Last Shot (14 page)

“Where in the world have you two been?” Bill Thomas said. “We had you paged in the lobby at the Hilton. We were about to come over there and look for you.”

Reverend Thomas gave Susan Carol a hug and then a look. “First, tell me you’re okay,” he said. “Then tell me why you’re so late.”

“We’re okay,” Susan Carol said. “It just got kind of crazy over there. When we finished the two shows we were asked to do, there were all these other radio people asking us to go on. We were finished by eleven-fifteen but we were both starving. We thought we would get a quick hamburger and still be back here at noon. But the service in that place was
so
slow.”

“And then we couldn’t get a cab,” Stevie said, adding the one element of truth to the story.

“I’m finally convinced. I’m getting you a cell phone,” Reverend Anderson said to Susan Carol.

Seeing an opening, Stevie said, “I could use one, too, Dad.”

“Mm-hmm. I’m still not convinced,” his dad said.

“Well, Mr. Thomas and I haven’t eaten and I need to get moving here,” Reverend Anderson said. “You kids can come in and sit with us while we eat. Did you have dessert?”

“Actually, Dad, we never ate,” Susan Carol said. “The service was so bad we got up and left. We’re starved, too.”

Boy, she’s good, Stevie thought. She talks us out of the corner, keeps us from missing lunch,
and
gets herself a cell phone.

They all proceeded into the restaurant, which was packed. “This is how it was at the Hilton,” Susan Carol said when they were finally seated after a fifteen-minute wait.

Stevie couldn’t believe how crowded every place in town was. His dad did a smart thing when they sat down, telling the hostess they wanted to order right away because they were rushed.

“Everyone’s rushed,” the hostess said.

“These two kids have an interview with CBS in a little while,” Reverend Anderson said. Stevie was impressed: a minister lying to get something done. Apparently it ran in the family. Plus, it was a good lie. The hostess’s eyes sparked at the mention of CBS.

“Really?” she said. “TV?” She pulled a pad from her pocket. “Why don’t I just take your order now—that’ll save you time.”

After she was gone, Reverend Anderson said, “I feel badly doing that, but the one thing I learned in my years working with the Panthers is that most people will crawl through mud to be on TV, and the rest will help you find the mud just to be associated with TV. It’s like a magic trick. Mention TV and all obstacles disappear.”

While they were eating, Dick Weiss, who had apparently been sitting on the other side of the restaurant, walked over to the table. “Steve, I left you a message in the room,” he
said. “We’re going to walk over about two-thirty if you want to go with us.”

Stevie looked at Susan Carol to see if she thought that was a good idea or if they needed that time to work on their own.

“Is Mr. Brill going then, too?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” Weiss said. “I think he left you a message, too.”

“Sounds good to me,” she said.

Weiss nodded. “Let’s meet here on this level just like yesterday,” he said.

They finished lunch by one-forty-five and Reverend Anderson glanced at his watch as he signed for his portion of the bill. “I’ve got just enough time to walk over to the church,” he said. He looked at his daughter. “I can trust you to stay out of trouble this afternoon and tonight, can’t I?” he said.

She smiled. “Of course, Daddy. Steve and I both have to do stories, so I won’t be back until late. But we’ll make sure a grown-up walks us back here.”

“Good,” he said. “You have your key, right?” He stood up and kissed his daughter on the forehead.

The hostess was back. “You folks get everything okay?” she said. They all told her she had been wonderful, and she looked at Stevie and Susan Carol and said, “Now, when you see Jim Nantz, you tell him when he gets tired of Bonnie Bernstein, he needs to call Jan Miley, right here at the Hyatt. I did TV work in college, and I am ready.”

Stevie hadn’t really noticed before but she was pretty,
tall, and blond. He imagined there were probably thousands of Jan Mileys in the world who wanted to replace Bonnie Bernstein as CBS’s on-court reporter at the Final Four.

“We’ll make sure to pass the message to Jim,” Bill Thomas said.

