Blood Games (32 page)

Two days later, on Thursday, July 7, Bart, Chris and Hank were sitting again at California, downing more pitchers of beer, when they decided to take off on another trip, this time to the beach. They stopped to see friends of Chris’s in Greenville, and Chris showed off the quarter-gram of cocaine and the ounce of Hawaiian pot that he had bought. Later, they drove through Washington with Bart and Hank urging Chris to roar down his street so they all could take a piss on his parents’ front lawn.

“We were in that Hunter S. Thompson, drug-induced spirit of adventure,” Bart said. “We figured, we’ve already fucked up so much, let’s go and fuck up some more.”

They got to the beach at three in the morning and headed back after a short frolic in the surf. At Havelock, Chris was stopped for speeding. The cops searched the car but didn’t find the pot that Bart had hidden under the dashboard. Chris got away with nothing more than another speeding ticket.

Although both Bart and Chris still made efforts to go to class sporadically, their outside activities left them little time to study. Chris, who had quit his job at Miller & Rhoads after the trip to South Carolina, was playing in two D&D groups and keeping track of his games and his characters’ powers on the computer in his room. After the long D&D sessions, which sometimes stretched far into the night and usually were enhanced by marijuana, alcohol, and acid, Chris often wanted to go adventuring in the tunnels beneath the campus. Usually, he and the others carried flashlights, but they sometimes made torches from sticks wrapped in toilet paper, and Chris usually carried a falchon, a bamboo martial arts sword.

“Chris was always saying, ‘Let’s go tunneling,’” Bart said later. “He liked going down there. He’d always take some pot, and we would walk around and smoke pot and read the graffiti.”

Once, they took cans of spray paint and left behind their own graffiti, Chris spraying “Underground Guild” and “CWP, July 1988” on the walls.

They never attempted to play D&D in the tunnels, and the most exciting thing that ever happened there was unexpectedly hearing another group of students and chasing them, making them think the cops were after them. “After a while, it got boring,” Bart said of their underground adventures. “It was hot and uncomfortable down there, but Chris never got enough of it.”

Chris spent more time with Sandra and Sybil than Bart did, sometimes devoting evenings to playing a card game called spades with them in one dorm room or another. Sandra often spent nights in Sybil’s room rather than driving back home.

Bart shied away from being alone with Sandra and Sybil after he realized that Sybil had a crush on him. He wanted nothing to do with her, and after she realized that he wasn’t interested in her, she never pressed her attentions.

Sandra was engaged, but her fiance had transferred to an out-of-state college in May, and they had since agreed to begin seeing others. She was dating somebody off campus and had no romantic interest in Chris or any of his friends.

Nonetheless, Chris tried hard to impress Sandra and Sybil. For one thing, he led them to believe that he kept important secrets in his computer. One was a “cool plan” that would bring him a lot of money, he boasted. Both Sandra and Sybil had heard Chris bragging about knowing big-time drug dealers, and they assumed that the plan had something to do with a drug deal.

Drugs were becoming more and more a part of Chris’s life by then. He was smoking pot at least three times a day, often sleeping for a while afterward. He continued drinking at least a pitcher of beer a day at California. And he used acid two or three times a week, usually a hit and a half at a time. His fifty-dollar weekly allowance all went for drugs, and his credit card was at its limit. Sandra and Sybil later recalled Chris asking his mother for money to buy clothes and bragging when she sent it that it was all going for drugs. He stopped buying cocaine because it was too expensive and didn’t offer a long-enough high. He continued to depend on Tim Parker and Parker’s friends for marijuana. And he got his acid from Bart and Hank, he said, although Bart later denied that he and Hank were Chris’s suppliers.

Chris made several more trips as the second summer school session wore on, twice going to Greenville to visit friends from high school. On one of those trips he took a friend named David, who was called Wasted White Skin, and a black friend of David’s.

