Blood Ties (33 page)

“He looks just the same, too. Big and pushy. If he sent you to ask what I remember you can go to hell, too.”

“He didn't send me. I don't like him either,” I ventured. “But that's what I came to ask.”

“I know what this is about.” She winked at me, took a quick gulp of her beer.

“What?”

“Money.”

“What do you mean?”

“That's how lawyers like Al get rich.” She told me this in a tone of voice that said I was lucky to be talking to someone who knew the ways of the world. “He sues people and keeps a third. I know all about it. I,” she said, downing a long swallow of beer, “
I
have been married three times. Bums every one of them, but I cleaned them out.” She waved the Bud at the living room, showed me her loot: mismatched lamps, a stained and threadbare carpet, the big TV. “Three tries at the brass ring,” she said, not really to me. “Fuck it.” She gulped some more beer. “Al wants me to sue Jared's folks so he can make money.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him to go away.”

“Did he go?”

“I told him,” she said, as though she hadn't heard, “I told him I don't remember.” She was looking at the sunlight slanting in the windows. The grime on the glass was bright; you couldn't see past it. “I don't remember and I don't like to think about it.” Her voice had changed and her lip trembled. The arm she had wrapped around the dog tightened as she pulled him closer to her. The dog squirmed and rearranged himself but didn't try to leave. “We wouldn't get anything from Jared's parents and I don't care if we would, just so I don't have to think about it. I told him to go away.”

“Did he go?”

“He said if I ever changed my mind I should let him know. He left me his business card.”

“Can I see it?”

She turned her gaze to me, stared for the first time directly into my eyes. “I threw it away. I ripped it into little pieces,” she said, “and threw it the hell away.”

nineteen

I drove away from Beth Adams's house, back down the empty roads, thinking how bleak autumn sunlight can look sometimes, shining off the vivid colors of leaves about to fall.

I steered carefully, searching for someplace I could get a cup of coffee to cancel out Beth Adams's beer. I found a gas station with a mini-mart, fueled the car and myself, and took off again. The coffee held me until I was out of the hills and back on a strip road headed south. Then I pulled off at a diner whose blue neon sign read
EAT HERE—GET FAT
. Direct and to the point, I thought, unlike so much in life.

I ordered scrambled eggs and sausage, and more coffee. After the first cup I told the waitress I'd be right back, took my phone out into the sunshine and called Lydia.

Traffic whizzed by in both directions, exhaust filling the morning air. I dialed, waited until she'd answered in both languages, then said, “It's just me.”

“Oh. How'd you do?” she asked.

“I talked to her. She doesn't remember what happened that night. She says she never has. But that's not the real news.”

“What is?”

“Al Macpherson was there last night asking her the same thing.”

Sunlight glinted off chrome as a big rig pulled into the diner lot. Lydia said, “Our Al Macpherson? You're kidding.”

“Never. I'm all business, you know that.”

“Uh-huh. What did he want?”

“He said he wanted to help her make big bucks suing the parents of the kid who killed himself. If only she could remember what happened.”

“That's unbelievably ghoulish. Not to mention,” she said, “plain unbelievable.”

“I know,” I said. “Twenty-three years later? All of a sudden, last night?”

The driver of the big rig climbed out, a long-limbed beanpole of a guy who ambled across the parking lot like a walking challenge to the diner's mission.

“How did he find her?” Lydia asked.

“She wasn't hiding; Vélez found her for me in under two hours. Macpherson could have had somebody do the same. Or he could have been keeping track of her all these years.”

“So what did he really want?”

“Must be to see what she remembered. He must've thought dangling money in front of her would make her think harder.”

“What did she remember?”

“Nothing. Except that she didn't like him. She threw him out.”

“Good for her,” said Lydia. “It does sort of give you the feeling, though, that there's something to remember.”

Through the diner window I saw my eggs arrive. “Listen,” I said, “I love you but my breakfast's here. You have anything to say?”

“About your breakfast?”

“About your place in my heart.”

“Just behind eggs?”

“Before eggs. But behind coffee.”

“Not a word, except that if you're eating it now, it's lunch. But in case you're dying to know what I've been up to, I've been talking to these kids some more.”

I checked my watch. She was right about lunch. “Nothing fascinates me more than your movements. Except my coffee. Find anything?”

“I seem to be confirming what Kate Minor said. Consensus is Tory Wesley was supplying Warrenstown High with hallucinogens and designer drugs.”

“The kids are telling you this?”

“It's more like, I'm saying ‘what if' and they're not denying much. It comes out the same. But no one seems to think Gary's involved. Though from the kids I'm talking to, you always get, ‘Of course, he's a jock.'”

“Meaning there's a whole jock life mortal kids know nothing about?”

“Seems to be.”

“Kate said jocks do hallucinogens and steroids. Did they get the steroids from Tory, too?”

“I haven't heard that.”

“How about where Tory was planning to get the ecstasy that never came through?”

“I asked that; no one knows.”

I looked back in the window of the diner. “I'm going to have my breakfast, or whatever it is,” I said. “Those eggs are calling me. After that I'm going to come meet you. I know someone who'll know.”

Lydia tried to talk me out of going to Warrenstown but it was no good. This was something that had to be done in person, not over the phone, and by me, not by her.

“Competent as you are,” I said, “indeed, even skilled, talented beyond my own humble abilities—”

“I'm going to be sick.”

“It always comes down to that, doesn't it?”

We compromised on a meet in the Greenmeadow Hospital parking lot, mostly because we both knew where it was. I plowed through the eggs and sausage, decided that food like this was breakfast no matter when you ate it.

It took me another forty minutes to get to Greenmeadow; when I did I found Lydia already there, leaning on her car in sunglasses and black leather. We left my car behind and took hers, so at least it would have to be my face and not my license plate that alerted the Warrenstown PD that I was around.

