by Gare Joyce
“How did you come to these conclusions?” he asked. He figured being officious could defuse a ticking bomb.
“How doesn’t matter to you. How is going to matter to the police and I figure the College of Physicians, who are going to pull all your papers and your parking privileges too. It all comes down to what and you know that this isn’t a wild guess. I’m not going to tell you how and maybe not even all of what. I’m dealing with you on a need-to-know basis.”
He couldn’t speak. I didn’t wait for him.
“I have no interest in taking you down. I can keep things in nice compartments. I’m not going to draft the kid. My team isn’t going to draft the kid. But the father is going down and you might consider your options.”
He took a big gulp. I thought I would have liked to play poker against him.
“Did you take money from him?” I asked.
“No.”
I was relieved that he didn’t ask me if I had. I kept going. I had momentum. He was turtling.
“Your father had the results of the tests from the hospital before you did. He knew the kid’s heartbeat was irregular.
Either he or the doctors in emergency skedded the tests for him. Your father knew the results. So did you. So did the coach. You gave the kid samples that some drug salesman had left with you. You made out the prescription. You could keep a secret. Your father and the coach couldn’t. They were going to tell teams. They were going to make it public. Not like they’d put it out in a press release, just that they’d tell other teams before the draft.”
He said nothing. He denied nothing. He registered no indignation. That passed for confession in the circumstances.
“It’s not my business to defend you but I’ll offer you an out. You’re going to be able to claim that a page out of Billy Mays Jr.’s file was missing, that it was taken out. Given that a murderer was handling them, that’s not so far-fetched. Maybe you can fudge the timeline. I leave that to you, your lawyer, and the College of Physicians.”
I let him take a breath.
“I know he offered you money,” I said. “He wouldn’t leave anything to friendship if money would close the deal. You have nothing in email correspondence about that, right? Nothing about the murders either.”
His defences were shattered.
“There’s nothing,” he said. His eyes watered. “I never thought he’d kill … he never said anything like that. And after he killed them, the stakes were all different. I didn’t think he’d stop at anything. I was worried about my life. He had the money. He could get things done for him, get a professional rather than do it himself. And who could I go to who wouldn’t believe I was in on it?”
“You could have made calls. He bought you with promises or threats. Doesn’t matter to me. Maybe you didn’t know your friend as well as you thought.”
“You have to understand …”
“I don’t have to understand anything,” I said.
“No, you have to understand,” he said. “He hated Hanratty.
Hated him. He said he would have played pro and been a star if Hanratty hadn’t benched him and driven him out of junior hockey. His worst nightmare came true when Hanratty drafted his son, but it was going okay the whole time. Hanratty liked the son. He and my father thought they were saving Billy’s life. Mays saw it that Hanratty was going to do to his son what he’d done to him twenty-five years before. That’s the way he saw it but it wasn’t the way it was.”
“That explains why he did what he did. So why did you do what you did?”
“I didn’t think I was going too far out of bounds. I thought we’d wait and see on Billy. I wouldn’t put him at mortal risk, that’s for sure. I just didn’t want to jeopardize his chances in the draft if it was just a single incident with no chance of repeating.”
“Which it wasn’t.”
“It was an enlargement …”
“That was going to end his career,” I said. I filled in the blank because the clock was ticking and I had to make it back to the meeting.
“Yes, based on what we know now, it was going to end his career,” he said. “One hundred percent sure. Just too much risk. We could do follow-up, but I think that would have offered false hope.”
“I’ll make a bargain with you. You seem like someone I can trust. Mays seemed to think that and he knows you better than me. I won’t mention this outside of this room, so long as you never mention to William Mays that we had this conversation. I don’t think the police are going to need you to take him down. I can’t do anything if he says you’re in on it, but you’ve got time to figure that out and hope. If he knows you were meeting with me you can just tell him we talked about the mono thing.”
“Right.”
I figured I’d kick him while he was down before I made my exit. “How could you stand by when your own father was murdered?”
He looked away. “It’s like all fathers and sons. It’s complicated.” Bones II bowed his head and didn’t say anything more. He looked pained and self-pitying. His father had supported him but only so far. His father attended to the medical needs of hundreds of players over the years and travelled with the team on nights he didn’t have to. He liked the games, the bus rides, the beer, the cigars, and the company of the Ol’ Redhead more than the time he spent with his son and the rest of the family. Bones was a better doctor than a father. When his son made it as far as the Peterborough team, he came up just short of his aspirations and his father’s best friend’s minimum standards.
Bones II became a much better doctor than his father in every way but one. Bones II would try to keep a secret when truth-telling was the right thing to do. He was a guy who, like me, would skip number 24. Which is okay, maybe ideal if you’re a player or a PI, but not what you look for in a doctor.
I left the room.
