Blood Ties (14 page)

Then a Warrenstown boy shouted, “Killing them, Coach!”

“What?”

“Killing them, coach!”

“I can't
hear
you!”

“Killing them, Coach! Killing them! Coach!” And then it was all the boys, in a rising, swelling shout: “Killing them! Coach! Killing them! Coach! Killing them! Killing them! Killing them!”

The shriek of Hamlin's whistle cut off the chant. “All
right
! And the way you're working now, you gonna kill them?”

The Warrenstown boy who'd started it knew his job and jumped to it: “No, Coach!”

“Damn right! So what am I gonna see tomorrow?”

“Work, Coach!” A Westbury kid, getting into the act, yelled, “We're gonna bust our asses, Coach!”

“You are?”

“Yeah, Coach!” the boys shouted as one.

Hamlin smiled, looked at them all. “Good,” he said.

Hamlin blew the whistle again, three long loud blasts. The boys turned and jogged away, disappeared through the doors into the field house.

The men and women around us started to walk away. None made any attempt to talk to the kids.

“You can't,” Lydia told me when I pointed that out. “I told you, it's a rule. You can only come watch after three in the afternoon, and you can't talk to them. ‘While they're here, they're Hamlin's.'” She took a brochure from her pocket, handed it to me.

I glanced at the brochure, a glossy four-color job full of ringing endorsements, statistics, pictures of uniformed boys playing hard. “So you never got near the Macpherson kid?”

“Right.”

“Even an investigator?”

“Mr. Hamlin wasn't impressed,” she said dryly.

“You told him a girl had been killed and these kids might be suspects, at least witnesses?”

“He said suspects or witnesses, they're football players and they're not going anywhere, so whatever they have to say they can say at the end of the week. I told him the cops were coming out here so he might as well let me start, but he said sorry, this was practice.” She added, “I guess he'll have to let that cop from Warrenstown—Sullivan?—he'll have to let Sullivan talk to them, but it won't make him happy.”

“He doesn't seem like a very happy guy.”

“He's sour and he's mean.”

“One of the fathers told me the kids love him.”

She gave me a long look. “If they do, it's because they're afraid not to.”

We stood at the edge of the field as the lowering sun blazed in the windows of the gym. I was exhausted, I realized, as wiped out as if I'd done all that running, that cutting, all those push-ups that come from failure, myself. I rubbed my hand over my face, tried to clear my head. Gary's face came back to me, his tired, haunted eyes.

Maybe this was dumb, the idea that Gary would come here, that he really did have something important to do and it had to do with something, someplace, someone besides himself. Maybe he was just, as Sullivan had said, running away.

Lydia touched my hand. I hadn't realized what a chill had crept into the air until I felt her warmth.

“God, you look tired,” she said. “What do you want to do? You want to see if we can find a way to talk to the kids anyway?”

I looked up and down the field, silent now, and empty. I reached into my jacket for a cigarette. “Well,” I said, “maybe you could join them in the showers and distract the coaches, and I could get the kids to come out one by one and talk to me.”

She looked at me, then turned away with a smile and a shake of her head. Sighing, she appeared to consider the suggestion. “No,” she finally said. “I don't think so. If you want a distraction, you'd better come up with a different one.”

“You mean, something more likely, like the Martians landing on the field house?”

“Exactly. Besides,” she asked innocently, “if I joined them in the showers, why would the kids ever leave?”

“Good point.” I smoked, said, “I don't know what to do. I'm not even sure what I want to do, what I want to have happen.”

“I suppose,” Lydia said, and now her voice changed, grew more gentle, “I suppose the best thing would be if we found Gary, and we found he had nothing to do with that girl's death.”

I nodded. “For Gary, for my sister. But that town, that girl.” On the empty field, the sinking sun picked out the sharp edges of each blade of grass, cast tiny shadows from each rough lump of chalk on the lines. “Helen said Scott brought them there because it was a great place to grow up.”

“Maybe it is. Bad things happen everywhere. Even something like this doesn't have to change the place forever.”

