Winter and Night (37 page)

I was headed down the walk before the door closed. I wanted to keep going into the wind, away, anywhere, any distance, not look back again, not ever. But Lydia's car was at the curb and Lydia's footsteps, light and sure, sounded behind me. I stopped at the car; after a second, I brought my fist down hard onto the hood. I heard my voice throwing a curse into the wind, felt pain jar my arm to the shoulder. Then I thought, No! Goddammit, no. I stood, head down, hands on the cold steel of the car, trying again to force the fire back down into that small, controlled place.

Lydia said nothing. After a moment she went around and unlocked the car. I got in. She started it up and we drove away along the well-laid-out, gently curving streets. The people who'd planned this place had tried to eliminate sharp turns, hidden ways, any chance of anything unexpected. There was supposed to be nothing here to make you suddenly have to change where you were headed, take another path. But up ahead a dog sniffed his way onto the street from behind a parked car. Lydia stamped on the brake, pressed the horn. The dog, startled, snarled and sped across. It could have been a kid on a bike, on a skateboard. It could have been a police car racing up the street, or fire trucks at a burning house. I thought of the planners, and an icy contempt filled me, both for the intention, and for the fact that it had failed.

I rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. Lydia hadn't been to this development before but she seemed to know well how to get out, how to leave these houses, and Warrenstown, behind. She put us on the road to Greenmeadow, back to where we'd left my car.

We drove in silence. Not until we were pulling into the hospital parking lot did Lydia speak. She said, "That's why he hates you."

I looked over at her as she stopped her car beside mine. I tried my voice carefully, not sure I trusted it. "Why?"

She turned the key in the ignition, faced me. "His testimony could have sent a friend to prison, and he took his story back."

"And I didn't?"

"That's right."

Her eyes were steady and clear; it was I who looked away.

"And I'm even worse," I said. "Because in my case it was family. And in his, he wasn't sure of what he saw."

"No," Lydia said. "He was sure."

I watched her face, soft in the shadows. "You think so?"

"He was. Al Macpherson raped Beth Victor; Scott saw them, just before. The stalking stories, the coach started that. The teacher who wanted to stay anonymous. He picked that boy, Jared, because he was weird anyway, so people might believe it. And because he was expendable."

"Then why did Jared shoot himself?" I asked her, though I thought I knew.

"Because he was a nerd at Warrenstown High, and now they said he was a pervert. His life was already hell, and all he had now was a choice between going to prison, or worse hell."

"No other way out?"

"In a town where the parents held a candlelight rally in support of Al Macpherson?"

I slipped another cigarette from my jacket, rolled it around in my fingers.

"Scott's always known that," Lydia said. "That the coach's lies and his own silence killed that boy. He's spent his life telling himself that what he did was the stand-up thing to do, for his friend. Not the kind of thing a coward would do who was afraid of the other jocks, and the coach, and this town, and who wanted to play in the game."

I said, "He's spent his life trying to make a man— a stand-up guy, he said— out of Gary."

An ambulance pulled into the parking lot, no siren howling, no lights flashing. It rolled slowly around the building to the emergency entrance. It was headed there, I supposed, because that was the entrance ambulances used; but it was in no hurry, carrying no one who could be helped.

"And he hates you," Lydia says, "and calls you a coward, because you had the guts to do what he should have done."

The car was hot and close; I couldn't sit there anymore. I got out, stood in the wind. Lydia got out also, and came around the car to stand beside me, and this time she took my hand. I thought of Scott, and fire, and boys forced to make choices men are forced to live with; I thought of Gary, without a jacket, without help on the cold streets; I thought of a lot of things, a lot of places, and through it I felt the solid warmth of Lydia's hand.

"Why did he come back?" I said.

"Scott? To Warrenstown?"

I nodded.

"My guess?"

"Yes."

"Gary was getting to be the age Scott was when Warrenstown made a man out of him."

"So Scott brought him here?"

"To prove he'd been right, what he'd done. To prove he had nothing to be ashamed of."

"Prove to whom?"

She didn't answer that, because she didn't need to.

"Do you think Gary knows?" I said.

"What Scott did? Probably what he knows is that Scott stood up for his friend."

"And that's what Gary's doing now, that Scott would be proud of? Standing up for Paul? By helping him get ready to shoot the school up?"

"We don't know that's what he's doing."

"We don't know anything."

She shook her head, looked at the ground A gust of wind lifted her hair; she pushed it back off her cheek, said, "You know who I feel bad for?"

"Besides me, because I'm so pitiful?"

That caught her by surprise; she smiled, and our eyes met. I thought again of fire, but a different kind. I don't know what she thought of, but her smile grew; then she looked away, and it faded again. "That other boy," she said. "Nick Dalton. Watching that happen to his friend, and there's nothing he can do."

"He said he'd be back, and get them all."

"Umm-hmm," she said. "Does he seem to have?"

The wind turned and blasted across the parking lot, pounding into us like a weight. I shook my head, saw Jared Beltran's face, the grinning kid in the newspaper photo, the kid who was excited at the idea of what lay ahead.

"Jesus Christ." I was suddenly cold and it had nothing to do with the wind. "Oh, shit. Oh, sweet Jesus on the cross!"

Lydia lifted her eyebrows. "Am I to understand from this that an idea has hit you?"

"That picture! I've seen that kid before."

"Which picture? Which kid?"

"Get in the car, I'll tell you as we go."

"Which car?"

"Oh," I said. "Oh. Both cars."

"Where are we going?"

"Hamlin's." I dropped her hand, fished for my keys. "He has a picture on his desk."

"Two skinny kids on the beach? Bad haircuts, glasses?" She'd seen that one, too, but she hadn't seen the photo from the Warrenstown PD case file.

I nodded. "Nerds. The one on the left is Jared Beltran."

Twenty-Four

We talked on the phone for a while, as we drove away from Greenmeadow, past Warrenstown, to the bridge, but the questions we had were not really for each other. Both of us knew the way to Hamlin's, so we didn't worry about traveling together, just set up a meeting place at the head of the driveway there.

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 was like 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?"