Marie Gamache was behind the counter: short, plump, her short brown hair in a pixie cut. She was talking to a slim man with black curly hair and thick wire-rimmed glasses. She beamed when she saw Rick. “I’ve still got some more to bring out, but you can get started right now if you’re ready.”
He turned in the direction she was pointing and saw a long blond-wood library table covered with gray archival boxes.
“Oh, boy,” he said tonelessly. “Well, first things first.” He handed her the box of donuts. “For you.”
“From the Tastee? God, I haven’t had one of those for years! But I’m gluten-intolerant now. I can’t. Oh, this is torture!”
“I’m not,” her curly-haired colleague said, taking the box from her. He opened the box and pulled out a glazed donut.
“God, I miss bread,” Marie said. “And pizza. And donuts. But I do feel so much cleaner without wheat.”
It was mind-numbingly tedious work, going through the minutes of the Boston Licensing Board for 1996, scanning through hundreds of filings. His father had billed Club Fifty-One twenty-five thousand dollars for legal work connected to a “liquor license suspension.” It was probably pretty routine work. Maybe the place got caught serving minors or just serving after the legal hours. The club’s license would be revoked or suspended. A lawyer-in this case, Len-would go before the board and appeal to get the license reinstated.
But after an hour of combing through the records for 1996, he didn’t find a single mention of Club Fifty-One. He went back to the invoice. Sure enough, it was dated May 1996. But there was nothing about it in the files. Which was bizarre. He wondered whether something in the archives was missing.
He moved on to another invoice, this one made out to “Jugs DBA LaGrange Entertainment” in the amount of thirty thousand dollars for a “Board of Health matter.” Jugs was a strip bar, a popular place for bachelor parties, or it used to be. He had no idea if it was still in business. The city had all sorts of intricate laws regarding strip clubs, such as requiring there always be a three-foot gap between performer and customer. No touching allowed. Even if you paid extra for a private dance in the Champagne room. Sometimes undercover officers would go into the clubs, pretending to be customers, to make sure the laws were being followed. If not, they’d slap a fine on the club or suspend their license for a day or two, which meant closing down briefly.
Rick pored through the archives, looking for “LaGrange Entertainment” or “Jugs” or “Leonard Hoffman,” but there was nothing in April or May. This was beginning to bother him. He went back to the counter. “Can I get the Licensing Board records for all of 1995 and 1996?”
Marie groaned. “Really?”
“Really.”
Half an hour later she rolled a library cart stacked with twenty more archive boxes up to his table. “Go crazy,” she said.
Two hours later he’d gone through all the board of licensing records and still hadn’t found any mention of his father making an appearance or filing a plea. He’d billed eight separate clients a total of 295,000 dollars in May 1996. This was big money for a small-time lawyer. Yet nowhere was there a record of Len actually doing the work he’d billed his clients for. Board of Health appearances, zoning variances, liquor license suspensions… all those jobs billed for-but none of it, apparently, done.
Sherlock Holmes had once deduced the identity of a thief from the fact that a dog didn’t bark. Sometimes the thing that doesn’t happen is more important than the thing that does.
Leonard Hoffman had billed almost three hundred thousand dollars for work that he apparently didn’t do.
So what did that mean? Either his father had been a master scammer and his clients had been dupes-not likely-or something else was going on. Some kind of tricky arrangement involving large sums of money.
So did this mean that his father had not only billed for work he didn’t do-but he then hadn’t gotten paid for it?
It was time for some good old-fashioned gumshoe work. It was time to go to the old Combat Zone and find out which, if any, of his father’s clients, the strip clubs and adult bookstores and such, still existed.
And start asking questions.
18
In the mid-1970s, the mayor of Boston, seeking to contain the spread of prostitution and “adult entertainment,” declared a four-square-block area of downtown Boston next to Chinatown the red-light district. Teeming with peep shows and strip clubs, adult bookstores and prostitutes, it became known as the Combat Zone, probably because of all the sailors and soldiers it attracted. It looked like a miniature version of the old Times Square in New York City before it was pasteurized and homogenized.
But as Boston’s downtown became more desirable, the big real estate developers moved in and began buying up property, and the next mayor campaigned to shut the Combat Zone down. He succeeded.
Now all that remained of the Combat Zone was one adult bookstore and a couple of strip clubs. The oldest and best known of them was Jugs. Jugs had a big pink sign outside that proclaimed WHERE EVERY MAN IS A VIP. He wondered how Jugs and the other place were able to survive the eradication of the Zone, the way cockroaches are supposed to be able to survive a nuclear war. He wondered if it was under the same ownership now as it was in 1996. Back then the owner was an entity called LaGrange Entertainment. No names. But he needed a name. Sometimes the easiest way to find something out was just to ask.
It was late afternoon and the sun was shining bright. A sign on Jugs’s front door said PROPER ATTIRE REQUESTED. WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANY CUSTOMER. NO PHOTOS ALLOWED.
Inside it was dark. It took his eyes several seconds to adjust to the light. Behind the long bar he saw a stage where a young black woman in a G-string gyrated around the pole. She was wearing the proper attire. Mounted high on the wall were three flat-screen TV sets, one tuned to a basketball game, one to Access Hollywood, one to something else, the sound off. Music was thumping, a Lil Wayne hip-hop song.
Rick was one of maybe five patrons, two at the bar and three in booths. Each of them was sitting next to a dancer wearing only a G-string. He sat down at the bar. A sour-looking Asian man with large bags under his eyes asked him what he wanted.
“I’ll have a beer,” Rick said. He noticed the refrigerators under the stage filled with Bud Light and Blue Moon and Sam Adams. “A Blue Moon.”
The bartender slapped a coaster down in front of Rick. “Ten dollar,” he grunted. He sounded almost defiant. Ten dollars for a beer-that was probably more than they charged at the Ritz-Carlton, only a block away. But that was the price of admission, and it was also the price of information. Rick shrugged. The bartender took a bottle from the refrigerator and thumped it down in front of him. Rick watched the dancer. She was doing what looked like isometric exercises with her butt cheeks, which were firm and round. Probably because of all the isometric exercises. She was wearing only a G-string and sparkly platform heels.
Someone came up and sat at the stool next to his. It was one of the dancers, clad in a skimpy thong and black leatherette bra with tens and twenties sticking out of her right cup. “Hi,” she said, extending her hand with her elbow crooked, mock-formally. “I’m Emerald.” She was cute and small, with a diamond stud in her lower lip. Her skin was mocha and her tits were small. She looked Hispanic. Her eyebrows looked as if they’d been painted on.
“Hi, Emerald, I’m Rick.”
A pause, then she said, “Is this your first time here?”
“Yep. You been dancing here a while?”
A woman behind the bar, with black hair cut into bangs high on her forehead and very red lipstick, interrupted them. “You want to talk to Emerald,” she said in what sounded like a Russian accent, “is thirty dollars.”