The Code (29 page)

“I owe you a coffee,” Sarge said.

“The guy who took these collapsed,” I said.

Sarge gave me a dirty look. He thought I had quickened the pace too much to be sociable. It didn't matter, though. The old pharmacist went behind the back counter and moved around. Unseen drawers and containers were opened and shut. This was going to be less work than Sarge and I had anticipated. I'd envisioned that the samples would have to be sent away.

“This one is amiodarone,” the pharmacist said. He pushed the big pill across the table.

“He had a lot more of those than the others,” I told him.

“That would make sense,” he said. “The fellah was probably on a higher dosage. This is a 200 mil, and at the start of treatment you'd take 400 or 600 mils daily. After that you'd drop down to one pill a day. I see a lot of scrips for this. The cardio clinic is next door.”

“What's it for?” I asked.

“He'll get around to it,” Sarge said.

“It regulates heart rhythm,” the pharmacist said. “This one is a beta blocker, something that slows the heart rate down. The other lowers blood pressure, gives the left ventricle less resistance, as it were, just makes it easier to pump out blood. This is basically what you'd see for someone who has an arrhythmia—an irregular heartbeat. Co-morbidities might be heart enlargement or things along those lines. The blood thinner prevents clots if the blood flow isn't what it should be.”

I didn't need just the standard product advisory. I needed to know how this was going to play out, what it would mean down the line for Junior, for the team that was looking to take him.

“So if you started out on these …”

“You could feel very nauseated with the amiodarone, that's for sure.”

“Even an athlete?”

“Even an athlete.”

“What could you do if you started out on this stuff?”

“Bed rest would be best, but you'd have to take it easy until you were finished with the loading. Sometimes the heart kicks back into rhythm and it's a one-off. Could there be more to it than that? Sure, but I'm in no position to say.”

“If he's an athlete, it might be a risky condition,” I said.

“It might be anything,” he said. He was tired of speculating.

Sarge gave me a look. I had to ask, though.

“So it might be a problem for his athletic career going forward,” I said. I offered it up. The old pharmacist hit it like a piñata.

“It might be a problem for his life going forward. It's a heart issue.”

It was the best I could do without a doctor, probably a specialist, and the lab work. I could get a specialist. Our team doctor could refer me to one. The lab work was another issue. At that moment I knew that I had seen it from a distance. It had to be the file that William Mays Sr. carried out of Hanratty's office, that caused him to spill his coffee, that he dumped in the trash. What it contained was a question. One guy who knew the answer was the one who gave it to Senior that night and drew his last breath a few hours later. It had to be something less than a clean bill of health.

It sure as hell explained Hanratty's last words to Junior:
You'll go on to great things, hockey or not. You're part of this team even when you're not on the ice.
The kid thought Hanratty was saying farewell, like he had some sort of fatalistic foreknowledge. Nix. The Ol' Redhead was just trying to soften Junior's landing with the imminent end of his career. Bones and Hanratty probably didn't want to tell the kid on his own because Junior didn't turn eighteen until July. He was still a minor, and with something as major as a serious cardiac issue, a doctor and even a crusty old coach wouldn't have wanted to break the news to him without a parent present. And probably they'd have wanted to tell the father first so that he could figure out how to tell his son that it was game over and the first day of the rest of his life.

The file: Senior takes the file saying that he wants to break the news to Junior away from the arena. Or maybe he says that he wants to take the test results to a specialist for a second opinion. I'm leaning toward Door Number One. I liked the idea of
Senior telling the two old guys that he wanted to have a heartto-heart with Junior about his heart.

Was Senior capable of a show of bogus compassion? Probably the only kind of compassion he was capable of.

“What more can you tell us?”

I winced. I had gone through the story of Mays's meds with our team doctor and a heart specialist who was a member at the same golf club and had never been to a hockey game in his life. They were on speakerphone. I had given them all the details, as much as I knew them. I had given them the files but I had blacked out Mays's name. That didn't matter to them, and it mattered to me to keep the circle as small as possible. The drugs as identified by the pharmacist. The sequence of events: Junior's collapse, his hospitalization, the ordering of tests, the shutdown from training, his complaints about nausea and fatigue.

“Everything but a smoking gun,” the specialist said.

“Or a blood-stained cinder block,” I said.

“What?” the specialist said.

I didn't explain. The whole deal seemed like too much of a coincidence for me. It smelled, no reeked, of cover-up for motive. But all we had was the kid being on these meds. Not a diagnosis.

“It could well be a single irregular episode,” the specialist said. “The treatment seems aggressive, but maybe it's been effective.”

Our team doctor chimed in. “Brad, I have the reports from the combine and I've shown them to Stan. It says the kid's heartbeat is regular. The blackout episode isn't noted. Not an arrhythmia. No mention of it. As for the drugs, no mention of them.”

Yeah, I supposed that mention was in the file folder and in the trash.

“Brad, is there anything more you can tell us?”

“Let me think,” I said. I felt like I was on the clock on
Jeopardy!
and had gone into brain lock. I thought back to my last medical. Back to the questions that I've been asked. They've all been pretty mundane. Drinking yeah, smoking no, drugs no. Going back, going through some unfortunate by-products of the magnetic force generated by sports celebrity, a pocketful of cash, and reasonable looks, I was asked about sexual activity. The problem was a treatable infectious condition. The truth was less than the interviewing doctor expected. He wanted a little vicarious entertainment, but the source was hardly hot- and cold-running women. It was something that I'd picked up from the mother of my child after she'd been on location with the junkie actor who took my place.

