Hush Money (2 page)

I had dug a large hole in the recently thawed earth in one corner of the yard and into it I was putting shovelfuls of yard waste which Susan, wearing fingerless leather workout gloves, had raked into a number of small piles. One of the things that made Susan so interesting was the fact that she looked like a Jewish princess and worked like a Bulgarian peasant. As far as I knew she had never been tired. I dumped a shovelful of waste into the hole and shoveled a little dirt over it.

“Reminds me of my profession,” I said.

“Cleaning up after?” Susan said.

“Yeah.”

In addition to her workout gloves, Susan had on black tights, a hip-length yellow jacket, and a black Polo baseball cap. In the spirit of cleanup she had put on designer work boots, black leather with silver eyelets, which looked odd, but good, over the tights.

“It’s a good reminder,” Susan said, “of life’s essential messiness.”

“Or Pearl’s.”

“Same thing,” Susan said.

Pearl raised her head slightly at the mention of her name, and then looked slightly annoyed that it was a false alarm. She sighed noisily as she settled her head back down onto her front paws. The sun was bright, and the earth had thawed, but in the shady corners against the fence and under a couple of evergreen shrubs, granular snow lingered like a dirty secret, and lurking inside the sixty-degree temperature was an edge of cold to remind us that it was too early for planting.

When we were done, and I had shoveled the dirt over the waste hole and tamped it down, Susan and I went and sat on the penultimate step, just below Pearl.

“Are you actually going to investigate that tenure case at the university?” Susan said.

“Yes.”

She smiled.

“What,” I said.

“The thought of you rampaging about in the university tenure committee,” Susan said, “is very engaging.”

“Rampaging?” I said. “I can be delicate as a neurosurgeon when it’s called for.”

“Most university tenure committees call for rampaging, I think.”

“I admit to being more comfortable with that approach,” I said.

Moved by an impulse understandable only by another dog, Pearl raised up and began to lap my face. I hunched up and endured it until she decided I’d had enough and switched to Susan.

“How’d you know about the case?” I said.

She was fending Pearl off, so it took her a while to answer. But finally, Pearl-free and makeup still mostly intact, Susan said, “Hawk discussed it with me, before he asked you.”

“He did?” I said.

“He wanted my view on whether he was asking more of you than he should,” Susan said.

“And you answered?”

“I answered that he had the right to ask you for everything and vice versa.”

“What’d he say?”

Susan smiled.

“He agreed,” she said.

I nodded.

“Is Hawk’s friend gay?” Susan said.

“Don’t know,” I said.

“But wouldn’t raging heterosexuality be a useful defense against the allegation that the graduate student killed himself as the result of an affair with Professor Nevins?”

“I guess it would,” I said.

“Did you ask him?”

“No.”

“I understand why you would not, but isn’t it something that needs to be established?”

“Can it be established?” I said. “In my experience it’s not always so clear-cut.”

Susan leaned her elbows on the top step and pressed her head back against Pearl’s rib cage. She thought about my question for a moment while I observed the way in which her posture made her chest press sort of tight against her jacket.

“Are you looking at my boobs?” Susan said.

“I’m a trained investigator,” I said. “I notice everything.”

“Do you make judgments on what you observe?”

“I try not to, but am sometimes forced to.”

“And the boobs?”

“Top drawer,” I said. “What about the question?”

“It’s a good one,” Susan said, “and much more complicated than is generally thought.”

“Then I’ve come to the right place.”

“Yes.” Susan smiled at me. It was a smile that could easily have launched a thousand ships. “Complications R Us.”

She rubbed the back of her head on Pearl for a moment.

“Sexuality is not as fixed as is commonly thought, and the discussion of it has become so political that if you quoted in public what I’m about to say I’d probably deny I said it.”

“Before or after the cock crowed?” I said.

“I didn’t know it crowed,” Susan said.

“Never mind,” I said. “Talk to me about sexuality.”

Susan smiled but didn’t go for the obvious remark.

Instead, she said, “I have treated people who experienced themselves as homosexual at the beginning of therapy and experienced themselves as heterosexual at the end.” Susan was picking her words carefully, even with me. “I have treated people who experienced themselves as heterosexual at the start of therapy and experienced themselves as homosexual at the end.”

“And if you said that in print?”

“A fire storm of outrage.”

“Because you seem to be saying that sexuality can be altered by therapy?”

“I am recounting my experience,” Susan said. “Obviously I have experienced a self-selecting sample: people whose presence in therapy is probably related to either uncertainty about, or dissatisfaction with, their sexuality. It is not always the presenting syndrome, and it is not always what people thought they wanted. Some people come to be ‘cured’ of their homosexuality, only to embrace it by the end of the therapy.”

