Hush Money s-26

by Robert B. Parker

  “Yeah, cops are us. What’s bothering you?”

  I told him about the case.

  When I finished, he said, “Guy made a move on Hawk?”

  “When Hawk was a kid,” I said.

  “I didn’t know Hawk was ever a kid,” Farrell said.

  “I knew him when he was a kid,” I said. “And I find it hard to imagine.”

  “You and Hawk were kids together?”

  “We fought on the same card when we were eighteen. But Hawk isn’t what’s bothering me.”

  “You straight guys are simple tools,” Farrell said. “Lemme tell you what’s bothering you. You’re chasing along after whatever it is that you can’t quite catch, and every gay person you encounter is sleazy, crooked, second rate, and generally unpleasant.”

  “Or so it has seemed,” I said.

  “And, being a basically decent guy, despite the smart mouth, you fear that maybe you are prejudiced and it’s clouding your judgment.”

  “Also true, except for the smart mouth part.”

  “Same thing happens to me with blacks,” Farrell said. “I spend two months on a drug-related homicide and everybody’s black, and everybody’s a vicious sleazebag, and I begin to wonder, is it me?”

  “Neither one of us gets to deal with the best parts of a culture,” I said.

  “No. We deal with the worst. You got a case involving murder and blackmail, most of the people you meet are going to be scumbags.”

  “Regardless of race, creed, or color,” I said. “Or sexual orientation.”

  “And not because of race, creed, color, or sexual orientation,” Farrell said.

  “You mean homos aren’t any better than the rest of us?” I said.

  “Most of us are,” Farrell said, “but not all of us.”

  “How disappointing.”

  “I know,” Farrell said.

  There was a big picture window in the front of the bar. The sun was west of us now and throwing long shadows onto the street outside. Men in suits carrying briefcases sidled in for a few fast ones before they got the train to Dover. It wasn’t a place where women came much.

  “Shall we have another beer?” I said.

  Farrell grinned at me.

  “We’d be fools not to,” he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  I spent the rest of the afternoon in my office with a pad of lined yellow paper drawing little connection diagrams among the principals in the Prentice Lamont case. None of them seemed very useful, but that just made the exercise like all the other ones I had been through. Maybe it was time to get the cops into it. I knew Quirk when he tried the window Lamont had jumped from would agree with me that the suicide smelled bad. But with the cops came the press, and Robinson Nevins would be frequently mentioned in connection with the murder of a gay man. This was not, I was pretty sure, what he’d wanted when Hawk brought him to me.

  Twice the phone rang, and both times, when I answered there was nothing but the sound of someone not talking at the other end. I did business with enough wackos that it could be one of several, but at the moment my money was on KC Roth. After the second one I dialed *69 and the phone rang for a while but no one answered, which meant nothing. KC could have shut off her answering machine. She could be refusing to answer. She could have called from a phone booth which was now ringing to the empty sidewalk. Or it could have been someone else doing these things.

  It was after six when I left the office and walked down Berkeley Street toward my apartment. When I turned right onto Marlborough Street I saw her hiding behind a tree across from my apartment. When I got to my apartment entry I turned and looked over at the tree.

  “KC,” I said. “You’re slightly larger than the tree trunk. I can see you.”

  She came out from behind the tree and walked toward me. She was dressed in black. She wore a large black hat, and her face, pale in contrast to her outfit, was tragic.

  “I can’t stay away from you,” she said.

  “Work on it,” I said.

  “I think of you all the time.”

  “How about the stalker,” I said. “He come back?”

  “No. I need to talk with you.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Can we go upstairs?”

  “No.”

  “Afraid?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked up at me with her head lowered. She looked like an old Hedy Lamarr publicity still.

  “Of me or yourself?” she said.

  “You,” I said.

  “Damn you, can’t you understand how desperate I am. I’ve been abandoned, betrayed, my husband has left me, I’m being stalked.”

