By a few minutes after eleven he parked a few blocks from the Alfred Becker Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. He approached the tan-brick building with a heightened awareness and a low-level sense of anxiety. He wore a Red Sox baseball jacket and a black wig and a pair of aviator sunglasses. Anyone who wasn’t looking too closely wouldn’t recognize him.
Inside, he stopped at the men’s room off the lobby and removed the wig and sunglasses. The woman behind the glassed-in counter seemed to take no notice of him. He wasn’t sure what she was doing there.
“Twice in one week!” Brenda the health care aide said with a gummy smile when she saw him. “Dad’s gonna be thrilled.”
“Got something for him,” Rick said. He stuck out the navy blue Brooks Brothers gift box.
“He loves chocolate,” Brenda said.
“It’s clothing. Don’t get his hopes up.”
She fell in beside him, joining him on the long walk down the corridor to Lenny’s room. Rick was a little surprised. He didn’t need an escort; he’d been coming here since long before Brenda started working here. He wanted to ask his father some questions, or rather, to give it another try, and he preferred not to have company.
He studied the wall-to-wall carpet underfoot, tan and beige and brown in a tight checkered pattern. The carpet was only a few years old. The Alfred Becker home took in a hell of a lot of money from its patients-its patients’ families, actually-and could afford to keep the place up. Though it was really little more than a long-term parking facility for old people. They gave Lenny hardly any medical care, because his health was basically stable. In his case, six figures a year went to pay for the nursing home’s staff and its terrible institutional food, which its inmates mostly didn’t mind, probably, because after all they had no choice, and what was the use of complaining? The old people probably started off complaining vociferously when they first entered. But after a few months, they settled down and resigned themselves to their fate.
Lenny Hoffman wasn’t much of a complainer, but Rick suspected that he, too, might be grousing if he were able to speak.
“There he is,” Rick said heartily. Lenny was slumped in his big vinyl-cushioned chair next to his bed. There was a line of drool on his shabby old pajama top.
The TV was on-TV doctors in scrubs standing around a glossy set. “One cough-one sneeze-one million germs released into the air!” a gravelly voice-over said. The Chyron on the screen read, Disease Cloud!
His father lifted his head slowly, as if it were too heavy for his neck. Once again Rick was momentarily flustered by the outraged look on Lenny’s face.
“Leonard!” Brenda called as if he were deaf, not just mute. “Look who’s here again!”
His father moved his head warily in Rick’s direction and then turned back to the TV.
“Next on The Doctors,” the TV announcer said, “hybrid tummy tucks!”
“Thanks, Brenda,” Rick said, dismissing her, or at least trying to. “Lenny, I’ve got something for you.” He handed his father the Brooks Brothers box. Lenny took it in his left hand, the one that worked. It slipped from his grasp into his lap.
“Let me help you open it,” Brenda said. She took the box from Lenny and pulled it open. Meanwhile, Rick found the TV remote and clicked Mute.
“Oh, aren’t these handsome!” she said, taking out the navy blue pajamas with white piping around the lapels, sort of nautical-looking. “That’s exactly what he needs. We’ll have to put them on after lunch.”
“Hey, Lenny, how’s it going?” Rick turned to Brenda, who showed no signs of preparing to leave. “I think we’ll be fine now,” he said pleasantly. “Time for a little father-son bonding.” He sat at the end of his father’s bed.
“Of course, of course, I completely understand,” Brenda said, and with a curt nod she left the room.
Rick looked at his dad and found it hard to breathe. The air in the room was thick and oppressive. He smelled rubbing alcohol and cleaning solvent and nursing home food and something vaguely fecal. Something was pressing down on his chest. He could see a black hair sprouting out of a pore on his father’s nose.
Lenny Hoffman, it turned out, harbored a secret ambition. He wasn’t blithely satisfied with his sketchy job, his embarrassing clientele. He wanted more. He wanted something else. Maybe it was like his obsession with having Rick attend the Linwood Academy, that aspiration, that ache for something more in life.
There was nothing wrong with Rindge and Latin, the local public school. The mayor of New York City had gone there! So had Ben Affleck and Matt Damon! And the Linwood Academy was a mediocre prep school, for kids who couldn’t get into Milton or Roxbury Latin or Belmont Hill or Buckingham Browne & Nichols. Sure enough, Rick hadn’t gotten in to any of the good schools. He didn’t interview well. He had no interest in switching to a prep school, but his father insisted. This was right after Rick’s mother had died. Maybe Lenny wanted a school to take the place of a mother, give his kids the attention he couldn’t. Or maybe there was something else going on, something even sadder. Like, if he couldn’t be respectable, at least his kids could go to fancy schools.
“Dad,” he said now. “The day you had your stroke you were scheduled to have lunch with someone. Someone whose name began with P. Do you remember who it was?”
His father looked at him, or at least seemed to be looking at him. Rick moved closer down the bed. His father’s eyes remained fixed on his.
“Blink once for yes and twice for no. Do you remember?”
No response. Rick waited. A few seconds later Lenny blinked, but it seemed to signify nothing.
“Let me give you some names. See if you recall. Was it Phil Aronowitz?”
No response.
“How about Nancy Perry?”
No response. No blinks at all. What, if anything, did that signify?
“Was it Alex Pappas?”
Something seemed to come over Lenny’s face. He looked agitated-even more agitated-and pained.
“The money-was it meant for Pappas? Blink-”
His father’s left hand suddenly reached out and clutched Rick’s wrist. Rick’s heart seized.
“My God,” Rick said softly. “You understand.”
26
In the late afternoon, after moving to a new B &B, in Boston, Rick went back to the house.
He took measures-parked three blocks away and didn’t get out of the car until he felt sure no one had taken notice of him-and carried a cooler of Bud for Jeff and the crew.
But everyone had gone home except Marlon and Jeff. Marlon was still working, framing, screwing in two-by-fours. The racket made it hard to hear what Jeff was saying. Jeff and Rick popped open cans of Bud and sat on the plaster-dusty hardwood floor next to a Sawzall and a discarded can of Red Bull.
“The city inspectors came by,” Jeff said, popping open a beer.
“What for?”
“Make sure everything’s going according to code.”
“I assume we passed.” Rick opened a beer and took a few cold sips.
Jeff shrugged. “They know me by now. You do enough work in the city, they get to trust you.”
Marlon shouted, “Mind if I pack it in for the day? I’m finished up here.”
“Go ahead,” Jeff shouted back.
A moment of silence passed. Jeff scratched his chin. The goatee was probably new and he hadn’t gotten used to it yet. He looked at Rick, tilted his head. “Ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“How much money was there, inside the wall?”
Rick hesitated, but only for a minute. The question wasn’t whether Jeff knew; it was how much he knew. He shook his head vaguely. “I didn’t count it. Forty, fifty thousand, maybe? Maybe not that much. But, I mean, it was a lot.” Because any found money was a lot, to him and to Jeff. Jeff, who worked hard for it. And Rick, who used to.