Blood Ties (41 page)

After we hung up I pressed another number into my phone. I braced myself for Vélez's,
“Ay, dios
mio,”
when he heard it was me, and after it came, I said, “Hey, it's not four in the morning, what's your problem, Luigi?”

“I ain't about to tell you,
chico
, because you ain't about to care. What you got now, you want done in ten minutes?”

“Tom Hamlin,” I said. “Runs a place called Hamlin's Institute of American Sports, in Plaindale. Long Island,” I added, in case Vélez's definition of the borders of New York didn't extend to Long Island. “Whatever you can get me. And Luigi? Forty minutes,” I said generously.

I drove the bridge, the Cross Bronx, the Long Island Expressway. Commuters heading home crowded the roads, and traffic was thick, slow, but it kept moving. Lydia was with me, just ahead or just behind; in the darkness I couldn't tell which, but I knew she was close. Somewhere in there, at just under half an hour, Vélez called back.

“This guy,” he said. “I got his address, his phone number, his driver's license, his credit rating—and his credit's good,
chico
—and all this shit about this institute thing.”

“Like?”

“Used to be a army reserve base, decommissioned and sat around for a while growin' weeds until this guy Hamlin bought it fifteen years ago.”

“Does it make money?”

“Makes enough. Pays him, assistant coaches, trainers, nurse, maintenance people, all shit like that.”

“No extra money? Nothing being laundered, maybe?”

“That what you're looking for, you shoulda told me that up front,
chico
, make my life easier,” he grumbled. “Uh-uh. Hamlin and his other coaches, they're making a living, but no one's getting rich out there.”

“Sorry, Luigi,” I said. “It was a stab in the dark. I don't know what I'm looking for.”

“You ever do? But I do got something interesting for you, amigo, no extra charge.”

“And what's that?”

“All of this shit I got, it's right up front, you know? Anybody could dig it up, not just a genius like me. Like the guy's not trying to hide nothing. But I'm telling you, he's hiding
something
.”

“Why?”

“The man's life's an open book, but the book don't go back no more than twenty years.”

“What do you mean?”

He sighed. “Twenty years,
chico.
Like this guy was made in a lab, put out on the street then.”

“Nothing earlier? Birth certificate, grade school, high school graduation?”

“Old driver's license, old address, medical records, credit, college, military. No nothing,
chico.
Like that other guy, from yesterday, that one who disappeared? This guy could be the negative of him.”

“Yeah, Luigi,” I said. “I think he is.”

I called Lydia, told her what Vélez had said. As I pulled off the highway onto the streets of Plaindale I found her, in my mirror, following. We met up, left her car up the street from the diner on the road outside Hamlin's, and drove down Hamlin's long drive in mine.

Barboni was behind the desk again, and his surprised scowl when he saw us held a shadow of dark pleasure: the unexpected chance for a rematch.

“No,” I said, holding my hands up, palms out, as he started to rise. “Your boss wants to see us.”

“I don't think so.”

“You're wrong.” I took out a business card, wrote
Nick Dalton
on the back. “Give him this.”

Barboni read the card, hesitated, and might have been about to rip it up and haul off and sock me, but Lydia winked at him. He flushed scarlet. She smiled, ran her hand through her hair, and as she lifted her arm her jacket moved and revealed a flash of the gun clipped to her waistband.

He scowled again, then said gruffly, “Wait here, and don't touch nothing!” and slipped through the double doors behind him.

“That's the same as wiggling your hips,” I muttered to Lydia as we stood waiting, touching nothing.

“How little you know,” she answered.

Barboni came back, wordlessly held the door for us. He followed Lydia with hungry eyes as we walked through.

Tom Hamlin was standing behind his desk in the inner office; the outer one was again empty. He held my card out in front of him, looked from it to me as though comparing a picture. I was ready for the full fury, the withering scorn, of the Coach I'd seen on the field and in this office. But after a moment Hamlin just smiled, asked not unpleasantly, “Who exactly are you?”

