“Did you say staples?”
“You got a pretty bad cut on your scalp. Also, there’s some stitches to your left cheek. Those are absorbable, but you might want to get them out anyway.”
Someone, a male voice, said, “Can I talk to him now, Doc?”
Rick saw a uniformed police officer enter the curtained-off area.
“I think he’s good to talk now, don’t you agree, Mr. Hoffman?”
“Talk to . . .”
“Mister, uh, Hoffman,” the cop said, “I’m Detective Harrison. Can we talk for a minute?” He was young and overweight, with black hair and gray eyes and deep circles under his eyes.
“Sure, I guess so.”
“All right, Mr. Hoffman,” the doctor said, “I’ll see if we can reach Ms. Messina.” She tugged at a curtain and was gone.
“Mister Hoffman, who beat you up?”
“I don’t . . . know.”
He thought: The bouncer at Jugs. What was his name again? Don’t answer.
“Lemme, lemme back up a second. Do you remember anything about the incident?”
“Just being beaten with a baseball bat. Everything else is kind of vague.”
“But you don’t know the person who attacked you?”
“Right, I don’t.”
“Can you describe him?”
“All I saw was the baseball bat.”
“Do you have any idea why he beat you up like this?”
Rick tried to shake his head but it hurt too much. “No.”
“Mr. Hoffman,” the cop said, exasperated, “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what you know. Are you afraid of this person, for some reason?”
“Take a look at me,” Rick said. “Wouldn’t you be?”
“You must have some idea who did it.”
“No.”
“It just came out of the blue. You were walking down the street and someone went after you with a baseball bat and beat the crap out of you.”
Rick was silent.
“Here’s my card,” the detective said, handing it to Rick. “Just call and ask for Detective Harrison if you change your mind.”
Rick nodded, and it hurt, but less than shaking his head.
Why was he refusing to tell the police? He had no idea. Maybe because it seemed pointless. The police weren’t going to be able to do anything anyway.
A minute later he heard a woman’s voice and the curtain parted and he saw Andrea.
“Rick, you’re awake! What the hell happened? Who did this to you?”
He looked at her through his one open eye. He smiled, or tried to. She was wearing a green jewel-toned suit. Her honeyed brown hair fell to her shoulders in tangled waves. Her full lips, the lips that always looked slightly pursed, were parted. Her brown eyes, normally skeptical, were wide.
“They said your wallet is gone. Did you get held up and you tried to fight them off or something?”
“Something like that. Andi, why are you here?”
“Andi? No one’s called me that in, like, twenty years.”
“Old habits. Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay, it’s just . . . someone took your wallet and the only thing you had on you was my business card for some reason so they must have assumed we were friends.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Don’t. . . .” She smiled ruefully. “You’re going to have to go home with me. Otherwise they won’t let you out.”
“That’s okay, I’ll be fine.”
“Have you seen yourself? You look like . . . Raging Bull or something. Anyway, I’ve got plenty of room.”
“I don’t want you to do this, Andrea.”
“As far as I can tell, you have two choices. Spend the next week in the North Shore Regional Medical Center in Salem or go home with me. As long as you don’t mind sharing a house with an eight-year-old boy.”
He closed his sole functioning eye, then opened it again. “Just for a day or so.”
“Let me see what I can do about getting you discharged.”
“Thanks.”
“On the ride home you can tell me everything.”
“Right,” he said. The question was whether he could safely tell her anything at all.
50
He sat in the front passenger’s seat of her Volvo station wagon. He could barely keep his eyes open. He wanted nothing more than to drift off in a narcotic haze.
“I hope you don’t mind my getting you out of the hospital that quickly,” Andrea said. “I’ve got to get back to my office.”
“Happy to get out of that place. I couldn’t sleep with all the beeping.”
“I’ve got a big meeting this afternoon with a foundation that’s interested in giving us a multimillion-dollar gift. So I have to be on my best behavior.”
“That’s why the fancy suit?”
“You got it.” She signaled and sped up to pass a slow-moving truck. “Rick, what happened to you?”
“I . . . got mugged.”
“Mugged?”
“I made the mistake of trying to fight the guy off.”
A long silence followed. “You were mugged in Marblehead.” She sounded dubious.
“Right.”
Another pause. “Okay. So they took your wallet but they didn’t take your iPhone.”
“You can’t use someone else’s iPhone if it’s locked with a code.”
“Strange.” She glanced in the rearview mirror, then back at the road. “You want to stop by your house and pick up some stuff?”
“My house?”
“Clothes, whatever.”
“Oh, right. No, I’m not living there.”
“Yeah, all that plaster dust . . . can’t blame you. Where’re you staying?”
He couldn’t remember. There’d been so many hotels and B&Bs. “Oh, right, the DoubleTree. On Soldiers Field Road. But I’m okay for now.”
“Think you’ll be okay if I just drop you at home and leave you for a while?”
“I got my pain meds, I’m all set.”
