Hush Money by Robert B. Parker Read Free Book Online Page A

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