Hush Money (10 page)

“I got a call from KC Roth this morning,” Susan said.

She sprinkled a little Equal into her decaffeinated coffee and swirled it with the little red swizzle that came with the coffee.

“Swell,” I said.

I liked the donuts they sold with the little handle on them. When you had finished the donut you still could eat the little handle and have the illusion that you’d gotten extra.

“She says you’ve been hitting on her.”

I finished my donut and drank some coffee to help it down.

“And how did you respond?” I said.

“I said that it seemed very unlike you.”

“And she said?”

“That apparently I didn’t know you as well as I thought I did.”

“Well,” I said, “if I were going to hit on someone besides you, she’d be an early candidate.”

“Yes, she is undeniably stunning,” Susan said. “But I’m pretty sure that I do know you as well as I think I do.”

“Maybe better,” I said.

“So I don’t want you to deny it,” Susan said. “Because I don’t believe you did it. But I’d be curious as to why she is telling me you did.”

“She blandished me and I was unresponsive,” I said.

“Blandished?”

“Yes.”

“As in blandishments?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure that’s a word?”

“It is now,” I said.

“Tell me about her blandishments,” Susan said.

So I did, graphically.

“I don’t wish to hurt your feelings, but KC has always been something of a hot pants.”

“Damn,” I said, “I thought maybe you had told her what a Roscoe I was in bed.”

Susan shook her head and sipped some more decaf. “Your secret is safe with me,” she said.

From the backseat Pearl nudged at my elbow as I was about to bite into a new donut.

“Excuse me,” I said and broke off a piece and gave it to her.

“KC and I have been friends a long time,” Susan said. “I would have hoped for a little better behavior.”

“Maybe she’s different with men than she is with other women,” I said.

“I’d say that was a given,” Susan said.

“I don’t know why, and obviously I’m making some rather large intuitive leaps here, but she seems to be in bad need of male attention and she seems to need it from men she can be scornful of.”

“Including you?” Susan said.

“If I had, ah, come across,” I said. “Then she could have been scornful of me because I was unfaithful to you.”

“Maybe that was part of your attraction, in addition to being a Roscoe, of course.”

“This is your department,” I said, “but maybe it’s why she cheated on her husband. He seemed hard to scorn.”

“Yes, Burt is quite admirable. How about her stockbroker?”

“Easy to scorn.”

“I of course understand some of that.”

“You understand some of everything,” I said.

Susan smiled and held her decaf up so Pearl could lap a little from the cup.

“Yes we do,” she said. “How did your talk go with Louis Vincent? Did he admit it?”

“Not exactly.”

“Did he seem remorseful?” Susan said.

“I think by the end of the discussion he felt some remorse.”

“Does his remorse have any connection with the bruised knuckles on your right hand?”

“It was a talking point,” I said.

“Did you have to talk much?”

“Awhile.” I said.

“So how come there aren’t any other bruises on your knuckles.”

“All the other talking was to the body,” I said.

“Did you reach an agreement?”

“We agreed that he would stop bothering KC.”

“Leaving KC all the free time she needs,” Susan said, “to bother you.”

“Exactly.”

“Maybe I’ll talk with her.”

“And say what?”

“And say that if she doesn’t stop fucking around with my honey bun, she’ll be sleeping with the fishes.”

“You shrinks know just the right thing,” I said.

“Yes,” Susan said. “We do.”

“I wasn’t exactly in the closet,” he said. “But I wasn’t, you could say, broadcasting it.”

“Probably not the road to advancement,” I said.

Randolph was slimmer than he looked on camera, with a good haircut, round, gold-rimmed glasses, and a sharp-edged face.

“Hell, glasses put you at a disadvantage.”

“And well they should,” I said.

He glanced at me for a moment and then smiled.

“Nothing,” he said, “is too trivial for local television.”

“Did you know Prentice Lamont?” I said.

“He the guy ran the magazine?”

“Yes.”

“No, I didn’t know him. I saw his name on the masthead. Somebody, I assume it was he, wrote me an unsigned letter saying that I was scheduled to be outed in the whatever date issue of
OUTrageous,
unless I wished to make other arrangements, and included a phone number. I called the number and I said what sort of arrangements, and he said, financial. And I said you mean you’ll take money not to out me? And he said, yes, and I told him to go fuck himself, and hung up. About two weeks later I was out.”

