Hush Money (16 page)

“I met your father the other day,” I said.

“Most people are impressed when they meet him,” Nevins said.

“He’s impressive,” I said.

“Hawk’s affection for him is sort of touching,” Nevins said. “Since, as you must know better than I, Hawk shows very little of anything, let alone affection.”

“You like him?” I said.

“He’s my father,” Nevins said. “I guess I love him. I’m not very comfortable with him.”

“Because?”

“Because he is from a different world. Machismo is the essence of his existence, and I am remote from that.”

“Is he disappointed in you?” I said.

Nevins looked startled.

“Why I… no… I don’t think he is.”

“I don’t think he is either,” I said.

“You talked about me?”

“Yes. He asked me if I thought you were queer.”

“And?”

“And I said I didn’t know. And he said he didn’t know either, but that it didn’t matter much one way or another. You were still his son.”

“I knew he wondered,” Nevins said. “Forty years old and unmarried.”

“I guess the time has come, I need to know,” I said.

“If I’m queer?”

“Yeah.”

“No,” Nevins said. “I’m not.”

“Might have saved you some grief if everyone knew that.”

“Might have,” Nevins said. “But I have always thought that it is entirely corrupt to judge people based on what they do with their genitals in private with a consenting adult.”

“I think that’s right,” I said. “Here’s an even worse question. Can you prove it?”

Nevins stopped with his cup half raised to his lips and stared at me a minute, then he put the cup down, and folded his hands and rested his chin on them and looked at me some more.

“Just how do we go about that?” he said. “Go down to the Pussy Cat Cinema, perhaps, see if I erect?”

“Maybe the testimony of satisfied females?” I said.

He nodded slowly, an odd half smile on his face.

“I don’t like this much better than you do, but everybody’s telling me nothing, and I need some kind of fact to wedge in with.”

“What is really, what, ironic, I guess, is that at least one member of the tenure committee knows perfectly well that I’m heterosexual.”

“Care to share the name?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Look,” I said. “It would have to be a female. How many are there on the tenure committee?”

“Four.”

“For crissake,” I said. “I’m a detective. You think given four names I can’t find out which one it was?”

“If I tell you, can you keep it to yourself?”

“I can keep it from anyone who doesn’t need to know it,” I said.

He still looked at me above his folded hands. The odd half smile faded. Finally he spoke with no expression at all.

“Lillian Temple,” he said.

“If that’s true,” I said, “Lillian Temple knowingly lied about you in the tenure meeting. She was the one who introduced the business about Prentice Lamont.”

Nevins nodded slowly, without taking his chin off his folded hands.

“Was this before she was Bass Maitland’s main squeeze?” I said.

“While,” Nevins said.

“Ah,” I said. “And you are too gentlemanly to kiss and tell.”

“That relationship is important to her. I don’t want to destroy it.”

“You’re getting lynched here,” I said, “and won’t say anything in your own defense because it would be dishonorable.”

Nevins shrugged.

“Honor requires difficulty,” Nevins said.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Your old man isn’t the only one for whom machismo is the essence of existence.”

Nevins widened his eyes at me as he sat there, and cocked his head slightly without lifting it.

“You think I’m motivated by considerations of machismo?”

“I hope so,” I said. “I hope you’re not crazy.”

An old fat black woman in white sneakers shuffled to our table, cleared the table debris, including the coffee cups we hadn’t finished, into the cart she was pushing, and shuffled on. Neither of us said anything. I wasn’t even sure she had seen us.

“Have you had other girlfriends,” I said. I wasn’t even investigating anymore. I was simply interested.

“Yes, and I’ve been reticent about them because they have been white.”

“Un huh.”

“And… I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a priggish jerk.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “You’re a professor.”

He smiled sort of automatically.

“Well, I am badly overeducated. I can only relate well to women who are also badly overeducated.”

“And most of those women are white.”

“Yes.”

We were quiet while the old fat black woman came back and wiped off our table with a damp cloth and moved on.

“I’d have thought interracial dating would not have caused problems in your circles.”

“I don’t know if it would have. I wasn’t brought up to believe that it wouldn’t. My mother was very careful about staying on
our
side of the line. I find it difficult to overcome my upbringing.”

“I’ve heard that could be hard,” I said. “So you kept your dating a private matter.”

“Yes.”

“And because you were single and forty it was assumed you were gay?”

“Single, forty, educated, bookish, unathletic – do you know I’ve never played a basketball game in my life?”

“A clear betrayal of your heritage,” I said.

“You know, the funny thing, I have no interest in sex with other men, but I am, in many ways, more at home in the gay community than the straight. I found the gay world readily accepting of a black man and a white woman. No one expected me to be Michael Jordan.”

“No one expects anyone to be Michael Jordan,” I said.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I do. You have a large number of gay friends?”

“Yes. I’m more comfortable in the gay world than I am in the black world.”

I wasn’t sure that worlds divided themselves so neatly as Robinson suggested, but that wasn’t my issue. I nodded encouragingly.

“America expects black men to be macho,” he said.

Again, I wasn’t sure either of us was in a position to know what America expected, and, again, it wasn’t my issue. So I nodded some more.

