Текст книги "Small Vices"

Автор книги: Robert B. Parker

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Chapter 33

MOST OF THE traffic in the Quincy Market Building was ambulatory. People going to work, picking up coffee on the way. We got one of the little tables at the east end of the Market and a waitress gave us coffee while we studied the menu.

When we had ordered, Quirk said, "Spenser thinks this is part of something he's working on."

"You think this has something to do with the Alves case?" Healy said.

"Yeah."

"You know the Alves case, Martin?" Healy said.

"No."

"Why don't you tell Martin about the Alves case and then go ahead and tell both of us what you know," Healy said.

So I did, sticking to what I knew and not theorizing, while eggs and ham and toast and coffee were brought and eaten and the table was cleared and more coffee was poured. No one asked us to move when we were finished. Neither Quirk nor Healy showed a badge, but there was something about them that people recognized. We were welcome all day if we wished.

While I talked, neither Quirk nor Healy spoke, or even moved except to drink coffee. I could feel the weight of their concentration. When I was through, they were both quiet, thinking about what I'd told them.

"And you didn't shoot him?" Healy said.

"You know he didn't shoot him," Quirk said.

Healy nodded sadly.

"Yeah, I know," he said. "I knew it when I asked the question."

"Okay, we got the same facts you do. You want to theorize with us?"

"Sure," I said.

"You figure Miller put Parisi on you," Quirk said.

"Yeah. He'd know guys like Parisi, and he'd have leverage to make Parisi do him a favor."

"And he showed up right after Parisi got collared," Healy said.

"Why'd he do it?" Quirk said.

"Miller? I figure he talked with the kid, at the time of the murder…"

"Stapleton," Quirk said.

"Yeah, and the kid mentioned that his pro tennis career would be adversely affected if he got hauled in and questioned about his girlfriend's murder."

"And?" Healy said.

"And he may have mentioned to Miller that his dad had around two hundred gazillion dollars."

"So they made a deal?"

"Yeah."

"And Miller rigged it for Ellis Alves to take the fall so the pressure would be off the kid," Healy said.

"My guess," I said. "Either he came across Alves in the course of his employment or he looked him up in the case files under Rape."

"We can look at Miller's finances," Healy said. "See if he was involved in a case that Alves was involved in. See if we've got Alves in the Rape files."

"Then you show up and talk to the kid, Stapleton, and the kid gets scared," Quirk said. "And he calls Miller and Miller sends out some sluggers because he thinks you're like a regular person and a few big guys with guinea names can scare you right back to doing divorce tails."

"Guy I know heard that someone was looking to, ah, coerce me, so I had Hawk with me."

"Don't seem fair," Quirk said.

"Seemed fair to me," I said.

"Okay, I like it pretty good so far. Why'd Miller come after you himself when Parisi was picked up?" Quirk said.

"He was a cop," I said. "And a particular kind of cop. He was used to scaring people. He was a big tough guy. He was used to getting things done by slapping people around."

"Maybe so," Healy said.

"But I don't see why he comes on like Conan the Barbarian," Healy said.

"He came in, wanted me to stand up, I declined, and he came for me. I think before he started trying to find out what I knew, he wanted to be sure I wasn't wearing a wire," I said. "And things got away from him."

"Meaning you kicked his ass," Quirk said.

"In a manner of speaking," I said modestly.

"Which made scaring you to death sort of problematic," Healy said.

"Yes."

"So he didn't get to find out what you knew, and he didn't get you to walk away from the case."

I shrugged.

"Tommy was a tough guy," Healy said.

"So who popped him?" Quirk said.

"The Gray Guy?"

"Miller told me it was way above," I said.

"Above what?"

"Above all of us," I said.

"You figure the Gray Guy comes from above?" Quirk said.

"He's not somebody you hire out of a pool hall someplace," I said.

"Kind of guy might use a.22?" Quirk said.

"Looked like a small hole in Miller," Healy said.

"Yep."

"Guy uses a.22 is a specialist," Quirk said. "Anybody can blow a hole the size of an ashtray in some guy's skull with a.44 Magnum."

"Guy uses a.22, wants people to know he's a specialist," Healy said. "Know how good he is."

"Use the right load and know where to shoot and you can put one in his head and have it ping-pong around inside the skull," Quirk said. "Do more damage than a Mag."

"How much more damage do you need to do?" Healy said.

The people moving through the marketplace were changing character. The workers in suits and overcoats had given way to the tourists in parkas and warmup jackets. They didn't hurry. They meandered, stopping at food stalls, looking at the food.

Quirk said, "You think this kid Stapleton did his girlfriend?"

"He's a better bet than Alves," I said.

"He got the kind of reach that could orchestrate this kind of coverup?" Healy said.

"The Gray Man and all?"

"I doubt it," I said. "But his father might."

"You think he hired the Gray Man?"

"He might have."

"You think the Gray Man clipped Miller?"

"Yes."

"You got any evidence for any of it?" Quirk said.

"Not a jot or a tittle," I said.

"How you going to get some?"

