Hush Money Read Online Free

answering machine; a guy she dated got a threatening letter.”
    “Anonymously,” I said. “Of course.
    “He keep it?”
    “I don’t know. She said she hasn’t seen him since.”
    “Course of true love,” I said, “never did run smooth.”
    Pearl saw a cocker spaniel coming along the Esplanade from the other direction. She growled. The hair on her back rose.
    “Not a friendly dog,” I said to Susan.
    “Friendly to you and me,” Susan said.
    “All you can ask,” I said. “What you’ve described may legally be stalking, but it falls more into the realm of dirty tricks.”
    “I know.”
    “Husband abuse her when he was with her?”
    “I asked that,” Susan said. “She says he did not.”
    “Why’d they divorce?”
    “She left him for another man,” Susan said.
    “And the other man?” I said.
    “Didn’t work out.”
    “How come she doesn’t think it’s the other man doing the stalking?”
    “He dumped her,” Susan said.
    “As soon as she became available?”
    “Yes.”
    “You know his name?”
    “No. She won’t tell me, says he’s a married man.”
    “Who was happy to sleep with her on the side and said ‘oh honey if only we were single’ and she believed him and got single.”
    “I don’t know what happened,” Susan said, “but your scenario is not unheard of.”
    The spaniel passed by and kept going with its owner. Pearl looked longingly after it and then stopped growling and let her hair back down and forged ahead again, keeping the leash taut.
    “What’s her ex’s name?” I said.
    “Burt – Burton. Burton Roth.”
    “You know him?”
    “He seemed a pleasant man.”
    “Any kids?”
    “One, she’s with her father.”
    “Hmph,” I said.
    “Hmph?”
    “Hmph.”
    “What’s hmph mean?”
    “Means now I’ve got two cases and no fee,” I said.
    “Well, in this case there might not exactly be no fee,” Susan said.
    “I’ll get right on it,” I said.

CHAPTER SIX
    Hawk and I sat on a bench by the swan boat lagoon in the Public Garden on the first good day of spring. The temperature was 77. The sun was out. And the swan boats were cranking. We were looking at the notes I made from Belson’s confidential files.
    “So,” Hawk said when we were through. “Nobody actually claims to have seen Robinson and the Lamont kid together in any romantic fashion except these two professors.”
    I looked at my photocopy of Belson’s report.
    “Lillian Temple,” I said, “and Amir Abdullah.”
    “Amir,” Hawk said.
    He was looking at a squirrel who kept skittering closer to us, and rearing up and not getting anything to eat and looking as outraged as squirrels get to look.
    “You know Amir?” I said.
    “Yeah, I do,” Hawk said.
    “Tell me about him,” I said. A man in an oversized double-breasted suit walked by eating peanuts from a bag.
    “Gimme one of your peanuts, please,” Hawk said.
    The man in the big suit looked flustered and said, “Sure,” and held the bag out to Hawk. Hawk took a peanut out and said, “Thank you.” Big Suit smiled uncomfortably and walked on. Hawk gave the peanut to the squirrel and then said again, “Amir.”
    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,