The Fixer

by Joseph Finder

  No results found for “Donegall Charitable Trust”

  Charities, he knew, had to file with the Internal Revenue Service. There had to be some information to dig up. But unless Joan Breslin had lied about the name—which was a possibility—it didn’t seem to exist.

  A dead end.

  So then there was the biggest, fattest target: Who built the Ted Williams Tunnel? That was easy. Google yielded a number of companies. The project manager was the mammoth construction firm Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff. But then a name jumped out at him: Donegall Construction Company.

  That was the link. Donegall Construction.

  It didn’t take long to determine that Donegall Construction was out of business.

  So what did that mean?

  Two points determined a line. Never mind if both points remained out of focus. An out-of-business construction company and a below-the-radar charitable trust. With enough digging, he would connect the two. He was confident in his ability to do just that.

  But there was an easier way in. A name in the file of notes Monica had given him.

  The name of the cop who had signed the accident report. If there had been a cover-up, the police officer who’d been on the scene would know the truth. He had a name—Police Sergeant Walter Conklin. He’d been a police sergeant twenty years ago. Odds were, he was still alive. Also that he was retired.

  There was a handful of Walter Conklins in the country. In Massachusetts, only one. But he lived in Marblehead, which was a wealthy town full of yacht clubs. Not a place where cops lived. A Google search for that Walter Conklin pulled up a few articles about some local controversy over a windmill off the Marblehead coast. There’d been a public hearing at Marblehead city hall, standing room only, at which local residents voiced their opinions on putting a nearly four-hundred-foot wind turbine off Tinker’s Island, within view of Marblehead. “Over my dead body,” said local resident Walter Conklin.

  When Rick went on Google Maps, he did a double take. Conklin’s house was not just in Marblehead but on Marblehead Neck, a peninsula where some of the town’s biggest houses were located. His house was directly on the water. No wonder he didn’t want his view marred by a few giant windmills. Rick shifted to Google Street View and found a sprawling shingle-style house on Ocean Avenue. He went on Zillow.com and pulled up Conklin’s house. It was valued at 2.9 million dollars.

  A retired Boston policeman living in a three-million-dollar house on Marblehead Neck?

  Something was very wrong.

  He checked his watch. It wasn’t too late to make a call.

  “Walter Conklin?”

  “Who’s asking?” a gruff voice answered.

  “Rick Hoffman with Back Bay magazine in Boston. I’m doing a piece on the windmill controversy up in Marblehead. Looks like they want to put some awfully big, butt-ugly windmill right in your front yard. I was wondering whether you might be willing to talk a bit about it.”

  “Hell, yeah, I want to talk about it. If the board of selectmen thinks—”

  “I’ll be in Marblehead tomorrow midday and would love to come by and see your view and do an interview.”

  “Absolutely,” Conklin said. “It would be my pleasure.”

  45

  He was at City Archives when they opened, holding a box from a high-end bakery in Harvard Square.

  “I hope that’s not from the Tastee again,” Marie Gamache said. “Because that would be cruel and unusual.”

  He handed her the box. “Raisin-pecan morning buns and carrot cake muffins. Both gluten-free.”

  “Interesting,” she said. She opened the box. “Definitely promising. You are too nice to me.”

  “Only when I’m being unreasonable.” He’d e-mailed her last night and asked for an appointment first thing in the morning. But that wasn’t the tough ask. He asked to see the city’s Transportation Department archives, specifically the repair records for a specific time period in 1996. Since 9/11, for some reason, these records weren’t open to the general public. But access could be arranged with special permission.

  “It’s no big deal,” Marie said. She indicated a steel trolley that held gray file boxes. “If you know the right people. Have fun.”

  Rick had a theory. Eighteen years ago there’d been an accident in the Ted Williams Tunnel. A bad accident, bad enough for three people to be killed. The tunnel was closed to traffic for at least part of the next day, according to the newspaper. Standard operating procedure: The damaged car would be left there long enough for an accident reconstruction team to map out what happened. Only then would the car be towed away and the tunnel reopened to traffic.

