The Fixer

by Joseph Finder

  She was jotting down notes on a pad. “The Cabrera family . . . Will she know what this is about?”

  “They’re the family that was killed in the Ted Williams Tunnel almost twenty years ago.”

  “Yes, sir, one moment, please.”

  The receptionist got up from her desk and went over to the inner office and knocked on the open door. Then she went inside. A moment later she emerged. “I’m sorry, sir, Gloria is tied up with appointments. Is there something I can help you with?”

  “Not really, thanks. I just need to talk with her. It shouldn’t take more than a minute or two. May I—” and he approached Gloria Antunes’s office door.

  “Sir, please wait here,” the receptionist protested.

  “Ms. Antunes,” Rick said, “I just wanted to talk with you briefly about the Cabreras.” Doorstepping her this way was an aggressive—some would say obnoxious—move, but he knew when he was getting the runaround. Opportunity doesn’t knock, an old saying went; it shows up only when you beat down the door.

  Gloria Antunes was a slim, elegant woman with short, curly salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a colorful silk scarf around her shoulders and large hoop earrings. She rose from her desk and said, “Yes, Mr. Hoffman, I got the message but I’m sorry, I have a full plate here. I just don’t have time to talk.”

  “Understood. Can I grab five minutes of your time today or tomorrow? Shouldn’t take any more than that.”

  She replied in an imperious tone, “Mr. Hoffman, what happened to the Cabreras was a terrible, heartbreaking thing, but I have nothing to contribute.”

  “Would you be able to guide me toward any of their survivors?”

  “Mr. Hoffman, I told you, I don’t have time to talk. Now, good day.”

  Gloria Antunes’s hostility was puzzling. He’d expected a community leader like her to be welcoming, wanting to remember the dead. There was some reason she didn’t want to talk, and he needed to get to the bottom of it.

  * * *

  Within an hour Rick had located the rundown triple-decker house, not far from a behemoth brick housing project, where Oscar Cabrera and his wife and daughter had once lived on the second floor, according to the police report. He sat in his car outside the house, painted olive green, missing shingles, its cement porch steps crumbling. “Now what?” he said out loud to himself.

  The family had died eighteen years ago. Maybe someone was around who remembered them and knew something about how they’d been killed. Dolores had worked at a hair salon that was located on Centre Street. He drove around, past a butcher shop called, cleverly, Meatland, an off-brand mobile phone store, and a Latino restaurant whose sign featured a palm tree and a cooked lobster. He found Hair Again salon. It was a “beauty center,” according to a sign in the window, “especializing in” perms, extensions, and highlights.

  He asked the young woman at the front desk if anyone there remembered Dolores Cabrera. It took a while for him to be understood. Besides the language barrier, there was the strangeness of the query. But eventually the manager of the salon, an older woman with glossy black hair and high arched eyebrows, came out from the back. “Why you asking about Dolores Cabrera?” she demanded.

  “I’m writing an article. Remembering them.”

  The woman seemed to soften at once. “She was a sweet girl.”

  “Did she or her husband leave any family?”

  “Family? Yes, of course. Why?”

  Five minutes later, Rick left the salon with one useful piece of information: Oscar Cabrera’s relatives still lived in the triple-decker where the young family had lived. He drove back there and rang the bell.

  For a long moment nothing happened. From behind the door he could hear a cacophony of voices, shouts muffled and shrill. Then there were footsteps and a couple of women’s voices. The door opened a crack and a woman looked out. She wore green hospital scrubs and curlers in her hair.

  “Sí?”

  “Do you speak English?”

  “Em, a little. Yes?”

  She was a tía, she said, Oscar Cabrera’s sister. The hubbub behind her, which had abated when she opened the door, resumed. Rick could hear water running and dishes clinking and at least one baby crying and screaming.

  He gave her a version of the pretext he’d given the woman at the beauty salon, that he was a journalist writing a story on the deaths of the Cabrera family. He didn’t explain why he was writing it, eighteen years later.