“I'm not sure,” I said, “how much a place changes. Like a person.”

“What do you mean?”

“If Warrenstown's such a great place, why did Scott leave as soon as he graduated and not go back for twenty years?”

“You left Louisville when you were nine,” she said. “You never went back.”

“I didn't want to leave; I was a kid. And I never went back because by the time I could've gone back there was nothing to go back to.”

Cars started up around the other side of the buildings, parents driving away. I found myself thinking, but that's not true. If a place holds nothing, you might find yourself passing through there or not over the years, as currents take you. A place you avoid still holds something; and whatever that is still holds you.

Lydia said, “You never went back because you were happy there.”

I stared at her. A breeze ruffled her short hair. I wanted to reach out, smooth it down for her, but I didn't.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “It's none of my business.”

“No.” I shook my head, spoke slowly. “No, I think you're right. Those memories kept me going a long time, after we left. By the time I could have gone back everything was different there.”

“So it did change.”

“Not Louisville, I don't think. Just the little part of it I knew. I didn't want to see it.”

“Don't,” she said. “You don't want to see it.”

“What?”

“Those memories still help keep you going.”

The breeze came back, colder now. I turned again to the football field. The goalposts at one end were tipped with sunlight; at the other they were already in shadow.

After a minute Lydia said, “You're wondering what kept Scott away from Warrenstown for so long.”

I wasn't; and it probably didn't matter. But I knew why she said it. I was grateful and I went along.

“Helen says Scott always talked about what a great place it was,” I said. “But twenty-three years ago—while he was there—they had a rape and a suicide at the high school. It wasn't Eden then, and I don't think it is now, either.” I watched the breeze fan the burning tip of my cigarette. “I think,” I said, “I'll ask him.”

“Ask Scott?”

“Ask him what his hometown was like, years ago.”

Lydia tilted her head. “Are you sure you need to do that?”

“What?”

“Are you sure the answer matters? Or are you just mad and you want to hit something?”

I looked at her, small and still, outlined by the day's final sunlight. She looked back at me. She didn't say anything else.

“Shit.” I crushed my cigarette against the bottom of my shoe, dropped it in the cellophane off the pack. Leaving a cigarette butt on Hamlin's track probably would be a deadly sin. “Don't you have something else to do? A shower to take or something?”

“Yeah,” she said. After a moment she smiled again. “Come on.”

We turned, walked off the field together, not holding hands, not touching, but together.

eight

Back around the buildings Lydia and I headed along the driveway and in through Hamlin's front doors, a steel-and-wire-glass pair that looked like the doors to any gym at any high school in the world. The lighting inside was fluorescent, a little grim, and the smells of disinfectant, sweat, and liniment punched me right back to Brooklyn.

A bored-looking guy, not much older than the kids on the field, sat at a cheap metal desk just inside. Behind him, above a second set of doors, hung a sign:
THIS IS HAMLIN'S—NO ONE LEAVES THE SAME AS HE CAME IN
. I guessed that was supposed to be a good thing.

The bored guy wore a security guard's uniform straining over huge, cut muscles. Like security guards the world over, he was leaning over the sports pages of the local tabloid. Also like security guards the world over, he glanced up at us with an annoyed, suspicious look, as though the one thing experience had taught him was that no one trying to get past his station was ever up to any good. The name tag above his pocket read
BARBONI
, and I got the feeling that that was more than he wanted you to know.

“Hi again.” Lydia smiled.

Barboni smirked. “Hey, you still around? Like I said before, I'm off at seven. Anything you want to know about this place, I could tell you.”

“Sorry,” she said. She tilted her head, indicating me. “This is my partner, Bill Smith.” Barboni leaned back elaborately in his chair.

“Can I help you?” he asked, addressing me, and I had to stop myself from saying, Probably, but if you do I'm sure you'll be as surprised as I will.

