“I deserve it.” Consigning their grotesquely bad date to the realm of mockery felt like progress. He tried to get up off the carpet. “Could you give me a hand?” He reached out his left hand, then remembered and put out his right. She pulled, and he groaned as he got to his feet, his broken clavicle shimmering with pain. He sat on the edge of the bed next to her. “How’d it go with the big funder?”
“Could not have gone better. I think they’re going to come through big-time. It’s going to let us hire a bunch of new tutors and get iPads for all the kids, and… Hey, thanks for being so sweet to Evan.”
“No problem. Seems like a cool kid.”
“He is. He really is. Are you still in terrible pain?”
“I’m better,” he lied. Even taking a breath hurt.
It had been a mistake to come home with her. But the painkillers had screwed up his judgment, sapped his will, made him far more compliant than usual. He hadn’t been thinking clearly. For him to stay at Andrea’s house was just putting her and her son at risk.
And since he’d recently taken another couple oxycodone tablets, everything was starting to slow down just a bit.
“Good. Listen. When we talked on the way home you said you got mugged and you tried to fight the attacker off.”
“Right.”
“Problem is, I don’t believe that. You weren’t mugged on the street in Marblehead. Sorry. You should have said Central Square. Dorchester, Roxbury maybe. Just not Marblehead.”
He looked away.
“What really happened?”
He hesitated, then told her.
It took almost fifteen minutes, with Andrea breaking in several times for clarification. He spoke slowly because of the drugs he was on. When he was finished, she had tears in her eyes and she seemed angry. Neither of which he had expected.
“You don’t think he meant to kill you, did he?”
“No more than they meant to kill my dad twenty years ago.”
“Meaning-what? They wanted to leave you maimed?”
“Maybe they wanted to know where the money is. Also, I think it was meant to be a warning. He could easily have killed me if he’d wanted to.”
“A warning.” Her eyes flashed. “Warning you what?”
“To stop digging. To stop trying to uncover something they want to keep covered.”
“And are you going to obey their warning?”
Rick exhaled slowly and was silent for a long while. “I don’t know,” he said truthfully.
“Do you know anybody in the police?”
He nodded. “I had a pretty good source at the FBI who’s still there. But I don’t have enough to take to the FBI. Not yet anyway.”
“Okay. You said the guy who attacked you was the bouncer from that strip club.”
“Right.”
“The strip-club owner-you don’t think he was behind the attack, do you?”
“No. The bouncer and the guys who abducted me, the guy with the shamrock tattoo-they’re all part of the same gang. I think he gets assigned these guys as muscle.”
“By who?”
“By what he calls ‘the powers that be.’ I think he’s an old stoner who does what he’s told. I don’t think he knows who’s pulling the strings.”
“So who is pulling the strings? Who are the powers that be?”
“It’s whoever’s behind a defunct construction company called Donegall. And whoever’s behind the Donegall Charitable Trust. But it’s a dead end. And you can bet I looked. Remember, I used to be an investigative reporter.”
“What do you mean, a dead end?”
“Donegall Construction is out of business. Went bankrupt.”
“But bankrupt doesn’t necessarily mean a dead end. Remember, I used to do troubled assets. There’s tons of corporate records filed in a bankruptcy. There’s a trustee and an agent of record-”
“From the stuff I’ve seen online, the agent of record is a shell company.”
“Huh. Weird. What about the charity? Nonprofits have to file tax returns and such.”
“I pulled up nothing on the Donegall Charitable Trust.”
“Well, that I can help you with. I run a nonprofit. I know how these things work. Hold on.”
She returned a few minutes later with a Dell laptop under her arm. She opened the laptop, wiped a few tendrils of hair back from her forehead, tucked them behind her right ear. He was beginning to float away, making it increasingly difficult to understand what she was saying.
“Okay, there’s a couple of websites for nonprofits… one called GuideStar… and the Donegall Charitable… Oh, now, this is bizarre.”
“What?”
She said something about “form 990” and “the IRS,” then he subsided back into a black fog of exhaustion and opiates.
“Rick?” she said.
“I’m here.”
“It’s registered in Reno, Nevada. The address is a law firm I recognize. It’s used as a home to millions of corporate addresses, limited liability corporations that want to disguise ownership. It’s basically a post office box. A dead drop.”
He didn’t understand what she was getting at. A thought glimmered and vanished, like one of those transparent fish you can see only when it catches the light.
She said, “I’ve never heard of a nonprofit going under the radar like that. Someone’s got something to hide and they’re serious about it. What about this guy Alex Pappas?”
“Pappas?” he said thickly, and he tried hard to focus.
“He knows who’s calling the shots.”
“Pappas isn’t… he won’t…”
“There must be some way to get it out of him. Or to find out from him. He’s our best way in.”
He noticed that our but said nothing. His tentative grasp on what she was saying was slackening, and she began to speak nonsense. “Alex Pappas” and “meeting” and something else.
“Rick?”
He opened his eyes. “I’m here.”
But when he opened his eyes again, she was gone.
He closed his eyes, and when he opened them once again, he looked at his watch. It took him some time to understand what time it was-his watch said nearly three o’clock, but was that in the afternoon? The shades in his room had been drawn, but he could see the darkness around their edges and he realized it was the middle of the night.
With some effort he managed to sit up in bed, and he reached over to the bedside table for his phone. It showed 19 percent battery life remaining. Slowly and deliberately he opened the Uber application and set the pickup location.
Fifteen minutes later he was in a cab, and on the way he got the phone call he’d long been dreading.
52
Change of plans,” Rick told the cab driver. “I’d like to go to the Alfred Becker nursing home in Brookline.”
“Where?” The driver pulled over to the side and entered the Becker home in his smartphone’s GPS.
Rick felt his heartbeat slow as he watched the traffic, the buildings they passed, and everything seemed remote and miniature. He was lost in thought. Twenty minutes later, though it seemed to be two or three, the cab pulled up to the circular drive in front of the Alfred Becker.
He got out gingerly and limped to the entrance, pushed the glass doors open with his right hand. The woman sitting at the front desk ignored him, as she ignored everybody. He signed in and walked down the broad main corridor, past the elevator, everything slower and unreal, as if in a dream.
When he reached his father’s wing, he passed one of the nurses, Carolyn, who just looked at him with surprise as he passed. For a moment he forgot why, then he remembered what his face must look like. The beautiful Saint Lucian nurse, Jewel, with the fawnlike eyes, was lingering in front of the closed door to Lenny’s room. “What happened to you, Mr. Rick?”