Blood Ties (26 page)

I raised my eyebrows, said nothing.

Stacie went on, “So this guy jumped me in the school lot. The lot's almost deserted Camp Week anyway, there's almost never anyone around.”

“Except geeks like you?”

“I thought you were going to be quiet.” She turned to Lydia, told her, “And I'm not a geek. I'm an artsy type. He can't get it right.”

“He has that problem sometimes,” Lydia agreed. “What were you doing at school?”

“At the paper we can keep going through the break if we want. Researching stories or the graphics people can do layouts or whatever. It's extra credit.”

“So lots of people would have known you were there?” I asked.

“Oh, a detective question. I guess so. We can work after two-thirty, any days we want. I'm the editor, so I come in every day. I guess people know that.”

I said to Lydia, “She's the editor, you know.”

“I can't believe,” Stacie said, “that I'm in the hospital and you're picking on me.”

“I got shot once working with him,” Lydia said. “I was in the hospital for four days and he visited every day and picked on me.”

Stacie's one open eye opened wider. “You got shot, for real?”

“He's a dangerous guy to know. I'll show you my scar later if you want.”

“Cool.”

“Can we get back to why you're here?” I asked.

“I'm here because this guy jumped me. He kept hitting me and kicking me.” Stacie's voice started strong, but suddenly wobbled, at the end. I reached out, squeezed her hand. Surprisingly, she didn't let go. She said, “Don't you want to know why
you're
here?”

No wise guy retorts: I just nodded.

“He kept asking me, ‘What do you have?' I didn't know what he meant. Then he switched to, ‘What did Tory Wesley have?'”

“That's it?” I asked. “‘What did Tory Wesley have?'”

“I kept saying, ‘I don't know, I don't know.' Then he cursed me out, and then he told me I'd better not tell anyone what he said, and I'd better drop it or he'd be back.” She looked at me. “What did he mean? What do I have? What did Tory have?”

“I don't know,” I said. “That was all he said?”

She nodded. “Over and over.”

Lydia got up, took the plastic cup from Stacie's bedside, filled it with water for her. Stacie released my hand so she could hold the cup.

“Could you identify him?” I asked. “Anything about him?”

She gave Lydia back the cup. “I don't think so.” She seemed to sink into the pillows a little. “He kind of growled, like a really hard whisper, not talked, so I don't think I'd know his voice if I heard it again. He wasn't real big, but he wasn't real skinny or anything else you'd notice. Just sort of average.”

“Just your average mugger.”

“In a Jason mask,” Lydia added.

“Did you tell the police? Sullivan?”

“I told them about the mask and stuff but not what he said. It wasn't Detective Sullivan. I would've told him, I think.” She sounded not quite sure of that. “But it was Bobby Sánchez. He's not a detective, just a cop.”

“Why didn't Sullivan come? Is he off duty?”

“No, he's someplace else.”

Oh, right, I thought. In New York, with the NYPD, picking up a gun dealer in Queens.

“Besides,” Stacie said, “from what it looked like, it was just, like, a mugging. They didn't think they needed a detective, I guess.”

“But you think they're wrong.”

“Of course I think they're wrong.” She turned her battered face to me. “What does he want me to drop? What
do
I have? What did Tory have?”

“I don't know,” I said. “But I'll find out. And if anyone ever comes near you again, I'll kill them.”

She gave me the grin, weaker and more weary this time, but real. “Could you put that a different way? So I can keep, like, dating?”

“I can't believe,” I said, “that you're in the hospital and you're picking on me.”

I left first, waited in the hallway while Lydia showed Stacie her bullet scar. Lydia and I rode the elevator down and walked out in silence, stood in the hospital parking lot by my car.

“I can see why you like her so much,” Lydia said. “She's great.”

“I meant it,” I said. “I'll kill him.”

Lydia gave me a long look under the sodium lights. “It would be better,” she said, “to figure out who he was and what he wanted.”

“Shit,” I said, and then, when I'd gotten a cigarette going, smoked half of it in silence, said, “I know that.”

