Last Shot (9 page)

“Yes, I guess so.”

“So we know who—well, mostly—and what and where and when … but not why or how.”

“And no one will believe us without the why and how,” said Susan Carol.

Stevie remembered something Dick Jerardi had told him when he had asked him about how to get a good story. If it’s important, Jerardi had said, you have to get someone on the record. Otherwise, it’s too easy for people to shoot you down.

“We have to do two things,” he said. “We have to find out what exactly is going on here. And we have to get someone to go on the record.”

“Well,” Susan Carol said, snapping the notebook shut, “it’s a sure bet that Professor Whiting isn’t going to fill us in.”

“Which leaves one person,” Stevie said.

“Right. Chip Graber.”

“Yup. We have to figure out a way to get him to tell the story on the record. And if we get him to say he’s being blackmailed, then—”

“Hold on, hold on,” she said. “How are we even going to
talk to Chip Graber? Even if we knew where MSU was staying, there’ll be security all over the hotel. We’ll never get close to him.”

She was right, of course. Maybe they could wait until after the games tomorrow and try to talk to him in the locker room. No, that would be impossible; the locker rooms would be overrun with people. Maybe he could somehow hitch a ride on the golf cart with Roger Valdiserri and talk to him then. That wasn’t likely, either. They had to get to him before the games tomorrow and they had to somehow get to him alone.

“First we have to find out where they’re staying,” he said. “My guess is that won’t be too hard. The hard part will be getting into the hotel and finding him.”

“No kidding,” she said.

“What’s the old saying?” he said. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way? We have the will. We’ll figure out the way.”

Finding out where Minnesota State was staying wasn’t that hard at all. They remembered that there was a media workroom in their hotel basement, and in it, Susan Carol spotted a book labeled
Media Final Four Information
sitting among the team media guides and press releases promoting products and press conferences. One was headlined “Papa John’s Pizza invites you to meet Dick Vitale!” Another was for a book signing for Dale Brown, the ex-LSU coach who was still a big name in New Orleans.

Stevie picked up the information book and began paging through it. Sure enough, there was a section on hotels. And
in the hotel section there was a listing of the team hotels. “Atlanta Regional Champion—Downtown Marriott,” it said. Minnesota State had advanced to the Final Four by winning the regional in Atlanta.

“Bingo!” he said, pointing at the listing.

“Bingo—maybe,” Susan Carol said. “I remember Coach K telling me that when Duke is in the Final Four, they never stay in their assigned hotel because they want to get the team away from all the crazy stuff going on downtown. See, it says there that the Syracuse Regional Champion is staying at the Embassy Suites. Mr. Brill told me Duke is really staying in a Radisson by the airport. MSU may not be at the Marriott.”

“Or they might be. Coach Graber isn’t as experienced at going to the Final Four as Coach K. Let’s find out.”

He walked over to a bank of phones labeled
COURTESY PHONES—LOCAL CALLS AND CREDIT CARD CALLS ONLY
. As instructed on the phone, he dialed 9, and then, looking at the Marriott phone number in the information book, he dialed the hotel. Susan Carol started to ask him what he was doing, but he put a hand up when the phone was answered on the first ring.

“Hi, I’m trying to reach Professor Thomas Whiting?” he said. Susan Carol looked horrified. “He’s with the Minnesota State basketball team.”

He smiled when he heard the operator’s answer. “Oh, really? No, that’s okay, thanks.” He hung up.

“What happened?” Susan Carol said.

“She said that all phone calls to people with the
Minnesota State team were being blocked and I could leave a message if I wanted.”

“Which, of course, you didn’t.”

“No way! Okay, that’s the easy part. Now, how do we get into the hotel and find Chip Graber? If they’re blocking calls to people’s rooms, they certainly aren’t letting people roam around the hotel.”

Susan Carol looked at her watch. “My father’s expecting me upstairs any minute. We’re supposed to go to dinner with a friend of his who lives here in town. There’s no way I can get out of it.”

