The Fixer

by Joseph Finder

  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.

  8

  Music was blasting from the house on Clayton Street by the time Rick pulled up in his red BMW the next morning, angry-sounding rap, so loud it was distorted. He parked behind an old Ford flatbed truck, a beater with DEMO KING TRASH-A-WAY painted on its side, and not by a professional.

  The front door was wedged open. Plaster dust was everywhere. Three guys in white polypropylene coveralls and white plastic helmets, wearing respirators, were tearing off chunks of wall. Plaster chips were flying. The floors were covered with Masonite panels duct-taped together. A gray plastic trash barrel was heaped with scrolls of ancient wallpaper and scraps of lumber with nails sticking out.

  A radio blared: You ain’t gotta like it ’cuz the hood gone love it.

  “What the hell?” Rick said, but the guys in the white suits didn’t hear him. One of them was prying off a door casing, the nails screeching a protest as they pulled out.

  I’mma kill it . . . I buy a morgue in a minute.

  “There he is! You better put one of these on.” Jeff handed Rick a dust mask, a white cup with elastic loops. “You don’t want to breathe that shit.”

  “Where’s all the furniture?”

  “DeShawn and Marlon and Santiago have been working since seven—they moved stuff into the basement. Put tarps on it and all that.” He reached down and shut off the radio or CD player. The guys in the white suits turned to look. “DeShawn, Santiago, Marlon, this is Mr. Hoffman. He’s the owner.”

  The three workers were huge, tatted guys, two black and one Hispanic, one bigger than the next. One of the black guys thrust out his hand. “Marlon.”

  “Rick.”

  The other two just nodded, regarding him suspiciously.

  “Demo crew?” Rick asked Jeff.

  “Construction, too. They do everything for me. I don’t use subs. Keeps the costs down.” He pointed toward one of the trash barrels. “You see the black mold on that plaster? It’s bad.” Then he pointed to a big section of the wall that was open. “The old lath-and-plaster construction. They put horsehair in the plaster, which makes it a real pain in the ass when it comes to demo. I get hives.”

  “How long is this going to take?”

  “Demo, a week, maybe. Most of the house gets left intact. But you’re not staying here. I, uh . . . I notice you didn’t spend the night here.”

  “Glad I didn’t.”

  “Back to your apartment across the river?”

  “I stayed . . . with a friend. You got a minute? We need to talk.”

  Jeff looked at him curiously, shrugged. “Sure.”

  One of the guys, either DeShawn or Santiago, flicked the boom box back on. The angry rap blasted: Get out the way, bitch, get out the way. They resumed hurling chunks of plasterboard and scraps of timber out of the second-floor window into the Dumpster below.

  Rick signaled outside and they stepped onto the front porch.

  “I signed the contract,” he said, “but that wasn’t our deal.” Rick wanted it out in the open. He wanted Jeff to acknowledge it.

  “These guys need to be paid,” Jeff said.

  “I thought you were planning to front the money.”

  “I don’t normally do that, front the money. Anyway, things have changed.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Look, I didn’t wan
t to say anything about this, but you know, we’ve been helping out your family for years. All those years, Meghan and I kept an eye on your house. When you had those sketchy renters, we let you guys know. I used to shovel the driveway when the snowplow service didn’t show up.”

  Rick blinked a few times, surprised. He knew Jeff and his medical-receptionist wife, Meghan, had been vaguely helpful, but didn’t know the specifics. He wondered if this was going where he feared it might be going.

  “I appreciate all that, Jeff. A lot. You guys have been great.”

  “I’m just saying. All these years, we never said anything about it. Plus the guys. They need to be paid.”

  “What happened to our arrangement?”

  “Like I said, things have changed. You can afford a hell of a lot more than forty thousand bucks for the job, and you know it.”

  “Jeff, I don’t know how much you—”

  “You really want to have this conversation?” Jeff’s eyes glittered, as if maybe he did.

  Rick felt his stomach flip over. He heaved a sigh.

  “I’m thinking maybe I’m owed a little . . . consideration,” Jeff said.

