Текст книги "Hush Money"

Автор книги: Robert B. Parker

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CHAPTER NINE

So far I was nowhere.

We had annoyed the hell out of Amir Abdullah but hadn’t learned a thing. I had talked with KC Roth and hadn’t learned much about that case, except that KC was a piece of work. I had talked with Belson and gotten nothing to help me. My next appointment was at the university with Professor Lillian Temple of the English department tenure committee, that afternoon at two. Until then I had nothing else to do except watch the swelling subside in my lip, so I decided to go up to Reading and talk with the cops about KC Roth. No grass growing under my feet. Two cases at a time. I thought about having “Master Sleuth” added to my business cards.

I talked to a beefy red-faced Reading police sergeant named O’Connor in the squad room.

“Yeah, we have a car go by there usually about every hour. It’s easy enough, we routinely patrol that stretch anyway.”

“You vary the time?” I said.

“We’re just sort of shit-kicker cops out here, a course,” O’Connor said, “but we did figure out that if we showed up the same time every night people might start to work around us.”

“Good thinking,” I said. “You have any thoughts on the stalker?”

“Like who he is?”

“Un huh.”

“Well, the ex-whatever is usually the one you look at, if there is somebody.”

“You have any reason to think there might not be a stalker?” I said.

“Well, you’ve talked to the lady,” O’Connor said. “What’s your impression?”

“Good-looking,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Seems as if she might be sexually forthcoming,” I said.

“You bet,” O’Connor said.

“You got any information on that?”

“Nope, just instinct.”

“Nice combo,” I said. “Good-looking and easy.”

“The best,” O’Connor said, “if there wasn’t the next morning to think about.”

“That could be grim,” I said. “But what’s your point?”

“Just that she seems like she ain’t wrapped too snug,” O’Connor said. “Nothing about her bothered you?”

“She seemed a little contrived.”

“Contrived? I heard you was a tough guy. Tough guys don’t say contrived.”

“Probably don’t say sexually forthcoming either,” I said.

“A course they don’t,” O’Connor said.

“Part of my disguise,” I said. “So you haven’t seen any sign of a stalker.”

“No.”

“Telephone records?”

“She hadn’t talked to the phone company when we talked with her. They weren’t keeping track.”

“I suggested she do that,” I said.

“We did too.”

“Damn. She acted like I was smarter than Vanna White when I suggested it.”

“Sure.”

“So why would she make it up?” I said.

“You’ve seen broads like her, probably more than I have. Husband dumps them, they’re alone out in the suburbs, and they want men around. They want to be looked after. So they call the cops a lot. Maybe Mrs. Roth just took it a step farther and hired a guy to look after her.”

“Me,” I said, “after you broke her heart.”

“Could be.”

“On the other hand, you look like her, you probably don’t have to hire anyone,” I said.

“After they get dumped,” O’Connor said, “they’re pretty crazy. Ego’s fucked. Maybe she don’t know she’s good-looking.”

“She knows,” I said.

O’Connor thought about it for a minute. “Yeah,” he said. “She does.”

“And there’s at least two ex-whatevers,” I said.

“Boyfriend?” O’Connor said.

“Yep. Way she told me,” I said, “she left her husband for the boyfriend and the boyfriend dumped her.”

“Fucking her was one thing,” O’Connor said. “Marrying her was another.”

“I guess,” I said. “You know the other thing that bothers me, her husband’s got the kid.”

“She got a kid?”

“Yep.”

“And the kid’s with the husband.”

“Yep.”

“Doesn’t fit with your usual stalker,” O’Connor said.

“Custody of the kid?”

“Yeah.”

“No it doesn’t. But you never know. He could love his kid and still be crazy.”

“I got seven,” O’Connor said. “The two may go together.”

“You going to stay on this for a while?” I said.

“Yep. We’ll keep a car checking her, keep the file open. ‘Bout all we can do.”

“I’ll talk to the ex-husband, and the ex-boyfriend,” I said. “I learn anything I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks,” O’Connor said. “You learn who it is you might try dealing with him one to one. We can help her get a restraining order and we can warn him he’s subject to arrest. And sometimes if it’s done right he can get hurt resisting arrest. But it usually works better if you get his attention before we’re involved.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said.

CHAPTER TEN

I got to Lillian Temple’s office in the university English department at two o’clock exactly, hoping to impress her with my punctuality. It proved an ineffective approach, because she wasn’t there and the office was locked. I leaned on the wall outside her office until ten minutes past two when she hurried down the hall carrying a big blue canvas book bag jammed with stuff. She didn’t apologize for being late. She was, after all, a professor, and I was a gumshoe. Apology would have been unbecoming. At first glance I figured that Hawk had called it on her appearance, but when we got seated in her small office and I looked at her a little more, I wasn’t so sure.

