Hush Money (5 page)

I started with the mother.

“Yes,” she said, “Prentice was gay.”

“Do you know if Robinson Nevins was his lover?” I said.

“Well,” Mrs. Lamont said. “You get right to it, don’t you?”

“There aren’t any easy questions here, ma’am, and they don’t get easier if I sneak up on them.”

“No,” she said. “They don’t.”

She was a smallish dark-haired lively woman, not bad-looking, but sort of worn at the corners, as if life had been wobbly. We sat in the yellow kitchen of her apartment on the first floor of a three-decker off Highland Ave in Somerville.

“So what do you know?” I said. “About Prentice and Robinson Nevins.”

She shrugged. The initial horror of her son’s death had faded with the six months that had passed. The sadness was deeper and probably permanent. But she was able to talk calmly.

“I think Prentice knew we weren’t too comfortable about him being gay. He didn’t talk much about it in front of us.”

“‘Us’ being you and his father?”

“Yes.”

“You’re divorced.”

“Yes. Five years ago.”

And she still talked about
us
. Things didn’t go away from Mrs. Lamont.

“Did he know Robinson Nevins?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would he have dated a black man?”

“I shouldn’t think so, but I wouldn’t have thought he’d be gay either.”

“Do you think he killed himself?” I said.

“Everyone says he did.”

“Do you believe them?”

I pushed too hard. Her eyes began to fill.

“How can I believe he killed himself?” she said. “And how can I believe someone killed him? Prentice…”

“Awful stuff, isn’t it,” I said.

She nodded. She couldn’t speak. The tears were running down her face now.

“I’ll find out, Mrs. Lamont, it’s all I can offer you. I’ll find out and then you’ll know.”

Still she couldn’t speak. Again she nodded her head.

“Would you like me to leave?” I said.

She nodded.

“Are you going to be all right?”

She nodded. There were more questions. But you had to be a tougher guy than I was to ask them now. As far as I knew, there wasn’t anyone tougher than I was, so I patted her shoulder uselessly and got up from her kitchen table and left.

I met him and his more recent wife for a drink at an athletic club in the financial district. Lamont and his wife were both in workout gear. She carried two small racquets. He was bald, medium sized, muscular, and deeply tanned. She was blonde, medium sized, muscular, and deeply tanned. She was also about the age that his son must have been when he did his Brody. Her name was Laura. We sat by a window looking down at the indoor tennis courts where several games of mixed doubles were progressing badly.

“Whew,” Lamont said after we’d shaken hands. “She’s starting to push me.”

“Oh, not very hard,” Laura said.

“Racquetball?” I said.

“Yeah. You play?”

“No,” I said.

“Ought to, it’s a great workout.”

“Sure,” I said. “Do you know Robinson Nevins?”

Lamont’s eyes narrowed.

“That’s the jigaboo was supposed to be involved with my ex-wife’s kid.”

“Not your kid?”

Lamont shook his head.

“He made his choice,” Lamont said.

Laura put her hand on top of his on the table.

“You mean he was gay,” I said.

“No need to clean it up with a cute word,” Lamont said. “He was a homosexual.”

“And his choice was you or homosexuality?”

“I’m an old-fashioned guy,” Lamont said. “In my book it’s a shameful and corrupt thing for men to have sex with each other. Makes my damned skin crawl.”

“I can see that,” I said. “So you wouldn’t know if he did in fact have a sexual relationship with Robinson Nevins.”

“No.”

“You ever meet Nevins?”

“No.”

“How long have you been divorced from Prentice’s mother?” I said.

“Six years.”

“When’s the last time you saw Prentice.”

“When I left the house.”

“More than six years?”

“Yes, closer to seven. The divorce took about ten months. Obviously, I wasn’t living there while it processed.”

“So you hadn’t seen your son for what, six, six and a half years before he died?”

“For me,” Lamont said, “he died a long time ago.”

“Was he an issue in the divorce?”

“Well, if she’d brought him up right, maybe he’d be alive now.”

