Hush Money (15 page)

“Well, the world’s straightest straight boy,” Walt said when I came in.

He was drinking red wine. And I could tell that he’d been doing it for a while.

“Good to be the best at something,” I said.

The bartender had bright blond hair and an earring. The bar had Brooklyn Lager on draught. I ordered one.

“So what you want to talk about, Mister World’s Straightest?”

I saw no reason to vamp on the subject.

“I’d like to talk about the blackmail doodle you guys were running with
OUTrageous
.”

“Huh?”

“I’d like to talk about the blackmail doodle you guys were running with
OUTrageous
.”

“Doodle?”

“You guys were discovering closeted gay people and threatening to out them if they didn’t give you money. I’d like us to talk about that.”

Walt finished the rest of his wine and motioned to the bartender.

“I’m going to switch to martinis, Tom.”

“Belvedere,” the bartender said, “up with olives.”

“You got it,” Walt said.

I waited. Walt watched as the bartender mixed his martini and brought it to him. The bartender put out the little napkin, set the martini on it, and went away. Walt picked up the martini carefully and took a sip, and said “ahh.” Then he looked at me, and as I watched him, his eyes began slowly to fill up with tears.

“Whose idea was it?” I said.

Tears were running down Walt’s face.

“Willie and I have been together for seven years,” he said.

His voice was shaky.

“Long time,” I said.

Susan and I had been together for more than twenty, with a little time out in the middle. So I didn’t actually think seven was a long time, but it seemed the right thing to say at the moment.

“I never cheated on him,” Walt said.

He drank most of his martini and then stared wetly into the glass, twisting it slowly by the stem as he talked.

“And here he is stepping out with Amir Abdullah,” I said.

Walt looked at me as if I’d just leaped a tall building at a single bound.

“I’m a detective,” I said. “I know stuff.”

Walt finished his martini and gestured for another.

“That son of a bitch,” he said. “He used to be Prentice’s boyfriend, you know that?”

Walt was monitoring the construction of his second martini, and when it arrived he sampled it immediately. He wasn’t paying much attention to me.

“So what about the blackmail?”

“Willie and I didn’t know anything about it. We were serious about
OUTrageous
.”

He studied his martini again for a time. His face was wet with tears.

“Then when Prentice died, Amir came to Willie and me. He explained what Prentice had been doing. He said that it had a wonderful justice to it, that queers without the courage to come out of the closet could at least be made to contribute to those of us who were loud and proud about it.”

“Good to take the high road,” I said.

“He said Willie and I ought to continue it,” Walt said. “Said that it was a proud tradition.”

“He want a cut?” I said.

“No. He said he didn’t need the money.”

Walt ate the single big olive from his martini, in several small bites.

“Willie loved it,” Walt said. “He’s always been more rebellious than me. Always ready to give the finger to the straight world.”

“What’s this got to do with the straight world?” I said.

“During Gay Pride he’d march in outrageous drag,” Walt said. “Once he went as a priest with the collar and everything, only wearing a skirt, holding hands with two altar boys.”

“That ought to shock them in Roslindale,” I said.

“I was always kind of embarrassed by it,” Walt went on.

He was having more trouble now, talking, because periodically he’d have to stop and get control of his crying enough to continue.

“Willie used to tell me I was just playing into the straight guilt trap, that I was ashamed of my sexuality. I guess I’m pretty conservative. Willie was always much more out there than old stick in the mud Walt. It’s probably why it happened.”

He was nearly to the bottom of his second martini. His speech was slurring. I didn’t know how much wine he’d drunk before I arrived. Considerable was a fair guess. Right now it was working for me. He was drunk and garrulous and had someone to talk to about his pain. But I didn’t know how long I had before he would get too drunk to talk. I wanted to push him, but I had the feeling that if I pushed I’d remind him that he was admitting to a felony and, drunk or not, he might shut up.

“Why what happened?” I said carefully.

“Why Willie started fucking Amir,” Walt said and started to cry full out.

The bartender looked at me. I shrugged. The bartender went to the other end of the bar and began to reorganize some clean glasses.

“Who would blame him?” Walt said, snuffling and gulping. “Got this uptight homophobic gay lover. Who wouldn’t want somebody more interesting, for crissake. Who wouldn’t want somebody with more…” He stopped and tried to get his breathing under control. “With more… I don’t know what, just more.”

“I don’t know a lot about this,” I said, “but I do know that in a situation like this if you can blame yourself it gives you hope. He’s out of your control, but if it’s your fault, maybe you can fix it.”

“I can change,” Walt said.

He had some trouble with the
ch
sound.

