Winter and Night (22 page)

"What the hell was I supposed to do, tell him, 'Just browsing, thanks?' I'll turn it over."

A brief silence. "All right," Sullivan said again. "I'll call the NYPD, tell them I got a tip. Anonymous. I'll keep you out of it if I can. That'll be what you get, for giving this up."

"It may not be what I want."

"I know," he said. "But it's all I have."

"Gary?" I asked.

"I have to tell them. About Gary, and that other kid. You know that."

"Yeah," I said. "I guess I do. Sullivan, one more thing."

"What?"

"School's out in Warrenstown, until Monday. If no one's got their hands on this Premador kid by then—"

"Yeah," Sullivan said. "I'm ahead of you. But shit: Gary's new here. If he's talking to this Premador kid by e-mail, he doesn't have to be from here. He could be anywhere."

We hung up again, Sullivan and I, and I slipped the phone back in my pocket, looked out across the street, watched people go about their business, cars roll by, a dog sniff at a trash can.

"I'm sorry," a soft voice said, and of course it was Lydia, beside me.

I shook my head. "You were right."

"I'm still sorry." She took my hand, gave it a quick squeeze, let it go again. I nodded, looked away.

"I was thinking," she said.

I turned back to her, waited.

"There must be reporters in Warrenstown by now, covering the Wesley investigation."

"There probably are."

"You didn't tell Sullivan I was with you at Ray's. He has no idea I exist."

"You want to go to Warrenstown?"

"I'm young, I'm small, I'm a girl, I do 'Gee whiz' really well."

In spite of myself, that made me smile, and when I smiled she did, too. "You also," I said, "do evil kick-ass psychotic sidekick well. If Ray had a brain, he'd have been scared of you."

"I endeavor," she said, "to give satisfaction."

* * *

So we made a plan. I'd stay here, around the neighborhood, talk to the woman in the One to One van when it came, try to turn up someone else who'd seen Gary. I'd keep an eye on Ray's place, see if anyone came or went before the NYPD showed up. Lydia would rent a car and head out to Warrenstown.

"It'll be supper time by the time I get there," she said. "Maybe I can find kids hanging around the McDonald's or someplace."

"I can call Stacie Phillips, find out where the kids hang out," I said. "If I get her I'll call you. But I'm not going to tell her who you are. If you come across her, you can talk, girl reporter to girl reporter."

"I can't wait."

She took my hand again, and I leaned down, kissed her, and then, in the chill of the gray afternoon, let her go. I watched as she crossed the street, as she trotted up the subway steps. I stood there and smoked another cigarette until the train came and I knew she was gone. Then I took a picture of Gary from the envelope Lydia had left with me, and started to slog.

I worked the pictures for forty minutes or so, getting nowhere. The One to One van didn't come, and though I checked Ray's block half a dozen times, I saw no action. It's hard to get a warrant on an anonymous tip, though it can be done; whoever Sullivan had called in the NYPD was probably taking a little time to figure out how to do it in a way that would stick. That was okay with me, and I told myself it was okay because I wanted to be sure it would stick, too. Though if that were the whole truth, my heart wouldn't have pounded the way it did when I saw a tall, broad-shouldered kid walking down Ray's block, and the current wouldn't have flashed up my spine later when a different, dark-haired kid in a letter jacket turned the corner. Neither of them was Gary, and neither went into Ray's building. No one else that age came close, and I accomplished nothing. I kept at it, though, because sometimes going on, even when you're exhausted and winning is hopeless, is easier than quitting.

I walked up and down the blocks and I handed out the flyers and I thought about being fifteen. I called Stacie Phillips and got her voice mail. I talked to people and had another cup of coffee and smoked more cigarettes and was almost relieved when my cell phone rang.

"Smith."

"Please hold for Mr. Macpherson," a woman's voice told me. I stepped out of the flow of sidewalk traffic and held. After that extra half-minute so I'd be sure to know that, though he'd been the one to call, he had more important things to do with his time than talk to me, Al Macpherson came on the line.

"This Smith? I want to see you."

His voice was as it had been yesterday: loud, fast, a voice used to saying things once and being obeyed.

"Last night you wanted to drive over me," I pointed out.

"And you better believe I still do. Come up here. My office."