“Of course,” and he smiled suddenly, “I am also relighting the family fight, you know, the refined mother and the father who trained fighters?”

That sounded a little closer to it and I liked him better for knowing it.

“Yes,” I said. “Being a straight man in a gay circumstance would be a nice way to do that, wouldn’t it.”

His eyes widened and he looked at me.

“Well,” he said, “you’re not…” He made a little oh-I-don’t-know hand wave.

I finished it for him.

“… as stupid as I look,” I said. “In fact I am. But I have a smart girlfriend.”

“I’m impressed,” Robinson said.

I went for the complete show-off.

“For a black man,” I said, “dating white women might be another way of dramatizing his ambivalence.”

“Your girlfriend must have had some therapy,” Robinson said.

“She’s a shrink,” I said.

“Oh,” Robinson said, “well, that’s not fair.”

“Of course not,” I said. “I don’t like to ask this, but may I speak to your current girlfriend?”

“Yes. Her name is Pamela Franklin. I’ll give you her address.”

He took a ballpoint pen and a small notebook from his inside pocket and wrote for a moment and tore the page out and handed it to me.

“Thank you. Do you know Amir Abdullah?”

“Yes.”

“Comment?”

“Amir is a fraud. He’s an intellectually dishonest, manipulative, exploitive charlatan.”

“Know anything bad about him?” I said.

Robinson started to protest, caught himself, looked at me a moment, and smiled without much humor.

“You’re joking.”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t so much,” he said.

“Almost certainly,” I said. “Tell me more about Amir?”

“He has created himself in the image of a black revolutionary, without any vestige of a philosophical ground. I am not by nature a revolutionary or an activist, but I can respect people who genuinely are. Amir is not. He is a contrivance. He gets what he wants by accusing anyone who opposes him of being a racist or a homophobe.”

“Or a Tom,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Are you and he politically opposed?”

“I am not political,” Robinson said. “But I disagree with almost anything Amir espouses.”

“Have you been critical of him?”

“Yes.”

“Would your denial of tenure benefit him?”

Robinson looked thoughtfully at the old fat black woman shuffling among the now nearly empty tables.

“Someone once remarked,” he said, “I don’t recall who, that the reason academic conflicts are so vicious is that the stakes are so small. There is no genuine benefit to Amir if I am denied • tenure. But it would please him.”

“And it would reduce by one the number of people who could confront him without the risk of being called a racist.”

“Given the number of black faculty members, that would be a significant reduction,” Robinson said.

“How about Lillian?”

“What about her?”

“She and Amir are the two members of the tenure committee who told the cops they had direct knowledge of your relationship with Prentice Lamont.”

“Lillian?”

I nodded.

“I haven’t done anything to Lillian.”

“And since we agree that the allegation is untrue, why would she make it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “but I could hypothesize.”

“Do,” I said.

Robinson took in a long breath and let it out slowly. “Most straight black men know someone like Lillian,” he said. “She has very little connection to what people outside of English departments sometimes refer to as the real world. She doesn’t do things because they would be fun, or they would be profitable, or they would be wise. She does things because they conform to some inner ideal she has structured out of her reading.”

“I’ve met Lillian,” I said.

“Okay,” Robinson said, and smiled, “a pop quiz: why would you guess she is in this long-term relationship with Bass Maitland?”

“Because he reminds her of Lionel Trilling,” I said.

“Or Walter Pater,” Robinson said. “You’ve got the idea. Now, for extra credit, why was she sleeping with me?”

“White woman’s burden,” I said.

“Yes.” Robinson’s face was suddenly animated. “And why did she stop?”

“You weren’t black enough.”

“Wow,” Robinson said. “You’re good.”

“I’ve met several Lillians,” I said. “If she transferred her passions to Amir she could be supporting the aspirations of her black brothers and sisters and still stay faithful to Bass.”

“Yes, and I’m sure that’s what happened because that was what she thought she was doing. But she’ll be unfaithful to Bass again.”

“Because what she really liked was the sex?” I said.

“As long as she could disguise it under a mound of high-mindedness.”

“My guess is that Bass is not Lionel Trilling.”

“No,” Robinson said. “He’s just your standard academic opportunist blessed with a good voice and nice carriage.”

“We might have saved a lot of time and aggravation,” I said, “if you’d told me all this at the beginning.”

“Or if you’d asked,” Robinson said.

I nodded. “Both had the same reasons, I guess. Can you prove you had a relationship with her?”

“Obviously I can’t prove I, ah, penetrated her. I’ve got some pictures of us together.”

“I’d like the best one of you both,” I said. “You meet anyplace where there’d be a witness?”

“Witness?”

“Did you check into a motel, have drinks together in Club Cafe? Spend the night at a friend’s house on the Cape?”

“We spent several nights together at a little place in Rockport that is hospitable to black people.”

“What’s the name?”

“Sea Mist Inn,” Robinson said.

“When’s the last time?”

“We went up there last Labor Day weekend. Last time we went out.”

“Thank you.”

“I don’t want to cause her trouble,” Robinson said.

