“A fire storm of outrage.”
“Because you seem to be saying that sexuality can be altered by therapy?”
“I am recounting my experience,” Susan said. “Obviously I have experienced a self-selecting sample: people whose presence in therapy is probably related to either uncertainty about, or dissatisfaction with, their sexuality. It is not always the presenting syndrome, and it is not always what people thought they wanted. Some people come to be ‘cured’ of their homosexuality, only to embrace it by the end of the therapy.”
I nodded. As she concentrated on what she was saying, Susan had stopped rubbing Pearl’s rib cage with her head, and Pearl leaned over and nudged Susan with her nose. Susan reached up and patted her.
“And in the therapeutic community that would be unacceptably incorrect?” I said.
“I don’t know anywhere, but here, that what I’ve said wouldn’t stir up a ruckus.”
“You’ve never minded a ruckus.”
“No,” Susan said. “Actually, I sometimes like ruckuses, but this ruckus would get in the way of my work, and I like my work better even than a ruckus.”
“How about me,” I said. “Do you like me better than a ruckus?”
“You are a ruckus,” Susan said.
CHAPTER FOUR
I talked with Frank Belson in his spiffy new cubicle in the spiffy new police headquarters on Tremont Street in Roxbury.
“Golly,” I said when I sat down.
“Yeah,” Belson said.
“This will knock crime on its ear, won’t it?” I said.
“Right on its ear,” Belson said.
He was built like a rake handle, but harder. And, though I knew for a fact that he shaved twice a day, he always had a blue sheen of beard.
“They issue you a nice new gun when you moved here?”
“I could call informational services,” Belson said. “One of the ladies there be happy to tour you around the new facility.”
“Maybe later,” I said. “What do you know about a suicide named Prentice Lamont?”
“Kid from the university?”
“Yeah.”
“Did a Brody out the window of his apartment. Ten stories.”
“A Brody?”
“Yeah. I heard George Raft say that in an old movie last week,” Belson said. “I liked it. I been saving it up.”
“Why?”
“Why’d he do a Brody?” Belson grinned. “Left a note on his computer. It said, I believe, ‘I can’t go on. There’s someone who will understand why.’”
“What kind of suicide note is that?” I said.
“What, is there some kind of form note?” Belson said. “Pick it up at the stationery store? Fill in the blanks?”
“Did he sign it?”
“On the computer?”
“Well, did he type his name at the end?”
“Yeah.”
“Any thought that maybe he got Brodied?”
“Sure,” Belson said. “You know you always think about that, but there’s nothing to suggest it. And when there isn’t, we like to close the case.”
“Any more on the cause?”
“We were told that he was despondent over the end of a love affair.”
“With whom?”
‘That’s confidential information,“ Belson said.
“Who told you?”
“Also confidential,” Belson said.
He reached into the left-hand file drawer of his desk and ruffled some folders and took one out and put it on his desk.
“That’s why we keep all that information right here in this folder marked confidential. See right there on the
