Cover-up

by John Feinstein

  Stevie wondered where she was going with this. Meeker was well known for not talking to the media at all—at least not publicly. He was famous for calling a small handful of reporters he liked and leaking dirt about other people—sometimes his own players and coaches—that was always attributed to “a source close to Dreams owner Donald M. Meeker.”

  Meeker was shaking his head. “I’m afraid I have a strict policy against TV interviews. And if I appeared with you, I would be bombarded by everyone else wanting me too.”

  He snapped his fingers at one of the bodyguards. “Notebook,” he said.

  The bodyguard reached into his coat pocket and produced a small notebook. “Pen, you idiot!” Meeker roared, making Stevie wish the bodyguard, who was almost a foot taller than Meeker, would simply crush him like a grape. Instead, he produced a pen. Meeker opened the notebook and wrote something inside it. He ripped the page out and handed it to Susan Carol. “If you have any questions about our team, or if you want to know what’s really going on with the league, you call me,” he said. “That’s my cell phone number. There aren’t a dozen people who have it, so please don’t share it with anyone. But I will gladly talk to you—strictly background, of course.”

  Susan Carol took the piece of paper and turned the wattage up on her smile. “Oh, that is so nice of you,” she said. “I know how busy you must be. But I will call because I know I can learn so much from you.”

  Stevie felt just a little bit nauseated. He noticed that one of the bodyguards was eyeing him. Maybe he should tell him that he was Susan Carol’s bodyguard.

  Meeker had moved a step closer to Susan Carol—in her heels she towered over him—and had taken her hand. “People don’t understand me,” he said. “I enjoy helping people. That’s why I do so much for charity.”

  She smiled down at him. “I’ve heard that. Well, it was a thrill to meet you, sir.”

  “The pleasure was mine,” Meeker said, still smirking with self-congratulations.

  He turned toward the escalator, snapping once more at the bodyguards, who fell into place—one in front, one behind. Stevie and Susan Carol watched as they disappeared at the bottom of the escalator.

  “What was that all about?” Stevie said.

  “This,” Susan Carol said, holding up the piece of paper on which Meeker had written his cell phone number. “At some point, we’re going to want to talk to him—either for a comment or maybe to try to bluff some information out of him. I couldn’t imagine any other time we’d get that close to him.”

  “I thought being close to him was a pretty disgusting experience myself.”

  She nodded. “Completely gross. What a jerk. I feel like I should take a shower. But it worked.”

  “What would you have done if he had said yes to going on the show?”

  She shrugged. “I was pretty sure he’d say no. But if he had said yes, the USTV people would have been thrilled. They’d have run around screaming, ‘exclusive, exclusive!’ even if he didn’t say anything worth hearing—which he wouldn’t.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  She shrugged. “We wait to hear what Eddie Brennan tells us tomorrow.”

  That sounded about right to Stevie. And so did going back inside to finally get something to eat.

  12: QUARTERBACK SNEAK

  NOT SURPRISINGLY, Stevie ate far more than he should have, unable to resist going back for second and third helpings of shrimp and roast beef and ice cream. He and Susan Carol were sitting at a corner table watching the stars go by when someone Stevie didn’t recognize came up and began nervously telling Susan Carol she was needed for some kind of photo shoot with the rest of the USTV talent.

  Stevie wondered yet again how other people who worked in TV—producers, directors, camerapeople—felt about the on-air people being called talent, as if they were the only ones who had any. The man never even looked at Stevie.

  “Josh, I’m sure you talked to Steve Thomas at some point on the phone,” Susan Carol said. “Wouldn’t you like to say hello to him?”

  The man reddened slightly, then turned to Stevie and said, “Josh Krulander,” offering Stevie a quick, limp handshake. Stevie recognized the name. He was a USTV public relations type whom Stevie had spoken to on the phone on several occasions when USTV had wanted him to do interviews about the show. Before Stevie could respond at all, Krulander turned to Susan Carol and said for a third time, “We really need you right now.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m coming,” Susan Carol said, standing up. She pushed past Krulander, bent over, and kissed Stevie on the lips. The look on Krulander’s face was almost as good as the kiss. She walked off with Krulander trailing her.

