Hush Money s-26

by Robert B. Parker

  “It comes from ancient Rome. It derives from the word fasces which refers to the symbol of Official Power, a bundle of reeds with an axe head protruding. We at Last Stand are hardly fascists. We don’t symbolize official power. We oppose it. We oppose a government hell-bent to dissemble my country, your country, our country. We oppose a government which will make us not Americans, but mongrelized members of a world government where every Arab despot and cannibal dictator may say yea or nay to us.”

  He was good. The audience was listening.

  “And we ask you to join us in that opposition. We are not asking of you the sacrifices that were asked of the men who founded this country.”

  “And women,” someone shouted.

  Quant smiled.

  “They made their own sacrifices. But I’m talking about the men who were asked to fight and often die for liberty. We don’t ask that of you. We ask only that you keep yourself worthy of the liberty they died for. We ask that you keep yourself clean and straight. We ask that you value marriage. That you respect the God of our fathers. That you honor your ethnic purity. That you fulfill the destiny for which so many of those men suffered and died.”

  He paused. They listened. He smiled warmly at us all.

  “If this be treason,” he said slowly, “let us make the most of it.”

  Some people clapped. A few hooted. Most were quiet. Quant went on. If he spoke ill of other races and religions, if he said that all American values were to be found only in white Christian males, he said it obliquely, sliding it in always in terms of honor and cleanliness, heritage, straightness, and respect.

  He spoke until 8:15, and then took questions. The majority of the questions were hostile. He handled them easily. He had heard them before. He never said nigger, or queer, or Jew, or dyke. He managed also to be more magnanimous than his questioner, and he always had a gracious and convincing answer for even the most difficult questions.

  His answers were largely bullshit, but they were good bullshit. I had years ago learned that it was useless to debate zealots. They had spent most of their adult life thinking intensely about the object of their zealotry. Normally their debaters had not. I wanted to stand and ask him if in fact he were wearing lifts in his shoes. But I was there to watch and listen and I didn’t want to get into it with Horn Rims or any of the other preservers of our heritage. So I shut up. Which is a ploy that often works well for me.

  When it was over, Quant was escorted out by his keepers and the cops. It was raining. A small group of students were standing across the street, getting wet, chanting “Two, four, six, eight, USA can’t use your hate.” I wondered why protesters so often demeaned their deepest-held convictions by reciting them loudly in doggerel. Nobody in Quant’s party paid any attention to them. And, in fact, neither did many people in Quant’s audience. Shielded by an umbrella one of the security guys deployed, Quant got into his black Lincoln and departed with three bodyguards. The other security guys got into a large van. The protesters chanted at them until they were out of sight. Then they stood somewhat aimlessly for a few moments and then drifted away in various directions.

  I suspected that Quant hadn’t convinced anyone who hadn’t come convinced. But he had made them see that he was pleasant, and that he spoke as if what he espoused was both reasonable and kind, and they were puzzled. And maybe they didn’t enjoy doggerel much, either.

  My car had a parking ticket on the windshield issued by the Fitchburg State College Campus Police. I took it off my windshield and tucked it carefully under the wiper of the car next to me. Then I got in and drifted along behind Quant with the windshield wipers making long steady sweeps across my glass, their sound like the rhythm of music that wasn’t playing.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  At about 10:30 with the rain coming down steadily, the Quant limo pulled off of Route 495 near Chelmsford and into the parking lot of a big motel that looked like the Disney version of a Norman castle. The van kept on going. I followed Quant, and got into a slot in the next row and watched as Milo and his bodyguard deployed umbrellas and walked across the glistening parking lot into the hotel lobby. The place was more hotel than motel, in that it was four stories high and entry was through the front door. For my purposes, I would have liked the conventional one-room one-door approach, but the more I live the more I don’t always get what I want. I sat for a while and thought. While I was doing this Hawk opened the passenger door and slid in, the rain beaded on his smooth head.

  “Ah ha!” I said.

  “Ah ha indeed, my good man,” Hawk said. “The game’s afoot.”

