The Code (24 page)

I messaged William Mays Sr. and asked to come out to their spread. Wednesday. Tuesday Junior had an appointment up in Peterborough. Senior would send a car for me. I was going to insist on driving myself but reconsidered. I couldn't imagine pulling up in the Mays driveway and parking the Rusty Beemer next to the Lamborghini or vintage Porsche or one of the other collectors' rides. There's only so much humbling I can stand and I don't actively seek it out.

The driver walked me to the door. He punched in the security code. Before going inside, I took a quick look around the grounds. A security camera above the front door. Cameras high up in the corners of the courtyard. There were more cameras and angles of the action than you'd find in the arena for game seven of the Cup finals. I'm sure the coach house was converted into some sort of production studio. The driver walked me into the foyer. While we waited for my host, I looked for more discreetly positioned cameras. When I saw one near the top of the spiral staircase I gave a little wave. Should have brought my Hi Mom! sign.

“Great to see you, Brad,” Senior said. He handed me a copy of
The Seven Keys of Turning Maybes into Wills
™
. He'd inscribed it: “To Brad, Let Key #8 for L.A. be Billy.” Cute. Junior wore number eight for Peterborough. William Sr. had scrawled his name at the bottom of the title page and all I could make out was a stretched-out
M
.

“Come on with me,” he said. He struck me as a guy who liked to walk people through his house with a commentary like a museum guide. He talked up his collection of artwork. I feigned interest. He talked about buying the paintings at auctions and dropped dollar signs in there. This meant nothing to me but explained the presence of the security cameras.

I followed him out to his backyard. He stretched back on a chaise lounge. I sat up at the foot of mine, feeling like I could have used something with a hard back. My ass was too low, my knees were at a tight angle, and Arthur said hello.

“I think your son is a great player,” I said. “Don't get me wrong. I can see him being a major player in the league for a long time …”

“Cigar?”

“No thanks. But the thing is, I don't like seeing kids in the league at eighteen. It's too young for anyone except the ones who are really physically mature. If we draft Billy, I can see him coming to our training camp but going back to Peterborough for one more season before coming up to the big club. We're looking at signing Billy in June or July after next season.”

“I think Billy will play for you next year.”

Too typical. After thousands of drives to the arenas with their kids' hockey bags in the trunk, after thousands of hours standing in arenas where their coffees go bone cold in ten minutes, parents start thinking in millions when their kids are a step or two away from the league.

“If he didn't miss as many games as he did this year, I might agree with you. But I think he needs to be thicker through the shoulders and lower body. The contact he's going to see in the league, it's different from what he's ever experienced. We don't want to put him in a position where he's in danger of getting really injured.”

“Brad, I appreciate your concern, I really do. But I'm going to manage …”

The Oh No Moment in Bad Hockey Parenting was upon us. “… Billy's career using the same principles that I've put into play with my own enterprises. Start with a Vision, one of the Seven Keys. Everything starts with a vision, and a vision starts with knowledge and imagination …”

My vision was escape as soon as possible, safe in the knowledge that the Franchise Prospect had the ultimate Father Who Tests a General Manager's Soul.

“… What we have to look at is who Billy will be, not who he was this season or is today, but who he will be. I know Billy, in some ways better than I know myself. That's the knowledge that I possess and I alone. The imagination is to see things as they may be. That's the theme in
Seven Keys
™
. Maybes to Will Bes.

And you must act upon things as they
may be
to make them come to fruition. The team that drafts Billy is not drafting Billy for what he has done but who he will be. That's a big difference. After we sign …”

My aching head, he was in the dreaded First-Person Plural. “… with the team that drafts Billy, he'll go to training camp and he
will
make the roster and he will be a contender for the Rookie of the Year.”

His son hadn't played a game in the league and already this guy was trying to find a place to hang his son's plaque at the Hall of Fame. I tried to jump in. I shouldn't have bothered.

“I think a team would have to see Billy perform in training camp before they would have a vision with a contract in it. Unless he makes the team coming out of training camp, a team would probably hold off doing a contract at least until next winter.”

Fire, meet gasoline.

“Brad, I don't mean to sound didactic, but the fact is Billy will be offered a contract this summer, he will go to training camp, he will play on the top two lines of the team that drafts him and signs him. That's our vision. And part of the
Seven Keys
™
is Eliminating Obstacles. We'll eliminate any team that does not intend or in fact commit to negotiating a contract in good faith with Billy this summer. I want to make that clear to you. And another of the
Seven Keys
™
is Achieving Opportunity and Minimizing Risk …”

I was going to ask if those should be two Keys but bit my lip. “Training camp with a contract is an opportunity. Training camp without a contract is a significant risk. We're not intending Billy to go to a training camp without a contract in his hands. I want you and your team to understand that we are unequivocal in our position. We think it would be best for all involved that we're dealing with a team that shares our vision and commits to eliminating obstacles and minimizing risk.”

Senior went through five more chapters of the
Seven Keys
™
as they were going to apply to Junior's career. I drifted off. I looked over at a cast-iron statue by the pool. Something along the lines of Rodin. It captured a young man holding a scroll. I tried to have a vision of Junior holding a contract drawn up by L.A. lawyers. I figured there was a better chance of the kid in the statue autographing the scroll than there was of Billy Mays signing a contract with us this summer.

I got a call from Harley Hackenbush. He had my number from the call I made about old man Mays's days in P'boro.

Hackenbush said he was on the junior beat again. Temporarily, I guess. The kid who was covering the team was having back surgery and would be stretched out for at least a couple of months. Hackenbush had to write up a story on the likelihood of Mays going in the top five of the draft and the possibility that he'd play in the league at age eighteen rather than heading back for another year of junior.