  Stevie knew he had a huge grin on his face. If he had been old enough, he would have sat back in his chair and lit up a cigar. Instead, he spooned up the last of his ice cream.

  It was still pitch-dark outside when the alarm went off at 6:15, and Stevie was tempted to hit the snooze button. But knowing that Jamie Whitsitt had made it to the pool early enough to see Susan Carol swim was enough to get him out of bed and into the shower. He dressed in what he had come to think of as his “TV clothes”—dress shirt, clean pants, tie, and sports coat—and was out the door within twenty-five minutes of the alarm’s going off.

  The lobby was almost empty at 6:40. The doorman got him a cab and Stevie told the cab driver he needed to go to the IUPUI Natatorium, as Susan Carol had instructed. He was convinced the cabdriver would look at him blankly, but he simply flipped on the meter. It took less than ten minutes to get to the pool.

  Following Susan Carol’s instructions, he found the check-in desk. He was explaining to the woman at the desk that he was meeting a friend who was inside swimming when she stopped him. “Your friend is the tall girl with the dark hair, right? From the South? She told us you were coming. You can get to the pool deck through the men’s locker room. Just take your shoes off before you go on the deck.”

  She pointed him down the hall to the locker room, where he stopped to take off his shoes and socks and put them in an empty locker. Since it was steamy warm inside the locker room, he took off his jacket too, hanging it on a hook inside the locker. He walked out onto the deck and knew immediately that Susan Carol hadn’t been joking about this being one of the best pools in the country.

  There were actually, by Stevie’s count, three pools. One 50-meter pool and two 25-yard pools with eight wide lanes and the kind of thick lane dividers Stevie had seen when watching the Olympics on TV. Hanging over each lane was a banner with the name and a photo of a great American swimmer: Michael Phelps, Natalie Coughlin, Tom Dolan, Clay F. Britt, and Wally Dicks. Stevie recognized most of them.

  There was a swimmer in almost every lane of the pool at the end where Stevie had entered, but no one who looked like Susan Carol. He walked gingerly to the second 25-yard pool, which was separated from the one nearer the locker room by a bulkhead. Stevie guessed it was the movable kind that could be manipulated to make the pool any length people wanted it to be. Then behind the second pool was a completely separate diving well.

  Walking past the bulkhead, Stevie spotted Susan Carol. She was at the far end, wearing a blue-and-white bathing cap, hanging on to the edge of the pool. He started to wave at her, but just as he did, she and the man in the lane next to her pushed off and began swimming butterfly—fast. They both reached the wall near where Stevie was standing, turned, and pushed off. They were stroke for stroke with one another until the last five yards, when Susan Carol seemed to find an extra burst of energy and got to the wall about a half-stroke ahead of her competition.

  Stevie was amazed. Even though he knew she was ranked in the top ten in the country, he hadn’t really thought about what that would look like in the water. He began walking toward the end of the pool where Susan Carol and the man had stopped when, to his surprise, they pushed off again. Again, they went down and back—fifty yards, Stevie figured—and again Susan Carol got to the wall just barely in front.

&nbs
p; “How many?” Stevie heard the man say as he reached the end of the pool.

  “That was eight,” she said. “Two more. Let’s push.”

  An instant later, they were off again. Stevie watched, deciphering the brief conversation. His guess was that they were swimming the 50 butterfly ten times. Butterfly was by far the most difficult stroke in swimming. The thought of trying to swim one 50 made him tired. Ten? No way. And yet Susan Carol was plowing through them as if she could keep going all morning.

  She finished the ninth one, looked up, and saw Stevie staring at her.

  “Hey,” she said, breathing hard. “One more, okay?”

  Stevie barely had time to say “Okay” before she and her companion pushed off again. This time Susan Carol pulled away the last few yards, winning by several strokes.

  “Susan Carol, you’re just too young and too good for me,” the man said, panting as they hung on the wall.