“Sounds like you passed on a good piece of investigative reporting.”

“I did,” Randolph said. “It was also my life, and I thought maybe I can just sit tight and it’ll blow over. I mean who ever heard of
OUTrageous,
anyway? I thought they might be bluffing, and if they weren’t I thought no one read the damned thing.”

“Unless they backed it up,” I said, “and made sure somebody saw it.”

“The station manager got a copy in the mail.”

“How’d that work out?”

“He was hurt,” he said, “that I hadn’t leveled with him. The sonovabitch. Like he’s telling me about his sex life.”

“But he didn’t fire you.”

“Hell no. The union would be on them like ugly on a warthog. The PR fallout would swamp him, and he knows it.”

“He taking any action?” I said.

Randolph shrugged. “You watch the news on this station?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, if you did, you might next see me covering a fashion show.”

“Or modeling them,” I said.

“Ah, if only,” Randolph said.

“Was it Lamont that was doing the blackmail, you think?”

“I don’t know. The letter was unsigned, appeared to be written on a computer. The voice on the phone was anonymous. I have no idea who I talked to, but how big an operation was it?”

“Maybe bigger than I thought,” I said. “Could you tell anything from the voice? It was male.”

“Yeah, male. Native English speaker, I’d say.”

“How old?”

“Couldn’t tell. Wasn’t a kid, or an old person. Twenty to sixty, somewhere in there, I guess.”

“Race?”

Randolph shook his head.

“Anything to indicate that it wasn’t Prentice Lamont?”. “Given that I don’t know who Prentice Lamont is, no.”

We sat for a moment. Outside his cubicle the newsroom clattered and hustled. Monitors gleamed. Assignments were being given. Phones were ringing. Computers were being keyed.

“You talk to any other people who’ve been featured in
OUTrageous
?” I said.

“No.”

I nodded.

“How come you get a cubicle?” I said.

“Senior correspondent,” he said.

“Wow,” I said.

“Yeah,” Randolph said.

We sat for another moment.

“You know what my real name is?” Randolph said. “My real name is Dick Horvitz. Media consultant said it didn’t have sympathetic overtones.”

“Gee,” I said, “I choked up the minute you said it.”

“You ever wonder why people care about shit like this?” he said.

“Often,” I said.

“You have an answer?”

“No.”

He leaned back and put his feet up.

“Senior correspondent,” he said.

I started with the Dean of Arts and Sciences, whose name was Reynolds. We sat in his first-floor office with a view of coeds in the student quadrangle. His desk was neat without being barren, and a picture of his wife and three daughters was displayed on a side table.

“I can get you Prentice Lamont’s transcript,” he said, “hold on.”

He stood and walked to the door and stuck his head out and spoke to one of the women in the outer office.

Back behind his desk, he smiled.

“Things move quicker,” he said, “when it’s a request from the dean’s office.”

Reynolds was a tall trim man with a bald head and hornrimmed glasses. He wore a dark suit with a red silk tie, and a matching pocket square.

“The information from the English department tenure committee will be harder. Requests from the dean don’t impress them, and legally, they have the right to keep their proceedings secret.”

“Legally in a court of law?”

Reynolds shrugged.

“I don’t know. Legally under university bylaws.”

“Even if the proceedings may in themselves have violated university bylaws?”

Reynolds smiled again.

“My guess would be,” he said, “especially then.”

“Did you know Prentice Lamont?” I said.

“No.”

“How about Robinson Nevins?”

“I recognized him if we passed in the corridor, I don’t think we’ve ever talked.”

“How about Amir Abdullah.”

Reynolds leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head.

“Ah,” he said, “Mr. Abdullah.”

I waited.

“I understand you’ve already had an altercation with Mr. Abdullah.”

“I prefer to say I’ve already won an altercation with Mr. Abdullah.”

“Not everyone can claim that,” Reynolds said. “You appear to have the build for it.”

“How’ve you done?” I said.

“Our altercations are somewhat different,” Reynolds said. “But I guess we’re about even.”

“What can you tell me about him?”

“Officially? Professor Abdullah is an esteemed member of our faculty.”

“And unofficially?”

“A great pain in the ass,” Reynolds said.

“I need to know as much as I can,” I said.

“About Abdullah?”

“About everything. You seem to know about Abdullah.”

