The Fixer (3 page)

T
he whiteboard sign mounted outside Leonard Hoffman’s room said, in big flowery purple letters:

A sign like that hung outside every resident’s room at the Alfred Becker Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. It was meant to remind the nursing staff that their charges were real people with real families and lives, give them something to chat about.

All the nurses and health care aides acted as if they liked Len a lot, probably because that was part of their job, to make visiting family members think that each Dad or Grandma was their very favorite. Which had a certain piquancy to it. Because if Leonard Hoffman did have the power of speech, they’d all love him for real.

He’d had what people called an outsize personality. He was endearing, funny, corny. He loved women, flirted with them in a way that was flattering, that didn’t seem at all icky, especially coming from an older guy. Women were always “girls” to him. They were “honey” and “sweetheart” and “doll.” If a massive stroke hadn’t robbed him of his ability to wheedle and charm, he’d have the nurses glowing around him, wagging their index fingers, mock chiding. He could never resist a pun or a groaner. Leonard, in full command of his speech, would have asked the squat dark-haired nurse Carolyn, with a wink, “You sure you’re not Greek? ’Cause you look like a goddess to me!” He would have told the sloe-eyed nurse Jewel, the Saint Lucian beauty, “You must be Jamaican—Jamaican me crazy!”

And they would have loved it.

He’d been something of a lady’s man, in his day. He was always a flamboyant dresser, favoring bold striped shirts and double-breasted pinstriped suits like Al Capone might have worn and bright ties with matching pocket squares.

Now he wore drawstring pants and a pajama top.

But life wasn’t like
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Lenny wasn’t exactly Atticus Finch, and Rick wasn’t Scout. There was nothing soft-focus about their relationship. It was tense, distant, frustrating.

“You haven’t touched your lunch,” Rick said.

The meat loaf was a revolting beige, the peas a hideous electric green. Len, pre-stroke, would have patted his food with his fingertips in response and said, “There, I’m touching it.”

But Len now just looked at Rick balefully. His expression rarely changed. He had a penetrating, almost horrified stare, as if he’d just glimpsed something blood-curdling. Rick visited his father almost every Sunday, had done so as often as possible since the stroke, but he still couldn’t get used to his father’s harrowed expression.

“Actually,” he said, “I don’t know how they expect you to eat that shit. But they’re not going to let me give you any ice cream if you don’t eat your meat loaf.”

His father turned his head toward the window and watched the Brookline traffic, a gob of spittle on the left side of his mouth. Rick took the napkin from his lunch tray and daubed the spit away.

It had been a bumpy ride since Len’s long-suffering, loyal secretary, Joan, had discovered him sprawled out on the floor in his office after lunch one day eighteen years ago. An ambulance had rushed him to Mass General, where they determined he’d had what they called a “left-side blowout.” His left internal carotid artery, stiffened and gummed up from seven decades of steaks and ice cream, had burst, cutting off blood flow to most of the left hemisphere of his brain. He had a huge lesion in the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes.

They put him on a ventilator, explained that he was likely now a global aphasic—meaning he couldn’t speak, probably couldn’t read or write, and they didn’t know how much he understood of what was said to him. Rick figured his father would be a vegetable. Wendy, being younger, deferred to her brother on all decisions.

After a week, Leonard was shunted to a rehab facility, where he seemed to make progress for a while. An occupational therapist had taught him to walk again, which he did now in a frantic, staggering way, swinging his stiff right leg around in a circle. Most of the time he used a wheelchair. His right arm didn’t work anymore. The right side of his face drooped. A speech pathologist, a large black woman named Jocelyn, tried in vain to get him to communicate. It didn’t look good.

Then one day, Jocelyn grabbed Rick in the hall outside his father’s room and said, “He understands. I know he does.”

She pulled him into the room and demonstrated by putting some objects on the table in front of Len. A key ring, her watch, her glasses. “Leonard, would you please look at the watch?” she said.

Len moved his eyes to the right and stared, unmistakably, at her pink Fossil.

There was, Rick thought sadly, someone inside there.

But apart from that one parlor trick, Len seemed to make no progress, and a month later he was moved to the nursing home to sit in a wheelchair all day in front of the TV. Rick still had no idea how much his father understood when you talked to him.

He was unshaven this morning, or maybe just poorly shaven, clumps of gray beard scattered here and there like tumbleweed on his chin and his sunken cheeks. His fingernails were long and ridged and yellow, badly in need of clipping.

“Hey, Dad, I’m having some work done to the house.”

Len turned and looked in his direction. His expression was hostile, disdainful, the way he constantly looked these days.

Talking to his father felt like talking to himself, except that Rick kept some topics—Holly and all that, the flaming wreck of his career—carefully off-limits.

“You remember Jeff Hollenbeck next door? He’s a contractor now, and he’s going to give me a good price.”