“Sure,” I said. “You think Amir had anything to do with Prentice going out the window?”

“Amir?”

“Amir Abdullah,” I said.

“You mean do I think he killed him?”

He had a lot of trouble moving his mouth from
I
to
think
.

“You could put it that way,” I said.

“I… I… I don’t…” As he stumbled over his answer, Walt got one of those crafty looks that drunks get when they have this great insight, which in the morning will embarrass them.

“I bet he did,” Walt said. “I bet he did an‘ I bet Willie help’ him.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause he a sonfabish,” Walt said. “They both sonfabish.”

He pushed the nearly empty martini glass away from him and folded his arms on the bar and put his head down on them and mumbled “sonfabish” a couple of times and was quiet.

“Any evidence other than him being a son of a bitch?” I said.

I waited. Walt didn’t move. The bartender ambled down the bar. Walt started to snore.

“Walt a friend of yours?” the bartender said.

“No,” I said.

“Okay. He’s a regular. Bar’s almost empty. Let him sleep it off a little. When he wakes up I’ll send him home in a cab.”

“Good,” I said.

“He’s got a forty-three-dollar tab here,” the bartender said. “Including your beer.”

I put a hundred-dollar bill on the bar.

“My treat,” I said. “Take his cab fare out of that too.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem,” I said.

As I was leaving I contemplated the, albeit illusory, sense of power one achieved by slapping a C note on a bar. Maybe I should start carrying several. More important, maybe I should start earning several. At the moment I was doing two pro bonos, one for Susan, one for Hawk. I wondered if it was too late to cut myself in on
OUTrageous.
Maybe I could earn a bonus by telling everyone everything about everybody.

It was raining again, but I was dressed for it, and the walk back up to my office wasn’t very far, and I liked to walk in the rain. So I strolled the block down Tremont and turned up East Berkeley with my hands in my pockets and my collar up, while the rain came down gently. I thought about what I knew. I knew a lot, but nothing that solved my problem with Robinson Nevins. It was clearly time to talk with Amir Abdullah again. He almost certainly was a son of a bitch, but he didn’t look like someone who could have forced open that jammed window and thrown anyone through it. On the other hand, he might know someone who could.

“Lives on the fourth floor front,” Hawk said.

“Learned anything else about him?” I said.

“Stops by the packie on Boylston, couple times a week, and buys two, three bottles of wine,” Hawk said. “Usually before Willie comes calling.”

“Anybody else come calling?”

“Almost every day,” Hawk said. “Young men. Any race. Look like students. Most of them are one time only.”

“You think he’s tutoring them in the formulaic verse of the North African Berbers?”

“Be my guess,” Hawk said, “that they exchanging BJ’s.”

“Yeah,” I said, “that’s another possibility.”

“He went away last weekend.”

“Where?”

“Took a cab to Logan to one of those private airways service areas, walked out onto the runway, got in a Learjet and…”

Hawk made a zoom-away gesture with his hand.

“Came home Monday morning, went to class.”

“Private jet?”

“Yep.”

“You have any idea where?”

“Nobody I asked knew,” Hawk said. “Plane was a Hawker-Sibley, left at two thirty-five last Friday from in front of the Baxter Airways building. Some numbers printed on the tail.”

Hawk handed me a slip of paper.

“Somebody has to know,” I said. “They have to file a flight plan.”

“You know who to ask?” Hawk said.

“Not right off the top of my head.”

“My problem exactly,” Hawk said. “I bet Amir will know.”

“Of course,” I said. “Let’s ask him.”

“He’s teaching a late seminar,” Hawk said. “Doesn’t get home until about seven.”

“Good,” I said. “Give us time to break into his apartment.”

“You think he might not let us in if we knocked nice and said howdy doo Mr. Abdullah?” Hawk said.

“I hate your Uncle Remus impression,” I said.

“Everybody do,” Hawk said happily.

We left the car in a no parking zone and walked across to the Vendome. Hawk said hello to the good-looking black woman at the security desk and pointed at the elevator. She smiled and nodded us toward it.

“Isn’t she supposed to call ahead and announce us,” I said.

“Un huh,” Hawk said.

“Been busy,” I said.

“Never no strangers,” Hawk said, “only friends you haven’t met.”

“That’s so true,” I said, and pushed the call button for the elevator.

“You know,” Hawk said as we were waiting for the elevator, “I suppose Amir got the right to go off on a weekend without us coming in asking him where and why.”

“Absolutely,” I said.

“But we going to ask him anyway.”

“Absolutely,” I said.

“‘Cause we don’t have anything else to ask,” Hawk said.

