Текст книги "Hush Money"

Автор книги: Robert B. Parker

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Hawk and I were parked on Commonwealth Avenue outside the former Hotel Vendome, now a condominium complex. We had decided to conduct our discussions with Abdullah in a different venue, the first discussion having been a little brisk.

“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.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

I was with Robinson Nevins at the university in the faculty cafeteria, drinking coffee. I was currently experimenting with half decaf and half real coffee. Not bad.

“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 ourside 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.”