“Why would she want to blame you?”

“Because she feels guilty about leaving me, and she feels like a fool for being in love with a guy who dumps her, and she can’t stand either feeling, so she needs to make it my fault somehow.”

“You seeing a shrink?” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” Roth said. “This is much too hard to do alone.”

“You know the boyfriend?”

“We’ve never met.”

“Know his name?”

“Just his first name, Louis.”

“How do you feel about him?”

“I’d like to kill him.”

“Of course you would,” I said.

“But I won’t.”

“No,” I said.

“You sound like you understand that.”

“Yes,” I said.

He looked at his watch.

“I’ve got to pick up my daughter,” he said. “I don’t want to discuss this in front of her. Would you like to schedule another time to talk?”

“Not for the moment,” I said. “If I need to, I’ll call you.”

“I am happy to help with this. I don’t want Jennifer’s mother to be stalked.”

“Do you still love her?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “But less than I used to and in time I won’t.”

“Good,” I said.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I’d put it off as long as possible. Now I had to talk to Prentice Lamont’s parents. It was always the worst thing I did, talking to the parents of a dead person. It almost didn’t matter how old the deceased had been, it was the parents that were the hardest. I’d had to do it a couple years ago for the parents of a girl alleged to have been raped and killed by a black man. The mother had called me a nigger lover and ordered me to leave. It often was the mother that was most frenzied. In the case of the Lamonts, it was worse because they were divorced, and I’d have to do it twice.

I started with the mother.

“Yes,” she said, “Prentice was gay.”

“Do you know if Robinson Nevins was his lover?” I said.

“Well,” Mrs. Lamont said. “You get right to it, don’t you?”

“There aren’t any easy questions here, ma’am, and they don’t get easier if I sneak up on them.”

“No,” she said. “They don’t.”

She was a smallish dark-haired lively woman, not bad-looking, but sort of worn at the corners, as if life had been wobbly. We sat in the yellow kitchen of her apartment on the first floor of a three-decker off Highland Ave in Somerville.

“So what do you know?” I said. “About Prentice and Robinson Nevins.”

She shrugged. The initial horror of her son’s death had faded with the six months that had passed. The sadness was deeper and probably permanent. But she was able to talk calmly.

“I think Prentice knew we weren’t too comfortable about him being gay. He didn’t talk much about it in front of us.”

“‘Us’ being you and his father?”

“Yes.”

“You’re divorced.”

“Yes. Five years ago.”

And she still talked about us. Things didn’t go away from Mrs. Lamont.

“Did he know Robinson Nevins?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would he have dated a black man?”

“I shouldn’t think so, but I wouldn’t have thought he’d be gay either.”

“Do you think he killed himself?” I said.

“Everyone says he did.”

“Do you believe them?”

I pushed too hard. Her eyes began to fill.

“How can I believe he killed himself?” she said. “And how can I believe someone killed him? Prentice…”

“Awful stuff, isn’t it,” I said.

She nodded. She couldn’t speak. The tears were running down her face now.

“I’ll find out, Mrs. Lamont, it’s all I can offer you. I’ll find out and then you’ll know.”

Still she couldn’t speak. Again she nodded her head.

“Would you like me to leave?” I said.

She nodded.

“Are you going to be all right?”

She nodded. There were more questions. But you had to be a tougher guy than I was to ask them now. As far as I knew, there wasn’t anyone tougher than I was, so I patted her shoulder uselessly and got up from her kitchen table and left.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The old man was a different story.

I met him and his more recent wife for a drink at an athletic club in the financial district. Lamont and his wife were both in workout gear. She carried two small racquets. He was bald, medium sized, muscular, and deeply tanned. She was blonde, medium sized, muscular, and deeply tanned. She was also about the age that his son must have been when he did his Brody. Her name was Laura. We sat by a window looking down at the indoor tennis courts where several games of mixed doubles were progressing badly.

“Whew,” Lamont said after we’d shaken hands. “She’s starting to push me.”

“Oh, not very hard,” Laura said.

“Racquetball?” I said.

“Yeah. You play?”

“No,” I said.

“Ought to, it’s a great workout.”

“Sure,” I said. “Do you know Robinson Nevins?”

Lamont’s eyes narrowed.

“That’s the jigaboo was supposed to be involved with my ex-wife’s kid.”

“Not your kid?”

Lamont shook his head.

“He made his choice,” Lamont said.

Laura put her hand on top of his on the table.

“You mean he was gay,” I said.

“No need to clean it up with a cute word,” Lamont said. “He was a homosexual.”

“And his choice was you or homosexuality?”

“I’m an old-fashioned guy,” Lamont said. “In my book it’s a shameful and corrupt thing for men to have sex with each other. Makes my damned skin crawl.”

“I can see that,” I said. “So you wouldn’t know if he did in fact have a sexual relationship with Robinson Nevins.”

“No.”

“You ever meet Nevins?”

“No.”

“How long have you been divorced from Prentice’s mother?” I said.

“Six years.”

“When’s the last time you saw Prentice.”

“When I left the house.”

“More than six years?”

“Yes, closer to seven. The divorce took about ten months. Obviously, I wasn’t living there while it processed.”

“So you hadn’t seen your son for what, six, six and a half years before he died?”

“For me,” Lamont said, “he died a long time ago.”

“Was he an issue in the divorce?”

“Well, if she’d brought him up right, maybe he’d be alive now.”

“Maybe,” I said. “You have any thoughts on his suicide, any reason to doubt it, any reason to think it might not have been Nevins who triggered it?”

“As I say, Mr. Spenser, for me Prentice died a long time ago.”

“I wonder if he’d have lasted longer if he had a father.”

“Mr. Spenser!” Laura said.

“That’s a cheap shot, pal. You got kids?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Then you don’t know shit.”

“Probably don’t,” I said.

I looked at Laura. “I hope he’s a better father to you, ma’am,” I said.

I didn’t want to scramble his teeth. I wasn’t even mad. I was sad. It was all sad. Families breaking up, people dying, mothers grieving.

For what?

I stood and walked away.

For fucking what?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Belson and two other detectives had talked to thirty-five people about Prentice Lamont, and twenty-nine of them had been a routine waste of time. Professors Abdullah and Temple had alleged that Lamont had been having a love affair with Robinson Nevins. Though not to me. I wondered why they were so reluctant to speak to me. Academics, being academics, attached great importance to abstraction, and there may have been reasons that had to do with listening long to the music of the spheres, reasons a mind as deeply pedestrian as mine would not be able to understand. I had already talked with his parents. Not very informative and not very pleasant either. Next on the list were Robert Walters and William Ainsworth, who were listed as close friends. They has been associated with Lamont in his pamphleteering career.

The pamphlet was published out of Lamont’s apartment and despite his demise it was still appearing. His successors had agreed to meet me there. When I arrived the door was open.