It was time for some good old-fashioned gumshoe work. It was time to go to the old Combat Zone and find out which, if any, of his father’s clients, the strip clubs and adult bookstores and such, still existed.
And start asking questions.
18
In the mid-1970s, the mayor of Boston, seeking to contain the spread of prostitution and “adult entertainment,” declared a four-square-block area of downtown Boston next to Chinatown the red-light district. Teeming with peep shows and strip clubs, adult bookstores and prostitutes, it became known as the Combat Zone, probably because of all the sailors and soldiers it attracted. It looked like a miniature version of the old Times Square in New York City before it was pasteurized and homogenized.
But as Boston’s downtown became more desirable, the big real estate developers moved in and began buying up property, and the next mayor campaigned to shut the Combat Zone down. He succeeded.
Now all that remained of the Combat Zone was one adult bookstore and a couple of strip clubs. The oldest and best known of them was Jugs. Jugs had a big pink sign outside that proclaimed WHERE EVERY MAN IS A VIP. He wondered how Jugs and the other place were able to survive the eradication of the Zone, the way cockroaches are supposed to be able to survive a nuclear war. He wondered if it was under the same ownership now as it was in 1996. Back then the owner was an entity called LaGrange Entertainment. No names. But he needed a name. Sometimes the easiest way to find something out was just to ask.
It was late afternoon and the sun was shining bright. A sign on Jugs’s front door said PROPER ATTIRE REQUESTED. WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANY CUSTOMER. NO PHOTOS ALLOWED.
Inside it was dark. It took his eyes several seconds to adjust to the light. Behind the long bar he saw a stage where a young black woman in a G-string gyrated around the pole. She was wearing the proper attire. Mounted high on the wall were three flat-screen TV sets, one tuned to a basketball game, one to Access Hollywood, one to something else, the sound off. Music was thumping, a Lil Wayne hip-hop song.
Rick was one of maybe five patrons, two at the bar and three in booths. Each of them was sitting next to a dancer wearing only a G-string. He sat down at the bar. A sour-looking Asian man with large bags under his eyes asked him what he wanted.
“I’ll have a beer,” Rick said. He noticed the refrigerators under the stage filled with Bud Light and Blue Moon and Sam Adams. “A Blue Moon.”
The bartender slapped a coaster down in front of Rick. “Ten dollar,” he grunted. He sounded almost defiant. Ten dollars for a beer—that was probably more than they charged at the Ritz-Carlton, only a block away. But that was the price of admission, and it was also the price of information. Rick shrugged. The bartender took a bottle from the refrigerator and thumped it down in front of him. Rick watched the dancer. She was doing what looked like isometric exercises with her butt cheeks, which were firm and round. Probably because of all the isometric exercises. She was wearing only a G-string and sparkly platform heels.
Someone came up and sat at the stool next to his. It was one of the dancers, clad in a skimpy thong and black leatherette bra with tens and twenties sticking out of her right cup. “Hi,” she said, extending her hand with her elbow crooked, mock-formally. “I’m Emerald.” She was cute and small, with a diamond stud in her lower lip. Her skin was mocha and her tits were small. She looked Hispanic. Her eyebrows looked as if they’d been painted on.
“Hi, Emerald, I’m Rick.”
A pause, then she said, “Is this your first time here?”
“Yep. You been dancing here a while?”
A woman behind the bar, with black hair cut into bangs high on her forehead and very red lipstick, interrupted them. “You want to talk to Emerald,” she said in what sounded like a Russian accent, “is thirty dollars.”
Rick nodded and took a twenty and a ten out of his wallet and set it down on the bar. The price of admission had gone up.
“I’ll have a Dirty Shirley,” Emerald told the bartender. He went to work filling a tall glass with ice and some kind of soda from the bar and vodka from a Grey Goose bottle and grenadine. Rick assumed the vodka was water. They weren’t going to waste Grey Goose on a dancer. Probably not even alcohol.
“I’ve been dancing here for a year,” Emerald said, taking a sip of her drink. “But I’ve been dancing since I was eighteen.”
