The Fixer

by Joseph Finder

  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.

  6

  He walked to Harvard Square, limping slightly, his head pounding, and into the Charles Hotel. The pain had subsided considerably. He’d been kicked, or hit, or walloped with something. His abdomen was tender and bruised. His rib cage hurt, mostly when he breathed. He’d bit his lip, hard, when he fell. Other than that, he was unharmed. By the time he’d gotten to his feet and gone downstairs, his attacker was gone.

  He had no idea how the man—he’d assumed it was a man—had gotten in. But he had no doubt the man was after the cash. The house wasn’t safe.

  “I have a deluxe king for three ninety-nine,” the clerk—midtwenties, neatly trimmed beard, tweezed brows—said.

  “I’ll take it.” He hesitated. “You take cash, right?”

  “Of course, sir, but I’ll need to take an imprint of your card for incidentals.”

  He handed over one of his useless credit cards and hoped the clerk wouldn’t run it.

  It occurred to him that he could in fact take the Presidential Suite, if the Charles had one. The most expensive suite in the hotel. But for now, just staying in a nice hotel room felt like an outrageous splurge. At least until he determined who this money belonged to, he’d be . . . prudent, as he liked to think of it.

  He went to his room and felt relieved to bolt the door behind him. He felt safe. Later he’d bring a suitcase over. He took the packets of money out of his ski parka and locked them in the hotel safe. He took his
MacBook Air out of his shoulder bag and did some quick research.

  His father’s secretary—she’d been more than that, actually; she was his adviser and traffic cop and praetorian guard and personal assistant—was a woman named Joan Breslin. A no-nonsense platinum-haired woman with a South Boston accent, a brusque manner, a tart tongue. And clearly the patience of Job, having put up with Len’s shenanigans for all those years. As far as Rick could recall, she had retired after his father’s stroke. She was living in Melrose or Malden or Medford, one of the M-towns north of Boston.

  He had her phone number but didn’t remember where she lived. Switchboard.com was no help. There was a long column of Breslins in Melrose and Malden, none of them Joan. She was married, Rick was fairly sure, or widowed, and she was of the generation of women who usually listed themselves under their husbands’ names. So she’d be under John or Frank or whatever, probably not Joan. ZabaSearch .com was more helpful, since it listed ages. Eventually he found a Joan Breslin, age seventy-two, in Melrose, listed under her husband, Timothy.

  A woman answered the phone on the fifth ring. He imagined a tan wall phone in the kitchen, a long gnarled coiled cord.

  “Is this Joan?”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “It’s Rick Hoffman. Leonard Hoffman’s son.”

  A pause. “Oh, my goodness, Rick, how are you?”

  “I’m good. And . . . Tim?”

  “Yeah, you know . . .” She suddenly sounded worried. “Oh, no, is it—Lenny?”

  “Dad’s fine. I mean, he’s the same.”

  “Oh, good. I paid him a visit a couple years ago, Rick, but it’s hard, you know. Seeing him like that.”

  “I know.”

  “I can’t. It—it tears me apart.”

  “Me, too,” he said. “Me, too. Thanks for that.” He paused. “I haven’t heard from you in a while, so I assume everything’s okay with the insurance, right?” She’d set up long-term care insurance for Lenny and very generously volunteered to handle all the paperwork for him as long as he was alive.

  “Everything’s fine, nothing to worry about.”

  “Joan, I wonder, if it’s not too much of an inconvenience, whether I could come by and talk to you for a bit. I have some questions.”

  An inconvenience. Like your schedule is crowded, Rick thought, between mah-jongg and trips to the supermarket and to the post office to buy stamps, one at a time.

  “Talk? I don’t know what I—”

  “Just some loose ends concerning my dad’s law practice. It’s about . . . Well, I don’t know anything about how law firms operate. Things like escrow accounts and how he dealt with cash and all that kind of thing.”

  “Escrow? Is someone complaining they never got their retainer back? Because—”

  “No, nothing like that. It’s a bit . . . involved. Could I drive out to, ah, Melrose, and maybe we could have a cup of coffee?”

  “I’ve got houseguests,” she said. “Can this wait?”

  Rick agreed to call her back in a couple of days, after her guests had left. But Rick wasn’t particularly optimistic. She hadn’t sounded defensive or squirrelly on the phone. If she knew something about a vast quantity of cash, she’d sound different, he decided. Evasive, maybe, if she’d been involved in covering something up. Or frightened. Or at least knowing, somehow.

  He went out to get some supplies for the next few days.

  Half an hour later, in line at a supermarket on Mount Auburn Street, pushing a cart full of cold cereal and milk and yogurt, plus some junk food, SunChips and Tostitos Hint of Lime, he heard someone call his name. He turned around.

  “Rick? That is you. Oh my God.”

  “Andrea.” His face lit up.

  He’d barely noticed the woman in line behind him, wearing sweatpants and a long puffy white down coat, scraggly hair pulled back in a kerchief. At first glance she looked like some overscheduled Cambridge mom racing through her checklist of errands.

  Andrea Messina had been his girlfriend senior year at Linwood. They’d gone out starting with the winter semiformal, continuing into the summer after graduation, when he’d broken things off before heading to college. He hadn’t seen her since. Just seeing her now gave him an uneasy pang of guilt. He’d been an asshole and had never paid the bill.