I nodded. As she concentrated on what she was saying, Susan had stopped rubbing Pearl’s rib cage with her head, and Pearl leaned over and nudged Susan with her nose. Susan reached up and patted her.

“And in the therapeutic community that would be unacceptably incorrect?” I said.

“I don’t know anywhere, but here, that what I’ve said wouldn’t stir up a ruckus.”

“You’ve never minded a ruckus.”

“No,” Susan said. “Actually, I sometimes like ruckuses, but this ruckus would get in the way of my work, and I like my work better even than a ruckus.”

“How about me,” I said. “Do you like me better than a ruckus?”

“You are a ruckus,” Susan said.

“Golly,” I said when I sat down.

“Yeah,” Belson said.

“This will knock crime on its ear, won’t it?” I said.

“Right on its ear,” Belson said.

He was built like a rake handle, but harder. And, though I knew for a fact that he shaved twice a day, he always had a blue sheen of beard.

“They issue you a nice new gun when you moved here?”

“I could call informational services,” Belson said. “One of the ladies there be happy to tour you around the new facility.”

“Maybe later,” I said. “What do you know about a suicide named Prentice Lamont?”

“Kid from the university?”

“Yeah.”

“Did a Brody out the window of his apartment. Ten stories.”

“A Brody?”

“Yeah. I heard George Raft say that in an old movie last week,” Belson said. “I liked it. I been saving it up.”

“Why?”

“Why’d he do a Brody?” Belson grinned. “Left a note on his computer. It said, I believe, ‘I can’t go on. There’s someone who will understand why.’”

“What kind of suicide note is that?” I said.

“What, is there some kind of form note?” Belson said. “Pick it up at the stationery store? Fill in the blanks?”

“Did he sign it?”

“On the computer?”

“Well, did he type his name at the end?”

“Yeah.”

“Any thought that maybe he got Brodied?”

“Sure,” Belson said. “You know you always think about that, but there’s nothing to suggest it. And when there isn’t, we like to close the case.”

“Any more on the cause?”

“We were told that he was despondent over the end of a love affair.”

“With whom?”

‘That’s confidential information,“ Belson said.

“Who told you?”

“Also confidential,” Belson said.

He reached into the left-hand file drawer of his desk and ruffled some folders and took one out and put it on his desk.

“That’s why we keep all that information right here in this folder marked confidential. See right there on the front: Con-fid-fucking-dential.”

He put the blue file folder on his desk, and squared it neatly in the center of the green blotter.

“I’m going down the hall to the can,” Belson said. “Be about ten minutes. I don’t want you poking around in this confidential folder on the Lamont case while I’m gone. I particularly don’t want you using that photocopier beside the water cooler.”

“You can count on me, Sergeant.”

Belson got up and walked out of the squad room down the hall. I leaned over the desk and turned the file toward me and opened it. The report was ten pages long. I picked up the file and walked down to the copy machine and made copies. Then I went back to Belson’s cubicle.

When Belson came back the copies were folded the long way and stashed in my inside coat pocket, and the file folder was neatly centered on Belson’s blotter. Belson picked the folder up without comment and put it back in his file drawer.

“Unofficially,” I said, “you got any thoughts about this thing?”

“I’m never unofficial,” Belson said. “When I’m getting laid, I’m getting laid officially.”

“How nice for Lisa,” I said.

Belson grinned.

“I don’t see anything soft in the case,” he said. “The kid was gay, apparently had a love affair with an older man that went sour, and he did the, ah, Brody.”

“You interview the older man?”

“Yep.”

“He admit the affair?”

“Nope. He is a faculty member at the university. I heard he was up for tenure.”

“So he’d have some reason to deny it.”

“I don’t know how they feel on the tenure committee about professors fucking students,” Belson said. “You?”

“I’m guessing it’s considered improper,” I said.

“Maybe,” Belson said.

“You ask?” I said.

Belson dropped his voice.

“The deliberations of the tenure committee are confidential,” he said.

“So they wouldn’t tell you if sex with a student counted for or against tenure?”

“Some of the people I talked to, sex with anything would count,” Belson said.

“But you got no information from the tenure folks.”

“No.”

“And if you yanked their ivy-covered tuchases down here for a talk?” I said.

“Tuchases?”

“You can always tell when a guy’s scoring a Jewess,” I said.

“I thought the plural was tuch-i,” Belson said.

“Shows you’re not scoring a Jewess,” I said. “You didn’t want to shake them up a little?”

