Small Vices

He turned toward Brooks.

"That's an entirely inappropriate question and you damned well know it, Owen."

Brooks nodded vigorously. "Entirely," he said.

"It was an accident," Clint Stapleton said softly.

Don Stapleton said, "Shut up, Clint."

"We were having fun, it was rough but she liked rough, and there's a thing you do, you know where you choke someone while having sex and it makes them come…"

Dina Stapleton put her hand over her son's mouth. Don Stapleton said, "Clint, that's enough, not another word out of you. I mean it."

Clint gently turned his head away from his mother's hand.

"Great White Bwana," he said without looking at his father. "You think you can fix this?"

Don Stapleton was on his feet. "You goddamned fool, I can if you'll keep your mouth shut."

Clint shook his head staring at the floor between his feet.

"Get fucking real," he said.

"Don't you speak to me like that," Don said.

Dina began to cry softly, her hands clasped in her lap, her head down. Farantino was on his feet now, beside Don.

"Everybody just shut up," he said.

"Well, Melissa loved that, we'd done it before, but this time we both got too excited and… she died."

It had been said. There was no way to reel the words back in. They hung there in the room, surprisingly inornate after all that had been done to keep them from being said.

Clint was trying not to cry, and failing. His mother cried beside him, her shoulders slumped hopelessly. His father, still on his feet, was white faced, and the lines at the corners of his mouth seemed very deep.

"And I got scared and left her body and called my dad." Clint's voice was soft and flat and the emptiness in it was uncomfortable to hear. "My dad," he said, "the Great White Fixer. He fixed it good, didn't he."

"Clint, you're my son," Don said. "I was doing what I had to do."

"You been fixing it all my life," Clint said in his effectless voice. "Fix the pickini

There was a rehearsed quality to Clint's speech as if it were a part he'd learned, the fragment of a long argument with his father that had unspooled silently in his head since he was small.

Farantino said, "You simply have to stop talking, both of you. You simply have to be quiet." He looked at Brooks, who was listening and watching. "This is informal," Farantino said. "This is off the record. You can't use this."

Brooks smiled at him politely.

"Goddamn you," Don said to his son. The tension trembled in his voice.

"He already has," Clint said and the words seemed clogged as he started to cry hard and turned toward his mother and pressed his face against her chest and sobbed.

Dina put her arms around him and closed her eyes. She cried with him, the tears squeezing out under the closed eyelids. I glanced back at Quirk. He was expressionless. I looked at Brooks. His face was as empty as Quirk's. I wondered what mine looked like. I felt like a child molester.

"You hired Rugar to kill Spenser, didn't you?" Brooks said quietly to Don Stapleton.

Farantino said, "Don!"

Don said, "Yes," in a voice so soft it was almost inaudible.

"And Miller," Brooks said, "to cover your tracks."

"Yes."

I was looking at Clint when his father confessed. The dead look left his eyes. For a moment he looked triumphant.

"I think we need a stenographer," Brooks said and picked up the phone.

Chapter 54

WHEN THEY LET Ellis out, Hawk picked him up and brought him to my office. I had just finished endorsing the check from Cone, Oakes, and was slipping it into the deposit envelope when they came in.

"What are you going to do now?" I said to Ellis.

He was as tight and watchful and arrogant as he had been before, but now that he was out he was more talkative.

"You been in the place four years, what you do?"

"Whatever it was would involve a woman," I said.

"You got that right," he said.

"Try to make it voluntary," I said.

"You got no call talking to me that way," Alves said. "ah'm an i

"You didn't do Melissa Henderson," I said. "That's not the same as being i

"You get me in here to talk shit?" Alves said.

"You need some money?" I said.

"'Course I need money," he said. "You think being inside a high-paying fucking job?"

I took two hundred dollars out of my wallet and gave it to him. It left me with seven, until I deposited the check, but the bank was close by. Ellis took the money and counted it and folded it over and slipped it into the pocket of his pale blue sweat pants.

"Ah' in supposed to say thank you?"

"We know you an asshole, Ellis," Hawk said. "You don't have to keep proving it every time you open your mouth."

"I just figure Whitey owe me something, and he making a down payment," Alves said.

Hawk looked at me and gri

I nodded modestly.

"You got a job anywhere?" I said.

"No reason for you to be asking me about no job," Alves said. "It got nothing to do with you."

"Know a guy runs a trucking service out of Mattapan," I said.

"Don't need no help from you," Alves said.

"You did yesterday," Hawk said.

"I'm supposed to be grateful?" Alves said. "I'm in for four years on something I didn't do, that some honky rich kid done, and they let me out and ah'm supposed to say thank you?"

"Actually it was a nigger rich kid," Hawk said. "And they didn't let you out, Spenser got you out."

"And he got paid for it too, didn't he? Who go

"Actually," I said, "two hundred is probably about what four years of your time is worth. You want that trucker job give me a call."

"Don't you be sitting 'round waiting," Alves said.

He turned toward the door and hesitated fractionally while he looked at Hawk, saw no objection, and walked out of my office.

"Glad he didn't get all sicky sweet with gratitude," Hawk said.

"Yeah," I said. "It's always so embarrassing."

"He be back inside in six months," Hawk said.

"I hope so," I said.

We were quiet for a moment…

"I probably wouldn't have made it back without you," I said to Hawk.

"Probably not," Hawk said.

I picked up the deposit envelope and looked at it.

"What do you think he'll do with the two hundred?" I said.

"Depends," Hawk said. "If he don't have a gun, he'll buy one. If he does, he'll spend it on a bottle of booze and a woman."

"Nice to know he's got priorities," I said.

"Good to know what they are, too," Hawk said.

I nodded and looked at the deposit envelope again. It was a lot of money.

"I might have made it back alone," I said.

Hawk smiled his charming heartless smile.

"Maybe," he said.

Chapter 55

RUGAR'S TESTIMONY CONVICTED Don Stapleton. Clint's confession was supported by Hunt McMartin and the lissome Glenda. He too was convicted. Both convictions were being appealed when they let Rugar out. Brooks told me when he was getting out, and I met him on the steps of the new Suffolk County jail. The first snow of the season had begun to fall, it was only a degree or two away from rain, and it fell like rain, straight down, and small.