Hush Money

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

It was nearly noon. I was at my desk with my feet up reading the to-be-outed list I had acquired from Prentice Lamont’s file drawer. It was dated at the top two weeks before Lamont died. The list was several pages long with notations next to various names, which apparently suggested likelihood: “not sure” or “dead giveaway.” Some were more graphic: “wrinkle room” or “chicken fucker.” Near the bottom of the third page was Robinson Nevins, and the notation “research continues.” So there was a connection between Prentice Lamont and Robinson Nevins. There were several names I recognized on the list, but nobody seemed more likely than anybody else to have tossed Prentice out the window. Even the women on the list couldn’t be eliminated – Prentice was small, and I knew some lesbian women who might throw me out the window.

I put the list aside and picked up the stack of OUTrageous magazines again and began to read. It was not pleasant. Whatever Prentice Lamont had been, he had not been a writer. His literary style was school newspaper gossip prose. It was twenty to two and I was on my third back issue of OUTrageous, when I came to an interview with “scholar/activist” Amir Abdullah about the problems he encountered as an African-American man who was also gay. The article added nothing to my understanding of the situation, but it did connect Prentice Lamont, already connected to Robinson Nevins by the Out list, to Amir Abdullah. It might mean nothing. They were after all also connected to the same university. It didn’t mean Robinson was gay. The Out list had been still researching the question. And if Robinson were gay it didn’t mean that he had been intimate with Prentice Lamont, and even if he had been, it didn’t mean he had thrown Prentice out the window. Still when the same names kept turning up, it sometimes meant something. And when nothing else meant anything, it was a thing to hang on to. The interview between Prentice and Amir could have been the source of the story which Amir had passed on to the tenure committee about a connection between Robinson Nevins and Prentice Lamont. Had Prentice asked Amir about Nevins in the course of the interview? Had Amir suggested Nevins to Prentice in the course of the interview? Could Amir have suggested Nevins for reasons of university politics? Could Amir have embroidered what he learned from Prentice for reasons of university politics? I was pretty sure that worse had been done in the service of university politics. And if any of it were true how did it connect to one of the few facts I had – which was that Prentice Lamont was dead, and he’d died with a quarter of a million dollars in the bank. I thought about the quarter million, which was a relief. Sexuality was a slippery devil. Greed you could get a handle on. Any time there’s money in a case, what do you do?

“Follow the money,” I said aloud, just as if I were the first person to have thought of that approach.

Even when there’s sex in the case too?

There’s always sex, what are cases about but sex and money.

“Follow the money,” I said again.

I pulled my phone over and called Mrs. Lamont.

“Would you call Maxwell T. Morgan at Hall, Peary,” I said, “and tell him that he may discuss your and Prentice’s account with me?”

“Why?” she said.

“I’m trying to help you find out how there came to be so much money,” I said. It wasn’t exactly untrue.

“If you think I should,” she said.

“I do,” I said, and gave her the phone number and made sure she had it right and got up and went out to see Prentice Lamont’s financial advisor at Hall, Peary.

Maxwell Morgan had a smaller office than Louis Vincent, two floors lower and in the middle of the building with a view of another building. He didn’t seem to mind. He was a big round blond cheerful healthy-looking guy with pink cheeks.

“Max Morgan,” he said. “Come on in.”

I sat across his desk from him in a moderately comfortable chair with arms. He had on the uniform – shirtsleeves and suspenders, his coat jacket hung neatly on a hanger on the back of his door.

“Care to invest in American Industry?” Morgan said.

“No.”

Morgan grinned. “Okay,” he said. “You got a thingamajig that says you’re a detective?”

I showed him my license.

“So what do you need?”

“You handled Prentice Lamont’s investments.”

“Yes.”

“Lamont is dead.”

“Yes, I know, poor devil killed himself, I understand.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“You don’t?”

“No, but that’s not our issue. What can you tell me about the quarter of a million he has invested with you.”

“Not much,” Morgan said. “Alive or dead Mr. Lamont is entitled to confidentiality.”

“Did Mrs. Lamont call you?”

Morgan smiled and nodded. “Just wanted to be sure it was you,” he said.

“I understand,” I said. “Lawyers.”

“You better believe it, the bastards took over Wall Street about five years ago.” Morgan shook his head sadly. “This business used to be fun,” he said.