Maybe. But still it felt like a violation. There were all sorts of letters to friends, from the days when people still wrote letters instead of dashing off e-mails. Most of the names he didn’t know, or knew only vaguely.
Then his eye was drawn to one file name: Warren_Hinckley_letter.doc.
Warren Hinckley was the headmaster of the Linwood Academy. Why in the world had his father written to Headmaster Hinckley? Rick couldn’t resist opening the file.
A document came up, green letters against the gray-black monitor.
Dear Mr. Hinckley:
I was dismayed to learn from our telephone conversation today that you are considering expelling my son from the Linwood Academy.
Rick stared in disbelief. He was almost expelled? That he’d never heard before. His father must have fought this battle without telling him. Heart pounding, he kept reading:
I am enormously proud of my son. What he did in publishing that article about Dr. Kirby’s plagiarism took genuine courage. He didn’t “play by the rules,” as most people would have done. That much is true. Yes, he is required to submit each issue of the school newspaper to your office for pro forma approval. By not doing so-by publishing an article that exposed an egregious instance of plagiarism by a member of your faculty without running it by you first-he knowingly broke a minor school regulation and thereby put his future at risk. Publishing this article would get him in trouble and he knew it. But instead of being expelled, he should be commended for his adroit scholarship and his bravery.
Violating school protocol pales in importance next to the plagiarism carried out by an esteemed member of your faculty-who also happens to be your friend. In a school whose mission is to teach its students the right way to live, plagiarism is by far the graver offense.
My son broke the rules to achieve a greater good. He demonstrated a courage most people lack. He is a braver man than either of us. If the Linwood Academy expels my son, you can expect a lawsuit and all the attendant publicity that will not put the school in a flattering light.
Please do not teach your students to play by the rules when there are important principles at stake.
Sincerely,
Leonard J. Hoffman
Attorney at Law
Rick read the letter three times through, astonished. His father had gone to battle for him. Rick could feel a wetness on his face, and he tried to blink away the tears. How he’d misunderstood his father!
And as he thought about the father he never really knew, something inside him gave way, and finally he wept.
He wept for the man he’d lost. For the man he was only now beginning to know.
Rick went over to the Charles Hotel and retrieved his BMW from the parking garage. On his way back to the house something came over him and he deliberately made a wrong turn and soon he was on Mass Ave heading south through Boston. He drove aimlessly. He just wanted to drive. He found himself drawn, like iron filings to a magnet, to Geometry Partners, in Dorchester. The subconscious mind has aims of its own.
He was in front of the old brick warehouse that housed the Geometry Partners offices. A young Latino-looking teenage girl was coming down the front stairs of the main entrance.
The girl had pigtails and was talking excitedly to a boy around her age, which was probably fourteen. She grinned and he could see her big gap-toothed smile, and for an instant he thought she was Graciela Cabrera, the pianist in that old videotape.
The dead girl.
She looked just like Graciela.
Graciela, who had been killed along with her parents in that terrible accident in the Ted Williams Tunnel eighteen years ago. Graciela, whose death was the fault of sloppy construction and was covered up. Graciela, whose tragic, altogether unnecessary death had haunted Lenny Hoffman and caused him finally to rebel, to refuse to make a payoff. Lenny had refused to sell out. He couldn’t do it.
Unlike Rick.
Of course, this young girl wasn’t Graciela. Graciela would have now been thirty-two. A woman. Maybe a mother herself.
He felt his stomach turn to ice.
He wanted to keep all that money and just live his life. I just want to live my life, he thought, that glorious cliché.
But part of him was a mule-headed goddamn fool.
Stand down: That was the smart move. Live your life. Move on. He knew what the smart move was.
Suddenly, though, Rick wasn’t feeling very smart.
57
Gloria Antunes, executive director of the Hyde Square Community Partnership, was polite but firm.
“Mr. Hoffman, I’ve already told you I have nothing to contribute.” She wore a blue paisley scarf around her shoulders and the same large hoop earrings she’d been wearing the last time he saw her.
“Actually, you do,” he said. “You are already part of my article. The question is how big a role will you play in it. That’s up to you.” He held a DVD in its case from the video duplication place on Newbury Street. She wouldn’t know what was on that DVD-he’d had a copy made of the old VHS that Manuela Guzman, Graciela’s piano teacher, had played for him. But he waved it like a prosecutor wagging a piece of evidence in court.
“I don’t understand.”
“Give me five minutes of your time and you will.”
“I can give you two.”
Rick shrugged and entered her office. He sat in front of her desk, and when she had taken her place behind the desk he handed her the DVD.
She took it. “And?” She cocked her head.
“Play this in your computer.”
“What is it?”
But she inserted the DVD in the disk drive of her desktop.
When the video started to play, Rick narrated: “That’s the little girl. Graciela Cabrera.”
He saw it in her tear-flooded eyes. The tape had that effect on people. On him, on Lenny, and now on Gloria Antunes. The girl’s awkwardness and her endearing, pure sweetness.
Rick continued, speaking over the audio. “At first you called for an investigation into the accident that killed the Cabreras. After your organization received a sizable gift from the Donegall Charitable Trust, you suddenly zipped up. I know this because my father was the one who arranged it.”
That last sentence he was improvising, but he knew at once he’d guessed right. She had no idea what his father might have told Rick after all these years. And if she had been given a check by Pappas and not Lenny, she wouldn’t know what might have happened behind the scenes.
“You knew this family. This girl. Didn’t you?”
Gloria nodded. Her eyes looked red. She closed them. “A terrible thing.”
“It must be so difficult.”
“What must be so difficult?”
“To live with yourself. Knowing what happened to them.”
When her tears began to flow, Rick knew he had reached her.
Whether it was the videotape or Rick’s bluffing, his intimations that he knew for certain far more than he did, she finally broke down. She had lived with the guilt for eighteen years, the guilt of her silence. The Donegall Charitable Trust was still one of her main funders, but she had others now. That wasn’t the case when it was just Gloria Antunes, community activist, before the Donegall trust had offered to fund the launch of her own organization.
Legally, she’d committed no crimes. But she was haunted. The responsibility she felt was a moral one, the weight of all those years of keeping her silence about what had really happened to the Cabrera family one night in a tunnel in Boston.
Now, finally, she was willing to speak on the record.