“I spoke to the Wesleys,” she said, turning left out of the lot, me beside her trying not to press my brake foot to the floor every time we neared another car.

“Learn anything?”

“Not about the party, who might have been there. They had no idea about the drugs, according to them. They did say Tory had trouble ‘fitting in.' She didn't seem to have many friends.” Lydia fell silent; I turned to look at her.

“And?”

After more silence she said, “They told me her social life started to look up this summer when she began seeing a boy who was new here.”

“Gary.”

Lydia nodded. “But after football tryouts, he started hanging out with the jock crowd, and he stopped calling her.”

“That's what Morgan said: He dated her before he knew who was cool.”

“Her mother said Tory was really upset. A couple of times she found her crying in her room. She told her mother she'd do anything to be cool, to be one of the crowd. Her parents thought it was just teenage melodrama. They told her it didn't matter who liked you, as long as you liked yourself.”

I turned back to the windshield. In a front yard, a guy was raking leaves. A gust of wind charged into his leaf pile, tossed the leaves around his lawn. It shook the branches of the oak tree above him, raining down more leaves, and blew the maple leaves from his neighbor's yard over to him. The man straightened up, stood holding his rake, staring around him, as the leaves swirled.

“You want to hear the really awful part?” Lydia said.

“Oh, sure.”

“The town's cutting them dead.”

“Meaning?”

“‘What was your daughter thinking, throwing a party the night before the boys went to Hamlin's?' ‘Why did you leave her home alone, what's the matter with you?' ‘Dealing drugs? What kind of a girl was she?' ‘Look what she's done to this town. Look what trouble she's gotten the boys in.' That sort of thing. Bill, they're burying their daughter, and the town's blaming her. And them.”

I had no answer to that. I rolled down the window, lit a cigarette. We sat in silence until we neared Warrenstown, when Lydia took out her phone, made a call to a number I gave her.

“Morgan Reed, please . . . Oh . . . Can you tell me when he'll be in? . . . I'm calling from the school library, about some books he reserved. . . . Oh, has he? . . . Oh, fine, I'll call him then. Thank you very much.”

She flipped the phone shut as I said, “He's ungrounded?”

“Only to go to football practice. He has to come right back home when it's over.”

“Sounds like Warrenstown,” I said. “But football practice starts at three. It's barely two.”

“He's not allowed to drive.”

“The Reeds live more than three miles from the high school.”

“That's why he left early. He's walking.”

I directed Lydia to the Morgans' well-kept wooden house, and from there we cruised along the most likely route to Warrenstown High. The yellow school bus passed us carrying children home from the elementary school. Suburban cars rolled down the street on suburban errands. At a Tastee-Freez Lydia pointed out to me two of the kids she'd talked to.

“None of the jocks will talk to me at all, and of the kids who will I can't get anyone to admit they were at that party.”

“Neither can Sullivan. I guess they know it could get them in big trouble.”

“Having been there could get them in trouble with Sullivan,” Lydia said. “Admitting it, the kids tell me, could get them in trouble with the jocks.”

We spotted Morgan Reed's tall, lean form about a mile and a half from the school. He was ambling down one of Warrenstown's newer residential streets. He wore his letter jacket, maroon and white like the one Gary had left behind, and his uniform pants, white, skin-tight, ending just below the knee. His maroon jersey swung from his hand. It was knotted and it bulged with his shoulder pads and the rest of his gear.

The street, in the way of suburban streets in the middle of the day, was deserted. Lydia pulled over just ahead of Morgan, kept the engine running while I stepped out of the car. “Hi, Morgan,” I said.

Morgan stopped short, scowled. “Oh, shit. What the hell do you want?” He tried to keep walking. I blocked the sidewalk. “Get the fuck out of my way.”

“Last time we talked, you were grounded,” I said.

He smiled, squinting in the sun. “Coach Ryder called my mother. So did a couple of neighbors. The assistant principal, too. Everyone said it was real important for me to be at practice.”

“Well, then,” I said, “I'll give you a lift.”

“Fuck you.”

“Or,” I said, “I'll knock the hell out of you right here on the sidewalk and you'll never make it to practice.”

“What the—?”

“I only want to talk. But you're a hard man to talk to.”

“You're fucking crazy.”

“Get in the car,” I said. “I'll get you to practice on time. Or you can try to get past me. But I wouldn't advise it.”

He glanced at the car, at me. “Come on, man. I don't make practice today, I don't play at Hamlin's tomorrow.”

I nodded. “That would be a shame, Morgan. I saw Davis at practice Wednesday. Not much of an arm. You guys wouldn't have any chance at all with him at quarterback, would you?”

He licked his lips. “What do you want?”

“Just a few questions,” I said, holding the door for him.

He shook his head. “Out here, man. And make it fast.”

I gave Morgan a long look, then waved Lydia out of the car. She smiled at Morgan from behind her Ray-Bans as she came around from the driver's door to stand on the sidewalk behind him.

“My partner,” I told Morgan. “Lydia Chin. Morgan,” I said for Lydia's benefit, “is a quarterback. Young, but they say he's pretty good. They say he's smart, can react to the situation.”

Lydia nodded her approval.

“Well,” I said to Morgan, “here's the situation. Tory Wesley—you remember her, Morgan, she died Saturday night—Tory Wesley was dealing drugs to you and your friends.”

Morgan turned from Lydia to me. “I—”

“Don't bother, I don't really care,” I said. “I'm mostly interested in a few other things. First, I want to know who beat up Stacie Phillips last night in the school parking lot.”

Morgan stared. “Stacie? Hey, she's cool. She, like, covers us for the
Gazette
. What do you mean, beat her up?”