Then he pulled out a large piece of white foam core with a lot of small rocks affixed to it. Rick’s old, once cherished, rock collection. He was surprised to see it here. As a kid, Rick had for some reason collected rocks and minerals and had once painstakingly glued his best specimens to a poster board: rose quartz, obsidian, shale, mica schist. . . . Then he’d carefully labeled everything with one of those old-fashioned Dymo label makers, the kind with the alphabet dial and the embossing tape. (Click, click, click, squeeze!) But Rick distinctly remembered tossing it when he entered high school, purging his room of childish things. Len must have rescued it from the trash and brought it into his office, holding on to it for all these decades like a curator of Rick’s childhood.
He found a silver desk clock, vaguely familiar. TIFFANY & CO., it said on the face. Then he noticed that its base was engraved:
FOR LEONARD HOFFMAN WITH THANKS FROM THE PAPPAS GROUP.
What was the Pappas Group, he wondered, that had given Lenny such an expensive gift?
He turned to the computer and saw the blinking prompt: C:>. Ready for him to type in text. My God, he’d forgotten about those days, when computers were first widely used. Rick had used a Macintosh for years and had gotten used to the ease, the friendly interface. Back in the day, you had to type in commands. He’d forgotten how.
But he knew how to insert a floppy disk. He pulled it out of its paper sleeve and slid it into the drive slot. The hard drive grunted some more, and after a few seconds some text appeared on the monitor.
It was a financial program called Quicken, and it was really nothing more than a record of deposits made into, and withdrawals from, two different Fleet Bank accounts. Fleet Bank hadn’t existed in years, having been swallowed up by a bigger bank that was in turn swallowed up by an even bigger bank.
One was a regular business account, recording checks written to the electric company and other utilities, to the real estate company for the office rent, to Staples, that sort of thing. The other one was apparently a client fund account, a record of the checks Lenny had received from his clients.
All pretty standard and all pretty unremarkable. Rick wasn’t sure if any of this would help him, but just in case it might, he plugged in the dot matrix printer, heard it clatter noisily to life, and made sure its cable was connected to the computer. It was. He clicked Print, and a minute or so later a long spool of perforated computer paper with little tractor-feed holes on either side came spewing out of the printer.
Sitting on the side of the desk he studied the sheaf of computer paper. It showed deposits and withdrawals for the last three years of his father’s practice. He found the entries for the year 1996 and began scanning the columns slowly for deposits.
He found various deposits, in amounts ranging from fifty to thirty-two hundred dollars. Nothing bigger.
This just compounded the mystery. According to Lenny’s office files, he’d billed eight of his clients 295,000 dollars in the month of May 1996. Yet according to the city archives, he hadn’t done any of the work he’d billed for. And now he’d found that his father hadn’t gotten paid for any of the work he’d billed for. Work he apparently hadn’t done. So the bills were fraudulent.
He heard a noise from upstairs, a thump, and he froze.
He clicked off the flashlight and, in the pale moonlight, wove a path through the piles of chairs and the tarp-covered coffee tables toward the stairs. There he stood and listened again for the thump, and after another minute it came again, and he realized it was coming from the refrigerator in the kitchen directly above, cycling noisily on or off. He’d turned it on to use for cooling water and beer.
Keeping the flashlight off, he returned to his father’s desk, grabbed the printout, and headed back up the stairs and out of the house.
* * *
Back in his room at the B&B, Rick Googled the Pappas Group.
It seemed to be some sort of public relations firm. Its website showed a bright photo of the gold dome of the Massachusetts State House, which was probably meant to symbolize power and access, the way a DC-based firm’s website would probably show the Capitol. It disclosed little. There was language about “our expert tacticians” and “high-profile clients” and “discreet representation” and “reputation management.” One page featured the logos of some of their clients—banks, restaurant groups, universities, shopping malls, radio stations, health clubs, and high-end retailers. All Rick gleaned from the website was that Pappas’s firm was deeply entrenched and well connected.
The founder and CEO was Alex Pappas. His biography was spare: “For almost thirty years Mr. Pappas has brought his unique media savvy and political acumen to bear in investigations, high-profile celebrity clients, and strategic advice on dealing with corporate communications challenges.”
A Google search on Alex Pappas pulled up very little. A few passing mentions in the Globe, a blip in Boston Magazine. Everything was cursory and vague. Pappas had been a press secretary to a Democratic governor of Massachusetts years ago, ran the governor’s successful reelection campaign, then left the public sector in a blaze of glory to start his own “strategic and crisis communications firm.” It was as if he then decided to fly under the radar. You almost never saw mentions of him in the press. He’d all but gone into the witness protection program.
A search for the “Pappas Group” yielded more results. The firm was leading the public relations campaign on behalf of the Olympian Tower, a planned skyscraper in Boston that was sort of controversial, since it threatened to cast a long shadow over the Boston Public Garden. That was about all Rick was able to pull up.
What in the world was Lenny Hoffman, solo lawyer, doing with a Tiffany clock from such a high-powered firm?