Stevie and his dad had been invited to dinner by a group of the coaches from Philadelphia at some hot shot New Orleans restaurant called K-Paul’s. When his dad had told him about the dinner, he had been excited at the prospect of eating with Fran Dunphy, the Penn coach he’d interviewed at the Palestra, and Jay Wright, the coach at Villanova. Now all he could think about was the entire evening being wasted. There wasn’t much they could do.

“I think we need to get an early start in the morning,” he said. “The first game isn’t until five o’clock. That means the coaches won’t want the players up too early, so we can probably catch him in his room.”

“Why don’t we leave here at eight-thirty,” she said. “It can’t be too far away if it’s in downtown.”

“The question is, what do we tell our dads?”

She looked baffled for a second, then snapped her fingers. “Easy. Remember when Mr. Brill was saying there’s an
entire room filled with radio stations doing broadcasts over at the coaches’ hotel?”

“Yeah, so?”

“So we’ll tell them we were invited over there by a couple of radio stations to appear, and Mr. Brill and Mr. Weiss said we should do it because it would be good publicity for the USBWA.”

“And what if they say they want to go with us?”

“Chances are my dad won’t want to. He said something about wanting to go to a museum in the morning. And if they do, let’s just tell them we’d sort of like to do this on our own.”

Stevie thought his dad would probably buy that, since they always argued over how much independence Stevie should be allowed at home. “Good idea,” he said. “I think that can work.”

They got on the elevator to head to their rooms. Stevie’s floor came first. As he got off, he turned back to Susan Carol. “I’ll see you at eight-thirty in that lower lobby, okay?” he said.

She gave him a nervous smile that reminded him how very pretty she was. “I hope you sleep tonight,” she said. “I know I won’t.”

The door closed. She was right again. He knew he wouldn’t sleep at all. There was just much too much to think about. And worry about.

STEVIE WOULD HAVE LAUGHED
if someone had told him he would spend an evening in the presence of four college basketball coaches—Fran Dunphy had brought Harvard coach Frank Sullivan and Billy Hahn, the ex-La Salle coach, with him—wondering when it would be time to go home and go to bed. But that’s pretty much what happened. The coaches took turns telling stories that normally Stevie would have been fascinated to hear. Sullivan, who seemed very un-coachlike to Stevie, with his soft-spoken manner and easy smile, talked about how close Harvard had come to landing Wally Szczerbiak a few years earlier.

“You mean
the
Wally Szczerbiak?” Stevie’s dad asked as Sullivan told the story.

“The one who is an All-Star in Minnesota right now,”
Sullivan said. “We had him until the last minute. Then Miami of Ohio came in and, well, they were in a better basketball league than the Ivy League—”

“Wait a minute,” Bill Thomas said, breaking in. “You’re telling me a kid turned down Harvard to go to Miami of Ohio because the Mid-American Conference is a better basketball league than the Ivy League?”

Sullivan laughed. “Are you kidding? When you recruit a basketball player, he thinks of himself as a basketball player first and foremost. The student part comes second.”

“Unless he’s not a very good player,” Dunphy put in.

“But Penn has had some very good teams,” Stevie said to Dunphy.

“That’s because kids think of us as a basketball school,” Dunphy said. “Same with Princeton. But Frank and the other coaches in the league fight the notion that basketball isn’t a serious sport at their schools.”

“But turning down Harvard?” Stevie’s dad said again.

“Happens all the time,” Sullivan said. “Every once in a while we get lucky and there’s a kid who is a good player and a good student who has been overlooked by the big-time schools. That’s what happened with Szczerbiak … until the very end. Once Miami got involved, we were done.”

Later, Hahn regaled them with stories about Maryland coach Gary Williams, who had a reputation for being perhaps the most intense coach in the profession. Hahn had worked for Williams for twelve years. “One night we’re playing North Carolina,” Hahn said. “We’re down thirteen at halftime. Gary is ballistic. We’re in his office right off the
locker room and he looks at Dave Dickerson, one of our assistants, and he says, ‘Look at you, you’re not even sweating! You don’t even care that we’re losing! How can you
not
be sweating?’ From that day forward, Dave always wore a heavy vest under his suit jacket to make sure he sweated.”