  Susan Carol shook her head. “You stuck right with me until the very end, Jason. I thought you told me you were out of shape.”

  “Compared to you, I am out of shape,” Jason said.

  Susan Carol looked up at Stevie. She was still breathing hard but appeared perfectly capable of ripping off ten more 50 butterflies if asked.

  “Stevie, this is Jason Crist. He’s in town for the Super Bowl and he’s a Masters swimmer. He offered to swim a couple of sets with me.”

  “Which was my mistake,” Crist said. He looked to be in his mid-forties, with dark hair that was tinged with gray. He had an easy, friendly smile.

  “What is a Masters swimmer?” Stevie said.

  “Someone who is old,” Crist said, climbing slowly out of the pool. “It’s just a term used for people over twenty-five who are still silly enough to try to compete. I’m well over twenty-five and quite silly.” He looked at Susan Carol. “We on for tomorrow?”

  “Same time, same place,” she said.

  He gave them both a wave and headed in the direction of the locker room. “I need a shower too,” Susan Carol said. “Why don’t I meet you by the check-in desk in fifteen minutes.”

  “Susan Carol, I can’t believe how good a swimmer you are,” he said.

  “We were only doing fifties,” Susan Carol said. “If it had been hundreds, I might not have looked so good.”

  “Yeah, right,” he said. “I’m going to read the paper while you change. Don’t take too long. We don’t want to be late.”

  She looked at the swim watch she was wearing. “Oh—it’s seven-ten,” she said. “You’re right. I’d better hurry. I have to get my hair dry so I can look good on TV in a few hours.”

  “You’ll look good,” he said. “You always do.”

  “Why, Stevie,” she said, going into full Scarlett mode. “You are just all flattery this morning.”

  She left him standing there, still feeling a bit overwhelmed by what he had just seen.

  At 7:28, she walked out of the locker room, her hair tied back but dry, her swim bag hanging from her shoulder.

  “You know where we’re going?” he asked.

  “Yup. Follow me.”

  He did—up the steps and down a long hallway. It was dark, with no signs of life anywhere until they rounded a corner and saw someone sitting on a bench wearing a hooded gray sweatshirt. Hearing the footsteps, Eddie Brennan looked up.

  “Right on time,” he said.

  Stevie almost laughed out loud when he saw the sweatshirt. It said “Baltimore Ravens.”

  “You going over to the enemy?” he said, pointing at the shirt.

  Brennan laughed. “Darin gave it to me,” he said. “I figured between the hood and the logo no one would look twice.”

  “Good thinking,” Susan Carol said. She pointed down the hall to an open door. “That’s the gym down there. No one will be inside. Why don’t we go sit in there?”

  The gym was completely dark except for a spotlight in the rafters that was shining on a banner. The banner said NCAA TOURNAMENT 2005, which reminded Stevie that he had heard of IUPUI. The school had made it into the NCAA basketball tournament a couple of years earlier, causing all sorts of jokes about how you correctly pronounce I-U-P-U-I as a word. The gym was set up for a game: bleachers rolled down, chairs in place for team benches. They sat down on chairs marked IUPUI on the backs.

  “So,” Brennan said, “where should we begin?”

  As usual, Susan Carol took the lead. “Probably at the beginning. When did you find out about the positive tests?”

  Brennan put a hand up. “Hang on, hang on,” he said. “We need some ground rules here. I’ll talk to you guys, but at least for right now, we have to agree we’re off the record.”

  “Why?” Stevie asked.

  “When I tell you, you’ll understand. But you have to trust me. I’m trusting you just by being here.”

  “That’s fair,” Susan Carol said. Stevie was thinking the same thing. “Okay, at least for now, we’ll be off the record. But please—this is too big a story for us to drop, and we need to know what’s really going on here.”

  Brennan sighed. “I understand.” He sighed again. He had pushed the hood back off his head and he ran a hand through his hair as if thinking about what he was going to say next.

  Finally, with one more deep breath, he began talking. “Unfortunately, Susan Carol, the story that idiot Snow told you the other night is essentially true. How much do you guys know about the new collective bargaining agreement?”