“I know something about Abdullah, and I have some opinions, but they are not for dissemination.”

“It is not in the best interest of a guy who does what I do,” I said, “to blab things told him in confidence. And you have my word that it will be in confidence unless I am legally compelled to repeat it.”

“Fair enough,” Reynolds said. “Abdullah is a poseur. He is intellectually dishonest. He exploits his blackness and his gayness for his own advantage. He cares only about his own advancement. He does not like to teach, and his publications are polemic rather than scholarship. He is, I believe, though I’ve not been able to catch him, a sexual predator who preys on young men in his classes.”

“If you catch him?”

“If I catch him,” Reynolds said, “he’s gone. Tenure or no tenure.”

“And you win,” I said.

“And I win.”

A tall good-looking black woman with gray highlights in her short hair came in carrying a copy of the transcript.

“Who gets this?” she said.

Reynolds pointed at me and she handed it to me and smiled and walked out. I gave the transcript a fast eyeball.

“Prentice took three courses last semester in African-American studies,” I said. “Could they be Abdullah?”

Reynolds put out a hand and I gave him the transcript; he glanced through it.

“All of them,” he said, “would be Professor Abdullah.”

“What is Prentice’s major?”

Reynolds glanced at the transcript.

“He was getting a master’s degree in English literature,” he said.

“Is it unusual that he’d take all these African courses?”

“Yes.”

“What department does Abdullah belong to?” I said.

“English. The African-American Center is not funded by the university and has no official standing, though we are not opposed to it, and would be hesitant to oppose it anyway.”

“If you do find that he is hitting on young men in his class and you fire him, will there be a firestorm of protest alleging you are homophobic and racist?”

“Absolutely,” Reynolds said.

“But you’ll do it anyway.”

“There are no university bylaws that tolerate sexual exploitation of students by faculty, straight or gay, black or white.”

“I can prove he hit on a student at the community college some years ago.”

“Doesn’t help me here,” Reynolds said.

“Maybe it will,” I said.

Reynolds studied me for a moment. His eyes were both humorous and hard, like a turtle’s.

“One entry,” he said after a moment, “into the proceedings of the tenure committee would be to talk with the members. Some are fools, but one or two are quite human.”

“Who would you say is the most human?”

“Tommy Harmon.”

“Does he know all the words of ‘Hail to the Victor’?” I said.

“It’s a nickname, I believe his real name is David.”

“Doesn’t sound like you had to sort through a long list,” I said. “To come up with him.”

Reynolds smiled.

“I’ll call Tommy if you like and tell him you’ll be stopping by.”

“Do,” I said.

“Carol Sloane,” I said.

“With Clark Terry,” he said. “Very good.”

He was a blocky man with a thick neck and a kind of healthy-looking redness to his face that suggested he spent time out of doors.

“I represent Robinson Nevins,” I said.

Harmon nodded.

“He thinks he was jobbed on his tenure promotion.”

“I do too,” Harmon said.

“And he asked me to look into how that happened.”

“And?”

“In the process I came to the conclusion that Prentice Lamont didn’t commit suicide,” I said.

“You think he was killed?”

“Yes.”

“Christ!”

“Which lends a larger urgency to the inquiry,” I said.

“I should say so.”

“It’s my impression that Nevins was denied tenure because of allegations that his relationship with Lamont resulted in Lamont’s suicide.”

“Nobody ever said that, exactly,” Harmon said. “And, of course, no one is required to explain or even admit their vote. What makes you think he was killed?”

“He couldn’t have opened the window he went through,” I said.

“Perhaps it was open.”

“Perhaps.”

“And perhaps I ought to stick to my area of expertise,” Harmon said. “Have you shared your theory with the police?”

“Not yet, one of my goals is to refurbish Nevins’ reputation, which I thought I might attempt, before I called the cops.”

Harmon nodded again.

“What do you need from me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’d like you to tell me whatever you can about the deliberations of the tenure committee. Maybe I’ll recognize something I need.”

Harmon reached over and turned off his boom box, then he shifted back in his chair and put one foot up on a partly open drawer in his desk. He was wearing an open-collared white shirt, khaki pants, and white sneakers. On his desk next to a couple of books by R. W. B. Lewis was a book titled
Death in the Landscape: The American Pastoral Vision
by David T. Harmon.

Harmon took in a long slow breath and let it out slowly.

