by Gare Joyce
Several more innocuous passersby, none of them going out into the parking lot before the Ol’ Redhead and Bones, none following them out soon after. The coach and the team doctor hadn’t quite shut the lights out behind them but were the last out the door before meeting their maker. Fifty-two minutes in real time after they had gone out to the parking lot, the Broom Pusher looked both ways out the door and, safe in the knowledge that no one was looking, ducked out for a smoke. Madison hit the freeze-frame.
“We checked out this guy’s story and we didn’t like him as a suspect,” Madison said. “There was a lot of blood all over the place. Whoever did the deed would have had a significant amount of blood on him.”
“If it matters it splatters, as my father says,” I rambled. Madison let the video run on. Muzz the Broom Pusher was outside a scant twenty-something seconds, not time enough to commit the crime. He stumbled inside the door and looked both ways, this time in desperation. Soundlessly, on the screen, he shouted. One worker, then another, then another arrived, and one by one they ducked their heads outside. When they shut the door, they shared Muzz’s stricken look and paralysis.
“A sorry commentary on the arena staff’s preparedness, I guess,” the detective said. “None of them tried to administer CPR or took any emergency measures.”
“From the sounds of it, there wasn’t much chance of resuscitating a guy with his grey matter spread out on the asphalt like so many toppings on a pizza.”
“Like my father says, it couldn’t have hurt,” Madison said and coughed. “Sorry, punchline to an old joke.”
I shrugged. Yeah, my father told that one too, the one about the guy who jumps ten storeys off a building and onto a street and one bystander tells another Samaritan to go get a glass of water … oh well, no sense going there. It’s not even funny at last call.
Madison stopped the video.
“That’s it, really, what you saw before. I don’t think there’s anything you didn’t see before, right?”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “Do you have any other angles of that hallway?”
The detective took a deep breath. His video-side manner shifted. He was a little less patient this time.
“There are cameras all over the arena. We took the video from the ones outside the dressing rooms. We didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. No confrontations, physical or otherwise. We saw Pembleton and the coach exchange dirty looks and that old reporter get brushed off, but really nothing suspicious at all.”
“Is there video from another angle outside the visitors’ dressing room?”
“There is, but like I say, we went through it frame by frame and didn’t see anything suspicious. We checked out everyone who came out of the dressing rooms after the game.”
“Can I see the video of the visitors’ dressing room before the game?”
Deep breath and a roll of the eyes. If Madison didn’t have someplace he had to go, he could have thought of one if given another ten seconds.
“The last thing, I promise,” I said emptily. “Just the visitors’ and just before the game.”
Madison sorted through the other files and with a couple of clicks it was up on the monitor. The dignitaries. “We don’t like the mayor for this,” Madison said. He then went into a straight play-by-play without any enhancing detail. “The Mays kid and the Russian. Autograph seeker. Harry Bush. Trainer. The Mays kid’s father …”
Madison kept going but I didn’t listen. I watched William Mays. He had his hands full: the coffee that he was soon going to splash over me, his iPhone, and the file he emerged from Hanratty’s office with. People moved in and out of the frame at the door, and Madison kept reeling off names when he had them, saying just “a fan” or “a kid” or “a worker” when he didn’t.
I watched the screen, waiting for the elder Mays to exit. When he did, he walked over to a row of trash cans. They had openings on all sides but were covered, probably so that people in the arena wouldn’t overfill them and build a range of small mountains of refuse. Mays tossed in his coffee. He looked around. He tossed in the file. He straightened himself. Looking for coffee that had dripped on him, that was probably what he was doing. I could have assured him it was on me. And then he walked off.
43
* * *
I left headquarters. I got into the Rusty Beemer and drove over to O’Murphy’s. It would be an hour before the waiters and bartenders checked in for the night shift. That made it just about the time that Beef would have been reporting for his staff dinner. Beef was a growing boy. He was the one I wanted to talk to.
When I walked in the door, the clock was ticking down to happy hour. Beef was sitting at the bar, the only single surface that could fully accommodate his cluster of orders. O’Murphy’s had no tables for eight. Beef was gnawing at ribs and licking his fingers or perhaps counting them in case he’d accidentally bitten one off. He was crouched over his plate. I coughed loud enough for him to have heard but he didn’t look up. A goaltender facing a penalty shot in overtime of game seven wouldn’t have been more focused on the task at hand than Beef was on the spread before him.
“Gonna save me some?” I asked.
“Get your own, mister,” he said and then he looked back over his shoulder. “You gonna get into trouble tonight?”
“Nah, I’m Mr. Brotherly Love.”
“We’re not that kinda place, mister.”
“No, I mean, I’m here in peace, as a friend.”
“When I need a friend I’ll call a friend. When I need an accountant, well, I won’t call you.”
When his mouth wasn’t full and he wasn’t wearing out a knife and fork, Beef seemed distracted, as if the food were calling him. I tried to get him to focus.
“There’s something I wanted to ask you about, something you mentioned to me at the gym the other day.”
“What’s that?”
“You talked about how hard Billy Mays trained. That the other guys weren’t serious but he was.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“I want you to tell me everything you know about that kid working out.”