Len stared, blinked a few times.

“Remember I said we’re going to sell the old place, now that no one’s living there anymore?” He sidestepped the fact that he was sleeping on Len’s couch. That was too depressing to talk about; Len didn’t need to know.

“So I wanted to ask you something.” He watched Len’s eyes. “I found something inside . . . inside the house.” He waited a beat, glanced back at the door, then back at his father. “Inside the walls. Next to your study.”

“I
thought
it was Rick!” a loud female voice exclaimed. Rick turned, saw the aide he liked the most out of all of them, a heavyset blonde named Brenda, swoop into the room. She was probably fifty and wore her thick glossy hair in a pageboy. She wore baby-blue scrubs and had rhinestone-speckled harlequin glasses, which seemed to be an artsy affectation. The rhinestones glittered in the light from the ceiling. She smiled her big gummy smile. “Wait, it’s not Sunday, is it?”

“Nah, decided to shake things up a bit.”

“Phew, I guess I’m not losing it after all.”

“My dad treating you okay?”

“Your dad’s a sweetie,” she said. “We all love Leonard.” They both knew that Brenda had no idea what Len was like, whether he was a sweetie or an ogre. The man didn’t talk, didn’t even react. But Rick appreciated her saying it just the same.

She glanced at her watch. “It’s almost time for
Judge Judy,
and I know he doesn’t like to miss that.”

“Dad and I are going to talk just a little more.” His father had never watched
Judge Judy
or any other court show, back when he was able to voice his opinion; he doubted Len liked it now. And if he did, he had no way of letting anybody know.

“Leonard, what about your lunch, honey?” she said. “Not hungry today?”

“I don’t think he’s a big meat loaf fan.”

As Brenda began to leave, Rick asked, “Do you have a pair of nail clippers?”

“Of course.” She swiveled to one side and plucked a pair of clippers out of a dresser drawer, handing them to Rick with a flourish.

“Let’s see your hands, Dad.” He took hold of Len’s left hand and began to clip his father’s thick, grooved nails, and Brenda drifted out of the room.

Rick clipped slowly. His father held out each hand, one at a time. It felt oddly intimate. It was like taking care of a small child. He thought about how everything sooner or later comes back around. He realized with a jolt that his eyes had teared up.

He stopped clipping. “Jeff and I were doing some exploratory demolition,” he said quietly, “and we opened up the wall next to your study, at the back of the closet.” Len’s mouth was frozen in that haughty expression, but his watery eyes seemed anxious. They followed Rick’s. “There was money back there. A huge amount of money. Millions of dollars. How did it get there, any idea?” Rick swallowed, waited. “Is it yours?”

Len’s restless eyes came to a stop, looked directly into Rick’s.

“Is it?”

The old man’s eyes bore into his. Then he began to blink rapidly, three or four times. Nervously, maybe.

“Are you signaling me, Dad?” His father was able, at times, to blink: once for yes, twice for no. But not always, and not consistently. Did he sometimes lose the ability; did it wax and wane? Or did he grow weary of trying? Rick had no idea.

The blinks stopped, then resumed after a few seconds.

“How about you blink once for yes and twice for no. This cash I found—is it yours? Once for yes, twice for no.”

Len looked straight, unblinking, into Rick’s eyes, held his gaze for a few seconds.

Then blinked twice.

“No,” Rick said. “It’s
not
yours, correct?”

Nothing. Then one blink.

Yes.

“Okay, we’re getting somewhere.” Rick’s heart rate began to accelerate. “Do you—do you know whose cash it is?”

Nothing. Five, ten seconds went by, and Len didn’t blink. He looked away, then blinked a few times, but it didn’t seem to mean anything.

“Dad, who does it belong to?” Rick asked, before remembering he couldn’t ask a question that didn’t have a yes or no answer. “Let me try again: Do you know whose cash it is?”

Now Len blinked rapidly, not just once or twice. Many times, too many to count.

It was hard to tell, but he looked frightened.

H
e had a hundred thousand dollars in cash burning holes in his down parka and no room on his credit cards. His Citicard MasterCard, his Bank of America Visa, his Capital One MasterCard—all maxed out, all as worthless as Confederate dollars.

He was carrying around an insane amount of cash, with many times that sitting in a storage locker, in a world where fewer and fewer people took cash anymore. Who used cash in any serious quantity? Drug kingpins and Mafiosi. Criminals. The infamous Boston mobster Whitey Bulger, hiding out in Santa Monica, paid his rent in cash, Rick had read somewhere. Sure, you tip bellhops and parking valets with real money. But buy an airplane ticket with cash and you’ll have Homeland Security crawling up your ass.

