Hush Money s-26

by Robert B. Parker

  Hawk tilted the beer bottle back and drank some more and held it up to the light and looked to see how much was left. I stayed quiet. Then he took another swallow and put the bottle down.

  “‘Course I never say nothing in class. Those days I only know six words if you count mother fucker as two. But I listened. One day after class Professor Crawford asks me to come to his office.”

  Hawk had turned so he was staring out at the now empty harbor where the ocean moved in its directionless way.

  “When I get there he say he notice me in class and don’t think I’m your usual night school student and he ask what I do. And I tell him I’m a fighter and he says well tell me a little about that, so I do.”

  I was as still as I was able to be and still breathe. The air in the room seemed to have gotten suddenly very dense. I wanted to drink some beer but I didn’t want to move. Hawk swung slowly around and let his feet rest on the floor.

  “And while I’m telling him, he hit on me,” Hawk said with no discernible change in his voice.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “I got up and left. Never went back to his class again. Never told nobody about it.”

  “Professor Crawford get caught up in the black power movement?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He change his name?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Amir Abdullah?”

  “Yeah.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Susan and I had begun having brunch every Sunday at her home. She’d set the dining room table with flowers in a vase and I’d cook something, and when it was ready, we’d sit in her dining room and eat. Pearl normally joined us. Today I had done huevos rancheros with mild green chilies. We were talking about Hawk.

  “Was it because the professor was gay?” Susan said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Would he have reacted the same way if it had been a female professor that hit on him?”

  “No. Femaleness didn’t matter the way maleness mattered.”

  “It was because he was treating Hawk as a means not an end,” Susan said.

  “Avoiding the obvious wise remark about end…” I said.

  “Thank you,” Susan said.

  “… I think so.”

  “The most august and accomplished black man Hawk had ever met and he – what would the street term be – dissed him?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “And years later he turns up. Do you think he remembered Hawk?”

  “I don’t know. Hawk’s probably not the only kid he ever hit on. Still most people meet Hawk remember him.”

  “Didn’t he go out of his way to be insulting?” Susan said.

  “Maybe. I think by nature he’s an annoying sonovabitch.”

  “Predators often resent rejection,” Susan said.

  I shrugged. Pearl was resting her head on my thigh. I cut off a small bite of the linguiзa I had substituted for chorizo, and gave it to her.

  “You’re just confirming her in her bad habits,” Susan said.

  “Yes,” I said, “I am.”

  Susan stirred some Equal into her coffee. Pearl heard the spoon click in the cup and left me for a more promising prospect. Susan gave her a small forkful of black beans.

  “Talk about bad habits,” I said.

  “At least I’m teaching her to use flatware,” Susan said.

  “Important for a dog,” I said.

  Susan smiled. She put her spoon down and put her chin on her folded hands and looked at me.

  “It’s very odd,” she said. “It’s like suddenly discovering Beowulf’s childhood.”

  “I met him about the same time this happened,” I said.

  “When you were both fighting at the Arena.”

  “Yes.”

  “You think he’s all right?”

  “Hawk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Few people are more all right than Hawk,” I said.

  “He’s very contained.”

  “Very.”

  “And he pays a high price for it,” Susan said.

  “You think?”

  “The distance between containment and isolation is not so great,” Susan said.

  “He’s got a lot of women,” I said.

  “But not one,” Susan said. “I guess that’s right,” I said.

  “You ought to know.”

  “You think I’m too contained?” I said.

  “You have me,” Susan said.

  “A claim no one else can currently make,” I said.

  “It makes your containment more flexible,” Susan said.

  “More fun too,” I said.

  “You’re just saying that because I balled your ears off an hour ago.”

  “Not just that,” I said.

  Susan ate some of her food.

  “This is very good,” she said.

  “You deserve it,” I said.

  “Because I’m deeply insightful?”

  “Sure,” I said. “And you also balled my ears off about an hour ago.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I had a couple of ways to go in chasing down Louis Vincent. I could talk to the cops in Hingham where he lived. Or I could talk to people at Hall, Peary where he worked. Hall, Peary was closer, so I called over there and talked with Phyllis Wasserman, the human resources director. She told me that of the five complaints of sexual harassment they’d had in the past year, one involved stalking and remained unsolved. Two others, she said, were much closer to angry disagreement than they were to sexual harassment, and the last two had been resolved by firing the harasses I asked who was involved in the stalking, and she said she was not at liberty. I asked if she would give my name to the victim and ask her to call me. She said she would.

  While I was waiting hopefully, I called the Hingham police. It took a little while but I got to the chief, whose name was Roach. They’d had two stalking complaints in the last year. In one case the stalker had been in violation of a court order, and they had been able to arrest him and urge him to change his ways.

