The Code (7 page)

I panned the room, looking for my fellow C-listers. I made a beeline for the cheapest suit I recognized: Double J, Jackie Jameson, a Florida scout who grew up in Peterborough and played one season for Hanratty, the only season he played in major junior. Short but squarely built, Double J had been a legend in lacrosse, his main game back in his day. He became a pretty good scout, a decent judge of talent, and, more importantly, an excellent cultivator of useful friendships. This last skill has enabled him to stay employed for almost twenty years. Every time there was a front-office housecleaning, he had a marker he was able to call in.

Double J was not above stating the obvious just to fill the silence.

“This is unbelievable,” he said.

“At best,” I said.

“If his wife were still alive it would be enough to kill her.” Double J worked a variation on a line he heard so long ago that he couldn't remember the source.

“What do they know about what happened?” I asked. I presumed not a hell of a lot or it would be all over the news. It wasn't.

“My brother-in-law works the desk downtown …”

I had heard this before. Because of that connection, Double J had the 100 Percent Real Juice when any of the Peterborough kids had scrapes with the local peace officers. This happened with alarming frequency, a fact that was tied to the very loose reins Hanratty had kept on his youthful charges, another reason for their love of the old coot.

“… and he says they've questioned pretty much everybody who was around that night and don't have any real leads. Security got what they think was a car leaving the scene. Got the make of car, not the plates. A Caliber, I think.”

I hadn't been contacted, but I figured the investigators would get around to me eventually—the last guy to call, just like the old-timers game's organizers. “They didn't question me and I was there … but I'm alibied up.”

“Shadow, you've got no history of violence.”

“I beat myself up but that's about it.”

Double J stifled a laugh, as was appropriate. As soon as he composed himself he carried on. He looked over at those passing and pausing beside the open casket. The funeral home director buried his chin in his chest, not because he was moved, though. The Great Man's teenage soldiers had walked in out of the freshly fallen snow and were tracking salt on the freshly shampooed carpet.

“Is he gonna be buried, cremated, or just stuffed and mounted in the Hall of Fame?” I asked Double J.

“I thought the boys in the backroom here did a real good job putting him presentable and everything.”

“Well, he probably wouldn't look as good if it had come down after a loss.”

If this had spilled from the lips of someone in any other trade, Double J would have shot me a dirty look. With me, he just smirked. In case you haven't picked up on it yet, irreverence is the stuff that keeps a scout sensible, if not sane. Besides, this had the ring of truth. The blackest thing in hockey was the Ol' Redhead's mood after a loss, and the players' best worst stories would always feature a bus ride home after a loss on the road with not a word spoken for hours at a time. Hanratty didn't allow music or even whispered conversation in the back of the bus while he and the assistants drained flasks in the front.

There are infinite variations on the story. Reagan has always related the account of the longest night of his life: the
Peterborough bus getting held up at a border crossing after a loss in Michigan because a Slovak import, a decent defenceman, didn't have his papers in order. According to Reagan, the bus idled in silence for five hours. The best worst story of all I take with a grain of salt: After a loss in Owen Sound, the Peterborough driver managed to take the bus into a ditch, and even with a crashing thud the players were as mute as the cheerleading squad at Gallaudet U.

My chest tingled. The BlackBerry was muted. I was gonna change the ring tone but I couldn't find “Taps.”

It was Hunts shooting me a message.

Sit on Mays. If he's back playing do the games. If not, just do the background.

Serendipity. The Local Hero was standing the length of a stick away from me. I knew that Hunts had liked him when he caught a couple of views of him in the early fall. He was thinking he'd still be on the board at number four or maybe number five in the June draft. And a pick in that slot or better would be ours if Columbus kept going sideways. By February before the draft, scouting staffs draw up their targets. You want to know enough about everyone but everything about anyone who's in the mix where you're likely to land in the draft order.

When Hunts said “sit” he was telling me to get the comprehensive workup on Mays. The Large Pitcher of Fresh Squeezed. A stretch of games, five or six. Something well beyond thumbnails of family. First rule of drafting is that you don't draft a prospect—you draft the whole family. Sitting on a kid is in a lot of ways the best assignment you can hope for. You can get fooled on a single viewing—fooled into writing off a kid with talent,
fooled into thinking a kid will show up for every game when really he's there one game in five.

Interviews are pro forma. Likewise, comprehensive background checks. The previous administration in L.A. wasted a top-five pick by drafting a kid whose father was a complete grifter, a guy with a criminal record who somehow flew under the radar. Dad ended up with the son's platinum card, and $175,000 in online gambling debts and hookers later, the kid didn't know whether he was coming or going. He never made it through his second contract. Happens more than you'd expect, but it wouldn't have happened if they'd known the father's “issues.”

My sitting on Mays was complicated by several factors. The least of them was the cancellation of Peterborough's three upcoming games out of respect for the Dearly Departed Legend. More problematic: In an important stretch of the season, the Peterborough kids would be under the direction of a hopelessly overmatched old-timer, Hanratty's long-time second banana. No assistant in hockey was asked to do less assisting than the unfortunately named Harold Bush. It was always Hanratty's show, and he was widely considered the master of line matching and game management. Bush wouldn't have had any problems if he'd just tried to do what Hanratty did in similar situations, but I'm not sure poor Harry was paying attention all those years, and he sure as hell wasn't taking notes.

I didn't anticipate this being much of an assignment. I guess I'm a Freudian at heart, thinking about character only when I suspect something is wrong. My intuition isn't foolproof but it's pretty solid, and it told me that Mays would be above reproach. Hunts isn't a Freudian, though. He suspects everybody who might cost him a dime.

Double J saw me check the message. I shook my head.

“Hell of a time for Sandy to tell me to pick up milk and eggs on the way home,” I said. “So what's on tap for you the next couple of weeks?”