“I was going to ask you that,” I said, a little thrown, then remembering Lydia's words:
It waslike a switch turned off.

“Tom Hamlin.” The smile spread on his weathered face. He opened his arms, showed us his photo-lined, trophy-packed world. “Builder of men.”

I picked the framed picture up off his desk, looked at the grinning kids. Jared Beltran, on the left. On the right, another kid, taller, bigger but still skinny, looking into the camera with a sunnier version of the same smile Tom Hamlin was wearing right now.

I handed the picture to Lydia. “Formerly Nick Dalton,” I said. “Of Warrenstown, New Jersey.”

Hamlin dropped my card on his desk, reached over and took the picture from Lydia's hand. He set it gently back in its place, facing him. “Warrenstown, New Jersey,” he said, “is a shithole.”

“I'm not sure you'd get an argument from me on that,” I said. “But they just spent a big pile of money sending their seniors to you for a week, so you could make men out of them.”

“A week in the fall for the seniors,” Hamlin agreed, “summer camps, weekend clinics. Sometimes we have a three-hour program on a weekday evening, and do you know some of those assholes will drive an hour and a half to bring their kids to those?”

“Do they know who you are?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Tom Hamlin.”

I shook my head. “Nick Dalton was in the army. They'll have his fingerprints.” I asked again, “Does anyone in Warrenstown know?”

He shrugged, dropped into the desk chair. “Goddamn unlikely, don't you think? Although I'm not so sure they'd give a damn. Sit down.” He leaned back comfortably. Lydia sat on a chair facing him, and I pulled over another one.

“Why wouldn't they give a damn?” I said.

“Me and Warrenstown, that's ancient history. Warrenstown's always been a forward-looking place. No one there ever gave a shit about what happened. Just what's going to happen. Focused on the future. Results-oriented. ‘It doesn't matter how you play, as long as you win the game.' The town motto of Warrenstown, New Jersey. And,” he added, “words we live by here at Hamlin's Institute.”

“We know what happened,” I said.

“Good for you. You think anyone else gives a flying fuck? What Warrenstown cares about is
men
. And just look how many men I've built for them.”

“Fifteen years' worth?”

“Absolutely. We guarantee it.” He nodded his head gravely. “You remember that senator, Shane Fowler, youngest state senator ever in New Jersey? Had a hell of a career going for a while, until they caught him with a sixteen-year-old girl? He was one of mine, from Warrenstown.” He looked into space, smiled as though at a pleasant memory. “I had a Warrenstown kid, Brandon Doyle, playing football for Harvard three years ago.”

“Doyle? He was a linebacker,” I said. “Got thrown out in a cheating scandal, I remember that. He was from Warrenstown?”

“You bet,” Hamlin said. “Oh, and just last spring, one of my Warrenstown boys, a freshman halfback at New Hampshire, got so shit-faced at a frat party he showed the highest level of blood alcohol ever recorded in someone who wasn't dead. Almost dead, after they peeled his car off a light pole, but not quite dead.”

“You sound proud of him.”

“Proud of them all, Smith, proud of them all. They're men.”

“I don't get it.”

“Oh, come on. These boys own the world. Warrenstown tells them that, I tell them that. Work hard enough, tear your muscles, fracture your bones, shit your pants and puke on the field, you can get to play football like a motherfucker. Play football like a motherfucker, you own the fucking world. You can have it all, do whatever you want, no one will stop you. I'd apologize for my language,” he said, turning to Lydia, “but I really don't give a damn.”

“That's what it's like in Warrenstown,” I said.

“Goddamn right. And that's what it's like at Hamlin's.”

“Revenge,” Lydia said, her voice low and clear. “Nick Dalton said he'd be back for revenge.”

“I'm giving them,” Hamlin said, “what they want.”

“You're making their boys into monsters,” I said.

“In Warrenstown, they know what they want.” He smiled again.

“Coach Ryder's drills, his attitude, his words. Everyone in Warrenstown loves Hamlin's because you do it just the way they do it there.”

