Hush Money s-26

by Robert B. Parker

  “Could be.”

  “But why would he?”

  “Maybe he feels like he’s lost control of you.”

  “But we love each other.”

  “Not enough for him to leave his wife,” I said. “Not enough for you to sleep with him if he doesn’t.”

  “Of course I won’t. Why would I give him what he wants when he won’t give me what I want.”

  “I can’t think of a reason,” I said.

  “Well, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe a thing you’ve said about him.”

  “Just a hypothesis.”

  “Why isn’t my ex a hypothesis?”

  “Doesn’t seem the type,” I said.

  “How the hell would you know what type he is?”

  “I talked with him.”

  “And you think that’s enough?”

  “No, but it’s all I’ve got. I’m not a court of law here. I am allowed to go on my reactions, my guesses, my sense of people.”

  “And you sense that Louis would stalk me and Burt would not?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, I don’t have to listen to you. And I won’t.”

  “Reading cops still checking on you,” I said.

  “Like you care.”

  I stood. “Time to go,” I said.

  “Past time.”

  I walked toward the door. She turned slowly to watch me, her hands on her hips, her face flushed.

  “I would have shown you things that tight-assed Susie Hirsch doesn’t even know.”

  I smiled at her. “But would you have respected me in the morning?” I said.

  “Prude.”

  “Prudery is its own reward,” I said, and left with my head up. I did not run. I walked out the door and toward my car in a perfectly dignified manner.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  When I came into my office in the morning there was a message on my answering machine from Prentice Lamont’s mother. It had come in late yesterday while I was in KC Roth’s condo preserving my virtue.

  “Mr. Spenser, Patsy Lamont. I need to see you, please.” I had some coffee to drink and some donuts to eat and the tiresome-looking pile of homosexuals-to-be-outed list still to read. Reading it while eating donuts and drinking coffee would make it go better.

  I called Patsy Lamont.

  “Spenser,” I said. “When would you like to see me?”

  She sounded like I’d awakened her, but she rallied.

  “Could you come by around noon?” she said. “I have my support group in the morning.”

  “Anything I can do on the phone?” I said.

  “No, I, I need to talk with you.”

  “Be there at noon,” I said and hung up.

  I took a bite of donut, a sip of coffee, and picked up the Out list. There were some surprises on it, though none of them seemed like a clue, and by 11:30, with the coffee a dim memory, and the donuts a faint aftertaste, I put the list down and headed for my car. All I could think of was to talk with each of the people on the list. This, coupled with trying to find out who else Louis Vincent had been hustling, meant a great deal of boring legwork that made me think about becoming a poet.

  I parked illegally near Mrs. Lamont’s three decker and rang her doorbell at noon. Prudish but punctual. We sat at her thick wooden kitchen table with the high sun shining in through the upper panes of the window over her sink. There was a big white envelope on the table in front of her. It had been mailed and opened.

  “Would you like some coffee?” she said. “I have instant.”

  “No thank you.”

  “Tea?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “I’m going to have some tea.”

  “By all means,” I said.

  I sat at the table with my hands folded on it, like an attentive grammar school student, and looked around. It was a kitchen out of my early childhood: painted yellow, with Iuan mahogany plywood wainscoting all around, yellow, gray, and maroon stone patterned linoleum on the floor, white porcelain sink, an off-white gas stove with storage drawers along one side. The kitchen table top was covered with the same linoleum that covered the floor. The hot water kettle whistled that it was ready, and Mrs. Lamont poured hot water into a bright flowered teacup. She plopped in a tea bag and brought the teacup in a matching saucer to the table. She took a spoon from a drawer in the table and prodded the tea bag gently until the tea got to be the right shade of amber. Then she took the tea bag out and put it in the saucer. She picked up the teacup with both hands and held it under her nose for a moment as if she were inhaling the vapors. Then she sipped and put the cup back down.

  “I barely know you,” she said.

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “And yet here you are,” she said.

  “Here I am.”

