“She taken a liking to you?”
“You might say.”
“Hear victims do that sometimes.”
“Sometimes,” I said.
“You say she good-looking?”
“Un huh.”
“And, you ain’t available, being as how you in love and all.”
“True.”
“Maybe you can divert her my way,” Hawk said. “She’ll thank you for it.”
“I’ll keep that option in mind.”
We emptied the bowl of cashews, and the bartender came over and refilled it and drew us two more beers. Way upscale.
“How we doing with Robinson?”
“We?”
“Yeah, you and me. We finding out anything?”
“We figure Prentice was killed,” I said.
“‘Cause of how he couldn’t have opened the window,” Hawk said.
I nodded.
“And we’re pretty sure he was blackmailing people,” I said.
“How about at the university?”
“I know that the rumor of his relationship to Prentice was introduced by Lillian Temple and a guy named Bass Maitland.”
“Lillian from Cambridge,” Hawk said.
“Clearly. And Bass is her boyfriend.”
“Lillian got a boyfriend?”
“Maybe when she lets her hair down and takes off her glasses,” I said.
“They don’t do that in Cambridge,” Hawk said.
I shrugged. “We know that both Lillian and Bass are friends with Amir Abdullah,” I said.
“Which tell you something about them,” Hawk said.
There were still cashews left. I took a couple.
“And we know that Amir had met Prentice because Prentice wrote about him in his little magazine.”
“So there a connection from Prentice through Amir to Lillian Cambridge and her boyfriend.”
“Bass Maitland. Yeah there is.”
We both drank some beer. The bar was nearly empty in the middle of the afternoon. The television above the bar was dark. There was no music playing on the jukebox. The light from the street filtered quietly in through the front windows.
“You know what I thinking?” Hawk said.
“Maybe,” I said.
“I thinking that if the kid Prentice banking a quarter of million out of the blackmail gig then it too good a gig to end when he die.”
“And you’re thinking it might be a good idea to keep an eye on the ones doing the magazine now.”
“Yowzah.”
‘That would be Walt and Willie.“
“You know them?”
“Yes.”
“They business partners or are they a couple?”
“Couple, I think.”
“So one’s in it they probably both in it.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“They know you too?”
“Yeah.”
“So we’ll go by tomorrow,” Hawk said, “and you point them out to me and I’ll watch them for a while.”
