Small Vices

chapter 53

The chances of a black man being elected DA in Suffolk County were comparable to discovering that the pope is a Buddhist. But there he was, Owen Brooks, the son of a New York City cop, a graduate of Harvard Law School, neat, well dressed, pleasant, and as easy to fool as a Lebanese rug merchant.

We were in Pemberton Square in Brooks’s office: Brooks, Quirk, Donald, Dina, and Clint Stapleton, a guy named Frank Farantino from New York who represented Donald Stapleton, and me.

Brooks did the introductions. When he finished, Farantino said, “Why is Spenser here?”

“Mr. Spenser is here at my request,” Brooks said. “Since he has been both the primary investigator in this case, and one of its victims, I thought it might serve us all to listen to him, before we get into court and this thing turns into a hairball.”

“Is this a formal procedure?” Farantino said.

“Oh, of course not,” Brooks said. His smile was wide and gracious. “Nothing’s on the record here, I just thought we might get some sense of where the truth lies if we talked a little before we started grinding the gears of justice.”

Quirk sat in the back row of chairs, against the wall of the office, next to the door. Clint sat rigidly between his parents. He was stiffly upright. His face was blank. Don was regal in his bearing. Dina rested her hand on her son’s forearm. Farantino was to the left of Don. I was to the right of Dina.

“Spenser, you want to hold forth?”

“Here’s what I think happened,” I said.

“Think?” Farantino said. “We’re here to see what he thinks?”

Brooks made a placating gesture with his right hand.

“He can prove enough of it to require us to pay attention,” Brooks said.

“Clint Stapleton killed Melissa Henderson,” I said. “I don’t know why. But he concocted a story about a black man kidnapping her and he got his cousin Hunt McMartin and his cousin’s wife Glenda to say they saw the kidnapping. When a State cop named Tommy Miller came in on the case, he took one sniff and it smelled bad. It would have smelled bad to any cop. But Miller also knew that Stapleton had dough and that his father had more money than Courtney Love, and Miller saw a chance to get some of it. So he supported Clint’s story and even supplied a fall guy, guy named Ellis Alves. Maybe he busted him once for something else. Maybe he just pulled him up off the known offenders file. We look hard, we’ll find a connection. And it all works, and Alves goes to Cedar Junction and everybody else gets back to being a yuppie.”

Nobody said anything. From his place by the door, Quirk’s eyes moved from person to person in the room. Otherwise he was as motionless as everyone else.

“But because Alves’s lawyer won’t quite quit on the thing, I get brought in and I start to poke around and pretty soon people are having to lie to me, and the lies are the kind that won’t hold if I keep on looking, and I keep on looking and Miller tries to scare me off and that doesn’t work out, and it implicates Miller so somebody killed him before he can say anything, and Clint’s father hires a guy to kill me. We have that guy, he probably killed Miller, he tried to kill me, and he’ll testify that Don Stapleton hired him.”

“In exchange for what?” Farantino said.

“We’ve made no deals with him,” Brooks said.

“So he’s looking at major time,” Farantino said.

“I would think so,” Brooks said without expression. “If Spenser testifies against him.”

Farantino looked at me very quickly. “Why wouldn’t you testify,” he said.

I shrugged and shook my head.

Farantino looked back at Brooks just as quickly.

“What’s your case against Rugar.”

“Eyewitness,” Brooks said. “Rugar shot Spenser and Spenser saw him do it.”

Farantino’s head swiveled back at me. “You sonova bitch,” he said. “You have a deal with him, don’t you?”

I shrugged again.

Don Stapleton said, “What’s going on, Frank?”

“You see how cute they are?” Farantino said. “The DA’s got no deal with him, but unless Spenser testifies against Rugar they’ve got no case. So Spenser makes the deal. Rugar gives them you, and Spenser won’t testify. So they may as well give him immunity and use him to try and get you.”

“And he goes free?”

“He goes free.”

All three of the Stapletons stared at me.

I said to Clint, “Why’d you kill her? Did you mean to or did something happen?”

Farantino said, “Don’t answer that.”

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 affectless voice. “Fix the pickininny. Well, you fixed it good this time, Bwana.”

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.