  “No!” she suddenly said, waving a hand back and forth. “No! No talk about this!” She pushed the door closed.

  Baffled, Rick rang the doorbell again. Had she misunderstood? The door opened again, just a crack.

  “No, yo no quiero hablar! Por favor, vete! Déjanos en paz! Por favor, vaya lejos!”

  Then she closed the door again.

  He understood most of what she’d said. She didn’t want to talk. She wanted him to go away. Obviously something had gone very wrong in the translation between Spanish and English. He turned to leave and saw an elderly woman standing at the foot of the concrete steps.

  “You want to talk about the Cabrera family,” she said. She was stooped, with steel-gray hair in a tight bun, a very wrinkled face. She must have been in her late eighties. “They won’t talk to you. Come with me.”

  She told him she’d heard from someone who’d been at the beauty salon that he was asking about the family. She knew them, she said. Her name was Manuela Guzman and she knew them from church. She had also been the daughter’s piano teacher.

  The woman invited him into her apartment, in the basement of a triple-decker across the street and down the block. It was a small but neatly kept space fragrant of recent cooking, of onions and garlic and wood fires, and dominated by a grand piano.

  She beckoned him over to a large wing chair and sat next to him on a couch that was protected with plastic sheeting.

  “The family, they will never talk about the accident,” she said in a near whisper. “But if you are writing something about them, I want to remember them for you the way they were, not what everyone says.”

  “Thank you,” Rick said, uncomfortably. He didn’t like lying to this sincere and very kindly seeming old woman. “But why don’t they want to talk about it?”

  “I will explain for you.”

  “Okay, thanks.” He took out his reporter’s notebook to make it look as if he were taking notes for an article.

  “Graciela was my piano student. She was so talented. A sweet girl she was. She was working, trying to learn Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ when she . . .”

  She fell silent. He heard the faint ticking of a clock somewhere nearby.

  “Tell me the story,” Rick said. He was still grappling with how everything fit together. Why was Pappas so interested in this accident that he repeatedly called Monica Kennedy at the Globe—and persistently called Lenny Hoffman as well?

  “There is no story,” she shot back. “There is only sadness. Sadness and lies.”

  “Lies,” Rick prompted.

  “After they were killed, there was talk that Oscar was drunk.” She pantomimed drinking from a glass. Then she waved a hand dismissively and frowned. “But I know this is not true. He did not drink.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Graciela was so excited about going to Santo Domingo with her mother to visit her abuela and abuelo. Oscar went to the airport to pick up his wife and daughter, but their flight was late . . . delayed. In the middle of the night they are driving through this Williams tunnel and then suddenly they were all killed.”

  “But . . . Oscar wasn’t drunk.”

  She held up a crooked finger. “Never.”

  “And the car crashed. How?”

  “But you see, nobody knows. There is only stories and rumor.”

  “Such as?”

  She shook her he
ad.

  “Was there, you know, grease on the pavement?” Rick asked. “Was there something wrong with the car? Something went wrong, that’s for sure.” Monica Kennedy’s article didn’t mention anything like that. Her notes indicated that she suspected drunk driving, but obviously that hadn’t panned out or it would have been in her story. “Don’t you think the newspaper would have reported something about this?”

  “The newspapers didn’t know the truth. But when people say Oscar was drinking, I tell them I know better.”

  “But I still don’t understand why the family won’t talk to me.”

  She leaned forward and held up an index finger and bounced it in the air. “Because they get paid.”

  “They get paid.”

  “They got money. To buy their silence. To say nothing and ask nothing. So they live in their house on the money they got.”

  “Money—from what? From whom?”

  She frowned and shook her head. “Maybe even they don’t know. But no one will talk about what happened in the tunnel. No one will say the truth about what killed Graciela. I want to show you something. Please?”

