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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