“And?”
She put up a hand to indicate Stevie should be patient, which wasn’t easy for him at that moment. “So I said to him, ‘What gets a player suspended these days?’
“He laughs and says, ‘Oh, come on, sweetheart, you read the papers—HGH, the preferred drug of champions. Champion football players anyway.’”
Stevie had read about players getting suspended during the season for testing positive for HGH—human growth hormone. He wasn’t all that familiar with it except to know that it was a steroid that helped players become bigger and stronger. If his memory was right, most of the players suspended had been linemen—the biggest men in the game trying to get even bigger. Or so it seemed.
Susan Carol had paused for a moment as if catching her breath. Now she plowed on. “I didn’t want to act too interested, so when he brought up HGH, I just said, ‘What’s the big deal? A few guys got suspended for it this season—so what?’
“He leaned in very close to me, too close, and said, ‘What if I told you not everyone who tested positive has been suspended?’
“My eyes must have gone wide because he kind of leaned back with a smirk on his face and said, ‘That got your attention, huh, gorgeous?’”
“This guy is really a sicko,” Stevie said, even though he knew the lecherous nature of the doctor wasn’t the issue.
“Forget that,” Susan Carol said. “I told him I couldn’t believe someone had tested positive and not been suspended, and even if they had, what did it matter now—in the middle of Super Bowl week. He laughed again and said, ‘Would it matter if a couple players—let’s, for the sake of argument, say five players, maybe even five offensive linemen—were getting away with a positive test right now?’”
“WHAT?!” Stevie interrupted. “He said that?”
“Yeah, he did. Obviously, he must be talking about five of the Dreams, otherwise how would he know? I tried to bluff him. I told him I didn’t believe him, that he was making it up, that there was no way something like that could stay secret during Super Bowl week.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said I would be right—unless someone was covering up test results.”
Stevie gasped. “Oh my God! Is he saying that five Dreams tested positive for HGH and the league is covering it up?”
She shook her head. “He never said who was covering up—I tried to get it out of him, but I think I came on a little too strong at that point, because he started backpedaling, claiming he was just trying to get my attention with a wild story.”
“You don’t believe that, do you?”
“Not for a second. I could see in his eyes that he knew he’d said too much and was trying to get out of it.”
“Okay,” Stevie said, still trying to make sense of what he had just heard, “what do we do now?”
She pointed at his computer. “We need to get online and find out more about HGH and, if we can, about how testing for it works.”
She was—as usual—right. Even if it was almost three o’clock in the morning.
The next thirty minutes were spent online. Stevie knew how important drug testing had become in all sports. He vividly remembered how crushed he had been in the summer of 2006 when it had come out that Floyd Landis, after winning the Tour de France as an unknown, had tested positive for steroids. He’d heard all the rumors about Lance Armstrong, not to mention all the stories about Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, and Sammy Sosa in baseball. According to what they read, HGH was the latest in a long line of steroids—one that could only be detected through blood testing, and even then some doctors believed the testing wasn’t one hundred percent accurate. According to the NFL Players Association Web site, the players had agreed to include HGH as a tested drug only after the owners had agreed that a player could only be tested once during the regular season and that no test results would be revealed until a second, confirming blood sample had turned up positive.
“Here’s the crucial part,” Susan Carol said, reading through the information. “It says here that once the play-offs begin, players on play-off teams can be tested at any time because the league and the union agree that any kind of drug use on a play-off team would be very bad for the league’s image.”
“Didn’t a Super Bowl team have a drug issue a few years ago?” Stevie asked.
“Yes,” she said, sounding exasperated. “The Carolina Panthers.”
“Oh right, your hometown team.”
“The team my dad worked with, remember? I guess this part of the deal could be called the Panthers Rule.”
“Sounds like, if this doctor—what’s his name anyway?—is telling the truth, it may become known as the Dreams Rule.”
“If they get caught,” she said. “His name’s Snow, by the way.”
