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.