  “My husband took care of all the financial things,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “When he left I didn’t even know how to write a check.”

  I nodded again. You find something that works, you go with it.

  “I don’t know any lawyers or people like that.”

  I nodded. She had some tea. I waited.

  “So when this stuff came in the mail, I didn’t know who to ask.”

  “This stuff?” I said and patted the big envelope.

  “Yes. Now that he’s… gone, his mail comes to me.”

  I knew who he was. I knew that parents tended to think of their children as he, or she, or they, as if there were no one else that could be so designated. And I knew that when something bad happened to a child the tendency exacerbated.

  “Would you like me to look at it?” I said.

  “Yes, please.”

  She handed me the envelope. It was a financial statement from Hall, Peary. Home of that great romantic, Louis Vincent. Boston isn’t all that big, sooner or later cases tended to overlap. The statement showed that Prentice Lamont and Patsy Lamont JTWROS had $256,248.29 in a management account consisting mostly of common stocks and options. I copied down the name and phone number of his financial consultant which was listed at the top. It wasn’t Louis Vincent. It was someone named Maxwell Morgan.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “It’s a financial statement from a stockbroker.”

  “What does it say?”

  “It says that your son and you had two hundred fifty-six thousand and change invested in stocks and bonds, which the stockbroker managed for him.”

  “You mean Prentice’s money?”

  “Yes. Now yours I assume.”

  “Mine?”

  “Yes, see this, JTWROS? Joint tenants with right of survivorship. It means that now that your son has passed away the money is yours.”

  “Mine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where would Prentice get two hundred thousand dollars?”

  “I was hoping you’d know,” I said. “His father?”

  She snorted, in a gentle ladylike way.

  “You’ve talked to his father.”

  “Yes. I withdraw the question.”

  I picked up the envelope. It was addressed to both Prentice and Patsy at Patsy’s address.

  “Envelopes like this come here before?”

  “Yes. Every month. I just gave them to him.”

  “He wasn’t living here.”

  “No, he lived in that apartment where they had the newspaper.”

  But he had the statements sent here.

  “What should I do?” Mrs. Lamont said.

  “With the money?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you need it?”

  “Need it?”

  “It’s yours,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do I get it?”

  “Somewhere in Prentice’s effects there’s probably a checkbook.”

  “He showed me one once.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “I don’t recall exactly, just something about see t
his checkbook.”

  “If you had it you could simply write a check on this account when you needed to.”

  “Maybe in his room,” she said. “It’s not the room he grew up in. We lived in Hingham until the divorce. It’s just the room he used when he came to see me. A child always needs to have a home to come to.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I haven’t been in his room since the funeral.”

  “Would you like me to look?”

  She was silent, looking into her teacup, then she nodded.

  “Yes,” she said very softly.

  It was a small room behind the kitchen. Single bed with a maple frame and flame shapes carved on the tops of the bedposts. A braided rag rug, mostly blue and red, that was a little raveled at one edge. A patchwork quilt, again mostly blue and red, covering the bed, some jeans and sport shirts and a pair of dark brown penny loafers in the closet. A maple bureau with an assortment of school pictures on top of it. Prentice Lamont when he was in first grade, looking stiff and a little scared in a neat plaid shirt, and in most of the grades between. His high school graduation picture dominated the collection, a round-faced kid with dark hair and pink cheeks, wearing a mortarboard. His bachelor’s degree was framed on the wall, but no college graduation picture. In the top drawer of the bureau was a checkbook and a box of spare checks and deposit slips and mailing envelopes. Apparently Prentice did his financial planning in Somerville.

  There was nothing else of interest in the room. It wasn’t a room that spoke of him, of his sexuality, his fears, why he was dead, or who killed him. It was an anonymous child’s room, maintained by a mother, for an adult to come and sleep in once in a while. I brought the checkbook and the spare checks out to his mother.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Hawk and I were sparring in the boxing room at the Harbor Health Club. There was no ring, just an open space to the left of the body bag and speed bag and the skitter bag that was so hard to nail that even Hawk missed it now and then. We had on the big fat pillow gloves that even if you got nailed wouldn’t hurt much, and we were floating like a couple of butterflies and pretending to sting like a couple of bees.