“Maybe,” I said. “You have any thoughts on his suicide, any reason to doubt it, any reason to think it might not have been Nevins who triggered it?”

“As I say, Mr. Spenser, for me Prentice died a long time ago.”

“I wonder if he’d have lasted longer if he had a father.”

“Mr. Spenser!” Laura said.

“That’s a cheap shot, pal. You got kids?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Then you don’t know shit.”

“Probably don’t,” I said.

I looked at Laura. “I hope he’s a better father to you, ma’am,” I said.

I didn’t want to scramble his teeth. I wasn’t even mad. I was sad. It was all sad. Families breaking up, people dying, mothers grieving.

For what?

I stood and walked away.

For fucking what?

The pamphlet was published out of Lamont’s apartment and despite his demise it was still appearing. His successors had agreed to meet me there. When I arrived the door was open.

One of the two men said, “Are you Spenser?”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “Come in. We’re Walt and Willie. I’m Walt.”

I shook hands.

“You can sit on the bed, if you want,” Walt said.

“I’d just as soon stand,” I said. “That way I can stroll around while we talk, and look for clues.”

It was a bed sitting room with a kitchenette and bath. The floor was covered with linoleum. The walls were plasterboard painted white. There were travel posters Scotch taped on the wall; the tape had pulled loose, and the posters curled off the wall like wilting leaves. The bed was covered with a pale blue chenille spread. There was a pine kitchen table in the middle of the room with a kitchen chair in front and a big important-looking computer on it. There was a color monitor on top of the hard drive and a laser printer under the table along with a tangle of lash-up. A recent issue of the publication was piled on the table beside the computer screen. Several open cans of diet Coke were scattered around the room. None of them looked recent.

“This the latest newsletter?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Mind if I look at it?”

“No,” Walt said, “go ahead.”

He was a tall trim man with a smallish head. He looked like he exercised. He had even features and short brown hair brushed back and a clipped moustache. Willie was much smaller, and wiggly. His blond hair was worn longish and moussed back over his ears. There was a sort of heightened intensity to his appearance, and I realized he was wearing makeup. I picked up one of the newsletters.

“
OUTrageous
?” I said.

“I made up the name,” Willie said.

He sounded like Lauren Bacall.

“Nice,” I said.

The newsletter was one of those things that, pre-computer, would have been mimeographed. It was a compendium of gay humor including a number of lesbian jokes, poetry, gay community news, badly executed cartoons, all of which were sexual, many of which I didn’t get. There was a section on the back page headed “OUT OUT” in which famous homosexuals through history were listed and where, as I read through it, it appeared that covert gay people were revealed.

“You out people,” I said.

“You better believe it,” Walt said.

“Do that when Prentice was alive?”

“Absolutely,” Walt said. “Prentice started it, we’re continuing the newsletter just the way he left it, kind of a memorial to him.”

“Are there back issues?”

“Sure,” Walt said. “All the way to the beginning.”

“Which was?”

“Three, three and half now, years ago. When we all started grad school.”

“You been in grad school three and a half years?”

“Un huh,” Willie said.

“Lots of people go six, eight, nine years,” Walt said. “No hurry.”

“Could I see the back files?”

“Certainly,” Walt said. “They’re in the cellar. You can get them before you go.”

“Good,” I said.

I was walking around the room. I stopped at the window and looked at it, tapping my thigh with the rolled-up newsletter.

“He went out here,” I said.

“Yes,” Walt said.

“You see any clues?” Willie said.

“Not yet,” I said.

I opened the window. It was swollen and old and warped and a struggle. I forced it open finally, and looked down. Ten stories. I put my hands on the windowsill and leaned out. The window was big enough. It would have been no particular problem to climb out and let myself go. And I was probably bigger than Prentice had been. I turned away from the window and looked back at Walt and Willie.

“Prentice a big guy?”

“No,” Walt said.

Willie sort of snickered, or giggled, or both.

“Not very butch?” I said.

