The Code (35 page)

Billy Mays Jr. shed his suit jacket and donned a New York sweater for the first and I suspected just about the last time.

I hit Send.

I
T LANDED
in Madison's personal account seconds later. I didn't think it would be a good idea to have sent it to him through the official police lines. I didn't want to go in the front door and have to answer a bunch of questions. Or have Madison have to either ask or answer them himself.

I bcc'd Harley Hackenbush. No harm throwing a bit of a scoop to the guy sinking in the newsroom. I used to read him in
The Hockey News
. I still had that yellowing signed copy of
Tough Guys of Hockey
in a box with my textbooks from B.C. It was a signature he could spend his life trying and failing to re-create.

Anderson led Billy Mays to the New York table. Like I said, our table was next to New York's and I had my back turned to it. Anderson brushed the back of my chair. I ignored him even though Hunts flashed me a look. I turned around. Mays recognized me but didn't have time to acknowledge it. Again, he was caught up in a swirl of congratulations. New York's mediarelations guy was giving him the details of a promotional trip to Manhattan, where he could meet the media and do videos for the team and the league.

I turned around and gave Anderson a nudge. “Andy, right there is a real heart-and-soul player,” I said and winked. Anderson went from smug to puzzled in a split second. It all had seemed easy just a couple of minutes before. The thought was only now penetrating the many layers of conceit: It seemed too easy. It's never that easy. I could read the question on his scarred grill: Why had Hunts come to the New York table looking to flog the number four pick? We knew something he didn't.

He had company, of course. Hunts and I knew something that no one else at our table did. No one else in the league. For that matter, no one in law enforcement either, unless Madison had already opened his email.

I called Skater Boy up in the owner's box.

“Okay, give the second one to him.”

“Okay.”

The kid handed his father the second envelope.

Mr. Galvin,

Per my first message, we also know that William Mays Sr. is being investigated by police for the murder of the Peterborough coach and the team doctor in connection with a conspiracy to cover up his son's condition.

Hunt

“Per” was my idea.

We didn't celebrate after the last pick of the first round Friday night and the adjournment until Saturday morning. Hunts's plan was to bring the scouting staff back to his suite for a couple of beers to steady our nerves and for a post-mortem on the twenty-nine other picks in the first round. Hunts had set up an erasable board in the living room and I stood by it listing the thirty names as they were called in the left-hand column and the top twenty as-yet-unclaimed players on our list on the right side. Hunts was mostly talking to himself at the start. Not a mumble, not a murmured laugh, nothing from the rest of the gathering.

Duke Avildsen was unelected but spoke for the group. “What just happened?”

“We found out something,” Hunts said. “If we're right, and I believe we're right, we saved ourselves a wasted pick and a lot of grief and maybe, just maybe, our jobs. That's all I have to say about it. It will come out eventually. Let's just say that I can't say.”

I was facing the erasable board with my back turned to Hunts and the scouts. I did my best to stay deadpan and Hunts did his
best to conduct the meeting, but after twenty-five minutes he declared it a night. He called for all of us to report back to his suite at 7
A
.
M
. Effectively a curfew called by a guy whose early mornings were just one way he kept his life on the rails.

I had never worried about Hunts falling off the wagon, but when we went our separate ways that night, I thought that he might need a quart to settle his nerves. I had a notion to go out on patrol on the Strip and duck my head into his old haunts from his wet days. Many have lapsed for less. Hunts managed to stay in the pocket that Friday night, but Saturday morning he still had a hangover. It wasn't the sweats or anything like that. It was Hunts's 56/100th Percent Uncertainty that was banging like a bass drum in rhythm with the vein on his temple. The vein swelled when his jaw was clenched hard, like it had been for a week after his last drink and like it was when he started to get a read on the fall-out from our choosing Sorensen over Mays.