"I'll talk to the Stapleton kid again, see what happens."

"You want some cover?" Healy said.

I shook my head.

"No point being more macho than you need to be," Healy said.

"That ain't it," Quirk said. "He figures to keep pushing until the Gray Man makes a run at him again."

Healy looked at me. I nodded.

"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 hell…" 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 Saturday 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 brass 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 tasseled 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 fuck 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 pronounced 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 passing 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 space, 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 space where I drifted without weight or direction forever, until I bumped 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.

"Massachusetts 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. Hickock."

"James Butler Hickock?"

"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.

"You are going to live," Susan said.

"I don't seem to have much feeling in my left leg or my right arm."

"Doctor said to expect that," Susan said.

"For how long?"

"I don't think he knows," Susan said.

I nodded, which made me feel a little funny, and I closed my eyes again for a moment. When I opened them the sun was too bright against the far wall. Susan was gone and so was Hawk. Martin Quirk was sitting where Hawk sat, and a man in a white coat was standing staring down at me over half glasses. He was a lean guy, with graying hair and a thin, sharp face. The face was tanned. There was a stethoscope hanging out of his pocket. Under the white coat he wore a white shirt with wide blue vertical stripes, and a blue tie with small white polka dots. He had a wedding ring on his left hand. His hands were tanned. His nails were square and neat as if they'd been manicured.

"My name is Phil Marinaro," he said. "How do you feel?"

"Like I got shot and fell in the river," I said.

"Makes sense," he said. "You feel like talking?"

"I feel more like listening," I said.

"Okay," Marinaro said. "If the man who shot you had used bigger bullets, you'd be dead."

"Twenty-two longs," Quirk said. "Same as Miller."

"And you were lucky. The cold water probably slowed down the bleeding a little, and some of the internal swelling. The kids who found you probably saved you from dying of exposure. They covered you with their ski parkas, and one of them, in fact, pressed herself against you until the ambulance came."

"Who can blame her," I said.

"By the time the EMTs got there, you didn't have a pulse," Marinaro said. "They got you started on the way to the hospital. With all of that, the small caliber gun, the cold water, the resourceful Harvard kids, the professional EMTs, with all of that, if you weren't as big and strong as you are, you'd be dead."

"Right now I feel about as strong as a chicken," I said.

"Right now you are about as strong as a chicken," Marinaro said. "You are going to need a lot of rehab. Can you move your right arm?"

I couldn't.

"Left leg?"

No.

"How technical do you want this," Marinaro said.

"Eventually I want it all," I said. "But right now all I want is a prognosis."

"I don't really know," Marinaro said. "I'm a good surgeon. The repair job is first-rate. But you were damned near shot to pieces and almost drowned. A bullet fractionally missed your spine. I can make some informed guesses, which is mostly what prognosis is anyway. I think if you are willing to work hard enough you can come back from this. I don't know how far. It is probably a matter of how hard you work."

"I can work pretty hard," I said.

"That's what they tell me. Once you're able to get up, we'll start you on some simple exercises with a trainer. It will be a long, slow process."

"How soon," I said.

"Don't know. We'll watch you. We'll get you started as early as possible."

"Not a big rush," I said.

"No, you're pretty battered, and the amount of anesthesia you've had is debilitating. Captain, do you wish to say anything?"

"Yeah," Quirk said.

He stood and stepped to my bedside and looked down at me.

"You know who shot you?"

"Gray Man," I said.

"We figured. Hawk brought me up to date on that."

"I saw him," I said.

"Dr. Marinaro knows who you are and why you're here. Everybody else thinks your name is Hickock and you are the victim of a jealous husband. We've told the papers that your lifeless body was recovered from the Charles River. Both papers ran an obit on you. You'll probably enjoy them."

"Call in some favors, did we?"

"Several," Quirk said.

"Aren't you a little out of line?" I said.

"Yeah."

"When you assigned Belson and Farrell to Susan, I said you weren't really in a position to do that, and Hawk said that was true, but you didn't give a shit."

Quirk shrugged.

"Why you think it took me so long to make captain?" he said.

"I always wondered."

Quirk grinned.

"Besides, from Hawk that's a compliment."

"True."

"We'll keep somebody with you while you're here," Quirk said. "Hawk will be around a lot, and Vinnie Morris, and some of our people. I'm transferring Belson and Farrell to this detail."

"The cops and the robbers," I said.

"Changes places and handy dandy," Quirk said.

"Well," I said. "You literate son of a bitch."

"I heard you say it once. I got no idea what it means."

"As long as the Gray Man thinks I'm dead, and he has no reason not to, Susan's safe. This is a guy doesn't waste time killing people for nothing."

"That's what Hawk and I thought, but we also figured he might watch her for a while just to be sure. So when you woke up, we had the Cambridge cops pick her up and take her in as if for questioning. Then we smuggled her over here."

"And no one followed her?" I said.

"Hawk brought her," Quirk said.

"I withdraw the question," I said.

I might have said something else, but I'm not sure, and then I was back in dreamland listening to the music of the spheres.