The Code (26 page)

Two more deep breaths and another light bulb flashed. Nobody knew that Mays had taken this run at Sandy. Not
even Sandy. I knew something that no one else did. The cops didn't know. Junior didn't know. And, more importantly for me, the other teams in the league didn't know.

Then there was Mr. Seven Keys himself. He knew only that I'd caught him in attempted assault, a sexual assault or something along those lines. But connecting him with the Peterborough murders was something that I could play dumb to. It wasn't hard. That was, after all, just a theory at this point. I could act as if I didn't know.

I improvised.

“Look, you bastard, I'd call the cops if I thought this would stick, but I know with all your money you'd beat any beef, even attempted murder. You're just a sick fuck who made the mistake of stalking my girlfriend. I don't want to drag her through this. And, yeah, I've had my trouble over the years. Some people might not think that I'm a credible witness. You could probably turn this around on me and I'd get hit with assault or something. You're going to make out a nice fat cheque to me and this will go away. No, make it cash. One-time payment. Six figures. After the draft. Our team likes your son—we don't have to like you, and if we're able, we're going to draft him. But you have nothing to do with him. Nothing from here on. One briefcase, a hundred grand, delivered. Clean. I could squeeze you for a regular payday but I don't want to fuck up our dealing with your son. So after that I don't want to see you in the arena or on the street. Do you hear me?”

He twitched and stiffened. For a split second I thought I had killed him. He was just trying to nod.

“This is how we're going to do it. After the draft, a week or so, I'm going to email you and ask you to buy me lunch. We go to lunch. You give me the suitcase. We're going to say that it's an advance on personal training that I'm doing with your son.”
He was a little more lucid. His nod was a little stronger. I suspected this was a piece of business a lot like his regular working day. Maybe not even as dirty.

I let go of his hair and he slumped up against the back door of a Chinese restaurant. I dusted myself off, looked out to the street. No one passing. I walked back to where I'd left Sandy.

“B
RAD
,” S
ANDY YELLED
. “What happened? Are you all right?”

“You're asking me?”

Sandy was surrounded by cruisers and unmarked cars. Their flashing lights bathed the staid columns of the building behind her with a disco-worthy strobe.

“You're Brad Shade,” a young officer with my father's brushcut said.

He said it like it was an accusation that he could make stick. I gave him a simple “Yup.” I wasn't going to start volunteering anything.

“Sandy, are you okay? You could have been killed.”

“I tried calling you.”

Oh boy, guilty without a good explanation.

“I fell asleep in the car.”

“Your knees are out of your jeans,” Brushcut said.

“I fell,” I said. “I tried to tackle him but he got away.”

“Did you get a look at him?”

“He had a ski mask on. Dark ski mask, black Nike outfit, and expensive running shoes. Reflective ones.”

I turned to Sandy.

“You think it was one of your patients?” I asked. “I don't like the idea of you working with dangerous guys …”

She had at least a couple of kids with violent, physical histories, not including me.

“I can't imagine that it's one of them,” she said.

They took us to headquarters and walked us through the events. I took them on the route of the chase. I stuck with it as far as the lane, but at that point I had him going straight and getting as far as Yonge Street, which was packed with crowds coming out of the theatres and Gordon Lightfoot's show at Massey Hall.

“… And that's where I lost him,” I said for the fourth time. And no, no one had reason to go after Sandy because of me.

I didn't owe anyone money. Of course the detectives doing the questioning knew about my financial troubles over the years.

Sandy was still trembling a full three hours after Mays had tried to snuff out her life and her knowledge of his son's calls to her.

They had our statements. Sandy told them everything she knew and was going to talk to them over the next few days. I told them everything I knew with one large, wholly intentional omission. They closed their notebooks and thanked us. It was the wee small hours. A rookie and an old bull gave us a ride around to the Rusty Beemer, which had a sixty-dollar ticket for illegal parking but thankfully hadn't been towed. They bade us farewell and good night. We could have used a stiff drink but everything was closed.

On the drive back to her place Sandy stared straight ahead. She was pissed.

