The Code

by Gare Joyce

  These guys weren’t all-stars, not even first-liners, but they had enough to grind Pembleton on.

  “I was sleeping it off. I don’t like night driving. Not after having a pinch or two. Need ’em to steady my nerves.”

  “Right, steady your nerves before a pressure-packed situation like an old-timers game.”

  “I don’t like crowds.”

  “Or the coach of the other team who turns up dead.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with anything. So you say I didn’t like him. If it was such a problem I wouldn’t of come out to the game outta my own pocket.”

  “I suppose. But the problem I have is that you show up on a security video.”

  “Yeah, coach, there are a bunch of security cameras at the arena and, funny, you show up on the camera right at the exit, the door nearest where Mr. Hanratty’s car was parked …”

  “Where Mr. Hanratty and the doctor were lying dead later …”

  “… where we drew chalk lines around them.”

  They had Pembleton in a head spin.

  Voices lowered. Some of what they said fell out of earshot.

  Not the tone, though. For the plainclothesmen it was interrogation by insinuation. For the coach, it was furious back-pedal. He left and stopped. Or make that, he had a drink and then stopped. Couldn’t remember going to his car but, yeah, it musta been parked close to there, except that was the reserved parking and he said that he had paid out of his own pocket. Must have been mistaken.

  “We’ll be in touch, coach,” the one said. A sigh was heaved.

  I STEPPED AWAY from the door, lest I be made for eavesdropping. I kept my head down and eyes on the BlackBerry’s screen as if I were studying the notes on Gillen I’d dashed off.

  “Brad Shade …,” the one plainclothesman said, parked in front of me. Two hundred and seventy pounds, he would have had to parallel park.

  “That’s me.”

  “Detective Madison, OPP up in Peterborough. That’s my partner, Detective Freel. I recognized you ’cause I coached against your father’s teams. He’s a good man. Helluva coach. Talked about you, real proud …”

  He made this sound either inexplicable or as a loving leap.

  “… How’s he doing?”

  “Retired but not tired.”

  “Give ’em my best. Tell him he’s not missing much, off the ice anyway.”

  “You’re a long way from your arena, detective.”

  “Thanks for reminding me about filing for mileage. Fact is, it’s the Red Hanratty deal. You mighta put that together. We’re questioning practically anybody who was within the city limits the week of … well, you know how it is. Only case where I got autographs for my kids along the way. I guess technically I shouldn’t of asked for them.”

  I dialed him back to the subject at hand.

  “Yeah, I was there that night.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Playing in the game, one of the old-timers.”

  Okay, I don’t lack for self-worth clinically or chronically, but somehow my name didn’t show up on the list of those to be questioned. As it would turn out, I wasn’t listed in the program because I’d been a late addition to the lineup. Didn’t know that. And I didn’t end up on the score sheet. Which I did know. On a night of a hundred stars, I was the guy working the curtain. Again.

  Detective Madison’s oversight was more embarrassing to him than my enduring anonymity was to me.

  “Brad, I guess we’re going to have to question you too. You understand. Not saying you’re a suspect or anything.”

  I asked him if it could wait until I was finished with Pembleton. Told him it was a working night for me too, that I was scouting for L.A. Told him I’d have a brief and hopefully polite conversation with Snidely Tonguelash, the fellow he and his partner had left in a puddle behind his desk in his office. Told him I just wanted to ask about a kid who was a near-prospect.

  Detective Madison told me that their questions could wait until sometime down the line and left unsaid that he and his partner had about a four-hour drive back to Peterpatch. I gave him my number. The 416 area code let him know that I was in Toronto, so I didn’t bother mentioning it. He gave me his card. I told him I’d be back in Peterborough on work in the next week, and he said that he might have some pictures to look at.

  The trip from Peterborough was useful for the two detectives. Pembleton and me, a bird and a half with one stone. The trip to London was potentially useful to me. An audience with the black hat and another with two guys with badges, two birds in a bush. It seemed that I was more likely to trip into some useful dope on Mays and the Peterborough players from Madison and Freel than they were to find out anything from me about the murders at the arena.

