Small Vices Part 25

"You figure to take him?" Healy said.

I nodded again.

"Pretty big risk for a guy like Ellis Alves," Healy said.

"He ain't taking the risk for Alves," Quirk said.

"Then who the h.e.l.l..." Healy stopped halfway into the sentence and closed his mouth and looked at me for a minute. Then he nodded.

"Never mind," he said.

Chapter 34.

IT WAS A bright Sat.u.r.day morning. I had finished the last of my breakfast as I turned off of Route 128 into Newton. Clint Stapleton lived off campus in a condominium in Newton just across the Walford line near the Charles River. It was a townhouse arrangement that shared a mutual wall with another townhouse on a carefully curved road of other townhouses. All of the townhouses were white faux colonial structures with green shutters and big bra.s.s knockers on the front door, and big carriage lamps above the front door. The street was called Fifer's Way, and wherever the developers could put up a white picket fence they had. There was no one on the street. No kids. No dogs. This was a neighborhood of the not yet married, the recently divorced, the trying-it-out-for-a-year.

Clint Stapleton came to the door in a loose-fitting ivory cable knit sweater and a pair of baggy wheatcolored canvas pants with a drawstring waist. On his feet were a pair of ta.s.seled moccasins, no socks. He had a navy blue paisley print do rag on his head. Maybe it wasn't just a fashion statement. Maybe he was bald and his head got cold. On the other hand, if you were bald, then you really couldn't be said to have a do, so would it be possible to have a do rag?

"Now just what in the f.u.c.k do you want?" Clint said.

"You ever think of the metaphysical aspects of that question?" I said.

"I got no time for jiving," he said.

He p.r.o.nounced all the letters, jive-ing, like some guy at a Princeton eating club trying to get down. I inched my foot into the doorway and hoped he wouldn't slam it. I was wearing running shoes.

"We need to talk a little more," I said.

"About what?"

"About Melissa, about your pro career, about your cousin Hunt, about Tommy Miller, stuff like that."

Clint didn't know what to do. He started to speak, and didn't. He looked over his shoulder back into the room behind him. He looked at me. I smiled.

"Can't it wait?" he said. "I got company."

I shook my head and smiled some more. Maybe if sleuthing didn't work out, I could get a job selling aluminum siding, door to door.

He backed away from the front door and opened it wider.

"Okay," he said. "Come in."

I walked into a small entry hall with a stairway along the right-hand wall. A breakfast nook and a kitchen was to my left. The living room was straight ahead. A pretty girl with no makeup and straight blond hair that hung below her shoulders appeared in the door to the breakfast nook wearing a pale pink velour robe. She too was barefooted, her toenails painted pale pink. She might have been twenty.

"I gotta talk to a guy, Trish, maybe you could make us some coffee or something."

"Sure, Clint," she said. "Cone filter okay?"

He nodded and I nodded and smiled at her, too. It was working so well I thought I'd spread it around. The blond kid smiled back at me and went to the kitchen. I followed Clint into the living room. There was a fireplace on a diagonal across the corner. It was one of those prefabbed, double-walled metal jobs that can be framed in anywhere you can run a chimney. A sawdust and paraffin log was burning in it, looking sort of cheerful but putting out very little heat.

"Whaddya want," Stapleton said.

He was trying to sound tough, but there was no iron in his voice. He was scared.

"Somebody aced Tommy Miller last night, on the sixth floor of a parking garage at Quincy Market," I said.

"Who?"

"Tommy Miller, big blond State cop who framed Ellis Alves for you."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"How much did it cost to frame Ellis?" I said.

He stood without speaking.

"You don't know, do you?" I said. "Because your old man paid."

He glanced toward the kitchen.

"Your old man pay someone to crank Tommy, too?" I said.

The girl with the pink toenails came into the room carrying a silver carafe of coffee, a creamer, a sugar bowl, some spoons, and three cups on a big black lacquer tray. She gave the room a big smile.

"Here's coffee," she said and set the tray down on a low table in front of the couch.

Clint looked at her as if she were a stranger, then he looked back at me the same way, then he said, "I gotta go," and walked to the front hall, grabbed a blue and gold warmup jacket from the hall closet, and went out the front door. The girl stared after him. I poured two cups of coffee, handed one to her, and added cream and sugar to mine.

"Don't feel bad," I said. "Means more for us."

"Where is he going?"

"Probably to call his father," I said. "You known him long?"

"Clint? I met him when i was a freshman, but we didn't start dating until this year."

"What year are you now, Trish?"

"Junior."

"You live here, or just visiting?"

"Oh, no. I live on campus. I just come over on weekends mostly."

"You love Clint?"

"Well, sure, I mean what's not to love, he's gorgeous, he's a big tennis star, lots of dough. He's very nice."

"You think you'll get married?"

"Oh, no, I don't think so. I didn't mean I loved him that way."

"What way do you love him?"

"Until I graduate, sort of. You know? I didn't mean, love and marriage kind of love. Who are you anyway?"

"I'm a detective," I said. "I think Clint is in quite a lot of trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

"I'm trying to find that out," I said. "He ever talk to you about Melissa Henderson?"

She shook her head.

"Tommy Miller?"

"I don't know anything about those people. I don't know anything about any trouble Clint is in. In fact, I don't believe you. I don't think he's in trouble at all. I think you're a nasty racist. And I think you should leave."

"You ever meet his father?" I said.

"I think you should leave right now," she said.

She was frowning, and it made a little vertical furrow between her eyes that would one day be a wrinkle, depending upon how much frowning she had to do.

"Okay," I said. "Most people don't pay any attention to my advice, and are probably wise not to, but I think you should stay away from Clint Stapleton."

