The Fixer by Joseph Finder

recalled.
    The house was just as immaculate inside as out, almost oppressively so. Not a single piece of mail on the demilune mail table in the hall. Turquoise was the color scheme: everywhere, the walls, even the wall-to-wall carpet, which showed the fresh tracks of a vacuum cleaner.
    She poured him weak coffee in a mug that said GATE OF HEA VEN PARISH. She asked again if Len were “all right,” which probably meant whether he was still alive.
    “It’s funny,” she said. “You look so much like him. The way he looked when I first started working for him.”
    “He’s lucky you didn’t quit on sight.”
    They both laughed. “No, no,” she said. “He was a handsome man back then.”
    Rick eased into a conversation about the nursing home and how nice the nurses were, how sometimes Rick thought his father could understand what people said to him and sometimes didn’t.
    “Your dad was one of a kind,” she said. “They broke the mold when they made him, that’s for sure.” She had a smoker’s raspy voice, but he didn’t smell any smoke. She’d probably quit some time ago.
    “For sure. So I found some records in Dad’s study at home that I wish I could ask him about. Notes about quantities of cash he was given to hold on to, something like that.”
    “Cash?”
    “I figured if anyone knew what my dad was up to, you would.” He found himself going right into investigative reporter mode, an old groove but comfortable. His reporter’s instincts told him to come in at a slant. To be oblique in his questions. This was a lot of money he was asking about, and money like that did funny things to people. It could make them greedy and uncooperative. He remembered that line, a classic, from
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre:
“I know what gold does to men’s souls,” says the old prospector.
    There was also the possibility—the likelihood, he thought—that the money was connected to something illegal. Maybe something she’d been involved in, too. Until it was proven otherwise, he knew he couldn’t trust her.
    “I don’t know how much I can help you,” she said. “We’re talking almost twenty years ago.”
    “If a client gave him cash, you’d be the one who’d handle it, right?”
    “Well, I was the one who made the bank deposits most of the time. And I had the combination to the safe.”
    “He obviously trusted you implicitly.”
    “He did. But I can’t speak for what he might have done, or gotten, outside the office, when I wasn’t around.”
    “Right, sure.” He gave a slow, easy grin. “Some of dad’s clients were kind of . . .”
    She raised her eyebrows. Pretending she had no idea. She wasn’t playing along.
    “. . . Sketchy,” he finished.
    “He defended a whole range of people. And yes, some of them were, well, unconventional. He certainly had his pet projects, your father did.”
    “Strip clubs, adult bookstores, that kind of thing.”
    “Our office was a few blocks from the old Combat Zone,” she said uncomfortably. The Combat Zone was Boston’s red-light district, an area of porn houses and hookers, that by the 1990s was mostly gone. “Your father was a strong believer in the First Amendment.”
    “I know.” Leonard Hoffman: the Clarence Darrow of pole dancing. “Those are cash businesses. I assume some of those clients preferred to pay him in cash, right?”
    She seemed to flinch and was now regarding him warily, as if she were a witness on the stand and he were a prosecutor. He wondered why she was being so defensive. She wasn’t just protecting his father’s image. It was something else.
    “It’s legal as long as you declare it as income,” she said. “You could get disbarred if you don’t report your income truthfully.”
    So maybe that was it. “I’m guessing he didn’t report all of his cash income.”
    “What does any of this have to do with—I mean, why are you asking?”
    “Joan, I’m not with the IRS. I have no interest in getting him, or you, in