Winter and Night (10 page)

Stacie and I had walked to the parking lot together— she'd insisted on paying for her own coffee, to keep her journalistic integrity intact— and I'd watched her drive off in her green Corolla. I wondered about the story she'd write, how something like this looked when it happened in your town and you were seventeen.

Then I'd made two phone calls. The first was to Morgan Reed.

He answered the phone himself with a sullen, "Hello."

"Bill Smith," I said. "Cops leave yet?"

"Man, what the fuck are you calling for?" Rage boiled through the phone. "Did you tell them to come here?"

"Don't be stupid. Detective Sullivan took one look at that house, you were the first name that sprang to mind."

"Go fuck yourself."

"Don't hang up on me, Morgan, I'll just come over. I want to know if Gary Russell was at Tory Wesley's party Saturday night."

"Oh, fuck that party! I wish I never went to that fucking party!"

"But you did go?" I said it as a question, but neither of us thought it was.

"It's a fucking joke, too, because like I told Sullivan, I was so fucking wasted, I came home early. People were still coming when I left. Maybe Gary got there, maybe he didn't. I didn't see him. Who cares?"

"I guess Jim Sullivan already asked you if you killed her?"

"Fuck you!"

"Did you know she was dead?"

"No!" His voice tamped down. "I knew shit like that, I'd tell somebody."

That's what you say, I thought, until you know shit like that, and you know people you're tied up with are involved, will be in trouble if you tell somebody. I watched a car pull into the space Stacie Phillips had pulled out of. All right, I told myself, let it go. I asked Morgan Reed, "Do you know who killed her?"

"How could I, I didn't know she was dead?" The sneer was back. Another victory over a dumb adult.

"Did the reason Gary Russell went to New York have something to do with what happened at Tory Wesley's?"

"I don't know. I got no idea why he went and guess what? I don't give a shit."

"I don't buy it," I said. "You're a quarterback, he's your receiver. I didn't play, but I remember who was tight."

"The guy's new," Morgan snapped. "And him and me, we don't start." Meaning the thing that would tie them together, these boys, create a bond they would both remember as the best friendship they'd ever had: that thing hadn't happened yet.

"Okay," I said, and then because he was still a fifteen-year-old kid and some things were important to him, I said, "Have a good practice."

"I can't go to practice!" The real reason for his fury came out in a blast of outrage at the scale of the injustice. "My mom was so pissed when that asshole Sullivan came here and she found out about the party, I'm fucking grounded."

I called Lydia.

"That camp," I said. "Someone there has got to know something about this girl's death, what happened at that party. It might be one of them who killed her." I told Lydia about Stacie Phillips. "She said they were all bound to have been there, including Gary. And that Reed kid just about confirmed it. Whatever Gary's up to, it's got to have something to do with what happened there."

"I tried to call that kid at the camp, the one you wanted me to talk to, Randy Macpherson, but guess what— you can't talk to the kids."

"While they're at practice?"

"At all. No phone calls while they're at camp, except for certified emergencies."

"You're kidding."

"It sounded weird to me, too, but I decided it must be a guy thing. A football thing. You know, for building men."

"A lot of sarcasm going around today."

"Football brings that out in me. What do you want me to do?"

"About that, nothing, I think it's incurable. About the kids, go out there. This isn't just a social call, they'll have to let you talk to them. Sullivan'll be going there soon, but he'll have to hook up with the locals. Maybe you can find out something from the kids before he gets there."

With a note of caution in her voice, she said, "This is a homicide investigation now, Bill."

"That's in case I forgot?"

"It's in case you remembered and don't give a damn."

A Mustang racing out of the parking lot screeched its brakes when the traffic didn't stop to make way for it.

"I'm sorry," I said, rubbing my eyes. "You're right. If you don't want to go on with this—"

"Of course I'll go on," she said impatiently. "But I want you to pay attention. The way you would if this were any other case."

When we hung up, I watched the Mustang muscle into the street, then stand at a red light, engine stupidly racing.

Six

i needed to see Helen once more, and I needed to get out of Warrenstown before Sullivan made me a short-term guest of the place. But there was one other thing I wanted to try, and if I was lucky I'd be able to get in and get out before Sullivan knew I'd been there.