“Exactly,” I said and got into the elevator.

Hawk got in with me and pushed the button for the second floor.

“You ever think of getting into a line of work where you knew what you was doing?” Hawk said.

“Why should I be the one,” I said.

“No reason,” Hawk said. “Just a thought.”

The elevator stopped. We got out. Hawk pointed left and we walked down the corridor to the end door. I knocked, just to be sure. No one answered. I bent over to study the lock.

“You want to kick it in?” Hawk said.

“Looks like a pretty good dead bolt,” I said. “We’ll raise a fair ruckus kicking it in.”

“Might as well use a key then,” Hawk said.

I looked up at him. He looked like he might spit out a canary feather.

“The Nubian goddess at the desk?” I said.

“Un huh.”

“You sure you been keeping an eye on Amir all this time?” I said.

“She got a little closed-circuit TV can watch the lobby from her bedroom,” Hawk said. “While he in his apartment teaching young men about them formulaic Berbers, I doing a little lesson plan with Simone.”

Hawk unlocked Amir’s door. We went in. The dark room was close, heavy with the smell of men’s cologne mingling with something that might have been incense. I flipped the light switch beside the door. The room was done in tones of brown and vermilion. There was a six-foot African ceremonial mask on the far wall facing us between the seven-foot windows. A squat fertility goddess from Africa’s bronze age stood solidly on the coffee table in front of the beige sectional sofa, and a large painting of Shaka Zulu on the wall opposite the sofa. The rugs were thick. The windows along the front were heavily draped. To our left off the living room was a dining area, with a glass-topped table ornamented with two thick candlesticks in tall ebony holders that had been carved to resemble vines. A kitchen L’d off the dining area. The bedroom and bath were to our right. The bed was canopied. On the night table was a small brass contraption for burning incense. On the bureau was a framed photograph of a stern thin-faced black woman with her hair pulled tightly back and her dress buttoned up to the neck.

“Amir got some style,” Hawk said.

“Incense is a nice touch,” I said.

I sat on the couch. Hawk went over and turned the lights back off.

“Don’t want Amir to spot it from the street,” Hawk said. “Want him to walk right in and close the door behind him.”

He came over, walking carefully while his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, and sat beside me. He put his feet up on the coffee table.

“What’s happening with the woman got raped?” he said.

“She’s staying with her mother in Providence.”

“She getting any help?”

“Susan referred her to a rape crisis counselor, down there,” I said.

“She going?” Hawk said.

“I don’t know. Her ex-husband said he’d pay for it.”

“He likely to end up with her back in his lap,” Hawk said.

“I don’t think so. I think he’s pretty clear about her.”

Hawk was quiet for a time.

“‘Course there’s always your lap,” he said.

“Not if I keep moving,” I said.

“We got a plan what we do when Amir shows up?”

“We’ll ask him a bunch of questions,” I said.

“And when he lies to us?”

“We ask him some other questions.”

“When do I get to hang him out the window by his ankles?” Hawk said.

“We can always hang him out the window,” I said. “Trouble is then he’ll say anything he thinks we want to hear, and we may learn as much stuff that’s not true as we will stuff that is.”

“You just too soft-hearted,” Hawk said.

“Softer than you,” I said.

“Probably both happy ‘bout that,” Hawk said.

“This visit we try it the easy way,” I said.

“Might stir the pot a little,” Hawk said. “Might make him do something that we can catch him at.”

“Might,” I said.

There was the sound of a key in the door. We were both on our feet. Silently on the thick carpet I stepped into the kitchen, Hawk went into the bedroom. The bolt turned. The door opened. The lights went on. The door shut. I could hear him put the chain bolt on. I stepped out of the kitchen and stood in front of Amir. There was an Asian boy, Japanese was my guess, maybe eighteen years old, with Amir. The moment he saw me Amir spun toward the door. Hawk had stepped out of the bedroom between Amir and the door. Amir turned again and tried for the phone beside the sectional sofa. I stepped between him and it. Amir stopped and looked toward the bedroom. Not a chance. Same with the kitchen. He had nowhere to go. He stood frozen between us. Behind him Hawk took the bolt off, and opened the door slightly.

“You go home,” he said to the Asian kid.

The kid looked at Amir. Amir had no reaction. He was stiff with panic.

“Now,” Hawk said.

The kid turned and Hawk opened the door enough and the kid went out. Hawk closed the door and put the chain back on.

“Sit down,” I said to Amir. “We need to talk.”

“Don’t hurt me,” he said.

Amir’s voice was shrill and thin-sounding, as if it was being squeezed out through a small opening.