  “Consideration.”

  “You know what I’m saying.”

  He paused, decided to change the subject. “Let me ask you something. You see anyone around the house a couple nights ago? I mean, middle of the night.”

  Jeff shrugged, shook his head.

  “The kitchen door was unlocked. You weren’t in the house, were you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Someone came in, was snooping around.”

  “Didn’t see anyone. Sorry.”

  Rick noticed that one of the guys in the white suits was standing at the front door, watching them. The guy pushed open the glass storm door and said, “Jeff, you want us start filling up the Dumpster?”

  “Yeah, Santiago, you and Marlon cart out the scraps. DeShawn can keep at what he’s doing.”

  Santiago peered at Rick, then over to Jeff, and said something in Spanish. Jeff answered him in Spanish, sounding fluent. Santiago laughed gutturally and said something back, this time clearly looking at Rick as he spoke. He was gesturing with his hands. Then he turned and headed back inside, letting the storm door slam behind him.

  Rick didn’t know Spanish, but he understood one word Santiago had said.

  Dinero.

  9

  Jeff knew about the money. He’d seen it, that was clear. But how much did he know? Jeff was smart, no question about it. He had a builder’s gift of space perception—had he somehow extrapolated, based on his glimpse of the hundred-dollar bills, how much was there?

  Though they’d known each other since they were both kids, Rick didn’t know Jeff well. But Jeff had always struck Rick as basically honest. Salt of the earth. A Good Samaritan, maybe. He wasn’t going to do anything threatening or violent, Rick was confident.

  Nearly confident, anyway.

  The guys in the demo crew Rick wasn’t so sure of. They were huge, and their tattoos looked like prison ink. If they found out about the cash, they could be serious trouble. Greed brought out the worst in people.

  Back in his hotel room, his mind went to Andrea Messina, and he opened his laptop. A quick Google search turned up a LinkedIn profile, showing her employed at Goldman Sachs in New York as a banker. The entry had to be out of date. He could imagine the rest of her story line. She marries a fellow investment banker or a trader at Goldman, gets pregnant, has a baby—and then the marriage implodes. The Goldman guy’s an asshole. Not exactly front-page news. She gets divorced and moves back home to Cambridge, where her mother’s available to be part-time babysitter. Or something along those lines, anyway. Hubby visits his kid two, maybe three times a month. She’s used to pulling in big bucks at Goldman, and now she’s living at home with Mom. A long slide down the razor blade of life. Welcome to the club.

  His feelings toward Andrea were complicated. He was surprised at how attractive he found her. He also felt a considerable degree of guilt. He’d been a jerk in high school. He wanted to apologize, but it was twenty years too late.

  At least he could try to make it up to her. He called the best restaurant in Boston, a place called Madrigal. Back Bay regularly ran pieces on the chef and reviews, and he knew that you had to call them a month or more in advance to get a reservation. If you were lucky and had strings to pull. Plus, it was preposterously expensive, rivaling New York spots like Per Se or Masa. The girl on the other end of the phone had no idea, when he identified himself as Rick Hoffman from Back Bay Magazine, that he’d been fired. They knew his name. They might have cared more about what Zagat or Michelin thought, but they preferred to stay on Back Bay’s good side, even if it was now only a website.

  He got a table for two that evening at eight.

  The problem was—though it really wasn’t much of a problem at all, he realized—that he didn’t have anything decent to wear on his date with Andrea tonight. His good clothes had been sold. What remained in his few suitcases was mostly jeans and casual attire, the stuff he couldn’t sell online, not what you’d wear to Madrigal.

  And he wanted to look good for her. He was fronting, he knew: He wanted to look successful even if he felt like an enormous failure.

  He debated taking his car into Boston. Then he thought about the difficulty of finding a parking space in the Back Bay and settled on the easiest, if most expensive option. He’d take a cab, reminding himself he didn’t have to worry what it cost.

