Blood Games (39 page)

Soon after Bart had moved, he had encountered Neal on the street unexpectedly. It was the first time they had seen each other since the previous summer, and they chatted for only a couple of minutes. Bart said that he might soon be looking for another place to live. He was lying low, he said, because Christy was after him again for parole violations, and this time, if she caught him, he almost certainly would have to go to jail.

By early April, when John and Christy were heating up their search for him, Bart had moved back onto campus, staying with friends in Burgaw dorm who let him sleep on the floor. As he continued to hear reports from friends who had been interviewed by police, it became apparent that they were talking to Chris’s entire circle of friends, but he thought their interest in him was greater than that. If the police were suspicious of Chris, Bart figured, his friendship with Chris and his criminal history also likely made him suspect, and he was sure that the police knew about his high school break-ins and other troubles.

“You ought to think about leaving town,” Hank told him, and Bart agreed, but, as usual, he was nearly broke, and he was afraid to call his parents for money, for fear that might lead the police to him.

Late in April, Bart went looking for Neal. He stopped by the apartment Neal had shared with Butch Mitchell on Ligon Street, only to discover that Neal no longer lived there. He had moved the previous fall, and Neal’s and Bart’s old high school friend and fellow D&D player, Quincy Blackwell, had moved in with Butch, with whom Neal had had trouble getting along. Quincy told Bart where Neal was living with two new friends in Sylvan Park Apartments on Marcom Street, only about half a mile away.

Neal had left his job at Sav-A-Center the previous fall and gone to work at Hardee’s. He remained there only a couple of months before leaving after Christmas to work at Wendy’s on Western Boulevard, near the campus. After breaking up with Kenyatta at the end of the summer, Neal had started seeing her again in the fall. She was finishing her senior year at the School of Science and Math in Durham, and she often came to Raleigh on weekends to be with him.

Neal’s depression from the previous summer had continued, and Kenyatta remained concerned about it. She questioned him about it repeatedly.

“Neal, what is the matter? Why aren’t you happy?”

“It’s something I can’t explain,” he would tell her, to her immense frustration. “I can’t put it in words.”

Neal’s mother was deeply worried about him as well. He was not going to see her or anybody else in the family. She had come at Christmastime and found him in the clutter and filth of his apartment, his skin broken out in psoriasis.

“She kept asking me, ‘What’s wrong?’” he recalled later. “‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’m fine. Doing just great.’ We had a talk about school. I tried to let her think that was what was bothering me. I may have cried a little bit. At all times, I was trying to put her mind at ease. I didn’t want Mom to have to worry about me. She had enough to worry about.”

Kenyatta kept trying to get Neal to talk with Weldon Slayton, but he refused. He had let Slayton and his family down, he said, and he just couldn’t face them until he could prove himself worthy again.

Kenyatta had talked with Slayton about the problem. Slayton said that if Neal wanted his help, he would have to ask for it. It was not his place to interfere uninvited.

“I told Slayton, ‘He’s not going to come and talk to you until he’s got something to show you,’” Kenyatta recalled later.

If he made manager at Wendy’s, Neal told Kenyatta, he might go and see Slayton.

By the end of April, when Bart again showed up in Neal’s life, that prospect seemed close at hand. Neal had worked hard at Wendy’s. He was willing to work long hours and those hours that others didn’t want. His coworkers liked him, his bosses liked him.

“I was finding my own sense of self-worth in the opinions of coworkers,” Neal said later.

Bart told Neal that he needed a place to stay. Would Neal mind if he moved in with him for a few weeks, just until he could get a little money stored away? Neal said he would have to check with his roommates. They didn’t object. Others were always sleeping on the floor amidst the clutter anyway. Neal always seemed to have a group over playing Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games. Neal said it would be okay, and Bart brought his few belongings and settled in shortly after the first of May. A week later, he took a job with AAA Student Painters.