“No need for hurting,” I said. “Just sit down and talk with us.”

“The boy saw you here, he’ll tell the police,” Amir said.

Hawk stepped up behind Amir, put his hands on Amir’s shoulders, and steered him to the couch and sat him down.

“Stay,” he said.

Amir stayed. Hawk sat on the couch beside him. I sat on a hassock across from them, and rested my elbows on my knees and clasped my hands.

“Now, here’s what we know about you. We know it was you who informed the English department tenure committee that Robinson Nevins was sort of responsible for the death of graduate student Prentice Lamont.”

Hawk said, “Be quiet, Amir.”

“We know that you yourself were having a sexual relationship with Prentice Lamont before his death.”

Amir opened his mouth, looked at Hawk, closed his mouth.

“We know that Prentice was blackmailing gay people who didn’t want to be outed, and we know that you knew about that.”

Amir sat with his mouth clamped shut, trying to look intrepid, determined to make a virtue of necessity.

“What else do we know?” I said to Hawk.

“We know you a chicken fucker, Amir,” Hawk said.

Amir tried to look haughty. He was, after all, a professor.

“I don’t even know what that means,” he said.

“Sure you do,” Hawk said. “Means you’d fuck a young snake if it was male and you could get it to hold still.”

Hawk’s expression was, as always, somewhere between pleasant and noncommittal. Amir’s expression failed at haughty. It was more a kind of compacting silence, as if he was becoming less, dwindling as he listened, freezing in upon himself.

“We know you advised the current staff of
OUTrageous,
namely Walt and Willie, that they should continue the blackmail,” I said. “We know you declined to be a financial part of it because you said you didn’t need the money. We know you are currently having an affair with Willie, which is causing Walt to refer to you as a son of a bitch.”

“And,” Hawk said, “we know you went away this weekend in a private plane.”

“And here’s what we don’t know,” I said. “We don’t know if you made up the story about Nevins, or if it’s true. We don’t know why you told the committee about it in either case. We don’t know why you condoned the blackmail. We don’t know why you didn’t then take any money from it. We don’t know why you claim not to need money. We don’t know where you went this weekend. We don’t know if you are responsible for Prentice Lamont being dead.”

The silence in the thick sweet stench of the living room was palpable.

Hawk said very softly, “We’d like to know.”

“I didn’t do a thing to Prentice,” Amir said.

“Know who did?”

“Prentice killed himself.”

“No,” I said. “He didn’t. Do you know who did?”

“Prentice killed himself,” Amir said again.

“Who’d you go to see this weekend?”

“I didn’t go anywhere,” Amir said.

“You took a private jet out of Baxter Airways at two thirty-five last Friday.”

“I didn’t.”

“We can run that down,” I said. “You think people who are gay and don’t want the world to know should be announced?”

“There’s nothing shameful about being gay.”

“I agree. But my question stands.”

“Every gay person who announces himself proudly to the world is another step toward full recognition of our sexual validity.”

We were beginning to discuss abstractions, and Amir was on firmer ground. His voice was less squeaky.

“Unless they pay off,” I said.

“I think of it as a fine for noncompliance,” Amir said.

“But you wouldn’t take any of the money.”

“I do very nicely thank you on my salary and my lecture tours and my writing.”

“You have an affair with Prentice Lamont?”

“Prentice and I were lovers. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“While he was in love with Robinson Nevins or before?”

Amir hesitated. He could sense a pitfall in the question.

“While,” he said.

Wrong answer.

“So he was willing to cheat on Nevins but when Nevins left him he was so heartbroken that he killed himself?”

“You don’t understand the gay life,” Amir said.

“Why do you think Prentice killed himself?”

“Everyone thinks so,” Amir said.

“And why did you tell the tenure committee?”

“I felt honor bound to do so.”

“Honor bound,” Hawk said.

Amir looked at Hawk sort of sideways trying to seem as if he weren’t looking at him.

“I know you from before,” he said.

“Sure, we come to your office, couple weeks back,” Hawk said. “Boogied with some of your supporters.”

“No, I mean a long time ago. I know you from a long time ago.”

Hawk didn’t say anything. His face showed nothing. But something must have stirred in his eyes, because Amir flinched backward as if he’d been jabbed.

I let the silence stretch for a while, but nothing came out of it. Amir was rigidly not looking at Hawk.

“Amir,” I said. “I don’t believe a goddamned thing you’ve said.”

Amir stared straight ahead. I nodded at Hawk. We stood and went to the door. I took off the chain bolt. We opened it and went out. Before he closed it Hawk looked for a time at Amir. Then he closed the door softly.