The Fixer

by Joseph Finder

  He must have a source inside the nursing home, Rick thought. One of the nurses, at least, was on his payroll. “But not just my dad. There’s also a very brave woman, a community activist who’s agreed to speak on the record for the first time.”

  “Rick, let me tell you a story. A Buddhist parable, actually.”

  Rick smiled back. Another one of Pappas’s stories.

  “Two traveling monks are about to cross a river. There’s a young woman on the bank who says, ‘Please, brother monks, can you carry me across? The river is too deep.’ The young monk turns away. See, they’re not allowed to touch a woman. But the older monk hoists her up on his shoulder and brings her over. The monks keep going, over hills and dales, and the whole time the younger monk is complaining, ‘Why’d you do that? You know we’re forbidden to touch a woman. What you did was a violation of our precepts.’ And on and on, mile after mile. Won’t shut up. Finally the older monk looks at him and says, ‘I left that woman at the riverbank. Seems to me you’re still carrying her?’”

  Pappas’s expression was almost kindly. “My point is, Rick, you need to let this go. For your own sake. Leave it at the riverbank, and get on with your life. I’m telling you this because your father was a man I respected, and I figure I owe him this much. You want to martyr yourself because of what you imagine might have possibly happened two decades ago? Who are you really helping at this point? Whose life are you saving? What good do you think could possibly result from this?”

  “It’s an important story,” Rick said blandly.

  Pappas abandoned all benevolent pretense. “You’re not writing an article, Rick. I know you. You’re still the weasel who’ll sell out to the higher bidder. What are you angling for, Rick, a bigger payoff? You want another million so you can buy fancy duds and a fancy watch and you can impress another vacuous fashion model? And then why stop there? Why not keep coming back to the well, asking for more and more, right? Well, as I told you at your father’s funeral, this was a one-time-only offer.”

  “And I’m turning it down. I’m going to publish this piece with or without your cooperation. But I’d rather have your side of it. I’ve already established that Donegall was a client of yours.”

  “Donegall Construction filed for bankruptcy two decades ago!”

  “Accounting trickery. They’re more active than ever.” This last part, he knew, was just speculation. That was the part he needed Pappas to reveal, what Donegall Construction had become. “We know you were in contact with The Boston Globe after the accident. If there’s anything about my account that’s inaccurate, I’d like to hear it now. This is your chance.”

  For a moment Pappas looked as if he was seriously considering the proposition.

  Then he spoke, shaking his head sorrowfully. “I gave you the golden ticket, my friend. I gave you my personal guarantee that all will be good. And now you come with this? You sit there in front of me, beat up and bloodied and bruised and hobbling like an old lady, and you tell me you want back in the game?”

  “There’s no game,” Rick said. “I’m giving you an opportunity to go on the record. You can confirm or deny. What you tell me can affect what I write.”

  Pappas’s smile was wide and bright. “This is my big chance, huh? No, actually, this is all history, and as the saying goes, history is written by the winners. And you, sir, are no winner. If the Confederate army had won the Battle of Gettysburg, you think we’d be celebrating Lincoln’s birthday? Every event can be made to mean a dozen different things. But the ultimate reality is determined by the victor. Call it the reality principle. Your father—he had a healthy goddamned sense of reality. Shame you never learned anything from him.”

  Rick closed his notebook. “Thanks for your time.” He got to his feet and went to the door.

  “You know what your trouble is?” Pappas called out. “You never learned anything from your dad.”

  “Yeah?” Rick said at the doorway. “Maybe I learned too much.”

  59

  How’d it go?” asked Andrea. She was leaning back in an armchair in Rick’s suite at the DoubleTree. She wore black jeans and a crisp white shirt and a pair of gray TOMS. She had no makeup on. Her hair was up, held back with a band. Her attitude made it clear that this was a business meeting at Rick’s hotel, nothing more than that. But the way she was sitting in the chair was more casual than businesslike.

  “About how I expected. He came back at me with threats and ridicule.”

