The Code (32 page)

I sat at the breakfast buffet at the Courtyard from dawn and staked out the guests coming and going, the passing parade of prospects and parents and friends. It's the same scene at every draft. The scouts eyeball the prospects and their mothers, who are usually pretty hot. The scouts use the excuse that you can get a good idea of projecting a kid's height down the line if his mother is tall. The players eyeball each other's sisters, who are definitely and almost exclusively hot. My own draft week at age eighteen when everyone lusted after the number one's sister and my first draft as a scout at forty I noticed the players less than their talented mares.

Friday, though, I looked only for Bones II. I found him early. He came down for breakfast at the buffet just before it closed. My ass was practically numb and my coffee room temperature
at that point. I went over, said hello, and told him that if he didn't have plans we could talk at 2
P
.
M
. I asked for his cellphone number and he gave it to me. He said he was expecting a quiet day spent by the pool. He said he and the Mayses had a round of golf planned at Torrey Pines on Saturday.

I took him at his word but I still staked out the hotel. Bones II spent a few hours by the pool eyeballing the other prospects' mothers. He was out there with the Mayses. Poor Junior, he was the colour of a sun-dried tomato. Bones II didn't tell him that one of the pills he was taking for his heart condition, amiodarone, made him photo-sensitive. A sunblock in the hundreds wasn't going to help him. Bones II and Senior just told him to sit in the shade before he came down with heatstroke.

Bones II was well into his daiquiris when he went upstairs for a nap. I called his room on the house phone at 1
P
.
M
. I told him that I was held up and could be there at 2:30 at the earliest. He said it wasn't a problem. I delayed it twice more. He told me just to come up to his room and knock. I'm not sure that he had the strength to get up and I'd have bet against the odds of him making it to Torrey Pines the next day.

I knocked on his door at 3:45. I had fifteen minutes left to get over to our staff meeting. It was going to be fast but it had to be this way.

Bones II had a beer in his hand when he opened the door. As a doctor he should have known this was no way to get rehydrated and beer wasn't going to be strong enough to steady his nerves through my interrogation.

I closed the door behind me. He sprawled on his bed. I didn't bother sitting. I didn't bother easing into the conversation.

“I'm not worried about the mono, but I worry about any kid on heart meds. I'm sure the pharmacy has a record of who prescribed them and when.”

“I don't know what you mean,” he said.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a Kleenex that held the pills I'd purloined from Junior's room at his billets. I put them on the night table so he could see them clearly enough through the radiant heat he was giving off.

“I know about the kid passing out and going to the hospital and going to your clinic. That's only the start of what I know. I suspect that it's the father who killed your father and Hanratty, though I'm not sure you're aware of that or suspect as much. For all I know you could be in on it. You don't strike me as that type.”

“How did you come to these conclusions?” he asked. He figured being officious could defuse a ticking bomb.

“
How
doesn't matter to you.
How
is going to matter to the police and I figure the College of Physicians, who are going to pull all your papers and your parking privileges too. It all comes down to
what
and you know that this isn't a wild guess. I'm not going to tell you
how
and maybe not even all of
what
. I'm dealing with you on a need-to-know basis.”

He couldn't speak. I didn't wait for him.

“I have no interest in taking you down. I can keep things in nice compartments. I'm not going to draft the kid. My team isn't going to draft the kid. But the father is going down and you might consider your options.”

He took a big gulp. I thought I would have liked to play poker against him.

“Did you take money from him?” I asked.

“No.”

I was relieved that he didn't ask me if I had. I kept going. I had momentum. He was turtling.

“Your father had the results of the tests from the hospital before you did. He knew the kid's heartbeat was irregular.

Either he or the doctors in emergency skedded the tests for him. Your father knew the results. So did you. So did the coach. You gave the kid samples that some drug salesman had left with you. You made out the prescription. You could keep a secret. Your father and the coach couldn't. They were going to tell teams. They were going to make it public. Not like they'd put it out in a press release, just that they'd tell other teams before the draft.”

He said nothing. He denied nothing. He registered no indignation. That passed for confession in the circumstances.

“It's not my business to defend you but I'll offer you an out. You're going to be able to claim that a page out of Billy Mays Jr.'s file was missing, that it was taken out. Given that a murderer was handling them, that's not so far-fetched. Maybe you can fudge the timeline. I leave that to you, your lawyer, and the College of Physicians.”

I let him take a breath.

“I know he offered you money,” I said. “He wouldn't leave anything to friendship if money would close the deal. You have nothing in email correspondence about that, right? Nothing about the murders either.”

His defences were shattered.

“There's nothing,” he said. His eyes watered. “I never thought he'd kill … he never said anything like that. And after he killed them, the stakes were all different. I didn't think he'd stop at anything. I was worried about my life. He had the money. He could get things done for him, get a professional rather than do it himself. And who could I go to who wouldn't believe I was in on it?”

“You could have made calls. He bought you with promises or threats. Doesn't matter to me. Maybe you didn't know your friend as well as you thought.”

“You have to understand …”

“I don't have to understand anything,” I said.

“No, you have to understand,” he said. “He hated Hanratty.

Hated him. He said he would have played pro and been a star if Hanratty hadn't benched him and driven him out of junior hockey. His worst nightmare came true when Hanratty drafted his son, but it was going okay the whole time. Hanratty liked the son. He and my father thought they were saving Billy's life. Mays saw it that Hanratty was going to do to his son what he'd done to him twenty-five years before. That's the way he saw it but it wasn't the way it was.”

“That explains why he did what he did. So why did you do what you did?”

“I didn't think I was going too far out of bounds. I thought we'd wait and see on Billy. I wouldn't put him at mortal risk, that's for sure. I just didn't want to jeopardize his chances in the draft if it was just a single incident with no chance of repeating.”

