There was a long silence. Rick said nothing.
Finally, Pappas said mournfully, “Do you really want to know what’s in that file drawer, Rick?”
29
Alex Pappas hadn’t been fooled by the interview ruse, not for a moment. He seemed to know why Rick was there even before he arrived at his office. He was the sort of man who prided himself on always being a step ahead. And he had been.
Rick had the uneasy feeling that Pappas had agreed to the faux interview because he wanted to meet Rick. He wanted to sound Rick out, to find out what he could about what Rick knew and how he knew it.
And to manipulate him, to shame him if possible, to discourage him from probing any further and to try to buy him off. Pappas had done deep research into Rick, to a creepy extent, and he wanted to make sure Rick knew it.
But though Pappas had seen right through it, the meeting had been successful, from Rick’s point of view. For one thing, Rick had spotted Pappas’s business cards in a holder on his desk, facing the visitor on the outer edge of the desk, and he’d slipped one into his pocket. More important, he’d learned a number of useful things. He was now certain that Pappas was the “P” in his father’s appointment calendar. And he’d corroborated his theory that Pappas was connected to the “cash bank” Monica Kennedy had mentioned. Pappas’s behavior, his blatant attempts at manipulation, had confirmed it.
But all Pappas’s attempts at intimidation had failed. Rick didn’t much care for Pappas’s condescending attitude toward his father. Pappas had given him a warning, and Rick was never good with warnings. Warnings just egged him on. They awakened the long-dormant investigative journalist part of his brain. Pappas was afraid of something, and now Rick was determined to find out what.
In fact, the meeting with Pappas had emboldened Rick. He’d stuck his head into the lion’s mouth and pulled it back out without any visible bite marks on his neck. Five days had gone by without his being abducted again by the poetry-quoting Irishman with a butcher’s saw.
I’ll ask you again, the man had said. Who’ve you been talking to? A simple question, Mr. Hoffman. Because your father doesn’t speak. So it’s someone else.
Maybe the Irishman had gotten the answer he wanted. Or maybe he’d decided Rick didn’t know the answer.
Who’ve you been talking to?
The question wasn’t Where’s the money? It was Who have you been talking to? Who’d told him about the money?
The Irishman, and by implication Pappas-since they had to be a team-wanted to know who he’d been talking to.
You must have proof of some sort, Pappas had asked. Proof that Lenny had engaged in bribery.
The more I know, Rick, the more I can help you.
Pappas had wanted to know what Rick knew. Were there account books? Were there records? Was there proof?
Maybe Pappas had finally concluded that Rick knew next to nothing, that he hadn’t been talking to anyone, that he had no records, no proof.
Nothing that would cause Pappas any kind of problems.
If so, that would mean that Rick was no longer a threat to Pappas. Which meant that Pappas wasn’t a threat to Rick. And neither was the poetry-quoting Irishman.
That would mean it was safe for Rick to appear at the obvious, expected places. He needed to return to Clayton Street anyway, and it would be easier in the daytime.
On the way, he thought about what Pappas had said. Did I call your father? Of course. I called when I needed his help.
Rick had been bluffing, but the bluff had turned out to be the truth. Pappas had indeed called Lenny.
So maybe there were records of those calls. When you were doing investigative journalism, you amassed as many documents, files, records as you could, to try to spot the tiny anomalies that might reveal something unexpected. Investigative journalism wasn’t like meeting Deep Throat in a parking garage. It was like mining for gold. You dug and dug, past the topsoil, down to the mineral layer, then you blasted the rock apart using explosives, then you trucked the rocks somewhere else to crush and process, and for every ton of rocks you went through, you’d get maybe five grams of gold. If you were lucky.
He was still digging into the topsoil.
He called his sister, Wendy, spoke for just two minutes, and hung up. Then he parked and entered the house. The crew was hard at work, their music blasting, nail guns rat-a-tat-tatting, power screwdrivers whining and squawking.
Rick gave Jeff a wave. Jeff replied with a thumbs-up.
Then Rick headed down to the basement, where it was quieter, and cool, and peaceful. He pulled the cord on the bare overhead bulb in the back part of the basement where the old files and records were kept. Within a few minutes he’d located the cardboard boxes from Staples in which Wendy had boxed up all the old files and papers left around the house after their father’s stroke.
He found the box marked PHONE BILLS and took it down from the shelf. He took out a few bills and opened them.
They were useless. Each bill listed the menu of “services” the phone company had provided for the month as well as whatever long-distance calls Lenny had made. But local calls weren’t listed. They never were. There was nothing here.
Then Rick found a thick envelope that changed everything. It was a bill from Cellular One, for Lenny’s cell phone. Rick had forgotten that his father had a cell phone fairly early on. By 1996 cell phones were starting to become popular, especially among businesspeople and lawyers.
And in the early days of cell phones, the wireless providers were still sending thick bills detailing every single call placed.
He pulled out all the Cell One phone bills for 1996. He couldn’t find any after August, but then he remembered that Joan Breslin had canceled his father’s phone after a few months, when it became apparent that he wasn’t going to recover. He opened the envelope for the February bill, which covered all calls for a month starting from the beginning of January.
And he began going through the statement, his eyes running down the lists of phone numbers, of calls placed and calls received. He was looking for patterns, particularly repeated calls to and from any phone number. The number listed most often by far was the number of Lenny’s office, which was no surprise: Lenny would have called the office to talk to Joan multiple times when he was out and on his mobile. Then there was the family home number, showing calls between Rick and Wendy and their father at work.
Rick took out the June bill, detailing May’s calls, and moved right to May 27, the day of the stroke. He immediately saw a lineup of three calls, all to the same 617 area code number. He pulled out Alex Pappas’s business card and confirmed that it was Pappas’s mobile number. The day before, there were five calls to that same number. Six the day before that. None for the two weeks previous.
So why all the calls to and from Alex Pappas on those three days between May 25 and May 27?
Something must have happened that required Lenny’s services. Pappas had wanted something from Lenny. So what had happened on those three days?
He couldn’t ask his father. He needed some other way. The simplest solution was to look through a newspaper from those days, an online archive. That meant returning to his B &B and getting back online. Taking not just the one phone bill but all his dad’s Cell One phone bills back to the hotel and poring through them.