On another trip, he and Brew went to the beach, stopping first at Chris’s house in Washington and visiting briefly with his mother. The real purpose of that trip was to go to the courthouse in New Bern and pay off the speeding ticket he had gotten on the earlier trip to the beach with Bart and Hank, but Chris was careful not to let his mother know that. He’d already had four previous traffic tickets and had lost his license once, and he knew what his parents’ reaction would be if they found out about this one. He told his mother on the stopover that he and Brew might come back and spend the night, but they returned to Raleigh instead. Chris waited until he got back to the dorm to call his mother and tell her that he wouldn’t be returning to spend the night, but he would come back soon for a longer visit, he promised.

He kept that promise on Friday, July 22, calling his mother first to let her know that he was coming. Before leaving, he tried to make a marijuana buy from a friend of Tim Parker’s, a high school student who took his money and a check, left him waiting three hours in a shopping center parking lot, and never returned.

Angry and frustrated, Chris drove on to Washington and spent that night at home. His visit took an unexpected turn on Saturday when the mother of the high school student from whom Chris had tried to make the drug buy called his house seeking an explanation for the check Chris had given to her son. Chris finally had to admit to his upset mother and stepfather that the check had been for marijuana and that he did smoke a little pot now and then. After that unpleasantness, Chris remained to grill hamburgers for his family. But despite his mother’s plea that he stay another night, he returned to campus after supper, saying he had to get back to work on a report for his political science class that was due Monday morning.

But when he got back to Raleigh that Saturday night, Chris did not work on the unwritten report that had been nagging at him for days. Instead, he and Bart went to California Pizza and drank beer. He didn’t work on his report the next day either. Sunday night, July 24, he, Sandra, and Sybil rode to the Sav-A-Center and Sandra went in and bought a case of beer. They brought it back to the dorm, put part of it in the refrigerator in Chris’s room, and took the rest to Sybil’s room, where they were joined by Chuck and Brew and began a game of spades. About eleven, Brew got upset at Chuck for helping the girls with the game, and they had words. Chuck left and went back to his room, but Chris and Brew remained, drinking and continuing the game.

The summer was not turning out as Kenyatta Upchurch hoped that it would. Instead of she and Neal rebuilding their relationship, they seemed to be growing further apart. Almost everything that he did irritated her and they argued constantly.

She hated that he remained so devoted to Dungeons and Dragons and focused most of his energies on the game, ignoring her. She hated that he continued stealing, slipping something into his clothing every night as he left his job at Sav-A-Center (later Neal would say that this was mostly food and he didn’t really consider that stealing). She hated the stupid things he was doing, like playing in the tunnels and using drugs. She was particularly upset that Neal had started using acid.

“I hate drunk people,” she said later. “I’m scared of drugs. I asked Neal, ‘Why do you have to do this?’ He said ‘I just want to try it.’ Neal is big on this experimental stuff, thinks you should try everything. I said, ‘Well, you’re going to get addicted to it.’ ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘It’s just experimental, it’s not really addictive.’ I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, sure.’”

More than anything, Kenyatta hated the people Neal was associating with that summer, his roommate Butch, her cousin Bart, whom she still called James and despised (“He’s scum,” she told Neal), and Chris Pritchard.

“Every time I saw Chris, he was either coming off or going on a high,” she said later. “Drugs or alcohol, every time he did it, he did it to excess. He was very skinny, very sick looking, black rings around his eyes, totally nasty looking, like he was right on the edge. He just looked real weird to me. Looked like he didn’t care about anything. James and Chris both had that look: We don’t care what happens.”

Kenyatta worked a later shift than usual at McDonald’s on Sunday night, July 24. She got off from that shift early and came back to the apartment thinking that she and Neal might do something together. As usual, she found Neal playing Dungeons and Dragons with Butch and another friend in the clutter of the living room.

“It just pissed me off,” she said later.

She went into the bedroom she shared with Neal, slammed the door, changed clothes, went about furiously cleaning the room. Several times, she went out to the kitchen or the bathroom, each time giving cold scowls to Neal and his friends, who played right on. Each time, she returned to the bedroom, slamming the door.

