Hush Money

He was having more trouble now, talking, because periodically he’d have to stop and get control of his crying enough to continue.

“Willie used to tell me I was just playing into the straight guilt trap, that I was ashamed of my sexuality. I guess I’m pretty conservative. Willie was always much more out there than old stick in the mud Walt. It’s probably why it happened.”

He was nearly to the bottom of his second martini. His speech was slurring. I didn’t know how much wine he’d drunk before I arrived. Considerable was a fair guess. Right now it was working for me. He was drunk and garrulous and had someone to talk to about his pain. But I didn’t know how long I had before he would get too drunk to talk. I wanted to push him, but I had the feeling that if I pushed I’d remind him that he was admitting to a felony and, drunk or not, he might shut up.

“Why what happened?” I said carefully.

“Why Willie started fucking Amir,” Walt said and started to cry full out.

The bartender looked at me. I shrugged. The bartender went to the other end of the bar and began to reorganize some clean glasses.

“Who would blame him?” Walt said, snuffling and gulping. “Got this uptight homophobic gay lover. Who wouldn’t want somebody more interesting, for crissake. Who wouldn’t want somebody with more…” He stopped and tried to get his breathing under control. “With more… I don’t know what, just more.”

“I don’t know a lot about this,” I said, “but I do know that in a situation like this if you can blame yourself it gives you hope. He’s out of your control, but if it’s your fault, maybe you can fix it.”

“I can change,” Walt said.

He had some trouble with the ch sound.

“Sure,” I said. “You think Amir had anything to do with Prentice going out the window?”

“Amir?”

“Amir Abdullah,” I said.

“You mean do I think he killed him?”

He had a lot of trouble moving his mouth from I to think.

“You could put it that way,” I said.

“I… I… I don’t…” As he stumbled over his answer, Walt got one of those crafty looks that drunks get when they have this great insight, which in the morning will embarrass them.

“I bet he did,” Walt said. “I bet he did an‘ I bet Willie help’ him.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause he a sonfabish,” Walt said. “They both sonfabish.”

He pushed the nearly empty martini glass away from him and folded his arms on the bar and put his head down on them and mumbled “sonfabish” a couple of times and was quiet.

“Any evidence other than him being a son of a bitch?” I said.

I waited. Walt didn’t move. The bartender ambled down the bar. Walt started to snore.

“Walt a friend of yours?” the bartender said.

“No,” I said.

“Okay. He’s a regular. Bar’s almost empty. Let him sleep it off a little. When he wakes up I’ll send him home in a cab.”

“Good,” I said.

“He’s got a forty-three-dollar tab here,” the bartender said. “Including your beer.”

I put a hundred-dollar bill on the bar.

“My treat,” I said. “Take his cab fare out of that too.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem,” I said.

As I was leaving I contemplated the, albeit illusory, sense of power one achieved by slapping a C note on a bar. Maybe I should start carrying several. More important, maybe I should start earning several. At the moment I was doing two pro bonos, one for Susan, one for Hawk. I wondered if it was too late to cut myself in on OUTrageous. Maybe I could earn a bonus by telling everyone everything about everybody.

It was raining again, but I was dressed for it, and the walk back up to my office wasn’t very far, and I liked to walk in the rain. So I strolled the block down Tremont and turned up East Berkeley with my hands in my pockets and my collar up, while the rain came down gently. I thought about what I knew. I knew a lot, but nothing that solved my problem with Robinson Nevins. It was clearly time to talk with Amir Abdullah again. He almost certainly was a son of a bitch, but he didn’t look like someone who could have forced open that jammed window and thrown anyone through it. On the other hand, he might know someone who could.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Hawk and I were parked on Commonwealth Avenue outside the former Hotel Vendome, now a condominium complex. We had decided to conduct our discussions with Abdullah in a different venue, the first discussion having been a little brisk.