1
On a lovely West Cambridge street this 1903 Queen Anne home is on a large level lot with many mature trees. Graciously proportioned rooms and elegant millwork. Pocket doors and two working fireplaces with original ceramic tile. The house is in need of updating, please see attached home inspection report.
The house was a dump. There was no way around it. The listing had been online for seven months, and it had generated a flurry of interest at first and one offer so lowball that the real estate agent refused to dignify it with a reply. The agent had written the ad himself and was justifiably proud of it. It was a great ad. It was also a steaming pile of horseshit, as everyone eventually discovered when they got a look at the house. An absolute lie. The place was a disaster. A money pit. Potential buyers usually fled after spending a minute or two stumbling through the decaying interior.
So Rick Hoffman, who’d left the family house on Clayton Street in Cambridge seventeen years ago, solemnly vowing never to return, was now camping out in what used to be his father’s study, on the second floor. December in Boston could get awfully cold, but he’d turned off the heat, which was ridiculously expensive, so he was sleeping fully clothed in a sub-zero expedition sleeping bag on the old leather couch, next to a space heater. The study smelled vaguely of cat piss. Glassed-in legal bookcases lined the walls, tall and rickety. On his father’s desk was an ancient IBM PC, in early-computer ivory, that belonged in the Smithsonian, and an Oki Data dot-matrix printer. If the 1980s ever came back, he’d be all set. His old bedroom, where he’d lived until he went off to college, had become a storeroom for broken furniture and cardboard boxes of files. So he slept on the leather sofa in a room as cold as a meat locker with the faint aroma of cat urine in the air.
This was, he realized, the lowest point in his life.
He had nowhere else to live. A week earlier he’d been forced to move out of the Back Bay apartment he’d shared with his (now) ex-fiancée until Holly had announced she no longer wanted to marry him. He’d spent a few nights in a motel on Soldiers Field Road in Brighton, but his money was running out fast. He had no income anymore. He’d sent out his résumé to dozens of magazines and newspapers, with no reply. He’d sold his watch, a nice Baume & Mercier, on eBay and unloaded most of his fancy clothes on a website that let you buy or sell “gently used, high-end” clothing.
His money was almost gone. He was lucky he had a place to crash for free. But it didn’t feel so lucky, sleeping in the cold hovel on Clayton Street, the house he and his sister had grown up in.
Wendy, three years younger than Rick, was living in Bellingham, Washington, with her partner, Sarah, who owned a vegan restaurant. “Just sell the damned place,” she’d told Rick. “The house is shit, but the land’s got to be worth a couple hundred thousand bucks. That’s money I could use.”
Until Holly had broken off the engagement and kicked him out of their apartment on Beacon Street, that had seemed like a decent plan. But Rick needed a place to live, at least until he found another job, got back on his feet.
* * *
Two months ago, he’d been the executive editor of Back Bay, a glossy magazine devoted to the rich and the famous in Boston, the movers and shakers. It had just enough slavish coverage of celebrity chefs and posh weddings and best bartenders to ensure a nice, fat magazine, and just the right dash of snark—a knife-edge balance, really—to hook covetous and aspirational readers who considered themselves smart and sophisticated but actually weren’t.
Seven or eight years ago, a local private-equity maestro named Morton Ostrow took over the joint, infusing Back Bay with cash, made it slicker and glossier, a rich man’s plaything. He ushered in a golden age of big salaries and almost unlimited expense accounts. You had to spend money to make money! he liked to say. He moved the magazine’s offices from a cramped but elegant redbrick town house on Arlington Street in the Back Bay to a converted mill building on Harrison Avenue, in the newly desirable, artist-infested SoWa district in the South End. Brick and beam, huge nineteenth-century industrial windows, and polished concrete floors. Parties at dark, bunkerlike clubs no one could get into, sponsored by Ketel One or Stoli Elit.
Rick, who’d rented the movie All the President’s Men at an impressionable age and had been obsessed with it, had always wanted to be Woodward or Bernstein, an intrepid reporter who specialized in ferreting out high-level government fraud and conspiracy. He went to work for The Boston Globe in the Metro section and got a lot of attention for an exposé he did on private, for-profit prisons. He did an article about corruption in the city’s taxi business and a series on how easy it was to get out of drunk-driving charges in the state. He might, he told himself, have been on the upward trajectory toward Woodward-and-Bernsteinism if he hadn’t met Mort Ostrow at a book party in Cambridge. Ostrow, a short, squat frog of a man, liked Rick right away. He was hired away from the Globe at a ridiculous salary to beef up Back Bay’s coverage of the “power elite”—scandals at Harvard, intrigue at the State House, gossip among the pashas of the hedge funds. He was given license to puncture and skewer.