“Me either.”

We were quiet then. The old fat black woman had shuffled out and we were alone in the empty dining room.

“You know,” Robinson said after a while. “My father named me after Jackie Robinson.”

“No one better,” I said.

“I know. I guess I’ve always felt I never lived up to it.”

“Nobody’s Jackie Robinson,” I said. “You’re doing pretty well.”

“I wish you were right,” he said.

“I’m always right,” I said. “I have a smart girlfriend.”

When I got to my office about ten in the morning, less rested than I was used to, there was a message on my machine to call Captain Healy at State Police Headquarters.

“Plane you were asking about,” Healy said when I got him. “Private plane owned by an outfit called Last Stand Systems, Inc. Flew from Logan to Bangor, Maine.”

“Do you know anything about Last Stand Systems?”

“No.”

“Got an address for Last Stand Systems, Inc.?” I said.

“Beecham, Maine.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Healy said. “You ever heard of Beecham?”

“No.”

“Me either.”

“It’s a wonder you got promoted to captain,” I said.

“No wonder at all,” Healy said and hung up.

I got out my atlas and looked up Beecham. It was on the coast, southeast of Bangor. I called the office of the Maine Secretary of State in Augusta and, after a while, learned that Last Stand Systems, Inc. was a not-for-profit corporation. After another while, I got the names of the principal officers, and the members of the board. According to their incorporation papers Last Stand Systems was committed to social and political preservation. After I hung up I looked at the list of names. None of them meant anything to me. The CEO was somebody named Milo Quant.

I called information and asked for Last Stand Systems, Inc. and got it. I called them and asked for literature. They asked my name and address. I told them I was Henry Cimoli and gave them the address of the Harbor Health Club.

Then I called Henry and told him to look for the literature and asked him to have Hawk stop by. Which Hawk did in about an hour. There was always something lustrous about Hawk. His shaved head gleamed. He moved as if he were spring loaded. And there was about him a kind of genial absence of affect that made him seem almost otherworldly.

“I think we might have buzzed somebody’s button,” I said. “My car blew up last night.”

“Trying for you?” Hawk said.

“I don’t think so. It went off at three thirty-five in the morning, a guy who could have rigged that device wouldn’t have gotten the timer so far off.”

“Want to kill you he ties it to the starter anyway,” Hawk said.

“Yes. But there’s no way to know what I’m being warned about, yet.”

“So they going to have to follow up,” Hawk said.

“Un huh. Call me, write me, come and visit me.”

“They’ll come calling,” Hawk said. “Show you they can reach you whenever they want.”

“Yes,” I said, “and see how I take the warning.”

“You talk to anyone since we sat with Amir?”

“No.”

“So maybe talking with Amir was the buzzer.”

“Maybe. Or maybe busting Louis Vincent was the buzzer, and they just got around to following up.”

“Nope,” Hawk said, “this a warning. Too late to warn us off Vincent.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You’re right.”

“Who that plane belong to?” Hawk said.

“Last Stand Systems, Inc.,” I said. “Out of Beecham, Maine.”

“Beecham, Maine?”

“I never heard of it either,” I said.

The door to my office was open so that Hawk and I could keep an eye on Lila in the design office across the hall. Six men in close formation came through the open door like a drill team. Two moved to the left of the door, two to the right, and two marched straight up to my desk.

“Maybe these guys know,” Hawk said.

“You guys know where Beecham, Maine, is?” I said.

They looked like Secret Service men or IBM executives. They were all in dark suits and white shirts. They all wore ties. They all had short hair. They all were of northern European descent. When everyone was in place the suit closest to the door pushed it shut.

One of the two men in front of my desk said, “Spenser?”

He was wearing horn-rimmed glasses, which made him look smart, probably why he was the designated speaker.

“Yes,” I said. “Is it on the coast?”

“Is what on the coast?”

“Beecham.”

Horn Rims shook his head in dismissive annoyance.

“You’ve been put on notice,” he said. “As of this morning at three thirty-five.”

I looked at Hawk.

“Did you take those library books back like I told you?” I said.

Hawk was leaning against my file cabinet as if he might fall asleep. He smiled softly.

“Can’t be librarians,” Hawk said. “Librarians would know where Beecham is.”

Horn Rims didn’t change expression.

“You are to stay entirely away from Amir Abdullah. Repeat, entirely. If you fail to comply you will be incinerated as was your car.”

“How come,” I said.

“You’ve been informed,” Horn Rims said. “Your Negro friend as well.”

“You guys associated with Last Stand Systems?” I said.

One of the guys in the back opened my door, and four of them marched out. Horn Rims and his partner marched out after them. At the door, Horn Rims’ partner turned and aimed a semiautomatic pistol with a silencer. He squeezed off three rounds; each shot broke one of the three coffee cups that were lined up on the file cabinet about a foot from Hawk. Hawk never moved. The gun disappeared. The door closed. We were left with the silence and the smell of the gunfire.

Hawk looked at the remains of the coffee cups.

“Guy can shoot,” Hawk said.

“Yes, my Negro friend, but is he a nice person?” I said.