  He hugged her, gave her a kiss on the cheek. She kissed the air. She smelled of a new, different perfume than he remembered, something more sophisticated, but after two decades a woman had the right to change perfumes.

  On second glance, he realized that despite her general dishevelment, she was attractive, strikingly so. Even more than in high school. She’d always been cute, doe-eyed, winsome, graceful. A dancer. Her brown hair had honey highlights. Now her face was thinner, more contoured. She still had creamy skin; she’d always had, but in a woman in her midthirties it was particularly noticeable. She’d grown into her beauty.

  “Great,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in like forever and I look like a bag lady.” She adjusted her kerchief and finger-combed a few tendrils of hair behind her ears. He noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

  “Not even close,” Rick said. “You look terrific. You live around here?”

  “Off Fresh Pond, yeah. Don’t you live in Boston? Not around here . . . ?”

  “I’m doing some work on the old house on Clayton Street.”

  “Is your dad still . . .”

  “He’s still alive, yeah. In a nursing home.”

  “I heard he had a terrible stroke.”

  He nodded. “It sucks, but it is what it is.” He hated that empty phrase—what did that mean, anyway, it is what it is?—but it had just slipped out. It was what it was. He’d once done an interview for Back Bay with a local hip-hop celebrity who kept saying It is what it is and haters gonna hate and I just want to live my life. “Your mom and dad okay?” he asked.

  “Charlie and Dora are still Charlie and Dora, so . . . yeah.”

  He looked at her grocery cart full of Goldfish and graham crackers, juice boxes and applesauce, peanut butter and Fruit Roll-Ups. “Crazy guess here, but you’ve got a kid?” He bypassed the question of whether she was married or not; the absence of a wedding ring seemed conclusive. “Or maybe you’ve just gotten into snack foods in a big way.”

  “Evan is seven.” She smiled. “It even rhymes. But not much longer—he’s about to turn eight.”

  “Evan eats a lot of Goldfish, I see. The five-gallon carton.”

  “He’s having a birthday party. And you’re still a health-food nut.”

  “You mean Tostitos aren’t a basic food group?”

  “It’s got the hint of lime, so you’re getting your vitamin C.”

  He squinted, tilted his head. “Why did I think you were in New York?”

  He remembered she’d gone off to the University of Michigan but lost track of her after that. He thought she might have made the obligatory postcollege migration to Manhattan.

  “Yeah, I was with Goldman Sachs for about like two seconds.”

  “Goldman Sachs?” Not what he’d expected. He’d pegged her for a more modest career track, working for the state or an insurance company. Less high-powered, anyway. Goldman Sachs seemed pretty high-test for the Andrea he knew.

  “Yep. How’s the magazine business?”

  “Eh, I’ve moved on, I guess you’d say.”

  “Oh yeah? What are you doing?”

  “Bit of this, bit of that.” He put his Golden Grahams and Cheerios and Tostitos on the conveyor belt and put the green plastic divider bar at the end of his items like a punctuation mark. He glanced back at her again and smiled. “Hey, are you ever free for dinner? Like maybe tonight?”

  “Tonight? I mean . . . no way I could get a babysitter last-minute.” She blushed. He remembered now: Whenever she was embarrassed or excited, she blushed. Her
translucent skin displayed her discomfort like a beacon. She could never hide it.

  “Tomorrow night, then?”

  “I could . . . I could ask my sister . . . but the thing is, I can’t stay out too late. My day starts ridiculously early.” She fingered a tendril of hair. “How about I let you know?”

  Usually, he knew, that formula meant no. But something about her told him that this time it meant yes.

  7

  Rick’s ex-fiancée, Holly, had a small studio apartment on Marlborough Street in the Back Bay. She’d moved back into it once their engagement was broken. He should have realized from the glaringly obvious fact that she insisted on holding on to it even after they got engaged that she’d always had one foot out the door. She’d claimed one day they’d be glad “they” had the extra space, for storage and such. Maybe an office.

  They’d lived together in a spacious three-bedroom condo on Beacon Street, in the same building where Tom Brady, the Boston quarterback, had once lived with his fashion-model partner. When Rick and Holly broke up, neither of them could afford it. They could scarcely afford it even when Rick had a job.

  Holly’s tiny apartment was lovely, elegant, and jewel-like, like the woman herself, though also a bit cramped and impractical, like the woman herself. Or so he thought when she opened the door in a toxic cloud of recently reapplied Chanel No. 5. He was not in a forgiving mood.

  She’d insisted he come over and take away his Wilson Audio floorstanders or else she’d sell them to the building super. She didn’t want those giant loudspeakers, and she was in a hurry. The movers were coming tomorrow to pack and move her out. She was moving to Miami. She worked in the fashion division of a luxury branding agency, and they’d offered her a promotion and a big raise, and besides, her mother and sister lived in South Florida.

  “Oh, hi,” she said as if she didn’t expect him. As though he were a salesman, a nuisance interrupting her day. “Come on in.”

  She’d taken her lunch hour to meet him here and didn’t look pleased about it either. She was dressed for work: a black leather motorcycle jacket over a white top that draped at the neck, skinny black jeans and studded black leather booties. Her ass was perfect.