Blood Ties (11 page)

Doing what she did with the milk and the sugar, Stacie nodded, said, “Totally.”

“Who's not cool?”

“Everyone else. Some of us are less uncool than others, I guess. Freaks and stoners are the uncoolest. Then brainiacs and geeks, then the artsy crowd and tree-huggers—they're sort of the same—then cowboys, then jocks.”

“Brainiacs are kids who get good grades?”

“And do Student Council and all that stuff. If they're like, Chess Club, they're geeks.”

“Artsy, that would be you?”

She nodded. “And the drama kids, and the band, people like that.”

“Cowboys?”

“They, like, drink and do dope and fight, and push everybody around. It's like being a jock, but without being on a team. So cowboys actually get detention or suspended or whatever, when they get caught.”

“Jocks do all that, too?”

“Jocks do whatever they want.”

“And don't get in trouble?”

She gave me the wide-eyed look. “Who would play on Friday night?”

“Uh-huh.” I drank some coffee. “Are there girl jocks?”

“Not exactly. I mean, we have varsity teams and stuff—I play softball, I catch—but it doesn't make you cool. Nobody sort of notices.” She shrugged.

“And freaks?” I asked. “Who are freaks?”

Stacie pursed her lips. “Kids who aren't anyone else. They hang out together but it doesn't mean they like each other. You just have to have someone to hang out with, I guess.”

“Sullivan said half the kids in Warrenstown were probably at Tory Wesley's party,” I said to Stacie. “Were you there?”

She shook her head, looked into her coffee.

“You knew about it, though, didn't you?”

She shrugged. “I knew her folks were going away.”

“You mean, you didn't just hear about it afterwards, you knew before? That she was going to have a, what did Sullivan call it, a P double-A P?”

“I told you, she wanted to be cool. She didn't get invited to the jock parties. I'm sure she totally thought this would make her cool.”

“If you knew it was going to happen, why didn't you tell someone?”

She looked at me. “Tell who? Tell them what? That some sophomore I don't even know is having a party Saturday night? So what?”

“According to Sullivan, those parties pretty much always end up like that. Shouldn't the police at least have been warned?”

“If they wanted to know,” she said, “they'd know.”

The waiter came to take away my plate and pour us more coffee. This time he brought a full sugar packet holder, which he traded for the decimated one on the table. I sat with Stacie Phillips for a while longer. She confirmed again what Sullivan had said: Chances were all the cool kids in Warrenstown had been at Tory Wesley's house Saturday night. She gave me some of their names, though I wasn't sure how I'd be able to make use of them, having been thrown out of town.

“If Gary Russell wasn't there,” she said as the waiter put down the check, “it cut his chances of being cool way, way down. They'd have figured he was chicken. Especially,” she added, “it was the night before the seniors went to Hamlin's. Randy would've been extra pumped, and it would've been a chance for him to show his protégé how it's done.”

How it's done. I thought about that as I drove over to the high school. How much of your life you spend, especially when you're new, trying to figure out how it's done.

Stacie and I had walked to the parking lot together—she'd insisted on paying for her own coffee, to keep her journalistic integrity intact—and I'd watched her drive off in her green Corolla. I wondered about the story she'd write, how something like this looked when it happened in your town and you were seventeen.

Then I'd made two phone calls. The first was to Morgan Reed.

He answered the phone himself with a sullen, “Hello.”

“Bill Smith,” I said. “Cops leave yet?”

“Man, what the fuck are you calling for?” Rage boiled through the phone. “Did you tell them to come here?”

“Don't be stupid. Detective Sullivan took one look at that house, you were the first name that sprang to mind.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“Don't hang up on me, Morgan, I'll just come over. I want to know if Gary Russell was at Tory Wesley's party Saturday night.”

“Oh, fuck that party! I wish I never went to that fucking party!”

“But you did go?” I said it as a question, but neither of us thought it was.

“It's a fucking joke, too, because like I told Sullivan, I was so fucking wasted, I came home early. People were still coming when I left. Maybe Gary got there, maybe he didn't. I didn't see him. Who cares?”

“I guess Jim Sullivan already asked you if you killed her?”

“Fuck you!”

“Did you know she was dead?”

“No!” His voice tamped down. “I knew shit like that, I'd tell somebody.”

That's what you say, I thought, until you know shit like that, and you know people you're tied up with are involved, will be in trouble if you tell somebody. I watched a car pull into the space Stacie Phillips had pulled out of. All right, I told myself, let it go. I asked Morgan Reed, “Do you know who killed her?”

“How could I, I didn't know she was dead?” The sneer was back. Another victory over a dumb adult.

“Did the reason Gary Russell went to New York have something to do with what happened at Tory Wesley's?”

“I don't know. I got no idea why he went and guess what? I don't give a shit.”

“I don't buy it,” I said. “You're a quarterback, he's your receiver. I didn't play, but I remember who was tight.”

“The guy's new,” Morgan snapped. “And him and me, we don't start.” Meaning the thing that would tie them together, these boys, create a bond they would both remember as the best friendship they'd ever had: that thing hadn't happened yet.

“Okay,” I said, and then because he was still a fifteen-year-old kid and some things were important to him, I said, “Have a good practice.”

“I can't go to practice!” The real reason for his fury came out in a blast of outrage at the scale of the injustice. “My mom was so pissed when that asshole Sullivan came here and she found out about the party, I'm fucking grounded.”

I called Lydia.

“That camp,” I said. “Someone there has got to know something about this girl's death, what happened at that party. It might be one of them who killed her.” I told Lydia about Stacie Phillips. “She said they were all bound to have been there, including Gary. And that Reed kid just about confirmed it. Whatever Gary's up to, it's got to have something to do with what happened there.”