As she walked away, he shook his head and laughed. “Don was right. Mention TV to people and it’s like waving a magic wand.”

Reverend Anderson headed down the escalator to go to his meeting. Susan Carol and Stevie and his dad walked to the elevator. “I’m going to make that call before we go over to the game,” Susan Carol said to him as they stepped on the elevator.

“What call is that?” Bill Thomas said.

As usual, Susan Carol covered. “Oh, we wanted to double-check the deadline for tonight with our editor. So I’ll do that and then meet you in the lobby, okay, Stevie?”

He wasn’t sure how he felt about the fact that she was starting to call him Stevie. But since he messed up and introduced himself that way so often, she probably thought he preferred it. “Sounds good,” he said as they got off the elevator. “Let me know what he says.”

When they got to the room, Stevie’s dad announced he was going to take a shower and then do a little more pregame sightseeing once “all you media types head over to the arena.”

He asked Stevie what time the first game started.

“Five-oh-seven,” Stevie told him. “Six-oh-seven in the
East.” Saying it reminded him there were actually
games
to be played in a few hours.

“Well, let’s hope St. Joe’s can do it,” said his dad. “MSU will be tough.”

“Yeah, right,” Stevie answered. He felt guilty, realizing he was probably going to be rooting against the team from Philadelphia.

His dad went into the bathroom and Stevie changed his clothes. He was putting his credential around his neck when the phone rang. He looked at his watch. It was 2:25. Maybe Dick Weiss was getting antsy. He picked up the phone on the second ring.

“I may have something.” It was Susan Carol.

“What?”

“I found Christine Braman. At least I found her home phone number. She’s not home right now, but I’ll call her back again when we get to the arena.”

“Campus police?”

“No. Didn’t have to call them. It’s better than that. I’ll tell you when we get over there.”

“Okay. I’ll see you in five minutes.”

Stevie’s dad had walked out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist. “Who was that?” he asked.

“Oh. Mr Weiss. I guess he wants to get going. I told him I’d be right down.”

Bill Thomas nodded. “The game doesn’t start for almost three hours. It’s a five-minute walk over there, and he’s itchy to get going.”

“Guess that’s why they call him Hoops.”

“Guess so.” His dad looked at him for a moment and smiled. Then he put both hands on his shoulders. “I’m not sure I’ve told you how proud I am of you,” he said.

Stevie felt himself flush a little bit. “Gee, Dad, what’d I do?”

“You won the contest. You’re writing stories like a real pro this weekend. And you’ve handled yourself very well. I think even Susan Carol is coming around. I heard her call you Stevie.”

“Come on, Dad.”

“Okay, you go. Have a great time. Just remember I’m proud of you.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

As he gently shut the door behind him, he couldn’t help but wonder if what he had done that morning would make his dad proud, too.

All he could do was hope.

The walk over to the Superdome was a little bit like taking in all the sideshow acts at a circus at once. Stevie was convinced he saw a bearded lady at one point. There were several fortune-tellers, not to mention all the various ticket-scalpers and vendors selling “official” merchandise. Stevie looked around for Big Tex, but he was nowhere in sight. Stevie wondered for a moment if maybe Big Tex had been arrested. Unlikely, he thought.

They made it through security with relatively little hassle, helped by the fact that they were early and that they didn’t have to pick up credentials. The NCAA guy who had
kept demanding Stevie’s driver’s license the previous day was still there, but he didn’t even look at Stevie or Weiss as they walked through the metal detectors. Once inside, they all headed straight to the workroom to set up their computers near telephones.

“I think we should walk out courtside,” Susan Carol said to Stevie once they had plugged their computers in and checked to make sure the electricity was working.

“Nothing going on out there right now,” Bill Brill said. “The teams probably aren’t even in the building yet. It’s only three o’clock.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Susan Carol. “But I kind of want to see the place fill up. For my story.”