“Which it wasn't.”

“It was an enlargement …”

“That was going to end his career,” I said. I filled in the blank because the clock was ticking and I had to make it back to the meeting.

“Yes, based on what we know now, it was going to end his career,” he said. “One hundred percent sure. Just too much risk. We could do follow-up, but I think that would have offered false hope.”

“I'll make a bargain with you. You seem like someone I can trust. Mays seemed to think that and he knows you better than me. I won't mention this outside of this room, so long as you never mention to William Mays that we had this conversation. I don't think the police are going to need you to take him down. I can't do anything if he says you're in on it, but you've got time to
figure that out and hope. If he knows you were meeting with me you can just tell him we talked about the mono thing.”

“Right.”

I figured I'd kick him while he was down before I made my exit. “How could you stand by when your own father was murdered?”

He looked away. “It's like all fathers and sons. It's complicated.” Bones II bowed his head and didn't say anything more. He looked pained and self-pitying. His father had supported him but only so far. His father attended to the medical needs of hundreds of players over the years and travelled with the team on nights he didn't have to. He liked the games, the bus rides, the beer, the cigars, and the company of the Ol' Redhead more than the time he spent with his son and the rest of the family. Bones was a better doctor than a father. When his son made it as far as the Peterborough team, he came up just short of his aspirations and his father's best friend's minimum standards.

Bones II became a much better doctor than his father in every way but one. Bones II would try to keep a secret when truth-telling was the right thing to do. He was a guy who, like me, would skip number 24. Which is okay, maybe ideal if you're a player or a PI, but not what you look for in a doctor.

I left the room.

Hockey Time is fifteen minutes early. Hockey Time isn't a negotiable option. It's a drop-dead proposition. Eight isn't 8:01. If the bus is leaving at eight, at 8:01 it's a speck on the horizon. The first pick of the draft was at 8
P
.
M
. that Friday night. We were going to have our last war-room meeting in the late afternoon. We'd go over scenarios. What we might do in the event of Hunts making a deal on the floor, a deal that landed us a second first-round pick, probably in the twenties. It was unlikely to unfold that way but we had to be prepared for it. Hunts sent out the message that we'd meet in the lobby at 4
P
.
M
. It was Double Super Hockey Time. I hustled out of the tense but brief session with Bones II and made it into the lobby with my laptop and notes at 3:59. I was the last one to arrive by twenty minutes.

We were staying at the Marriott like most of the clubs, but we couldn't book a room there for our last pre-draft meeting. Other teams had beaten us to every conference room in every time slot. We cabbed to the team's offices in the arena in twos and threes, fourteen of us on the staff and four of
our part-time bird dogs who were sleeping two to a room. The part-timers had flown to L.A. on their own nickel with the hope that Hunts would see fit to bring them in full time. The poor deluded souls, they imagined that Hunts had a scouting budget to play with.

“After the meeting, we have to talk,” I told Hunts in the cab ride over. “Five minutes. Just you and me.”

I could see the pressure getting to Hunts, as out of the single request he sensed some sort of creeping conspiracy. “If you have a job lined up, tell me now,” Hunts said, pissed off. “If you've talked to another team, let me know now and you don't have to go out on the floor tonight. You can turn around and walk back to the hotel.”

“It's not anything like that, for fuck sake,” I said.

I glanced back. The other guys on the staff were looking at us. Their antennae were twitching involuntarily, like they did any time it seemed that change was in the air. Change would have been opportunity for them to move up. Or change would have been reason to look elsewhere, as if I had been job hunting because I knew Hunts was going to be pink-slipped.

“All I need is five minutes before we go out on the floor,” I said.

“What can take five minutes that you can't say in front of these guys? What do you wanna say that none of these guys can contribute to?”

This wasn't the place to start arguing the point. I drew on history.

“One guy once came to me, knocking on my door at 4
A
.
M
. of the worst morning of his life, and I didn't ask him why he didn't take it up with the team.”

Hunts didn't recognize himself immediately and we'd joke about it later. If I had to make it seem like I was in trouble, so
be it. If I had to do that to stop him from putting his job on the line, so be it.

He sighed. My private audience with my best friend was booked, though he wasn't happy about it.

H
UNTS PUT IN
a request for a snack tray and coffee to be brought into the largest conference room in the team's offices. It might have sat ten comfortably, twelve in a crunch. We had to roll in chairs from surrounding offices. Crowded doesn't start to describe it. I couldn't have swivelled without my chair hitting another guy's legs. When someone spoke in the back of the room and everyone turned, it was like bumper cars.

The discussion sputtered to a mundane start. I stood at the erasable board. I drew up a vertical list, numbers one to thirty and beside them the teams that were picking in that slot in the first round. We went through the first three picks with lightning speed.

Nothing much to discuss. Back in mid-winter I liked Mays over Meyers and I would have fought for the point. Not on the third Friday of June, though. Other guys in the room debated the order, but I stayed out of it even though I was supposed to be managing it. They could have spent an hour talking about it but Hunts shut it down.

“Okay, if I knew we were going to sit around and toast marshmallows all day long, we coulda walked over to the park and started a campfire,” Hunts said. “Shadow, put four up there. That's why we're here. Mays. We're all on board with that.”
I tried my best to keep a poker face when I filled in the name in ink as pink as the Wonder Boy's cheeks.

I kept my back turned on the group and stared at the board. I pretended to be deep in thought while discussion ensued. I listened to them going back and forth. They knew that Hunts liked Mays. Liked him a lot. They were falling over themselves, trying to show that they liked him a lot, as much as Hunts, who might give them a promotion or at least spare them from the axe if he had to chop the scouting budget. They didn't discuss Mays so much as bid him up as if it were a cattle auction.