35
As soon as I hear the news, I went to the Cabreras’ apartment to try… to see, to help them,” Manuela Guzman said.
“To console them.”
She nodded. “Oscar’s sister Estrella was there and also Dolores’s brother Ernesto and his wife and everyone was… well, they were in shock, and everybody crying. How could this happen? Everyone is saying, how could this possibly happen? They were… upset and angry, out of their mind, you understand?”
“Of course.”
“The police say maybe Oscar is drinking, but everyone knows this is not so. Oscar never drinks. Picking up his wife and daughter from the airport? Oscar is so careful! And then Dolores’s brother Ernesto said he talked to Gloria Antunes, who is like leader in the Dominican community.”
“I know who she is.” How could he forget: the imperious woman who didn’t want to talk to him.
“Gloria Antunes say she want to start an investigation, the accident is not what people say. But then a man come to the door, a man who look just like you. He must be your father, no?”
“It’s possible.”
“He say he’s with chamber of commerce, and he say he want to do anything he can to help them out in this terrible time. He want to help them with funeral expenses. He say anything we can help you with, here’s my card, you call me.”
Chamber of commerce? Rick thought. It must have been someone else. His cell phone rang, but he let it go to voice mail.
“He want to help out. He was the nicest man. He called me ‘doll.’”
Calling a woman “doll” was almost Lenny’s signature. Maybe it was him.
“And then I take this man-your father?-to my house and I showed him Graciela’s recital, just like I show you. And he start to cry. He say it is a tragedy. Wait. A moment.”
She put a hand on his shoulder and turned around and began looking in a dim corner of the apartment, rummaging through a bookcase. She pulled out a small green plastic box, the kind used for index cards or recipes. “I know I have the card. Wait.”
Several more minutes passed by. Suddenly she said, “Ah! Yes!” She handed Rick a dog-eared white business card that said, as he knew it would,
THE LAW OFFICES OF LEONARD HOFFMAN
He looked up at her. “That’s my dad.” It didn’t say chamber of commerce. He had the decency not to use fake business cards. But he was dealing with immigrants who would be easily misled. A lawyer’s business card had its own kind of authority. He gave a sad smile. “How did he want to help out, did he say?”
She shook her head. “The family will never talk about it. I think this man paid them money. Maybe a lot of money.”
“For their silence?”
“No one talks about it. But all of a sudden”-she rubbed her palms together as if dusting them off-“No more talk about the car accident. They never want to talk about it. They live in that house, all three floors, all the family. I don’t know what they do for work. And Gloria Antunes-suddenly the Hyde Square Community Partnership becomes this big thing with an office and a secretary. I think they gave her money, too. And even all this time… nobody talks.”
As soon as he left the old piano teacher’s apartment, he checked his phone. The call that had come in was from an exchange he recognized as Massachusetts General Hospital.
“Mr. Hoffman, this is Dr. Girona from Mass General Neurology,” the message said. “Could you give me a call as soon as possible?”
To Rick’s surprise, Dr. Girona left his personal cell phone number.
Standing outside a convenience store, Rick called the doctor back.
“Yes, Mr. Hoffman, thanks for calling,” Dr. Girona said. “I’ve just been looking over the new MRI scans we ordered for your father, and I’m troubled by something.”
“Okay?” he said.
“Your father’s chart indicates a hemorrhagic stroke, obviously. But the scans we just got back-well, they’re quite a bit more sophisticated than the scans we got twenty years ago-and they indicate the legacy effects of forceful traumatic brain injury. I mean, consistent with grievous battery.”
“I don’t understand.” Rick felt his mouth go dry.
“I’m saying that we’re picking up something that was entirely overlooked when he first was admitted back in 1996. The likely cause of his condition.”
“You’re telling me he was beaten,” Rick said.
“I’d say so, yes.”
“I’ll be right over.”
36
Driving to the Charlestown Navy Yard to meet Dr. Girona, he thought about his father. About the mystery of Leonard Hoffman. The more Rick learned, it seemed, the less he knew.
His father was beaten? This didn’t gibe at all with Leonard’s secretary’s account. She had found Len slumped on the floor and called 911. Not lying in a pool of blood.
His entire understanding of the last two decades had tipped to one side. His father had placed a bunch of cell phone calls to Alex Pappas over a period of three days before… before he was beaten. Rick imagined a baseball bat to the side of his father’s head. One blow and his father slumped to the floor, immediately suffering a stroke. Maybe not what the attacker had intended.
So who could have attacked Leonard, if indeed he was attacked? And what was going on during those three days?
Rick now knew that his father had come to pay off the Cabrera family survivors for some reason and then had seen the same videotape that Rick had just seen, and cried seeing the little girl, just as Rick had done. Rick now knew that at some point shortly after that, Leonard had been beaten, badly enough to bring on a stroke.
But who had done it? And why?
Rick wondered whether his father’s secretary, Joan, might have some idea.
And he thought about the cash hidden in the house, the three million dollars now in storage. If that was money Lenny had bought from places in the Combat Zone to use for bribes, then it was money he hadn’t yet paid out. He must have given money to the Cabrera family-
Unless he hadn’t.
Unless for some reason his father had held on to the money, not paid it out, and maybe that was why he was beaten.
At a stoplight, Rick glanced at his watch. His father would just be starting his treatment about now. A nursing home aide had begun driving Lenny to Charlestown for the daily treatments in a nursing home van. This was the way they preferred to do it.
Rick reflected that the more he dug, the more rot he was exposing. He couldn’t help but think of the work that Jeff and his crew were doing on the old house, ripping out the decayed wood and plaster.
As Rick drove, his mind wandered, but he kept coming back to one question: Why did his father offer to pay off the Cabrera family? What was it about the accident that required silence? He thought and thought and kept coming up empty. Finally he called Monica Kennedy at the Globe. She answered after one ring, with her customary bark: “Kennedy.”
“It’s Hoffman,” he said. Without checking first whether she had time to talk, he plunged ahead. “You’ve got a note in your file about a DUI. You wrote ‘pending BAC,’ which I assume means you were waiting to see when the blood alcohol concentration results came in from the toxicology reports. So what made you suspect drunk driving?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. ‘Pending BAC’… Okay, right. That must have come from the cops.”
“Not from Pappas?”
“Probably from him first, yeah.”
“So why didn’t you run with that? You don’t mention it in your piece.”
She sighed. “Because toxicology reports take sixty days to come in.”
“You could have reported it anyway.”