Last Shot (20 page)

“What?”

“You’ve got a walkie-talkie right there. Call someone.”

“Look, you can go in,” the guard said. “You’re fine. They just have to go up and around.”

“I understand,” Chip said. “But I’m not going inside without these guys.”

The guard rolled his eyes and picked up his walkie-talkie. “NCAA public relations, come in please,” he said.

A voice crackled back. “PR here, what’s up?”

“I’ve got a student-athlete at the back door.”

“Graber? Chip Graber, I hope.”

“Yeah and—”

“Well, send him in, for crying out loud. He’s late.”

“He’s got two kids here with press credentials. I told him they had to go around to the media entrance.”

“Right.”

“He won’t come in without them.”

Stevie heard a profanity come through the walkie-talkie. No more than sixty seconds later, a blue-blazered man with what looked like a very bad toupee rounded the corner with an exasperated look on his face.

He pointed his walkie-talkie at Graber. “Come on, Chip, you’re late. Let’s go.”

Chip pointed at Susan Carol and Stevie. “They have credentials. Let them in, too.”

The blazer shook his head. “Can’t make exceptions. They have to go around.”

For the first time since he had met Chip Graber, Stevie
saw him really get angry. He walked right up to the blazer and pointed a finger at his chest.

“Listen, jerk, I’m tired of all this NCAA crap. All the rules, and the student-athlete mumbo jumbo, and no exceptions. I’ve been hearing it for three weeks in three cities. Here’s the deal: You take all three of us back there
now
or we all leave now. And then you can go in there and explain to the national media that I’m not at the press conference the day before the championship game because
you
couldn’t do anything except recite the freaking rules.”

The bad toupee was clearly surprised that a student-athlete would speak to him this way. He backed up from Chip to clear some space. “Look, Chip, let’s talk about this later.…”

“Now,”
Chip said. “Five seconds and I walk.”

The guy looked at Chip as if trying to decide if he was bluffing. Apparently he decided he wasn’t. “Okay, okay. Come on. But your school will be penalized for you being late, and I will report this to the basketball committee.”

“Yeah, go right ahead,” Chip said. “Maybe they’ll declare me ineligible to play tomorrow, huh? Your friends at CBS would love that.”

The blazer wheeled and began talking into his walkie-talkie again. “Bringing Graber now,” he said.

As soon as they reached the interview room, the blazer pointed Chip to the back entrance that would lead to the podium. Stevie could hear Coach Graber talking over the microphone about how much respect he had for Duke and Coach Krzyzewski.

“Okay,” Stevie said to Susan Carol, “I’ll go find Brill while you call our dads to tell them we came straight to the press conference. I’ll meet you in the press room in a few minutes.”

She nodded and headed off. Stevie walked into the back of the interview room and scanned for Bill Brill. Fortunately, he wasn’t sitting down; he was standing off to the side in a purple-and-green sweater, arms folded, not taking notes. Stevie walked over and lightly tugged on his arm.

“Hey,” Brill whispered. “You guys okay? Where’s Susan Carol?”

“She’s in the press room making a call. Can I talk to you outside for a minute?”

Brill shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “I don’t need to listen to this.”

Once they were outside the room, Stevie came right to the point. “Susan Carol said you were trying to reach the chairman of Duke’s board of trustees to set up an interview, is that right?”

“Right,” Brill said, looking a bit baffled at Stevie’s sudden interest in Duke. “
Blue Devil Weekly
has a special edition coming out on Wednesday on the Final Four and the search for a new president, so I’m doing a story.”

“Why does the new president matter to a magazine that’s about sports?” Stevie said, getting a little sidetracked, but curious.

“The president of a college affects athletics a lot,” Brill said. “If Duke gets someone like the woman before Sanford,
who didn’t get sports at all, Krzyzewski won’t be happy. And they need him happy, because he’s the school’s most important fund-raiser. And there are questions about what they’re going to do about football.…”

“Football?”

“Yes, believe it or not, there are some people who still care about football.”

“They play football at Duke?”

“Badly. Very badly.”

“Okay, okay.” Stevie realized he was way off topic and Brill was starting to look at him just a little bit suspiciously. “So, who’s the board chairman?”

“Stuart M. Feeley, software billionaire. Sort of the East Coast’s answer to Bill Gates. Knows not a damn thing about basketball, but I have been granted an audience at four-thirty this afternoon.”

That was exactly what Stevie was hoping to hear. “Could you take Susan Carol and me with you?” he said. “We don’t want a story, we just want to watch you conduct the interview. We both think we would learn a lot.”

“Well …,” Brill said, hesitating. “I guess that’s fine. But where is she again? Why isn’t she asking me about this, too?”

“She’s in the press room talking to her dad. He’s a little upset with her because we kind of wandered off together this morning and forgot to call.”

Brill smiled. “Oh, okay.” He patted Stevie on the back. “Good for you.”

Stevie tried to give him what he thought might be a conspiratorial look. He had no idea if he succeeded.

“I’ll meet you here as soon as Duke is finished,” Brill said.

Stevie shook his head. “Actually, can we just meet you in the hotel lobby? We both need to write our stories for today and our computers are back at the Hyatt.

“We went to an FCA prayer breakfast and talked to some people,” Stevie went on. “But we both admitted that interviewing people was hard—that’s why we thought we’d like to see how you do it.”

