Chasing a Blond Moon

by Joseph Heywood

  CHASING A BLOND MOON

  JOSEPH HEYWOOD

  THE LYONS PRESS

  GUILFORD, CONNECTICUT

  AN IMPRINT OF THE GLOBE PEQUOT PRESS

  Copyright © 2003 by Joseph Heywood

  First Lyons Press paperback edition, 2005

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to The Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  The Lyons Press is an imprint of The Globe Pequot Press.

  Text design by Georgiana Goodwin

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN 978-0-7627-9771-4

  To Michigan Conservation Officers Dave Painter, Steve Burton,and Grant Emery, who haul me around in their trucks and share their world. While the weather is sometimes lousy and the rides and roads rough, the work and company are always fascinating. Only the swimming conditions leave a bit to be desired.

  PROLOGUE:

  SUMMER HAZE

  Grady Service stood at the aged brick entrance of Monroe’s Custer Memorial Municipal Ice Arena and recalled that the flamboyant George Armstrong Custer had been raised in Monroe and that his life, after some exhilarating highs, had ended badly at the Little Big Horn. Perhaps the naming of the building was aimed at exhorting its teams to find a better outcome than Custer had found. Service wondered if the general’s youth spent only forty miles south of Detroit had inured the youthful Custer with a time-released dose of bad luck. Detroit had that effect on a lot of people.

  It was early August and humidity added to the funk inside, which smelled of generations of fans and players. The lobby was filled with rows of tarnished trophies and aging dusty photographs of players and teams. In the arena itself, scents and the sounds of steel blades scraping and cutting ice brought memories rushing back into Grady Service’s mind, but he tried to will them away. He had walked away from hockey because he had brutally injured and nearly killed another player in his final collegiate game. Had he possessed a thicker skin, he would have had a shot at the NHL out of college, but after the incident his heart had been laden with remorse and was no longer in the game. It was not that he lacked the ability to kill. He had done that in Vietnam. What he feared was killing without purpose or choice. Nearly killing someone in a child’s game had made him walk.

  “You gotta be crazy play a game on ice,” Detroit Metropolitan Police Lieutenant Luticious Treebone grumbled, walking beside Service. “No ice with hoops. Get to keep your size twelves on Mother Earth’s booty.”

  Service smiled at his friend. He and Treebone had finished college the same year, Service at Northern Michigan University and Treebone at Wayne State. Service had been a fair student and a solid hockey player. At six-five and two hundred and sixty pounds, Treebone had lettered in baseball and football and had graduated cum laude. They had both volunteered for the marines and met at Parris Island before serving together for a year in the same long-range recon unit in Vietnam. They had been through hell and rarely spoke of it.

  When they got back to “the world” they had joined the Michigan State Police and two years after completing the academy, there had been an opportunity to jump to DNR law enforcement and both had done so. After a year, Tree had moved to the Detroit Metropolitan Police and had risen to lieutenant in one of the department’s many vice units. The two men had remained close for more than twenty years and when Tree called him and announced, “Get your white booty to Detroit most dinky dau,” Service and Maridly Nantz had flown south in Nantz’s plane with her at the controls. Tree had been vague on the phone, saying only that there was something that Service had to see for himself. It was the end of July and the call had come last night; now it was 11 a.m. and he and Nantz and Tree were inside the ancient arena in the rusting industrial city of Monroe.

  Service ignored his friend and saw a short man with a graying goatee and unmatched dark hair standing beside the boards. He couldn’t be more than five-five, but he had the facial scars, bull neck, and wide upper body of an old-time player. He wore a faded blue corduroy jacket with “Marlies” stitched in white script across the right breast. Marlies was slang for the Toronto Marlboroughs, the Junior A club sponsored by the NHL Maple Leafs.

  “Coach Bernard?” Service said. A half-dozen players were on the ice, moving lethargically, loosening muscles and kinks by halfheartedly slapping pucks against the boards with staccato cracks.

  The man turned and squinted with dark eyes. “You ever have to take a dump and your plumbing don’t work?”

  Service blinked.

  “I get me that problem,” Tree said. “I take the prunes.”

  “Prunes be go to hell,” the coach said, glaring at Tree. “Nothin’ to do but wait ’er out.”

  “Hey Hempsted, get the cement outta your ass!” he screamed at an acne-faced player gliding by, admiring his reflection in pitted plexiglass.

  “Bloody kids all concerned about their mugs, eh? I tell ’em, you want ginch, put a right hook in the mush of the other guy’s goon and the broads’ll come. Some things don’t never change about this game,” he said wistfully. The man suddenly seemed to realize that he had strangers before him. “Banger Service?” he asked. “Yah, you’d be him, eh! I seen you play a lot longer ago than either of us wants to remember. You hit like a bloody bulldozer.”

  Service said, “You called Lt. Treebone.”

  Tree and Bernard nodded perfunctorily, leaving Service to conclude they had met before.