“They treat you well here?”
“Uh-huh. Where’re you from, Rick?”
“New York. She doesn’t own the place, that woman?” he asked, pointing with his chin at the black-haired woman.
“No, she’s the manager.”
The music segued bizarrely from Lil Wayne to Nickelback doing “Photograph.” The dancer left the stage and another one, white with bleached blond hair, took her place. She had a spray bottle in one hand and a white rag in the other, and she was cleaning the pole while undulating to the rhythm.
“Is the boss around, or does he come in later?”
Emerald smiled uncomfortably. “There’s a couple of bosses. Why you asking all that?”
Rick shrugged. “Just making conversation.” He’d come on too hard with the questions. He was out of practice; his investigative skills were rusty. But that was okay; he didn’t seriously expect to learn much if anything from her. She might know the name of the owner or owners, sure, but he hadn’t been counting on it. He mostly wanted to get the lay of the land. When the right moment presented itself, he’d be ready to ask questions of the manager or the owner, under the guise of being an undercover city inspector. “Maybe I’m looking to buy the place.”
She laughed, not sure whether to take him seriously.
Rick looked around. The sour Asian man was taking glasses out of a dishwasher built into the end of the stage. The black-haired Russian woman was talking with a man in a black fleece at the far side of the bar. He didn’t look like a patron. They were speaking with an easy, joking familiarity. Maybe he was an owner or one of the owners. The man nodded at someone in back. Rick turned to see who he was nodding at. It was another man, tall and wide, with a blond buzz cut, emerging from the dimly lit recesses at the back of the bar. He looked like a bouncer type.
At the back of the bar he saw a restroom sign. Maybe the bouncer was coming from the restroom, or maybe that’s where the employees’ entrance was.
“I’ll be back,” he told Emerald, getting up from the stool. He went toward the back. He passed the women’s restroom, then the men’s. He glanced down the narrow hallway and saw a couple more doors. One was painted steel with a push bar on it and looked as if it led outside. Another was ajar. Light from the room flooded out into the hall. Probably an office of some kind.
He looked around, didn’t see anyone coming, then shouldered the door open. It was indeed an office, a metal desk piled with papers and mail, a framed poster of a stripper, signed with a Sharpie in flowery script. The I was dotted with a heart. On top of a dented black steel file cabinet was an old Mr. Coffee coffeemaker and a few reams of printer paper.
No one here. He scanned the heap on top of the desk, saw a Comcast bill in a window envelope. So maybe he’d get lucky, find a letter or a magazine addressed to the owner, by name. He took the Comcast bill and saw it was addressed to “Jugs DBA Citadel LaGrange Entertainment.” That wasn’t a name, but it was something. He shoved it into his back pocket.
Something or someone slammed him up against the wall. He turned just in time to see the crew cut bouncer, his right hand pincered on Rick’s throat, choking him. With his other hand the bouncer pinioned Rick’s right hand against the door.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he said.
Rick gagged. He looked down at the bouncer’s left hand, saw a green blob on the inside of his wrist. It was familiar. Then he remembered: He’d seen a similar tattoo on the wrist of one of his abductors in the Charles Hotel parking garage. It was actuall
y a clover leaf, not a blob. A three-leaved shamrock. On each leaf was the number 6, making it 666. The number of the antichrist.
Rick kneed the man in the groin, thrusting hard. The man groaned and doubled up and Rick was able to break free of his grip. He lunged into the hallway, spun around, then slammed a hip against the push bar on the steel door. The door made a bleeping sound, and Rick could feel a rush of cold air. He stumbled, scraping a knee against the asphalt ground. The bouncer lurched through the door after him, shouting something, but Rick was already out of the alley and down the street and racing as fast as he’d ever run in his life.
19
He arrived at the offices of Back Bay magazine with scuffed jeans and a big rip at the knee. He’d torn his jeans in the alley and didn’t feel like going back to the B&B to change. He didn’t particularly care. He wasn’t going for a job interview.