Stevie didn’t hear the name. He was deep in thought. “You know what?” he said. “It may be up to us to catch these guys.”
“Whoever these guys are,” she said. “Or is it whomever?”
Stevie blinked at her for a moment and then laughed.
“What?” Susan Carol asked.
“Only you would care if it was ‘who’ or ‘whom’ at three-thirty in the morning.”
“Shut up,” said Susan Carol, though she was starting to blush.
“No, I love that about you.”
“You know, it’s funny, but when I finally got away from this Snow guy, all I could think was, I have to talk to Stevie. As mad as I was at you today, I knew you were the only one I could talk to about this.”
“You didn’t want to talk to Jamie the dude?” Stevie was immediately sorry he hadn’t kept his big mouth shut.
“Okay, I deserved that,” she said. “I wasn’t very nice today.”
“That’s not important right now,” he said. “The question is, what do we do with this? We can’t just go on the word of a drunken doctor.”
“You think he was lying?”
“No. But he was drunk and he was trying to impress you, and you know as well as I do that no one—not the Washington Herald, USTV, or CBS—is going to run a story like this based on so little.”
“Nor should they,” she said. “Okay. I could call Dr. Snow in the morning and ask him to go on the record.”
“You have his number?”
She smiled. “Oh yeah, he gave me his card. Said if I needed anything to call him.”
“My guess is ‘anything’ doesn’t include repeating his story for the record.”
“No kidding. Plus, we’ll have tipped our hand. If we stay away from him, he’ll figure I was just a silly girl who didn’t really understand what he told me. If he even remembers that he told me.”
“We can only hope. By the way, how’d you get rid of him?”
“You won’t like it,” she said.
“Go ahead.”
“I told him I had to leave with Jamie and that he was very jealous.”
Stevie shrugged. “As long as it worked.”
“Yeah,” she said. “But back to the big question: Where do we go with this? Should we tell Bobby and Tamara? I don’t think this is one we can tackle by ourselves.”
“You’re right,” he said. “But I do have an idea.”
“What?”
“Eddie Brennan. He might talk to me, at least on background.”
“Rat out his teammates? We don’t even know if he knows.”
“Well, it’s worth asking. He strikes me as the kind of guy who wouldn’t be happy with this sort of cover-up.”
She stood up and stretched. “It’s nearly four o’clock,” she said. “We both have to get some sleep. And I need to soak my feet or something. The person who invented high heels should be killed.”
She looked very tired, very stressed, and very tall standing there. But still beautiful. He could see why dirty old men would want to hit on her. Being tall and pretty, he decided, wasn’t all good.
“We’ll talk more in the morning,” he said. “I have to be at the CBS compound at eight to find out my as
signment for the day.”
“Let’s meet when the media sessions are over,” she said. “I’ll call you on your cell and we’ll figure out when and where.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll know my schedule better when the sessions are over. I think they end by eleven.”
“They do,” she said. “We’re interviewing Ray Lewis at the end of the Ravens’ session. The Dreams go first tomorrow.” She paused. “I mean today.”
Susan Carol had her hand on the doorknob when, much to Stevie’s surprise, she started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” he said.
“How is it,” she said, “that this always happens to us?”
He laughed too. “Just lucky, I guess.”
She turned to face him. He wished he had a box to stand on. But Susan Carol stepped out of her shoes and leaned in to hug him. So Stevie took his chance and kissed her—a really good kiss.
“Don’t give another thought to Jamie Whitsitt,” she said.
He smiled. Actually, he probably grinned goofily. “Don’t worry,” he said. “He’s the last thing on my mind right now.”
She kissed him again quickly, then stepped back into her shoes. “Here we go again,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Here we go again.”
9: READING THE DEFENSE
STEVIE RARELY HAD TROUBLE SLEEPING, especially when he was exhausted—which he certainly was after Susan Carol left the room. But he tossed and turned for a while, trying to figure out what had just happened and, most important, what should happen next.
