Then he hollered, “Betty.”

I punched him in the solar plexus with my right hand and he sagged. He tried to yell Betty again but he had too little breath. Behind me the door opened.

A woman’s voice said, “My God.”

“Call cops,” Vincent gasped.

I stepped away. He tried to straighten up, still struggling to get air in, and I clipped him on the jaw with a good professional right cross and he sat down hard on the floor and stayed there.

“Stop it,” Betty screamed, “stop it.”

“Done,” I said.

Betty turned and ran toward her desk. Vincent was staring at me from the floor. He was about half functional.

“Can you understand me?” I said.

He nodded.

“If anything even slightly annoying, anything at all happens to KC Roth, ever again, I will come back and knock every tooth out of your head.”

He continued to stare.

“And maybe I’ll tell Al where you are.” I could see that he heard me.

“You understand that?” I said.

He nodded very slightly. He was very pale, and he kept himself rigid as if any movement would make him disintegrate.

“Feel free to explain to the cops why I punched you,” I said and turned and walked out of his office.

Betty had hung up the phone. When she saw me she pointed me out to a couple of vigorous-looking young guys who were probably good at squash.

“That’s him,” she said. “Don’t let him get away.”

I didn’t feel like instructing them in the difference between scuffling and squash, so I smiled at them courteously and opened my coat so they could see that I was wearing a gun.

“Let him get away,” I said.

Which they did.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Pearl and Susan and I were sitting in Susan’s large black Explorer in the parking lot of the Dunkin‘ Donuts shop on Route 1 in Saugus, eating donuts. Actually Susan and Pearl were sharing a donut and I was eating several, with coffee.

“I got a call from KC Roth this morning,” Susan said.

She sprinkled a little Equal into her decaffeinated coffee and swirled it with the little red swizzle that came with the coffee.

“Swell,” I said.

I liked the donuts they sold with the little handle on them. When you had finished the donut you still could eat the little handle and have the illusion that you’d gotten extra.

“She says you’ve been hitting on her.”

I finished my donut and drank some coffee to help it down.

“And how did you respond?” I said.

“I said that it seemed very unlike you.”

“And she said?”

“That apparently I didn’t know you as well as I thought I did.”

“Well,” I said, “if I were going to hit on someone besides you, she’d be an early candidate.”

“Yes, she is undeniably stunning,” Susan said. “But I’m pretty sure that I do know you as well as I think I do.”

“Maybe better,” I said.

“So I don’t want you to deny it,” Susan said. “Because I don’t believe you did it. But I’d be curious as to why she is telling me you did.”

“She blandished me and I was unresponsive,” I said.

“Blandished?”

“Yes.”

“As in blandishments?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure that’s a word?”

“It is now,” I said.

“Tell me about her blandishments,” Susan said.

So I did, graphically.

“I don’t wish to hurt your feelings, but KC has always been something of a hot pants.”

“Damn,” I said, “I thought maybe you had told her what a Roscoe I was in bed.”

Susan shook her head and sipped some more decaf. “Your secret is safe with me,” she said.

From the backseat Pearl nudged at my elbow as I was about to bite into a new donut.

“Excuse me,” I said and broke off a piece and gave it to her.

“KC and I have been friends a long time,” Susan said. “I would have hoped for a little better behavior.”

“Maybe she’s different with men than she is with other women,” I said.

“I’d say that was a given,” Susan said.

“I don’t know why, and obviously I’m making some rather large intuitive leaps here, but she seems to be in bad need of male attention and she seems to need it from men she can be scornful of.”

“Including you?” Susan said.

“If I had, ah, come across,” I said. “Then she could have been scornful of me because I was unfaithful to you.”

“Maybe that was part of your attraction, in addition to being a Roscoe, of course.”

“This is your department,” I said, “but maybe it’s why she cheated on her husband. He seemed hard to scorn.”

“Yes, Burt is quite admirable. How about her stockbroker?”

“Easy to scorn.”

“I of course understand some of that.”

“You understand some of everything,” I said.

Susan smiled and held her decaf up so Pearl could lap a little from the cup.

“Yes we do,” she said. “How did your talk go with Louis Vincent? Did he admit it?”

“Not exactly.”

“Did he seem remorseful?” Susan said.

“I think by the end of the discussion he felt some remorse.”

“Does his remorse have any connection with the bruised knuckles on your right hand?”

“It was a talking point,” I said.

“Did you have to talk much?”

“Awhile.” I said.

“So how come there aren’t any other bruises on your knuckles.”

“All the other talking was to the body,” I said.

“Did you reach an agreement?”

“We agreed that he would stop bothering KC.”

“Leaving KC all the free time she needs,” Susan said, “to bother you.”

“Exactly.”

“Maybe I’ll talk with her.”

“And say what?”

“And say that if she doesn’t stop fucking around with my honey bun, she’ll be sleeping with the fishes.”

“You shrinks know just the right thing,” I said.

“Yes,” Susan said. “We do.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

One of the people who’d been outed by OUTrageous was a television reporter named Rich Randolph. I sat with him in his cubby inside the newsroom at Channel Three, next door to the news set.

“I wasn’t exactly in the closet,” he said. “But I wasn’t, you could say, broadcasting it.”

“Probably not the road to advancement,” I said.

Randolph was slimmer than he looked on camera, with a good haircut, round, gold-rimmed glasses, and a sharp-edged face.

“Hell, glasses put you at a disadvantage.”

“And well they should,” I said.

He glanced at me for a moment and then smiled.

“Nothing,” he said, “is too trivial for local television.”

“Did you know Prentice Lamont?” I said.

“He the guy ran the magazine?”

“Yes.”

“No, I didn’t know him. I saw his name on the masthead. Somebody, I assume it was he, wrote me an unsigned letter saying that I was scheduled to be outed in the whatever date issue of OUTrageous, unless I wished to make other arrangements, and included a phone number. I called the number and I said what sort of arrangements, and he said, financial. And I said you mean you’ll take money not to out me? And he said, yes, and I told him to go fuck himself, and hung up. About two weeks later I was out.”

“Sounds like you passed on a good piece of investigative reporting.”

“I did,” Randolph said. “It was also my life, and I thought maybe I can just sit tight and it’ll blow over. I mean who ever heard of OUTrageous, anyway? I thought they might be bluffing, and if they weren’t I thought no one read the damned thing.”

“Unless they backed it up,” I said, “and made sure somebody saw it.”

“The station manager got a copy in the mail.”

“How’d that work out?”

“He was hurt,” he said, “that I hadn’t leveled with him. The sonovabitch. Like he’s telling me about his sex life.”

“But he didn’t fire you.”

“Hell no. The union would be on them like ugly on a warthog. The PR fallout would swamp him, and he knows it.”

“He taking any action?” I said.