58
* * *
Hockey Time is fifteen minutes early. Hockey Time isn’t a negotiable option. It’s a drop-dead proposition. Eight isn’t 8:01. If the bus is leaving at eight, at 8:01 it’s a speck on the horizon. The first pick of the draft was at 8 P.M. that Friday night. We were going to have our last war-room meeting in the late afternoon. We’d go over scenarios. What we might do in the event of Hunts making a deal on the floor, a deal that landed us a second first-round pick, probably in the twenties. It was unlikely to unfold that way but we had to be prepared for it. Hunts sent out the message that we’d meet in the lobby at 4 P.M. It was Double Super Hockey Time. I hustled out of the tense but brief session with Bones II and made it into the lobby with my laptop and notes at 3:59. I was the last one to arrive by twenty minutes.
We were staying at the Marriott like most of the clubs, but we couldn’t book a room there for our last pre-draft meeting. Other teams had beaten us to every conference room in every time slot. We cabbed to the team’s offices in the arena in twos and threes, fourteen of us on the staff and four of our part-time bird dogs who were sleeping two to a room. The part-timers had flown to L.A. on their own nickel with the hope that Hunts would see fit to bring them in full time. The poor deluded souls, they imagined that Hunts had a scouting budget to play with.
“After the meeting, we have to talk,” I told Hunts in the cab ride over. “Five minutes. Just you and me.”
I could see the pressure getting to Hunts, as out of the single request he sensed some sort of creeping conspiracy. “If you have a job lined up, tell me now,” Hunts said, pissed off. “If you’ve talked to another team, let me know now and you don’t have to go out on the floor tonight. You can turn around and walk back to the hotel.”
“It’s not anything like that, for fuck sake,” I said.
I glanced back. The other guys on the staff were looking at us. Their antennae were twitching involuntarily, like they did any time it seemed that change was in the air. Change would have been opportunity for them to move up. Or change would have been reason to look elsewhere, as if I had been job hunting because I knew Hunts was going to be pink-slipped.
>
“All I need is five minutes before we go out on the floor,” I said.
“What can take five minutes that you can’t say in front of these guys? What do you wanna say that none of these guys can contribute to?”
This wasn’t the place to start arguing the point. I drew on history.
“One guy once came to me, knocking on my door at 4 A.M. of the worst morning of his life, and I didn’t ask him why he didn’t take it up with the team.”
Hunts didn’t recognize himself immediately and we’d joke about it later. If I had to make it seem like I was in trouble, so be it. If I had to do that to stop him from putting his job on the line, so be it.
He sighed. My private audience with my best friend was booked, though he wasn’t happy about it.
HUNTS PUT IN a request for a snack tray and coffee to be brought into the largest conference room in the team’s offices. It might have sat ten comfortably, twelve in a crunch. We had to roll in chairs from surrounding offices. Crowded doesn’t start to describe it. I couldn’t have swivelled without my chair hitting another guy’s legs. When someone spoke in the back of the room and everyone turned, it was like bumper cars.
The discussion sputtered to a mundane start. I stood at the erasable board. I drew up a vertical list, numbers one to thirty and beside them the teams that were picking in that slot in the first round. We went through the first three picks with lightning speed.
1 Galbraith
2 Dailey
3 Meyers
Nothing much to discuss. Back in mid-winter I liked Mays over Meyers and I would have fought for the point. Not on the third Friday of June, though. Other guys in the room debated the order, but I stayed out of it even though I was supposed to be managing it. They could have spent an hour talking about it but Hunts shut it down.
“Okay, if I knew we were going to sit around and toast marshmallows all day long, we coulda walked over to the park and started a campfire,” Hunts said. “Shadow, put four up there. That’s why we’re here. Mays. We’re all on board with that.” I tried my best to keep a poker face when I filled in the name in ink as pink as the Wonder Boy’s cheeks.
4 Mays
I kept my back turned on the group and stared at the board. I pretended to be deep in thought while discussion ensued. I listened to them going back and forth. They knew that Hunts liked Mays. Liked him a lot. They were falling over themselves, trying to show that they liked him a lot, as much as Hunts, who might give them a promotion or at least spare them from the axe if he had to chop the scouting budget. They didn’t discuss Mays so much as bid him up as if it were a cattle auction.
“Upside all-star.”
“Upside franchise player, trophy winner.”
“Potentially the best player to come out of the draft.”
They kept at it for five minutes. Hunts took the back seat. I tried to be inconspicuous and would have liked to hide behind the lonely rubber plant by the window, but I wasn’t about to get away easy.
“Shadow, you saw him more than the rest of us. He was your assignment. What do you have to say?”
I had a lot to say, but this wasn’t the time or place.
I sat down and opened my computer. I went to the team’s database. I called up my files. I counted the dates.
“Twelve views this season. He was the best player on the ice ten times. He was the best player on the Canadian team at the summer 18s … best in his birth year. He’s smart … wins the league award for academics. He interviewed well at the combine. He did well in personal interviews. Spotless record off the ice …”
“What next? You gonna tell us that he’s a member of the glee club? What he has for breakfast? Favourite movie? Are you going to read from the team’s media guide or tell us what you think of this kid?”