  “So, Lamont is outing people,” Hawk said.

  I put a left jab out and Hawk picked it off with his right glove.

  “Un huh.”

  I turned my head, and rolled back from a right cross and felt the big soft glove just brush past my cheekbone.

  “And he got two hundred fifty thousand in his money management account at Hall, Peary.”

  I tried a flurry of body punches which Hawk took mostly on his elbows, and then closed up on me and clinched.

  “Un huh.”

  We broke and moved in an easy circle around the ring looking for daylight.

  “I not a thinker like you,” Hawk said, “being the pro-duct of a racist ed-u-cational system.”

  “This is certainly true,” I said and threw a lightning fast left hook which Hawk seemed to catch quite easily on his hunched right shoulder. He countered with a whistling right uppercut which I managed to avoid.

  “But if I a thinker,” Hawk said. “I be thinking that OUT plus money could equal blackmail.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said as I circled him clockwise, bouncing on my toes to demonstrate that I wasn’t getting tired. “And you’re not even a licensed investigator.”

  Hawk shuffled in suddenly and threw a short flurry of punches which I bobbed and weaved and rolled and ducked and mostly avoided. I countered with an overhead right which Hawk pulled back from. Hawk stepped back and leaned against the wall of the gym.

  “You think we go fifteen and not get a winner?” Hawk said.

  “Fifteen for real,” I said, “maybe we’d be trying harder.”

  “Have to.”

  We walked out of the boxing room and down to Henry Cimoli’s office.

  “How long’d you go,” Henry said.

  He was in his trainer’s costume, a very white tee shirt and white satin sweatpants. His small upper body looked like it might pop the weave in the tee shirt.

  “Half hour,” I said.

  “You need mouth to mouth?”

  “Not from you,” Hawk said and put his hands out for Henry to unlace the gloves. When we were both glove free, Henry nodded at the small refrigerator next to his desk.

  “Trick I learned when I was fighting,” he said. “Keep some good sports drinks handy so as to replenish the electrolytes.”

  I opened the refrigerator and took out two bottles of New Amsterdam Black and Tan.

  “You can use my office, you want,” Henry said. “I got to go suck around the customers.”

  “You too teeny to run a health club,” Hawk said. “The same people come here year after year, since the place stopped being a dump. Nobody lose weight. Nobody put on muscle. Everybody look just like they did when they signed up to get in shape.”

  “One difference,” Henry said. “They are a little poorer, and I am a lot richer.”

  Hawk grinned at him.

  “Maybe you ain’t too teeny after all.”

  Henry jumped up and kicked the palms of his outstretched hands with his toes, and landed easily and laughed and went out to the gym floor.

  “Agile too,” Hawk said.

  “Easy to be agile if you’re the size of a salt shaker.”

  “Almost beat Willie Pep once,” Hawk said.

  “I know.”

  Hawk sat in Henry’s chair and took a pull at the beer. He swiveled the chair so he could look out Henry’s picture window at the harbor.

  “You getting anywhere on Susan’s friend’s stalker.”

  “I got a guy I like for it.”

  “Time for me to go reason with him?” Hawk said.

  “No. I’m not sure he’s the one.”

  Hawk shrugged. He put his feet up on the windowsill and crossed his ankles and took another drink of beer.

  “Thing I like about Henry,” Hawk said. “He keep the sports drinks cold.”

  “That’s a good thing.”

  We were quiet for a moment. One of the big harbor cruise boats eased past, all glass and sleek lines, on a luncheon cruise to nowhere. It loomed close to the window. We could see the people, mostly couples, seated at tables in the main cabin.

  “You think Robinson connected to the Lamont kid?” Hawk said.

  “I don’t know yet. I hope not. That thing shows every sign of being a mess.”