“The l-ll-league's gain would be our l-ll-loss,” Hackenbush said.

Never-say-die Hackenbush. The Ol' Redhead had opened the trap door beneath Harley's feet and he still talked about the franchise as if he were in the team photo.

I spelled it out for him.

“Everybody thinks that these kids should be back in junior for at least another year and almost nobody is ready to play pro at age eighteen,” I said. “Physically they're not up for it. Almost
all of them get banged up. But then again, everybody thinks that about everybody else's draft pick. Every general manager thinks his player is the exception.”

Hackenbush got his money quote. Small talk ensued. He wanted to know about other kids on the Peterborough team who were draft eligible. I told him I had a limited interest in Markov, and that was true. I didn't tell him that I thought L.A. was about the worst place for a player who was willing and eager to take pictures of his Johnson on his iPhone. He'd have his own spot on TMZ. And I told Hackenbush that I had a limited interest in the others, “limited” in its application here being none whatsoever.

I nudged our conversation over to the subject of Bones II. Hackenbush was a fan.

“If it weren't for h-h-him, I-I-I wouldn't be alive,” he said. “Howz that?”

“Stress. I got taken off the beat because the stress was killing me. My ticker was out of whack.”

I imagined that the cause and effect might be reversed. I imagined that it was the stress of being sentenced to the night desk that got to him. And I imagined that there was an intermediate causation as well. He was demoted, he hit the bottle, and every double made his heart skip a beat.

“I was coming to my six-month regular appointment with him and called his office, but they said he won't be back in until next week. He's been off for two weeks or so.”

I bade him farewell. It seemed screwy that Mays had an appointment with a doctor on holiday and Hackenbush could have been at death's door and had to wait. I couldn't wholly trust Hackenbush's version of events. He could have muffed the timeline and the details the same way he'd mangled my quotes at the old-timers game. The same way he was going to mangle
my quote about kids not being ready to play in the league at age eighteen. Then again, if there was something he wasn't going to muff it would be a visit to his cardiologist that would sustain his life, such that it was.

I put in a call to Spike. I wanted to ask him about Markov. I looked at Duke Avildsen's reports on him from mid-winter and Duke gave him pretty positive reviews. Spike confirmed that Markov had been nothing but a good citizen. “Better as the year went on,” Spike said.

We made small talk. Of course, our discussion went back to the murders. It had been the first topic of conversation in Peterborough for weeks. I told him that I'd seen a couple of detectives grilling Norm Pembleton.

“They're barking up the wrong tree,” Spike said.

“How's that?”

“They're friends … they
were
friends. A couple of times when Pembleton was heading for a bad fall, in a bad, bad way, it was Red who stepped in and got him to dry out. It was Red who helped Norm get a couple of his jobs. All that other stuff was an act.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“It fooled everyone. Like Red used to say, ‘There's no cowboys
if there's no Indians.' Red was the good guy, Pembleton the black hat. And when their teams played, people came out just to see the guys behind the bench. Doesn't happen often. But they did get together, real low profile. They didn't want their players or reporters to know. It woulda ruined a good thing for them. Fact is, they were an awful lot alike.”

“What about the cheerleader they dated? Mrs. Red. Pembleton had to have a gripe about that …”

“Hah, Judy was a cheerleader, all upright and uptight. She'd been crazy about Pembleton but he liked his stuff fast and loose.”

I could see that. I could see him later regretting it. He couldn't have held it against Hanratty that he had something that he'd passed up, someone he didn't want to hurt.

I rolled around the bed. There was no sleeping. I was glad that Sandy wasn't there. She wouldn't have been able to sleep with me turning the light on and off, starting a book and putting it down, turning on the television in the bedroom.
Chinatown
was on. I needed someone to come up to me and say, “Forget about it, Shade, it's hockey.” But there'd be no forgetting about it. My job was on the line.
Our
jobs were on the line. If we ended up making the wrong decision about our pick, the owner was going to kick all of us out to the curb. It looked like our pick would be Mays, but there were big holes in our background check on the kid, holes six feet deep where they'd lowered the Ol' Redhead and Bones.

“Detective Madison, please.”

A pause.

“Madison.”

We exchanged niceties by rote.

I stuttered out a thought that was instinctive rather than well founded. “Something has been bothering me about … well,
‘bothering' isn't the right word, but something occurred to me after talking to you and watching the security video.”

“What is it?”

“Just something about the people coming and going. It could be nothing. I don't know. Could I maybe drop in and watch the video with you when I'm up in Peterborough this week?”

June was not quite upon us. It didn't feel like hockey season. It might have if the Merry Widow's air conditioning worked. I sat at barside in front of Nick's most recently serviced flat screen. It was game night, game seven of the Eastern Conference final, and, as such occasions demand, Nick had the music off and the sound of the broadcast turned up high.

My father sat beside me. I'd like to think that he stood out from and above the mangy clientele, but, fact is, he'd made a career of blending in and getting along, just as the Irregulars had scratched out their bare existence by rising to the minimum standards of human decency or thereabouts.

Sarge had lost the coin flip with my mother. She wanted to watch some godawful show where celebrities dance ballroom style, utterly lacking talent for the task. Actually, Sarge threw the coin flip—she'd called heads and it landed tails when he tossed it. He put his act over. He wanted to get out. He wanted a chance to catch up with me now that my season on the road was over but for the draft. It wasn't just my company he wanted, though.

The game was one thing to watch at home, another to share communally. Sarge wanted to be in the company of men, of fans who could name all those dancing their own dance on the ice, who could appreciate excellence. Larry, his German shepherd, retired from the canine division, was tied up out on the curb, looking through the window, not at his master but at the game.