Part of him was still reveling in his encounter with Susan Carol, not just the kiss but her comment about him being the only one she could come to with this story. But every time he caught himself smiling about it, he flashed back to how serious this was. He was pretty much convinced Dr. Snow had been telling the truth. His father always said that drinking too much alcohol was almost like taking truth serum: somehow you ended up revealing things you really shouldn’t. And in his obvious desire to impress Susan Carol, Dr. Snow had revealed a piece of information he would never have shared had he been sober.
The last time Stevie looked at the clock, it read 4:12. He finally dropped off to sleep, but was awakened just before seven by a dream in which Susan Carol was telling him she had decided Dr. Snow was her one true love. Tired as he felt, he knew he wasn’t going back to sleep, so he got up and took a long shower. He decided a cup of coffee would give him an extra jolt, so he went downstairs to the coffee shop and was finishing his first cup when Bobby and Tamara walked in to join him.
“Long night, Stevie?” Kelleher said, pointing at the coffee mug in his hands.
“Didn’t sleep very well,” Stevie said.
Tamara gave him a smile, the one that showed her dimples, and put an arm around him as she sat down. “You’ll work it out with Susan Carol. Just give it a little time.”
Stevie was tempted to tell them what he and Susan Carol really needed to work out, but resisted. They had agreed to sleep on it and talk more before bringing in Kelleher and Mearns. Though Stevie wasn’t doubting the story even in the cold morning light. He almost wished he did.
Once Stevie had bolted down some French toast and had half of a second cup of coffee, he had to leave to get to the CBS compound by eight. He was tingling slightly from the coffee as he crossed the street in front of the hotel. It was snowing again, and traffic around the Dome was moving very slowly. When he walked into the compound, a man whom he guessed to be in his early thirties was hovering near the doorway.
“Steve Thomas?” he asked. When Stevie nodded, he put out a hand and said, “Andy Kaplan. We met yesterday for a second. I’m going to be producing you today. In fact, if I don’t screw up, I’ll probably be producing you all week.”
Stevie laughed and shook hands with Kaplan, who was soft-spoken and had an easy smile. Stevie liked him right away.
“You want some coffee?” Kaplan asked as they walked back through the maze of desks and temporary cubicles. “Wait, I forgot. You’re fourteen. We’ve got juice around here somewhere.”
“Had some coffee already,” Stevie said, feeling quite adult. “I probably better not have any more.”
Kaplan smiled as they reached a cubicle that had a desk with a computer on it and a chair on either side of the desk. “Look, I think today will be easy,” he said. “I read your story on Darin Kerns and Eddie Brennan in the Herald this morning. You did the impossible: you wrote a story on media day at the Super Bowl no one else had.”
“I can’t take credit,” Stevie said. “Bobby Kelleher fed me the idea. I just talked to the two guys and the story wrote itself.”
Kaplan nodded. “Well, then Kelleher is good and nice. You did a good job writing it too. So I’m thinking we should do almost the same story: get Kerns and Brennan on camera. I’ve already got a guy in New York tracking down some video and still shots from Summit High we can use with the piece.”
“The only problem might be getting Brennan alone for a couple minutes,” Stevie said.
Kaplan shook his head. “Remember who you’re working for. Dewey Blanton will make it happen for CBS.”
Stevie leaned back and felt himself relax. He was relieved that Kaplan was doing all the thinking for him because he was in no condition to think about anything except what he and Susan Carol would do next. What’s more, seeing Brennan again might give Stevie a chance to talk to him about the Dreams’ offensive line.
“Steve?”
“Oh, sorry, I was just trying to think about getting my work done for you and finding something to write for the Herald.”
“Well, I wouldn’t presume to tell you what to write, but the Dreams show up first today. We can knock out these interviews, and then you would have time to find a Ravens story when they show up.”