  He got out on Newbury Street in front of one of the few stand-alone buildings on the street, which was lined mostly with three- or four-story row house brownstones. This was a magnificent redbrick mansion, originally built in the nineteenth century as a single-family residence. Now it housed the most exclusive men’s clothing store in town, Marco Boston. Marco was where Mort Ostrow was outfitted, at least until his calamitous financial blunder.

  Ostrow had taken Rick in here a couple of times. Rick had seen a pair of socks selling for a hundred dollars, a baseball jersey selling for twenty-three hundred dollars. He’d seen cashmere jogging suits and ostrich vests and lizard-leather boots and a kangaroo-hide jacket. The price tags had commas but no decimals.

  Inside, the store was spare and imposing. The floors were polished concrete. There were no clothing racks; items were brought out and displayed with hushed reverence. Here and there were austere floral arrangements, white calla lilies and orchids. A ten-foot-long library table had exactly three sweaters on it, each folded into a perfect square. An antique tapestry hung on one wall. An immense crystal chandelier twinkled overhead.

  A couple of clerks—sales associates—were murmuring off to one side as he entered, a slender man all in black and a severe woman in a black pencil skirt and a charcoal cardigan. The woman drifted toward him and asked, “How may I be of service?” Then she cocked her head in recognition. “Welcome back.”

  “Thanks.” She was good. Now he remembered her waiting on him the last time he was here, in the lower-priced section of the store, on the top floor. That was where they sold the Marco’s Own line. Which still wasn’t cheap, not even close, just not as ridiculously expensive.

  “Mr. . . . Hoffman, isn’t it? Sheila.”

  Surprised she remembered, he smiled. “Nice to see you again.”

  “Shall we take a ride to the fourth floor?”

  “Sure. Actually, you know what? The hell with that. Maybe I can find something I like on this floor.”

  He sat in an antique leather French club chair in his own private changing-room suite, while Sheila rounded up a couple of blazers and shirts and pants she thought he’d like. Meanwhile, a white-gloved butler served him a flute of excellent Champagne. Rick half expected to get a foot massage (“Care for a bit of reflexology?”) as he compared Massimo Bizzocchi ties. He could have been the sultan o
f Brunei.

  Sure, he could have picked up a jacket and a pair of pants at J.Crew or at Brooks Brothers, down the street. But somehow that felt lame. It felt . . . inadequate to the occasion. He was going on a date with a lovely and intelligent woman at the fanciest, most expensive restaurant in Boston, and he’d rather not look like a suburban dad driving the carpool to soccer practice on Saturday morning.

  This would be his first date since Holly had kicked him out. And it wasn’t just with an ex-girlfriend. It was with a woman with whom he’d clearly screwed up. No, that wasn’t even it. He’d been a jerk, plain and simple. He felt a twinge of embarrassment, of shame, remembering what he’d been like as a high school senior, what an asshole he’d been. He was going to Northwestern, to the Medill School of Journalism, and then he was going to become the next Bob Woodward. Whereas Andrea was sweet and pretty, but she wasn’t going anywhere. Or so he’d thought. When he broke things off after graduation, he explained they were moving in different directions. He was going far and fast and wanted to travel light. He didn’t want to check any baggage. Back then, with a young man’s arrogance and obliviousness, he hadn’t wanted the entanglement. He was ambitious, and she didn’t seem to be, didn’t seem to fit the profile. She wasn’t right for him.

  Truly: What an asshole.

  And almost as bad: He’d completely misread her. He’d got her completely wrong. He’d underestimated her. She wasn’t just some around-the-way girl; she was a Goldman Sachs woman. She was a go-getter. She was one of those high-powered women who appeared in the photos Back Bay magazine used to run. And she was smart. And lovely.

  He wasn’t going to misread her again, and he wasn’t going to screw up again. He was going to take her out to have an amazing meal at a romantic, high-end restaurant, and he’d be damned if he was going to look like some zhlub. He thought about how gorgeous Andrea was in the supermarket, and that had been without makeup, after running. He was going to look great, stylish, no matter what the cost. He wasn’t just going to look like his old self; he was going to look better. And he wasn’t even going to look at the price tags.