“When you called,” Lydia said, after a moment, “I was talking to a girl I wanted you to talk to anyway.”

“Someone in Warrenstown?”

“Yes. One of a crowd I found hanging out in the park. I guess you'd call them freaks. Dyed hair, pierced noses, those things. None of them had anything to say, but I gave them my card and about half an hour later this girl called me. Do you want to talk to her?”

“You think it'll help?”

“I don't know what will help,” she said. “But I know this is what we do.”

Lydia made a call from her cell phone. We got into our separate cars and navigated down the hill from Greenmeadow Hospital into the town.

We were meeting Lydia's contact on the playground at Greenmeadow Elementary School. I'd offered coffee, or dinner, but the girl told Lydia she wanted to make it somewhere less public. I would have been reluctant in any case to go back to Warrenstown until I had to; but it was she, not I, who had suggested meeting outside of Warrenstown.

I stopped to buy coffee, and tea for Lydia, and caught up with Lydia on the street in front of the school. I parked behind her and we walked to the playground that filled the lot between the school and a baseball field. A fence surrounded it but the gate was open. I dropped myself onto a picnic table bench, leaned back against the table. I stretched my legs, stared across the street at the neat little houses with their windows glowing an inviting yellow. Lydia sat on the table itself, arms around her knees, sipping her tea.

“Her name's Kate Minor,” Lydia said. “She's a senior at Warrenstown High. She thinks I'm an investigative reporter for New York One.”

“She's seen your business card,” I said.

“I used the reporter ones,” she said, lifting her eyebrows as though I should have known that.

“You had them with you?”

“I always do. You never know.”

Never, I thought. You never know.

It was ten minutes before Lydia's contact showed up and we spent it in silence, sipping from cardboard cups, watching the evening. I wanted to tell Lydia where I'd been that afternoon after she left for Warrenstown, what I'd been thinking about on my slow walk downtown. But I couldn't, right now. Right now all I could do was drink coffee and smoke a cigarette and try to push away the images of Stacie's face, and Gary's, the echoes of their voices asking for help, the echoes of Macpherson's voice and Scott's and Hamlin's and Coach Ryder's telling me to go to hell, and my sister's small bewildered voice saying she didn't understand.

At one point Lydia reached a hand out, kneaded my shoulder. Even through the thickness of my leather jacket I thought I could feel her warmth. I don't know why she did that, but when she did the faces and the voices faded, and the fence and the streetlights and the night became, again, what was real.

Finally an Audi a few years old pulled around the corner, parked behind my car. The driver got out and headed through the playground fence. Lydia slipped down off the table, stood and waved. The figure walked slowly toward us, and now I could see it was a girl, large and heavy; as she neared us I saw the spiky black hair, the moon-pale face, the ring in her nostril and the one in her eyebrow. She came to stand before us, hands in the pockets of her army-surplus jacket. She scowled, and she shifted from foot to foot, looking as though at any second she might turn and leave.

“This is Bill Smith,” Lydia said. “My partner. We're working this story together. Bill, this is Kate Minor.”

I put out my hand and Kate Minor's scowl deepened. I didn't move and finally she offered her hand, withdrew it after a perfunctory shake.

“Sit down,” I suggested, as though this were my office and I was trying to be hospitable. After a moment she did, straddling the bench, hands thrust deeply into her pockets. I sat on the end, where I had been, and Lydia perched on the table again, between us.

Lydia took out her small notebook. “I asked Kate and her friends,” she said, “whether they could tell me anything about Tory Wesley, or the party, or the boy who disappeared. Gary Russell?” She said that as if to refresh my memory. “Or anything they think viewers would be interested in. Things people should know.”

Kate Minor looked down at her feet, at the tufts of grass drained of color by the streetlights at the playground's edge. Looking back up, her eyes belligerent slits, she said, “I don't want anyone to know I'm doing this.”

“Of course not,” Lydia said. “Our sources are confidential, always.”