Hunts was a piñata for the league's chattering classes. The
Times
top sports columnist was no fan of the game. Since I went to L.A. as a rookie I had never seen him in the flesh. Supposedly he timed his visits to our games to coincide with full solar eclipses. That didn't stop him from weighing in on our GM. For such occasions he saved His Premium Outrage and Vitriol.

Hunt inherited a position and has never shaken the interim tag. Nor should he. His mishandling of his team's first-round pick, a consensus dropped ball, has surely guaranteed his ticket out of town …

The column cited many unnamed executives and scouts calling into question Hunts's call on Sorensen. The columnist didn't have any sources in the league. He did have three zealous interns who worked the floor at the draft and sent files to him and called him at his home in Newport Beach. I even suspected that one or two of the unnamed scouts were members of our own staff—one of the interns stopped me for comment and I tried to talk up Sorensen without saying anything about Mays. My quotes ended up being not quite racy enough to make the column. The one expert who was willing to attach his name to an opinion about our first-round pick was, yes, Grant Tomlin.

“I've said all along that I thought Mays was no worse than the second-best player in the draft. I can't even start to comprehend what L.A. was doing with Sorensen. He wasn't even good enough to play for the Swedish under-18 team ten months ago. Has he improved? Yes. Is he Billy Mays Jr.? Not even close. Firstround draft picks are valuable assets. You can't just waste them.

L.A.'s poor draft record is a major reason why they've struggled. Until they get that right, this franchise is adrift and it falls at the feet of Hunt.”

I got a text message from Lanny.

The gurls at the gym say you blew the pick. What happened?

I texted back.

Tell them 2 put it in writing and u save it 2 show them later.

The second day of the draft started at 11
A
.
M
. Saturday. We were on the clock with our second-round pick when my phone vibrated. Incoming call, 705 area code. I recognized it as Detective Madison's number. I messaged him.
Back 2 U ASAP
. We ended up taking a little kid out of the Quebec league, a smart, skilled kid, a very nice skater, but (and you knew there would be a but) undersized. He wasn't physically mature. His father was a decent size, so I held out some hope that he'd grow a bit. In the third round we took a lanky goaltender from just down the road from Morden, Hunts's hometown. In the fourth, at Duke Avildsen's urging, we took Markov.

“Can't see the point of taking some eager untalented kid over him, and besides, the Mays kid liked him,” Duke said. All true. A roll of the dice, but then everything is a roll of the dice on day two.

After round four I figured I couldn't keep Maddy waiting any longer. I went for what looked like a bathroom break. I went below the stands and out a side door to get better
reception and privacy. I took a deep breath. There were going to be questions.

“Maddy, Brad Shade here.”

“Interesting message,” he said.

“It's all good.”

“Is that all there is?”

“There's something more, but I'll have to come in to talk to you about it.”

Dead air.

“I'm heading back tomorrow afternoon.”

More dead air.

“I can move my flight up to the red-eye, I guess.”

We ended up having a long, involved conversation. I told him a lot of things. What he needed to know. I left some things out. What he was better off not knowing. What I was better off with him not knowing.

It was the second week of July. I was sitting in the Merry Widow, nursing one, waiting for Nick to finish changing a keg so that I could get an update on our baseball roto league standings. Polo was at the bar. He didn't pick a team. He couldn't find enough Czech players.

Hunts messaged me:
Have u seen it?

I messaged back.
Yeah. One for the good guys.

It had been all over the late-night news and sportscasts. The boys picked up Senior and he was going to appear in court in an hour or so to be formally charged with the murder of the Ol' Redhead and Bones. The morning paper had it splashed across the front page. A headshot of the Beloved Mentor of Men before that shot that split his head in two. A pic of Mays from a charity event in Peterborough alongside his son.

“… junior hockey star Billy Mays Jr., a first-round draft pick of New York …”

The newspaper had only the sketchiest details. From the outside no one could have made sense of it—the father of a
future millionaire killing the coach who had made his son. He seemed to have every reason to thank him rather than kill him. He should have felt a debt, not held a grudge. On the surface it made no sense to anyone except the detectives in Peterborough, Hunts, and me.