That seemed to satisfy Brill. The two of them walked out to the arena floor, where the giant screens in each corner of the building were showing a replay of the 2004 final between Connecticut and Georgia Tech. Stevie remembered falling asleep at halftime with UConn in complete control.

“Duke should have been in that game, not Connecticut,” Susan Carol said.

“I know, I know. J.J. Redick got fouled on the last play.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, he was, but the worst call was on the play before when Emeka Okafor went over Luol Deng’s back for that offensive rebound.”

Stevie
did
recall thinking the same thing, but he wasn’t about to admit it. “Well, Okafor won’t be out there tonight,” he said.

“Neither will Deng—and he
should
be. It’s crazy to go pro after one year of college.”

Stevie didn’t answer because they had arrived on press row. There were very few people around. A couple of reporters at their seats writing pregame stories. And he could see Jim Nantz and Billy Packer standing near their seats with a coterie of people around them.

“Think I should go tell Nantz about Jan Miley?” he said.

“What? Who? Oh, the hostess. Absolutely. I’m sure Bonnie Bernstein will be quaking in her pumps.”

They sat down in an open area and Susan Carol glanced around at the empty building, partly for her story, but mostly to make sure no one could hear them. The fans had not yet been let in, so there were no more than 200 people—including all the ushers—in a place that would soon hold 65,000. Stevie liked the emptiness.

Susan Carol took another look around to be absolutely certain no one could hear them. “So, first I tried to find Chip’s Econ professor’s family, which was dead easy. His widow is still in Rochester—she was the only Scott in town. Plus, she was home. But that’s where our luck ran out. Professor Scott never kept any records at home, and his wife seemed sure they would have cleaned out his office at the college.

“But
then
I called this Braman woman’s number,” she said, “and I got voice mail.”

“Figures, on a Saturday—”

She put up a hand to stop him. “Right. And I’m about to hang up, because there’s no sense leaving a message, when I hear the tape say, ‘If this is Chip,
please
call me at home. My number is’ ”—she paused to pull out her notebook—“ ‘704-555-2346.’ ”

“Wow! So did you call?”

She nodded. “Yeah. And get this: she wasn’t home but her tape said, ‘Chip, if it’s you, either leave me a number where I can find you or call me back after four o’clock. I know you play at six, but I have that information you needed.’ ”

Stevie looked up at the giant digital clock on the scoreboard. It said 3:14. He noticed that fans were now starting to make their way into seats.

“So we have to wait another forty-five minutes and call back,” Susan Carol said.

“But we aren’t Chip,” Stevie said. “What are we going to—” He stopped himself in mid-sentence, suddenly struck by the last words on Christine Braman’s tape:
You play at six
.

“Hey, wait a minute,” he said. “She’s in Charlotte. That means she’s on eastern time, which means it’s four-fifteen already. We need to call her now.”

Susan Carol smacked her fist lightly on the table in front of her. “I completely forgot,” she said. “How dumb am I? We’ve got to find a phone.”

“Preferably one with some privacy,” he said.

“Good point,” she said.

They were sitting at three seats that were all marked
THE WASHINGTON POST
. There was a phone that also said
WASHINGTON POST
on it sitting just to Stevie’s right. No one was anywhere near them.

“This might be as good a place as any,” he said. “It’s a zoo back there in the press room.”

“I wonder if I can call long-distance from here,” she said.

Stevie looked around. There was no one looking at them, and the closest people to them were the CBS types who were two rows and almost half the court away. “I don’t think one long-distance call is going to kill the
Washington Post,”
he said.

She nodded and opened her notebook again to the phone number. “Keep an eye out and nudge me if you see someone coming,” she said.

Stevie played guard for the next few minutes, walking up and down behind Susan Carol while she talked. He couldn’t hear exactly what she was saying, because she was practically whispering into the phone, but she was taking a lot of notes and there were periods where she just listened and wrote. He did hear her say one thing that baffled him: “Oh, I’m adopted.”