“Speak up, Amir,” Hawk said.
Amir looked as if someone had taken a shot at him.
“They’re after me,” Amir said. “They are after me because they think I made a person lose tenure.”
“Tenure?” Milo said.
“And because a kid you know got pitched out a window,” I said. “Tell him about that.”
“Window?” Milo said.
“It’s all craziness, Milo,” Amir said.
Milo looked at me and Hawk. Rallying is hard when you’re half stoned, and you got no pants on, but Milo was trying.
“There are armed men in rooms on either side of us,” Milo said. “If you were to fire that revolver, they would rush in here and kill you.”
Hawk smiled.
“You think?” he said.
Milo turned his head and stared at Amir.
“What is this about tenure and a person getting thrown from a window?”
“It’s not anything, Milo.”
“What are you doing to me, you degenerate cannibal?”
“Who are you calling degenerate?” Amir said. “I’m everything you hate and you can’t stop fucking me.”
Milo slapped him across the face. Amir laughed at him.
“Talk about degenerate,” he said.
It came all at once. Gestalt. The whole thing. For the first time since Hawk had come in with Robinson Nevins in the spring, I knew what was going on. It was a feeling I wasn’t used to.
“Prentice knew about you and Milo,” I said to Amir.
Amir’s face seemed to freeze.
“You got a lot of perks out of being a militant black man, just like you got a lot of perks out of being a militant gay activist.”
Milo had stopped looking at Amir and was looking at me.
“And Prentice caught you,” I said to Amir.
He seemed to be freezing right there in front of me. Compacting as he froze, growing smaller.
“Who, pray tell, is Prentice?” Milo said.
“Kid that got thrown out the window by some of your security twerps,” I said.
“I know nothing about any Prentice.”
“No,” I said, “you don’t. Prentice Lamont ran a newspaper called OUTrageous, which was primarily committed to outing gay men and women who would have preferred otherwise.”
Milo frowned. I knew he could identify.
“First the kid probably was doing it for philosophical reasons. Hiding one’s sexuality contributed to the belief that it was shameful. Something high-sounding like that, but then, and I’m guessing here, Amir started hitting on him, and the kid was flattered because Amir is a big-deal gay guy and a leading black activist, and a professor, and an all-around joy to contemplate.”
Outside the room the rain kept coming down in the dark. The motel window was streaked with it.
“And Amir gives him the blackmail idea. Maybe he wanted a cut of it. Maybe he wanted Prentice to think he was smart. Maybe he gets a kick out of perverting idealism. I’d guess all of the above with the perversion of idealism especially appealing to him, because he did it again with Willie and Walt when he was with you, Milo, and no longer needed the money. There’s people like that, get a kick out of seducing virgins, so to speak.”
Both Milo and Amir were now watching me as if I were Scheherazade. Hawk seemed to have faded back a little into the background. No one made a sound. I was talking mostly to Milo now.
“Anyway the scheme was working good. Good enough for Prentice to have accumulated two hundred fifty thousand dollars. Also, while Amir was with Prentice, he learned that OUTrageous was investigating the possibility that another professor at the university, Robinson Nevins, was gay. Nevins was Amir’s bitterest rival, and Amir filed that away for future use.”
The pupils in Amir’s eyes seemed to have reduced to pinpoints. I spoke to him again.
“But somewhere in there you got bored with Prentice, and you dumped him and moved on and somewhere in there you took up with Milo Quant.”
Neither of them said anything.
“And Prentice was jealous, wasn’t he?”
Amir shrugged, as if he were embarrassed to talk about how magnetic he was.
“And he used his OUTrageous sources and he found out who you’d left him for.”
“The damned queen used to follow me,” Amir said to Milo.
Milo was looking at him as if he had just discovered a Gila monster sharing his pillow.
“And that was too explosive to let out,” I said. “Each of you sexually involved with everything you hate. Hard as it is for me to imagine it, I assume you have devotees, and your devotees would be hysterical. It would ruin both of you.”
Milo’s face was mottled to an almost maroon flush. Amir was rigidly still. It was raining harder outside. The water flooded down the motel window in crystalline sheets.
“So you spoke to one of the bodyguards, the guy with the horn-rimmed glasses, maybe, and they went and threw Prentice out his window, and left a generic suicide note, and went back up to Beecham.”
“I…” Milo Quant’s voice was very hoarse, it sounded as if it was squeezing out of a very narrow opening in his windpipe. “I knew nothing of this.”
“No,” I said. “You probably didn’t. Amir probably said that you wanted it done and didn’t want to know about it. Was it the guy with the horn rims, Amir?”
Amir stood up suddenly from the bed. He was naked. Hawk moved slightly to his right between the door and Amir.
“Chuck,” Milo said. “Did you have Chuck kill this boy?”
Amir stood looking around the room. He seemed unaware that he had no clothes on.
“Up to there, he’d probably have gotten away with everything, and you and he could have waltzed to the music of time for the rest of your lives. But he got greedy. He put out the story that the boy had killed himself because of Robinson Nevins. That way he gets rid of the kid, and he gets rid of a man whom he saw as a threat to his position as boss black man at the university. And that brought Robinson’s father in. And he brought Hawk in. And Hawk brought me in and here we are.”
“Is this true, Amir?” Milo wheezed.
“No. No. No.”
“You can consult with Chuck,” I said. “See what he says.”
Amir broke for the door.
“Let him,” I said to Hawk. “How far can he get?”
Hawk smiled and Amir Abdullah, naked, burst out of the room and disappeared down the corridor.
On the bed, Milo began to blubber. I could pick out the train of his complaint at first.
“I fought it,” I think he said. “I fought it day and night… but it consumed me… it is my sin… my corruption. I gave in to my corruption. And it has brought me to this.”
The ratio of blubber to clarity diminished so quickly as he continued that the rest seemed all blubber and I couldn’t understand it.
“What I think we need here now,” I said to Hawk, “is some cops.”
Hawk grinned and went to the chair and picked up the handset and reattached it to the phone. I took it and called the cops while Milo sat in the bed with his face in his hands and sobbed.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Pearl was visiting for the day. She and I had some donuts while I read the paper, and around 10:30 in the morning I put her leash on and took her for a stroll. As we walked down Boylston Street, realized that I had picked up a tail. By the time we crossed Arlington Street I realized that the tail was KC Roth. I crossed Boylston at the light and went into the Public Gardens. I let Pearl off her leash so she could point pigeons and barrel fruitlessly after squirrels. KC came behind me. I thought about what to do. Pearl spotted a duck and went into her full point, elongating her body, sucking up her stomach, one paw raised, head extended, tail motionless. I stopped beside her and aimed my finger at the duck and said “Bang” loudly. The duck flew up a few feet and resettled near the small bridge. Pearl seemed satisfied and began tracking Devil Dog crumbs among the shrubs.