The Code (31 page)

I occasionally thought about it. Maybe I got a long-distance look in my eyes when I went out to dinner with Sandy or drove a golf cart for her around the course or killed a couple of pints at the Merry Widow watching the playoffs with Sarge or sweated them out in the steam bath at the health club after a workout. I definitely thought about it when I took my piece out of Sarge's lock-up and went with him to the shooting range to work through a few clips, so I kept my eye and not just my licence. I took my piece home with me and kept it under my bed when Sandy was over, within reach on the bedside table when she wasn't. I almost had the goods on a perp who had killed
twice and tried for the hat trick. Even with me smoothing him, getting inside his twisted hair-plugged head, William Mays still had more reason to take me out of the game than he had with the Ol' Redhead, Bones II, and Sandy.

Sarge, Sandy, and the others might have thought I was just running on a drained battery after travelling from Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver in the west to Moscow and Omsk in the east. I had lost count of how many changes in time zones I had been through all season. They had that right. I was punchy.

They might have thought I was out of sorts with all the speculation about Hunts's job and the L.A. staff. Grant Tomlin had racheted up his act, suggesting on-air that Hunts might not even make it to the draft. “My sources tell me that ownership in L.A. is considering a complete reboot in the front office,” Tomlin said on his network hockey-panel gabfest. And it was undoubtedly true, given that Tomlin himself was in our owner's ear on a daily basis. There was plenty of chatter behind the scenes, none of it reassuring. Duke Avildsen told me that Anderson was telling his buddies in the trade that he was looking at real estate in L.A.

I had mixed emotions. I wasn't exactly in love with my job, but I didn't want to lose it and be perceived as a failure again. I sent on a couple of emails to William Mays. I kept the messages short and the words vague. I just wanted to remind him that I hadn't gone away. I imagined the flop sweat. He knew he was going to have to deal with me, though not the way he imagined, nothing like it. Someone else was going to have to deal with me first.

I put in a call to Bones II ten days before the draft. I got only as far as his receptionist. I left my name, number, and the message that I wanted to speak to him about Billy Mays's recovery from mono. He got back to me within the hour. Someone with a bum valve was just going to have to sit tight in the waiting room while important business was getting sorted out.

“Ollie Buckhold sent along Billy Mays's medical report and I've spoken to our team doctor,” I said. “He told me that you were the doctor who told Billy to shut down his training. That's about the only thing I got clear. Really, I couldn't sort through what our team doctor was saying. Never can. When he says that he's going to put something in layman's terms, he thinks a layman is a second-year med student.”

That got a laugh out of Bones II. It also appealed to his sense of superiority. Yeah, he'd play along as if this were an audition for his own afternoon medical-talk show.

“It would be my pleasure to answer any questions you might
have about Billy's condition,” he said. “I have patients this afternoon but …”

“I was wondering if you were going to be at the draft,” I said. It took him off guard. I tried to play it like I made a wild stab at it, like I didn't know that he and William Sr. were former teammates, former roommates, and stress-tested friends.

“I am,” he said.

“Can we meet there? I don't need to tell you that our team has an intense interest in Billy, but we really have to cross every
t
and dot every
i
, if you know what I mean. I'd be more comfortable doing that in person.”

I tried my best to pass for the guy who fell off the back of the turnip truck. It worked.

“I can do that,” he said. He told me the Mayses and their entourage were staying at the Courtyard Marriott. He told me that they arrived on the Wednesday before the Friday-night draft. I told him that I was going to leave a message at the hotel. I hung up and then called the Courtyard posing as Eastern Ontario's Leading Cardiologist and asked to double-check my reservation. What Bones II told me was on the square.

I had work to do in the meantime. Madison and the Peterborough police had the eyewitness account of a Caliber speeding from the scene, Ontario plates but no numbers or letters for the licence plate. They didn't have a reason to suspect Mays the Elder on the basis of the information they had, but when questioning him they'd have asked for the name of the vehicle that he had driven to the arena that night. I worked on the assumption that he gave them the name and licence plate of a Jaguar or some other quarter-million on wheels that resided in his seven-car garage. It would have been a perfunctory question, and they'd have been satisfied with and even impressed by the answer. The answer fit the image he cultivated in the business press. They wouldn't have known to ask Junior about Senior's rides to the rink in rentals.

It was a chip shot. I figured with multiple rentals he opted for the same company and as often as not the same location. I figured it would have been “the anti-empathy” if he sent his assistant to look after his transportation needs. I figured he
opted for something either close to home or to his offices. If the latter, he would find another opportunity to connect with one of those whom others would call “the little people.” I made a few calls and had a few misses posing as the Motivational Guru. I hit the jackpot when I landed an Indian gent who patiently waited out my story at the Avis outfit hard by the food court in the downtown concourse.

“Mr. Mays, how are you?”

“I'm in a bit of trouble that you might be able to help me out with,” I said. “I've misplaced a memory stick with some vital business information. It could be easily missed in a standard cleaning of a car, especially after very light use like I had that night. Can you check to see if anything turned up in a car that I rented back on St. Patrick's Day. I think it was a white Caliber. Don't ask me how I remember that.”

I told him that I didn't have my Wizard number handy. He asked for my postal code. I had that, thanks to Central Scouting's database where the home addresses of the top draft prospects are posted for organizations looking to get in touch with the players and their families. It struck me that a Caliber wouldn't have been the high-end ride. Maybe the premium cars were all gone. Maybe he was avoiding ostentation as much as he could and that extended as far as his choice in rental cars, but no farther.

“Yes, Mr. Mays, it was a Caliber, white, but I don't see any reports of anything found in the car.”

