He found a silver desk clock, vaguely familiar. TIFFANY & CO., it said on the face. Then he noticed that its base was engraved:
FOR LEONARD HOFFMAN WITH THANKS FROM THE PAPPAS GROUP.
What was the Pappas Group, he wondered, that had given Lenny such an expensive gift?
He turned to the computer and saw the blinking prompt: C:>. Ready for him to type in text. My God, he’d forgotten about those days, when computers were first widely used. Rick had used a Macintosh for years and had gotten used to the ease, the friendly interface. Back in the day, you had to type in commands. He’d forgotten how.
But he knew how to insert a floppy disk. He pulled it out of its paper sleeve and slid it into the drive slot. The hard drive grunted some more, and after a few seconds some text appeared on the monitor.
It was a financial program called Quicken, and it was really nothing more than a record of deposits made into, and withdrawals from, two different Fleet Bank accounts. Fleet Bank hadn’t existed in years, having been swallowed up by a bigger bank that was in turn swallowed up by an even bigger bank.
One was a regular business account, recording checks written to the electric company and other utilities, to the real estate company for the office rent, to Staples, that sort of thing. The other one was apparently a client fund account, a record of the checks Lenny had received from his clients.
All pretty standard and all pretty unremarkable. Rick wasn’t sure if any of this would help him, but just in case it might, he plugged in the dot matrix printer, heard it clatter noisily to life, and made sure its cable was connected to the computer. It was. He clicked Print, and a minute or so later a long spool of perforated computer paper with little tractor-feed holes on either side came spewing out of the printer.
Sitting on the side of the desk he studied the sheaf of computer paper. It showed deposits and withdrawals for the last three years of his father’s practice. He found the entries for the year 1996 and began scanning the columns slowly for deposits.
He found various deposits, in amounts ranging from fifty to thirty-two hundred dollars. Nothing bigger.
This just compounded the mystery. According to Lenny’s office files, he’d billed eight of his clients 295,000 dollars in the month of May 1996. Yet according to the city archives, he hadn’t done any of the work he’d billed for. And now he’d found that his father hadn’t gotten paid for any of the work he’d billed for. Work he apparently hadn’t done. So the bills were fraudulent.
He heard a noise from upstairs, a thump, and he froze.
He clicked off the flashlight and, in the pale moonlight, wove a path through the piles of chairs and the tarp-covered coffee tables toward the stairs. There he stood and listened again for the thump, and after another minute it came again, and he realized it was coming from the refrigerator in the kitchen directly above, cycling noisily on or off. He’d turned it on to use for cooling water and beer.
Keeping the flashlight off, he returned to his father’s desk, grabbed the printout, and headed back up the stairs and out of the house.
Back in his room at the B &B, Rick Googled the Pappas Group.
It seemed to be some sort of public relations firm. Its website showed a bright photo of the gold dome of the Massachusetts State House, which was probably meant to symbolize power and access, the way a DC-based firm’s website would probably show the Capitol. It disclosed little. There was language about “our expert tacticians” and “high-profile clients” and “discreet representation” and “reputation management.” One page featured the logos of some of their clients-banks, restaurant groups, universities, shopping malls, radio stations, health clubs, and high-end retailers. All Rick gleaned from the website was that Pappas’s firm was deeply entrenched and well connected.
The founder and CEO was Alex Pappas. His biography was spare: “For almost thirty years Mr. Pappas has brought his unique media savvy and political acumen to bear in investigations, high-profile celebrity clients, and strategic advice on dealing with corporate communications challenges.”
A Google search on Alex Pappas pulled up very little. A few passing mentions in the Globe, a blip in Boston Magazine. Everything was cursory and vague. Pappas had been a press secretary to a Democratic governor of Massachusetts years ago, ran the governor’s successful reelection campaign, then left the public sector in a blaze of glory to start his own “strategic and crisis communications firm.” It was as if he then decided to fly under the radar. You almost never saw mentions of him in the press. He’d all but gone into the witness protection program.
A search for the “Pappas Group” yielded more results. The firm was leading the public relations campaign on behalf of the Olympian Tower, a planned skyscraper in Boston that was sort of controversial, since it threatened to cast a long shadow over the Boston Public Garden. That was about all Rick was able to pull up.
What in the world was Lenny Hoffman, solo lawyer, doing with a Tiffany clock from such a high-powered firm?
In the morning Rick waited till ten before he called Monica Kennedy at the newspaper.
“What do you know about a guy named Alex Pappas?” he said.
“You’re still on this cash bank thing?”
“Pappas is… the cash bank?” he said, surprised.
“Isn’t that why you’re asking about him?”
“Who is he?”
“I guess you’d call him a publicist.”
“I’d never heard of him.”
“Sure. He’s so high-profile you’ve never heard of him. See, Rick, there’s two kinds of publicists. The kind who gets your name in the paper, and the kind who keeps it out.”
“What does he do? I mean, besides keep your name out of the paper?”
“Reputation management, crisis management, introductions.”
“Introductions?”
“Back in the Big Dig days, Pappas was the guy to know if you wanted to land a contract. He introduced construction companies that wanted work to the people who hired. Let’s just say he made a lot of state workers rich.”
“You never did any reporting on him, did you?”
She sighed heavily. “To be honest, that guy was always too slippery for me to get a grasp on. Like nailing Jell-O to the wall.”
And only then did it occur to Rick that Pappas began with the letter P.
25
He was never going to evade the watchers, as he’d come to think of them, entirely. That wasn’t realistic. If he was careful, he could keep them from knowing where he spent nights. Theoretically he could change his rental car every couple of days, to make sure his vehicle wasn’t tracked.
But he wasn’t going to stop visiting his father, even though there had to be someone watching the nursing home, watching the comings and goings, waiting for him to show up at some point at the one place he was almost certain to go. So he’d have to take further precautions.
First he made a stop at Brooks Brothers on Newbury Street to pick up something for his father. He was there when the store opened, double-parked, and found a fluorescent orange parking ticket on the windshield of the Zipcar Toyota Prius when he got back. He didn’t care.
Then he stopped at a costume shop on Mass Ave near the Berklee College of Music. It wasn’t remotely Halloween time, but somehow this shop stayed open for business.