  Both westbound lanes closed for a day or so. That was in the public record. A huge hassle for drivers.

  But Rick was convinced there would be something else. There had to be some sort of record of the work done. He was hoping to find a document proving that there’d been a grease slick or a problem with the asphalt. Something. After two hours of searching through tedious files, his eyelids were like sandpaper. He was about to give up when something caught his eye.

  It was a memorandum on Donegall Construction letterhead to the secretary of transportation. “Replace fallen NuArt fluorescent light fixture” was its subject line.

  He read it over several times. A ceiling-mounted fluorescent light fixture in the Ted Williams Tunnel had fallen. It had been replaced the day after the accident that killed the Cabreras.

  A light fixture?

  He imagined a flimsy glass fluorescent tube dropping from the ceiling and couldn’t see what that had to do with causing an accident. He found a computer at one of the workstations provided for archives users, went online. Fairly quickly he discovered that the light fixtures used in the Ted Williams ranged from 80 pounds to 110 pounds. They were attached by means of bolts and epoxy adhesive.

  Eighty pounds fell. On what? What if it fell on a car? He imagined the impact, the spider-webbed windshield. The blinded driver, the panic.

  The car spinning out of control.

  It was as simple as that. Now he understood what happened, what had caused the accident. Now it made sense. But nothing about a falling light fixture had been reported in the press. Somehow it had been covered up.

  He had a pretty good idea how that might have happened.

  He needed to take a few notes. He reached into his pockets. All he had was his wallet and, for some reason, Andrea Messina’s business card. He smiled. He’d been thinking about her and about how awful their dinner had been. Then remembered he’d brought one of his old reporter’s notebooks, long and thin and spiral-bound on the top, for his interview with Conklin later that morning. He wanted it to look like a real interview.

  He opened the notebook and took notes. Now he knew exactly what he had to ask the ex-cop.

  * * *

  At the end of the afternoon he stopped by Clayton Street and found Jeff there, sweeping up with one hand. His other hand held his phone to his ear. “All right, cool,” he said. “Got it. That’s no problem. All right, later.”

  Jeff flipped the phone closed, and it tumbled to the floor. “Shit,” he said, reaching over to retrieve it. He held it up in the air triumphantly. It was an old-model Nokia flip phone. “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.” He flipped it open and closed a few times. “Oldie but goodie. Doesn’t talk to you and tell you what time the movie starts, but drop it and the screen doesn’t shatter.”

  “True.”

  “What’s up, boss?”

  “Got a minute?”

  Jeff shrugged. “Sure.”

  “I need your help on something. You know anybody who used to work on the Big Dig?”

  “The Big Dig?” He chuckled. “Oh, sure. A lot.”

  “Let me tell you a story.” He gave Jeff the briefest possible summary of what he’d been investigating. As he finished up, he said, “T
here must have been a dozen workers on site there to replace that light fixture. Subcontractors. Electricians and lighting specialists and epoxy guys and all that.”

  “Boston’s a small town,” Jeff said. “I should at least know someone who knows someone. I got a couple ideas; let me ask around and get back to you.”

  “Thanks. And do me a favor—be discreet about why you’re asking, okay?”

  Jeff paused a moment. Warily, he said, “Do my best.”

  “Some people out there don’t want anyone asking questions.”

  46

  Marblehead was a half hour’s drive from Boston, mostly up 1A, along the coast. It was a town usually called “charming,” its harbor one of the best on the eastern seaboard, allowing the chamber of commerce to call Marblehead “the yachting capital of America.”

  It was not the sort of town to which cops tended to retire.

  Rick had been to houses bigger and grander than Walter Conklin’s waterfront estate. But not many. And none of them belonged to retired police officers.