  Rick’s mind was reeling. Things were becoming murkier. Was the truth somehow concealed that night—and if so, was Pappas part of the concealment?

  And Lenny Hoffman?

  The old woman opened an armoire inside of which was an old TV and assorted other electronic components and then found a videotape cassette, which she put into a VCR. She fussed with a remote control, and the TV came on, blaring a Dr. Phil show. “Can you help me?” she said.

  Rick came over and tried a couple more remote controls and eventually the video was playing on the TV screen.

  “She’s the first one,” the woman said, taking one of the remote controls.

  It was a tape of a piano recital, Rick realized, showing each of her students. It took place in what could have been a room in a church or school. Manuela Guzman, looking considerably younger and peppier, wearing a high-necked blue dress, with black hair in a bouffant, made some remarks to the audience members, who seemed to be mostly parents and family.

  There was a round of applause and then an awkward girl in pigtails, dressed in a gauzy white dress with a big pink bow at the waist, came to the front of the room and sat down at the piano. She played energetically, moving her head a lot, emoting. Whatever piece she was playing she seemed to be playing it well. She made just a few mistakes. When she finished, there was enthusiastic applause, and she got up and bowed and curtsied again, but this time she gave a big gap-toothed smile.

  Something about that smile, earnest and uncertain, achingly beautiful, made Rick’s throat tight. He turned and saw that tears were running down the old woman’s cheeks. There were tears on his own cheeks as well. She was smiling back at Graciela, and she hit the Pause button.

  “When you write your article,” she said, “I want you to remember Graciela.”

  “I will,” he said, and he cleared his throat because it was getting hoarse.

  “This is sad about Graciela, isn’t it?”

  Rick nodded. “It’s a tragedy. It’s unspeakably sad.”

  “Tragedy, yes. It’s funny, he say the same thing when I show him this.”

  “Who did?”

  “Your father.”

  35

  As soon as I hear the news, I went to the Cabreras’ apartment to try . . . to see, to help them,” Manuela Guzman said.

  “To console them.”

  She nodded. “Oscar’s sister Estrella was there and also Dolores’s brother Ernesto and his wife and everyone was . . . well, they were in shock, and everybody crying. How could this happen? Everyone is saying, how could this possibly happen? They were . . . upset and angry, out of their mind, you understand?”

  “Of course.”

  “The police say maybe Oscar is drinking, but everyone knows this is not so. Oscar never drinks. Picking up his wife and daughter from the airport? Oscar is so careful! And then Dolores’s brother Ernesto said he talked to Gloria Antunes, who is like leader in the Dominican community.”

  “I know who she is.” How could he forget: the imperious woman who didn’t want to talk to him.

  “Gloria Antunes say she want to start an investigation, the accident is not what people say. But then a man come to the door, a man who look just like you. He must be your father, no?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “He say he’s with chamber of commerce, and he say he want to do anything he can to help them out in this terrible time. He want to help them with funeral expenses. He say anything we can help you with, here’s my card, you call me.”

  Chamber of commerce? Rick thought. It must have been someone else. His cell phone rang, but he let it go to voice mail.

  “He want to help out. He was the nicest man. He called me ‘doll.’”

  Calling a woman “doll” was almost Lenny’s signature. Maybe it was him.

  “And then I take this man—your father?—to my house and I showed him Graciela’s recital, just like I show you. And he start to cry. He say it is a tragedy. Wait. A moment.”

  She put a hand on his shoulder and turned around and began looking in a dim corner of the apartment, rummaging through a bookcase. She pulled out a small green plastic box, the kind used for index cards or recipes. “I know I have the card. Wait.”

  Several more minutes passed by. Suddenly she said, “Ah! Yes!” She handed Rick a dog-eared white business card that said, as he knew it would,

  THE LAW OFFICES OF LEONARD HOFFMAN

  He looked up at her. “That’s my dad.” It didn’t say chamber of commerce. He had the decency not to use fake business cards. But he was dealing with immigrants who would be easily misled. A lawyer’s business card had its own kind of authority. He gave a sad smile. “How did he want to help out, did he say?”