“Is it because I went after him rather than staying with you? I thought I could catch him.”

“No. It's just that I thought I was going to die and the last word I wanted to hear was my name, said softly. Lovingly. No one wants to go down and hear ‘Let her go, motherfucker.'”

I now liked Mays the Elder for the murder of the Ol' Redhead and Bones. He had established a willingness and a readiness to kill. Still, there was the problem of motive. It wasn't an elephant in the room. It was a bedbug in the room. You could feel the bite but you had no idea where it was.

Of course, William Mays's mind had to be racing too. He'd tell Junior and the folks at the office that he had to go out of town on business and he'd hole up somewhere while the swelling of his face went down. Or maybe he'd call the cops and claim to have been jumped, robbed, and beaten up. That way he wouldn't have to go out of sight. That way he could get some medical attention and I suspected he needed it, even if just for the pain.

I was lucky on one count: I've always been easy to underestimate. I was that way as a player. How was Gretz to know that I'd be able to find him just about every shift in the final? I was an annoying bastard on the ice but no coach behind the other bench factored me into his game plans in a big way. And that would be how Mays would look at me. He didn't know I
was going to try to piece together his assault on Sandy and the Peterborough murders. And if it occurred to him that I might try, he was thinking that I wouldn't be smart enough to pull it off.

Mays figured he was the smartest guy in any room he walked into. Anyone in any room he walked into could learn from him. He had enough conceit to publish his line of self-help books and enough hubris to give Donald Trump a pep talk. We studied personality types in Crim 200. I didn't have to take my textbook out of the box in the closet to remember the stuff about personality and crime. There were two lines of antisocial behaviour: extroversion-introversion and stability-instability. William Mays was a classic case of the extreme extrovert, a guy who lapses without the ability or even the inclination to process his motives and actions. He was willing and able to take the
Seven Keys
™
to the absolute, to complete moral blindness.

There was no defensible reason to kill two people who were trying to save your son's life. It was just psychopathic behaviour. He had only suspicions that Junior had told Sandy something that was going to undo the Mayses' hockey dream. Or maybe that Junior had given up some dark family secret. To break into her office to try to find it, to assault her or even murder her, again, was psychopathic.

I was going to handle him with kid gloves from this point on. I'd do nothing to alarm him. I'd play to his conceit, his dream of his son being a player. I'd quote from
Seven Keys
and his other books.
Yes, Mr. Mays, we're going to draft Billy. Yes, we're going to sign him. Max deal. Best bonuses. Yup, in our lineup next year. You want it, you got it. That thing with Sandy? Grease my palm and bygones are bygones. After all, it's the game that matters.

The Ol' Redhead, Bones, and Sandy had been in the unfortunate position of being potential obstacles in the way of William
Mays's dream, at least from where he stood. I had to be someone who was going to help his dream come true. I was going to tell him that Sandy and I had talked about Junior's sessions with her and Junior had spoken of him only in worshipful terms. That would take Sandy off his enemies list. That would make her an asset, and me too. And he was even going to talk about bringing in Sandy to help out with a spin-off line of
Seven Keys
™
books for kids.
Sure, Maysie, yeah after the draft, this summer let's talk about it. I'm sure she'd be game.
I was going to talk to him, on the phone, personal visits. I swear there were times that I thought he didn't even remember assaulting Sandy.

I was unsurprised that he was a hugely successful businessman. What made him a killer in investments and the corporate culture made him a killer in a literal sense.

I stared up at the ceiling while Sandy was lights out with the aid of a prescription. I played it out over and over again. No one could put William Mays right at the scene. He seemed to have no motive to go after the coach and the team doctor who had treated his son like gold. I tried to nod off. I couldn't. It was going to be a three-cups-of-coffee drive out to Peterborough the next day.

One hour. Two. Three. Madison sighed as he fast-forwarded through the sequences where no bodies passed through the frame, those many minutes during the game when we were putting on a show on the ice and most of the asses in the arena were planted on seats. He was a man of boundless good nature but finite patience.