  “Right,” Bernard said. “I got this kid come out from Phoenix. Not invited, see, but he had a note from an old pal, Lig Lemieux, and Lig told me I should give ’im a close look.”

  Everybody who knew anything about hockey knew of Lig Lemieux, who had played for five or six NHL teams over a dozen years and fought his way the whole time. His given name was actually Herve. Lig was an acronym for “Let It Go,” the words referees used to shout at him as they tried to pry him out of fights. After his playing career Lemieux had made a second and far more successful career as a pro talent scout who worked freelance; the highest bidder got his evaluations, which had become legendary in their accuracy. Lig rarely missed on a kid.

  Bernard continued, “The boy’s right on the bottom of junior age eligibility, but old Lig says take a look, I take a look. The kid’s got it,” Bernard added. “Barely sixteen, but he’s six-three, one-ninety-five, three percent body fat—all muscle. Soft hands, good head, quick reactions, and he skates like a bloody five-circle twirly, eh. After three days, I pult ’im back inta da office and I tell him I’m tinkin’ about takin’ ’im, but he’s a young pup and maybe we ought to put him in our midget feeder program. The kid says no fuckin’ midgets, it’s juniors or he’s gonna enlist in the marines. I tell ’im he’s got to have his folks’ permish, one way or t’other. Kid says he’s an orphan and his guardian will sign anything to get rid of him.”

  Service listened patiently.

  “So I calt Lig and ask him what the deal is. The kid’s name is Walter Commando and it turns out the kid’s mother died last September. She was on that plane went down in Pennsylvania, eh? Geez, what shit luck. The kid’s guardian is actually his stepdad, name ’s J. T. Commando, bigshot land developer in Phoenix. Lig says the stepdad and the lad don’t get along so well and all the kid wants is a life in hockey like his real old man. Lig pointed the kid to me and suggested I give
you a head’s up. I got a retired cop runs the fat boy leagues here, plays twice a week up in Detroit. Told me he knew a Detroit cop who knew where you were, and that’s how I got to Treebone.”

  “We’ve come a long way from the U.P.,” Service said, wondering if there was a point to this biography.

  Bernard focused his dark eyes on Service and said, “You got a longer way to go than you think, Banger. Lig says the kid’s father is you.”

  Grady Service didn’t react, but Nantz stepped in. “Which kid is he?”

  Bernard scanned the ice. “He ain’t out there yet.”

  As players streamed through the doors from the locker room to stretch and warm up for practice, Nantz said, “My God.”

  The player wore number fourteen, the same Grady Service had worn. The kid was rangy, with a frame that would fill out to carry a lot more muscle than he was already packing.

  Bernard said, “The stepdad says, I want him, he’s mine, but when I found out he was your kid I thought I’d better talk to you.”

  Service said, “I don’t have a kid.”

  Maridly Nantz poked him in the ribs. “Look at him, Grady.”

  Treebone grinned. “Dawg, that leaf didn’t fall far from the tree.”

  “You want me to get him over here?” Bernard asked.

  Service said, “You got the stepfather’s phone number?”

  “You betcha,” Bernard said, handing him a piece of paper. “My office is second on da right. I don’t got no secretary cause da club owner’s a cheap fuck, so just go on in and dial nine to get the outside line. You really didn’t know?”

  Service left without answering. Nantz followed at his side.

  He punched in the telephone number and nodded at another phone. Nantz sat at a small table by the wall and picked up the extension to listen.

  “Thomas Commando Development,” a woman said, answering the phone. “This is Joanne Baker, may I help you?”

  “I’d like to speak to Mr. Commando.”

  “He’s in a meeting,” the secretary said.

  “This is Grady Service and I am calling about his stepson.”

  “Walter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where he is?” She sounded concerned.

  “I do.”

  “I’ll get Mr. Commando.”

  “Thomas Commando, is this Service?” The man’s voice was both raspy and smooth, accustomed to giving orders and having them followed.

  “Grady Service,” Service said.

  “Where’s the boy?” Not his boy, but the boy, Service noted.

  “You already know where he is,” Service said. “You talked to Coach Bernard about him. What happened to Bathsheba?”

  “Sheba died September 11. What’s it to you?”

  Sheba? “She was my wife a long time ago.”

  “Ah, that Service. Now I get the connection. Have you seen the boy?”

  “A few minutes ago.”

  “She said you threw her out when you found out she was pregnant.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because the kid wasn’t yours.”

  Service was confused. “How could I throw her out when I didn’t know she was pregnant?”

  “She said she told you and you took it poorly. Said you had a hot head, had a bad time in ’Nam.”

  “Who did she say is the boy’s father?”

  “I think his name was Parker, but I don’t really remember the details.”

  Parker, Service thought. Bathsheba wouldn’t look at Parker, much less . . . “When did you get married?”

  “After Sheba finished law school at the University of Arizona. Her firm was representing my company and we started going out and you know how it goes.”

  “You told Bernard if he wants the boy, he’s his. What’s that mean?”

