Joel inhaled greedily. Then, through a mouthful of smoke, he said in a fuzzy voice, “Man, I can’t… it’ll come to me…”
“Anyway, you were going to be a concert promoter,” Rick reminded him.
Joel nodded, held a forefinger in the air, telling Rick to wait. He expelled the smoke after holding it in for ten seconds. “I was like-” Then Joel raised his arm and stuck out his middle finger. “Stick it to Tricky Dick.”
“Tricky Dick?”
“Tricky Dick Nixon. You’re either on the bus or off the bus, dig? I got a job in the old Combat Zone working at a newsstand, you know, selling Screw and Hustler and Swank, right… it was a gas. Then the opportunity came up to buy the place. And one thing leads to another and all of a sudden I own a couple of titty bars in downtown Boston. And now it’s down to just the one.”
“You were about to tell me about the business you did with my dad.” Rick’s brain had slowed down to a crawl. He was fighting to maintain a grasp on the conversational thread.
“Jugs was mostly a cash business. Guys don’t want wifey back home in Newton looking at the credit card bills and figuring out hubby wasn’t at a client dinner, you dig? I had tons of it coming in, and I guess your dad knew someone who wanted cash and was willing to pay a premium for it.”
“You sold him cash?”
Joel grinned. “Capitalism, man. That’s capitalism reduced to its essence, you know? Distilled to its purest form. Like”-his eyes lit up-“a paradigm. A beautiful thing.”
“So he gave you bills you could write off as legal expenses and you paid him in cash,” Rick said, realizing all of a sudden how it worked. Finally he understood the big-ticket invoices without commensurate bank deposits. His father was buying, and probably selling, cash. Most of Len’s clients were cash-rich businesses. Now it made sense.
“Who was he doing it for?” Rick asked. His mouth had dried out. His tongue was cleaving to the roof of his mouth.
“How would I know? He wanted cash, I had cash, everyone’s happy. The circle of life. I must have given him half a million bucks over the years. A lot of other guys in the Zone got in on the party, too. I wasn’t the only one.”
“He never told you who it was for?”
“What kinda lawyer would he be if he revealed his client’s name? Anyway, you didn’t ask. You didn’t look too close.”
“You don’t have a guess? That’s a lot of cash.”
“When was this, back in the 1990s?”
Rick nodded.
“You remember what it was like back then, back in the nineties? You grew up in Boston, right? You remember the Big Dig?”
Rick nodded again. “Of course.”
“I mean-you’ve never seen such a swamp of graft and corruption. It was like pigs at the trough. The greatest boondoggle of the twentieth century! Wasn’t it like forty billion dollars, all told? I mean, you could have a couple of wars for money like that.”
The Big Dig was an immense, infamous construction job that transformed the city of Boston. Back in the bad old days, a highway called the Central Artery had slashed through the middle of downtown. As the city grew, the traffic jams became ridiculous, hours-long. Then in 1991 a massive project began to sink the Central Artery deep under the city, in tunnels through Boston Harbor, beneath the towering skyscrapers. It was supposed to cost 2.6 billion dollars but ended up costing more than 24 billion. It was supposed to be finished in ten years but ended up taking twenty. The Big Dig was bigger than the Panama Canal, bigger than the Hoover Dam or the Alaska Pipeline or the pyramids.
Len’s secretary had said Len was a “fixer,” that he knew the right people to pay off to get things done.
But who was he fixing for? Not for the strip clubs and the massage parlors and such. Those places, which brought in a lot of cash and knew who to pay off themselves-the cops threatening to arrest a dancer for getting too close to a patron, the health inspector who wanted an extra payday-those places didn’t need a lawyer to do that.
But the Big Dig…
Now, that was interesting.
“He handled payouts for, what, contractors bidding on jobs in the Big Dig?” Rick said.
“If you were a big construction company and you wanted in on the Big Dig, you either had to know the right decision makers in the city or the state… or know whose palms to grease. Though why palms get greased, I never understood. A really strange expression, that one.”
Three and a half million dollars in cash had been hidden inside the walls of the house on Clayton Street, and now at least Rick knew where it had come from: from cash-intensive, high-liquidity businesses like Jugs, most of them in the old Combat Zone.
So… whose cash was it?
Someone who’d resort to violence to get it back, that was for sure.
“Man, there was so much cash washing around in those days, it was like Iraq after Saddam Hussein. It was like the fall of the Roman Empire. I mean, there were contractors and subcontractors and sub-subcontractors and sub-sub-subcontractors…”
“Joel?”
“Right. Right. So anyway, yeah. I don’t know who it was for, but Lenny must have had someone going through cash like veggies through a Vitamix.”
“He had a client, I think-I don’t know the name, just an initial. P. You have any idea who that ‘P’ might have been?”
Joel laughed. “I told you, I had a drug problem in those days. Half the time I was wasted.” He went to work crunching up some more marijuana on the CD case. “I could barely remember my wife’s name. Now I wish I could forget it.”
Something was tickling at the back of Rick’s brain, something niggling and uncomfortable, something unpleasant. His thoughts were floating and drifting like clouds. But then he remembered the shamrock tattoo and it all came rushing back to him. The terror of the hood being slipped over his head, the quiet insistent voice. And then the remembered fear became something much closer to anger.
“Hey, so your bouncer gave me a hard time,” Rick said, trying for a casual tone.
“Who, Padraig? Yeah, he’s a hothead.”
“He’s Irish?”
“As Irish as Paddy’s pig.”
“I think I’ve seen him around before.” Rick wondered if Joel was trying to maintain a poker face. But Rick’s perceptions were off. Joel might not be.
“Yeah?” Joel didn’t seem much interested. He slid the herb into the grinder and turned it a few times.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I recognize that tattoo.”
“What, the shamrock?”
“Right. With the 666.”
“You see it here and there. Bouncers and other tough guys in the clubs downtown. Those are the guys you hire. Kind of like the Teamsters, you know? Don’t have a choice. I think someone high up in the state has the power to get those guys visas and stuff. Anyway, you want to stay in business, you hire the guys you’re told to.”
“Told to by who?”
“The PTB, man.”
“PTB?”
“The powers that be.”
“Like… who?”
Joel tamped down the powder. “You know what?” he said. “Almost thirty years in this business and I’ve learned two things. You can’t fight the powers that be, and you don’t ask questions.”
21
It had been a mistake getting high. He felt a low-level paranoia starting to come on, like a migraine’s aura. The sky was iron gray and swollen. It was windy and cold and he felt disconnected from the world around him, the cars whooshing by, horns smearing the air. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling. A tractor-trailer blasted a cloud of diesel exhaust. A cold ocean breeze sliced through his jacket. He couldn’t find his car.