“Makes them feel like they're looking in a mirror. And you know what? They are. They made me, Smith. And I make men out of their boys. See,” he said, “see, Jared asked me to. He said, ‘Nicky, will you help me? Will you get them for me?' And I said, ‘Sure,' even though I didn't really know what he meant. I said, ‘Sure.'”

“Jared Beltran asked you? When?”

Hamlin looked at the photo on his desk. “The guys from the football team got him the next day, after the police let him go. Like they had before he was arrested. They beat him up some more. Broke his glasses. Made him say, ‘I'm a fucking pervert' over and over. They found some dog shit and made him eat it.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“He asked me to help him, and I said I would, and then he killed himself. It bothered me for a while, that I didn't help him. Then it hit me, you know, even if I couldn't help him, I could still get them. That's what he asked me to do, and I could do that.”

He raised his eyes calmly, met mine. Hamlin's office was brightly lit, heated well enough, but I was looking into his eyes. I felt a chill that nothing could warm anymore, saw a darkness nothing could ever light.

“You alibied him,” I said.

“He was with me.” Hamlin shrugged. “We were at my house. They had
Night of the Living Dead
on TV. He didn't go home until way after that girl left the party.”

“It was Macpherson, then.”

“Oh, yeah, sure it was,” he said without particular interest, a man telling a story he'd learned long ago that no one wanted to hear. “One kid even saw them together, but he changed his story. That's why they let Macpherson go, and they needed someone else. Me and Jared, we were both losers, but my dad had money.”

“You must have had trouble with them, too,” I said. “The kids on the football team. Because of the alibi.”

He rubbed his mouth. “Yeah,” he said.

“Do you know who it was who spread the stalking stories?”

“Never did. Doesn't matter. The thing about that was, it was so completely stupid, only a place like Warrenstown could have bought it.”

Doesn't matter, I thought. But maybe that was true. I wondered how much would change, if he did know.

“What about the other towns?” I asked quietly. “Westbury, places like that?”

“No one makes them send their boys here.”

“Hamlin,” Lydia said. “The Pied Piper. He led the children away.”

Tom Hamlin said, “Only the ones who wanted to go.”

“In the story,” said Lydia, “that was all of them. Except the crippled one. He wanted to, but he couldn't.”

“Led them away,” I said, “because the parents wouldn't pay.”

Hamlin said, “They're paying now.”

I watched his eyes. His right hand held his coach's whistle, turned it over, around. He met my gaze, smiled again. “And you're the first asshole—” He turned to Lydia. “—excuse me, ass
holes
, who ever figured it out. You know, I've had that picture on my desk since I opened this place, no one's ever looked at it?”

I picked it up, looked at it now. “The mouth's the same,” I said. “Not the nose, the ears. Plastic surgery?”

“Of course. Not much, just enough so those jerkoffs could keep from seeing what they didn't want to see. Mostly, I spent three years in the army, five years after, bulking up. Borrowed money, hired famous coaches and pro athletes because I knew those names would impress those motherfuckers. Kept my rates low in the beginning. Now, of course, I can charge whatever I want. They'd give me their firstborn. Oh, hey, they do, don't they?” He beamed.

“And no one's caught on?”

“You don't get it about those guys, that town.” He corrected me mildly, as though just to help me understand, not because what we were discussing mattered to him. “They don't want to see. I went out to Warrenstown to pitch the camp to them the year I bought it. Just eight years after I graduated. Nobody—Coach Ryder, nobody—even said, ‘Hey, don't I know you?' Well, you saw: That pervert Macpherson was in here the other night, probably the tenth time we've met. Up until then, I was his best buddy. He fell all over himself to give me money for the Warrenstown boys. And even pissed off like he was that night, it never crossed his mind I had a reason to be breaking his balls.”

I thought about what he was saying, what he'd done, and how reasonable and even clever it seemed to him. I thought about some of the things I'd done in my own life, about what Paul Niebuhr and Gary Russell might be doing now.