  Madison and Freel said their goodbyes, and as they walked off I swallowed hard. I knocked on the door. I heard a garbled “Fuck!” A pause and then an exasperated “What?” I didn’t bother for a proper invitation. I opened the door.

  PEMBLETON SAT behind his desk. He had been at work with an almost spent packet of tobacco and rolling papers when the detectives had walked in and was waiting to return to the business at hand once his hand stopped shaking. He was leaning back in his swivel chair, staring at a filing cabinet on the far wall, not turning to look at me, not bothering to ask who I was or what I wanted. He was lost in a train wreck of thought.

  He had been a nice hue of shale before the game but now looked waxy, a bit of ash mixed in. I can only imagine what his blood was like, some toxic sludge run off rye, nicotine, and recrimination, but whatever its composition it had run completely out of the face of this little tough guy. London had lost the game and he was inching closer to another pink slip. The boys from Peterborough had asked him some uncomfortable questions and he was inching toward, well, I didn’t know what.

  “Coach, I’m Brad Shade. I spoke to you briefly before the game. I’m a scout with L.A. and …”

  “I got all that the first time. You were on my fuckin’ team in the fuckin’ old-timers game, right?”

  I wasn’t about to be deterred at this point. I could have made my getaway about forty-five minutes earlier. I didn’t want to have to come out to London again. I wanted to finish my report on Gillen and be done with him for the year.

  “Yeah, but I thought you didn’t know who I was ’cause you called me ‘Hey, you’ and my name wasn’t on my sweater. Look, I just wanted to ask you about Gillen.”

  “I don’t have a bad word to say about him ’cept he can’t fuckin’ skate, which I’m sure you put in your fuckin’ report.”

  I took a deep breath, suspecting that the next sentence I managed to get out would be the last sentence I got in.

  “Look, you know why I’m here and I know you know, so let’s cut the shit. I’m not new. Just let me know about the Gillen kid, what I should know for me to do my job like you do your job.”

  Pembleton wasn’t much good at the pushback, like the one the detectives gave him, like the one I was giving him. He sighed.

  “I like Gillen as much as any kid on the team,” he said. “More than most that come this way. I don’t need to tell you he isn’t the sharpest skate. I don’t need to tell you about his father, ’cause you’ve already been through that before.”

  We had looked at Gillen’s older, smaller, tamer brother a year before. At that time we found out that dad was a lush who was occasionally violent, those occasions being when his synapses were firing on most cylinders and he could stand without leaning against a wall.

  “Has he had trouble?”

  “Trouble” being the great miscellaneous that captures curfew, chasing puck bunnies, catching puck bunnies, fathering children by puck bunnies, fights, drinking, fights and drinking, criminal charges, et cetera.

  “No trouble like mine. Wouldn’t wish it on anybody, not my worst enemy.”

  Despite his lukewarm co-operation, I was still irked by the little tyrant. I aimed low.

  “Here I thought your wo
rst enemy was as dead as Georges Vézina.” I put the snarl back in the whimpering little mutt.

  “Look, you fucker, I don’t have to take shit from you. I’d have you thrown out on your ass if I felt like it.”

  “If you felt like anyone would listen is more like it.”

  Okay, it was clear. I had overstepped.

  “Just so you fuckin’ know, I never had a problem with Hanratty. I wasn’t his buddy. Never said I was, never pretended I was. But I had no problem with him. All that other fuckin’ stuff gets ink, sells tickets, and lets our bosses know that we’re doing our job. Be serious … I kill the guy after an old-timers game. I’m mad about that how? Why the hell did I drive up to that fuckin’ game? Because he asked me. I didn’t have to pick up the phone. It didn’t matter that he beat us in the playoffs three years running and cost me my job in Brantford. Those dumb cops thinking that I’d want to kill him. What do they know about the game?”

  His mind was racing but he had spun out on the second turn. He was about to say something more but it was gone.