Everyone laughed, and Hahn went on. Stevie should have been in heaven hearing these inside stories, but he couldn’t stop looking at his watch. He wondered where Chip Graber was at that moment. He wondered what Susan Carol was doing. The only good news about the evening was that he and his dad got back to the hotel so late that he fell into bed and was so exhausted he went right to sleep.

He was up by six and lay awake in bed staring at the clock. He had told his dad in the cab coming back from the restaurant about how he and Susan Carol were planning to go to the coaches’ hotel in the morning to do a couple of radio interviews. His dad was so proud and excited that Stevie had started to feel bad about lying. Then his dad gave him a sideways look and said, “So, you and Susan Carol are hitting it off okay then, huh?”

“Yeah, okay,” Stevie said. “I mean, she’s all right. At least she seems to know about basketball.”

“Quite a concession coming from the world’s leading expert on the subject,” his dad said.

“Cut it out, Dad, I’m not an expert. I just like it.”

“But you concede Susan Carol may know something about it, too.”

“Actually, she knows quite a lot.”

Even in the darkness of the cab, Stevie could see his dad
smile. “Wow. A girl who knows a lot about basketball.
And
she’s pretty.”

“Daaaad …”

“Okay, okay.”

Stevie felt himself blush slightly just remembering the conversation. Maybe, he thought, in a year I’ll be taller than … He pushed the thought from his mind. He was still trying to formulate a plan to find Chip once he and Susan Carol got to the hotel.

He took a shower, then waited impatiently until seven o’clock, when he woke his dad to tell him he wanted to go down to breakfast by seven-thirty. The first people they saw when they walked into the terrace restaurant were the Andersons.

“Looks like we’re raising a couple of media stars, eh, Bill?” Reverend Anderson said, waving the Thomases over to the table.

“Yeah, how about that?” Stevie’s dad said as they walked over. The two men shook hands and Stevie made a point of acting casual when he said good morning to Susan Carol. He noticed that she did the same thing, barely managing a hello as Stevie and his dad sat down to join them. She was dressed a lot more casually than the day before, wearing a gray sweatshirt that said
GOLDSBORO BASKETBALL
and jeans. Stevie had also put on jeans, causing his dad to ask if he shouldn’t dress a bit more neatly to make his debut as a media star.

“Dad, it’s
radio
,” he said.

“Yes, I know,” his father said. “But it would be nice to
make a good impression on the people interviewing you, wouldn’t it?”

If his mother had been there, a full-scale argument would no doubt have ensued. His father didn’t bother. Stevie was actually relieved to see that Susan Carol’s thinking was the same as his: the more casual and unthreatening they looked, the better.

“I see your media star likes blue jeans as much as mine does,” Reverend Anderson said.

Stevie and Susan Carol couldn’t help smiling at one another. Clearly, the same fashion conversation had taken place in the Andersons’ room that morning.

Breakfast consisted mostly of the fathers comparing notes on dinner the night before and where each was going to be sitting that night. Reverend Anderson said that a member of his church was a Duke season-ticket holder and had gotten him a seat in the Duke section. “Probably a better location than what I dug up,” Bill Thomas said. “But at least I’m in the building.”

By eight-fifteen, Stevie was ready to bolt. Susan Carol, clearly able to read his mind, said, “Dad, I think Stevie and I ought to get going.”

“I thought you said your first interview was at nine,” Reverend Anderson said.

“It is, but we should probably get there a little early just to be sure.”

If either father was the least bit suspicious, they didn’t show it. There really wasn’t anything for them to be suspicious about. The radio story was a good one. Stevie’s dad
had been in the Hilton before and had seen “radio row,” so he knew they weren’t making it up.