Rick was still officially on the staff of Back Bay. Shortly after Mort Ostrow had fired Rick, after the shock had worn off, he’d swallowed his considerable pride and accepted Ostrow’s offhanded offer: If Rick agreed to post at least one piece a week, he’d get to keep access to the usual databases and receive a salary of sorts. A pittance. Next to nothing, but not nothing. It was useful to have access to the databases and be able to say he was calling from Back Bay magazine. That might come in handy now, too. He didn’t have to come in to the office to post things, so he’d stayed away. In fact, only once since Mort Ostrow had delivered the bad news had he been in to the office, and that was to pack up his desk.
His stomach tightened as he approached the glass door to the office suite. He dreaded meeting up with his colleagues. Ostrow had let go all the editors over the age of thirty except Darren Overby, the new editor in chief, and Karen, the managing editor, but she’d been part-time since the birth of her son, four years ago. They might still be here, though, slaving away on freelance pieces, taking advantage of the free office space to work until the magazine, which was really just a website now, downsized to whatever minuscule closet it was moving to and then disappeared altogether, like a wisp of smoke. Rick didn’t look forward to making small talk (The job search is going great, thanks! Updating my LinkedIn page as we speak!).
Then he remembered the pile of cash in his storage unit and he immediately felt better about everything. The money was like a suit of armor. It protected him against insults and indignities. Yes, he didn’t have a real job, but no longer did he have to worry about money. Except, he reminded himself, for worrying about protecting it. Keeping it safe from whoever knew he had it. Keeping himself safe, too.
Nine people were seated around the big cherrywood conference table. Rick recognized only two of them, the remaining two editors, Karen and Darren—so perfect a team they even rhymed! The other seven were a fresh-faced assortment, all in their early to mid twenties, hipster lumberjacks dressed so similarly they might have been wearing uniforms: bulky cable-knit sweaters or checked flannel shirts, a few of them wearing big chunky eyeglasses. They had to be freelance writers, here for a story meeting. All of them looked hopeful and optimistic. They weren’t yet cynics. They weren’t writers, really, either. They were contributors. They repurposed content from blogs and websites, and they were paid by the click.
But more than that, they were survivors. Looking around the conference table, Rick couldn’t help but think of a painting he’d once seen in the Louvre called The Raft of the Medusa. It depicted a small gang of desperate, dying people clinging to a raft in a turbulent ocean. The painting was based on a real historical event, a French naval ship that had run aground, leaving a couple hundred survivors hanging on a raft, enduring weeks of starvation and thirst and savagery, the stronger killing the weaker, throwing each other off to the sharks, and eventually resorting to cannibalism, until only a dozen or so were left to rescue.
The survivors of Back Bay magazine were clinging to the raft in their fashionable cable-knit sweaters.
Darren, in his heavy black glasses, was holding forth at the head of the table, drinking a stevia-sweetened green apple soda. “We’re not getting the uniques, people,” he said. “Every time you turn in a piece I want you to come up with twenty-five possible headlines. Then we’re going to A/B test the best ones. The headline is an itch the reader has to scratch. I want superlatives, okay? I want, I don’t know, ‘What This Chef Does with Lamb Is Amazeballs!’”
“What about ‘. . . Will Change Your Life’ instead?” suggested an earnest bearded guy in red-and-black buffalo plaid.
“Sure,” Darren said. “Or ‘Rock Your World.’ With me, people? Hit them right in the feels.”
“Numbers are always good,” Karen put in.
“Numbers!” Darren said. “‘Seven Facts about Wellesley That Will Blow Your Mind.’ ‘The Five Best Power Breakfasts in Boston.’”
“For the one about the Fall River city administrator’s resignation, how about this: ‘Her First Sentence Was Moving. Her Second Sentence Brought Me to Tears.’”
“Excellent!” Darren barked. “I love it. Do we have any photos of puppies from the animal shelter? Or GIFs? Any GIFs?” He noticed Rick slipping quietly into the room. “Rick Hoffman!” he sang out with false joviality. “Welcome! Joining us?”
He shook his head. “Doing a little research.”
