CHAPTER THIRTY


I spent the rest of the afternoon in my office with a pad of lined yellow paper drawing little connection diagrams among the principals in the Prentice Lamont case. None of them seemed very useful, but that just made the exercise like all the other ones I had been through. Maybe it was time to get the cops into it. I knew Quirk when he tried the window Lamont had jumped from would agree with me that the suicide smelled bad. But with the cops came the press, and Robinson Nevins would be frequently mentioned in connection with the murder of a gay man. This was not, I was pretty sure, what he’d wanted when Hawk brought him to me.

Twice the phone rang, and both times, when I answered there was nothing but the sound of someone not talking at the other end. I did business with enough wackos that it could be one of several, but at the moment my money was on KC Roth. After the second one I dialed *69 and the phone rang for a while but no one answered, which meant nothing. KC could have shut off her answering machine. She could be refusing to answer. She could have called from a phone booth which was now ringing to the empty sidewalk. Or it could have been someone else doing these things.

It was after six when I left the office and walked down Berkeley Street toward my apartment. When I turned right onto Marlborough Street I saw her hiding behind a tree across from my apartment. When I got to my apartment entry I turned and looked over at the tree.

“KC,” I said. “You’re slightly larger than the tree trunk. I can see you.”

She came out from behind the tree and walked toward me. She was dressed in black. She wore a large black hat, and her face, pale in contrast to her outfit, was tragic.

“I can’t stay away from you,” she said.

“Work on it,” I said.

“I think of you all the time.”

“How about the stalker,” I said. “He come back?”

“No. I need to talk with you.”

“Go ahead.”

“Can we go upstairs?”

“No.”

“Afraid?”

“Yes.”

She looked up at me with her head lowered. She looked like an old Hedy Lamarr publicity still.

“Of me or yourself?” she said.

“You,” I said.

“Damn you, can’t you understand how desperate I am. I’ve been abandoned, betrayed, my husband has left me, I’m being stalked.”

“I don’t think you’re being stalked anymore,” I said.

“You caught him?”

“Yep.”

“And?”

“I reasoned with him.”

“Who?”

“Louis Vincent,” I said.

“Louis?”

“Sorry.”

“Louis – oh my god,” she said and fell forward into my arms.

I held onto her and waited while she cried a little. When she stopped crying I let her go. She stayed where she was, leaning hard against me.

“Stand straight,” I said.

“I can’t,” she said. “It’s too much, too awful.”

I gave her a couple of seconds and when she didn’t stop leaning in to me, I stepped suddenly back away from her. She lurched forward and caught herself, and got her balance.

When she was on her own balance again her face darkened and she looked at me.

“You unutterable bastard,” she said, and turned and strode away.

Her hips swung angrily as she headed toward Arlington Street.

Unutterable, I thought. Not bad.

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