  “How did you react?”

  “He probably thought he scared me off. He’s good at that. That’s his thing.”

  “That’s fine. Let him think what he wants to think.”

  He looked at his watch. “Probably a good time to get back there.”

  “It’s been over an hour, right?”

  He nodded and headed back out the door.

  * * *

  At the office tower where the Pappas Group was located, front-desk security wouldn’t let Rick back into the elevator banks. They insisted on calling up to get verbal approval. Rick got on the phone.

  “Alex Pappas, please. It’s Rick Hoffman.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Pappas is out of the office.”

  “That’s all right. I think I left something in his office. I’m right downstairs.”

  Three minutes later he was standing in the reception area of the Pappas Group. A woman in her fifties, thick at the waist, with coppery hair, came out and introduced herself as Pappas’s administrative assistant, Barbara. He walked with her back to Pappas’s office. “He just left for a meeting out of the office,” Barbara said.

  “This shouldn’t take a minute,” Rick said. “I’m pretty sure I left my phone there.”

  “I didn’t see anything left behind.”

  He went to the overstuffed armchair where he’d been sitting. Sure enough, there it was, wedged between the seat cushion and the arm of the chair: Rick’s iPhone.

  “Oh, good,” Barbara said, sounding relieved.

  “This is something you hate to lose,” Rick said, pocketing it.

  “Oh, tell me about it,” said Barbara. “I’d be totally sunk.”

  “Well, all’s well that ends well,” said Rick.

  Not until he got to the elevator did he take out his phone and hit Stop on the recorder app. It said one hour and forty-six minutes. Then he opened the submenu that listed “voice memos,” and he selected the most recent one. He hit Play and put it to his ear. He could hear Pappas’s voice, distant but still audible.

  “Yeah, Barbara,” Pappas said on the recording, “I need to speak to Thomas Sculley. Can you get him on the phone?”

  A few seconds later his secretary’s voice came on. “Mr. Sculley, line one.”

  A moment later: “Thomas,” Pappas said. “We’ve got a problem.”

  60

  Andrea paled when she heard the first words of the recording.

  “Thomas Sculley,” she said. “My God.”

  Rick looked at her.

  “You know the funder I had lunch with the other day, and I didn’t want to jinx by naming?” she said. “That was Thomas Sculley.”

  Thomas Sculley was a major figure in Boston, a developer and builder whose Bay Group had transformed the Boston skyline. He was also a major philanthropist whose name was on several hospital wings and was a part owner of the Boston Red Sox. When Lenny had received TMS treatment, it had been at the Sculley Pavilion of Mass General Hospital. Rick had read all the Sculley profiles. He knew the basic outline of the story. Sculley had come to America from Ireland decades earlier with just a shovel and a wheelbarrow, as every single profile seemed to put it. And went from being a small-time house builder to one of the preeminent developers in the country. Sculley’s firm was about to build the tallest skyscraper in Boston, on the site of the old Combat Zone.

  “How long have you been in
talks with them?”

  “It’s been super fast. Their foundation director contacted us, I don’t know, two or three weeks ago.”

  “After our famous dinner at Madrigal?”

  “A couple days after. You’re thinking . . . ?” She tilted her head. “I don’t know. It’s a real coincidence, if not.”

  “Somehow I don’t think that was a coincidence,” Rick said.

  She nodded, looking despondent. She was quiet for ten, twenty seconds. Then she took a breath. She nodded again, but this time she looked different. Resolved.

  They listened to the recording a couple of times. The iPhone’s battery was at zero, so they plugged it in to charge while they used it. They couldn’t hear everything Pappas said. Only when he raised his voice for emphasis did his words become clear. But in truth they had all they needed. A name: Thomas Sculley.

  The billionaire builder and philanthropist he was supposed to be writing about.

  The conversation, conducted over speakerphone, went on for just a few minutes. Pappas arranged to meet Sculley at his State Street office. Then Pappas spoke to his admin on speaker and asked her to cancel his next two meetings.

