Winter and Night (38 page)

"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.

"Tell me about bulking up," I said, leaving the rest of it for later. "Lifting, conditioning, training?"

"Worked five years after the army in a place like this, upstate New York. Hey, I had a lot of sports to learn."

I gestured at the picture, its back to me now. "And you were a skinny little guy."

Something dark flicked across his face, but it passed. "Ancient history," he said.

"So maybe you needed some help bulking up."

"Everyone needs help. The army was great for that. Helpful guys, no worries about pain or long-term damage, sissy shit. Just 'Get up, Dalton, unless you're dead!' Helped a lot."

"Chemical help, too?" I asked.

"Like?"

"Steroids?"

"Well, now, you have to be really careful with steroids," Hamlin said, his face taking on a mock earnestness, a fake concern that chilled my spine. "You have to really know what you're doing. Especially if you're a kid." He smiled again. "Could fuck up your life."

"But you know what you're doing."

"I know all kinds of shit."

"And you tell the kids."

"They're here for their education."

"You tell them, for example, where they can get steroids."

"I don't have to. They know."

"What do they know? That they can get them here?"

"Here? Back off, Jack. No fucking way. Nothing illegal goes on at Hamlin's. Kid comes here with a can of beer, he's out on his ass. My goal is to stay out of trouble and stay in business. I'm building men here, and I love my work."

I was aching for a cigarette, but I didn't do anything about it. I couldn't tell what kind of an edge Hamlin was on, and I didn't want to push him. "So if the camp were searched right now, we wouldn't find any drugs?"

"Give me a break. We don't strip-search them. Some kid has a few pills in his wallet, vitamins, this and that, I guess I wouldn't know about it. But they don't get them here. Besides, what's the big deal? They want to be big. They work like sons of bitches, two-a-day practices, weights, homework until three in morning because they were in the gym until midnight, and their parents tell them how proud they are. Why shouldn't they get a little help from modern science?"

"Where do they get them?"

"What?"

"The steroids, Hamlin. Where do they get them?"

"Oh, here, there, who knows?"

I said, "I need to know."

"Well, I'm sure sorry I can't help you."

"There's a big problem." Lydia spoke up in a cool and steady voice, fixing Hamlin's attention. "A girl is dead, and other people may die, unless we unravel what's going on. Where the boys in Warrenstown get their steroids is one of the questions we've got to have answers to."

"These people who're going to die," Hamlin said, his voice easy, his smile wide and suddenly venomous, "are they in Warrenstown?"

Coach Hamlin, furious and vindictive on the field; Nick Dalton, aka Tom Hamlin, mild-mannered and reasonable in his office.

Well, I thought, whatever works.

I was around the desk before Hamlin could stand up. I yanked him out of his chair, slammed him against a file cabinet. The trophies crowding the top rattled and one fell to the floor as Hamlin's head hit the steel.

His eyes flew wide. "What the fuck is your problem?" He tried to grab for me, but though he'd built his muscles and changed his life what he'd become was a bully, and bullies are bad fighters. I danced back; he grasped air. I shouldered in again, this time smashing him against the cabinet's hard edge. He yelped. I took him by the shoulders and shoved him face down on his desk. Twisting his arm behind him, I shouted, "Where?" My shout and the sounds of rattling, crashing, pounding, brought Barboni to the door.

"Hey!" He charged in, but Lydia was up with a yell to distract him and a sweep of her leg to pull his feet out from under him. She sent him sprawling.

"Fuck!" Hamlin growled. "Jesus fuck, what's the big deal?" I let up some on his arm but kept him pressed to the desk. "Any Warrenstown boy could tell you where they get them, what the fuck are you beating on me for?"

"They could," I said, "but they won't. You will."

"Yeah, all right. Jesus." I let him up. He stood rubbing his shoulder. "Well, why not? Can't hurt me, and probably won't hurt my business, either. Of course, if you say you heard it here, I'll say you're a liar."

"Where?"

Hamlin smiled, that smile that was wide and warm in the photograph on his desk, dead and cold in here. "It's almost funny, now I think about it. It's the only difference between him and me anymore, really. Besides him thinking that what we both do, the way we build men, is a good thing. The only other difference between us, now, is that Coach Ryder deals steroids to the kids, and I don't."

Twenty-Five

I called Sullivan from my cell phone while Lydia and I stood in the wind in Hamlin's parking lot, Barboni watching us through the wire glass of the locked double doors.

"It's Smith," I said.

"I'm busy."

"You'll be busier. Did you know Coach Ryder is the guy dealing steroids to your football team?"

Silence; then, "If I knew that, you think I'd be sitting around with my thumb up my ass?"

"It's Warrenstown."

"You can't—"

"No," I said, "I'm sorry. Anyway, you know now."

"Yeah, well, now, Smith, right now, I'm kind of occupied. I'm looking for a couple of kids with guns."

"Take a break, go arrest the coach."

"On what evidence?"

"Nick Dalton's."

"What?"

"He's been under your noses for fifteen years." I told Sullivan about Hamlin, about his camp and his reasons.

"I don't believe this," he said when I was through.

"Worry about it later. Arrest the coach."

"On the word of a suspect's uncle about the word of a nut? Listen, this guy may not be Dalton, Smith. He may be some loony who heard the story, met Dalton in the army maybe—"

"And decided to devote his life to being Dalton's avenging angel?"

"Or his evening to pulling some PI's chain."

"That's crap. But even if it were true, he could still be right about Ryder. Pick him up."

"I can't do that."

"Why, because he's fucking St. Coach in Warrenstown and they'd hand you your ass on a platter? Christ, Sullivan, then pick up a kid. Any kid. One of those guys with the thick necks— Randy Macpherson, maybe. Or try my pal Morgan Reed. You have the answer, they'll break down and confirm it for you."

"Look," he said. "I'll look into this. If it's true, I'll build a case and when it's ready I'll arrest him. But right now—"

"No, Sullivan, now. Because if the steroids and the ecstasy were coming from the same place, Ryder may know something about Tory Wesley's death, and if he does, he may know something about where those boys are."

"The steroids and the ecstasy— that's your theory, Smith. I didn't buy it then, and if it's the coach, no way. Ryder handing out steroids, yeah, okay. Make them big, give them an edge. But party drugs, I don't think so. This is a coach who benches them, he finds them smoking, drinking coffee."

"Maybe it's wrong, maybe it's bullshit," I said. "But you say you're looking for those boys: What else do you have?"

A very long pause. The wind blew harder, colder; the stars and the moon had disappeared above a heavy weight of clouds. "Tomorrow," Sullivan said, "is the game at Hamlin's. Last time the seniors will ever play, most of them. Whole town goes out there to say good-bye to this year's heroes, see if St. Coach can beat them with what he's got for next year. You want me to pick him up for questioning, on the hearsay evidence of a nut. Smith, only way I could pick up Ryder before this game would be if he had some kid's blood dripping from his teeth."

"I think he does."

"You think." Another silence; then, "I'll call you." The phone went dead.

I folded it, put it in my pocket. From another pocket I slipped a cigarette. "Where to?" I asked Lydia.

"Excuse me? Your case, your car, your bright ideas. This, by the way, was a prizewinner."

"Yeah," I said, striking a match. "I want a trophy."

Lydia looked at me long and hard. The wind was messing with her hair; she ran her hand through it, and said, "Home."

"What?"

"You're exhausted. And I am, too," she added, overriding my objection. "Let's get away from this place, go have dinner, maybe get some sleep. The police are working on this, in high gear. Give them a chance. Unless you come up with another bright idea—"