Warrenstown High stood on the outskirts of town. Broad stairs led up to the doors and sunlight glinted off wide windows in the classroom wings on either side. Behind the classrooms rose the higher blocks of the irregular spaces: auditorium, library, gym. Everything was yellow brick and it all glowed triumphantly in the afternoon sun.

I climbed the steps past a group of kids sitting around killing time. Inside, a few more kids walked the deserted halls, opened lockers to exchange one set of books for another. These would be brainiacs, or geeks, or maybe the artsy crowd, doing what they did even over camp week. I asked directions, got pointed this way and that, and found my way to the gym, wondering how I'd feel if I were fifteen and new to this sprawling building on a crowded school morning, and everyone else was rushing around, and finding your way was confusing and difficult and really mattered.

The gym's polished floor gleamed in sunlight from high windows. The huge overhead lights, caged against damage, were off now, but they'd be on for evening practices, for Friday night games. The place was empty; I stopped inside and my footsteps and the thump of the swinging doors echoed, faded. A wave of memory crashed over me as I stood looking: high school basketball in Brooklyn, the two years I lived there before I joined the navy; shipboard games under a net to keep the ball from the Pacific; college intramurals; pickup games in the park. Shouts, sweat, feet pounding, heart pumping, pulling out more than you thought you had from deep inside you again and again. I'd been a good shooter, but it wasn't the game-saver shots I was seeing now, not the cheers of the crowd I heard. What I remembered, what I'd forgotten, was a different thrill, and it was real, and better: making the no-look pass, setting the solid screen, nailing the timing on the alley-oop. Getting the pointed finger and the thumbs-up from the guy you'd made the pass to, set the screen for. Being depended on by a team full of other guys, and coming through; depending on them and not being let down. Long exhausting practices you looked forward to, coaches and trainers whose insults you let pass and whose orders you followed, pain you iced and ignored, because all that was the price of being here, on the hardwood, under the lights, in a place where you belonged.

I shook off the memory. There was no one here. I pushed out the swinging doors again, left them to echo by themselves.

Back along the corridor I came across the Warrenstown Wall of Fame: photos of boys, grouped by the sport they played, with plaques identifying them as school record holders, county champions, season MVPs. There were pictures of girls, too, in basketball and tennis uniforms, but fewer, and set farther from the propped-open double doors through which I could see the athletic field, spread wide in the glorious sunlight.

I stepped outside, where kids in maroon jerseys were lined up in rows along the field, doing stretches and jumping jacks. The stretches were led by a blond kid in a red jersey: the quarterback, who strained and shouted with the rest of them, grabbing this chance to show he could give orders, command respect.

Toward the end of any season, football practice was usually half-speed, to save the kids' battered bodies for the upcoming game; and here, especially, I'd have expected to see kids goofing off, messing with each other, feeling some kind of relaxed, exhibition-game mood. Warrenstown's season, after all, was over, and these kids— varsity juniors and sophomores, JV standouts— were here now only to get ready for a game they couldn't win.

But though they were in shorts or sweats, no pads but the bulging shoulder pads under their jerseys, these kids were anything but relaxed. This could have been August, a preseason practice to find the stars, weed out the failures.

It was like that, I supposed, as I watched them work with a concentrated fury that would have snapped a muscle in anyone over seventeen. They were preparing for the game where Warrenstown said good-bye to this year's heroes and got a look at next year's, and everyone wanted to be one.

On the screech of a whistle blown by a square-jawed, not-tall guy in maroon Warrenstown sweats, the warm-up session ended, and the kids lined up for wind sprints across the width of the field. Even allowing for the padding, these kids were huge: tall, wide-shouldered, their unpadded forearms and calves sharply muscled. The whistle blew and I watched them fly full-speed, bend to catch breath, turn at the whistle and charge again. I saw one kid slap another on the shoulder as he passed him, saw the second step it up, saw them end the sprint dead even. They were young and effort was rewarded and that extra burst was there when they needed it. I watched them run on the green field in the afternoon sun and I thought they were beautiful.