  “You give me the name?” I said.

  “Not without a good reason,” Roach said.

  “Well, was the stalker a Hingham resident?”

  “No.”

  “Was he a stockbroker?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What about the other one?”

  “Never caught the guy.”

  “But the stalking stopped?”

  “Yep. My guess is he found someone else.”

  “That’s my guess too,” I said. “Can you give me the name of the victim?”

  “Nope.”

  “Can you give her my name and number, and remind her that I’m trying to help some other woman who’s going through what she went through?”

  “I can do that,” Roach said.

  “Thanks.”

  I hung up and sat. The phone was quiet. I swiveled my chair so I could look out my window at the corner of Berkeley and Boylston. I opened the window so I could listen to the traffic. People were already in summer clothes although we were only about half done with May. There was a Ford Explorer waiting for the light on Boylston Street. The sunroof was open and there was heavy metal music thundering up. As I watched, someone stuck a sign out of the sunroof that said Brendan Cooney for King. The light changed. The Explorer moved on, its exuberant sign still deployed. The young are very different than we are, I said to myself. Yes, I responded, they have more time. What if you could be young again and were able to undo the things that were done that made you into the person you would later become. But then who would you be. Would Hawk have been Hawk if he hadn’t met Professor Crawford/Abdullah? Maybe this wasn’t a useful avenue of inquiry. Maybe I should run over a list of the women I’d slept with and see if I could remember how each of them looked with their clothes off.

  I was up to Brenda Loring, who had looked excellent with her clothes off, when the phone rang.

  “This i
s Meredith Teitler,” a woman said. “Phyllis Wasserman gave me your number.”

  “I’m a detective,” I said. “I represent a woman who is currently being stalked.”

  “I understand,” Meredith said. “What do you wish to know?”

  “You worked at Hall, Peary?”

  “Still do,” she said.

  “You were a stalking victim.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it still a problem?”

  “I am no longer being stalked,” she said.

  “Did you ever identify the stalker?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever date anyone at Hall, Peary?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “He wouldn’t have been the stalker.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Well, he just wouldn’t. He was, is very nice.”

  “Can you give me his name?”

  “No, really, I’m happy to help. But I don’t wish to make trouble for a man who’s guilty of nothing.”

  “Did you ever date Louis Vincent?” I said.

  There was silence.

  After a moment I said, “May I take that as a yes?”

  “Why did you ask about Louis?”

  “He’s suspected in a stalking on the North Shore,” I said.

  Again silence. This time I waited her out.

  “Yes,” she said finally, “I dated Louis Vincent.”

  “And what caused you to stop dating?” I said. “I… I went back to my husband,” she said. “I had dated Louis while my husband and I were separated.”

  “How’d he feel about you reuniting with your husband?”

  “He was very much for it,” she said. “That’s why I can’t…”

  “Did he have any thought that you might continue to see each other after you reunited?”

  “I… well, he did say at one point it would be fun if we could still meet once a week or so and… ah… be in bed together.”

  “And you said no.”

  “I said I didn’t see how that would work if I were married again. He said he understood.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Will this have to come out?” she said. “I mean my husband and I… well, it’s working now. I’d hate to drag this thing back up.”

  “I don’t see why it has to be a public thing,” I said.

  “I don’t really believe it was Lou,” she said.

  “You never know,” I said.

  Profound.

  I hung up and went back to looking out the window, and thinking about nudity. It was late afternoon and I was up to how Susan looked with her clothes off, when the phone rang. It was a guy named Al.

  “I’m calling for a woman in Hingham,” he said. “You know who I mean?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “She doesn’t want to talk about the stalking thing. But if she can help stop it for some other woman she wants to help. She asked me to call.”

  “You her husband?”

  “Something like that,” Al said. “I can answer most of your questions.”

  “One, really,” I said. “She ever date a guy named Louis Vincent?”

  “I’ll ask her,” Al said.

  The line was silent for a minute or so, then Al came back on the line.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Anything she can tell me about him?”

  “No.”

  “Already been discussed?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Thank her for me,” I said.

  “You think this guy Vincent is the stalker?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said.

  “You know where to find him?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Where?”

  “I think I won’t tell you,” I said.

  “Well, you see him, tell him,” Al said. “There’s a guy looking for him, big guy, had some fights in his life, likes it, tell him when this guy finds him he’s going to yank his fucking head off.”

