The Code (20 page)

“I was. I have a Cup ring too. Nobody asks about the ring.”

I spied the rock on her third finger. Bigger than anything I saw in Hollywood.

“I've actually watched your son play a lot of hockey this season. Our team has an interest in him. I've spoken to him several times. He's a solid young man.”

“Billy's wonderful. I wish I could see him more than I do, but the game keeps him away so much. And in the summer, he feels he needs to be around an arena with a gaggle of like-minded kids. He told me that he couldn't get a good game in Cape Cod in July.”

The former Mrs. Mays had the wherewithal to make a good game happen in Cape Cod in July. She had the wherewithal to make an all-star game happen in the Netherlands Antilles on Christmas Day. She was happy that Billy was doing well at what he loved. She was otherwise happy that he did not encumber her.

M.T. excused himself when his BlackBerry vibrated. “Better get this,” he said. “Feels like money.” Mrs. Mays air-kissed him and gave him a hug with a long stroke of his back.

She invited me over for a drink. I told her I'd follow her car. She said it was okay to ride with her. Her driver was discreet. She hired him six months before her first implants.

D
IVORCIN'
DD
ORIS DIDN'T HAVE
a life story, just serial resentments that she acted upon in her boudoir and elsewhere whenever she could. I originally presumed that DDoris was exploiting rich old men when she sicced her lawyer on them. Four hours after we left the tennis club I realized that she was effectively saving their lives when she pursued cancellation of their legal bond. I was pumping her for information about her son and she was plying me with martinis in her
pied-à-terre
, a fourth-floor walk-up downtown that she probably maintained through a Swiss bank account, a numbered company, or something or other that kept her husband of the moment utterly in the dark.

She was under the impression that somehow I was a kept man out in Hollywood, and I did nothing to dissuade her—I figured if she saw me as a kindred spirit she'd be more willing to open up to me. “Open up” doesn't start to cover it. After a couple of drinks Pour Us DDoris became Porous DDoris. Our tryst stretched into triple overtime, and she was at once ecstatic and unrelenting. She sat up in the saddle and rode me as if I were a mechanical bull. She was thoroughly uninhibited.

Off in the distance I could hear a construction crew breaking up an outdated sidewalk. I figured the boys had knocked off for the day by hour four, the point at which DDoris had worked up a full head of steam and her sighs and moans had gone from porno quality to something like the MGM lion. Her pneumatic riding had lasted a good twenty minutes and the bounce of the epically constructed breasts was practically hypnotic. Pictures rattled on the walls. Unnoticed in the din was the fact that her violent thrashing was shifting the bed from one side of her bedroom to the other, a distance of fifteen or twenty feet, until it brought the headboard to an open window. For the life of me I thought the mattress was going to disassemble and I'd be skewered with a loosened spring. Thank God she didn't knock
over one of the hundred candles she lit as scene-setting for the event or the entire place would have been engulfed in flames, not that she would have noticed. At the end of her performance, her fourth orgasm in fifteen minutes, she fell onto my chest. She buoyantly rested there, her face eighteen inches above mine. At that point I heard applause from the street and then the start of jackhammers once more.

Don't get me wrong: I love Sandy, or something close to that. This, however, was something along the lines of taking one for the team, doing whatever it takes in the line of duty.

“Maybe we could come to an understanding if your team takes on my son,” she said.

I told her that would be great, something to look forward to. She probably knew the name of a good chiropractor too.

She wanted to know about Hollywood. Everything. I suppose she wanted to add a mogul to her collection of former husbands. Getting on TMZ and in the tabs would be like her hanging out a shingle. It would open a whole new field of rich men who would covet her and young men who could change her oil.

I opted for candour. I figured I'd give something up to get something back.

“No matter how full it looks, it's an empty place and people change on you,” I said. “Those you think you know best sometimes change the most. That's what happened with me. Met a girl who was a military brat, then a small-town girl, then the teenage sweetheart on an after-school show, then a struggling movie actress. She gets one breakthrough role and files for divorce the day after getting an Oscar nomination.”