“I tried to call that kid at the camp, the one you wanted me to talk to, Randy Macpherson, but guess what—you can't talk to the kids.”

“While they're at practice?”

“At all. No phone calls while they're at camp, except for certified emergencies.”

“You're kidding.”

“It sounded weird to me, too, but I decided it must be a guy thing. A football thing. You know, for building men.”

“A lot of sarcasm going around today.”

“Football brings that out in me. What do you want me to do?”

“About that, nothing, I think it's incurable. About the kids, go out there. This isn't just a social call, they'll have to let you talk to them. Sullivan'll be going there soon, but he'll have to hook up with the locals. Maybe you can find out something from the kids before he gets there.”

With a note of caution in her voice, she said, “This is a homicide investigation now, Bill.”

“That's in case I forgot?”

“It's in case you remembered and don't give a damn.”

A Mustang racing out of the parking lot screeched its brakes when the traffic didn't stop to make way for it.

“I'm sorry,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “You're right. If you don't want to go on with this—”

“Of course I'll go on,” she said impatiently. “But I want you to pay attention. The way you would if this were any other case.”

When we hung up, I watched the Mustang muscle into the street, then stand at a red light, engine stupidly racing.

six

I needed to see Helen once more, and I needed to get out of Warrenstown before Sullivan made me a short-term guest of the place. But there was one other thing I wanted to try, and if I was lucky I'd be able to get in and get out before Sullivan knew I'd been there.

Warrenstown High stood on the outskirts of town. Broad stairs led up to the doors and sunlight glinted off wide windows in the classroom wings on either side. Behind the classrooms rose the higher blocks of the irregular spaces: auditorium, library, gym. Everything was yellow brick and it all glowed triumphantly in the afternoon sun.

I climbed the steps past a group of kids sitting around killing time. Inside, a few more kids walked the deserted halls, opened lockers to exchange one set of books for another. These would be brainiacs, or geeks, or maybe the artsy crowd, doing what they did even over camp week. I asked directions, got pointed this way and that, and found my way to the gym, wondering how I'd feel if I were fifteen and new to this sprawling building on a crowded school morning, and everyone else was rushing around, and finding your way was confusing and difficult and really mattered.

The gym's polished floor gleamed in sunlight from high windows. The huge overhead lights, caged against damage, were off now, but they'd be on for evening practices, for Friday night games. The place was empty; I stopped inside and my footsteps and the thump of the swinging doors echoed, faded. A wave of memory crashed over me as I stood looking: high school basketball in Brooklyn, the two years I lived there before I joined the navy; shipboard games under a net to keep the ball from the Pacific; college intra-murals; pickup games in the park. Shouts, sweat, feet pounding, heart pumping, pulling out more than you thought you had from deep inside you again and again. I'd been a good shooter, but it wasn't the game-saver shots I was seeing now, not the cheers of the crowd I heard. What I remembered, what I'd forgotten, was a different thrill, and it was real, and better: making the no-look pass, setting the solid screen, nailing the timing on the alley-oop. Getting the pointed finger and the thumbs-up from the guy you'd made the pass to, set the screen for. Being depended on by a team full of other guys, and coming through; depending on them and not being let down. Long exhausting practices you looked forward to, coaches and trainers whose insults you let pass and whose orders you followed, pain you iced and ignored, because all that was the price of being here, on the hardwood, under the lights, in a place where you belonged.

I shook off the memory. There was no one here. I pushed out the swinging doors again, left them to echo by themselves.

Back along the corridor I came across the Warrenstown Wall of Fame: photos of boys, grouped by the sport they played, with plaques identifying them as school record holders, county champions, season MVPs. There were pictures of girls, too, in basketball and tennis uniforms, but fewer, and set farther from the propped-open double doors through which I could see the athletic field, spread wide in the glorious sunlight.

I stepped outside, where kids in maroon jerseys were lined up in rows along the field, doing stretches and jumping jacks. The stretches were led by a blond kid in a red jersey: the quarterback, who strained and shouted with the rest of them, grabbing this chance to show he could give orders, command respect.

Toward the end of any season, football practice was usually half-speed, to save the kids' battered bodies for the upcoming game; and here, especially, I'd have expected to see kids goofing off, messing with each other, feeling some kind of relaxed, exhibition-game mood. Warrenstown's season, after all, was over, and these kids—varsity juniors and sophomores, JV standouts—were here now only to get ready for a game they couldn't win.

But though they were in shorts or sweats, no pads but the bulging shoulder pads under their jerseys, these kids were anything but relaxed. This could have been August, a preseason practice to find the stars, weed out the failures.

It was like that, I supposed, as I watched them work with a concentrated fury that would have snapped a muscle in anyone over seventeen. They were preparing for the game where Warrenstown said good-bye to this year's heroes and got a look at next year's, and everyone wanted to be one.

On the screech of a whistle blown by a square-jawed, not-tall guy in maroon Warrenstown sweats, the warm-up session ended, and the kids lined up for wind sprints across the width of the field. Even allowing for the padding, these kids were huge: tall, wide-shouldered, their unpadded forearms and calves sharply muscled. The whistle blew and I watched them fly full-speed, bend to catch breath, turn at the whistle and charge again. I saw one kid slap another on the shoulder as he passed him, saw the second step it up, saw them end the sprint dead even. They were young and effort was rewarded and that extra burst was there when they needed it. I watched them run on the green field in the afternoon sun and I thought they were beautiful.

The guy in the sweats peered out over them all, eyes narrowed, mouth curved into a frown, looking for slackers, for losers, for fools.

I walked over, stood beside him. “Coach Ryder?”

He nodded without turning. “You found him.”

Ryder had maybe fifteen years on me, a lined, ruddy face, thinning sandy hair. “Bill Smith,” I told him. “Investigator from New York. I'm looking for Gary Russell.”