  “Are you serious about writing an article?” Andrea asked.

  “Deadly.”

  She smiled. “This is the old Rick Hoffman,” she said. “Fearless. I like it.”

  “It only looks that way.”

  “Then we need to prove that Sculley was connected to Donegall Construction. From what I’ve found, Sculley grew up in Belfast, Ireland, on a street named Donegall.”

  “So can you connect him to Donegall?”

  “Well, look—locating hidden assets and liabilities is what I used to do. But it’s a hell of a lot easier finding connections between two known entities than trying to find out what happened to one small firm like Donegall eighteen years ago. At least now I know how and where to start.”

  “Can you do it now?”

  “You got it.”

  As she typed on her laptop, she called her son to say good night. Then Rick’s phone rang. He recognized Jeff’s number. He glanced at his watch: almost eight o’clock P.M.

  “Jeff?”

  “Yeah, Rick, listen. I’m still at your house. I—I got something for you.”

  “You’ve got something?” Rick wasn’t sure what Jeff was talking about.

  “About that thing you wanted me to look into. I’ll be here for another half hour.” There was a click and the line was dead.

  Andrea was asking Evan whether he’d finished his homework, telling him he could stay up a little bit longer if he wanted to read some more of his Mike Lupica book.

  When she hung up, Rick said, “I need to head over to the house.”

  61

  The kitchen door was open, which meant Jeff was still here, though it was late. He could see light spilling into the stairwell to the second floor. Everything smelled strongly of some sort of solvent.

  “Jeff?”

  “Up here.” Jeff’s voice came from the floor above.

  Rick climbed the stairs. The solvent smell got stronger.

  “I’m up on the third,” Jeff called out.

  Jeff was in a corner of the hall next to Rick’s old bedroom. Beside him was a short ladder beneath a large hole in the ceiling. He looked around. The Sheetrocking was done, ready for painting. There were several large buckets of some kind of fluid, a few of them filled with rags.

  “This solvent from the floor guys?”

  “Right. They’re doing some stripping before the sanding. Look, I got something for you but first I wanted to show you something I found today.” He seemed nervous.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You got a serious problem,” Jeff said.

  You have no idea, Rick thought. “What is it?” he said. “Something structural?”

  “Over here.” Jeff beckoned Rick over to the ladder. Five foot high, four rungs, positioned in the corner of the hallway right below the hole ripped into the ceiling. Rick could see the rafters, the old plaster. “Wanna get up there and take a look?”

  Rick climbed the ladder, peered into the opening in the ceiling. It was dark and hard to make anything out. “What am I looking at?”

  “There’s some real termite damage in there.”

  Rick peered farther into the darkness. “Where?”

  “It’s all over,” Jeff said, now close behind him.

  “All over where?”

  Jeff spoke quietly, in a tight, choked voice, as if he was having trouble saying the words. “See, Rick, I asked around like you wanted me to do, and I heard some really interesting stuff.”

  Rick wasn’t tracking. Was Jeff still talking about termites?

  “The hell of it is,” Jeff went on, “if you’d been more generous from the start, their offer wouldn’ta looked so good to me, you asshole.”

  “What offer?”

  At the very moment that Rick realized, it was a beat too late. Jeff held a length of two-by-four and swung it at him, at his torso.

  Rick tried to duck, but standing on the top rung of the ladder he risked toppling and losing his balance.

  The board crashed into his ribs and Rick shouted, “What the hell?” As he began to topple from the ladder, Jeff swung at him a second time.

  Rick thought: Not my head!

  And he heard the impact an instant before he felt it, felt the screaming pain in his forehead, tasted blood, and then nothing . . .

  . . . When he came to, he was lying crumpled on his back, his nostrils full of smoke, and he coughed violently. For a moment he had no idea how he’d gotten where he was nor how long he’d been out.