  “We looked on the Internet to find out about drug testing and HGH,” Susan Carol said.

  Brennan nodded. “HGH was the diciest part of the new contract,” he said. “No one is sure yet that even blood testing is a hundred percent accurate, although the doctors I’ve talked to say they’re pretty close—especially if the HGH level is so high that there’s no doubt.”

  “Why has HGH become such a big deal all of a sudden?” Stevie asked.

  “Yeah, it’s the drug of choice right now. Mostly because it can’t be detected in a urine test, and that was all they used to do under the old CBA, and also because it helps you get big very fast. Look at the size of all the linemen in the league these days. You think that’s all from some workout regimen?”

  Neither of them answered, so he plowed on. “We all knew once we made the play-offs that we’d get tested again—at least once. The coaches warned everyone that if anyone was doing something, they should stop.”

  “How many guys on your team are users?” Susan Carol asked.

  Brennan shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. It probably wouldn’t be that hard to figure out. You could just look at a guy’s weight—everyone weighs in every single day. So if a guy comes out of college at two-sixty-five and then jumps to three-fifteen, odds are he’s doing something.

  “Every team has guys who are using something. But it just isn’t talked about—even inside the locker room. It’s part of the code. If you don’t talk about guys doing steroids, then it means guys aren’t doing steroids—even if they are.”

  Stevie wasn’t sure if he understood that, but then he thought he sort of did. “Why do you think so many guys do it?” he asked. “Putting aside the fact that you get in trouble if you get caught, there are all sorts of stories about the health risks.”

  Brennan laughed. “Did you see that survey of high school football players a couple years ago? They asked, ‘If you knew that by taking steroids you would guarantee yourself a ten-year career in the NFL but you would also guarantee losing ten years of your life, would you take them?’ Seventy-five percent said yes. Because there’s a lot of money and glamour in the NFL, and high school kids don’t think they’re ever going to die anyway.

  “And you have to understand—the margin for error in this league is tiny. You lose a half step of speed or a tiny bit of strength and you can be gone for someone younger, cheaper, stronger, healthier. Contracts aren’t guaranteed. Everyone wants to keep playing—making the big money, hearing all the cheers, being a hero. Most guys will tell y
ou they’d take the risk in an instant to extend their careers.”

  “Or to win a Super Bowl?” Susan Carol asked.

  Brennan simply nodded. “Exactly. Obviously, these guys thought they needed that extra edge as we went deeper into the play-offs.”

  “So you guys didn’t get tested until after you won the conference championship?” Stevie asked.

  Brennan shook his head. “No, that’s the thing, we got fooled. This is all new, remember? We were actually tested before we played the wild-card game against the Giants. I was one of the guys tested that time too—it’s all random. They can test up to half the team at any given time. Everyone was clean. I think the guys just figured we were in the clear.”

  “Only they tested again after you beat the Redskins,” Susan Carol said.

  “Right. I remember some of the o-line guys looking nervous when they posted the list of who would be tested. Three of them had already been tested the first time like me and they were grumbling about it.”

  “So when did you hear about the positives?” Stevie asked.

  “Friday,” Brennan said. “Omar Nelson, our fullback, told me. He rooms with Pete Akombe on the road. I guess Pete told him that he and the other four o-linemen had come back positive. I said to Omar, ‘My God, with the week off, they’ll all be suspended once the B sample comes back. We’re done.’”

  “What’s the B sample again?” Stevie said, remembering something about a two-test system from their late-night Internet scrolling.

  “They take a second blood sample if the first one comes up positive, just to be absolutely sure,” Brennan said. “It’s the same kind of testing they do in the Olympics and the Tour de France—that’s how Floyd Landis got nailed, remember? When I said that to Omar, he shook his head and said, ‘Pete says there won’t be a second sample. He says Meeker is taking care of it.’”

  “Meeker?!!!” Stevie and Susan Carol both screamed at once, causing Eddie to look around the dark gym as if someone could hear them.