After a while, the game broke up and Neal came in looking sheepish.

“Kenyatta, I just did acid,” he said. “It’s going to take effect in about twenty minutes.”

“Well, thank you very much for telling me,” she said. “You can leave now. I don’t want you in this apartment.”

“He stood in the doorway a long time,” she recalled later. “He said, ‘I can’t believe you’re throwing me out.’ I said, ‘Just go. And don’t take your key. I’m not going to let you back in here. I don’t want to see you on a trip.’ He got his stuff and left.”

“Where did Neal go?” Butch asked her later.

“He’s doing acid,” Kenyatta said with disgust. “I guess he’s going to wander off somewhere in the tunnels.”

When Sandra and Sybil tired of spades sometime after midnight, Chris suggested another game, Truth or Dare. They played it for an hour or so and then went back to spades. Sandra and Sybil were tired and sleepy from the effects of the beer, and they began yawning and giving other signs that they were ready for bed, but Chris was drunk and wanted to play more.

“Can we please quit playing this game?” Sybil said at one point, but Chris and Brew showed no signs of stopping.

Several more times, Sybil and Sandra mentioned how tired and sleepy they were. Still Chris and Brew didn’t leave. Finally, Sybil insisted that they quit the game.

“What time is it?” Chris asked.

“It’s nearly three-thirty,” somebody said.

And much to the relief of Sandra and Sybil, Chris and Brew finally left. Brew headed for home. Chris went up one flight of stairs to his room, where Chuck had been long asleep, and climbed into his sleeping loft. In little more than an hour, the phone by Chuck’s bed would ring, and he would awaken long enough to jog Chris from his brief sleep and hand him the receiver. Chris would hear his sister’s voice telling him that his mother and stepfather had been stabbed and that he’d “better get his butt home.”

28

Soon after dawn on Monday, July 25, 1988, Kenyatta Upchurch was awakened by a tapping noise at her bedroom window. Rousing herself, she was momentarily startled to see a frightened and forlorn face staring through the glass at her. It took only a second for her to register that the face was Neal’s.

“Let me in,” he pleaded.

Kenyatta got up and opened the front door of the apartment.

She never had seen Neal looking like this. His eyes, normally as hooded as a tortoise’s, were wide open.

“He was frightening looking,” Kenyatta recalled. “He was sweating like a dog. I’d never seen him so wired. I thought he was coming off a bad trip.”

Her impulse was to say, “I told you so” and lecture him about drug use. But she felt sorry for him and took him into the bedroom and comforted him.

“It took him a long time to calm down,” she said later.

He hadn’t slept. That was obvious. And Kenyatta knew that he had an appointment later that morning with an officer from the Army ROTC program at State. Neal had been hoping somehow to get back in college, perhaps with help from ROTC. Kenyatta urged him to go to bed and try to get some sleep before the officer arrived.

Before he went to bed, Neal pulled two twenty-dollar bills and a ten from his pocket and gave them to Kenyatta as a peace offering. Where’d you get that? she wanted to know. He’d found a wallet the night before, he said, and he had taken the money from it and thrown the wallet and identification away. It was an unexpected bit of luck. They needed the money.

Sandra and Sybil got up late Monday morning. After dressing, they went looking for Chris. He’d asked them the night before if they wanted to go to lunch the next day and maybe go swimming that afternoon. It was the first time they could remember him making plans that far in advance. Sandra and Sybil thought they saw Chris’s car in the parking lot. When they found nobody in his room, they thought he might be in class. But a suitemate appeared from an adjoining room and told them that he had heard that Chris had to go home because of an emergency. What kind of an emergency? And why would he have gone and left his car? Sandra and Sybil were left to wonder.

When they returned to the dorm from their lunch at California Pizza, Sybil got a call from Chuck Jackson. He asked if she and Sandra could come up to his room. He had something important to tell them, he said. Chuck met them at the door. Brew was in the room, and so was Bart, whom they called Moog. Sandra and Sybil had never seen these guys looking so serious.