She was plain, and she was plain in the Cambridge way, in that her plainness seemed a deliberate affectation. Had she chosen to treat her appearance differently, she might have been pretty good-looking. She was in the thirty-five to forty range, tallish, maybe 5’8“, brown hair worn long, no makeup, loose-fitting clothes straight from the J. Crew catalog. Large round eyeglasses, quite thick, with undistinguished frames, a mannish white shirt, chino slacks, white ankle socks, and sandals. She wore no jewelry. No nail polish. Her most forceful grooming statement was that she seemed clean.

“May I see some identification, please,” she said.

I showed her some. She read it carefully. It was a small office on an interior wall, and it was lined with paperback editions of English lit classics: The Mill on the Floss, Great Expectations,case books on English lit classics. Blue exam booklets were stacked in a somewhat unstable pile on a small table behind her chair. Above her desk was a framed diploma from Brandeis University indicating that she had earned a Ph.D. in English language and literature. She wore no perfume, but I could smell her shampoo – maybe Herbal Essence, and the faint odor of bath soap – maybe Irish Spring. I could see the neat part line on the top of her head as she looked down at my credentials.

She looked up finally, and handed me back my identification.

“I’ve asked the department ombudsman, Professor Maitland, to sit in on this interview,” she said.

Ombudsman. Perfect. I looked serious.

“Gee,” I said. “Couldn’t we just leave the door ajar?”

She suspected I might be kidding her, I think, and she decided that her best course was to look serious too.

“Is Amir Abdullah an English professor?” I said.

She thought about my question and apparently decided that it was not a trap.

“Yes,” she said. “African-American literature.”

“But he has offices in the Afro-American Center.”

“The African-American Center, yes, he prefers to be there.”

“And what do you teach?”

“Feminist studies,” she said.

“Anybody teaching dead white guys?” I said. “Shakespeare, Melville, guys like that?”

“Guys,” she said, “how apt.”

I think she was being ironic.

“Apt is my middle name,” I said.

She nodded, still serious.

“Traditional courses are offered,” she said.

A tall handsome man with a thick moustache walked into the office. He had on a brown Harris tweed jacket with a black silk pocket square, a black turtleneck, polished engineer’s boots, and pressed jeans.

“Hi, Lil,” he said, “sorry I’m late.”

He put out his hand to me.

“You must be the detective,” he said. “Bass Maitland.”

He had a big round voice.

“Spenser,” I said.

We shook hands. Maitland threw one leg over the far corner of Lillian’s desk and folded his arms, ready to listen, alert for any improprieties. I restrained myself. Whenever I got involved in anything related to a university, I was reminded of how seriously everyone took everything, particularly themselves, and I had to keep a firm grip on my impulse to make fun.

“I’m here at Lillian’s request,” he said. “My role here is strictly to observe.”

“Open-shuttered and passive,” I said.

He smiled.

“How do you feel,” I said to Lillian Temple, “about the allegation that Robinson Nevins was responsible for the suicide of Prentice Lamont?”

“What?”

“Do you think Nevins had an affair with Lamont? Do you think that the end of the affair caused Lamont’s suicide?”

“I… my God… how would I…?”

“Wasn’t it discussed in the tenure meeting?”

“Yes… but… I can’t talk about the tenure meeting.”

“Of course,” I said, “but such an allegation would certainly have weighed in your decision. How did you vote?”

“I can’t tell you that.” She looked shocked.

“You could tell me how you feel about the allegation.”

She looked at Maitland. Nothing there. She looked back at me.

“Well,” she said.

I waited.

“I feel…,” she said, “that… each person has a right to his or her sexuality.”

“Un huh.”

“But that with such a right there is a commensurate responsibility to be a caring partner in the relationship.” She stopped, pleased with her statement.

“You think Nevins was a caring partner?”

“Not,” she spoke very firmly, “if he left that boy to die.”

“And you think he did,” I said.

“I suspect that he did.”

“Why?”

“I have my reasons.”

“What are they?”

She shook her head.

“Oh,” I said, “those reasons.”

“There’s no call for sarcasm,” she said.

“The hell there isn’t,” I said.

“I think that’s probably enough, Mr. Spenser,” Maitland said.

“It’s not enough,” I said. “But it’s all I can stand.”

I stood. Maitland still sat half on the desk, looking bemused and neutral. Lillian Temple sat straight in her swivel chair, both feet flat together on the floor, her hands folded in her lap, looking implacable. I got to my feet.

“I’m sorry I can’t help you more,” she said. “But I do not take my responsibilities lightly.”

“You don’t take anything lightly,” I said.

As I walked past the African-American Center on my way to the parking lot, I thought that while I had been fiercely bullshitted in the English department, no one had tried to kick my head off. Which was progress.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Burton Roth lived in an eight-room white colonial house with green shutters on a cul-de-sac off Commonwealth Avenue in Newton. I went to see him in the late afternoon on a Thursday when he said he’d be home from work a little early. We sat in front of a small clean fireplace in a small den off his small dining room and talked about his former wife.