The guy in the sweats peered out over them all, eyes narrowed, mouth curved into a frown, looking for slackers, for losers, for fools.

I walked over, stood beside him. "Coach Ryder?"

He nodded without turning. "You found him."

Ryder had maybe fifteen years on me, a lined, ruddy face, thinning sandy hair. "Bill Smith," I told him. "Investigator from New York. I'm looking for Gary Russell."

I waited. If news of Tory Wesley's, death had gotten this far, my name might have too, and Sullivan's order, and Ryder might tell me to go to hell. He didn't. What he said, nodding toward the field, was, "Russell. He's supposed to be here."

I looked over the field, too, the kids on their backs doing sit-ups now. "This is your juniors, your sophomores?"

"Except for Russell and Reed. Russell fucking takes off, Reed's mother grounds him. How the hell am I supposed to build a football team here if people do whatever they goddamn want?"

I had no answer to that question and I wasn't sure there was one. "I just need to find Gary Russell," I said. "Can you tell me anything about him, anything that might have been on his mind lately?"

"Anything's on their minds besides football, I don't want to hear about it," Ryder said. He blew his whistle once more and the sit-ups ended. He gave them thirty seconds, not quite enough to recover, and blew again. The kids strapped on their helmets. One group trotted down to run plays at the far end of the field under the eye of another guy dressed, like Ryder, in Warrenstown sweats. The rest stayed up here, lined up in groups of two and seven at the blocking sled. On an assistant coach's, "Down! Set!" followed by a whistle, the kids crashed the sled, pounding, thumping into it, imagining the enemy there. Ryder watched for a while, then stepped forward.

"Gelson!" he yelled in a voice that probably shook coffee cups down at the Galaxy Diner. "Goddammit, Gelson, your sister show you that? Go play with her, you want to play like a pussy! Take a lap, then get your fat ass back here and hit that fucking thing like you mean it!" A big kid close to us broke away from the others, headed around the dusty track; the others charged harder when the whistle blew for them.

"Gary Russell," I said.

Ryder turned to me for the first time. "I got practice going here."

"The kid is missing. He's fifteen."

"Missing, hell. He ran away from home. I hear he even left a note so his mommy wouldn't worry. Mommy's boys, how the hell am I supposed to work with that? What the hell you asking me for?"

"You're his coach. Coaches sometimes know what's going on with the kids on the team."

"Russell's new, I hardly know him. And like I said, if it's not football, I don't want to hear it. Ask me, I'll tell you during the season I don't want them thinking about anything but Friday's game. If they're JV, Saturday afternoon's, same thing. When Russell comes back, I'm not so sure I'll let him play."

Two boys crashed the sled together. The groups of seven were the offensive and defensive lines; the groups of two, backs and receivers. This wasn't really their job, and in most places coaches didn't expect as much from them on a drill like this; but Ryder, watching these two, scowled.

"Grades?" I asked Ryder. "Girls?"

"Grades— if they gave a shit they'd be bookworms, they wouldn't be playing football to start with. Girls you can't stop them from thinking about," Ryder snorted. "Especially here. Warrenstown High girls, cock-teasing little bitches." The bitterness in Ryder's voice surprised me, and I wondered if he knew what had happened in Warrenstown, over the weekend.

"Coach," I said, "I don't know if you heard about this, but there was a wild party Saturday night, out at a girl named Tory Wesley's house. Detective Sullivan found her this morning; she's dead."

Ryder looked out over the field again, said, "I heard."

"Did you know her?"

Silence. Then a cold smile, and he said, "Tory Wesley. Warrenstown High girl."

Ryder started striding downfield, toward the red-shirted quarterback, who was firing passes at a receiver cutting fast.

"Davis!" Ryder shouted. The quarterback dropped his arm, waited. "Davis, if Reed doesn't play Saturday, you're all we have. You want that asshole Hamlin to let those seniors piss all over us?"

The kid shook his head. "No, coach."

"Then you have to be a lot better than that! We're playing fucking seniors, Davis! Watch your receiver! Throw where he is, not where you wish he was!"

I kept up with Ryder, stopped beside him. Davis threw another pass and Ryder cursed under his breath. He said nothing else to Davis, though, so I started again.