Three weeks after moving in with Neal, Bart was in the kitchen making iced tea shortly after noon when he heard a knock at the front door. He went to the peephole and looked out but saw nobody. Must be the cops, he thought. Only cops would stand back where they couldn’t be seen. But cops were not unusual at the door of this apartment. Officers had been brought there often by calls from neighbors complaining about the loud music that came from the stereo. Bart went to the window, peeked through the blinds, and saw a police car.

“I thought, well, they’ve found me,” he recalled later. “Let’s see if I can bluff this one out.”

He opened the door.

“James Upchurch?” asked one of the two officers who were standing back from the door with hands on their holstered weapons.

“Who?” Bart asked.

“Are you James Upchurch?”

“We’re looking for James Upchurch. Do you have any ID?”

A friend who had left campus early in the past semester had given Bart his meal card so that he could eat free in the campus dining hall. The photo on the card had only a slight resemblance to Bart. He went to get that and gave it to the officer.

“This your ID, Mr. Upchurch?” asked the officer.

“I’m not Upchurch,” Bart quickly responded.

“Mind if we come in and have a look around?” the officer asked.

“No problem,” said Bart. “Help yourself. I’m making some tea. Just go ahead and look all you want.”

Bart went back to the kitchen and nonchalantly went about making tea while the officers poked around the apartment. They soon thanked him and left.

“Man, that was a close one,” Bart said to one of Neal’s roommates, the only other person in the apartment.

“You played it just right.”

“They were snowed, weren’t they,” said Bart. “Wonder how they found out I was here?”

“I don’t know,” said the roommate.

Bart got on the phone and called Neal at Wendy’s. “The police just came by to arrest me.”

“Really? What happened?”

Bart described the entire incident. “I think I’m going to have to pack my bags and get down to the bus station.”

“Wait until I get there,” Neal said. “We’ll talk about it.”

As soon as Bart put the receiver back onto the telephone, another knock came at the door, this one loud and certain. When Bart opened the door this time, there was not one police car but three, not two officers but six. This time there was no question of bluffing his way out. The officers put in their reports that Bart tried to run, but he claimed later that two officers grabbed his arms and he had no chance to try to get away. They wouldn’t even allow him to put on his shoes, he said. They snapped on handcuffs and led him barefoot to the backseat of one of the cars. Over the police radio, Bart heard one of the officers reporting that the subject had been apprehended, that he was wanted as a suspect in a homicide in Little Washington. All the way to the jail, Bart kept insisting that he was not James Upchurch.

John Taylor had just come back from lunch when the phone rang in the detective division of the Washington police department and a Raleigh police-officer told him that James Upchurch was in the Wake County Jail, being held on probation violations. Without hanging up the receiver, Taylor dialed Christy Newsom’s number in Raleigh. She knew already. The Raleigh police had called her, too. Both were laughing in jubilation. The great frustration was behind them.

“There’s not any chance that he might get out before we can get up there, is there?” Taylor asked.

“I’ll see that there isn’t,” Christy said.

Grinning broadly, Taylor went to the chief’s office.

“Raleigh PD just picked up Moog,” he told John Crone.

Taylor had Lewis Young paged. Young called from Kinston, where he was working on another case, and agreed to meet him in Raleigh.

Taylor arrived at the Raleigh police department headquarters at five to find Young and a Raleigh police department detective waiting for him. They drove to the jail and waited for Bart to be brought down. A court order had been arranged that would allow the officers to take Bart back to a police department interrogation room, where he could be interviewed more comfortably. Bart was wearing the orange coveralls issued to all the jail’s guests.

“Man, we’ve been looking for you for a long time,” John Taylor said.

“Yeah, I heard you wanted to talk with me,” Bart said with a little grin.

Would he be willing to talk with them?

That depended, Bart said. He didn’t want to talk about anything that could affect his probation. He might want to talk with a lawyer before answering certain questions, if the answers might get his probation revoked.

