“Tea?”

“No ma’am.”

“I’m going to have some tea.”

“By all means,” I said.

I sat at the table with my hands folded on it, like an attentive grammar school student, and looked around. It was a kitchen out of my early childhood: painted yellow, with Iuan mahogany plywood wainscoting all around, yellow, gray, and maroon stone patterned linoleum on the floor, white porcelain sink, an off-white gas stove with storage drawers along one side. The kitchen table top was covered with the same linoleum that covered the floor. The hot water kettle whistled that it was ready, and Mrs. Lamont poured hot water into a bright flowered teacup. She plopped in a tea bag and brought the teacup in a matching saucer to the table. She took a spoon from a drawer in the table and prodded the tea bag gently until the tea got to be the right shade of amber. Then she took the tea bag out and put it in the saucer. She picked up the teacup with both hands and held it under her nose for a moment as if she were inhaling the vapors. Then she sipped and put the cup back down.

“I barely know you,” she said.

“That’s true,” I said.

“And yet here you are,” she said.

“Here I am.”

“My husband took care of all the financial things,” she said.

I nodded.

“When he left I didn’t even know how to write a check.”

I nodded again. You find something that works, you go with it.

“I don’t know any lawyers or people like that.”

I nodded. She had some tea. I waited.

“So when this stuff came in the mail, I didn’t know who to ask.”

“This stuff?” I said and patted the big envelope.

“Yes. Now that he’s… gone, his mail comes to me.”

I knew who he was. I knew that parents tended to think of their children as he, or she, or they, as if there were no one else that could be so designated. And I knew that when something bad happened to a child the tendency exacerbated.

“Would you like me to look at it?” I said.

“Yes, please.”

She handed me the envelope. It was a financial statement from Hall, Peary. Home of that great romantic, Louis Vincent. Boston isn’t all that big, sooner or later cases tended to overlap. The statement showed that Prentice Lamont and Patsy Lamont JTWROS had $256,248.29 in a management account consisting mostly of common stocks and options. I copied down the name and phone number of his financial consultant which was listed at the top. It wasn’t Louis Vincent. It was someone named Maxwell Morgan.

“What is it?” she said.

“It’s a financial statement from a stockbroker.”

“What does it say?”

“It says that your son and you had two hundred fifty-six thousand and change invested in stocks and bonds, which the stockbroker managed for him.”

“You mean Prentice’s money?”

“Yes. Now yours I assume.”

“Mine?”

“Yes, see this, JTWROS? Joint tenants with right of survivorship. It means that now that your son has passed away the money is yours.”

“Mine?”

“Yes.”

“Where would Prentice get two hundred thousand dollars?”

“I was hoping you’d know,” I said. “His father?”

She snorted, in a gentle ladylike way.

“You’ve talked to his father.”

“Yes. I withdraw the question.”

I picked up the envelope. It was addressed to both Prentice and Patsy at Patsy’s address.

“Envelopes like this come here before?”

“Yes. Every month. I just gave them to him.”

“He wasn’t living here.”

“No, he lived in that apartment where they had the newspaper.”

But he had the statements sent here.

“What should I do?” Mrs. Lamont said.

“With the money?”

“Yes.”

“Do you need it?”

“Need it?”

“It’s yours,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“How do I get it?”

“Somewhere in Prentice’s effects there’s probably a checkbook.”

“He showed me one once.”

“What’d he say?”

“I don’t recall exactly, just something about see this checkbook.”

“If you had it you could simply write a check on this account when you needed to.”

“Maybe in his room,” she said. “It’s not the room he grew up in. We lived in Hingham until the divorce. It’s just the room he used when he came to see me. A child always needs to have a home to come to.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I haven’t been in his room since the funeral.”

“Would you like me to look?”

She was silent, looking into her teacup, then she nodded.

“Yes,” she said very softly.

It was a small room behind the kitchen. Single bed with a maple frame and flame shapes carved on the tops of the bedposts. A braided rag rug, mostly blue and red, that was a little raveled at one edge. A patchwork quilt, again mostly blue and red, covering the bed, some jeans and sport shirts and a pair of dark brown penny loafers in the closet. A maple bureau with an assortment of school pictures on top of it. Prentice Lamont when he was in first grade, looking stiff and a little scared in a neat plaid shirt, and in most of the grades between. His high school graduation picture dominated the collection, a round-faced kid with dark hair and pink cheeks, wearing a mortarboard. His bachelor’s degree was framed on the wall, but no college graduation picture. In the top drawer of the bureau was a checkbook and a box of spare checks and deposit slips and mailing envelopes. Apparently Prentice did his financial planning in Somerville.

There was nothing else of interest in the room. It wasn’t a room that spoke of him, of his sexuality, his fears, why he was dead, or who killed him. It was an anonymous child’s room, maintained by a mother, for an adult to come and sleep in once in a while. I brought the checkbook and the spare checks out to his mother.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Hawk and I were sparring in the boxing room at the Harbor Health Club. There was no ring, just an open space to the left of the body bag and speed bag and the skitter bag that was so hard to nail that even Hawk missed it now and then. We had on the big fat pillow gloves that even if you got nailed wouldn’t hurt much, and we were floating like a couple of butterflies and pretending to sting like a couple of bees.

“So, Lamont is outing people,” Hawk said.

I put a left jab out and Hawk picked it off with his right glove.

“Un huh.”

I turned my head, and rolled back from a right cross and felt the big soft glove just brush past my cheekbone.

“And he got two hundred fifty thousand in his money management account at Hall, Peary.”

I tried a flurry of body punches which Hawk took mostly on his elbows, and then closed up on me and clinched.

“Un huh.”

We broke and moved in an easy circle around the ring looking for daylight.

“I not a thinker like you,” Hawk said, “being the pro-duct of a racist ed-u-cational system.”

“This is certainly true,” I said and threw a lightning fast left hook which Hawk seemed to catch quite easily on his hunched right shoulder. He countered with a whistling right uppercut which I managed to avoid.

“But if I a thinker,” Hawk said. “I be thinking that OUT plus money could equal blackmail.”

“That’s amazing,” I said as I circled him clockwise, bouncing on my toes to demonstrate that I wasn’t getting tired. “And you’re not even a licensed investigator.”

Hawk shuffled in suddenly and threw a short flurry of punches which I bobbed and weaved and rolled and ducked and mostly avoided. I countered with an overhead right which Hawk pulled back from. Hawk stepped back and leaned against the wall of the gym.

“You think we go fifteen and not get a winner?” Hawk said.

“Fifteen for real,” I said, “maybe we’d be trying harder.”

“Have to.”

We walked out of the boxing room and down to Henry Cimoli’s office.

“How long’d you go,” Henry said.