  “I don’t think you’re being stalked anymore,” I said.

  “You caught him?”

  “Yep.”

  “And?”

  “I reasoned with him.”

  “Who?”

  “Louis Vincent,” I said.

  “Louis?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Louis – oh my god,” she said and fell forward into my arms.

  I held onto her and waited while she cried a little. When she stopped crying I let her go. She stayed where she was, leaning hard against me.

  “Stand straight,” I said.

  “I can’t,” she said. “It’s too much, too awful.”

  I gave her a couple of seconds and when she didn’t stop leaning in to me, I stepped suddenly back away from her. She lurched forward and caught herself, and got her balance.

  When she was on her own balance again her face darkened and she looked at me.

  “You unutterable bastard,” she said, and turned and strode away.

  Her hips swung angrily as she headed toward Arlington Street.

  Unutterable, I thought. Not bad.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Hawk and I were drinking draught beer in a joint across from the Fleet Center. The Fleet Center had replaced the old Garden, and I could tell that the joint was trying to go along with the upscale clientele, because there was a bowl of cashews on the bar. I had several. So did Hawk.

  “Usually it’s a fight to see who gets the six cashews in a bowl of mixed nuts,” I said.

  “Kind of ruins the competition,” Hawk said. “When they all cashews.”

  We drank some beer.

  “You got that stalker thing worked out?” Hawk said.

  “Yes, I identified the stalker and explained to him why he should stop it.”

  “Firmly,” Hawk said.

  “Quite.”

  “Good,” Hawk said. “Don’t like stalkers.”

  “Only problem is now getting rid of the stalkee.”

  Hawk turned his head slowly and looked at me and his eyes were bright with pleasure.

  “She taken a liking to you?”

  “You might say.”

  “Hear victims do that sometimes.”

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “You say she good-looking?”

  “Un huh.”

  “And, you ain’t available, being as how you in love and all.”

  “True.”

  “Maybe you can divert her my way,” Hawk said. “She’ll thank you for it.”

  “I’ll keep that option in mind.”

  We emptied the bowl of cashews, and the bartender came over and refilled it and drew us two more beers. Way upscale.

  “How we doing with Robinson?”

  “We?”

  “Yeah, you and me. We finding out anything?”

  “We figure Prentice was killed,” I said.

  “‘Cause of how he couldn’t have opened the window,” Hawk said.

  I nodded.

  “And we’re pretty sure he was blackmailing people,” I said.

  “How about at the university?”

  “I know that the rumor of his relationship to Prentice was introduced by Lillian Temple and a guy named Bass Maitland.”

  “Lillian from Cambridge,” Hawk said.

  “Clearly. And Bass is her boyfrie
nd.”

  “Lillian got a boyfriend?”

  “Maybe when she lets her hair down and takes off her glasses,” I said.

  “They don’t do that in Cambridge,” Hawk said.

  I shrugged. “We know that both Lillian and Bass are friends with Amir Abdullah,” I said.

  “Which tell you something about them,” Hawk said.

  There were still cashews left. I took a couple.

  “And we know that Amir had met Prentice because Prentice wrote about him in his little magazine.”

  “So there a connection from Prentice through Amir to Lillian Cambridge and her boyfriend.”

  “Bass Maitland. Yeah there is.”

  We both drank some beer. The bar was nearly empty in the middle of the afternoon. The television above the bar was dark. There was no music playing on the jukebox. The light from the street filtered quietly in through the front windows.

  “You know what I thinking?” Hawk said.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “I thinking that if the kid Prentice banking a quarter of million out of the blackmail gig then it too good a gig to end when he die.”

  “And you’re thinking it might be a good idea to keep an eye on the ones doing the magazine now.”

  “Yowzah.”

  ‘That would be Walt and Willie.“

  “You know them?”

  “Yes.”

  “They business partners or are they a couple?”

  “Couple, I think.”

