Hush Money (20 page)

“Recognize any of these,” I said to Hawk.

He shook his head.

“Only do booze,” Hawk said. “But they don’t look like prescriptions.”

Milo opened his eyes. They didn’t focus. His mouth was still open and he was still making soft snoring noises. Hawk took his gun back out. Milo blinked a couple of times. He closed his mouth. He blinked a couple more times. Then he sat bolt upright and as he did so Hawk put the gun muzzle right up to Milo’s face.

“Don’t yell,” Hawk said.

Milo fumbled at the bedside phone. He couldn’t find the handset and couldn’t seem to register that it was gone.

“Phone won’t work,” Hawk said.

“There’s money in my wallet,” Milo said in a thick voice. “In my pants pocket. On the back of that chair.”

“Wake him up,” I said and nodded at Amir.

Milo turned and shook Amir awake. He came back from wherever he was even more slowly than Milo had, but after a while everyone was awake and looking at each other.

“Tell Milo who we are,” I said to Amir.

Both men had edged up into a sitting position, their backs resting against the headboard. Both were half covered by the bedclothes. Both their upper bodies were naked. Amir wore three thick gold chains. His chest was black and bony. There was a lot of short curly hair on it. Milo had no jewelry, nor hair on his chest. He was fat and pale with blotchy pink highlights.

“They’re,” Amir paused, “the white one is a detective.”

“Detective? Damn you, you have no right…”

Hawk tapped him gently on the forehead with the muzzle of his gun.

“Shh,” Hawk said.

“Tell him what detective I am,” I said.

“What detective? I don’t know what…”

“I’m the detective you sent your people to threaten,” I said.

“Threaten?”

I knew that Milo’s brain was fuddled by whatever controlled substance he’d been ingesting with Amir. But even so he looked genuinely puzzled.

“Didn’t he do that, Amir?” I said.

“I… how would I know?”

“Well, you and Milo seem sort of friendly,” I said. “I just thought you might. So, tell him what we’re doing here.”

“Doing here? God, how would I know?”

“You know,” I said. “Explain to Milo what we’re after.”

“Speak up, Amir,” Hawk said.

Amir looked as if someone had taken a shot at him.

“They’re after me,” Amir said. “They are after me because they think I made a person lose tenure.”

“Tenure?” Milo said.

“And because a kid you know got pitched out a window,” I said. “Tell him about that.”

“Window?” Milo said.

“It’s all craziness, Milo,” Amir said.

Milo looked at me and Hawk. Rallying is hard when you’re half stoned, and you got no pants on, but Milo was trying.

“There are armed men in rooms on either side of us,” Milo said. “If you were to fire that revolver, they would rush in here and kill you.”

Hawk smiled.

“You think?” he said.

Milo turned his head and stared at Amir.

“What is this about tenure and a person getting thrown from a window?”

“It’s not anything, Milo.”

“What are you doing to me, you degenerate cannibal?”

“Who are you calling degenerate?” Amir said. “I’m everything you hate and you can’t stop fucking me.”

Milo slapped him across the face. Amir laughed at him.

“Talk about degenerate,” he said.

It came all at once. Gestalt. The whole thing. For the first time since Hawk had come in with Robinson Nevins in the spring, I knew what was going on. It was a feeling I wasn’t used to.

“Prentice knew about you and Milo,” I said to Amir.

Amir’s face seemed to freeze.

“You got a lot of perks out of being a militant black man, just like you got a lot of perks out of being a militant gay activist.”

Milo had stopped looking at Amir and was looking at me.

“And Prentice caught you,” I said to Amir.

He seemed to be freezing right there in front of me. Compacting as he froze, growing smaller.

“Who, pray tell, is Prentice?” Milo said.

“Kid that got thrown out the window by some of your security twerps,” I said.

“I know nothing about any Prentice.”

“No,” I said, “you don’t. Prentice Lamont ran a newspaper called
OUTrageous
, which was primarily committed to outing gay men and women who would have preferred otherwise.”

Milo frowned. I knew he could identify.

“First the kid probably was doing it for philosophical reasons. Hiding one’s sexuality contributed to the belief that it was shameful. Something high-sounding like that, but then, and I’m guessing here, Amir started hitting on him, and the kid was flattered because Amir is a big-deal gay guy and a leading black activist, and a professor, and an all-around joy to contemplate.”

Outside the room the rain kept coming down in the dark. The motel window was streaked with it.

“And Amir gives him the blackmail idea. Maybe he wanted a cut of it. Maybe he wanted Prentice to think he was smart. Maybe he gets a kick out of perverting idealism. I’d guess all of the above with the perversion of idealism especially appealing to him, because he did it again with Willie and Walt when he was with you, Milo, and no longer needed the money. There’s people like that, get a kick out of seducing virgins, so to speak.”

Both Milo and Amir were now watching me as if I were Scheherazade. Hawk seemed to have faded back a little into the background. No one made a sound. I was talking mostly to Milo now.