“Could you give me the licence plate number? I just want to check with the lost and found at the head office.”

The Indian gent humoured me, though he believed I was just going up a blind alley.

“I'll also put in a request to locate the car for you so it can be checked.”

“Please. A memory stick could fall down between the seats.

You'd be more likely to find a dime down there than to see a little black plastic thing when it's in a dark space with dark upholstery.”

The Indian gent was sympathetic. Mays had driven a car that matched the one speeding from the scene. I guarantee that he didn't tell the police he drove a Caliber that night. He was going to be caught in a lie. The mileage in and mileage out was going to be the distance between his office and the arena and not a heck of a lot more. And when the forensic crew was through with the interior, blood matching the victims, something more than trace amounts, would show up on the driver's side floor and upholstery.

That was later though. I'd pass on all this information to Madison at the appropriate time. It wasn't the appropriate time yet.

I had made up my mind that we couldn't take Billy Mays Jr. I meditated on that thought and its potential consequences for the duration of the 9
A
.
M
. flight from Toronto to L.A. on the Tuesday before the draft. For once I managed to nod off in economy, but don't mistake that for peace of mind and confidence. There was still some heavy lifting to do before the first round of the draft Friday night. DDoris was in my dream, but an announcement from the cockpit woke up me up and I couldn't remember a single detail.

When I look at my playing days and my work with L.A., I think of a reading that I did in criminology class in my second and last year at Boston College. The reading was about cultural deviance theory. The theory holds that people in slums and projects act out on their isolation and poverty and that they struggle with and often fail to adapt to middle-class society. They can't handle
normal
. They enjoy trouble. They enjoy acting tough and acting out on angry impulses. They enjoy the sense of being smarter than everyone else in the room. They enjoy thrills. They enjoy hassling cops and any other authority figure. Fighting, drinking, drugs, gambling, rebelling: Those were the fabric of the gang subculture.

I got a B-plus in Crim 200. I felt like I knew a lot of it going in, having grown up as a cop's son. When the prof laid it out, it got me thinking that, well, a lot of that was me. And everyone I played with and against. And everyone else involved in the game. You might think that a player's life is anything but isolated, playing in front of thousands every night. But the fact is, in the
game, whether it was playing junior or college or, especially, in the league, everyone is in a bubble, cut off from those who sit in the stands.

When we're in the league we're not average guys with average lives. Our normal is no one else's: What we do to each other on the ice would be criminal in any jurisdiction if it were to take place on the street. Even the cleanest bodycheck would be assault. We glory in fighting. We drink to celebrate. Some do drugs, a lot steroids, but I've known some big weed smokers. A lot of guys gamble up to the line of compulsion and beyond. And we rebel against coaches who push us when we aren't inclined to be pushed, which is always, or against GMs whom we're always suspicious of. A team is just a gang by another name, playing hard, partying hard, living hard. Some harder than most. Some unable to behave differently when they hang their skates up to dry or hang them up for good.

True, we're anything but deprived when we're pulling down millions. And we worked for our money in one sense—all the practices, the workouts, the price paid in games. But we feel like we're stealing it doing what we do. I know guys who made ten times as much as I did and ended up practically homeless because they spent like they were going to make the same money past their playing days. Like there's always a bank to rob.

It's a game in a criminal sense, players playing a game that's run on the owners who are stooges and the fans who are marks to pay the money they do to come to the arena. And we're not deprived of sex. Fact is, you might run out of tape but you'll never run out of ass.

If you played to some half-assed level, you are forever a player. You spent not just your youth but a good chunk of your adult life in the game, and all your values are shaped by the subculture, by peers and the like. A lot of scouts hang around the game
because they'd be lost without it, like aging gang-bangers, career criminals who are less comfortable on the street than in the joint. I've never been above it all. Going to the draft in L.A. I was back in the game, and there's some sort of comfort to it. Unlike some, I had been on the outside. And the threat of being on the outside again was very real. When I looked down the Merry Widow's bar at the Irregulars in the days before the draft I thought:
That could be me and soon.
I could have been destined for banishment from the subculture of the pro game.

I left a message at the Courtyard Marriott for Bones II on the Wednesday of draft week, two days before the big show. He hadn't checked in yet. I asked the girl at the front desk to handdeliver a message asking him to call me when he got in. I wasn't going to wait on it. I checked back every hour. Mid-afternoon he was in the house. He was neither friendly nor hostile. I tried to warm him up.

“I appreciate that it's a long flight and a long day and I'm sure Mr. Mays has a great evening planned for you,” I said. “Why don't we just put it off until tomorrow? It can wait. It really won't take too much time, and I just want to check with my general manager to make sure that I'm asking the right questions.”

He took this as a kind consideration. I was just making time. I was baiting the hook.

The next day I called him. It took a few tries. He slept in. He missed breakfast. I staked out the breakfast buffet at the Courtyard and kept a line of sight on the lobby. He didn't show until 11:30. I made a point of crossing paths with him near
the front desk. I told him that I was at the hotel, talking with another prospect and his parents.

“Do you want to sit down now and we can look after this?”

“I wish I could but we have our last staff meeting this afternoon,” I told him. “I don't want to get in the way of any plans you might have. Can we do it tomorrow? I don't want to inconvenience you.”

I saw the Mayses exiting the elevator. The boy had been out by the pool, the father sleeping it off. It must have been a hell of a night for the Great Man and his party and, as far as I could tell, it numbered up around three dozen. I beat a retreat before he picked me out of the crowd.

Friday. The third Friday of June. It had come down to this. The last stone to turn was Bones II. It had to be done like this. And it had to be done not just last but at the very last. Too soon and all the effort would be wasted.