  “Amir,” I said.

  “Yowzah,” Hawk said. “Rents a car this afternoon, comes out here ‘bout three o’clock. I see him pull in and I take a chance and get into the lobby ’fore he do. There a phone booth right by the desk. I’m in it with my back turned and the phone at my ear when he gets to the desk. He’s got a reservation. He’s in room four seventeen.”

  “Good to know,” I said.

  “Well, I got nothing much else to do so I hang around, sit in the bar, read a paper, drink some Perrier with a nice wedge of lime, have a club sandwich, drink some more Perrier and about five minutes ago in come a group of people and one of them is our man with the horn-rimmed glasses. They got reservations. Their rooms are four fifteen and four nineteen.”

  “Either side,” I said.

  “Un huh.”

  “There were four bodyguards, right?”

  “Including the limo driver,” Hawk said.

  “Plus Quant.”

  “Two bodyguards in four fifteen,” I said. “Two bodyguards in four nineteen. Where’s Quant go?”

  “Four seventeen,” Hawk said. “Want to take a look?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why don’t I register and we can look at the room setup.”

  “Call from the car,” Hawk said, “make sure they have a room.”

  I did. They did.

  “Okay,” I said. “Stay here. I’ll call you.”

  I left the motor running, took a gym bag from the trunk of my car, and walked toward the lobby. The gym bag looked right, but all it contained were burglar tools. I checked into the lobby. They gave me room 205. I went up and let myself in and put the gym bag on the bed and called Hawk.

  “Room two-oh-five,” I said.

  “Fine. Is the desk clerk a man or a woman?”

  “Woman.”

  “Good. I’ll come in tell her I’m Amir and I’ve lost my key.”

  “They often want to see ID,” I said.

  “She’d be scared to ask me,” Hawk said. “Scared I say she racist for asking.”

  “And if she remembers Amir at all it’ll be that he’s black and so are you, so you must be him.”

  “Un huh.”

  “See you soon,” I said.

  And I did. In about ten minutes he knocked on the door and I let him in. He smiled at me and held up the plastic key card.

  “She thought I look like Michael Jordan,” Hawk said.

  “You know how to play that old race card,” I said. “Don’t you.”

  “I do,” Hawk said.

  The room was standard B-class hotel. Tile bath and shower in the short hall as you came in the door, king-sized bed, small table and two chairs by the window, built-in bureau with a large television set on top of it. The door unlocked electronically with the plastic card and could be chain bolted from the inside. I looked at the chain bolt. The chain was attached to the door frame by two small brass screws. I took a small pry bar from the gym bag.

  “Bolt the door,” I said.

  I took the room key and went out and shut the door. I heard Hawk set the chain bolt. I opened the door with the plastic card, slid the pry bar in through the opening, and popped the chain loose without much effort. I went back into the room and closed the door.

  “Shouldn’t be hard getting in there,” I said.

  “Once we in what we going to do?”

  “I guess we’ll ask them wh
at they’re doing here,” I said. “And then we’ll see what happens.”

  “What you want to happen?”

  “I want everyone to get so percolated that they start saying things they will later regret and we might finally know something concrete.”

  “And what we going to do they start hollering and the bodyguards come dashing in?”

  “I thought you had that covered,” I said.

  “‘Course I got it covered,” Hawk said. “I just meant you want me to shoot them or quell them with a stern look?”

  “Stern look will probably cause less ruckus,” I said.

  “I’ll work on it,” Hawk said, and we went out and took the elevator to the fourth floor.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  The room was half lit by the security lights that shone on the parking lot. We could have kicked the door in while singing Verdi’s “Othello” and neither Milo nor Amir would have heard us. They were in bed together, zonked. Hawk walked over to the bed and leveled his gun at them. When he was in place I closed the door, found the light switch, and turned on the lights. They slept on. Amir was on his side, his back to Milo who lay on his back, his mouth half open, snoring gently. Hawk put the big Magnum back under his coat. He picked up the telephone from the bedside table and disconnected the handset and tossed it onto one of the soft chairs by the window table. There were dirty dishes on the table, remnants of food, glasses, and an empty champagne bottle. There were also five small plastic pill bottles, the kind prescriptions come in. I picked one of them up. It had no label. I took off the top. It contained five large maroon capsules. I dumped them out on the table. I picked up another one. Blue capsules. All five were unlabeled. All five contained some sort of pills. I dumped all of them out on the table.