“Looks full for her,” she said.

“Does now, but wait. You walk into any respectable dinner theatre in SoCal and you can find an actress with an Oscar nomination on her credits and crow's feet. Too much like hockey,
I guess. You hang on until you forget what you're hanging on for, something you'd never figure on when you're in the clover.”

“I want to be young forever,” she said, up to her earlobes in clover. “I work at it.”

“Clearly, though it doesn't seem like you go at it like it's work.” I tried to push our discussion toward her second husband, father of her son. She didn't conceal her distaste.

“An angry little man,” she called him. This might have struck some as strange, given that the guy stands almost six feet tall. DDoris didn't measure in inches, height-wise anyway. She measured in millions. William Mays counted his by tens, her most recent two husbands by hundreds. I supposed DDoris left a trail of angry men, big and small, as well as an exit line of satisfied boy toys who indulged her surreptitiously, at least to whatever degree you can keep her Sensurround earth-moving and banshee-wailing on the down low.

“It was doomed, of course it was,” she said. “He had no special place for me, at least not until our son came along. After that, he spent all his time with him and that silly game. He always said that he wished to be the father that he never had. His father died of a heart attack when he was twelve. Dead away in a second. But he clung on to things, memories, in the worst way. He had these awful tin and plastic trophies left over from his own youth that he insisted on putting on the mantel beside Billy's, like they were brothers. It was all so tasteless. Even when Billy was six or seven I thought the relationship, if that's the word, was unhealthy. He didn't do it for Billy. Billy wouldn't fight him. He'd go to the rink, but at age three or four or five he was hardly in a position to put up any resistance …”

I imagined a little more maternal involvement might have established a more balanced childhood, but I also imagined that she was astraddle a clay-court specialist from Madrid, a pro from
the golf club who won the long-driving competition, or a busboy from the Granite Club.

We could have talked and frolicked all day but at 3
P
.
M
. my BlackBerry pinged with a reminder. I had the promised date at Vito's that night. I had to go.

S
HE LIT A SMOKE
, my cue to bid farewell. My loins felt sandpapered but I was otherwise refreshed. As I was slipping my shoes on, I saw a tortoiseshell-framed photograph on the mantel: left to right, DDoris, Junior, and Ollie Buckhold. I didn't think it remarkable at a glance. Buckhold was going to play a large role in her somewhat beloved son's life. I remarked, “Ollie's a good man.”

“He's a wonderful man,” DDoris said, lingering over the first syllable of “wonderful.” This was no standard character reference or testimonial.

I shot her a sideways glance.

“You like Ollie,” I said, “as an agent.”

“I love him in every way imaginable,” she said.

I was having trouble picturing him at the top of the list with regard to DDoris's intimate feelings toward the opposite gender. She left no doubt with the way her eyes glazed over. She sighed.

“I wish I had met him long ago. So much could be so different …”

I held off saying that his innate sexuality might have been one of those never-to-be-changed items. I let her continue with her delusions, but they were better founded than I expected.

“I recommended to my son that he sign with Oliver after we met privately,” she told me. “We have struck up a bond. Ollie is a regular visitor. As I hope you will be too.”

I wasn't about to explain the differences between Ollie and me, though anyone in hockey could have told you what Item Number One was.

“He's such a gentle man,” she said, deliberately breaking the word into two. “So fine and cultured and educated. Not to mention physically ravishing.”

The mental picture I was drawing featured Ollie in the supine position with eyes closed, head turned, teeth gritted, and face contorted as if he were bench-pressing 325 pounds. Which is to say, labouring. And yet I didn't doubt that she felt something for him that she didn't for me, despite her screams. He was her
objet d'art
even if she wasn't the ideal of his affections by just about the longest shot possible. Erecting him would be the ultimate exercise of her power. I always thought figuratively that there was nothing Ollie wouldn't do to secure a client, but my eyes were opened. His desire to secure fresh meat wasn't bound by his own biological imperatives.

