The Code (12 page)

Sandy and I started to clean up the mess. We were under the gun. Her patients would start arriving in forty-five minutes. We barely spoke. I wanted to say that I was concerned for her but she wouldn't want to hear that. It would have only given her more reason to worry. I just told her that I'd have my phone on and would stay in the coffee shop around the corner. That I'd be three minutes away.

Her appointments went off as scheduled. I sat in the coffee shop all day.

We never talked about it again.

It was the night of April Fool's when I drove out to London. I had seen London only twice all season, and I like to see the teams in the Ontario league at least three times. This was my last chance. London trailed Sarnia in the opening-round playoff series three games to love.

I came in the back door of the arena. I was wearing my team windbreaker, so the security man didn't ask me to pull out my ID from my wallet. Pembleton was standing outside, having a rollyour-own, close enough to the door that his exhaust was wafting into the otherwise smoke-free building. He didn't catch the bylaw exemption afforded his recently deceased nemesis. Maybe someday the league will approve a move to go to all the arenas and name all the designated smoking areas after Pembleton.

Pembleton looked as nervous as the next pig heading up the conveyor belt at the slaughterhouse. It was just another game but he looked like his whole job was hanging on the outcome of the next sixty minutes. This had been such a recurring theme over the course of his career that it had become his default mode.

“Death row inmate and the clock's striking midnight,” I spake to the fellah with the list of credentialed guests of this unstoried franchise. In case he missed my meaning, I gave a nod and a glance back at Pembleton.

“Lately he has been more of a bastard than usual, if you can imagine that,” he said, looking to the heavens.

“Shit,” I sighed. “I was hoping I could talk to him for five minutes before the game to ask him about the Gillen kid so I might be able to beat traffic.”

“Good idea,” the security guy said with confidence born of shared misery. “What's your day job, wrestling alligators?”

I took a deep breath, in part to gird myself for the challenge, in part to fill my lungs with O
₂
before venturing into the nicotinetinged fog that surrounded the Coach Ever Down to His Last Chance.

“Coach, I'm Brad Shade,” I started. I wasn't allowed to finish. “I'm a scou—”

“I know who the fuck you are,” he said.

Professional courtesy was now dispensed with.

“I just wanted to ask you about Gil—”

“After the fuckin' game. You do know there's a fuckin' game tonight.”

Ugh. Why bother? I'll admit that my patience and expectations for any useful dope on Gillen were instantaneously exhausted.

“Yes, I can see you're keenly taking note of Windsor's line combinations in the warm-up. Smokes out here, but I guess they let you keep your flask in the office.”

“You asshole.”

“From you that's a merit badge.”

He threw his spent butt across my bow and walked through the door. He made a point of brushing me with his shoulder. He
might have been on his tiptoes but only managed to hit me in the mid-latitudes of my ribcage. He reeked of tobacco bought from the reserve and Five Star.

I had been told that Pembleton lacked the social graces but had no idea it could be this bad. After all, even a novice coach knows that you have to have friends in this business. A favour granted here will eventually be repaid. Someday he might be coaching a kid we have drafted, who needs our whispers in his ears, assurances that his coach is doing a good job. Or if we have a Euro import he likes—we can deliver those to him like a pizza or, in his case, like a bottle of rye picked up by a cab driver. A junior coach saying “fuck you” to a guy from the league? Dumb, and this guy didn't last a thousand games behind the bench being dumb.

I looked at the credential list and saw the name of Arnie Hunter. Arnie's a junior-hockey lifer, a sixty-something insurance salesman by day, a bird dog for London by night. He told me that this would be one of three regular-season games he'd see his team play this winter.

“Nice way to break up six months of watching minor-midget games,” Arnie said.

“At the risk of crossing paths with Mr. Popularity Himself,” I replied.