“Aw, mister, geez, I dunno, like what’s to say?”
“I’ll throw in twenty for a tip.”
Beef’s recall pro bono was meagre. Sufficiently compensated, though, he was like those guys who commit phone books to memory. Every last detail. The only difference was that Beef was skipping page to page. He’d forgotten nothing but had failed to organize anything. His recollections came out unsorted. Mays was wearing a team T-shirt. He had on two-hundred-dollar New Balances. He had Markov in tow. A couple of his teammates were fooling around on the bench. He heard a couple of guys talking about using creatine. The manager of the gym bawling out Beef for dropping his weights on the floor.
“He expects you to lay them down,” Beef said. I told him that I’d check reviews of the gym online to see if this was a common complaint and tried as subtly as possible to get back to the matters at hand.
Beef restarted. Mays saying a couple of things in Russian but mostly showing Markov what they were going to do next in their routine. Mays shouting, “C’mon, c’mon, go, go.” Couple of girls sitting at the front desk checking out Mays and Markov, winking at them and miming some sexually explicit stuff. Beef looked uncomfortable recounting this and didn’t go into great detail, but I could use my imagination. Markov spotting Mays on the bench, the incline, and other stations. That seemed a normal safeguard given the shoulder injury Junior had suffered, one slip possibly threatening weeks and even months of rehab. Even with the light weights he was working with, one slip could set him back to square one or worse. Markov shouting at Junior in Russian. That was nothing out of the ordinary, I said to Beef.
“It was when he went to get the gym manager,” Beef said. “Why did he want him?”
“He was afraid for Mays.”
“Why would he have been afraid for him?”
“He didn’t look good.”
“It’s a wor
kout. You’re supposed to look worse the more you go on.”
“Nah, it was way more serious than that. After going at it real hard on the leg press, he lost the weight, dropped it. Not that the manager gave him shit for that. I drop an eighty-pound dumbbell six inches and it’s the end of the world, and he drops a stack of plates five feet and it’s like thunder and the manager doesn’t say anything to him.”
I tried to massage Beef over to useful dope and away from his grievances with management.
“No big deal,” I said. “He dropped a weight.”
“Yeah, he was down on his knees, though. He really didn’t look good.”
“Go in any gym and you see a guy who maxes out and he’s a puddle after.”
“Mister, I been in gyms and I blacked out or went so hard my nose started to bleed. I seen it. I know what it looks like. This wasn’t like that. Usually a couple of minutes and you catch your breath and your head clears up. You’re back at it. Y’know, it feels good to be out there at the limit. This wasn’t that. He didn’t really come out of it. He was in a serious sweat, like he’d been out in the rain.”
“Nothing unusual,” I said.
“No, the thing is he only had a little sweat on him before he went down. It was like he broke out in that sweat when he was lying on the floor. It was real strange.”
“So he got up …”
“No, he didn’t get up really. The Russian guy got the manager to come over and Mays was breathin’ real hard, couldn’t catch his breath. The manager wanted to call an ambulance. That doesn’t happen at the gym every day. Mays started to barf but it was like dry heaves or something, nothing came out. The Russian kid wanted to get Mays’s stuff out of his locker—Mays couldn’t even tell him which one it was or what his combination was. I mean, he was out of it. And the manager wouldn’t let the Russian kid get into the locker. Didn’t trust him.”
I wasn’t too concerned about the recovery of Junior’s wallet. Again, I tried to steer Beef on to useful stuff.
“So how did he get out of there?”
“One of the older guys took him. The manager said it was okay if Mays left his car in the lot. He gives anyone else shit if they don’t move their cars out of there five minutes after they work out, but just ’cause he’s a player …”
“One of the older guys took him where?”
“Manager told him to take him to the hospital or at least get him to a doctor the next day. I think he was just covering his ass in case he was gonna get sued. If he was on the hook and Mays’s career ended there, he could been on the hook for millions.
“Anyway, that was the last time I saw Mays at the gym and he wasn’t at school for a couple of days.”
“Maybe it was the flu. Fever breaking.”
“Nah, he was fine five minutes before. He was pushing real weight. Fine in class that day. He didn’t come down with the flu in the middle of a set of eight or anything.”
“You hear anything more?”
“I heard him talking to other guys saying he was real, real tired. Pushed it so hard that he wasn’t right all the next day. He said that the guy at emergency told him he should go for tests after something like that.”
44
* * *
I knocked on the front door of the billets. Ma Storms answered. Pa was over her shoulder in a beat. He advised me that Superboy wasn’t home. Billy was in and out during his high school exams. She invited me in anyway.
I sat on the couch. He sat in the easy chair. She hovered over us. Coffee. Coffee cake. She looked for ways to busy herself. He wanted to talk hockey and, yeah, about S. Everything about Junior was a celebration, everything about the ex an offering of condolences. I never imagined a Waitress-Slash-Actress and a Flashy Pro Jock ending up in a small town living a peaceful and seemingly uneventful life, but these two seemed thoroughly content. I guess my one and only shot at something like theirs had gone by the boards.