  “Recognize any of these,” I said to Hawk.

  He shook his head.

  “Only do booze,” Hawk said. “But they don’t look like prescriptions.”

  Milo opened his eyes. They didn’t focus. His mouth was still open and he was still making soft snoring noises. Hawk took his gun back out. Milo blinked a couple of times. He closed his mouth. He blinked a couple more times. Then he sat bolt upright and as he did so Hawk put the gun muzzle right up to Milo’s face.

  “Don’t yell,” Hawk said.

  Milo fumbled at the bedside phone. He couldn’t find the handset and couldn’t seem to register that it was gone.

  “Phone won’t work,” Hawk said.

  “There’s money in my wallet,” Milo said in a thick voice. “In my pants pocket. On the back of that chair.”

  “Wake him up,” I said and nodded at Amir.

  Milo turned and shook Amir awake. He came back from wherever he was even more slowly than Milo had, but after a while everyone was awake and looking at each other.

  “Tell Milo who we are,” I said to Amir.

  Both men had edged up into a sitting position, their backs resting against the headboard. Both were half covered by the bedclothes. Both their upper bodies were naked. Amir wore three thick gold chains. His chest was black and bony. There was a lot of short curly hair on it. Milo had no jewelry, nor hair on his chest. He was fat and pale with blotchy pink highlights.

  “They’re,” Amir paused, “the white one is a detective.”

  “Detective? Damn you, you have no right…”

  Hawk tapped him gently on the forehead with the muzzle of his gun.

  “Shh,” Hawk said.

  “Tell him what detective I am,” I said.

  “What detective? I don’t know what…”

  “I’m the detective you sent your people to threaten,” I said.

  “Threaten?”

  I knew that Milo’s brain was fuddled by whatever controlled substance he’d been ingesting with Amir. But even so he looked genuinely puzzled.

  “Didn’t he do that, Amir?” I said.

  “I… how would I know?”

  “Well, you and Milo seem sort of friendly,” I said. “I just thought you might. So, tell him what we’re doing here.”

  “Doing here? God, how would I know?”

  “You know,” I said. “Explain to Milo what we’re after.”

  “Speak up, Amir,” Hawk said.

  Amir looked as if someone had taken a shot at him.

  “They’re after me,” Amir said. “They are after me because they think I made a person lose tenure.”

  “Tenure?” Milo said.

  “And because a kid you know got pitched out a window,” I said. “Tell him about that.”

  “Window?” Milo said.

  “It’s all craziness, Milo,” Amir said.

  Milo looked at me and Hawk. Rallying is hard when you’re half stoned, and you got no pants on, but Milo was trying.

  “There are armed men in rooms on either side of us,” Milo said. “If you were to fire that revolver, they would rush in here and kill you.”

  Hawk smiled.

  “You think?” he said.

  Milo turned his head and stared at Amir.

  “What is this about tenure and a person getting thrown from a window?”

  “It’s not anything, Milo.”

  “What are you doing to me, you degenerate cannibal?”

  “Who are you calling degenerate?” Amir said. “I’m everything you hate and you can’t stop fucking me.”

  Milo slapped him across the face. Amir laughed at him.

  “Talk about degenerate,” he said.

  It came all at once. Gestalt. The whole thing. For the first time since Hawk had come in with Robinson Nevins in the spring, I knew what was going on. It was a feeling I wasn’t used to.

  “Prentice knew about you and Milo,” I said to Amir.

  Amir’s face seemed to freeze.