  “I’ll tell him,” I said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  It was nearly noon. I was at my desk with my feet up reading the to-be-outed list I had acquired from Prentice Lamont’s file drawer. It was dated at the top two weeks before Lamont died. The list was several pages long with notations next to various names, which apparently suggested likelihood: “not sure” or “dead giveaway.” Some were more graphic: “wrinkle room” or “chicken fucker.” Near the bottom of the third page was Robinson Nevins, and the notation “research continues.” So there was a connection between Prentice Lamont and Robinson Nevins. There were several names I recognized on the list, but nobody seemed more likely than anybody else to have tossed Prentice out the window. Even the women on the list couldn’t be eliminated – Prentice was small, and I knew some lesbian women who might throw me out the window.

  I put the list aside and picked up the stack of OUTrageous magazines again and began to read. It was not pleasant. Whatever Prentice Lamont had been, he had not been a writer. His literary style was school newspaper gossip prose. It was twenty to two and I was on my third back issue of OUTrageous, when I came to an interview with “scholar/activist” Amir Abdullah about the problems he encountered as an African-American man who was also gay. The article added nothing to my understanding of the situation, but it did connect Prentice Lamont, already connected to Robinson Nevins by the Out list, to Amir Abdullah. It might mean nothing. They were after all also connected to the same university. It didn’t mean Robinson was gay. The Out list had been still researching the question. And if Robinson were gay it didn’t mean that he had been intimate with Prentice Lamont, and even if he had been, it didn’t mean he had thrown Prentice out the window. Still when the same names kept turning up, it sometimes meant something. And when nothing else meant anything, it was a thing to hang on to. The interview between Prentice and Amir could have been the source of the story which Amir had passed on to the tenure committee about a connection between Robinson Nevins and Prentice Lamont. Had Prentice asked Amir about Nevins in the course of the interview? Had Amir suggested Nevins to Prentice in the course of the interview? Could Amir have suggested Nevins for reasons of university politics? Could Amir have embroidered what he learned from Prentice for reasons of university politics? I was pretty sure that worse had been done in the service of university politics. And if any of it were true how did it connect to one of the few facts I had – which was that Prentice Lamont was dead, and he’d died with a quarter of a million dollars in the bank. I thought about the quarter million, which was a relief. Sexuality was a slippery devil. Greed you could get a handle on. Any time there’s money in a case, what do you do?

  “Follow the money,” I said aloud, just as if I were the first person to have thought of that approach.

  Even when there’s sex in the case too?

  There’s always sex, what are cases about but sex and money.

  “Follow the money,” I said again.

  I pulled my phone over and called Mrs. Lamont.

  “Would you call Maxwell T. Morgan at Hall, Peary,” I said, “and tell him that he may discuss your and Prentice’s account with me?”

  “Why?” she said.

  “I’m trying to help you find out how there came to be so much money,” I said. It wasn’t exactly untrue.

  “If you think I should,” she said.

  “I do,” I said, and gave her the phone number and made sure she had it right and got up and went out to see Prentice Lamont’s financial advisor at Hall, Peary.

  Maxwell Morgan had a smaller office than Louis Vincent, two floors lower and in the middle of the building with a view of another building. He didn’t seem to mind. He was a big round blond cheerful healthy-looking guy with pink cheeks.

  “Max Morgan,” he said. “Come on in.”

  I sat across his desk from him in a moderately comfortable chair with arms. He had on the uniform – shirtsleeves and suspenders, his coat jacket hung neatly on a hanger on the back of
his door.

  “Care to invest in American Industry?” Morgan said.

  “No.”

  Morgan grinned. “Okay,” he said. “You got a thingamajig that says you’re a detective?”

  I showed him my license.

  “So what do you need?”

  “You handled Prentice Lamont’s investments.”

  “Yes.”

  “Lamont is dead.”

  “Yes, I know, poor devil killed himself, I understand.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “You don’t?”

  “No, but that’s not our issue. What can you tell me about the quarter of a million he has invested with you.”

  “Not much,” Morgan said. “Alive or dead Mr. Lamont is entitled to confidentiality.”

  “Did Mrs. Lamont call you?”

  Morgan smiled and nodded. “Just wanted to be sure it was you,” he said.

  “I understand,” I said. “Lawyers.”

  “You better believe it, the bastards took over Wall Street about five years ago.” Morgan shook his head sadly. “This business used to be fun,” he said.

  “So,” I said. “Tell me about all this money that a twenty-three-year-old graduate student suddenly began investing in a management account.”

  He swiveled his chair sideways and brought the file up on his computer.

  “Cash,” he said. “Always in the amount of nine thousand.”

  “Cash?”

  “Well, bank checks.”

  “Close enough,” I said. “What bank?”

  “Endicott Trust,” Morgan said. “You don’t think he was a suicide?”

  “No,” I said. “I think he was murdered.”

  “Jesus,” Morgan said.

  “Always the same bank?”

  “Yes.”

  “Always nine thousand dollars?”