"You make it sound so inviting."

"Fuck you. I could have you arrested for last night. But first I want to talk."

First. "Do I have a choice?"

"You can do any damn thing you want. But it'll work out better for you if you come up here."

"Work out better how?"

"Two-forty-one Park. Macpherson Peters Ennis and Arkin, sixteenth floor. I'm here until six."

I checked my watch. Four-thirty; plenty of time if I wanted to do this.

"Yeah," I said. "All right. Half an hour, forty minutes."

"That the best you can do?"

"Well, yeah, but an important guy like you could probably do it faster. You want to come here? I'm in Queens."

"You don't know when to stop, do you? Half an hour. Smith? I don't like to wait."

He hung up without saying anything more.

I detoured along Sting Ray's block on the way to the subway, but nothing was happening: no young kids armed to the teeth, no NYPD cars racing up, no plainclothes detectives scoping the place out. I had the gun I'd bought from Ray stuck in the back of my jeans and the .38 I usually wear in a rig under my left arm. I had a sudden urge to take Ray's gun to the range and see if it actually worked, but I knew I wouldn't. At Sullivan's nod I'd turn the thing over to the NYPD, never fire it. I wondered about the gun Premador had bought, whether it would be fired, and where, and by whom.

I used the wait on the subway platform to call a lawyer friend and ask about Macpherson Peters Ennis and Arkin.

"Trusts and estates," he told me. "Divorces, if there's serious money involved. You about to shuffle off and leave someone a bundle?"

"No, I'm breaking up with my girlfriend. She's filthy rich and I'm looking for palimony."

"If that were true," he said dryly, "Macpherson would be your boy. He does the divorce work, a husband's man. Defends beleagured millionaires and their offshore assets against bloodsucking women and children."

"Good to know someone's willing to step up and do what has to be done."

"By all accounts, the man loves his job."

The subway rumbled through Queens and under the river, brought me back to Manhattan seven blocks up and two over from Macpherson's building. I took those blocks in long strides, moving in a rhythm, not slowing as I cut around other pedestrians, stepped off the curb, made lights or beat them. I stopped only once to wait for one to change, and cut in front of a slow-moving cab the second it finally did.

241 Park turned out to be a gray glass box on a corner, and Macpherson Peters Ennis and Arkin turned out to be a law firm big enough to take up three floors of it. The directory downstairs told me the senior partners, the ones with their names in the title, were on the sixteenth floor; I wondered, as I was shown to Al Macpherson's corner office, if they limited themselves to four senior partners because the building was square.

Macpherson's office was large, the leather furniture and hefty gold-lettered volumes lining the bookshelves meant to reassure clients that here was a man of weight and substance. You'd congratulate yourself, they said, for being smart enough to place your legal needs in his hands. This satisfying thought was echoed by the complicated maroon-and-blue Persian carpet sitting superiorly on the beige wall-to-wall; by the oil painting of a sailboat regatta, glowing under its own brass frame light; and by the breakfront bearing a dozen golf trophies, evidence that Macpherson played the game and played it well.

The paralegal leading the way had opened Macpherson's office door for me; the door was heavy, dark wood, silent on its hinges. Now he shut it again behind me, never saying a word. Macpherson stood as I came in, not out of politeness, but as a linebacker takes a stance waiting for the ball to snap, the play to start.

"Smith," he said. He looked pointedly at his watch; the trip had taken me nearly an hour.

"How's Randy?" I asked, stepping up to stand in front of his weighty desk, taking position. "He make it home last night, or did he spend the night in a cell?"

"You're an asshole," was Macpherson's response. He was shaved and groomed and his muscled, athletic frame was dressed in another expensive suit: navy this time, pale blue white-collared shirt, blue-and-yellow rep tie. He didn't look like a man who'd been in a fight last night and he especially didn't look like a man who'd lost. "You're a goddamn asshole and you don't know what trouble you're in."

"But you're about to tell me, right? If that's all this is about, write it down and fax it, Macpherson. I don't have time."

"Sit down. I want to ask you some questions. If you're smart, you'll stop fucking around and give me answers."

"We've already established I'm an asshole." I stayed standing. Macpherson did, too, looking me over, my jeans, my jacket, my boots. World-class players, his eyes said, didn't walk around in raggedy-ass uniforms.