“We had no reason to think that the case was anything but an open and shut suicide,” Belson said.

He smiled. “Quirk wanted to run them down here just because they annoyed him,” he said. “But they had the university legal counsel there, and like I say, we had no reason.”

“But it would have been kind of fun,” I said.

Belson smiled but he didn’t comment. Instead he said, “So what’s your interest. You think the suicide’s bogus?”

“Got no opinion,” I said. “I been hired to find out why Robinson Nevins didn’t get tenure.”

“Really?” Belson said.

“He says a malicious smear campaign prevented it, including the allegation that he was the faculty member for whom Lamont did the Brody.”

“See?” Belson said. “I knew you’d like that word. Does he admit it?”

“He denies it.”

Belson shrugged.

“Should be easy enough to prove he had a relationship,” Belson said.

“Harder to prove that he didn’t.”

“Yep.”

I stood up.

“Well, I think your new digs are fabulous.”

“Yeah, me too,” Belson said.

“But it’s a long way from Berkeley Street. What are you going to do when you need help?”

“You’re as close as my nearest phone,” Belson said.

“Well, that must be consoling to you,” I said.

“Consoling,” Belson said.

Susan came into my office wearing white shorts and a dark blue sleeveless top. She had Pearl on a leash.

“It’s summer,” she said. “I want us to go outside and play.”

“Don’t you have patients?” I said.

“Not this afternoon. It’s the afternoon I teach my seminar.”

“And?”

“And I canceled my seminar because of the weather.”

“I might have clients,” I said.

Susan glanced around my office.

“Un huh.”

“And I might be studying evidence,” I said.

She came around the desk and looked over my shoulder.

“Tank McNamara,” she said.

“There could be a clue there,” I said. “You don’t know.”

Susan gave me a look that, had it not been diluted by affection, would have been withering. I folded the paper carefully and put it down on my desk.

“So,” I said, “what would you like to do?”

“You don’t know where there’s a field of daffodils in bloom, do you?”

“Susan,” I said, “it’s March 29.”

“Okay, then let’s walk along the river.”

“Flexible,” I said.

“You bet.”

“I like flexible,” I said.

“I know.”

We were crossing the footbridge near the Shell when Susan said to me, “Do you have time between the Robinson Nevins case and Tank McNamara to do a little something for a friend of miner

I said I did.

“KC Roth,” Susan said. “Actually that’s a nickname. Short for Katherine Carole. She is recently divorced, and being stalked.”

“Ex-husband?” I said.

“That’s what she thinks, but she’s not actually seen him.”

“So how does she know she’s being stalked?” I said.

We were down on the Esplanade, and Pearl was leading out up the river.

“Phone calls, she answers, silence at the other end,” Susan said. “A flat tire, there’s a nail in it; eerie music on her answering machine; a guy she dated got a threatening letter.”

“Anonymously,” I said. “Of course.

“He keep it?”

“I don’t know. She said she hasn’t seen him since.”

“Course of true love,” I said, “never did run smooth.”

Pearl saw a cocker spaniel coming along the Esplanade from the other direction. She growled. The hair on her back rose.

“Not a friendly dog,” I said to Susan.

“Friendly to you and me,” Susan said.

“All you can ask,” I said. “What you’ve described may legally be stalking, but it falls more into the realm of dirty tricks.”

“I know.”

“Husband abuse her when he was with her?”

“I asked that,” Susan said. “She says he did not.”

“Why’d they divorce?”

“She left him for another man,” Susan said.

“And the other man?” I said.

“Didn’t work out.”

“How come she doesn’t think it’s the other man doing the stalking?”

“He dumped her,” Susan said.

“As soon as she became available?”

“Yes.”

“You know his name?”

“No. She won’t tell me, says he’s a married man.”

“Who was happy to sleep with her on the side and said ‘oh honey if only we were single’ and she believed him and got single.”

“I don’t know what happened,” Susan said, “but your scenario is not unheard of.”

The spaniel passed by and kept going with its owner. Pearl looked longingly after it and then stopped growling and let her hair back down and forged ahead again, keeping the leash taut.

“What’s her ex’s name?” I said.

“Burt – Burton. Burton Roth.”

“You know him?”

“He seemed a pleasant man.”

“Any kids?”

“One, she’s with her father.”

“Hmph,” I said.

“Hmph?”

“Hmph.”

“What’s hmph mean?”

“Means now I’ve got two cases and no fee,” I said.

“Well, in this case there might not exactly be
no
fee,” Susan said.

“I’ll get right on it,” I said.