“Ain't that the truth,” he said. “I leave the fedora at home when I watch our team play. If we lose I don't want him to be able to pick me out of a crowd. He'll pin it on me, some kid I pushed for. I'll take it. I worked for this franchise for twenty years before him, and God willing I'll be working for it twenty years after he's gone. Which, given his history, could be the end of this season, the end of the week, or ‘last minute to play in the third period.'”

Arnie gave me the straight dope on Gillen. The kid was dumb but earnest. He needed someone to show him his stall every
time he walked in the dressing room, but he could fight like a Navy SEAL. Not the worst combination. Sort of like a mutt that will never fetch you the newspaper but will bite the leg off a guy doing a B and E. I tapped out a note to that effect on my BlackBerry and filed it in our database:
Not smart but no issues.

By way of conversation, talk turned to the deaths up in Peterborough.

“Every time I see something like that, well, I'm sorry, but I can't help but think of the insurance implications,” Arnie said. His soul-baring was at once warm and creepy. “The beneficiaries would be the widows, but both were widowers. It seems like they both had big families so there's gonna be a significant split between the siblings down the line.”

I told Arnie that I played in the old-timers game, that I walked right through the parking lot and by the Ol' Redhead's car just minutes before the blood was spilled on the asphalt. I told him that I had an airtight alibi if the boys in Peterborough ever got around to questioning me. Arnie said he heard the dragnet was in high gear. He read my shrug as a disbelieving one. If their investigation was so thorough, why hadn't they got around to me yet? Arnie felt compelled to spill the beans.

“The cops came in and questioned Pembleton the next day,” Arnie said. “He told them that he left right after the game but it can't be true …”

I asked him how he could know that Pembleton was still there.

“It would be the first time in his life that he ever left right after the game. Rhythms of his life. After every game he's draining a jar and smoking a half pack of cigarettes and vomiting in the can. Whatever. He's the one who keeps the team bus waiting. Players have half an hour to get on board, but they're always waiting there for another half-hour after that.”

“Maybe,” I said. It was a well-educated guess.

“I'm not just going on habit,” Arnie said. “Next day he sent Stark …”

Stark being the beleaguered London trainer who had so often performed the fireman's carry to deliver Pembleton to his hotel room when he got shit-faced on road trips.

“… to pay a speeding ticket he was hit with. Stark being the inquisitive sort said he was clocked at twenty-five over the limit just outside of Toronto, 4
A
.
M
. If he left right after the game he'd of hit Toronto …”

“When I did, in time for the 11 o'clock sportscast …”

“It stuck in my mind—and Stark's—it would have been the first time in Pembleton's life that he'd of been pulled over at 4
A
.
M
. and passed the Breathalyzer. Usually by that time …”

“He'd be vital signs absent,” I said.

He nodded.

I
SAT UP
in the corner seats, nobody five rows in front of me, nobody five rows behind, all you need to know about the hit a losing team takes on the bottom line. I filed my scouting report on Gillen between the second and third periods:
Awkward skating but tough. Started well but faded when team fell behind 3–zip in the second. Might not have a lot to play with but then his linemates probably say the same thing.

You can only make wisecracks in your reports if you're dead sure that a kid can't play. You're allowed to be wrong about a kid. So long as you don't diss the kid it's a forgivable error. You carve a kid for laughs and other scouts will needle you forever if he ends up being a player. I wasn't going to get needled about Gillen. Nothing was going to get thrown back at me. He couldn't play, and if you needed a second opinion the kid probably would have backed me up.

I
WENT DOWNSTAIRS
after the game. I figured I'd take one more shot at Pembleton, even though his team lost and lost bad. My father always told me that life's too short to hold grudges. “You have to recognize who's your enemy and who's just a guy in a bad mood and remember that you've been in a bad mood before,” he'd tell me, usually to deaf ears. In a situation like Pembleton's, a guy sometimes is looking for someone to talk to, even if it's just to talk him down from the ledge. I'd extend him a courtesy that he didn't offer his crestfallen players. He didn't even bother saying a word to them after the game. No thanks for coming out.

