'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.'