A couple of minutes later she said something he didn’t quite get, and the next thing he knew they were pulling up to her house on Fayerweather Street.
* * *
Some time later—hours, probably, but he couldn’t be sure—he awoke to find a pair of eyes staring at him from a few inches away.
“Wow,” someone said. A kid’s voice. Probably the owner of the staring pair of eyes.
It was a mop-headed boy wearing a Red Sox T-shirt. Rick lifted his head off the pillow, which hurt. Moving his head hurt. It wasn’t just the physical act of moving his head, the muscles in his neck. That was bad enough, but then there was a headache from hell. His eyes felt as if there were needles sticking into them from behind.
“Gross,” the kid said. “You look like Jabba the Hutt.”
“Who are you?” he said.
“I’m Evan.”
“Evan who’s seven?”
“I’m eight now. I just had a birthday.”
“Right, with all the Goldfish. How was your party?”
“Good.”
“Get anything good?”
“I got Lego sets.”
“Yeah? Which one?”
“AT-AT Walker from Star Wars.”
“Cool. How come you’re not in school?”
“I just got home.”
“Where’s your mom?”
“She’s still at work. Most days she doesn’t come home till six.”
“She lets you go home from school on your own?”
“Grandma walks me home. Anyways, what happened to you? You look like a monster.”
“Thank you. I had a disagreement with someone who had a baseball bat.”
“Like a baseball player?”
; “Not exactly. But he had a pretty good swing.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Yep.”
“Where? On your face?”
“Pretty much everywhere. Which reminds me it’s probably time to take one of my happy pills. Also I need to use the bathroom. Evan, is there a bathroom around here?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
Evan pointed to the door.
“Got it.” Rick tried to bend his knees, to lift his legs, but that apparently involved muscles in his lower back, which were too stiff and painful to move. They shot out warning daggers of pain.
“Can I help?” Evan said.
“I’ll be okay.” Eventually, Rick was able to get out of the bed by lifting the chenille bedspread and revolving his straight legs around and down. He was wearing hospital scrubs, which must have been put on him in the hospital. The clothes he’d been wearing when he was attacked had been given back to him in a plastic bag. They’d been cut up.
He limped, like a very old man, across the carpet into the hall and into the bathroom. There he discovered that it hurt to relieve himself—no doubt a result of the Foley catheter—and that his urine was pink. They’d warned him it might be pink because of the renal contusions: The bouncer from Jugs had walloped Rick’s left kidney. They said the pink would go away.
When he came back to the guest room, Evan was still there waiting for him, sitting on the floor.
“You must really hurt,” Evan said.
“At least I can walk,” Rick said.
“Not really,” Evan said. “Not so good.”
Rick smiled. “True.” He lowered himself to the carpet next to Evan, wincing and groaning.
“Grandma said you’re a friend of Mommy’s.”
“We went to high school together.” He reached around to the bedside table and found a pencil stamped GEOMETRY PARTNERS. “Wanna see a trick?”
“Yeah!”
He put his hands together as if he were praying and parked the pencil in the hollow at the base of his thumbs. His left hand wasn’t quite working right, and it was radiating spasms of pain. But it was like riding a bicycle: You never forget how. His muscle memory compensated for the pain. He swiveled his left hand around and ended up with his hands flat on top of the pencil, thumbs hooked underneath. Fast and mystifying.
“Cool,” Evan said, wide-eyed. “Let me try it.”
But he was to discover that the truly cool thing about the pencil trick was when you tried it yourself and found it impossible to do.
“Wait,” Evan said as he struggled with it. “Wait.”
Rick watched benignly, patiently.
“Wait,” Evan said again, slowly growing frustrated. “Wait. I can do it. Argh! Do it again!”
Rick took the pencil back, hooked his thumbs around it, rotated his hands smoothly, ending up with the backs of his hands up and the pencil gripped underneath.
“Can you do it slower?”
“Sure.” Rick swiveled and twisted slowly.
Evan tried several times. “What’s the trick?”
“There is no trick.”
“Yes, there is. Can you show me how?”
“Sure.” Rick took the pencil. “Start with your thumb crossing like this, okay?”
“Okay.” Evan watched closely, mouth slightly ajar, mesmerized.
It took around five minutes to teach him, which was about how long it took Mr. Clarke a.k.a. Antholis to teach Rick years ago.
“I’m doing it!” Evan said excitedly. “I got it!”
“You got it.”
“But there’s no trick! I thought there was a trick, but there’s no trick.”
Rick laughed. “Want to know something, Evan? You’re a lot smarter than I was when I was your age. You got it. The trick is, there’s no trick.”
“Hi, guys.”
Rick looked up and saw Andrea standing at the door. She was holding a big balloon glass of red wine. He realized she’d been standing there for a minute or two, just watching.
“Hi, Mommy!” Evan said, springing to his feet. “Wanna see a trick?”
51
I’d offer you some wine,” Andrea said a few minutes later, after Evan had gone back to his room to do his homework, “but I don’t think it goes well with Vicodin.”
