Winter and Night (11 page)

"Sullivan thinks most of these kids were probably at Tory Wesley's, Coach. Your seniors, too."

"Varsity had a ten o'clock curfew Saturday night, seniors going to camp Sunday morning. JV has curfew whenever varsity does."

"Kids in Warrenstown never break curfew?"

He turned to me with narrowed eyes. "These are good kids— Smith, you said your name was? These are good kids, Smith. They're boys; they're high-spirited. Look at them: They're working their asses off to play this game at a Warrenstown level. Sometimes they need to cut loose, blow off a little steam. Doesn't matter, as long as they can play on Friday night."

"Doesn't matter? Ryder, that house is wrecked and that girl is dead."

"These kids had nothing to do with that."

"You know that for a fact? You talked to them?"

"No, I didn't goddamn talk to them. Sullivan's going to come out here soon as practice is over, take their minds way the hell off their game. I got to get some work out of them before he fucks everything up."

Gary, I reminded myself, as I felt my jaw tighten. Don't go up against this guy; he's Sullivan's problem. Your problem is Gary.

"I think the reason Gary Russell left town is because of something that happened at that party," I said. Gelson finished his lap, ran back off the track, took his position. I could see his chest rising and falling as he waited for the whistle. When it blew he crashed the sled with a new viciousness, but his timing was still off, when to plant his foot, when to throw his shoulder. For his size, he didn't have the power he should have had. I said, "I think more than one of these kids probably knows what happened there."

"No idea," Ryder said.

"Who're Gary's friends on the team?"

"I don't know."

"I hear he's a buddy of Randy Macpherson's."

"I wouldn't know about that."

"Christ, Ryder, what's your problem? I need your help here. I'm looking for a kid."

Ryder turned his hard face to me. "I've been coaching here for thirty-three years, Smith. Kids come and go. You try your best to make men out of them. Sometimes you get pussies like Gelson over there and you can't, but mostly these are good kids. But guys like you, you just want to make trouble. Leave these kids alone."

"Thirty-three years? Then you were here when that other thing happened. The rape, and the suicide." Touchy, Sullivan had said. People around here were touchy. "That why you won't talk to me? I'm from outside, and this is too much like that?"

Ryder stepped forward, blew his whistle, two short blasts. Instantly everyone stopped what they were doing, began jogging in place. Ryder turned back to me.

"Get the fuck off my field."

He marched forward, shouting commands, and the boys scrambled to do as he said.

* * *

I didn't go back through the building, walked around it instead to get to my car. Way to go, Smith, I congratulated myself. Bring up something they don't want to hear about: a great persuasive technique for use on people reluctant to talk.

I was unlocking the car when my cell phone rang. I leaned against the door in the sunshine and answered it.

"Smith."

"You son of a bitch." It was Scott, the rage in his voice hemmed in by a hard, tight control. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"Looking for your son."

"Where are you?"

"Warrenstown," I said. "The high school. Where are you?"

"I'm in New York, you fucker! Goddammit, I told you to leave it alone!"

"You getting anywhere?"

"Fuck you! I can handle this."

"Christ, Scott, will you let it go?" I switched phone hands, pulled a cigarette from my pocket. "You can't stand me, fine. We find Gary, you don't ever have to see me again. Meanwhile, let me help."

"Oh, you're a big fucking help. The cops think Gary killed some girl, thanks to you."

"That's not how it happened."

"It's what they told me."

"Sullivan said that?"

"Fuck Sullivan, I called the chief. He said you were at that girl's house looking for Gary when she turned up dead. You weren't there, they'd never have connected him."

"Every kid at that party's a suspect right now."

"Other kids have private eyes calling the cops on them? Ratting out your family, nothing new there for you. But this is my family, Smith. Get the hell out of Warrenstown and keep away from my wife."

I felt hot blood flash into my face. I said, "My sister."

"She gave a damn she was your sister, she'd call you sometimes. She doesn't want to talk to you. We don't want you around, Smith, not my family."

"Gary gave the cops my name last night," I said. "Not yours."

"Oh, man!" Scott exploded. "Oh, you cocksucker! You're fucked now, man. I'm telling you, you're fucked."