The officers assured him that they didn’t want to hang him on probation violations. The contents of his interview would not be passed on to his probation officer. They were investigating the murder of Lieth Von Stein, they said. They wanted only to ask him about Chris.

Fine, Bart said.

Both officers were impressed at how cordial and relaxed Bart appeared to be, showing no sign of anxiety or nervousness, although he appeared thin and a bit drawn, as if he had been using a lot of drugs or under a lot of strain. They were surprised at how talkative he turned out to be.

He told of meeting Chris through the bulletin board notice and of finding Chris’s room filled with marijuana smoke the first time he went there. He said that he was with Chris when Chris took his first hits of acid and cocaine and that Chris’s drug use had grown progressively heavier.

“Chris was obsessed with drugs,” Bart said.

He described Chris as “strange” and “eccentric,” a “show-off.” Chris especially loved to show off with drugs, he said. Chris would boast about having drugs and take them out in front of strangers. When he got a fresh batch of acid, he would run through the dorm telling everybody that he had it and asking if anybody wanted any.

Bart told about the trips he and Chris had made together, going into detail about their visit to Chris’s relatives in South Carolina, whom he described as “real rednecks.” He claimed that he spent most of his time in a motel room with a girl on that trip, while Chris went out with another girl and associated with some bad characters. Chris later told him that he’d met some people that weekend “who could supply him with anything that any man could ever want,” and that he was thinking about going into business with them.

Did Bart think these people Chris told him about could be capable of murder?

Probably so.

Bart told about Chris taking a group of his friends to the Golden Corral, a popular steak house near the campus, and paying for everybody’s dinner, the bill coming to more than one hundred dollars. Somebody mentioned that Chris didn’t make enough at his job to pick up such a tab, Bart said, and somebody else said, “Why don’t you off your parents and inherit all their money?” To that, Bart said, Chris replied, “Yeah, I’ve thought about that a few times.” Afterward, Bart said, he heard others mentioning “offing” Chris’s parents to him on several occasions, but always in a joking manner.

Asked about Chris’s relationship with his parents, Bart said that Chris loved his mother and liked his natural father. He didn’t think Chris loved his stepfather, but they got along okay.

Did Bart think it conceivable that Chris might have hired someone to kill his parents?

“Yeah,” Bart said. “It’s conceivable.”

He and Brew Simpson had talked about that possibility in depth after the murder, Bart said. They had agreed that Chris didn’t kill his parents himself because he liked them and didn’t have the guts. The only motivation they could think of for Chris to have had it done was money, but they figured Chris’s stepfather was smart enough that he would have put his money into some kind of trusts so Chris wouldn’t have been able to get any of it. Their theory, he said, was that Chris’s real father might have had something to do with it.

Bart said that Brew had had a conversation with Angela about the murder, and Brew had come away from it saying he thought that Angela was evil, because she’d showed no emotion when talking about it.

A friend who had talked with Sandra about the night before the murder had told him that Sandra said Chris had kept looking at his watch as that night wore on, Bart said, as if Chris were concerned about staying until a certain time.

What was he doing that weekend? Young wanted to know.

Bart said he really couldn’t remember. He’d been into drugs so bad that summer that it was difficult to recall details about specific days and times. He thought he probably was in his dorm room on the eighth floor studying English the night of the murder. He thought he remembered Chris calling and asking him to come down and play spades. Sybil might have called, too—he wasn’t sure—but he knew he didn’t go. He didn’t like spades.

Bart went on to tell about trying to keep Chris from getting acid after the murder, and about Chris’s bad trip. He said that Chris had acted crazy that fall before dropping out of college, brandishing a pistol and a big knife “He was really paranoid,” Bart said. He saw Chris only a few times before Chris dropped out and hadn’t seen him at all since January when Chris came back to show off his new Volkswagen. They’d talked for only a few minutes then, he said, and the murder didn’t come up at all.