I waited.

“Amir embarrassed as hell he didn’t grow up poor. And he embarrassed as hell he lived where there was white folks and he been working for the Yankee dollar all his life.”

“Most of us do,” I said.

“But Amir, he never had no ghetto to drag himself out of, and been treated decent by all the white folks he met along the way, and he got a scholarship and then he got another one and he got a nice middle-class income and now he got a Ph.D. and he can’t stand it.”

“Poor devil,” I said.

“So to make up,” Hawk said, “Amir so down even I don’t understand him when he talk.”

“So he’ll be really pleased to help me with this investigation,” I said.

“Can’t hide the fact that you a blue-eyed devil, but I maybe talk to him with you,” Hawk said. “Give you some, ah, authenticity.”

The aggressive squirrel returned and looked at Hawk, sitting up on its hind legs, balancing on its disproportionate tail.

“Give a squirrel a peanut and you feed him for a moment,” I said. “But teach him to grow peanuts…”

“You and Amir going to get along so good,” Hawk said. “Can’t wait to watch.”

“How about Ms. Temple,” I said, “I don’t suppose you know her.”

“How I going to know her?” Hawk said.

“Well, for a while you were running a sub-specialization in female professors,” I said. “She coulda been one of them.”

“Good-looking female professors,” Hawk said.

“How do you know Prof. Temple isn’t good-looking?”

“Don’t,” Hawk said. “But the odds are with me.”

“Just because she’s an academic?” I said.

“Where she live?” Hawk said.

I checked my notes. “Cambridge,” I said.

Hawk smiled.

“Well, it doesn’t actually prove she’s not a looker,” I said.

Hawk continued to smile.

“This is bigotry,” I said. “You’re generalizing based on profession and residence.”

“Yowzah,” Hawk said.

“She might be a beauty,” I said.

“What you figure the chances of that are?” Hawk said.

I shrugged.

“Slim and none,” I said.

Hawk smiled more widely.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I went to visit KC Roth. She was living in one unit of a brick complex of what used to be called garden apartments, on Route 28 in Reading. Across the street was a liquor store and a fish place called The Friendly Flounder. Up the street was what may have been the last drive-in movie theater in Massachusetts. Next to the garden apartments was an Exxon gas station and convenience store.

KC’s apartment was neat enough, but it had been built for the builder’s profit. The doors were hollow core. The finish work was minimal, mostly quarter round molding. The floors were plywood, covered wall to wall with inexpensive tan carpeting which didn’t wear well, but showed the dirt easily. The furniture was fresh from the warehouse at Chuck’s Rent-All, Everything for the Home.

“Well,” KC said when I introduced myself, “so that’s what you look like.”

“This is it,” I said.

“Susan spoke of you a lot, but I never knew what you looked like.”

“But from the way she talked, you were picturing Adonis,” I said.

“I guess,” she said. “Come on in.”

KC was wearing a man-tailored white shirt and blue jeans. She was amazingly good-looking. Thick black hair worn a little too long, large green eyes, wide mouth, flawless skin.

“You are so nice to come by,” she said when we were sitting in her ugly living room. “How about a nice cup of coffee, or a drink? Do private eyes drink before lunch? I have some vodka.”

“I don’t need anything,” I said. “Tell me about your problem.”

“Oh boy, all business,” she said.

She was sitting on the couch with her feet tucked up under her. I sat across in an uncomfortable barrel-shaped gray plush armchair.

“Well,” I said, “not all business.”

She smiled brilliantly. There was something about her that seemed to require flirtation. And when the requirement was filled, it pleased her.

“I’ll keep it in mind,” she said.

“So how about the harassment?” I said.

“The son of a bitch won’t give up,” she said. “Can you make him stop?”

“The son of a bitch being whom?”

“Burt, the bastard – I hope you don’t mind swearing, I can’t help it, I have a terrible mouth.”

“I’ll be all right,” I said. “Burt is your husband?”

“Ex-husband,” she said.

“And you know he’s doing this?”

“Who else.” She leaned forward and her voice became a little girl’s. “Could you beat him up for me?”

She had more affect than a Miss America contestant. Her voice went from contralto to soprano in an easy glissade. Her eyes widened and narrowed as she spoke. Everything she said, she dramatized. She went from seductress to child in an exhale. I was willing to bet she’d cry before I left. I was pretty sure she could cry at will.

“We’ll see,” I said. “Could anyone else be harassing you?”

She cast her eyes down.

“No,” she said softly. “Who else but Burt would have any reason?”

“Tell me about your boyfriend,” I said.

She kept her eyes downcast and was silent. It was a pose, but I didn’t think it was an insincere one. In fact I didn’t find her insincere at all. Rather she seemed to have been playing this role, whatever it was, for so long, that she probably didn’t have any idea when she was sincere and when she wasn’t.

“I can’t talk about him,” she said.

“Why not?” I said.

She raised her head and she was angry, or seemed to be.

“I’m not hiring you to cross-examine me.”

“You’re not hiring me at all, yet,” I said. “This is foreplay. See if we like each other.”

“You only work for people you like?”

“I only work for people I want to,” I said.

She smiled suddenly. It was quite spectacular.

“You’ll want to work for me,” she said.

“So what about the boyfriend?”

The smile went away.

“Must you?”

“‘Fraid so,” I said.

“Is it confidential?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “But it’s not privileged.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you hired me through your attorney,” I said, “under certain circumstances what you told him, and he told me, could be privileged. As it stands now, I won’t tell anyone, but it is not privileged. If it is information required by the police in the course of an investigation, or a prosecutor in the course of a trial, then if I’m asked I have to tell.”

“Police?”

“I’m just trying to be clear,” I said. “I don’t expect to tell anyone.”

“If you told anyone I’d die.”

“I’ll try to remember that.”

We were quiet. She was thinking, and, as she did everything else, she dramatized thinking. Her eyes narrowed, she got a vertical wrinkle between her eyebrows. Her lips pursed slightly. I waited. Finally she leaned back and shifted on the couch so that she could hug her knees while she talked.

“When we were together,” she said, “we could barely breathe. We couldn’t eat. We didn’t want to drink. All we wanted to do was be together and look at each other and make love.”

I nodded. I knew the feeling, though love had never made me lose my appetite.

“If only we were both free,” she said.

“You’re free,” I said.

She shook her head sadly and a little condescendingly.

“He can’t leave his wife.”

“Why?”

She shook her head again. Men were so dumb.

“He just can’t. She’s too dependent on him, and men can’t do the hard things. He’s such a baby.”

“Might have been smart to wait until he left her, before you left your husband,” I said.

“I’m not that way,” she said. “When I commit, I commit entirely. I give everything.”

“Would you have left your husband if you hadn’t thought you’d be with him?” I said.

“And what? Live in this gruesome goddamned apartment by myself? Burt and I lived in a castle.”

“Do you still see your boyfriend?” I said.