Three boys came around the building to the lot, pushing and shoving each other, laughing. I almost said something more to Scott, but I stopped myself, lowered the phone, thumbed it off. I forced my grip on it to loosen; I was surprised I hadn't broken it. I turned the ringer off, slipped the phone back in my pocket, left my brother-in-law in New York wanting me out of his town, his problem, his life.

I smoked another cigarette as I drove across town. I wanted another one after that, but I didn't light it. Screw Scott, screw his accusations, his threats and his anger. I parked in front of Helen's, slammed the car door, headed up the walk. Helen pulled the front door open before I go to it.

"Scott's mad," was the first thing she said.

I nodded. "He called me."

"I gave him your number. I—"

"Forget it. It doesn't matter. Sullivan was here?"

"Yes." She said that in the small voice, looked down, said nothing else. My shoulders, already locked after Scott's call, tightened some more.

"What the hell's going on, Helen?"

She flinched; I realized how loud that had been, lowered my voice. "Was Gary at that party?"

"I don't know." As I got louder she got softer. "He had curfew. I thought— we thought— he was upstairs in bed."

"He snuck out?"

"It's not like him."

"Stop saying that! You don't know what's like him, do you?"

"Don't yell at me!" Her face flushed and she thrust out her small jaw. "You can't tell me what my son is like! You don't know us!"

"Whose choice was that?" I said quietly.

In our silence, the dog came to the open door, stood behind Helen, stuck her face against Helen's hand. Helen scratched the dog's ears while the dog peered around her at me, wagged her tail once or twice, stopped.

"It doesn't matter," Helen said. "It doesn't matter anymore. Maybe you'd better go."

"What I did," I said, my voice suddenly as quiet as her own. "Back then. When I was Gary's age. You know why that was."

"It doesn't matter," she said again, and though it did, very much, I turned and left.

Seven

i drove through town, headed east, toward the highway. It was all right with me, this business of leaving Warrenstown. If I were looking for Tory Wesley's killer, I'd feel differently; and maybe I was, but not from that direction. What I needed now was to move, to keep going, to stay a step ahead of Sullivan and stop him from shutting me down.

Or maybe I just wanted to think that my need to move had a connection to the pattern of the case. That it was what I'd feel if it hadn't been Gary standing in my living room last night, asking me for help. That it had nothing to do with my sister and what I saw in her eyes when she looked at me, or the slump in her shoulders when she thought I wasn't looking at her.

I tried the Bach in the CD player again; again, as it had that morning, it only irritated me and I turned it off.

I took out the cell phone, flipped it open, thumbed the first number on the speed-dial.

"Lydia Chin. Chin Ling Wan-ju." Lydia always answered in both her languages; you never knew who might be calling.

"It's me. Anything up?"

"No. I'm headed to that camp. How about you?"

"Me, too, but you'll get there first."

"Don't I always?"

"And when you don't, you still deserve to." I told her about the coach, about Scott's phone call.

"Nice guys," was her comment.

"A matched set. Who's your cousin who was kicked out of school and arrested for computer hacking?"

"Oh, right, throw my criminal relatives up in my face."

"I love your criminal relatives. Kwong, his name was."

"Linus Kwong. He's really the son of my mother's second cousin's brother-in-law."

She waited, but I couldn't dig out from under.

"And he wasn't kicked out of school, only suspended," she said.

"For, if I remember, the whole semester."

"And those charges were dismissed," she went on. "He was found innocent."

"That's 'not guilty.' No one's ever found innocent. And if the charges were dismissed, he wasn't found anything."

"Give the kid a break. He's just a bright high school student with an unquenchable curiosity. He didn't mean to do anything illegal."

"Uh-huh. He available?"

"For what?"

"Computer hacking."

"I'm sure he is."

Lydia gave me Linus Kwong's cell phone number and he was my next call. I identified myself, explained my connection to Lydia.

"Oh, hey, yeah, she's like my aunt or something," he told me. "She's awesome."

"Where are you?" Thumping music and blaring electronic sounds in the background made him hard to hear.

"Chinatown video arcade. Wait. Is this better?"

He must have walked outside, because the shrieks and beeps morphed into traffic noise and his voice came clearer. I told him what I wanted.

"This afternoon?"

"Right now."

"Dude, I'm winning here."

"You find something out there, you win even bigger."