My mind raced but I was on a treadmill. I was getting nowhere. I thought again about that condition. I felt a little twist in my boxers. I thought that stress might have been causing the long-dormant condition to break out again. Maybe it was a late gift from DDoris. And I felt the existential dread that maybe, maybe, it was a condition I had regifted to Sandy. Thankfully, no, my boxers were just bunched up. As Sarge would say, my knickers were twisted.

DDoris. She talked about the way William Mays smothered
little Billy when she thought she deserved her husband's undivided attention. She talked about how William thought he should have had a career in hockey and that Peterborough had been an awful experience. It was DDoris who wanted and needed the smothering. I was off the treadmill.

“The kid's mom told me that his grandfather on the father's side died young,” I said. “Bad heart.”

The specialist waited a second to process this information. “Bad heart? Exactly what?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“Well, that's interesting,” the specialist said. I imagined him doing the physician's chin stroke on the other end. He sounded detached and bemused, as if he had been contemplating a crossword, One Across, five letters with the clue being
The stakes in l'affaire Billy Mays Jr
. and he had been given the first letter of
m
. If he cheated and looked it up he would have found the solution:
my job
. If One Down were six letters with the clue being
What an adverse diagnosis might explain in Peterborough,
he'd have been left puzzling over a couple of words until more letters came in. As it stood, the word could have been either
motive
or
murder
.

“I'm not worried about a hard and fast diagnosis, Doc,” I said. “I just need to know what we're looking at on the scale, y'know, from the possible to the probable to the very likely.”

The specialist took a deep breath, feeling the safety of not being held accountable or liable. I guess he needed that out of the way. In his day-to-day job he could take a wild stab when it came to putting the paddles to a guy's chest or doing an angioplasty or worse.

“Well, it has to be something, obviously, just taking the medication into consideration,” the specialist said. “They're very strong drugs with significant side effects. They aren't prescribed loosely. Certainly with amiodarone, you don't want to keep
anyone on it for any length of time as it can cause liver damage. So it's something. Was it a one-time cardiac incident? I'd put that in the possible category. With family history, though, it would take follow-up …”

I tried to speed him along. “Let's say that there was a follow-up and the kid has been shut down, taken off all exercise,” I said.

“That would be standard protocol even it were just a one-off,” he said. “If you're asking me to spin the Wheel of Fortune, I'd say that given that this is a young athlete …”

“A teenager,” I said.

“Yes, a teenager, I'd be tempted to investigate hypertrophic cardiomyopathy,” he said. He decided not to wait for me to ask to put it into layman's terms. “That's a thickening of the heart that would put him at significant risk of sudden death.”

“Later in life?”

“At a young age actually,” he said. “I've diagnosed several athletes here, a couple of basketball players in high school just in the last year, and I had to advise them to discontinue playing. I had to put them on beta blockers, and in the case of the one, an anti-arrhythmic med. And I've been approached by a couple of college football players, probably at an agent's request, to prescribe medication, these same beta blockers and antiarrhythmics, so that they might clear testing. There are millions at stake.”

“Same here, Doc,” I said.

“Well, I really haven't treated any hockey players, but if those are the stakes, I'm sure that the specialists in your neck of the woods would get the same sort of requests from young athletes. I prescribed the medication to the young men who came to me, but I told them that they should not under any circumstances look at anything above and beyond light recreational exercise, no pushing the envelope. Did they take my
advice? I'm not sure. My guess is one or both might not have. Just an athlete's stubbornness and a young man's sense of his immortality.”

He was a heart specialist with not even a passing knowledge of hockey, but what he said about a player's headspace was a top-shelf one-timer.

“Is it correctible? Is there an operation?”

“There's treatment but there's no ‘fix' per se,” he said. “He might be looking at a pacemaker or an implantable cardioverterdefibrillator if he were considered at high risk.”

I had the juice that I was looking for. The specialist offered up his Perfunctory Don't-Hold-Me-To-Its, saying in so many words that his opinion was based on incomplete information. I half-expected him to say that it would be accurate within 3 percent nineteen times out of twenty.

I offered my thanks and goodbyes. I suspected our team doctor would bill us and he'd be on the hook for lunch at the golf club.

I
DIDN'T TELL
the pharmacist, the team doctor, and the specialist that the meds I pulled out of Junior's basement apartment were in unmarked containers. I made sense of that off the hop. Junior didn't take his prescription to the pharmacy in Peterborough. His father did. And Senior brought it back. He could have bought or been given the containers there. He could have told them at the counter that his son was commuting back and forth between Peterborough and Toronto and wanted a stash at each stop.

It even occurred to me that Senior could have taken in the prescription and said it was his own. Same name, no one would have been the wiser. That would have headed off any small-town chatter. Peterborough is small enough that a pharmacist might have recognized Junior and wagged a tongue about his
prescription. Or maybe it would have been someone standing in line behind him, eavesdropping when the pharmacist walked the kid through the particulars of his prescriptions.

If it had been anyone else, I could have put everything down to a father guarding his son's privacy. But that would have been the only time that Senior had taken the high road. He didn't strike me as the noble type. To protect Junior, he just had to pick up the drugs. To put them in unwrapped plastic wrappers wasn't protection but concealment. Senior didn't want his son to know anything more than he wanted him to. And if he didn't want his son to know, he sure as hell didn't want teams in the league to know. I suspected that if the son had known exactly what he was taking and why he was taking it, he wouldn't have kept it a secret, not from friends, not from teams in the league. I suspected that the father suspected the same thing. As much as I knew of the son, he made a point of taking the high road. He was too noble for what Senior saw as their own good.

The draft was a couple of weeks off. I made an appointment to meet up with Ollie Buckhold over coffee around his offices near the airport.

“I always thought life would be a helluva lot easier if my offices were
in
the airport and I just stayed at one of the hotels out here,” he said. “I feel like I live nine months of the year out of my suitcase.”