  “See any connection with Abdullah?”

  “Nothing you don’t know,” I said.

  The cruise ship had moved out of sight. For a moment the only activity out the window was the wake of the cruise boat and the gulls that swooped ever hopeful behind it. I finished my beer and Hawk reached over without taking his feet down and got two more out of the refrigerator.

  “What’s going on with Abdullah?” I said.

  Hawk didn’t move. He continued to look out the window at the harbor. He raised the bottle and took another drink of beer.

  “You’re completely pragmatic,” I said. “You don’t care what people call you. You don’t care if people are annoying. You don’t care about color. You don’t get mad, you don’t get sentimental. You don’t hold a grudge. You don’t get scared, or confused, or boisterous, or jealous. You don’t hate anyone. You don’t love anyone. You don’t mind violence. You don’t enjoy violence.”

  “Kind of like Susan,” Hawk said.

  “Okay,” I said. “You don’t love many. My point stands. You taking a run at Amir Abdullah because he called you a Tom is bullshit. You don’t care about insults any more than you care about fruit flies.”

  Hawk drank the rest of the beer in his bottle and put the bottle on the desk. He dropped his feet off the windowsill, swiveled around, and got another two bottles out of the refrigerator. He put one on the desk in front of me, opened the other, and leaned back in Henry’s chair facing me. His face had no expression. His black eyes were bottomless. I waited. I was barely into my second bee
r.

  “I got you into this,” Hawk said.

  I nodded. One of the water taxis from Logan Airport plodded past. Few couples in this one. Mostly men, a scattering of women. Both genders dressed for business, carrying briefcases, paying no attention to each other, too busy to flirt, or too tired, or it might mess their hair.

  “I was about fifteen,” Hawk said, “making a living as a mugger. Used to go to the Joe Louis gym to use the bathroom. Joe Louis didn’t have anything to do with it, of course, but half the black boxing clubs in the country were using his name. Got so I’d hang around in there, watch the fighters. Sometimes when there wasn’t much going on they’d let me hit the bag. I figured if I was going to make a living beating people up, I might as well practice. I got good at it. Make the body bag jump, make the speed bag dance. Had trouble in those days with that little jeeter bag, but even some of the fighters had trouble with that.”

  “I still have troubles with that,” I said.

  Hawk smiled.

  “Naw, you don’t,” he said. “Neither one of us do. So one day Bobby Nevins comes in, sees me working on the bag, asks me have I got a manager? I say no. He says ‘You ever fight in the ring?’ I say no. So he says, ‘You want to try it?’ And since I been making a living beating people up I figure why not? So I say sure, and he puts me in with some tall skinny Puerto Rican guy probably don’t weigh more than a hundred fifty pounds. And I’m thinking how smart Bobby is to start me off easy, so I lace ‘em on and get in the ring and of course the guy cleans my clock.”

  “Knowing how helps,” I said.

  “It do. But Bobby sees something he likes and he takes me on, and when he finds out I’m not living anywhere special he takes me in, and I learn to fight and maybe along the way to use a fork when I’m eating. Stuff like that. Robinson was a little kid then, maybe twelve, and his mother kept him away from the fighters, so I see him, but I don’t know him much. So one day Bobby say to me, ‘I think you need to get a little schooling.’ And I say why, I gonna reason with people in the ring? And Bobby say, ‘You should take an English class and a math class.’ And pretty soon I’m in night school at the community college. And my English professor is a brother name of Dennis Crawford. Young guy maybe four, five years older than me. He talk like Walter Cronkite, and he wear horn-rimmed glasses and tweed jackets and English brogues and all around, he about the smartest brother I ever saw. I never saw a black man with an education. Bobby’s wife was a schoolteacher, but she didn’t spend no time with the fighters so I didn’t really know her either, and besides she was a woman. So we reading Othello and we reading Invisible Man and we discussing them and Professor Crawford, he smarter than the white boys and even the white girls in the class. Never saw nothing like it.”