I asked them about their neighbourhood. They told me it was so safe that they never locked their doors. The Canadian Pastoral. I asked them about their house. He told me it was the home he had grown up in. In his family 130 years now. She said that she had grown up just a block over and that her sister still lived in the house. She added that so much about Peterborough had changed. They were Exhibits No. 1 and 1A to the contrary.
I almost felt guilty playing them, but a job is a job.
I asked about Junior. Strictly stuff I already knew. Welltrodden ground. They recounted stories of the son they never had.
“Four daughters, no sons, so each of the boys who comes in here is like a son to us. Billy more than any of the others,” she said. Her smile was all the good times, her sigh the realization that at the end of the school year he was leaving home.
They talked about him to shoot down any questions about his character, questions that at this point didn’t exist. I kept fishing.
“I guess you never have to worry about him coming in late,” I said.
“Well, it is part of their life, when you get down to it, same as all the boys,” she said. “When they have road games, trips out of town where they don’t stay over, sometimes the boys don’t get in until two, three in the morning. We’re used to that. Normally we don’t get up.”
“I’m usually up watching a late movie or have fallen asleep on the couch,” he said.
“They come in the side door. Their apartment is in the basement, so it’s manageable. They try not to be noisy. Most are pretty considerate. Billy especially. Never had a problem.”
“Never? I played—you could never say never about anybody.”
“The only time was the other day, but it was hardly Billy’s fault,” she said. “Coach Hanratty picked him up at the hospital. I guess with a boy under eighteen, the hospital wasn’t going to release him unless it was to a parent or guardian and, well, we’re not that, so Billy called the coach, God rest his soul. They kept Billy a long time in the hospital that night.”
“The coach said that he had a fainting spell,” he said.
“So you talked to Red?”
“We did,” she said. “He came back with Billy and our young Russian boy, who was at the hospital with Billy the whole time, waiting for the coach to get there.”
He jumped back in. “Red told us to keep an eye on him overnight. Which we did, of course. Then the next day I drove him to get his tests. They said they didn’t want him driving right away.”
“The fainting,” she said. “He would have been fine, but they just wanted to be extra safe for the next few days.”
“The boy has been right as rain since his father picked up his prescription a few days after the whole thing.”
My first thought: maybe not. I pieced together the timeline. Junior works out and crashes. He goes to the hospital. He ends up there for hours, though that might been because of delays or waiting to get blood work back. Still, the doctors in emergency don’t release him except to Hanratty. He could have been right as rain and they wouldn’t have let him go on his own because it’s their policy with minors. But that doesn’t square with the rest, Hanratty wanting them to eyeball the kid, Pa taking Junior for tests, Senior picking up a prescription. That and the fact that Bones II gave pills to take before the prescription was filled. That and what Beef told me he’d overheard at school. That and the fact that Hanratty and Bones had shut down Junior for training across the board. Not just weights but the bike, too.
“It’s so strange, people blacking out and all,” Pa said. “Our neighbour has had his issues.”
“Harley Hackenbush?” I asked.
“Yeah, poor Harley. He had to give up covering the team because of his fainting spells. Originally they thought it was low blood sugar. Turned out to be mini-strokes.”
“And one maxi-stroke,” Ma piped up. “That’s when he picked up his stutter.”
“Yeah, one full-blown stroke on the team bus. Lucky that Doc McGarry was there. Saved his life and Coach Red did too. Red risked forfeiting a game t
o take the bus right to the hospital. Harley’s really lost use of his right hand for all intents and purposes. He can’t even sign his signature to cheques anymore, his hand is so shaky. And we end up shovelling his walk and cutting his grass even though we’re so much older. They keep a defibrillator beside his desk at the office. It must be awful for him.”
It was just awful enough to eliminate him as a murder suspect. If he couldn’t sign his name, he couldn’t have picked up a cinder block.
Hackenbush was off the list, though I’d never liked him for the crimes anyway. I made small talk. They said that they had to go to the Legion for a euchre tournament. I thanked them for their time. They got up to show me to the door. I made a point of leaving my clipboard behind. I was going to come back from that, probably at the point when Pa had both black bowers and the ace of spades.
I PARKED down the street. I pretended to be on my cellphone. I looked at the old folks’ house in the rearview mirror. It was twenty minutes before they were out the door and into their car. I hoped they were off to the Legion, but it didn’t much matter. Even if they were just going to the supermarket, they moved slowly enough that I’d have plenty of time to do a decent search. If someone asked, I was coming back for my clipboard. And I expected someone to ask because this was a Neighbourhood Watch block, even if it wasn’t advertised as such. Something out of bounds had a better chance of escaping the notice of the security cameras at the arena than on the street where Ma and Pa Storms lived. Every other house had some cat lady or another species of biddy acting as living-room sentry.
I knocked on the front door to keep up appearances and then walked in. I didn’t bother looking side to side. I knew I had to have been seen. I’d have to do a quick toss of the place, starting in the upstairs bathroom. The medicine cabinet was nothing but a dreary glimpse at what the future holds for us all. Pills bought over the counter for back pain, prescription anti-arthritics, drugs for an aching prostate just like Sarge had to take. One surprise: a jar of male-enhancement pills. Maybe old age had hidden pleasures, or could be just longings.