“We'd like to see Mr. Hamlin,” I said. I gave him my card. He picked up Lydia's card, already lying on his desk, flicked their edges against each other. He lifted the receiver of the phone next to him, punched a button, threw a glance down the vinyl-tiled corridor toward a door that said
OFFICE
before bringing his eyes back to me, fixing me with a sharp look to make sure I didn't try anything.

“Yeah, hi, Coach?” he said into the phone. “There's a guy here wants to see you. Smith. A private investigator, his card says.” Pause. “Yeah, she's here, too.” Pause. “Okay, sure.” He hung up the phone, looked at me. “Coach says go away.” He turned to Lydia, brought the smirk back. “He says he already told
you
to go away.”

Persuasion, reasoning, a convincing story—screw it, I wasn't in the mood. I reached across the desk, grabbed up the phone and punched the same button he had. He started to get up. Lydia leaned over, dropped her hands on his shoulders and shoved him back in his chair. She moved her jacket aside so her gun would show, smiled at him and put her finger to her lips. Barboni's eyes widened, snapped back and forth from Lydia to me. He made no move, confusion and anger throwing him into temporary gridlock.

“Yeah, what now?” snarled the voice of Coach Hamlin in my ear.

“It's Bill Smith, Coach,” I said. “I'm not leaving and I want to talk to you, so you might as well come out.”

“Who the hell—what, the detective?”

“Investigator. Yes.”

“What the—where's Barboni?”

“He's here. I just thought this would be faster.”

“Faster than what? What the hell is your problem?”

“Come on out and I'll tell you. Or just stay there, I'll come in.”

I hung up the phone. Lydia snapped her jacket shut and we moved around the security desk.

Barboni jumped up, face crimson, traffic jam over. “Oh, no!” He grabbed my wrist. I threw my arm in a wide circle to break his hold, shoved him away. I turned, but when I felt his hand on my shoulder I spun in tight, socked him in the stomach, then on the jaw when he doubled over. I was reaching for him again when Lydia pulled my arm back.

“Stop it!” she commanded.

Barboni looked up at her, I looked down, and, glaring at me, she swept past him down the corridor.

“Fuck!” Barboni coughed, straightening up. By the time he started to come after us I had caught up with Lydia at the office door. She pushed it open. In the outer office the secretary's desk was empty, but the door to the inner office was open and the two men in there were on their feet. The one who wasn't Hamlin had about six inches on him, was dark-haired and broad-shouldered, was dressed in a suit and tie, and wore an equally angry glare.

They came out, we came in, and Barboni came from behind. Lydia smoothly stepped between him and me, weight balanced, prepared for whatever she had to do. Barboni was probably as pissed at her as he was at me, but he obviously wasn't sure whether it was okay to hit a woman, even one who'd manhandled him. My guess was he'd have come down on the side of pulverizing her to get at me after a few seconds' thought. I was tempted to let him try it, because it would have served him right, but I said, looking at the other two men, “If this guy touches either of us I'll kill him. I just want to talk, Coach, but I'm in a bad mood, so call him off.”

It was the other man, not Hamlin, who said, “Who the hell are you?”

“Back off, Barboni,” Hamlin ordered at the same time.

“Coach, they—”

“I said back off!”

Barboni, after a moment's hesitation, took an angry, grumbling step back but didn't leave.

“I'm Bill Smith,” I said. “This is Lydia Chin. We're investigating a homicide and a runaway and we need to talk to some of these kids.”

“Fuck you,” Hamlin said with icy calm. “Get out. And you, too, Macpherson,” he said to the other man. “Nobody talks to these kids while they're here.”

Lydia's too good to give anything away, but I knew she felt the same small jolt I did, hearing the other man's name.

“The police are on their way,” I said to Hamlin. “They'll be—”

“I already talked to Detective—what the fuck was his name—Sullivan,” Hamlin cut me off. “I told him what I'm telling you. They come here with warrants, they can arrest any kid they want. Some kid's parents want to take him home, I don't give a shit who he talks to but he doesn't come back. You aren't cops, you're not parents, get the hell out of my camp.”