Hush Money

“Maybe that was part of your attraction, in addition to being a Roscoe, of course.”

“This is your department,” I said, “but maybe it’s why she cheated on her husband. He seemed hard to scorn.”

“Yes, Burt is quite admirable. How about her stockbroker?”

“Easy to scorn.”

“I of course understand some of that.”

“You understand some of everything,” I said.

Susan smiled and held her decaf up so Pearl could lap a little from the cup.

“Yes we do,” she said. “How did your talk go with Louis Vincent? Did he admit it?”

“Not exactly.”

“Did he seem remorseful?” Susan said.

“I think by the end of the discussion he felt some remorse.”

“Does his remorse have any connection with the bruised knuckles on your right hand?”

“It was a talking point,” I said.

“Did you have to talk much?”

“Awhile.” I said.

“So how come there aren’t any other bruises on your knuckles.”

“All the other talking was to the body,” I said.

“Did you reach an agreement?”

“We agreed that he would stop bothering KC.”

“Leaving KC all the free time she needs,” Susan said, “to bother you.”

“Exactly.”

“Maybe I’ll talk with her.”

“And say what?”

“And say that if she doesn’t stop fucking around with my honey bun, she’ll be sleeping with the fishes.”

“You shrinks know just the right thing,” I said.

“Yes,” Susan said. “We do.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

One of the people who’d been outed by OUTrageous was a television reporter named Rich Randolph. I sat with him in his cubby inside the newsroom at Channel Three, next door to the news set.

“I wasn’t exactly in the closet,” he said. “But I wasn’t, you could say, broadcasting it.”

“Probably not the road to advancement,” I said.

Randolph was slimmer than he looked on camera, with a good haircut, round, gold-rimmed glasses, and a sharp-edged face.

“Hell, glasses put you at a disadvantage.”

“And well they should,” I said.

He glanced at me for a moment and then smiled.

“Nothing,” he said, “is too trivial for local television.”

“Did you know Prentice Lamont?” I said.

“He the guy ran the magazine?”

“Yes.”

“No, I didn’t know him. I saw his name on the masthead. Somebody, I assume it was he, wrote me an unsigned letter saying that I was scheduled to be outed in the whatever date issue of OUTrageous, unless I wished to make other arrangements, and included a phone number. I called the number and I said what sort of arrangements, and he said, financial. And I said you mean you’ll take money not to out me? And he said, yes, and I told him to go fuck himself, and hung up. About two weeks later I was out.”

“Sounds like you passed on a good piece of investigative reporting.”

“I did,” Randolph said. “It was also my life, and I thought maybe I can just sit tight and it’ll blow over. I mean who ever heard of OUTrageous, anyway? I thought they might be bluffing, and if they weren’t I thought no one read the damned thing.”

“Unless they backed it up,” I said, “and made sure somebody saw it.”

“The station manager got a copy in the mail.”

“How’d that work out?”