We negotiated a fee. For just a bright high school student with an unquenchable curiosity, he had a pretty good sense of what his services were worth on the open market.

"How do I get there?"

"Rent a car. Send me the bill."

"Dude," he sighed at having to explain the obvious, "I'm fifteen. Hertz says you got to be twenty-five."

"Oh." I thought. "Call a car service."

"A stretch limo?"

"Don't push it."

"Okay, cool."

I gave him directions. "Listen, Linus," I said. "The mother'll let you in, but if you run into the father, blame me. Tell him I sent you and clear out."

"Dude won't be happy?"

"He'll explode."

"Cool," Linus Kwong said again.

I drove over the George Washington Bridge and straight across the Bronx, toward Long Island. I hit the beginning of rush hour, gritted my teeth as the traffic crawled. Most of the cars inching forward around me held no other passengers, just the drivers, men and women headed home, to their families, their houses, the places they lived. How was it, I wondered, where they lived, each of them? I saw in my mind the bright fall sun glowing on the fallen leaves and quiet streets of Warrenstown, the football coach making men out of boys, the party where a girl had died.

The drive took me along six-lane highways between ranks of apartment buildings, past wide, low shopping centers and two-family houses in rows with handkerchief-size lawns bordered by trimmed shrubs, chain-link fences, low brick walls— some way of saying, mine. Eventually the houses, though still close, began to be separated by driveways, and trees started to border the road. Where I pulled off the highway at Plaindale, the houses were bigger and the trees were older. I passed three- and four-story residential buildings and aging strip malls, bright new gas stations and blank-walled tire warehouses, on my way to the address Lydia had given me for Hamlin's Institute of American Sports.

The place took up a lot of real estate, though it didn't seem to be real estate many other people wanted. Flat, cropped-grass acres, playing fields and training fields now, probably potato farms once and meadow before that, spread away to my left from a road lined on my right with discount furniture emporiums and places that would fix your transmission, small grocery stores and even smaller bars where you could drink away the news that your transmission couldn't be fixed. The fields might have just kept going all the way over the miles to Long Island Sound, but in the distance they ran up against a scrubby woods, the kind of trees that grow while people aren't paying attention. The entrance to Hamlin's Institute was marked by a large sign, which claimed, as Lydia had said, that HAMLIN'S BUILDS MEN BY BUILDING CHARACTER THROUGH COMPETITIVE SPORTS. It listed program dates through the fall and a number to call for the schedule for spring.

I turned left. The road into Hamlin's took me between a parking lot and a baseball diamond wrapped with chain link, its bleachers looking lonely, sagging a little, now that the season was over and a cold winter would come and go before anyone would care about baseball again. Two long low concrete block buildings, barrackslike, and a smaller square one stood at the end of the road, fronted by another, smaller parking lot. A tall building, maybe the gym, loomed behind. A coat of thick yellow paint covered them all, the kind of job you do once and don't have to worry about for twenty years. Up close against one of the buildings, four hoops hung on perforated steel backboards on asphalt courts. One had no net and the painted lines on the asphalt were faded, but basketball is an indoor game; these hoops weren't for serious practice, just for fooling around.

And Hamlin's, it seemed to me as I parked, was a serious place. I could hear the shouts, the thuds, the whistles; as I walked around the buildings to the far side, I saw what the institute cut off from the street and the town, surrounded and kept for itself: the football field.

Two squads of kids, most in blue jerseys or in Warrenstown's maroon, but some in the colors of other towns, other schools, were divided into groups on the field and on the track. They were in full uniform: helmeted, padded, in all ways looking prepared to play. Hanging over the fieldhouse doors was a large-lettered sign reminding one and all, YOU ARE NOTHING-YOUR TEAM IS EVERYTHING.

Some of the boys, in small formations, practiced the patterns of offensive plays over and over to the shouts and whistles of men in navy jackets with HAMLIN'S on the back. Down the far end, one lone kid in blue and one in maroon kicked the ball between goalposts. Each kid in turn waited for the ball, caught it if he could and raced it back to the coach, who set it up for the next kick while the other kid charged down to be ready for the catch. If a kid missed the catch, the whistle blew and he sprinted the width of the field. The kid in blue wasn't much of a receiver. I watched him do a sprint, found myself thinking kickers, in a game, never have to catch anything.