  “The kid’s nothing but trouble. Drove Sheba crazy. Me too, but I didn’t take it so personally. She said he was just like his father, only out for himself and a risk-taker.”

  The description didn’t fit Parker, who had nominally been his sergeant for a period of time, and who Service couldn’t tolerate. Parker was a politicking toady and a devout coward. “The boy’s barely sixteen,” Service said.

  “The team can work that out. He’ll bunk with a family out there and then he’s their problem.”

  “Does the boy know how you feel?”

  “We don’t talk. Never have and it’s worse since I lost Sheba. I tried, but he wants no part of me.”

  “What was Bathsheba doing on that plane last fall?”

  “She was back and forth to the East Coast all the time. Hell, I still can’t believe it happened.”

  “You’re the boy’s legal guardian?”

  “I adopted him when we married, but he doesn’t listen to me. He wants to play that stupid game and get his brains scrambled, let him. The more miles between us, the better for the both of us.”

  “He’s a minor.”

  “I told Bernard, send me the paperwork and I’ll do what has to be done to make it happen.”

  “What if the boy doesn’t make the team?”

  Thomas Commando laughed. “Are you kidding? He can’t miss. His mother and I spent a fortune on him, the right individual skills coaching, the right teams, he’s got it for the game. Too bad he doesn’t have it for real life. After hockey the kid will be a loser.”

  The stepfather did not like the boy and Service sensed the feelings were much stronger than dislike. “But what happens if he doesn’t make the team?”

  “C’mon, there are other teams, lots of ’em. He went out there on his own. He doesn’t make it, let him find another one.”

  “What’s he supposed to live on?”

  Commando cleared his throat. “The boy is not without means. His mother was a very successful attorney. She did all the legal work for Larry Cressman.”

  “The movie producer?”

  “More like the one-man entertainment conglomerate. Who the hell called you into this and what business is it of yours?”

  “Lig Lemieux told Coach Bernard that Walter is my son.”

  “I don’t know where Lig got that idea. His father’s name is Parker.”

  “Lig insists he’s mine, and Coach Bernard says if the boy doesn’t make the team he’s going to enlist in the marines.”

  “Either way, he’s not my problem anymore. He wants to be a jarhead, I’ll sign for him. Not your problem either. You’re not his father.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Service said, hanging up.

  The room was silent. Nantz looked at Service and raised an eyebrow.

  “Severely negative vibes. Charlie Parker is the father?”

  “Parker and I were equals in those days and I didn’t have any use for him right out of the gate.”

  “He the type your ex might go for?”

  “I doubt it. I met her when I was a Troop and she was a student in East Lansing. She didn’t date guys her own age. Troops made good money back then. One thing led to another and we ended up married.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “I thought I did.”

  “She fool around on you?”

  “Not her speed. She couldn’t handle risk.”

  “But she became a lawyer.”

  “Contract law isn’t criminal work. She couldn’t handle confrontations.”

  “So you don’t buy the Parker story.”

  “Not her type,” he said, shaking his head.

  “What if she was trying her wings with him?”

  “You can’t fly with a dodo bird.”

  Nantz laughed. “DNA tells all,” she said. “If you’re the father, that will be easy enough to find out.”

  “The question is, do we want to find out?” he asked.
>
  “You don’t?” She looked and sounded surprised.

  “If he’s my son, I haven’t exactly been a force in his life before this. What good would it do now?”

  “Well, his mother is dead for one thing, and more importantly, if his father is alive, that father ought to be with him.”

  “He’s not looking for me,” Service said. “He came here to play hockey.”

  “And if he doesn’t make it, he’s going to join the marines. My gut says this boy knows about you, Grady. I don’t know where from or how, but my intuition says he’s here for a reason. I mean he could go and play anywhere, right?”

  “The Downriver Rattlers play in the best junior hockey league in Canada,” Service explained. “They’ve been to the Memorial Cup three times in the past five years. This is one of the premier Tier I junior clubs in North America. All the top players want into the best programs, because they’re the ones the pro scouts watch most closely.”

  “I doubt this is just about hockey,” Nantz said. “I’ve never pried about your marriage, Grady. I didn’t even know your wife’s name until a few minutes ago. What exactly happened between the two of you?”

  The question caught him by surprise. “I told you.”

  “As much as you tell anybody anything. You’ve never even called herby name. She’s always been the ‘ex.’ I’d really like to know, Grady,” she added crisply.

  “Bathsheba Pope. We got married six months after Troop academy and two years later I transferred to the DNR. She lived in Lansing while I moved around in training assignments and then she came up here with me and lasted six more months. It lasted just short of four years.”

  “What did she look like?” Nantz asked.

  Service glanced at her. “Tall.”

  “Tall? That’s it?”

  He grinned. “She was attractive.”

  “Was she good in bed?”

  He shrugged. “Not as good as you.”

  She granted him a smile of appreciation. “Good looking and good in bed—so what happened?”