Hunts was a runt among goaltenders. He’s maybe five foot ten. He found ways to compensate. He walked around the dressing room on his tiptoes to give the illusion of being at least a passable size. In the net he made any guy who skated too close to his crease look up his navel. His trademark wasn’t a fast glove, a kick save, a sprawl across the net. What he did with his stick was criminal. One hard slash across the back of the knees took the skates out from a trespasser and usually left him writhing on the ice. Hunts led all goaltenders in penalty minutes because of a wicked stick and a fast mouth. Here in the dressing room he didn’t have a stick, but he ran his mouth like he would have on the ice. He was out to humble me since I didn’t come out with a strong opinion about Mays and because he suspected that I might have been talking to another team about a job, a violation of my contract, and, worse, betrayal of a friendship. “All that points to us taking Mays,” I said without looking up.
I didn’t lie. I just held back as much as I could.
“Well, thank you for that. The amateur scouting director has spoken. Thank you.”
I tried to not get bothered but Hunts’s yap got under my skin like a hypodermic needle. Deep breath. I reminded myself that it would all come out in good time.
I stood up and went back to the erasable board.
5
“Sorensen,” I said.
“Not gonna come to that,” Hunts said. “It’s a four-deep draft.
If Mays is gone at four we’re taking one of those top three guys on the board. It’s not that complicated, Shade.” He had never called me Shade, not even when we first met.
I hoped that the mood would change. It didn’t. Hunts belittled me at every turn and the rest of the staff lapped it up. All the established scouts thought they had a shot at what looked like my soon-to-be-former post.
I sucked it up but it was a long ninety minutes until we wound down to a cluster of guys we expected to see when our third pick,
81
rolled around.
I logged each of the names in as we went. Our list had eighty-seven names on it. I would print it out and get it copied for each guy who’d be sitting at our table Friday night and Saturday. I wasn’t about to send it as an email because, well, who knows? One of them might let it leak out. One of them might lose his computer, leaving it in a cab or on a bar or something. Someone from another organization might pinch it. It has been known to happen. It’s bound to happen when you’re working against guys who spent their entire lives playing with their elbows up, charter members of the same subculture.
THE OTHERS FILED out of the room with what they thought were knowing backwards glances over their shoulders. They figured that whatever it was that was going down was bad for me and good for them. Probably very bad for me and very good for their job prospects. Ultimate schadenfreude.
“So, Shade, what’s this all about? You’ve got something to tell me …”
“I had to do it this way.”
“So who is it?”
“Mays.”
“We’ve been through this. If the first three picks go the way it should—it will—then we’re taking Mays. You were a little less sure of that in our meeting an hour ago but thanks for chipping in. Let’s cut the shit. Who is it? Who is it you’re going to work for? Not that I can blame you. No, because you’re like me. You have no idea if your job is going to be here July first. It doesn’t look that way, does it? Why wait? You …”
He kept going on. He was wound up and unravelling like a ball of string. One recrimination after another. He had nothing to go on but his gut instincts, this time all wrong, and he was casting me as Judas, betraying the team and, worse, him.
“Back the fuck off. I’m not trying to protect my job. I’m trying to protect yours,” I told him.
Left unstated was that by protecting his job I was protecting mine, but no matter.
“It’s Mays,” I said. “We can’t take him.”
Hunts rolled his eyes.
“It’s done. We’re taking him if he’s there. If you had something to say you had a chance to say it in the meeting. You didn’t have to wait till now.”
“I couldn’t say it in the meeting. I had to wait. I want on
ly you to know. I have to do it this way. It’s Mays. He’s never going to play a game in the league.”
“Maybe not this year, though I see him stepping right into the lineup in the fall.”
“I’ll bet my testicles that he won’t play a single game in the league. Ever. He can’t. It’s medical.”
“The shoulder has been checked,” Hunts said impatiently, packing up his computer and notes, getting ready to head out the door.
“It’s not his shoulder. It’s his heart.”
“What the kid has no problems with is his heart.”
“You should ask a cardiologist for a second opinion.”
Hunts stopped packing up. He couldn’t get off the idea that I was questioning the kid figuratively rather than literally. He took a breath and tried to make sense of it all.
“The only reason I’m telling you this now is that I only found out the other day. I thought something was up … something wasn’t right about this all along, and I couldn’t put it together.”
Hunts leaned back in his chair. He was still skeptical.
“The kid didn’t do his testing at the combine but nothing showed up on his physical. He got a green light.”
“’Cept that his resting heart rate was in the low forties …”
“Which means that he’s as fit as an Ethiopian marathoner.” Hunts was proud of the reference, even though he couldn’t have found Ethiopia on a map.
“I don’t know any marathoners who take beta blockers before their combine physicals.”
Hunts didn’t say anything, but we had known each other almost twenty years, so he didn’t have to. His look said: How the fuck do you know that?
“Something bugged me right from the point when Hanratty and Doc shut him down from off-ice training. His shoulder was on schedule in rehab, but even if it wasn’t, why couldn’t he ride the stationary bike? Had to have nothing to do with his shoulder. Had to be something else was up.”