  “You got a lot of perks out of being a militant black man, just like you got a lot of perks out of being a militant gay activist.”

  Milo had stopped looking at Amir and was looking at me.

  “And Prentice caught you,” I said to Amir.

  He seemed to be freezing right there in front of me. Compacting as he froze, growing smaller.

  “Who, pray tell, is Prentice?” Milo said.

  “Kid that got thrown out the window by some of your security twerps,” I said.

  “I know nothing about any Prentice.”

  “No,” I said, “you don’t. Prentice Lamont ran a newspaper called OUTrageous, which was primarily committed to outing gay men and women who would have preferred otherwise.”

  Milo frowned. I knew he could identify.

  “First the kid probably was doing it for philosophical reasons. Hiding one’s sexuality contributed to the belief that it was shameful. Something high-sounding like that, but then, and I’m guessing here, Amir started hitting on him, and the kid was flattered because Amir is a big-deal gay guy and a leading black activist, and a professor, and an all-around joy to contemplate.”

  Outside the room the rain kept coming down in the dark. The motel window was streaked with it.

  “And Amir gives him the blackmail idea. Maybe he wanted a cut of it. Maybe he wanted Prentice to think he was smart. Maybe he gets a kick out of perverting idealism. I’d guess all of the above with the perversion of idealism especially appealing to him, because he did it again with Willie and Walt when he was with you, Milo, and no longer needed the money. There’s people like that, get a kick out of seducing virgins, so to speak.”

  Both Milo and Amir were now watching me as if I were Scheherazade. Hawk seemed to have faded back a little into the background. No one made a sound. I was talking mostly to Milo now.

  “Anyway the scheme was working good. Good enough for Prentice to have accumulated two hundred fifty thousand dollars. Also, while Amir was with Prentice, he learned that OUTrageous was investigating the possibility that another professor at the university, Robinson Nevins, was gay. Nevins was Amir’s bitterest rival, and Amir filed that away for future use.”

  The pupils in Amir’s eyes seemed to have reduced to pin
points. I spoke to him again.

  “But somewhere in there you got bored with Prentice, and you dumped him and moved on and somewhere in there you took up with Milo Quant.”

  Neither of them said anything.

  “And Prentice was jealous, wasn’t he?”

  Amir shrugged, as if he were embarrassed to talk about how magnetic he was.

  “And he used his OUTrageous sources and he found out who you’d left him for.”

  “The damned queen used to follow me,” Amir said to Milo.

  Milo was looking at him as if he had just discovered a Gila monster sharing his pillow.

  “And that was too explosive to let out,” I said. “Each of you sexually involved with everything you hate. Hard as it is for me to imagine it, I assume you have devotees, and your devotees would be hysterical. It would ruin both of you.”

  Milo’s face was mottled to an almost maroon flush. Amir was rigidly still. It was raining harder outside. The water flooded down the motel window in crystalline sheets.

  “So you spoke to one of the bodyguards, the guy with the horn-rimmed glasses, maybe, and they went and threw Prentice out his window, and left a generic suicide note, and went back up to Beecham.”

  “I…” Milo Quant’s voice was very hoarse, it sounded as if it was squeezing out of a very narrow opening in his windpipe. “I knew nothing of this.”

  “No,” I said. “You probably didn’t. Amir probably said that you wanted it done and didn’t want to know about it. Was it the guy with the horn rims, Amir?”

  Amir stood up suddenly from the bed. He was naked. Hawk moved slightly to his right between the door and Amir.

  “Chuck,” Milo said. “Did you have Chuck kill this boy?”

  Amir stood looking around the room. He seemed unaware that he had no clothes on.

  “Up to there, he’d probably have gotten away with everything, and you and he could have waltzed to the music of time for the rest of your lives. But he got greedy. He put out the story that the boy had killed himself because of Robinson Nevins. That way he gets rid of the kid, and he gets rid of a man whom he saw as a threat to his position as boss black man at the university. And that brought Robinson’s father in. And he brought Hawk in. And Hawk brought me in and here we are.”