“Anyway the scheme was working good. Good enough for Prentice to have accumulated two hundred fifty thousand dollars. Also, while Amir was with Prentice, he learned that
OUTrageous
was investigating the possibility that another professor at the university, Robinson Nevins, was gay. Nevins was Amir’s bitterest rival, and Amir filed that away for future use.”

The pupils in Amir’s eyes seemed to have reduced to pinpoints. I spoke to him again.

“But somewhere in there you got bored with Prentice, and you dumped him and moved on and somewhere in there you took up with Milo Quant.”

Neither of them said anything.

“And Prentice was jealous, wasn’t he?”

Amir shrugged, as if he were embarrassed to talk about how magnetic he was.

“And he used his
OUTrageous
sources and he found out who you’d left him for.”

“The damned queen used to follow me,” Amir said to Milo.

Milo was looking at him as if he had just discovered a Gila monster sharing his pillow.

“And that was too explosive to let out,” I said. “Each of you sexually involved with everything you hate. Hard as it is for me to imagine it, I assume you have devotees, and your devotees would be hysterical. It would ruin both of you.”

Milo’s face was mottled to an almost maroon flush. Amir was rigidly still. It was raining harder outside. The water flooded down the motel window in crystalline sheets.

“So you spoke to one of the bodyguards, the guy with the horn-rimmed glasses, maybe, and they went and threw Prentice out his window, and left a generic suicide note, and went back up to Beecham.”

“I…” Milo Quant’s voice was very hoarse, it sounded as if it was squeezing out of a very narrow opening in his windpipe. “I knew nothing of this.”

“No,” I said. “You probably didn’t. Amir probably said that you wanted it done and didn’t want to know about it. Was it the guy with the horn rims, Amir?”

Amir stood up suddenly from the bed. He was naked. Hawk moved slightly to his right between the door and Amir.

“Chuck,” Milo
said. “Did you have Chuck kill this boy?”

Amir stood looking around the room. He seemed unaware that he had no clothes on.

“Up to there, he’d probably have gotten away with everything, and you and he could have waltzed to the music of time for the rest of your lives. But he got greedy. He put out the story that the boy had killed himself because of Robinson Nevins. That way he gets rid of the kid, and he gets rid of a man whom he saw as a threat to his position as boss black man at the university. And that brought Robinson’s father in. And he brought Hawk in. And Hawk brought me in and here we are.”

“Is this true, Amir?” Milo wheezed.

“No. No. No.”

“You can consult with Chuck,” I said. “See what he says.”

Amir broke for the door.

“Let him,” I said to Hawk. “How far can he get?”

Hawk smiled and Amir Abdullah, naked, burst out of the room and disappeared down the corridor.

On the bed, Milo began to blubber. I could pick out the train of his complaint at first.

“I fought it,” I think he said. “I fought it day and night… but it consumed me… it is my sin… my corruption. I gave in to my corruption. And it has brought me to this.”

The ratio of blubber to clarity diminished so quickly as he continued that the rest seemed all blubber and I couldn’t understand it.

“What I think we need here now,” I said to Hawk, “is some cops.”

Hawk grinned and went to the chair and picked up the handset and reattached it to the phone. I took it and called the cops while Milo sat in the bed with his face in his hands and sobbed.

KC was still behind me. I could confront her. I could lose her. Or I could ignore her. It was Wednesday. Susan didn’t see patients on Wednesday. She taught a seminar Wednesday mornings and took Wednesday afternoon off. It was our day to have lunch together. I smiled – a solution had presented itself. Pearl and I strolled and KC stalked us until we got back to the office at 11:30. Pearl and I went up. Pearl drank some water and then flopped on the rug. I stood and looked out my window. KC had taken up a position across the street outside F.A.O. Schwarz where she could gaze up at my window. I felt like the Pope.

Susan was due at noon. She arrived of course at 12:20.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry I’m late,” she said.

“It’s okay,” I said. “You’re always late. I expected you to be late.”

She came over and gave me a large kiss, which, I thought, boded well for later. When she was through kissing me she went directly to the mirror over my washbasin and began to reapply lip gloss.

“Where shall we lunch?”

“We could go straight to my place,” I said.

“Un uh,” she said. “And eat about four in the afternoon?”

“We could order out,” I said.

“Sure, and while we waited…? I don’t think so.”

“Where would you like to go?” I said.

“Anyplace where you won’t try to undress me.”

“You’re the one that came in here with the big kiss,” I said.

“Because I love you, does that mean I have to lie down immediately on my back?”

“I think so,” I said. “Though I’ve never been a stickler for position.”

“I’ve noticed,” Susan said. “Let’s go to the Ritz Cafe.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

I smiled to myself.

“Why are you smiling.”

“Just happy,” I said.

We walked Pearl down to my place and put her in my living room. I put fresh water in Pearl’s dish, and turned on the radio so she’d have music to listen to. She hated talk radio. Susan kissed her good-bye, and we went out. We came back out of my apartment and turned left on Marlborough Street and right on Arlington.

“Talk to me a minute about people who stalk people,” I said.

