So she was alive.
Rick stared at the computer monitor and thought. He could just call Patricia Rubin and ask who owned Jugs, but that was a risk. There was probably a reason the owner’s name wasn’t listed. Maybe the owner of a strip bar just preferred to keep a low profile. Maybe he didn’t want to be sued. Whatever the reason his name wasn’t public, Ms. Rubin probably wasn’t going to give it up readily.
Not unless she had a good reason to.
He thought some more, then did some quick Googling and found the right website. He entered a credit card number, the Citicard MasterCard he’d just paid down, and bought a subscription. Then he looked up the telephone number of the Internal Revenue Service’s office in Andover, Mass. He knew that was one of their big offices because he’d been ignoring numerous mailings from the IRS with an Andover return address. Their phone number was an 800 number that ended in “1040,” which was probably supposed to be clever. Tax humor.
Then, on an outside phone line, he punched in the number of the phone-number-spoofing website he’d just subscribed to, and after the tone he entered the IRS number. When the call went through, the phone number that would show up on the caller ID would be the IRS’s.
“Ms. Rubin, please? Patricia Rubin?”
A woman’s voice. “Who should I say is calling?”
“This is Joseph Bodoni from the Internal Revenue Service in Andover. I’d like to speak with a Patricia Rubin.”
A pause. The same voice. “Speaking.”
“Ms. Rubin, I have your name down here as corporate secretary of the Citadel LaGrange Entertainment company; is that correct?”
“What? No! I haven’t been connected with that place for years!”
“I’m sorry, you’re no longer the corporate secretary?”
“Not for years! Not since I got divorced from that jerk.”
“‘That jerk’ is the owner of the business?”
“Yeah. Joel Rubin. So?”
“Well, we need to reach your ex-husband, then. We have a refund of thirty thousand dollars that needs to be personally signed for by the president of the Citadel LaGrange Entertainment company. I’m going to need a name and a telephone number.”
“Yeah, great,” she said bitterly. “Give that asshole even more cash to squirrel away from me. Just what he needs.”
Rick paused for a few seconds. He realized he’d just screwed up. She wasn’t going to give up her ex-husband’s phone number if she thought it meant he’d get a chunk of money. “Huh. Busted. Okay, Ms. Rubin, I gotta come clean. I’m not with the IRS. I’m a process server, and I’ve got a summons to serve your ex-husband. He’s being sued for a lot of money in Suffolk County court.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, am I ever sorry to hear that!” She cackled. “Call me Patty. You want his home number or his cell?”
After Rick hung up the phone, the bearded freelancer’s head once again rose from behind the partition.
“Were you just pretending to be from the IRS?”
Rick shrugged.
“You can do that? That’s not… illegal or something?”
“It’s not illegal as long as you don’t do it for the purpose of defrauding someone. But most newspapers or magazines would fire you for doing it, so don’t try this one at home, kids.”
“She gave up the name and phone number?”
Rick nodded as he got to his feet.
“Huh,” he said. “Cool.”
“It’s just reporting.”
“That’s so retro, you know?” the guy said. “Like out of a noir film? I didn’t know people still did that kind of stuff anymore.”
20
Joel Rubin, the owner of Jugs, lived in a condo in Lynn, an unlovely town ten miles north of Boston. The condo building was a tall, ugly blond-brick structure with jutting balconies on Lynn Shore Drive near Nahant Beach. It looked like something you might see in the old East Berlin. The Atlantic was right across the busy street.
Rick parked in one of the numbered spaces in the parking lot, probably taking some resident’s space. When he got out of the car, he could smell the ocean, the seaweed and the salt. The waves crashed rhythmically. He could hear the squawk of a seagull. A plane flew by low overhead. Logan Airport was close.
Inside the narrow lobby was a call box. He scrolled through a seemingly endless list of residents’ names, found Joel Rubin, then pressed his four-digit unit number.
A full minute later a man’s voice said, “Yeah?”
“Rick Hoffman.”
Another long minute, then the plate-glass inner door buzzed open. He took an elevator to the tenth floor.
Rick was expecting some degree of hostility. On the phone, Rubin had barked at him, “Do I know you?”
“You knew my dad, Leonard Hoffman.”
There was a long silence. Then, slightly less hostile: “Where’d you get my number?”
“Patty.”
A sigh. “Figures. There some kind of problem?”
“No, not at all. There’s something I need your help with. It would be a lot easier if we talked in person. I’ll explain.”
Rubin was willing to meet, though grudgingly. Rick made a mental note not to start out asking about the bouncer at Jugs. That would certainly make the guy retract like a terrapin on high alert. He rang the doorbell. A shadow darkened the peephole and the door came open quickly.
Rubin looked to be in his sixties. He was bald on top with a cascade of gray-blond ringlets behind that reached his shoulders. He was skinny and had a small potbelly like a spare tire. He wore a bright orange African dashiki and scruffy faded jeans with new bright white sneakers. There were big dark circles under his eyes. He stuck out his hand and gave Rick a limp moist handshake.
“Sorry, I was doing dishes. Come on in.” He stopped short. “Jesus, you look just like your dad! It’s amazing.” He put a hand on each of Rick’s shoulders and squinted, tipping his head from one side to another. For a long moment, he didn’t speak. His eyes were bloodshot. He looked like he might be buzzed. “Yeah, you know, I thought you were just yanking my chain, but you’re Lenny’s son, all right. It’s written all over your face.”
The apartment was brightly lit. A set of glass slider doors looked out onto the shore road and the ocean. There was light blue wall-to-wall carpeting and a set of furniture-sectional couch and matching chairs-that looked as if they’d all been purchased on the same shopping trip to a low-end home store. The whole place smelled of rotting fruit and old bong water.
He offered Rick coffee, but Rick shook his head. “How’d you get to Patty, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I found her number in some of my dad’s old papers,” Rick lied. He didn’t want to provoke any more suspicious hostility by telling him about searching old city archives.
“You saw what that bitch looks like, right? Would you believe she was, like, a zipper-ripper when I first met her? I hired her as a bookkeeper, but I kept telling her she shoulda been a dancer. That girl had a body as hard as Chinese arithmetic, I kid you not.”
“We just talked on the phone.”
“What’s this about? Isn’t your dad… I mean, I heard he’s in rough shape.”
“He had a stroke like twenty years ago, yeah. Lost the ability to speak.”
“Yeah, you know, what happened to him-man, that sucked. Nobody should have that happen to him.”