  As he drove up he was dazzled by the light reflecting on the water, the bright white paint of the house, the emerald of the lawn. The house was situated on a bluff overlooking the ocean. It had to have water views from almost every room in the house. He parked in the circular drive beside a champagne Mercedes sedan. There was a long walk to the house. The place had absolute privacy. No neighbors to be seen.

  Walter Conklin looked like a retired captain of industry, maybe a retired admiral. His full head of white hair was carefully combed back. He wore a white polo shirt under a soft blue lamb’s wool sweater, tan slacks, and moccasins. His ruddy face spoke of long afternoons spent sailing off his private beach. His handshake was unnecessarily firm.

  “No problem finding me?”

  His accent, however, was pure unadulterated Southie.

  “Easy. Right up 1A. Beautiful setting.”

  “Thank you.”

  A slender woman in a tennis dress materialized from the hallway behind him. Her blond-gray hair was pulled back with a lime-green headband. She looked easily fifteen years younger than Conklin. “Lunch at one at the club?” She, too, had a working-class Boston accent, though Rick couldn’t quite place it. She kissed her husband on the cheek, gave Rick a wary glance before sliding out the front door.

  The décor was Grand Hyatt tasteful. “My wife made coffee,” Conklin said. “How do you take it?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Then I’ll help myself.” He led the way to a spacious kitchen—granite island, cherrywood cabinets, built-in ovens—and poured himself a mug of coffee from a Krups machine on the island. He went over to a banquette against the window next to a round wooden kitchen table and sat, gesturing to Rick to join him. Then he took a sip and looked at Rick over the rim. “So what’s your take on the wind farm gonna be?”

  “Actually, I’d be more interested to hear your take.” He took out one of his old reporter’s notebooks and a pen and started jotting.

  “You have any idea how big that thing is?” Conklin said. “It’s taller than the Statue of Liberty. It’s taller than the Zakim Bridge. I mean, each blade is like the width of a football field, you know that?”

  “You’ve got a gorgeous view of the Atlantic here. How do you feel about what a windmill would do to your view?”

  “The view? That ain’t the half of it. These things make a hell of a racket. I read a website about it. They disturb sleep and cause irritability. It’s like a jet engine hovering over you.”

  “‘A jet engine’ . . . that’s good.”

  “Plus, when it’s freezing they throw off shards of ice. And they kill birds.”

  Rick nodded, pretending to take notes, as he planned how he was going to segue to the tunnel accident.

  “Yeah, it’s an unholy monstrosity.” Conklin paused and gave a twist of a smile. “But I have a feeling you didn’t really come here to talk about windmills, did you, Rick?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m not exactly a Back Bay reader, but they never commissioned an article about the Tinker’s Island windmill. Not their kind of thing. Now, if someone wanted to put one of these wind turbines in Boston Common, maybe they’d do something.” Conklin’s eyes glittered. He took a sip of coffee.

  Rick felt a surge of adrenaline, a pulse of anxiety. “I’ve changed my mind about coffee.”

  “Help yourself,” Conklin said casually. “The mugs are right there. Cream in the fridge.”

  Rick took an earthenware mug from a spindle by the coffee machine and poured himself a cup of coffee, and by the time he took a sip he’d thought of a response. “They usually have no idea what I’m working on until I turn it in.” He sat down at one of the uncomfortable ladder-back chairs around the table.

  “Uh-huh. They also say you’re no longer on staff there.”

  All the years in retirement fell away, and Conklin was a cop again, talking to a perp in an interrogation room. He stared at Rick with a zookeeper look.

  “Busted,” Rick said. “You know what, you’re right. I’m actually interested in asking you about something else, and I apologize for coming here under false pretenses. I’m actually working on something a little more interesting. A story about an accident eighteen years ago in the Ted Williams Tunnel where a family was killed.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about. You were a patrol officer. You signed the incident report.”

  “You know how much shit I had to deal with in my twenty years on the force? How many years ago was that?”

  “Eighteen years ago.”

  “Come on.”