“Because I could get in trouble.”

“I understand.”

Kate looked at me and I nodded.

“It's only—I mean, it's always been really shitty, but now they finally killed someone. I mean, they
killed
someone.”

Her eyes wore heavy rings of coal-black makeup and her lips were painted a dark-outlined brown. She looked at me, and then at Lydia, and behind the toughness I thought I saw, in her eyes, a little girl asking us to say this all hadn't happened, no, everything's all right, you don't have to do this, go home. But we couldn't say that. Lydia asked instead, “Who did, Kate?”

“The jocks did,” Kate said, her tone suspicious, as though if Lydia and I didn't know something that obvious, maybe there was no point in talking to us. “Those fucking jocks. They own Warrenstown and we all live with that, but they can't just
kill
people.”

“Tell us why you say they did.”

“Killed Tory? Who else do you think was at that party?”

“Were you there?”

Kate Minor stared at Lydia. “I'm fat, I'm a freak. I get straight A's in honors calculus and computer science. Do I seem like someone who'd go to a jock party?”

A cold wind swept the playground, ruffling Lydia's hair, though it made no impact on the spikes Kate wore. Lydia's hand touched my shoulder again, and it was a good thing, because a hot wave of impatience had swept through me as though embers I'd been trying to ignore had been fanned into flame by the wind. This girl could tell us nothing: She thought it was news that the jocks in Warrenstown were capable of murder. She was here to persuade us with her hate, but it was all she had. I wanted to go. I wanted to move. This was useless.

Lydia, her hand still resting on my shoulder, said to Kate, “There must have been seventy-five kids at that party. If one of them killed Tory Wesley, do you know who?”

Kate Minor shook her head. “No,” she said bitterly. “But I know why.”

fifteen

Kate Minor kicked the dirt beneath her feet at the playground picnic table and told us what she thought.

“When they don't get what they want,” she said, “it's totally fucked.”

“The jocks?” Lydia asked.

Kate nodded. “It's, like, this famous tradition in Warrenstown. It goes back years.”

“And it's still true?”

Kate didn't look at us. “Like, last year, this one senior, Cody Macklowe? He wanted me to do his algebra homework for him.”

“When he was a senior and you were a junior?”

“Yeah, but I'm in honors and he was in, like, last math.”

“Not his subject?” Lydia tried a smile, and I knew it was to tell Kate, relax, it's okay. But Kate didn't smile back.

“Whatever,” she said. “He might have done okay in it, except half the time he never went to class or took notes or anything. He was a big football star.”

“He didn't get in trouble for cutting classes?”

“He started both ways,” Kate said, offering this as an obvious reason a kid wouldn't get in trouble for delinquent behavior. “We only had one other player that did that.”

Lydia nodded, asked, “What happened? About the homework?” as if she had any idea what it meant to start both ways.

“I told him to shove it. He kept telling me to and I kept saying no.” Kicking the dirt again: “So he beat up my dog.”

“He beat up your dog?”

“Lucky, my dog. We got him when I was eight. He came home all bloody one day, he couldn't walk right. We thought he was hit by a car. The vet said he almost died. In the morning I found a note on my locker that said, ‘Next time, I'll beat his fucking brains out.' It was stapled to Cody's homework assignment.”

“What did you do?”

From inside her army jacket Kate took out a pack of American Spirits. I lit a match, held it for her. She seemed slightly surprised, like when I'd offered to shake hands. Exhaling, looking away, she said, “I did his homework for the rest of the semester.”

“You didn't tell anybody?”

“If I told somebody,” she said, “and Cody got in trouble and couldn't play, the whole fucking town would be pissed at me. And Lucky,” she said, took another long drag on her cigarette, “Lucky would be dead.”

The wind gusted, lifting thin veils of dirt from the baseball diamond, herding them across the outfield grass along with a few stray gum wrappers, a sheet of newspaper, a Styrofoam cup. Over in Warrenstown, the park was kept clean by jocks in trouble: You'd never find this kind of trash there.