“Well, that was good thinking by both of you to go to the breakfast instead of writing this press-conference garbage. Fine then, meet me in the lobby of the Windsor Court Hotel at a little bit before four-thirty. Do you think you can find it okay?”

“Oh yeah, we have a good map. Thanks, Mr. Brill.”

Brill turned to go back inside the interview room. Stevie went in the other direction, circling the arena to the media workroom. It was virtually empty and Susan Carol was just hanging up the phone when Stevie arrived.

“Did you get our dads?” he said.

“Just yours. My dad wasn’t in his room, so I left him a long message. Your dad stayed in to watch golf because the weather’s so lousy. I told him we had run long this morning, then came over here to listen to the press conferences. I told him we would be back a little before dinnertime. He said that my dad was going to call him soon to see if he had heard from us. So, they should be fine.”

“At least for a few hours.”

They walked briskly back to the hotel through the rain. Susan Carol went to her room to pick up her computer while Stevie picked up sandwiches and sodas for them in the lobby café, and then they met in the Hyatt’s press room to get to work.

They had three hours to concoct some sort of story for their papers and do as much background research on both Steve Jurgensen and Stuart Feeley as possible.

Earlier, when they were in the car with Chip, they had decided that someone else had to be brought into the circle, someone with authority. Susan Carol had lobbied hard for calling the FBI, but Chip wasn’t ready for that yet. Stevie thought they should try Bobby Kelleher, since he’d uncovered that Brickley Shoe scandal, but a reporter sounded even worse to Chip. Finally they settled on a Duke official—the chairman of the board of trustees, Stuart M. Feeley.

They would tell him about Steve Jurgensen and the plot against Chip Graber and his dad. Then they would ask Feeley to confront Jurgensen and tell him to back off or face immediate banishment from the board and, potentially, criminal charges. No harm, no foul, Chip called it. If he agreed to stop blackmailing Chip and told Whiting it was all over, they wouldn’t call the authorities. They were hoping that Feeley would be just as eager to avoid the scandal of a Duke trustee trying to fix a game as they were.

“I don’t see how Jurgensen can do anything except back down,” Stevie said when they had discussed the plan.

“Unless he’s already made a big bet,” said Susan Carol.

“Lose a bet or go to jail. Which would you choose?”

“We can only hope.”

Susan Carol started writing a piece about Final Four fever in the Big Easy that they’d file under both their names. It was the best they could come up with on short notice.

Stevie’s computer search didn’t reveal much more than they already knew, except that Feeley did not have an especially warm relationship with Duke president Tom Sanford. There was some speculation that Sanford’s decision to retire at age fifty-eight had as much to do with Feeley as with wanting to do less fund-raising. Good to know, Stevie guessed.

He searched through the Duke media guide, but the bios of Sanford and Feeley were glowing and unhelpful. And Jurgensen didn’t even rate a bio, just a listing as a trustee. No picture, no nothing.

When Susan Carol was finished, Stevie began editing the story to add his perspective. The piece was full of color and amusing anecdotes. He had to admit, she was a good writer.

“Nice piece of fiction, Scarlett,” he said.

“Thanks,” Susan Carol replied. “It’s the weekend I was expecting to have.”

“What are you writing now?” Stevie asked as she was still typing rapid-fire.

“I’m writing up some notes on everything that’s
really
happened so far. I just think it would be good to have a backup copy.”

“Yeah, and you’d like to send it to the FBI, too, wouldn’t you?”

“Not yet. But maybe.”

They left the hotel shortly before four o’clock. The Windsor Court Hotel was conveniently close to the Hilton, so they hopped on the hotel shuttle again. It was a really fancy hotel, its lobby filled with oriental carpets, oil paintings, and flowers. They sat on a velvet settee by the door to keep an eye out for Brill and felt massively underdressed.

Almost as soon as they sat down, two men walked past, heading for the street. One of their voices snapped Stevie to attention. “It’s still a slam dunk” was all he heard. He knew that voice. He looked up just in time to see Thomas R. Whiting, dressed, Stevie was convinced, in the same charcoal gray suit he had been wearing Friday, holding the door for another man. He wondered if it was Jurgensen.

Stevie quickly followed them to the door, hoping he could casually walk outside and somehow get ahead of them so he could get a better look at the second man’s face. No such luck. A car was waiting for them, and Whiting and his companion slid inside before Stevie could even get through the door. Dammit, Stevie thought. He explained what he’d heard to Susan Carol, who had an idea. She found a house phone and asked for Steve Jurgensen’s room. She was prepared to hang up if someone answered, but there was no need. On the fourth ring the phone flipped over to voice mail asking her to leave a message.

That didn’t exactly confirm that it was Jurgensen with Whiting, but it was possible.

“Well,” Susan Carol said, “Whiting’s got one thing right:
this is going to be a slam dunk. But not the one he had in mind.”

Brill walked into the lobby looking a little bit exasperated at four-thirty on the dot. “Couldn’t get a cab,” he said. “Feeley’s not the kind of guy you want to be late for. Let’s go.”

“Did you tell him you were bringing us?”

“I left a message for his assistant so it wouldn’t be a complete surprise. I told him to call me back if there was a problem, and I didn’t get any messages on my cell.”

They crossed the lobby to the elevators. Since there were no players and coaches staying in the hotel, there was no security. Brill punched in a code on the keypad above the floor numbers when they got in. “He’s in some kind of penthouse suite,” he said. “They gave me the code to get up there.”