"You've got no right to tell me what to do," she said.

I put down my cup of coffee, half drunk.

"Of course I don't," I said and stood.

"Take care of yourself," I said and went out into the front hall and out the front door through which Clint Stapleton had only recently fled.

Chapter 35.

IT WAS A late Friday afternoon with a light snow falling steadily. Susan had two more patients to see and I was pa.s.sing the time until she saw them by running along the Charles River. I ran east along the Cambridge side, past the boat house, and up onto the Weeks Footbridge that crossed the river and linked the rest of Harvard with the Business School.

The streetlights on both sides of the river were blurry in the snow, and pedestrians coming toward me looked slightly out of focus. It was barely freezing, just cold enough for snow. The river wasn't frozen yet and the black water moved opaquely, patched with light and shadow, curtained by the snowfall, toward the harbor five miles east. The footbridge has a barrel arch to it, and as I reached the peak of it I saw a tall man in a gray overcoat coming toward me through the snow from the Boston side. The brim of his gray soft hat was pulled down to shield his face from the snow. He had a gun.

The first bullet hit me just as I dodged to my left. It got me in the right shoulder, and the gun I'd almost gotten out of my jacket pocket plopped softly into the cushioning snow. The sound of the shot was gentle in the falling snow. The second bullet got me lower and turned me sideways against the chest-high railing of the bridge. I had no feeling in my right arm. The Gray Man was maybe twenty feet away, standing square, holding the handgun in both hands, perfectly still, his outline muted in the snowfall. Nothing moving except for the slight recoil of the long-barreled hand gun. I felt the thump of his third shot in my back, near my spine, as I grabbed at the railing with what strength there was left in me. My left leg felt numb. I heaved myself mostly with my left arm and the push of my right leg up over the bridge railing and fell twenty feet into the not quite frozen water. The impact was stunning. The shock of the cold was slowed by my running clothes, but only for a moment. The cold water began to bite through the clothes almost at once. I went down under the black surface, carried by the momentum of my drop. The cold water seemed to give me a little lift at the same time it almost paralyzed me. I held my breath and let the current move me away from the bridge, treading water with one leg and one arm. I got my head above the surface, feeling already the cold and the numbness of cold and shock and, probably, blood loss. I was in the dark. I wouldn't last long in the river, but I had no chance on the bridge. I looked back and saw the blurred form of the Gray Man standing at the rail, motionless, looking into the darkness. He didn't shoot. He couldn't see me in the snow-curtained shadows. Then I couldn't see him. My vision shrank and all there was was my nearly senseless body in the icy water and the smell of the river at my face. I paddled feebly toward the left bank with my good arm and got hold of a pole. It was a pole in the center of the earth and I clung to it trying not to spin off into s.p.a.ce, and the pole shrank rapidly and the world spun faster and faster, and then the pole got too small to hang onto and the centrifugal pull spun me out, and I sailed, fast at first and then slower, into black s.p.a.ce where I drifted without weight or direction forever, until I b.u.mped against something and, still spinning, wriggled onto it in the deadly cold, and disappeared into the blackened vortex of infinity.

Infinity turned out to be busy. It revolved more slowly than the world had when I'd spun off its top-most pole. There was a lot of random noise, a lot of sudden and unexplained light coming and going. There was movement, jostling, wailing, and blaring, and long stretches of dark silence. There was an occasional blurred human sound, and the smell of chemicals, and the feel of my breath, and some pain, and the thud of my pulse that sometimes enveloped all the other sounds. The slow revolutions got slower. The thunder of my pulse quieted. My throat was sore. The light was too bright. It was hot. I shifted in the bed. There was a tube in my throat. There was an IV in the back of my right hand. There was a woman in a white uniform looking down at me. I wasn't dead.

"Welcome back," the nurse said.

She was a black woman. Her voice had a Caribbean lilt to it.

I smiled pleasantly and said, "Glad to be here."

She smiled back at me.

"You're not coherent yet," she said. "It'll take a little while."

It took a couple of hours. During which time a resident appeared and took the feeding tube out of my throat, and the nurse cranked my bed up enough that I could see Hawk sitting in a chair across the room reading a book by Tony Brown.

"Where's Susan?" I said.

"Vinnie's with her," Hawk said.

"I want to see her."

"She'll be here," Hawk said.

"Where is here?" I said.

"Ma.s.sachusetts General Hospital."

"How long?"

"'Bout three weeks," Hawk said. "Three weeks?"

"You been out three weeks, you been here two weeks, four days. Couple of coeds trying to cross-country ski found you on the bank of the river, 'bout opposite the foot of De Wolfe Street. They put their jackets over you and one of them stayed with you while the other one run over to Dunster House and called the Harvard cops. They got you up to Mt. Auburn. Soon as Mt. Auburn got you stabilized, Quirk had you brought over here. Officially you here as James B. Hick.o.c.k."

"James Butler Hick.o.c.k?"

"Un huh. Quirk's idea."

There was too much information coming at me too fast. I closed my eyes for a moment. Infinity revolved a little and I opened them. It was dark. Susan was sitting beside the bed. I put my left arm out to her and she bent over without a word and kissed me and I held her against me as hard as I was able, which wasn't very. I smelled her perfume and the scent of her shampoo, and the scent of her. I felt shaky inside, but the air going into my lungs seemed fresh and plentiful, and after a while I felt the shakiness quiet.

We stayed that way a long time with her face against mine, my arm weakly around her. I could feel her breath on my face. Then she sat slowly up, carefully taking my arm and putting it back down on the top of the sheet and kept her hand on top of it.

I grinned at her and said, "Here's looking at you, kid."

She patted my hand quietly.

"How am I?" I said.