“Research!” Darren said it as if research were something exotic that most people didn’t actually do themselves, like baking croissants or overhauling their car’s transmission. “Can’t wait to hear the juicy details! Oh, Rick, your piece on craft beers, we’re going to post that tomorrow morning. But you know, there’s going to be that groundbreaking for the Olympian Tower in a couple of weeks, and we’d really like you to do a Q&A with Thomas Sculley; could you do that?”
Rick shrugged. “What are we talking about?”
“Just fifteen hundred words. You know, give him the full Rick Hoffman treatment?”
“Sure, uh, fine.”
The Rick Hoffman treatment: Man, was that an expression Rick had come to detest. It meant an adoring, adulatory profile. The sort of mindlessly positive piece—usually a Q&A—that its subject, usually someone rich, powerful, or famous, could only love. Nothing hard-hitting, honest, or blunt. In other words, just the sort of article Rick had once promised himself he’d never do. At Back Bay, it had become his skill set. Thomas Sculley was one of those Boston billionaires the magazine made a specialty of covering with wet kisses.
“Excellent,” said Darren. “Also, Mark Wahlberg’s new movie starts filming at Fenway next month, so there’s that. And apparently the new dean of Harvard Law School, Ronald Proskin, has a twenty-thousand-bottle wine collection—David Geffen offered to buy the whole thing outright.”
“Great,” Rick said. “Lots of possibilities.” He excused himself and walked past his old office, which was still empty, just a desk and a credenza and power cables and snowdrifts of dust. The company computer had been removed. The desk and the credenza and the fancy Humanscale office chair all had SOLD tags on them.
The hall outside was lined with cardboard boxes. The lease on the Harrison Avenue space was up in a few weeks. He found a cubicle that looked unused—there were a lot of them—and signed on to the magazine’s intranet. His user ID and password still worked. That was something, at least.
He overheard Darren saying, “Everyone loves chocolate-chip cookies! The ten best chocolate-chip cookies!”
First he pulled up a half-written plug that had been moldering on his hard drive about an artisanal cheese maker who had a shop on Tremont Street. He came up with a line—“Rumor has it that the good stuff—the raw stuff—is hidden away in the back, like the hard cider in Prohibition days”—and zipped it off to a mellow snowboarder on the copy desk named Dylan Scardino. Dylan also served as “web producer,” which meant he was the guy who uploaded the files and put them up on the Internet.
Then he took out the cable company bill he’d filched fro
m the strip club. The bill was for high-speed Internet and a generous cable package for their wall-mounted TV sets. It was made out to “Jugs DBA Citadel LaGrange Entertainment.” No wonder he hadn’t pulled up any corporate records on LaGrange Entertainment. The name had been changed. There was any number of reasons why it might have been done. A change in ownership, maybe, or an attempt to duck a lawsuit.
Darren’s voice: “Is it awesome? That’s the only criterion—it has to be awesome!”
He entered “Citadel LaGrange Entertainment” in one of the corporate records databases and pulled up exactly . . . nothing. A P.O. box was listed, but no names.
The story meeting broke up and the freelancers scattered. The bearded guy in buffalo plaid sat down at the cubicle next to Rick’s.
Rick looked up the phone number online for the Massachusetts attorney general’s office and called the number. “I’m looking for some records on a business that’s incorporated in Massachusetts.”
“What sort of records, sir?”
“Corporate filings. Ownership records.”
“You might want to try the Division of Professional Licensure.”
“Could you transfer me?”
A click. “Licensure, Reilly.”
“Yes, Mr. Reilly, I have a client, an exotic dancer, who’s looking to sue a strip club in Boston called Jugs for wrongful termination. I’ve been searching high and low for ownership information, but I’m stumped. I’m wondering if you could be so kind as to pull the records.”
“You said Jugs?”
“That’s right. Maybe the name of the president . . . ?”
Tappa tappa tappa tappa tap.
“I don’t have a Jugs, sir.”
“You might want to try their corporate entity, Citadel LaGrange Entertainment.”
Tappa tappa tappa tappa.
“I’m sorry, sir, I don’t have anything on that.”
The Fixer Page 10
