Small Vices

Chapter 51

The next morning, clear eyed, clean shaven, close cropped, and contumescent, I went to see Clint Stapleton again.

He wasn’t at his condo. I found him on the indoor practice court at Taft playing against a short red-haired scrambler who kept getting the ball back over the net without looking very good doing it. The tennis coach was watching them closely, and maybe ten undergraduates were in the stands. Stapleton had graduated from Taft last June while I was fighting the hill in Santa Barbara, but he’d redshirted his first two years and had another year of eligibility left. And, according to my research, his coaches didn’t feel he was ready yet for the pro tour. Stapleton’s game was serve and volley, and he looked overpowering. Except the red-haired kid kept returning his serve and lobbing Stapleton’s volleys to push him back to the base line. It was annoying Stapleton. He kept hitting the ball harder, and the kid kept getting to it and getting his racquet on it and getting it back over the net. Sometimes he’d hit it on the rim of the racquet. Sometimes it would come back over the net like a damaged pigeon. But he kept getting it back and Stapleton kept hitting it harder. And the harder he hit it, the more erratic he became. They played three games while I watched. The red-haired kid held serve in the second one, and broke Stapleton’s serve in the third. Stapleton double-faulted on the game point and threw his racquet straight up into the air. It arced nearly to the top of the arena and fell clattering on the composition court five feet from the red-haired kid, who was grinning. I stood in the shadow of the stands for a while and watched.

“Control, Stapes, focus and control,” the coach said to him. “He’s not beating you. You’re beating yourself.”

“Control this,” Stapleton said and walked off the court and out the runway through the stands past me.

I fell silently in beside him as he walked, and we were out of the indoor facility and into the bright fall sunshine before he took notice of me. His focus on being mad seemed good. On the walkway that led toward the student union, Stapleton stopped abruptly and turned and looked at me.

“Are you following me?” he said.

“I prefer to think of it as you and me forging ahead together,” I said.

Stapleton recognized me. I could see the stages of recognition play on his face. First he realized he knew me. Then he realized who I was. Then he realized I was supposed to be dead. And finally he realized that I wasn’t dead. The effect of the sequence was cumulative. He stepped back two big steps.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

“We need to talk.”

“I heard you were dead,” he said.

“Where’d you hear that?”

“It was in the paper.”

“Media distortion’s a drag, isn’t it?”

Stapleton started walking again. I stayed with him.

“I can talk with you this way, but we’ve got hard things to talk about,” I said. “And it might go better if we sat on that bench there by the pond.”

He looked at me for a time without stopping, then he sort of sighed and gave a big forbearing shrug and walked over to the bench and sat. I sat beside him. Several ducks waddled promptly over expecting to be fed. They were brown ducks for the most part except one which had a green head and was probably a male duck, though I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know a hell of a lot about ducks.

“Your old man,” I said, “hired a guy named Rugar to kill me.”

Stapleton didn’t say a word. He didn’t look at me. He sat straight upright on the bench with his feet flat on the ground and stared at the ducks.

“He’ll testify to that in court,” I said.

Stapleton didn’t speak. The abyss was starting to open in front of him.

“But the question still to be answered is why did he?”

The abyss opened wider. Stapleton stared harder at the ducks.

“You know why he did that?” I said.

Stapleton shrugged, just enough to let me know he’d heard the question. The ducks waddled briskly back and forth in front of us, looking anxious about the possibility of scoring some stale bread.

“I think he did it to keep me from finding out that you killed Melissa Henderson.”

The abyss was beneath him. Looking at the ducks didn’t help.

“You want to talk about that?” I said.

He shook his head.

“You’re going to have to,” I said. “Sooner or later. I know you did it. And I know you and Miller and your old man set up a guy you didn’t even know named Ellis Alves to take the fall for it. And you or your father got your cousin Hunt to testify that he did it. What I don’t know is why did you kill her?”

Stapleton seemed frozen in his position, looking at the ducks but seeing the abyss. No more big man on campus, no more cold beer, no more women, no more picture in the paper, no more condominium in a nice section. No more leisurely Sunday mornings with oranges and a green cockatoo. The abyss was too wide and too deep and he was in it. He stood suddenly and began to walk away from me. I didn’t bother to follow him. He walked faster and then broke into a run. I watched him running away until he passed the corner of the gym and was out of sight.

I looked at the ducks. The one with the green head looked back at me with black eyes that held no expression of any kind.

“Yeah,” I said to the duck, “I know.”