That made sense. Since the two teams would only be on the field for an hour this morning, there was a thirty-minute break between sessions. That would give him a chance to consult with Kelleher in case there was something he needed Stevie to write that day.
Kaplan said he’d gather a camera crew and talk to Dewey Blanton about getting time with Eddie. He asked if Stevie could track down Darin Kerns. So Stevie left Kaplan and walked through the tunnel onto the field. It was still a few minutes before nine and TV crews were setting up equipment in various places in anticipation of the Dreams’ arrival. He spotted Dewey Blanton talking to a couple of cameramen and walked over to say hello.
Blanton saw him coming and, without saying hello, said, “Hey, Steve, great piece this morning.”
Stevie often forgot that in the age of the Internet, there was really no such thing as a local newspaper anymore. His story in the Herald was as available in Indianapolis as in Washington.
“I couldn’t have done it without you,” he said. “Which makes me feel bad asking you another favor.”
Blanton laughed. “I just hung up with Andy,” he said. “We’ll go back in the same room we were in yesterday as soon as Eddie finishes on the platform. Andy’s going to set his crew up there so you guys can get right at it when Eddie walks in.”
“He doesn’t have any other one-on-ones today?”
Blanton shook his head. “No. We got ’em all done yesterday. That was our deal. He’ll be happy to talk to you for this story, though; I’m sure he saw the newspaper piece.”
He thanked Blanton and told him he was going back to the locker rooms to see if Kerns had arrived yet.
“If he’s anything like our equipment guy, he’s been here since six,” Blanton said. “If you have any trouble getting back there, let me know.”
“I should be okay, thanks,” Stevie said. He walked up the tunnel and, sure enough, the CBS pass caused the security men to part like a yellow curtain at each checkpoint. Kerns was in his office on the phone. He waved Stevie in and held up a finger to indicate he was almost finished.
“Well, thanks for having me on, Mike,” he said. “In fact, the guy who wrote the story just walked in he
re.” He nodded and said, “Will do. Take care.”
“Who was that?” Stevie asked.
“ESPN Radio,” he said. “The phone’s been ringing off the hook all morning. I’ve got to stop answering.” He pointed a finger at Stevie. “And it’s all your fault.”
He was smiling, clearly enjoying the attention.
“Well, I’ve got one more thing I need you to do even if you hate me,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“My other bosses this week—CBS—want me to do basically the same piece for their late-night show. Have you got time to tape an interview before your guys get here?”
Kerns nodded. “Hey, anything for you—not to mention for CBS.”
Stevie nodded. He was beginning to not hate TV nearly as much as he had a few days earlier.
The Darin Kerns interview went quickly and smoothly. Andy Kaplan had his crew ready to go by 9:30, and Kerns was just as good a storyteller on camera as off, a relief to Stevie because he knew some people got nervous with a camera rolling. Once Kerns left, Stevie wondered if he should go on the field to make sure Brennan was coming. Kaplan advised against it: “Dewey’s reliable,” he said. “Plus, it’s better if you’re here, miked up and ready to go when he gets here.”
He was right. Blanton was as good as his word. At 10:10, he and Brennan and four security people appeared in the doorway. Blanton told the security people to wait outside. Brennan walked over with a big smile on his face. “You and I are going to have to stop meeting like this,” he said, hand extended. “Great piece this morning. I’m sure Darin really enjoyed it.”
Stevie loved the compliments, but he was struggling to focus on the interview at hand. The real work would begin once that was over. As with Kerns, the interview was easy. Brennan was a pro: he knew just what was needed to make the story work on television.
“Perfect,” Kaplan said when they were finished. “Steve, we’ll need to tape an open and a close on the field once the Ravens finish their session. So we’ll meet you on the fifty-yard line at eleven-thirty, okay?”
Stevie nodded and began unhooking his microphone, helped by one of the crew. Brennan was doing the same thing. He put out his hand to Stevie, who took it but said quietly, “I know this is a lot to ask, but can I talk to you for one more minute—alone?”
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