  “They’re just doing their job and questioning everybody,” I told him. “They’re questioning everybody and just looking for any leads they can sweat out. Shoulda just given them a straight story. You slept one off in the parking lot and got away when you shoulda blown over. But you have no alibi. And not having an alibi, well, that’s the slippery slope.”

  “The ice is slippery when it’s flat so long as the Zamboni just rolled over it.”

  “Point taken,” I said.

  “So how’d you become such a police expert?”

  “My father was a cop. He actually knew the bigger guy of the two that were just questioning you. And as far as what they know about hockey, trust me, you’ve got guys coaching in this league who don’t know the game as well as the one guy. Did you see the scar over his eyebrow and the seam in his lip? Did you think he did that fencing maybe?”

  “Didn’t notice.”

  “Didn’t think so.” He didn’t put it together that I basically hung it out there that I’d been listening in on the interview.

  “So what do I tell them?”

  “Try the truth if you didn’t do it.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Okay, you didn’t. You have no one to back up your story, but at the minimum you’re not talking your way into a jam, which is where the hard evidence is taking you. The time on the speeding ticket.”

  He was rattled. That I knew details of the night he had misspent fazed him.

  “Truth is, I had a skinful over the course of the day and night. A bunch of it in Hanratty’s office going from about 3 P.M. I went out to my car—and no, I can’t remember where it was—and fell asleep in the back seat.”

  “You decided not to drive.”

  “Sorta. I couldn’t even get my keys in the ignition. Or maybe I did. I don’t know, not sure.”

  “Right. If you give ’em the straight story then maybe something else that you don’t know will sort things out. Hell, if you have no alibi at all and you were driving home, they could run your car for bloodstains—there was a ton of blood and it would have to drip in the car. If there’s no blood in your car, well, it’s not an absolute alibi but it goes a long way.”

  “Right.”

  Something was just a bit off. I tried to figure it out. “How long did you know him?”

  “Going back to high school. We dated the same cheerleader.”

  “How’d that work out?”

  “He married her. That doctor was his best man.”

  “Oh.”

  So the sainted Judy had fired Pembleton before six junior clubs had given him the pink slip. Then she married Hanratty and predeceased him.

  “Tell it to them straight and maybe something will back up your story.”

  I tried to sound more confident in the Everything-Will-Work-Out than I was at that point. Likewise, I tried to sound more credulous about his version of events than I had become.

  20

  * * *

  A week later I put in a call to Duke Avildsen, a Hockey Semi-Legend. I talk to him a few times a month. Duke grew up in a small town on the north shore of Lake Superior. His father drove an eighteen-wheeler, and when Duke was fourteen, he rode in the front seat next to his old man, who dropped him off in Timmins to play midget hockey. Duke’s only been back to that town once over the years, when he was nineteen and had to bury his father.

  Duke blew into the league back in ’61 and decided to stick around a half century. Two hundred stitches and a few million air miles later he was still at it. He scouted for five L.A. GMs over the last fifteen years. Duke had filed reports from 250 games a season for the first couple of decades after he hung up his skates. He was one of the first scouts to go behind the Iron Curtain and smuggle out players, risking their lives and his. He had the nerves of a burglar. Now, in something like semi-retirement, he works weekends—a game Friday night a short drive from Toronto and a game Sunday afternoon, where he holds court in the scouts’ dining room at Mississauga arena, just down the street from the old house in the new subdivision he calls home. He still looks like he could play. The only thing that jiggles on him is a fortyyear-old dental plate. When someone drops the name of an old-timer he scrapped with, his gums must involuntarily flex or something because his set of store-bought teeth lose their grip and start to float about his mouth.

  Duke is still a sharp hockey man. He has a good eye, knows the game. He gives us good value and has been behind a few late-round finds that he can dine out on if he’s ever so inclined. When Hunts brought me out of exile I did my best to befriend Duke. Our conversations were informative and entertaining.