“Princess?” Willie said and laughed outright, or giggled outright, or both. “That’s what we called him.”

“Not very butch,” Walt said.

“Do you think he jumped?” I said.

Walt said, “No.”

Willie shook his head. His hair was so blond I assumed he colored it.

“Then you think he was, ah, defenestrated?”

Walt said, “Yes.”

Willie nodded. The nod shook loose some hair above his right ear and he tucked it back in place with a practiced pat.

“You have any idea who?”

Walt said, “No.”

Willie shook his head. His hand went automatically to his head to see that the hair hadn’t shaken down again.

“Or why?”

“No.”

Shake. Pat the hair in place.

“Was he having an affair with Robinson Nevins?”

“Oh, gawd no,” Willie said. “That square little prig. Don’t be silly.”

I looked at Walt.

“No.”

“So you know Professor Nevins.”

“He’s a damned Tom,” Willie said.

“Easy for you to say.”

“Yeah, well maybe I’m not black but I know about oppression.”

“Most of us have,” I said.

“Oh, really? Well, who has oppressed you, Mister Straight White Male?”

“Guy shot me last year,” I said.

“That’s kind of oppressive,” Walt said.

“Well, Robinson Nevins is a traitor to his people,” Willie said.

“Who are?”

“Every person of color,” Willie said.

“Heavy burden,” I said. “He out?”

“Out?”

Walt and Willie said it at the same time.

“Nevins isn’t gay,” Walt said. “He hasn’t got the soul to be gay.”

“He’s the straightest priss I ever saw,” Willie said. “He hire you?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Then who are you working for?”

“Friend of his father’s,” I said. “Why are you so sure that Prentice didn’t kill himself?”

“He had no reason to,” Walt said. “I saw him the morning before it happened. He wasn’t depressed. He’d, ah, he’d met somebody the night before and was excited about it.”

“A lover?”

“Potentially.”

“You know who?”

“No.”

“Where?”

“No.”

“He out any people who might have resented it?”

“Lot of people who are outed resent it, but it has to be done.”

“For the greater good,” I said.

“Absolutely,” Willie said.

“Anyone that might have been really mad?”

“Not to throw Prentice out a window,” Walt said.

“Any to-be-outed that might have wanted to forestall him?”

“Oh, come on,” Walt said. “This isn’t some cops and robbers movie.”

“How’d he find the names of people to out?”

“You go to the gay bars, you hear talk at parties, you talk to your friends, see some big contributors to gay-type charities, you sort of nose around, see what you can find out.”

“Investigative reporting,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“You have a file?”

“A file?”

“Of people you suspect that you may out if you can compile enough gossip?”

Willie’s eyes went to the desk and flicked away. I’m not sure he was even aware that they’d moved.

“That’s not fair,” Walt said. “It’s more than gossip.”

“You have a file?”

“No.”

I went to the desk and opened the center drawer.

“Hey,” Walt said. “You got no right to be looking in there.”

I paid no attention. And neither Walt nor Willie pressed the issue. I found nothing in the center drawer. The side drawer was locked.

“Open it,” I said.

“I have no key,” Walt said.

I nodded and went to the window. I leaned on it hard and after a struggle got it closed.

“Prentice about your size?” I said to Willie.

“Un huh.”

“Open the window,” I said.

“You just closed it.”

“Humor me,” I said. “Open it.”

Willie shrugged expressively and went to the window and pushed. It didn’t move. He strained until his small face was red. The window didn’t move. Walt watched frowning.

“Let me try,” he said.

He was bigger and looked like he worked out some. He couldn’t budge it either.

“So what’s that prove,” Willie said. “That you’re macho man?”

Walt shook his head.

“Prentice couldn’t have opened that window,” Walt said.

“So if he jumped he either got someone to open it for him,” I said, “or he waited around until it was open.”

“My gawd,” Willie said, “he really didn’t jump.”

“Probably not,” I said. “You got a key to that drawer?”

“Sure,” Walt said.