"Why the hell didn't you tell me you're Scott Russell's brother-in-law?" he demanded.

"When did you ask?"

"Where's Scott's son?"

"If I knew that I'd be out of your life."

"You'll be out of my life soon anyway, Smith. What's he up to, the Russell kid?"

"Why do you care?"

He gave me another look and a slow, cold smile. He dropped himself abruptly into his big leather chair. It was maroon, I noticed, Warrenstown's color, though in leather they call that oxblood.

"That asshole Sullivan," he said to me. "Fifty thousand dollars to send those kids to Hamlin's. Randy didn't kill that girl and neither did anyone else on the football team."

"They were at that party."

"Says who?"

"Some kid'll break down. Some kid'll start saying who was there, and then it'll all come out."

"Bullshit. All that'll happen is Sullivan'll fuck with their heads and there goes the Hamlin's game, maybe even next season. Warrenstown's a great place, but Warrenstown cops have always been assholes."

"Yeah," I said. "I heard about that. Been true for over twenty years, I guess?"

Macpherson appeared motionless, gazed steadily at me; but I sensed all his muscles tightening under his skin, the way you know, sometimes, which way the guy with the ball is going to move, just by looking in his eyes.

"That," Macpherson pointed a finger at me, "is your biggest fucking mistake. Big. Warrenstown doesn't need that shit dug up again. And I—" He stood, planted his fists on his desk. "—I sure as hell don't need it dug up, either. You know that arrest ruined my college career?"

I looked at the laminated diploma hanging by the bookcase. "You went to Harvard."

"Harvard fucking Law. Rutgers undergrad, where I worked my fucking ass off to get into fucking Harvard. Because I was going to goddamn be somebody, Smith. Because I couldn't play football."

"Why not?"

He blew out a breath. "It's a big fucking deal in Warrenstown to get recruited, you know that? Suburban schools, Eastern schools, colleges write you off. They like big colored boys from Texas, or dumb-ass bohunks from steel towns. I was recruited, Smith. By a Division One school. Notre Dame. But they were the only ones. And tight-assed Catholic pricks, after I was arrested they kissed me off."

"I don't get it. You were released, never even charged. Another kid killed himself, for Christ's sake. Or am I wrong?"

"Jared Beltran. Stinking little shit. But the party, it was all over the newspapers. Sex, drugs, rock and roll. Remember those days?"

"I remember."

"I was a middle linebacker. I never fooled myself, I knew where I stood: I would've started second string at Notre Dame. But that would've been enough for me, just to get the chance, just to show them what I could do."

A brief pause, and I almost thought I saw, behind this looming, arrogant bully of a man, the faint outline of a boy who wanted nothing so much as a chance to play.

"Not good enough, in other words, for them to keep the offer up after the bad publicity." The man's sneering words swept the boy's ghost away. "They had other candidates, they didn't need me. They thought I'd be a liability for the fucking alumni. These days, trust me, they wouldn't give a shit. They'd call it 'youthful indiscretion,' say I was a better human being and a better football player for it because I'd no doubt learned from my mistakes. No doubt. No fucking doubt. But that was then, and they didn't say that then."

"Couldn't you have played somewhere else?"

"Division Two? You're kidding me, right? I'm going to take that kind of punishment for a bunch of second-raters, no one comes to the games, team never makes the papers?"

"My mistake."

He leaned forward. "Randy plays his position as well as I played mine. Better. He's All-State, two years. I am not, not, going to let his career get fucked up the way mine did. And especially not over some Warrenstown High bitch."

"Did you know her?"

He took a breath, straightened up. "Tory Wesley? No, of course I didn't know her. She was a sophomore. Randy's a senior. His older brother graduated two years ago."

"Sons," I said. "No daughters."

"What I want to know is how you knew her."

"I didn't."

"I have to listen to this shit? That asshole Scott Russell shows up in Warrenstown after twenty years, his son disappears and his fucking brother-in-law who happens to be a private eye happens to find a girl's body a couple of days later and you tell me you didn't know the girl?"

There seemed to be a lot of assholes in Macpherson's life. "I didn't know the girl," I said.