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 effectless 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.
Chapter 54
WHEN THEY LET Ellis out, Hawk picked him up and brought him to my office. I had just finished endorsing the check from Cone, Oakes, and was slipping it into the deposit envelope when they came in.
'What are you going to do now?' I said to Ellis.
He was as tight and watchful and arrogant as he had been before, but now that he was out he was more talkative.
'You been in the place four years, what you do?'
'Whatever it was would involve a woman,' I said.
'You got that right,' he said.
'Try to make it voluntary,' I said.
'You got no call talking to me that way,' Alves said. 'ah'm an innocent man.'
'You didn't do Melissa Henderson,' I said. 'That's not the same as being innocent.'
'You get me in here to talk shit?' Alves said.
'You need some money?' I said.
''Course I need money,' he said. 'You think being inside a high-paying fucking job?'
I took two hundred dollars out of my wallet and gave it to him. It left me with seven, until I deposited the check, but the bank was close by. Ellis took the money and counted it and folded it over and slipped it into the pocket of his pale blue sweat pants.
'Ah' in supposed to say thank you?'
'We know you an asshole, Ellis,' Hawk said. 'You don't have to keep proving it every time you open your mouth.'
'I just figure Whitey owe me something, and he making a down payment,' Alves said.
Hawk looked at me and grinned. 'Way to go, Whitey.'
I nodded modestly.
'You got a job anywhere?' I said.
'No reason for you to be asking me about no job,' Alves said. 'It got nothing to do with you.'
'Know a guy runs a trucking service out of Mattapan,' I said.
'Don't need no help from you,' Alves said.