  “So one’s in it they probably both in it.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “They know you too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So we’ll go by tomorrow,” Hawk said, “and you point them out to me and I’ll watch them for a while.”

  “Christ,” I said, “almost sounds like a plan.”

  “Do,” Hawk said, “don’t it.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Pearl the wonder dog was staying with me while Susan was at a two-day conference in Atlanta. We were lying in my bed watching the Braves game on cable when the phone rang.

  A woman’s voice said, “Is Susan there?”

  “No,” I said, “she’s not. Can I take a message?”

  “Does she make a lot of noise when you fuck her?” the voice said.

  “Mostly she yells ‘bravo,’” I said.

  “I’ll bet she lays there like an old laundry bag,” the voice said.

  “KC,” I said. “Stop being a pain in the ass.”

  “There’s a letter for you,” she said, “in your mailbox downstairs.”

  Then she hung up. I thought about not looking, but that would be childish, so I got up, put on my pants, stuck a gun in my back pocket, and went down to look in my mailbox. The letter was there. Hand delivered obviously, no stamp, and no address, only my name. I took it and went back upstairs. Pearl was still on the bed though she had raised her head and was looking annoyed. I got back into bed beside her and opened the letter. It was handwritten in blue ink by someone who had been taught that a person was judged on her penmanship.

  I think about you and Susan all the time. Is it still romantic or does she just undress and lay on the bed? Do you take off her clothes for her, slowly, one garment at a time until she’s naked? Are you naked when you do it? Or do you undress after she’s undressed? Does she respond? Is she lively? Does she know a lot of tricks? Is she kinky? Or is she just the kind of prude who closes her eyes and lets you do what you want to her? She is so smart and sarcastic I have often wondered if she could ever be genuine enough to enjoy sex the way I do. The way we would, you and I. I would give you everything. Does Susan? I would ask nothing in return. Does Susan? You could still be with Susan. And have me on the side. And when you were with me, you might learn things that Susan can’t teach you.

  The letter made me uncomfortable. A little girl talking dirty without using bad words. It always interested me that people had a lot more trouble writing a dirty word than they did saying it. It was also very uncomfortable to be the object of salacious fantasy. The idea that a good-looking woman would think such things about me was attractive. The reality was embarrassing. It also made me think about why KC had trouble with men. She thought that it was about sex, when what it was about was love. It made me sorry for her. I could try to explain but she wouldn’t understand it, and, worse, if she did understand it she wouldn’t believe it.

  “KC is doomed,” I said to Pearl.

  Pearl opened her eyes and looked at me without raising her head. I didn’t follow up the remark so she lost interest and closed her eyes again. On television Andres Galarraga hit a hanging curveball into the general area of Buckhead scoring Chipper Jones ahead of him, and the ball game was over. I clicked off the television and lay quietly beside Pearl thinking about KC. I wondered if in fact I would learn something by sleeping with her.

  “You never know,” I said to Pearl.

  Pearl had discerned already that I was not looking for an answer so she moved her ear slightly to let me know she was listening, but she didn’t open her eyes. I was hungry. I got up and went to the kitchen and made one and a half ham sandwiches on light rye with dark mustard. I brought it back into the bedroom with a bottle of Sam Adams White Ale, got back into bed, gave Pearl her half, and ate my sandwich, and drank my beer from the bottle.

  “We’re going to have to do something about KC,” I said.

  Pearl was engaged with her half sandwich.

  “If only I knew what.”

  Pearl had mustard on her muzzle, she wiped it on the spread as I spoke. I drank some beer and had another bite of sandwich.

  “This may be,” I said to Pearl, “a job for Susan.”

  Pearl stood up, turned around three times, and settled back down with a large sigh. Clearly it was enough chitchat for the night.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  It was time to pay some more attention to Lillian Temple. I called the Brandeis alumni office and got her current address from them. Alumni offices know your address when even the IRS can’t find you. I called the university English department to make sure she wasn’t teaching any night classes. Which she wasn’t. The secretary sounded a bit offended that I would think she might be.