  He craned his head, looked around. Flames were crackling, leaping all around. The heat seared his skin. Tall licks of orange flame leaped and danced at this end of the hall, devouring the pristine walls, the floors, climbing the newly Sheetrocked walls, searing them black, curling the paper.

  The house was on fire.

  Rick got up unsteadily, swaying. Then came a whump as the fire discovered another bucket of solvent-soaked rags and traced its fingers of spill along the floor. The buckets of solvent, he realized, were the accelerant. They’d all been tipped over, feeding the ravenous flames.

  How could this have happened?

  Through the billowing black smoke he saw Jeff’s back. Rick watched in astonishment. Jeff was kneeling, back turned toward him, a lighter in one hand, setting more of the solvent alight. Next to him was a trash barrel filled with detritus, lumber scraps and wads of paper. Jeff was taking stuff from the barrel to use for kindling.

  Jeff wasn’t just burning down the house he had spent weeks renovating. He was trying to kill Rick.

  He meant to leave him to be burned alive.

  Rick’s heart was racing. He didn’t fully understand what Jeff was doing and why, but that no longer mattered.

  He launched himself at Jeff, knocking him over. The lighter dropped to the floor. Jeff’s phone, clipped to his belt, went scuttling across the floor. Rick’s knees were planted across Jeff’s neck.

  “They got to you, didn’t they?” Rick screamed. “They fucking paid you off!”

  Jeff reared up, swung a fist at Rick, hit the center of Rick’s chest. “You greedy son of a bitch, you goddamned liar. You said there was forty thousand bucks there? More like three and a half million!”

  Rick groaned but slammed his fist into Jeff’s left ear.

  Jeff was taller and probably stronger. He swung again, aiming for Rick’s gut, but Rick torqued himself to one side and the blow landed on his shoulder. He was bruised everywhere and aching, but he was powered by a great surge of anger and adrenaline. Just as Jeff swarmed at him, Rick reached over and snatched a two-by-four out of the barrel. He swung it with all of his strength at Jeff’s head. At the last instant Jeff turned so the
plank cracked hard into the side of his face. Rick heard the impact, the crunch of bone.

  “My eye!” Jeff screamed, flinging his hands to his face. Blood gouted down from his left eye socket.

  But Rick didn’t pause. He wound up and swung the board at Jeff again, crashing into the top of his head, and Jeff went down. A whoosh and another pile of solvent-soaked rags went up in flames.

  Rick got up wobblingly to his feet. Fire was all around him now, on all sides of the hall, encroaching into the staircase that led down to the second floor. He noticed Jeff’s phone on the floor and impulsively reached over and grabbed it. His own phone was charging back at the hotel, and he needed to call 911.

  Jeff must have intended to light the fire and then leave by means of the staircase. But now it was too late. The flames had them surrounded. He ran into the bedroom, where the fire hadn’t yet reached, though the smoke had, and yanked open the window. A leap to the ground from the third floor would be dangerous. Below, instead of lawn, was the blacktop of the driveway.

  Then he remembered the yew tree a few feet away from the window, wild and untrimmed. It wasn’t directly below the window, but it was close. Years ago when his mother was still alive he used to sneak out of the house by leaning out the window and leaping at an angle so that he could catch a branch and somehow shinny to the blacktop. But back then he was a young teenager and more agile. Not weakened by a nearly fatal beating.

  He inhaled, and his trachea was singed by the heat or the smoke. He was racked by a coughing fit. He turned around and saw that the fire was now roaring across the threshold of the doorway. It was moving faster than he’d expected; the solvent had nourished the fire. Plumes of flame blackened the white-painted door, crackling the old paint. His heart was hammering.

  He wanted to go grab Jeff and pull him out, but the fire was too advanced. Trying to save Jeff would likely be his own death sentence. He turned back to the window. He knew this was the only way out. But what was once, to a teenager, an exciting challenge now looked dubious. He would have to launch himself out of the window, angling to the right, hoping to grab branches of the tree before slamming into the ground.