“University politics is very odd. You get a lot of people gathered together who, if they couldn’t do this, really couldn’t do anything. They are given to think that they are both intelligent and important because they have Ph.D.s and most people don’t. Often, though not always, the Ph.D. does indicate mastery over a subject. But that’s all it indicates, and, unfortunately, many people with Ph.D.s think it covers a wider area than it does. They think it empowers their superior insight into government and foreign policy and race relations and such. In addition these people are put into an environment where daily, they judge themselves against a standard set by eighteen- or twenty-year-old kids who know little if anything about the subject matter in which their professors are expert.”

“Makes it hard not to take yourself very seriously,” I said.

“Hard, not impossible,” Harmon said. “More of them ought to be able to do it.”

“But they can’t?”

“But they don’t. Exemplar of the species is Lillian Temple. There is no liberal agenda, however goofy, that will not attract her attention. There is no hypocrisy, however bald, that she will not endure if she can convince herself that it is in the service of right thinking.”

“How about Bass Maitland?” I said.

“Officially he is as committed to right thinking as Lillian,” Harmon said. “In fact he is his agenda.”

“He a friend of Lillian Temple?”

“I believe they are more than friends.”

“Lovers?”

“I’d say so.”

“Are they the source of the Robinson Nevins – Prentice Lamont rumor?”

“Yes.”

“Where was Amir Abdullah in this?”

“Amir declines to attend tenure meetings which he views, with some justice, as a bunch of white straight people who will only vote for people like themselves.”

“A situation his attendance might help to modify,” I said.

“Amir is never that lucid,” Harmon said.

“Is he friends with Temple or Maitland?”

“Since he is gay and black, Lillian feels obligated to like and admire him. Bass tries to, but I believe that Amir makes him uncomfortable.”

“How do you feel about Amir?”

“I think he’s a jerk,” Harmon said.

“Since Robinson Nevins is black and alleged to be gay, why doesn’t Lillian Temple feel obligated to like and admire him?”

“Because he is a relatively conservative black. Which completely confuses Lillian.”

“Harder to feel the white person’s burden,” I said, “if he’s not asking for help.”

“Exactly,” Harmon said. “Basically, Robinson is interested in his students and his scholarship, but if asked he will tell you that he is opposed to affirmative action. I have heard him argue that a course, say, in Black Rage, is not an adequate substitute for a course in, say, Shakespeare, or American transcendentalists.”

“Do you share his view?”

“Pretty much. But whether I did or didn’t I could still pay attention to Robinson because he tries to base his views on what he has seen and experienced, rather than on a set of reactions preordained by race or social class. Lillian and maybe Bass, and maybe Amir, though I frankly don’t know what makes Amir tick, seem to feel that this is behavior unbecoming a black man.”

“Kind of rattles their stereotypes,” I said.

“Yes, I’m afraid it does.”

“Would they lie about Robinson to deny him tenure?”

Harmon thought about that. While he thought about it, I looked past him out through his window at an MBTA train grinding out of the station, full of people, mostly students, the train running on elevated tracks for a while to clear the parking lot below it before it dipped with angular sinuosity and disappeared into its tunnel.

“Bass would lie, I think, about anything at all if it served his best interest. Lillian probably would not knowingly lie. She would have to be able to convince herself that it wasn’t a lie. Which she could do quite easily, since her grip on truth and falsehood is pretty shaky anyway.”

“Who actually told the thing about Robinson?”

“Lillian.”

“Did she say where she got it?”

“No.”

“How many people believed her?”

“That I can’t tell you,” Harmon said. “I can tell you that on an eighteen-member committee, Robinson got only three votes for tenure. Mine was one of them.”

“Will your colleagues be angry with you for talking so freely?” I said.

“I imagine.”

“I can avoid mentioning your name.”

“Feel free to mention it. If I said it, I’m responsible for it.”

“Okay,” I said. “You ever play halfback at Michigan?”

“Tommy’s a pretty standard nickname for kids named Harmon,” he said. “I went to Williams College. I was a wrestler.”

“Ah,” I said. “That explains the neck.”

“And you used to box,” he said.

“Which explains the nose,” I said.

“And the scar tissue,” Harmon said. “You going to talk with Lillian again?”

“Have to,” I said. “I need to know where she got her information.”

“I’d like to know where she gets most of it,” Harmon said.

We shook hands and I left.