  “Well, I have a fairly good working theory of what happened. You were driving by or else got the call on the radio and you discovered a grisly accident scene. You saw a car that was badly smashed up. Then you saw what had happened. You saw that a light fixture had dropped from the ceiling and crashed into the car’s windshield. And that’s when you made a really smart decision.”

  Conklin was no longer meeting Rick’s eyes. He seemed deflated, maybe hostile, but hard to read.

  “Because you’re a smart guy,” Rick went on, “you realized you’d just found something really valuable. Something that might be worth a hell of a lot of money to the company that had just got finished building the tunnel. You probably even had friends who’d been hired by Donegall Construction. So you knew who to call. And that was a call that made you a rich man.”

  Gears were turning in the ex-cop’s mind. Maybe he was trying to decide whether to break almost two decades of silence.

  “You knew that Donegall Construction really wouldn’t want it known what caused this accident. Because that would expose them to some really bad publicity and, who knows, maybe a hundred-million-dollar lawsuit? You figured out that that light fixture would be worth a hell of a lot of money to them.” Rick paused, smiled. “But only if you put it away somewhere. Made sure it wasn’t found by any other cops or state troopers or accident investigators. So you put it away somewhere. Like the trunk of your car.”

  Conklin was still looking off into the distance. Rick tried to measure whether his conjecture was hitting home, whether he’d got it substantially right. But the man remained unreadable.

  “My guess is, you made a really good deal with them. Maybe even millions of dollars. Because it was worth it to Donegall Construction. Given how much they’d be on the hook for if anyone found out about the fallen light fixture, that was pocket change to them.”

  “It was blocking traffic,” Conklin said finally. “I wasn’t gonna leave it there.”

  “Of course not.” Rick had seen moments like this before, where the interview takes a sudden turn. The hostile corporate CEO abruptly decides what the hell, why not fess up? But it was important now to lock Conklin in to a confirmation.
>
  Rick leaned in and said deliberately, “Look, the story’s going to come out, one way or another. Your best hope is to make sure it’s a version of events that’s . . .” Favorable to you, he thought, but he said, “accurate as you recall it. This interview can be entirely off the record, if you prefer. Nobody needs to know that we spoke. You see, I just want to know the truth. That’s all.”

  Rick looked into Conklin’s eyes, and this time the old cop returned his gaze. Conklin pursed his lips and looked as if he’d just swallowed something unpleasant. There was a long beat of silence.

  “Get the hell out of my house,” he said.

  47

  Conklin’s already ruddy face had turned dark, and his eyes twinkled with moisture. There was something in his expression very close to hatred.

  Rick was about to speak, to attempt to talk the man down with some combination of wheedling and threat, when Conklin jabbed a fat finger in the air close to Rick’s nose and said, with teeth bared, “Get the fuck out of here this instant before I make you.”

  There was no more reasoning with him. Anyway, Rick had gotten what he’d come for. He stood up, the ladder-back chair crashing to the kitchen floor behind him. He picked up the chair and slid it neatly against the table. Then he left the kitchen and headed down the hallway to the front door, his footsteps loud in the silence.

  He descended the steps of the gray-painted wraparound porch, his heart thudding. The air was salty and the sun was so bright he had to blink a few times before his eyes adjusted. When he was a good ways down the long driveway, he heard a noise behind him. There was a scuffing sound, like a shoe against gravel, and he turned his head and for a fraction of a second he saw something in his peripheral vision: a person.

  Then something walloped his upper back with such force it sent him sprawling to the ground. He heard a cracking sound on impact and wondered if it was a bone. After a brief moment of nothing, a supernova of pain exploded in his upper back, of a magnitude he’d never experienced before. Needles of pain were shooting down his arms, his hands, and radiating down to his lower back. His right cheek had scraped against the asphalt, but that hurt was insignificant. What the hell? He looked up, saw a guy looming over him, holding a baseball bat, silhouetted against the bright sun.