dollars.

  More than 3.4 million dollars.

  He felt a strange vertiginous sensation, as if he were plummeting headfirst into space. His head was spinning, swimming. He picked up one of the packets of hundreds and rifled through it with his thumb. He inhaled its musk. He could smell mildew and tobacco, solvent and ink and sweat. Some of the banknotes looked as if they’d never been circulated: They were crisp and unmarked. Others were dog-eared and creased.

  He glanced at the off-center engraving of Ben Franklin on the front of the banknote, with shoulder-length hair and a constipated expression. It certainly looked legit, not counterfeit, though he was no expert.

  How long had this pile been walled up here? The bills looked new—uncirculated, anyway—but they’d probably been inside the wall for a few decades.

  He only knew he couldn’t leave them here.

  3

  He grabbed a handful of plastic supermarket shopping bags from the broom closet—a couple from Star Market and a couple from Whole Foods, from the old days, when they used to give out plastic bags. The packets of cash fit into six bags, but when he tried to lift one of them, the bag broke and the cash tumbled to the floor. He doubled each bag, then hauled them downstairs two at a time, handling the flimsy bags gingerly. When he’d gathered them at the foot of the staircase, he tested carrying two at a time. Not possible; the weight he could manage, but the cash was too bulky. He didn’t want to risk a bag failure between the house and the car, cash spilling across the driveway.

  Especially if Jeff were watching from next door. Why the hell wasn’t he off on a job somewhere, renovating a Watertown condo or building a spec house? What did he do all day when he didn’t have a job scheduled?

  The trunk of his old red BMW 3 Series—the red had been a mistake, one of a long line of mistakes; cops really did go after red cars more often—was stuffed with crap. A gym bag, a pile of magazines he’d optimistically planned to read on the elliptical trainer, a set of jumper cables. He rearranged the junk, jamming old Entertainment Weeklys and Back Bays as far back as possible, until there was room for the six bagsful of cash. Then, after looking around outside to make sure Jeff—or anyone else—wasn’t for some reason watching, he trundled the bags carefully to the trunk.

  Then he got into the driver’s seat and sat there, thinking for a moment of where he might take 3.4 million dollars for safekeeping. The obvious place, of course, was a bank. A safe-deposit box. He didn’t have one; all he knew about safe-deposit boxes was what he’d seen in the movies and on TV. He seemed to remember a standard size of a few feet long by maybe eight or ten inches wide. Did they come in larger sizes? He assumed you could request a larger one if you wanted.

  His bank had a branch office in Harvard Square. He started the car and maneuvered down Clayton Street to Huron Ave, and then over to Garden Street toward the square. He’d begun to think more clearly now, and he started having second thoughts about carting six grocery bags of cash into the Bank of America. Was it even legal to store cash in a safe-deposit box? He pulled the car over to the shoulder in a no-stopping zone and switched on his blinkers.

  He loaded the Safari browser on his phone and searched. The answer wasn’t clear. Banks had to notify the IRS of any deposits of more than ten thousand dollars. But that referred to deposits into bank accounts. Not stashing away packets of cash.

  Still, in this post-9/11 age, banks probably had to pay close attention to the movements of large quantities of cash, right? In case it was connected to ill-gotten gains? Maybe the US government could even confiscate your cash if it thought you were engaged in criminal activity. He wasn’t sure, but it wouldn’t have surprised him if that were true.

  If he wandered into the Harvard Square branch of the Bank of America toting six shopping bags full of cash, mostly hundreds, that was as good as blowing a trumpet and announcing to the world that he was a coke dealer. He would be observed, no question about it—how could any banker who wasn’t too busy texting or checking her Facebook page fail to observe him carrying in a load of cash? Then the teller would summon the assistant manager, and . . .

  It no longer seemed like such a good idea to bring all this cash into a bank.

  In fact, it didn’t seem like such a good idea to carry his cash anywhe
re in those crappy supermarket bags. Not just because of the risk of the bags’ splitting, but also because anyone could see their contents. That was just asking to get mugged.

  He turned off his blinkers and pulled back into traffic and headed back the way he’d come, then over to Mass Ave, where he found a 7-Eleven. Parking the car in a space he could monitor from inside the store, he quickly bought a box of Glad trash bags (ForceFlex, black, extra strong) and returned to the car. Standing at the trunk, about to pop the lid, he suddenly became aware of how exposed he was.

  Any passerby, anyone peering out of a car in the honking, snarling traffic, would be able to see into the trunk. All that cash—that insane, scarcely believable quantity of cash—wasn’t something you wanted to put on display.

  He pulled the car out of the space, turned it around, front end out. Safer this way. Now maybe someone inside the store could see, if he happened to be looking. But there seemed to be no one in the 7-Eleven except the cashier. He pressed the button on the remote and the trunk opened, and there they were, six bulky overstuffed shopping bags, the diaphanous plastic strained to the breaking point. He glanced over his shoulder for the third time, reassured no one was watching, and set to work pulling a big opaque black trash bag over each smaller one, jammed with legal tender.

  Then he slammed the trunk closed.

  He looked around again, just to make sure no one had seen anything, and then he glimpsed a truck lumbering by with COSMOS SELF STORAGE painted on its side, and he had an idea.

  * * *

  Cosmos Self Storage was a tall boxy cinder block building on a short block of matching cinder block buildings off Fresh Pond rotary, a faceless row of automotive glass companies and plumbing supply firms. It looked freshly painted, bright yellow, like a Crayola box. He parked right in front and locked the BMW when he entered. Inside it was cavernous, warehouselike. The storage units were rows upon rows of converted industrial pallet racks. Sitting at a desk behind a window was a young guy with big eyelet piercings in each earlobe. He answered Rick’s questions in a tone that made it clear he’d rather be doing anything other than sitting in a box in a self-storage facility. He slid a clipboard through the slot.