  She shook her head. “The family will never talk about it. I think this man paid them money. Maybe a lot of money.”

  “For their silence?”

  “No one talks about it. But all of a sudden”—she rubbed her palms together as if dusting them off—“No more talk about the car accident. They never want to talk about it. They live in that house, all three floors, all the family. I don’t know what they do for work. And Gloria Antunes—suddenly the Hyde Square Community Partnership becomes this big thing with an office and a secretary. I think they gave her money, too. And even all this time . . . nobody talks.”

  As soon as he left the old piano teacher’s apartment, he checked his phone. The call that had come in was from an exchange he recognized as Massachusetts General Hospital.

  “Mr. Hoffman, this is Dr. Girona from Mass General Neurology,” the message said. “Could you give me a call as soon as possible?”

  To Rick’s surprise, Dr. Girona left his personal cell phone number.

  Standing outside a convenience store, Rick called the doctor back.

  “Yes, Mr. Hoffman, thanks for calling,” Dr. Girona said. “I’ve just been looking over the new MRI scans we ordered for your father, and I’m troubled by something.”

  “Okay?” he said.

  “Your father’s chart indicates a hemorrhagic stroke, obviously. But the scans we just got back—well, they’re quite a bit more sophisticated than the scans we got twenty years ago—and they indicate the legacy effects of forceful traumatic brain injury. I mean, consistent with grievous battery.”

  “I don’t understand.” Rick felt his mouth go dry.

  “I’m saying that we’re picking up something that was entirely overlooked when he first was admitted back in 1996. The likely cause of his condition.”

  “You’re telling me he was beaten,” Rick said.

  “I’d say so, yes.”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  36

  Driving to the Charlestown Navy Yard to meet
Dr. Girona, he thought about his father. About the mystery of Leonard Hoffman. The more Rick learned, it seemed, the less he knew.

  His father was beaten? This didn’t gibe at all with Leonard’s secretary’s account. She had found Len slumped on the floor and called 911. Not lying in a pool of blood.

  His entire understanding of the last two decades had tipped to one side. His father had placed a bunch of cell phone calls to Alex Pappas over a period of three days before . . . before he was beaten. Rick imagined a baseball bat to the side of his father’s head. One blow and his father slumped to the floor, immediately suffering a stroke. Maybe not what the attacker had intended.

  So who could have attacked Leonard, if indeed he was attacked? And what was going on during those three days?

  Rick now knew that his father had come to pay off the Cabrera family survivors for some reason and then had seen the same videotape that Rick had just seen, and cried seeing the little girl, just as Rick had done. Rick now knew that at some point shortly after that, Leonard had been beaten, badly enough to bring on a stroke.

  But who had done it? And why?

  Rick wondered whether his father’s secretary, Joan, might have some idea.

  And he thought about the cash hidden in the house, the three million dollars now in storage. If that was money Lenny had bought from places in the Combat Zone to use for bribes, then it was money he hadn’t yet paid out. He must have given money to the Cabrera family—

  Unless he hadn’t.

  Unless for some reason his father had held on to the money, not paid it out, and maybe that was why he was beaten.

  At a stoplight, Rick glanced at his watch. His father would just be starting his treatment about now. A nursing home aide had begun driving Lenny to Charlestown for the daily treatments in a nursing home van. This was the way they preferred to do it.

  Rick reflected that the more he dug, the more rot he was exposing. He couldn’t help but think of the work that Jeff and his crew were doing on the old house, ripping out the decayed wood and plaster.

  As Rick drove, his mind wandered, but he kept coming back to one question: Why did his father offer to pay off the Cabrera family? What was it about the accident that required silence? He thought and thought and kept coming up empty. Finally he called Monica Kennedy at the Globe. She answered after one ring, with her customary bark: “Kennedy.”