Funny how it goes. It happens for us when we leave the game. It happens for the wives and girlfriends at just about the same time. Life and life's problems change and we change with them. After lives of action and aggression, players become passive, feminine really, more like those who wait on us as trainers or scribble words into notepads like boy Fridays. And the women at that stage throw their pants on, empowered by our retreat. So it was with DDoris. Her attraction wasn't to a man of a conventional sort but to a gentle one who had to be won.

For Ollie, the situation was more complex, to say the least. After serial stealthy relationships with attractive young men on his various cruises, he had gone to this sexual tigress. She was a mother figure of sorts, but in some ways more masculine than others who had buried their faces in his pillows. Okay, I'm reaching. That's the best I could do. I'll admit, if he hadn't been an agent I wouldn't have thought the love match was possible.

“You and Ollie see each other regularly?”

“Nightly,” she said. “I send my driver for him. Ollie is very discreet.”

I'm not sure whether “discreet” meant holding the truth from her son, from the hockey world that believed Ollie swung only from the other side of the plate, or from Ollie's many buff boyfriends past.

“Wherever Ollie goes for his work, my driver fetches him,” she said. “The many times he goes to Peterborough to look after my son. Game nights. Other nights.”

I boiled it down. She talked about the worst nights of the winter. Friday nights. Saturday afternoon. Whenever. Ollie was chauffeured to the arena and back to jungle gym.

“In March?” I asked.

“Every night in March,” she said. “My husband was in meetings in San Diego. An hour or so in a boardroom every day and then six hours on a golf course. Such a bore.”

I reduced it down to paste.

“St. Patrick's Day?”

“My maiden name is O'Reilly. Of course, the national holiday.

I insisted on no alcohol. It dulls the senses. I made sure that he rushed back. He said that he was in negotiations with the coach about another young player, a player nearly as talented as Billy. I told Oliver that any talks with that coach were going to have to wait and they did. Oliver said he had all the cards and the coach had to get along with him for his own good. Oliver liked that coach to lick his boots.”

Ollie, who probably wouldn't have minded sucking a cowboy's toes, was alibied up. At the time a cinder block was creasing the crania of Red and Bones, he was in the back seat of a limo on the 401, trying to summon up a stiffening in his loins in defiance of nature, like Dust Bowlers looking to the heavens for the Great Flood. Somehow that night and all the others he managed to
feed Her Insatiableness, though the refrigerator was bare and his stove wasn't plugged in. Ollie was elsewhere that night but in the last place and the last position you'd think of, unless you thought he was trying to return to the womb.

I felt like I'd been through two seven-game series when I left DDoris's, but I wasn't going to have a chance to recuperate. I had another calendar reminder flash on my BlackBerry: Vito's 7
P
.
M
. Yeah, I had to keep that promised appointment with Detective Madison, the fundraiser at the Italian restaurant in Peterborough. Bad timing. I needed to carbo-load before my session with DDoris, not after. Still, duty called and I set out once again for Peterborough. I had an hour and a half to think of how I'd be able to claim the mileage on this trip on my expense account.

When I got to the restaurant, the place was filled to capacity, maybe not quite a hundred, with a makeshift head table. Madison came up to me and offered a handshake and a word of thanks. When we sat down, we could look out past our plates to those locals who'd paid seventy dollars for their veal and signed up for various items in the silent auction. Kids came up to me for autographs and pictures. I didn't allow myself to get fooled. Most had no idea who I was. They just knew that I had to be somebody to get in without paying.

I made small talk with Madison as our waitress, Vito's mother, dropped Caprese salads in front of us.

“How goes the investigation?”

“I was hoping that you wouldn't bring it up. I was hoping that everyone else wouldn't too.”

I could take a hint to let it drop, but he felt he had to talk over the clatter of knives and forks and glasses chin-chining.

“We're getting hammered in the press,” he said. “Forensics hasn't turned up anything, and I've lost count of how many I've interviewed and re-interviewed. We have persons of interest, but that's for the paper and television stations. It's not a cold case, y'know, but it's sort of fallen below room temperature.”