We arrived at the post-game. As expected, the sequence opened with the crowd milling around as the fans made their way to the exits. They all bore a look of blissful contentedness, happy with their contribution to good works, utterly oblivious to the evil that lurked.

The crowd cleared and Hanratty and Bones walked through the frame to the office, closing the door behind them. There was no sound but I could almost hear the beers opening. I expected a cloud of cigar smoke to blow through the frame. It hadn't occurred to me that these were the last brews and stogies for the two men. Or at least I hadn't thought about their last manly pleasures. If they had been offered last requests, I suspect they
might have opted for Scotch and a better cigar than the discount ones in Hanratty's humidor.

The video rolled, more of it in real time now. One by one the old-timers filed by. They dropped their bags and sticks in the hallway and ducked their heads in the doorway to say their goodbyes. Again, it would have been just as the Ol' Redhead and his sidekick would have wanted it.

Fast-forward
. Pembleton went by. It wasn't a walk so much as a controlled stagger. He looked dishevelled but probably had at birth. Pembleton carried his suit in a garment bag over his shoulder and wore a ratty sweatshirt. He paused at the door a beat but then kept walking. Out the back door he went, where a bottle and a pack of smokes awaited. So too did a driver's seat that he'd fully reclined in a few minutes, a mile down the road.

Fast-forward.
Harley Hackenbush, shooed away. No quotes from the Ol' Redhead in his story, but he'd expected as much. He shut his notepad, stuffed it in the back pocket of his overstuffed Dockers, and tilted his fedora back as he went out the back door.

“We don't see Harley as a likely candidate,” Madison said.

“I don't think he'd have the strength to hit
himself
over the head with the cinder block that killed Red and the doctor,” I said.

Fast-forward.
Billy Mays and Valery Markov walking into view, Mays entering the office, Markov standing in the hallway looking down at his shoes. Not even a minute, a remarkably short time for the conversation as Junior remembered it, but there was no doubting him. Then again, how much time does it take to offer the assurance that everything would be just fine for the best player he had ever coached? Probably not much, nothing that you'd dress up with fudged anecdotes and old jokes. When Junior emerged, his dad and Markov were waiting for him. William Mays put the headlocks on the boys, Instantly
Reheating the Intimacy, seemingly to Markov's discomfort. The Mayses headed toward the front door and Markov exited the door to the parking lot.

I played dumb. “What did the Russian tell you? He didn't have a car. What would he have been doing out there?”

“His alibi's tight,” Madison said. “When he finally came in, he told us that Billy Mays sent him around to get the car and pull it around front. Billy Mays vouched for him. The kid was signing autographs and posing for pictures out front of the arena when Markov pulled up. Markov wanted to take a bus to Toronto to catch up with a girl, some Russian. Billy dropped him at the bus station.”

“There wouldn't be any buses that time of night.”

“No, but there would be cabs. Markov took one. He had a big wad of cash and a driver from Ace Taxi told us the Russian kid was his best fare of the year. It all checks out.”

“So at the estimated time of the coach's and doctor's departures the Russian was …”

“Either in park, violating the town's idling bylaw, or watching a meter click on its way to triple digits but that's about it.”

Fast-forward.
Don Visicale and his two Goombas entered without knocking, not quite kicking the door down.

“Visicale's alibi is tight too,” Madison said. “Italian restaurant.”

“Had the veal,” I said.

Madison wasn't going to let me one-up him. “And cannoli,” he said. “At least that's what we were told by the Mountie who was tailing him.”

When Visicale and his crew were making their exit, the Don reached back inside for handshakes with Hanratty and Bones. It seemed like good faith was in play, if not quite peace, love, and understanding.
Fast-forward.
William Mays Sr. He didn't knock. Instead he had his head down and pecked at his iPhone, holding
it in his left hand and tapping it with his right index finger. He didn't look up when he pushed the release bar on the door to the lot with his right hand. It was the move of an oblivious nerd and graceful athlete. It was a stark contrast to the guy who'd clumsily spilled coffee on me when he went to shake my hand in the dressing room earlier that evening.