“Same thing as you,” Double J said.

My dumb luck to be playing poker with another hustler. Yeah, everybody was going to be sitting on him.

The phone rang through to messaging. Sandy is one of those who don't bother personalizing the greeting. In fact, she doesn't even give her name. It's just the automated recitation of her phone number. Making things impersonal is an occupational consideration. I tell her that, at some level, we're in the same business: She works with troubled teens. The difference: She helps those who can't help themselves, while I'm looking for those we'll help ourselves to so that they might help our team down the line. Hers is a calling, mine a dodge. She sleeps more soundly than me but, then again, that's true of most anybody, I guess.

I left a message that was succinct but not quite as offhand as it might seem at face value.

“Hey, my little chou chou, it's me. I'm in Peterborough. Hunts wants me to sit on this kid up here …”

I pretended to stammer.

“… well, I thought if you wanted to, we could make a weekend of it …”

I was planning on using that gift certificate to the Falling Water Café and getting a receipt for the full amount for my expenses.

“… Hunts won't mind if we got something plush like the spa up here …”

I had to play this one up while seeming matter of fact. Hunts
would
mind if he knew the story, but if I'm ever called on it I'll tell him that everything was booked up and the roads were bad. He'll know I'm lying and he'll let it go. I had already made a mental note: Ask for spa charges to be billed separately.

“… I gotta do some door knocking but there's no game skedded …”

Cancelled out of respect, et cetera. That's what team officials will say, but that's not the whole story. The board of directors just didn't have a clue what to do and had to buy time, because Red Hanratty was Hockey's Longest-Running One-Man Show. Coach and general manager. He had no handpicked successor. No one he was grooming for the job. He just had a coterie of old cronies too intimidated to even say “yes”—they just bobbleheadedly nodded in agreement. Who could run the show? Who could even run a practice?

“… You could do a mud bath and get cucumbers over your eyes while I go to the rink and rattle some cages for a couple of hours …”

Okay, I was officially rambling. She's smart. In fact, I figured it was better than even money that she was going to figure out an unstated motivation for this invitation to a weekend getaway in Peterborough: cover. With Sandy along for the ride, I had good reason to separate myself from other organizations' scouts who'd landed in town. I didn't want them to know what I was doing. It was bad enough that Double J made me.

“… Call me. I love you …”

I had already checked to make sure no scout was within earshot in the funeral home's parking lot.

“… bye.”

I dialed Lanny. The call rang through to her voicemail. I left a message. I told her that I was sorry I missed her tournament in upstate New York. I told her I'd been in Europe, just in case she forgot. I don't think she did. There would probably come a time when she would start to forget things like that or not care to know in the first place. She was old enough to roll her eyes when she overheard someone call me Shadow. It was her mother's idea that she should go to the boarding school, not mine. It made her mother's life easier and mine harder. I was going to be a shadow to her someday.

At the funeral home the Hanratty sons and daughters, all sort of florid in a hard-living way, let everyone know that the town was staging a memorial service at the arena the next day. The funeral was skedded for the day after that. I told Double J that I was driving back to Toronto. I didn't want to tip him on L.A.'s intense interest in Mays, and my cover would be blown if, a half-hour after the fact, he saw me pulling into a hotel parking lot on Water Street. I actually checked to see if he was tailing me— paranoid, I know, but I err on the side of caution as a default mode. I drove out to the highway and pulled over at the first coffee shop on the route back to the Big Smoke. The only open table was beside a bunch of guys off the town's garbage trucks, and they were comparing notes, as I imagine they do daily, about their latest finds salvaged from their routes—“like working and shopping at the same time,” one said. Thank God the open table was upwind.

I grabbed a coffee and picked up a copy of the national newspaper while I waited for her callback. I skipped sports.

Almost every scout I know reads only the sports section, but I already know all the scores from the league and in junior. And, truth be told, I don't follow any other sport. I couldn't tell you who won the World Series last year, hard as that is to believe. I cared only about hockey when I was growing up. I played it and, during the time that I wasn't playing, I followed it.

I flipped right through the sports section until I found the obituary page. That's normal for me. Obits put a notable life's work into perspective. Maybe this sounds strange, but I've always wondered if I'll be obit worthy. I'd guess yes—a guy who plays one game in the league might not clear the bar for the obit page, but I figure getting invited to an old-timers game is a fair measure of my valueless notoriety. I wouldn't be the main obit but I'd probably get three paragraphs, the minimum for the trivial. Still, I'm not sure I'd get even that. I hope I die on a slow day for death.

An obit written by a reporter from the sports department spelled out the Ol' Redhead's life and lore.

Edward “Red” Hanratty, who won more games than any other coach in junior-hockey history, died of injuries suffered in an assault in Peterborough Wednesday. He was seventy-two.

Yup, he looked it.

Mr. Hanratty began his coaching career with the Peterborough juniors in 1973 and, after leading his team to a national championship in 1975, assumed the duties of general manager.

The late Shakey Summers had been the GM who hired the Then-Young Redhead with the hopes that Hanratty was going to be in for the long haul. Shakey's only worry was that a couple
of owners in the league might get into a bidding war to have him move up to the pros. After Hanratty's second season and the championship, Summers, well past the best-before date for any working hockey man, gave in to the inevitable—though Hanratty greased the Batpole from Summers's corner office by burying him with the Peterborough board of directors. Some of Hanratty's gripes were even valid, to my understanding.

Over his thirty-seven-year career, he coached two Hall of Famers …

Who the hell fact-checks this stuff? Three.

… and more than fifty players who made it to the NHL.

Well, again, technically true but misleading. A few of those fifty dropped in for a very short stint—guys picked up late in the season when Hanratty was loading up his team for a deep run in the playoffs.