“She always had that flair,” he said. “It made her seem maybe more special than she really was.”

“You miss her?” I said.

“Yes. I do. But not as much as I first did. And of course I’m really angry with her.”

“Because she left.”

“Because she took up with another man, and left me for him, and for crissake she wasn’t even smart enough to find a good one.”

“What would have constituted a good one?”

“One that loved her back. The minute she was free of me he dumped her.”

“You’d have felt better about things if she’d married him?”

“And been happy? Yes. This way she wasted our marriage, for nothing, if you see what I mean.”

“I do,” I said.

He was a well-set-up man, middle sized with sandy hair and square hands that looked as if he might have worked for a living. On the mantel over the fireplace was a picture of a young girl. It had the strong coloration of one of those annual school pictures that kids take, but the frame was expensive.

“Your daughter?” I said.

“Yes. Jennifer. She’s eleven.”

“How’s she handling all this,” I said.

“She doesn’t understand, but she’s got a good temperament. She sees her mother usually every week. Divorce is hardly a stigma in her circles, half her friends have divorced parents.”

“She’s all right?”

“Yes,” Roth said, “I think so.”

“Where is she now?” I said.

“She has soccer practice until six,” Roth said. “I have to pick her up then.”

“You dating anyone?” I said.

“I don’t mean to be discourteous, but you said you were investigating something about my ex-wife and a stalker.”

“Stalking is usually about control or revenge or both. I’m trying to get a sense of whether you are controlling or vengeful.”

“My God, you think I might be stalking her?”

“It’s a place to start,” I said.

Roth was quiet for a time. Then he nodded.

“Yes, of course, who would be the logical suspect?” he said.

“Did you say you were dating?”

“I’m seeing someone,” Roth said. “She’s fun. We sleep together. I doubt that we’ll walk into the sunset.”

“Do you think your ex-wife would invent a stalker?”

“Well,” he said, “she’s pretty crazy these days. So much so that I’m careful about letting Jennifer spend time there. KC and I had a pretty good fight about it, and I can’t simply keep her away from her mother. But I always stay home when she’s there so she can call me if she needs to.”

“So you think she might?” I said.

“No, I don’t really. I think she might go out with her boyfriend, now former boyfriend, and leave Jennifer alone. Or I think she might bring her with her when she and the boyfriend went someplace that was inappropriate for an eleven-year-old girl. She might be crazy that way, sort of like in junior high school where there was a girl who was boy crazy. But for all her drama and affect, she is a pretty shrewd woman in many ways, and I think she loves her daughter, and I don’t think she’d invent a stalker, even to blame me.”

“Why would she want to blame you?”

“Because she feels guilty about leaving me, and she feels like a fool for being in love with a guy who dumps her, and she can’t stand either feeling, so she needs to make it my fault somehow.”

“You seeing a shrink?” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” Roth said. “This is much too hard to do alone.”

“You know the boyfriend?”

“We’ve never met.”

“Know his name?”

“Just his first name, Louis.”

“How do you feel about him?”

“I’d like to kill him.”

“Of course you would,” I said.

“But I won’t.”

“No,” I said.

“You sound like you understand that.”

“Yes,” I said.

He looked at his watch.

“I’ve got to pick up my daughter,” he said. “I don’t want to discuss this in front of her. Would you like to schedule another time to talk?”

“Not for the moment,” I said. “If I need to, I’ll call you.”

“I am happy to help with this. I don’t want Jennifer’s mother to be stalked.”

“Do you still love her?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “But less than I used to and in time I won’t.”

“Good,” I said.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I’d put it off as long as possible. Now I had to talk to Prentice Lamont’s parents. It was always the worst thing I did, talking to the parents of a dead person. It almost didn’t matter how old the deceased had been, it was the parents that were the hardest. I’d had to do it a couple years ago for the parents of a girl alleged to have been raped and killed by a black man. The mother had called me a nigger lover and ordered me to leave. It often was the mother that was most frenzied. In the case of the Lamonts, it was worse because they were divorced, and I’d have to do it twice.

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.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The old man was a different story.

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?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Belson and two other detectives had talked to thirty-five people about Prentice Lamont, and twenty-nine of them had been a routine waste of time. Professors Abdullah and Temple had alleged that Lamont had been having a love affair with Robinson Nevins. Though not to me. I wondered why they were so reluctant to speak to me. Academics, being academics, attached great importance to abstraction, and there may have been reasons that had to do with listening long to the music of the spheres, reasons a mind as deeply pedestrian as mine would not be able to understand. I had already talked with his parents. Not very informative and not very pleasant either. Next on the list were Robert Walters and William Ainsworth, who were listed as close friends. They has been associated with Lamont in his pamphleteering career.

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.