He drove to Harvard Square and circled around for ten minutes, looking for a parking spot, before he realized he could now afford to park in that damned overpriced parking lot on Church Street. At the Bank of America branch next to the Harvard Coop, he deposited nine thousand dollars into his checking account. Then he opened an account at Cambridge Trust bank, across the street, and deposited nine thousand five hundred dollars into it. As long as he kept deposits under ten thousand bucks, he’d be fine. He saw a sign for Citizens Bank on JFK Street and stopped in there.

Now he had 28,500 dollars in three separate bank accounts, with temporary checkbooks to go with them. It seemed like a small fortune.

By the late afternoon he was back at the house. The side door off the driveway, which opened into the kitchen, was unlocked. Strange. He didn’t remember leaving it unlocked. He wondered if Jeff had.

When he opened it, he noticed a file folder that had been shoved under the door. He picked it up and flipped it open. It contained a stapled thatch of papers on Hollenbeck Construction letterhead.

It was a construction proposal, clearly done on some template, listing the scope of work. Demolition and renovation, the dates when work was to begin (tomorrow!) and completed (the end of March). A lot of legal gobbledygook.

And a standard payment schedule, including deposit. The cost was reasonable, but there was no mention of any sort of barter deal. Nothing about his doing the work and getting paid from the proceeds of selling the house.

All payments to be made in cash, starting with “Deposit: $8,000.”

If there was any doubt about whether Jeff had seen the cash, there wasn’t any longer.

He hesitated, thought about arguing with Jeff, then decided it wasn’t worth it. He pulled out a pen and signed each copy of the agreement. Then he stepped outside. Jeff’s house had been unimproved for decades, except for an exterior paint job not that long ago. The side door to his house also opened into the kitchen. Jeff’s kitchen, with its sheer curtains on the door and yellow wallpaper patterned with miscellaneous fruits, its Kenmore range and refrigerator, looked perfectly preserved, identical to the way it had looked when Rick and Jeff were kids. Rick slipped the copies of the contract under the door, along with a check written on one of the new bank accounts. He thought about knocking on the window and asking about the change, the money terms they hadn’t agreed to, but decided it was better not to get into it. Jeff had seen something; he’d seen the money, that was obvious. But it was only a glimpse. He had no idea how much there was.

Rick was already zipping up his sleeping bag and arranging himself uncomfortably on the couch when the realization hit him, like a clap of thunder: He didn’t have to stay here anymore. He didn’t have to live like the impoverished, scraping person he used to be. He could stay in a hotel. He could stay in the Four Seasons if he wanted to.

Tomorrow he’d find someplace decent to stay. Tonight he’d relish his last night in the sleeping bag on the leather sofa in his father’s office. Now that he had a choice whether to sleep here or not, he could think of it as slumming, as camping out.

He got back off the couch and walked through the rooms on the ground floor. It smelled faintly of natural gas down here—not squirrel piss—but not alarmingly so. An odor put out by the gas stove, maybe a minuscule leak from the pilot. Behind the stove, the wallpaper was scorched where there’d been a cooking accident years ago. A grease fire from when Wendy had experimented with deep-frying a turkey.

He found the place outside the kitchen pantry where his and his sister’s growth was recorded in horizontal lines made with pen or marker. They’d stopped measuring by the time he and Wendy got to high school. Maybe he and his sister had refused to submit to the indignity any longer, the ruler on top of the head, all that. He didn’t remember anymore.

He had no nostalgia for the house but couldn’t help feeling a slight pang when he saw those lines.
R
ICK—
M
ARCH 2 ’85—50"
 . . .
R
ICK—
N
OV. 14 ’92—64"
 . . . Between the ages of seven and fourteen he’d had his major growth spurt. The marker on the pantry wall showed it. Soon that would be gone, the wallpaper stripped off, the walls repainted, along with the scorch mark in the kitchen and the divots and dings and scrapes of a house where two kids had grown up.

He went back upstairs, turning off the lights behind him. He cranked up the space heater and settled down to sleep on the leather sofa.

In the middle of the night a creaking noise woke him up.

He opened his eyes. The only light in the room came from the streetlight on Clayton Street. The noise had sounded as if it came from inside the house, maybe down one flight.

Someone on the stairs?

He waited, listened. The house was old and had always made odd, random settling sounds throughout the day, like an old person sitting down stiffly in an armchair. You noticed it more at night when everything was quiet. That was probably all it was.

He turned over, closed his eyes. The leather sofa squeaked as he moved.

He heard it again, and this time it definitely seemed to be coming from the stairs. The sound of a footstep, a heavy tread taken carefully. No mistaking it.

He sat up, felt his heart start clattering, slipped out of the sleeping bag, and then got to his feet softly, quietly. He listened.

Another creak.