I was just down the hall from Pembleton's office when I saw a slab of beef draped in a cheap, too-tight suit knock on the door with a buddy, no
GQ
spread himself, riding shotgun and carrying a notebook. A pair of plainclothesmen, though they took the job title too literally. They knocked and entered without waiting for an invitation and didn't bother to look back when they shut the door behind them.

I leaned against the wall outside the door, managing to pass for None-the-Wiser. I played the role of him who's waiting his turn for an audience with this guy barely hanging on to his job and the game. I had three concussions so far as I know in my career, but none of them seemed to have damaged my hearing and I could pick up a fair bit of the conversation. I couldn't tell the detectives apart, if it was one of them talking or both taking turns. No matter really, they were speaking as one. Pembleton's growl was now a rasp.

“Okay, one more time, after the game what did you do?”

“Straight home.”

“Straight home?”

“Straight home, didn't talk to nobody.”

“Nobody. Nobody saw you.”

“Well, I wasn't signing autographs or stopping for a drink …”

I imagined that this could have been true. He was so well-practised that he probably could knock back doubles in a dead sprint without spilling a drop.

“You just left the arena?”

“Yeah.”

“What car were you driving?”

“My old Kia.”

“Where did you park?”

“What the hell do you mean, where did I park? There's no spots reserved for me. I dunno. I had to pay five bucks to park in a lot before a game I'm volunteering for.”

“If you'd asked somebody they would have reimbursed you. Probably paid your gas …”

And given you a gift certificate, I wanted to interject but wisely demurred.

“ … but you chose to leave immediately, what, ten minutes, fifteen minutes after the end.”

“Yeah.”

“Couple of things, coach. One, your speeding ticket.”

“Yeah, if you left right after the game and were stopped in Toronto at 4
A
.
M
. you wouldn't have been speeding, you would have been pulled over for driving your tractor on the 401.”

“I stopped to eat on the way. My ulcer …”

An ulcer for a career coach is like a carpenter's callus, I guess.

“You stopped for something to eat. So where did you stop?”

“I stopped at Tim Hortons …”

“For a doughnut for your ulcer.”

“Some diet you got there.”

“No, for a soup.”

“Did you eat it or make it?”

“Yeah, coach, I guess you could have done both seeing as you took about five hours to make an hour-and-a-half trip.”

These guys weren't all-stars, not even first-liners, but they had enough to grind Pembleton on.

“I was sleeping it off. I don't like night driving. Not after having a pinch or two. Need 'em to steady my nerves.”

“Right, steady your nerves before a pressure-packed situation like an old-timers game.”

“I don't like crowds.”

“Or the coach of the other team who turns up dead.”

“That's got nothing to do with anything. So you say I didn't like him. If it was such a problem I wouldn't of come out to the game outta my own pocket.”

“I suppose. But the problem I have is that you show up on a security video.”

“Yeah, coach, there are a bunch of security cameras at the arena and, funny, you show up on the camera right at the exit, the door nearest where Mr. Hanratty's car was parked …”

“Where Mr. Hanratty and the doctor were lying dead later …”

“… where we drew chalk lines around them.”

They had Pembleton in a head spin.

Voices lowered. Some of what they said fell out of earshot.

Not the tone, though. For the plainclothesmen it was interrogation by insinuation. For the coach, it was furious back-pedal. He left and stopped. Or make that, he had a drink and then stopped. Couldn't remember going to his car but, yeah, it musta been parked close to there, except that was the reserved parking and he said that he had paid out of his own pocket. Must have been mistaken.

“We'll be in touch, coach,” the one said. A sigh was heaved.

I
STEPPED AWAY
from the door, lest I be made for eavesdropping. I kept my head down and eyes on the BlackBerry's screen as if I were studying the notes on Gillen I'd dashed off.

“Brad Shade …,” the one plainclothesman said, parked in front of me. Two hundred and seventy pounds, he would have had to parallel park.