* * *
In the morning Rick waited till ten before he called Monica Kennedy at the newspaper.
“What do you know about a guy named Alex Pappas?” he said.
“You’re still on this cash bank thing?”
“Pappas is . . . the cash bank?” he said, surprised.
“Isn’t that why you’re asking about him?”
“Who is he?”
“I guess you’d call him a publicist.”
“I’d never heard of him.”
“Sure. He’s so high-profile you’ve never heard of him. See, Rick, there’s two kinds of publicists. The kind who gets your name in the paper, and the kind who keeps it out.”
“What does he do? I mean, besides keep your name out of the paper?”
“Reputation management, crisis management, introductions.”
“Introductions?”
“Back in the Big Dig days, Pappas was the guy to know if you wanted to land a contract. He introduced construction companies that wanted work to the people who hired. Let’s just say he made a lot of state workers rich.”
“You never did any reporting on him, did you?”
She sighed heavily. “To be honest, that guy was always too slippery for me to get a grasp on. Like nailing Jell-O to the wall.”
And only then did it occur to Rick that Pappas began with the letter P.
25
He was never going to evade the watchers, as he’d come to think of them, entirely. That wasn’t realistic. If he was careful, he could keep them from knowing where he spent nights. Theoretically he could change his rental car every couple of days, to make sure his vehicle wasn’t tracked.
But he wasn’t going to stop visiting his father, even though there had to be someone watching the nursing home, watching the comings and goings, waiting for him to show up at some point at the one place he was almost certain to go. So he’d have to take further precautions.
First he made a stop at Brooks Brothers on Newbury Street to pick up something for his father. He was there when the store opened, double-parked, and found a fluorescent orange parking ticket on the windshield of the Zipcar Toyota Prius w
hen he got back. He didn’t care.
Then he stopped at a costume shop on Mass Ave near the Berklee College of Music. It wasn’t remotely Halloween time, but somehow this shop stayed open for business.
By a few minutes after eleven he parked a few blocks from the Alfred Becker Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. He approached the tan-brick building with a heightened awareness and a low-level sense of anxiety. He wore a Red Sox baseball jacket and a black wig and a pair of aviator sunglasses. Anyone who wasn’t looking too closely wouldn’t recognize him.
Inside, he stopped at the men’s room off the lobby and removed the wig and sunglasses. The woman behind the glassed-in counter seemed to take no notice of him. He wasn’t sure what she was doing there.
“Twice in one week!” Brenda the health care aide said with a gummy smile when she saw him. “Dad’s gonna be thrilled.”
“Got something for him,” Rick said. He stuck out the navy blue Brooks Brothers gift box.
“He loves chocolate,” Brenda said.
“It’s clothing. Don’t get his hopes up.”
She fell in beside him, joining him on the long walk down the corridor to Lenny’s room. Rick was a little surprised. He didn’t need an escort; he’d been coming here since long before Brenda started working here. He wanted to ask his father some questions, or rather, to give it another try, and he preferred not to have company.
He studied the wall-to-wall carpet underfoot, tan and beige and brown in a tight checkered pattern. The carpet was only a few years old. The Alfred Becker home took in a hell of a lot of money from its patients—its patients’ families, actually—and could afford to keep the place up. Though it was really little more than a long-term parking facility for old people. They gave Lenny hardly any medical care, because his health was basically stable. In his case, six figures a year went to pay for the nursing home’s staff and its terrible institutional food, which its inmates mostly didn’t mind, probably, because after all they had no choice, and what was the use of complaining? The old people probably started off complaining vociferously when they first entered. But after a few months, they settled down and resigned themselves to their fate.
Lenny Hoffman wasn’t much of a complainer, but Rick suspected that he, too, might be grousing if he were able to speak.
“There he is,” Rick said heartily. Lenny was slumped in his big vinyl-cushioned chair next to his bed. There was a line of drool on his shabby old pajama top.
The TV was on—TV doctors in scrubs standing around a glossy set. “One cough—one sneeze—one million germs released into the air!” a gravelly voice-over said. The Chyron on the screen read, Disease Cloud!
His father lifted his head slowly, as if it were too heavy for his neck. Once again Rick was momentarily flustered by the outraged look on Lenny’s face.
“Leonard!” Brenda called as if he were deaf, not just mute. “Look who’s here again!”
His father moved his head warily in Rick’s direction and then turned back to the TV.
“Next on The Doctors,” the TV announcer said, “hybrid tummy tucks!”
“Thanks, Brenda,” Rick said, dismissing her, or at least trying to. “Lenny, I’ve got something for you.” He handed his father the Brooks Brothers box. Lenny took it in his left hand, the one that worked. It slipped from his grasp into his lap.
“Let me help you open it,” Brenda said. She took the box from Lenny and pulled it open. Meanwhile, Rick found the TV remote and clicked Mute.
“Oh, aren’t these handsome!” she said, taking out the navy blue pajamas with white piping around the lapels, sort of nautical-looking. “That’s exactly what he needs. We’ll have to put them on after lunch.”