It sounded as if it was coming from right outside the closed door to his father’s study. He slid barefoot along the floor, carefully—the floor in here creaked just as much as the stairs—until he reached his father’s desk. He looked for a weapon, or something that could function as a weapon. There was his father’s ancient computer, an IBM, under a plastic dust cover. He slid open the center drawer, looking for something, a pair of scissors, a paper cutter, a stapler, something heavy or sharp. Nothing—just some old pencils. A sharp pencil could be used as a weapon, but you had to get close up, if it came to it, and that he preferred not to do.

He spotted a bronze bust on the desktop behind the computer. A bust of someone his father idolized, probably Henry David Thoreau. Or was it Ralph Waldo Emerson? He grabbed it, cold in his hands, and substantial, and shushed over to the study door. There he stood and waited for another sound. Thought about switching the overhead light on, then decided not to.

He heard another sound. The high school kids from Rindge and Latin? But they wouldn’t be sneaking around. When they broke in, they did it because they were sure no one was home. Thus, no reason to be quiet. They’d be noisy. Drunk and noisy. Boisterous.

These were careful, furtive footsteps. He stood back from the door and off to one side. If anyone opened the study door, he’d have the jump on them. Slam them with the bronze bust.

He waited, breathing slowly, quietly. Another creaking sound, this one no closer than the last. He listened, heart pounding, and tried to locate the sound, decided it was coming from upstairs. He could hear the steady creaking overhead now, a sound more interior and muted, the sound of old cracked floorboards compressing, protesting underfoot.

Whoever was in the house—because there
was
someone—was climbing the stairs to the third floor.

He breathed steadily, listening. The sound grew more distant.

The intruder was upstairs.

He turned the doorknob and pulled the door open slowly, steadily, bracing for a squeaky hinge, prepared to stop if need be. He got the door halfway open, just far enough to sidle out, not wanting to risk opening it any farther and causing a telltale squeak.

When he was in the hall, he went still and just listened for thirty seconds, which seemed an eternity. He wanted to make sure the sound was indeed coming from upstairs, not the second floor. His chest was tight and his breath was short.

And the sound was coming from the landing upstairs, the small steady squeak of a heavy tread crossing the wooden floor, moving steadily yet carefully.

He knew which steps creaked and which did not. His bedroom, and Wendy’s, had been on the third floor, and he had gone up and down this staircase innumerable times. He’d sneaked upstairs late at night, occasionally drunk or stoned, in high school. He knew how to climb the stairs noiselessly, and he could walk it blindfolded.

It wasn’t Jeff—he wouldn’t be sneaking around the house, or at least not now that he knew Rick was staying here. Or would he?

What if it was Jeff?

He’d seen the money but said nothing about it, not yet. Maybe he was back to see if there was any more secreted in the house. But then Rick realized: That was farfetched. The money had been behind a closet wall. If there was more to be found, it would be walled up somewhere, behind plasterboard, and reachable only by doing some destruction. No way would Jeff be skulking around the house at two in the morning.

Then who was it?

Rick had a fleeting, paranoid thought. Someone had seen him, despite his precautions, with all that cash. But who? Had he been followed home from the storage unit? But who could have seen him there? Just the kid with the big holes in his earlobes who was barely paying attention.

Maybe someone in the neighborhood had seen him carrying the plastic bags of banknotes out to the trunk of his car. He no longer knew most of the neighbors here. It wouldn’t be impossible that someone had been watching, someone brazen and criminally inclined enough to break into the house. Maybe someone had got hold of a front-door key. Maybe someone had broken in before and had figured out how to do it quickly and quietly. A high school kid, maybe.

The more he thought, the more anxious he felt.

If he was going to do anything, it was time to move. Now.

Clutching the bronze bust, he started up the stairs, staying to the front of the first step, then to the back of the second, avoiding the noisy spots where the old boards had warped or shrunk over time, or both. A pallid moonlight shone in through the window. He looked up the staircase, didn’t see anyone there.

A board squeaked under his foot, and he froze. He stood still, waited and listened. He heard the footsteps upstairs, still moving along the floor.

He climbed a couple more stairs, silently. Waited and listened. Finally reached the third-floor landing.

His eyes had adjusted to the dim light. He looked around for a shape, didn’t see one.

“All right,” he said. “Whoever’s up here, come out now.”

He raised the bronze bust, cocked his arm, ready to slam it if need be, but equally ready to stay his hand if the intruder were just some high school kid, sheepish and apologetic.

From out of the darkness, something slammed into his gut, doubling him over in pain. He toppled, his head hitting the wooden floor, the bust clattering. He tasted blood, metallic and warm. Loud footsteps behind him. He tried to catch his breath, but he’d been hit in the solar plexus, and the pain was sharp and exquisite, as if someone were sitting on his chest, he couldn’t breathe, he spat blood. Someone was running, thundering past him and down the stairs.

From downstairs came a crash and a thud and the sound of a door slamming, and the intruder was gone.

Now he knew he had no choice. He had to get out of there.