  At about six o’clock in the evening I got in my car and drove over to Cambridge. Susan wasn’t due back until the next morning, so I took Pearl with me. We parked outside Lillian’s apartment building on Kirkland Street and waited. I didn’t know what I was waiting for, but I often didn’t. I was trying to figure out a way to get information from a hostile witness.

  Pearl and I watched the sights and sounds of Cambridge pass by the car. Pearl reacted only to other dogs, and then with hostility, otherwise she rested her head placidly on the backseat and stared.

  “Cambridge was placed here,” I said, “across the river from Boston to provide comic relief.”

  A woman came by with an ugly black dog wearing a bandanna. Pearl barked at her. Or maybe it was her owner. Across the street Lillian Temple came out of the door to her building and walked across the street behind the car. It was a cool night. I cracked the windows.

  “I gotta go,” I said to Pearl, “you gotta stay. I’ll be back.”

  I locked the car doors and followed Lillian down Kirkland Street toward Mass Ave. It was still light, but she seemed a single-minded person, like many in Cambridge, who didn’t pay much attention to what was happening around her. She took no notice of me tagging along behind. At Mass Ave she turned left and walked toward Harvard Square. There were some guys in native garb playing Peruvian pipes outside the Harvard Coop. Three or four people asked me for money. One offered to sell me a newspaper called Spare Change, “the newspaper by and for the homeless.” There was a guy beating rhythm on the bottom of a series of different-sized inverted buckets. There were many kids with ring-pierced body parts and pastel hair hanging around the subway kiosk. Harvard students, and future Harvard students, parents, faculty, and staff all moved about the square among the s
treet people ignoring the traffic and the traffic laws. There was a diverse variety of cops around the square. MBTA cops hanging at the subway entrance, Cambridge cops lingering near the corner of JFK and Brattle, a motorcycle cop with gleaming boots parked near Cardullo’s, Harvard cops standing outside the Holyoke Center near the perpetual chess games.

  Lillian turned right at Nini’s corner and went down Brattle Street to The Casablanca bar and restaurant. When I got inside she was at the bar. It was about 7:20 on Thursday night and the bar was half empty. Or half full depending on how much you’d been drinking. I slid onto a bar stool beside her. She paid no attention to me. But she was aware of at least a male shape beside her because she looked at her watch sort of obviously to let me know she was waiting for someone and was not available. She ordered a glass of white wine, making it a longer process than it might have been by asking what kinds they had and how much it cost. She settled on a modest California chardonnay. I ordered a draught beer. I looked around on the bar, no cashews. They didn’t seem to care about becoming upscale. Maybe they already were upscale. Lillian sipped her wine and looked ostentatiously at her watch again, lest one of the unaccompanied males, made reckless by animal lust, proposition her. She made no eye contact with anyone. Everything in her being vibrated with I’m-waiting-for-someone.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Do you come here often?”

  She fixed me with a withering stare, which changed slowly into recognition, which changed slowly into anxiety.

  “Oh,” she said, “it’s you.”

  “Yes it is,” I said.

  “I’m waiting for someone,” she said, and drank some of her wine.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Bass, Bass Maitland.”

  She said the name as if it would make me slide off the stool and scuttle for the door. I held fast. She drank some more wine.

  “While you’re waiting,” I said, “may I buy you a glass of wine?”

  “I… I’d… I would rather you didn’t,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I sat and looked at her. She looked at me and looked at her watch and glanced around the bar casually, the way a rat does when it’s cornered. I drank a little beer. She finished her wine. I was quiet, still looking at her with a friendly look. Spenser – large but pleasant. She looked at her empty wineglass. She glanced at me and smiled a half smile. And glanced quickly down the bar toward the door to remind me that Bass was imminent. I remained calm.