“It’s a good reminder,” Susan said, “of life’s essential messiness.”
“Or Pearl’s.”
“Same thing,” Susan said.
Pearl raised her head slightly at the mention of her name, and then looked slightly annoyed that it was a false alarm. She sighed noisily as she settled her head back down onto her front paws. The sun was bright, and the earth had thawed, but in the shady corners against the fence and under a couple of evergreen shrubs, granular snow lingered like a dirty secret, and lurking inside the sixty-degree temperature was an edge of cold to remind us that it was too early for planting.
When we were done, and I had shoveled the dirt over the waste hole and tamped it down, Susan and I went and sat on the penultimate step, just below Pearl.
“Are you actually going to investigate that tenure case at the university?” Susan said.
“Yes.”
She smiled.
“What,” I said.
“The thought of you rampaging about in the university tenure committee,” Susan said, “is very engaging.”
“Rampaging?” I said. “I can be delicate as a neurosurgeon when it’s called for.”
“Most university tenure committees call for rampaging, I think.”
“I admit to being more comfortable with that approach,” I said.
Moved by an impulse understandable only by another dog, Pearl raised up and began to lap my face. I hunched up and endured it until she decided I’d had enough and switched to Susan.
“How’d you know about the case?” I said.
She was fending Pearl off, so it took her a while to answer. But finally, Pearl-free and makeup still mostly intact, Susan said, “Hawk discussed it with me, before he asked you.”
“He did?” I said.
“He wanted my view on whether he was asking more of you than he should,” Susan said.
“And you answered?”
“I answered that he had the right to ask you for everything and vice versa.”
“What’d he say?”
Susan smiled.
“He agreed,” she said.
I nodded.
“Is Hawk’s friend gay?” Susan said.
“Don’t know,” I said.
“But wouldn’t raging heterosexuality be a useful defense against the allegation that the graduate student killed himself as the result of an affair with Professor Nevins?”
“I guess it would,” I said.
“Did you ask him?”
“No.”
“I understand why you would not, but isn’t it something that needs to be established?”
“Can it be established?” I said. “In my experience it’s not always so clear-cut.”
Susan leaned her elbows on the top step and pressed her head back against Pearl’s rib cage. She thought about my question for a moment while I observed the way in which her posture made her chest press sort of tight against her jacket.
“Are you looking at my boobs?” Susan said.
“I’m a trained investigator,” I said. “I notice everything.”
“Do you make judgments on what you observe?”
“I try not to, but am sometimes forced to.”
“And the boobs?”
“Top drawer,” I said. “What about the question?”
“It’s a good one,” Susan said, “and much more complicated than is generally thought.”
“Then I’ve come to the right place.”
“Yes.” Susan smiled at me. It was a smile that could easily have launched a thousand ships. “Complications R Us.”
She rubbed the back of her head on Pearl for a moment.
“Sexuality is not as fixed as is commonly thought, and the discussion of it has become so political that if you quoted in public what I’m about to say I’d probably deny I said it.”
“Before or after the cock crowed?” I said.
“I didn’t know it crowed,” Susan said.
“Never mind,” I said. “Talk to me about sexuality.”
Susan smiled but didn’t go for the obvious remark.
Instead, she said, “I have treated people who experienced themselves as homosexual at the beginning of therapy and experienced themselves as heterosexual at the end.” Susan was picking her words carefully, even with me. “I have treated people who experienced themselves as heterosexual at the start of therapy and experienced themselves as homosexual at the end.”
“And if you said that in print?”
“A fire storm of outrage.”
“Because you seem to be saying that sexuality can be altered by therapy?”
“I am recounting my experience,” Susan said. “Obviously I have experienced a self-selecting sample: people whose presence in therapy is probably related to either uncertainty about, or dissatisfaction with, their sexuality. It is not always the presenting syndrome, and it is not always what people thought they wanted. Some people come to be ‘cured’ of their homosexuality, only to embrace it by the end of the therapy.”
I nodded. As she concentrated on what she was saying, Susan had stopped rubbing Pearl’s rib cage with her head, and Pearl leaned over and nudged Susan with her nose. Susan reached up and patted her.
“And in the therapeutic community that would be unacceptably incorrect?” I said.
“I don’t know anywhere, but here, that what I’ve said wouldn’t stir up a ruckus.”
“You’ve never minded a ruckus.”
“No,” Susan said. “Actually, I sometimes like ruckuses, but this ruckus would get in the way of my work, and I like my work better even than a ruckus.”
“How about me,” I said. “Do you like me better than a ruckus?”
“You are a ruckus,” Susan said.
CHAPTER FOUR
I talked with Frank Belson in his spiffy new cubicle in the spiffy new police headquarters on Tremont Street in Roxbury.
“Golly,” I said when I sat down.
“Yeah,” Belson said.
“This will knock crime on its ear, won’t it?” I said.
“Right on its ear,” Belson said.
He was built like a rake handle, but harder. And, though I knew for a fact that he shaved twice a day, he always had a blue sheen of beard.
“They issue you a nice new gun when you moved here?”
“I could call informational services,” Belson said. “One of the ladies there be happy to tour you around the new facility.”
“Maybe later,” I said. “What do you know about a suicide named Prentice Lamont?”
“Kid from the university?”
“Yeah.”
“Did a Brody out the window of his apartment. Ten stories.”
“A Brody?”
“Yeah. I heard George Raft say that in an old movie last week,” Belson said. “I liked it. I been saving it up.”
“Why?”
“Why’d he do a Brody?” Belson grinned. “Left a note on his computer. It said, I believe, ‘I can’t go on. There’s someone who will understand why.’”
“What kind of suicide note is that?” I said.
“What, is there some kind of form note?” Belson said. “Pick it up at the stationery store? Fill in the blanks?”
“Did he sign it?”
“On the computer?”
“Well, did he type his name at the end?”
“Yeah.”
“Any thought that maybe he got Brodied?”
“Sure,” Belson said. “You know you always think about that, but there’s nothing to suggest it. And when there isn’t, we like to close the case.”
“Any more on the cause?”
“We were told that he was despondent over the end of a love affair.”
“With whom?”
‘That’s confidential information,“ Belson said.
“Who told you?”
“Also confidential,” Belson said.
He reached into the left-hand file drawer of his desk and ruffled some folders and took one out and put it on his desk.
“That’s why we keep all that information right here in this folder marked confidential. See right there on the front: Con-fid-fucking-dential.”