“Hey, Lenny, how’s it going?” Rick turned to Brenda, who showed no signs of preparing to leave. “I think we’ll be fine now,” he said pleasantly. “Time for a little father-son bonding.” He sat at the end of his father’s bed.
“Of course, of course, I completely understand,” Brenda said, and with a curt nod she left the room.
Rick looked at his dad and found it hard to breathe. The air in the room was thick and oppressive. He smelled rubbing alcohol and cleaning solvent and nursing home food and something vaguely fecal. Something was pressing down on his chest. He could see a black hair sprouting out of a pore on his father’s nose.
Lenny Hoffman, it turned out, harbored a secret ambition. He wasn’t blithely satisfied with his sketchy job, his embarrassing clientele. He wanted more. He wanted something else. Maybe it was like his obsession with having Rick attend the Linwood Academy, that aspiration, that ache for something more in life.
There was nothing wrong with Rindge and Latin, the local public school. The mayor of New York City had gone there! So had Ben Affleck and Matt Damon! And the Linwood Academy was a mediocre prep school, for kids who couldn’t get into Milton or Roxbury Latin or Belmont Hill or Buckingham Browne & Nichols. Sure enough, Rick hadn’t gotten in to any of the good schools. He didn’t interview well. He had no interest in switching to a prep school, but his father insisted. This was right after Rick’s mother had died. Maybe Lenny wanted a school to take the place of a mother, give his kids the attention he couldn’t. Or maybe there was something else going on, something even sadder. Like, if he couldn’t be respectable, at least his kids could go to fancy schools.
“Dad,” he said now. “The day you had your stroke you were scheduled to have lunch with someone. Someone whose name began with P. Do you remember who it was?”
His father looked at him, or at least seemed to be looking at him. Rick moved closer down the bed. His father’s eyes remained fixed on his.
“Blink once for yes and twice for no. Do you remember?”
No response. Rick waited. A few seconds later Lenny blinked, but it seemed to signify nothing.
“Let me give you some names. See if you recall. Was it Phil Aronowitz?”
No response.
“How about Nancy Perry?”
No response. No blinks at all. What, if anything, did that signify?
“Was it Alex Pappas?”
Something seemed to come over Lenny’s face. He looked agitated—even more agitated—and pained.
“The money—was it meant for Pappas? Blink—”
His father’s left hand suddenly reached out and clutched Rick’s wrist. Rick’s heart seized.
“My God,” Rick said softly. “You understand.”
26
In the late afternoon, after moving to a new B&B, in Boston, Rick went back to the house.
He took measures—parked three blocks away and didn’t get out of the car until he felt sure no one had taken notice of him—and carried a cooler of Bud for Jeff and the crew.
But everyone had gone home except Marlon and Jeff. Marlon was still working, framing, screwing in two-by-fours. The racket made it hard to hear what Jeff was saying. Jeff and Rick popped open cans of Bud and sat on the plaster-dusty hardwood floor next to a Sawzall and a discarded can of Red Bull.
“The city inspectors came by,” Jeff said, popping open a beer.
“What for?”
“Make sure everything’s going according to code.”
“I assume we passed.” Rick opened a beer and took a few cold sips.
Jeff shrugged. “They know me by now. You do enough work in the city, they get to trust you.”
Marlon shouted, “Mind if I pack it in for the day? I’m finished up here.”
“Go ahead,” Jeff shouted back.
A moment of silence passed. Jeff scratched his chin. The goatee was probably new and he hadn’t gotten used to it yet. He looked at Rick, tilted his head. “Ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“How much money was there, inside the wall?”
Rick hesitated, but only for a minute. The question wasn’t whether Jeff knew; it was how much he k
new. He shook his head vaguely. “I didn’t count it. Forty, fifty thousand, maybe? Maybe not that much. But, I mean, it was a lot.” Because any found money was a lot, to him and to Jeff. Jeff, who worked hard for it. And Rick, who used to.
“It sure looked like more than that.”
“I wish.”
Jeff looked at him for a few seconds, but it seemed a lot longer. “Huh,” he finally said. “Hope you’re keeping it in a safe place.”
“I think so.”
“Good. I mean, that’s a lot of money, and you wouldn’t want anything to happen to it. People hear about that kind of money around, they do all sorts of extreme stuff.”
“I know,” Rick said uncomfortably. It didn’t sound like any kind of a veiled threat, but he couldn’t be entirely sure.
“You think your dad saved all that, or what?”
“I wish I could ask him about it.”
“Does he . . . I mean, I know he can’t talk or anything, but does he get what you say to him?”
“Well, that’s the thing. I can’t be sure, but I’m pretty sure he does understand.”
“How do you know?”
Rick hesitated. “He grabbed my hand. When I said something about the money. Like he was warning me, maybe.”
“Warning you?” Jeff sounded amused.
“Could be I was just imagining it, I don’t know. Maybe it was nothing. I just get this eerie sense that he’s not a vegetable. That there’s someone home inside that head.”
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