  I phoned Duke at breakfast and told him about crossing paths with Pembleton and the Peterborough detectives the night before. Nothing came as news to him. He called Pembleton “a good hockey man when dry, which is sort of like saying that Vancouver’s pretty near the end of a drought.” He said Pembleton had been telling it straight when he downplayed his so-called rivalry with Hanratty.

  “They had a lot more in common than you’d think. They’d look at players like they had the same set of eyes. The difference was all in the packaging. Pembleton was a pretty decent guy, dry, but he always came off as a mean fucker. Hanratty seemed like your bartender at your corner tavern—y’know, all hey-how-areyou-buddy and singing ‘Danny Boy’ and that crap—but underneath he steamrolled guys, guys like Harry Bush, dozens, maybe hundred of players whose only problem was that Hanratty just didn’t like them. The Father Flanagan stuff was a dangle. Pembleton talked tough and he was never a pussycat or anything, but he was probably even fairer to his players than Hanratty was to the kids in Peterborough …”

  I took “fairer” to be “more even-handed” or “less arbitrary.” And even in my limited time working the Ontario league I’d heard tales, credible enough, that Hanratty’s mood could go as dark as a coal mine after midnight.

  Duke has always been a good judge of character. I came away with the feeling that he didn’t particularly like either Pembleton or Hanratty, even though they were pretty much contemporaries and shared old-school values. I also came away with the impression that he might have trusted Pembleton more than Hanratty.

  “… Pembleton and Hanratty weren’t really players. Hanratty was a career minor-leaguer. I talked to Floyd Jones, who played a long time in the league but was on Hanratty’s line in Syracuse, and he told me to ask Hanratty next time I saw him about how he used to ‘deflect’ the puck to his wingers. But Pembleton wasn’t even that, didn’t even get out of juniors, so I never played a shift against them. All I know of them is what I came across in the Ontario league. Hanratty was all blarney and bullshit. The game gives him an audience and attention. Pembleton’s a loner. If it weren’t for the game he’d be a drifter or a hobo or something. Pretty much is even with it.”

  Only later did I realize that Duke hadn’t called Hanratty “Red” or any variation on his nickname the whole time. Red was the cha
racter, Hanratty the actor. And only later did it occur to me that Pembleton had no nickname.

  Duke asked me about my list, about games I had worked. The usual shooting of the scouting breeze. I told him about sitting on Mays. Duke said that he saw him a couple of times at the start of the season and that he was the real article. I asked him if Mays reminded him of any player. I figured he’d drop the name of a Hall of Famer or all-star or something. Nope.

  “To me, Sorensen has some of the same game, same skating. Who he doesn’t remind me of is his father. I only ever saw the old man as an underager. He never did play in his draft year or after that. Not very big, not like the kid. He’s a head taller than the old man. And the father wasn’t real athletic. This kid is a horse, the power he generates with every stride. He could pick his sport, I bet. They both have the same head for the game, though. Great hockey sense. The father clearly schooled this kid and did everything he could to make sure he developed into a physical package. I suppose the father could’ve played, but he didn’t want it bad enough and ended up going to university. York U. I even kept an eye out for him to see if he’d play some hockey for the school team, but he never did. I guess it worked out okay. He made a helluva lot more money with those money schemes than he ever would’ve lacing up his skates.”

  Some scouts I’d take with a grain of salt, but not Duke. He planted a seed that was sprouting without watering: What happens if the game eventually doesn’t mean a whole heck of a lot to Billy Mays Jr., just like it did with his father? A kid with holes in his game can still help you. A kid who doesn’t want it is of no use to you at all. Did the team shut Billy Jr. down? Did his father? Or did the kid just decide to pull the chute? The last two possibilities were red flags. Our first-round draft pick was riding on the intel. So were our jobs, I figured.

  21

  * * *

  I drove up to Peterborough the next day. Some more door knocking. I called Harley Hackenbush at 5 P.M. Start of his shift. I figured I might be the last human voice he’d hear through his eight-hour shift unless the guy who takes his pizza order counts. I asked him about William Mays Sr. as a player.