“Sure,” Susan said. “I suspect you know what I know. It is some sort of attempt to maintain or, I suppose, acquire the feeling of power over someone. Following a person may not give you real power, but it gives you the feeling of it. You watch them. You know where they go, what they do, who they see.”

“Knowledge is power,” I said.

“Exactly,” Susan said.

“Are stalkers dangerous?” I said.

“Not necessarily. Sometimes the need for power extends to physical coercion, sometimes not. Sometimes dirty tricks, sometimes not.”

“And the purpose?”

“Fear of loss,” Susan said. “A lover, say, from whom you are estranged. You fear if she gets out of your power you’ll lose her. And the feeling of power is a way to feel as if you haven’t.”

We were at the corner of Commonwealth less than a block from The Ritz when Susan spotted KC Roth. She stopped dead in her tracks and stared at her. KC realized that Susan had seen her and tried to look as if she were just strolling along and didn’t notice us.

“What the hell is this?” Susan said to me.

“The lovely and tenacious KC Roth,” I said.

“She’s stalking you again?”

“Yep.”

“You knew it?”

“Yep.”

“And you didn’t say anything?”

“I thought it would be more dramatic if you discovered her yourself.”

“It is,” Susan said.

She was quiet for a moment, then she turned toward KC Roth and yelled.

“KC!”

KC tried to look startled.

“Susan?”

“Get over here,” Susan said.

KC walked over to us.

“Susan, what are you…?”

“Shut up,” Susan said.

She jabbed at a bench on the mall.

“Sit down,” she said.

Her teeth were clenched and her face was hard-edged and kind of white except for red splotches on her cheekbones. I stood a few feet away.
Oh boy!

KC wasn’t brave, but she was stupid. She stood there looking at Susan.

“Wha…?” she said.

Susan took hold of her blouse with both hands and yanked her to the bench and slammed her onto it.

“Now listen, you asinine little shit for brains,” she said with her teeth clamped hard together. “This is the last time you bother him, you understand?”

“Bother?”

Susan still had hold of her blouse. She pulled her close for a moment and slammed her back against the bench.

“Call, follow, whine at, see, talk to, touch, look at, annoy, anything – you understand? Annoy him again and I will knock out every stupid fucking tooth in your stupid fucking mouth.”

KC began to cry. She twisted loose from Susan and stood up.

“I need him,” she screamed at Susan. “You have no right to keep him from me, if it weren’t for you…”

With her clenched fist Susan hit KC on the jaw with a left hook just like I’d taught her, getting her shoulder into it so that the power came from the body, not the arm. KC fell backward and sat down hard on the bench. Her lip was bleeding.

“Are we clear?” Susan said.

KC touched her mouth and took her hand away and stared at the blood on it.

“My God, I’m bleeding,” KC said.

“You’ll be sleeping with the fishes, you neurotic bitch,” Susan said, “if you don’t stay away from him.”

KC nodded, still staring at the blood on her hand.

“Say it,” Susan said with such force that I was a little scared.

“I’ll stay away.”

“You bet you will,” Susan said.

She turned and looked at me and said, “Come on,” and started off toward The Ritz at a very fast pace. I followed her. We went in the Commonwealth Avenue entrance and across the lobby into the cafe. The maitre d‘ put us in a window seat only a few inches from passersby on Newbury Street.

“My hand hurts,” Susan said.

I nodded.

“You didn’t tell me that it hurts your hand to hit someone.”

“Mostly,” I said, “if you hit them on the face or head. It’s why I try to use my forearm or elbow when I can.”

“I’ll try to keep it in mind.”

“Were you influenced by Freud or Adler,” I said, “when you gave KC a whack on the kisser.”

“Wonder Woman, I think. Not very shrink-like, was I.”

“No.”

“Did you mind?” Susan said.

“No. I liked it,” I said. “It was what I wanted to do, but felt I couldn’t.”

“You knew I’d blow my top,” Susan said.

“I was hoping,” I said.

“What do you think she’ll do?” Susan said.

“Dash back to the shrink you sent her to, that she stopped going to.”

“So she can report me,” Susan said.

“Yep.”

Susan smiled.

“So maybe it was just the right thing to do,” she said.

“I’m sure it was. Will your reputation be destroyed in the psychiatric community?”

Susan smiled again, more broadly than before.

“No, my colleagues will envy me.”

“Good,” I said. “Want to see if they’ll bring you some ice for your hand?”

“No, but they’d better rush a martini out here pretty quick,” she said. “Before I’m overcome with pain.”

I signaled the waiter.

“Right away, Mrs. Silverman, I sure as hell don’t want to cross you.”

The drink came promptly, and a beer for me.

“You think it worked?” Susan said. “You think she’ll leave you alone?”

“Oh, I’m sure it will,” I said. “But you better not let word get out about my sexual performance, or you’ll be beating up beautiful women every week.”

Susan raised her glass toward me and touched the rim of it against the top of my beer bottle.

She said, “Be my pleasure, big guy.”