I messaged again before Hunts could reply.
Dominos falling. Give it a few days.

Hunts knew those dominos about as well as I did. William Mays Sr. was dead to rights on a double murder. Bones II was going to be implicated. He wouldn't be charged with the murders but he'd have his ticket punched as an accessory and he'd make a deal, giving the cops Mays's motive, giving the Ontario College of Physicians his shingle back. Bones II's deal would be made at the expense of his once-promising medical career.

Of course, there'd be implications on the hockey end, too. New York's management had tried to make a splash by quickly signing Billy Mays Jr. to a contract and then putting him on tour on Broadway, trying to squeeze all the pub they could in the wake of a losing season. Senior even managed to bang the drum, getting some ink in the
Times
, doing a couple of book signings in midtown Manhattan. Pretty soon the New York GM would be on the phone to the commissioner, to the lawyers, to try to void the contract of the Kid Formerly Known as the Franchise's Saviour.

To say it was going to be complicated doesn't start to cover it. The league had run the combine and provided teams with Junior's bogus medicals as written up by Bones II. The insurance company that underwrote Mays's contract wasn't going to pay out because of a pre-existing condition not disclosed by the player or team or league. New York's corporate ownership was perturbed, to say the least, that the New York tabloids were painting the team's management and scouting department as a bunch of boneheads.

The papers spared the front office the full Agent Orange Carpet-Bombing only because so much of their attention was devoted to the gawdawful basketball team, a 60-loss sideshow complete with a team president at the centre of a sexual harassment case and a coach whose divorce and a full bench of infidelities played out daily on Page Six of the
Post
. New York's GM was pissed because the team had wasted a draft pick—in that slot scouts are expected to deliver a first-line player who's good for a thousand games in the league. Anderson and his buddies were being paid not just to sort out the talented from the mediocre but also to sort out the game-readys from the damaged goods. No extenuating circumstances could explain away their failure.

There'd be dark speculation that Ollie Buckhold was in on it too, speculation that was unfounded. Still, his rep took a tarnishing. And thereafter, teams weren't going to take medical reports on his players at face value.

It wasn't all bad news. London whizzed Pembleton but a couple of Peterborough alums convinced the board of directors that he'd be a perfect assistant coach for Bobby Reagan, who was installed as the bench boss. It might not have seemed fair, Pembleton with about seven hundred wins working for a guy who was in his first coaching job at any level. Reagan, though, was one of the Ol' Redhead's most famous and bestliked alums and a fixture on the scene in Peterpatch. The job was staying Inside the Tent Pitched by the Greatest Coach in Junior History. Reagan could be sold to the good citizens of Peterborough, though everyone on the inside knew that it would be Pembleton doing the heavy lifting. It was a good situation for Pembleton: not quite head coaching money, but some of the weight was taken off his shoulders. And Harry Bush, the overmatched assistant to the Legend Taken from Us Too Soon, had enrolled in AA and managed to convince Pembleton to get
with the program. The next time I saw him, Pembleton was chain-chewing Nicorettes.

Pembleton would not have been Giuseppe Visicale's hire, but the Hockey Godfather's bid to acquire the Peterborough team fell a bit short. The mayor and a couple of board members grew spines. Visicale could get in on the arena, a money-maker, but not the team. Vis Hockey Enterprises set its sights on the franchise in Ottawa, which actually had long-untapped potential at the gate. It would also offer a chance for the Don to start snapping up kids' hockey teams in eastern Ontario. He was petitioned by directors of the Quebec league to buy in but declined to make any bids on available franchises. “That league is just too dirty,” he told them.

A week after William Mays was arrested, Sandy and I sat down for breakfast. Egg-white omelette for her. French toast for me. She was quiet. I could tell something was on her mind.