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

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