“Probably not.”
She sat on the bed. “Also, I don’t think you’d be satisfied with this. It’s not exactly DRC.”
He looked at her, saw the barest trace of a smile. It took him a moment to remember the nickname for Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. “Why do I get the feeling you’re giving me a hard time?”
She grinned. “I know, no fair with you in that condition.”
She was as brimming with confidence as once she’d been insecure. She’d grown up. Maybe the years she spent in the blast furnace that was Goldman Sachs had annealed her. But all that newfound confidence didn’t make her arrogant or obnoxious; it burnished her, gave her a glow, a vivacity she’d never had before. Or at least not that Rick had noticed.
“I deserve it.” Consigning their grotesquely bad date to the realm of mockery felt like progress. He tried to get up off the carpet. “Could you give me a hand?” He reached out his left hand, then remembered and put out his right. She pulled, and he groaned as he got to his feet, his broken clavicle shimmering with pain. He sat on the edge of the bed next to her. “How’d it go with the big funder?”
“Could not have gone better. I think they’re going to come through big-time. It’s going to let us hire a bunch of new tutors and get iPads for all the kids, and . . . Hey, thanks for being so sweet to Evan.”
“No problem. Seems like a cool kid.”
“He is. He really is. Are you still in terrible pain?”
“I’m better,” he lied. Even taking a breath hurt.
It had been a mistake to come home with her. But the painkillers had screwed up his judgment, sapped his will, made him far more compliant than usual. He hadn’t been thinking clearly. For him to stay at Andrea’s house was just putting her and her son at risk.
And since he’d recently taken another couple oxycodone tablets, everything was starting to slow down just a bit.
“Good. Listen. When we talked on the way home you said you got mugged and you tried to fight the attacker off.”
“Right.”
“Problem is, I don’t believe that. You weren’t mugged on the street in Marblehead. Sorry. You should have said Central Square. Dorchester, Roxbury maybe. Just not Marblehead.”
He looked away.
“What really happened?”
He hesitated, then told her.
It took almost fifteen minutes, with Andrea breaking in several times for clarification. He spoke slowly because of the drugs he was on. When he was finished, she had tears in her eyes and she seemed angry. Neither of which he had expected.
“You don’t think he meant to kill you, did he?”
“No more than they meant to kill my dad twenty years ago.”
“Meaning—what? They wanted to leave you maimed?”
“Maybe they wanted to know where the money is. Also, I think it was meant to be a warning. He could easily have killed me if he’d wanted to.”
“A warning.” Her eyes flashed. “Warning you what?”
“To stop digging. To stop trying to uncover something they want to keep covered.”
“And are you going to obey their warning?”
Rick exhaled slowly and was silent for a long while. “I don’t know,” he said truthfully.
“Do you know anybody in the police?”
He nodded. “I had a pretty good source at the FBI who’s still there. But I don’t have enough to take to the FBI. Not yet anyway.”
“Okay. You said the guy who attacked you was the bouncer from t
hat strip club.”
“Right.”
“The strip-club owner—you don’t think he was behind the attack, do you?”
“No. The bouncer and the guys who abducted me, the guy with the shamrock tattoo—they’re all part of the same gang. I think he gets assigned these guys as muscle.”
“By who?”
“By what he calls ‘the powers that be.’ I think he’s an old stoner who does what he’s told. I don’t think he knows who’s pulling the strings.”
“So who is pulling the strings? Who are the powers that be?”
“It’s whoever’s behind a defunct construction company called Donegall. And whoever’s behind the Donegall Charitable Trust. But it’s a dead end. And you can bet I looked. Remember, I used to be an investigative reporter.”
“What do you mean, a dead end?”
“Donegall Construction is out of business. Went bankrupt.”
“But bankrupt doesn’t necessarily mean a dead end. Remember, I used to do troubled assets. There’s tons of corporate records filed in a bankruptcy. There’s a trustee and an agent of record—”
“From the stuff I’ve seen online, the agent of record is a shell company.”
“Huh. Weird. What about the charity? Nonprofits have to file tax returns and such.”
“I pulled up nothing on the Donegall Charitable Trust.”
“Well, that I can help you with. I run a nonprofit. I know how these things work. Hold on.”
She returned a few minutes later with a Dell laptop under her arm. She opened the laptop, wiped a few tendrils of hair back from her forehead, tucked them behind her right ear. He was beginning to float away, making it increasingly difficult to understand what she was saying.
“Okay, there’s a couple of websites for nonprofits . . . one called GuideStar . . . and the Donegall Charitable . . . Oh, now, this is bizarre.”
“What?”
She said something about “form 990” and “the IRS,” then he subsided back into a black fog of exhaustion and opiates.
“Rick?” she said.
“I’m here.”
“It’s registered in Reno, Nevada. The address is a law firm I recognize. It’s used as a home to millions of corporate addresses, limited liability corporations that want to disguise ownership. It’s basically a post office box. A dead drop.”
The Fixer Page 25