Flea Flicker

by David Chill

  “All right. I’m not sure how long this case will take. Could be an hour or two, could be a couple of days. It’s hard to say,” I told her, thinking if I didn’t find her husband today, I might be looking for weeks or months.

  “The important thing is you find him.”

  I watched Madison climb across Hannah’s lap onto the couch, reaching for a little stuffed blue octopus. I didn’t want to ask this in front of her daughter, but sensed I wouldn’t have an opportunity to ask again. “And might there be anyone who was on any not-so-so friendly terms with Tyler?”

  Hannah Briggs drew in a breath. She looked down at her daughter playing with the toy, oblivious to what we were discussing. She turned her big brown eyes back to me. “Yes. In fact, there might be a few of them.”

  *

  Having moved from San Diego recently, the L.A. Chargers were a team in an unusual transition. They had come to L.A. without a home, and as they waited for their new stadium to be finished in Inglewood, they were playing their home games at a soccer stadium in the South Bay. Soon they’d be sharing a sparkling new stadium with the L.A. Rams, but for now they were splitting time with the L.A. Galaxy, a pro soccer team. If the world is becoming a shared economy, the Chargers were the NFL’s version of this.

  The Chargers were also in the process of building a state-of-the-art practice complex in Costa Mesa, a nice bedroom community Angelenos sometimes refer to as “behind the orange curtain.” It wouldn’t be ready until next year, so their short-term answer for a practice facility was dubious at best: a shuttered junior high school in El Segundo, just south of the terminals at LAX. While conversations would occasionally be interrupted by jets taking off and landing, additional hazards were being spewed into the air from both a nearby oil refinery and the Hyperion sewage treatment plant a few miles away. A pungent odor hung over the community, and the small town of El Segundo was sometimes coined El Stinko, and with good reason.

  The junior high campus consisted of half a dozen dilapidated buildings that the team quickly transformed into locker rooms, whirlpools and makeshift offices. But the main feature was a large, grass soccer field that the team tore up and replaced with artificial turf. Goal posts were installed, yard lines painted, and while its appearance suggested it barely fit the needs of a mediocre high school team, this was where L.A.’s newest pro football franchise was calling home for the time being.

  Befitting the rumpled conditions was a weary-looking security guard who asked if I had prior approval for watching practice. I crossed my fingers and told him I had, and I also dropped a few names, including Anthony Riddleman, the current QB coach. The guard, not surprisingly, couldn’t find my name on a lengthy sheet of paper, but finally gave me a wave, and let me wander onto the grounds. When the season is almost over, and the team has lost more games than it’s won, tight security is not a high priority.

  For the most part, a visitor to a football practice is treated to long periods of monotony. Watching players stretch, do agility drills and just sit on their helmets chatting took up over an hour. Scrimmages in full pads were reserved for the middle of the week; Saturdays were mostly walkthroughs, special team work, and going over what to do in certain situations. But as decrepit as the surroundings were, the practice itself finally became energetic and lively when the head coach walked onto the field. The team was in the midst of going through their reps, and there was a lot of shouting of assignments, and an occasional burst of encouragement whenever a coach noticed someone making a good play. While everyone was in shorts today, the offense still wore its traditional white jerseys, and the defense wore blue. The quarterbacks normally wore red, so even a highly engaged defender would know not to clobber the most important guy on the field.

  There was a smattering of visitors on the sidelines, and I recognized a couple of them. One was a former colleague, a USC assistant coach who had taken a job at a Texas school after our head coach, Johnny Cleary, departed SC for the Chicago Bears. There were a few others who looked like coaches, most likely networking and seeing if they could land a new gig next season. But there was one man who stood out; he was short and lean, but he had a presence about him that gave him a large aura. He was a well-known sports agent, and I took pains to hide from his view. But some people have a radar-like sense when it comes to spotting people, and it took Cliff Roper all of about 30 seconds to notice me.

  “Hey, get a load of this, will you,” he crowed, as he walked over and looked me up and down. “Thinking of getting back into coaching? About time. That two-bit job as a private dick doesn’t come close to paying what coaches make, now does it, Burnside?”

  “Nope,” I said warily. “But I normally don’t have 16 hour days to put in, either.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you’re a real family man now. Wife and kid. Or is it kids now? Slip another one past the goalie?”

  “You have a sweet way of putting things. But no, we just have one.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Hey, that boy of yours in school yet?”

  “Preschool,” I said. “He’ll start kindergarten in the fall.”

  “You get him into a private school?” he peered at me, and as if reading my mind, he started curling his lip. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those parents who think there’s a moral obligation to use public education?”

  “We’re weighing our options,” I said evenly, wondering how the conversation started veering off in this direction.

  “Geez, Louise. Thinking of sending your kid to L.A. Unified? That’ll toughen him up, I’ll bet. Turn him into a gritty football player in a hurry. That hot wife of yours okay with him growing up quick?”

  I shook my head. If there was one person in the world who knew how to get under my skin, it was Cliff Roper. Wildly successful as an agent, he had no boundaries when it came to social skills or polite pretense. He was, in an odd way, one of the sharpest people I’d ever met, yet also one of the most perplexing.

  “You send Honey to public school?” I asked, thinking of Cliff Roper’s beautiful daughter, Honey Roper, possibly the only thing in the world that kept him sane.

  “Nope,” he declared. “Bishop Gorman. Best school in Las Vegas.”

  “I didn’t know you were Catholic.”

  “They don’t discriminate,” he said.

  “Make a large donation, did you?”

  “Hey, you listen. They let Honey in because she’s terrific. And she started on their varsity basketball team. And yeah, maybe I was generous with the donations. Geez, what world do you think we live in?”

  “The type of world where someone like you would position himself to make friends with their best football players,” I countered, knowing Bishop Gorman High School consistently had one of the top prep football teams on the West Coast, and was something of a pipeline to USC. It was also a pipeline into Roper’s agency, which regularly signed some of the premier football talent in the country before they entered the NFL draft.

  “Hey, hey, hey” he said, wagging a finger in my face. “Making some contacts was just icing on the cake. You’d think I’d pimp my only daughter out just to earn a few bucks? What kind of a father do you think I am?”

  I shrugged and raised my palms skyward. In actuality, I really didn’t know the answer. I did know that Cliff had once gone by the name Hal Delano and had been brought up on manslaughter charges, although three separate trials resulted in three separate hung juries. The prosecution debated bringing him up on separate charges of jury tampering, but they finally concluded they’d have even less luck making that stick. Cliff Roper was a piece of work, and he often operated in a way that kept everyone guessing.

  “And here I was,” he said, “about to offer you a big payday.”

  “You were, were you?” I started, not entirely sure of how to separate fact from fiction.

  “I was thinking about it. You’ve got the perfect background for an assignment.”

  “Is any of it legal?” I asked.

  Roper pointed a finger at me
again. “Watch it with the wise cracks. And yeah, what I need from you is perfectly legit.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “I’ve got this client. Or potential client I should say. Patrick O’Malley. He’s finishing up his junior year at SC. Plays quarterback. You might have heard of him.”

  Indeed I had. I knew Patrick for years, just like I knew most of the upperclassmen on USC’s football team, having coached there for a number of seasons. I worked with the defensive backs, and while I didn’t have regular interaction with Patrick, my defensive guys went up against him every day in practice. He was a gifted quarterback, and a true surprise. Patrick had secured one of the last scholarships we had that year, the coaches debating tirelessly over whether he had enough experience to play college football. He was mostly a skateboarder and a surfer and a snowboarder, a kid whose high school coach discovered him one day playing catch on the soccer field. What stood out was his ability to throw a football 70 yards in the air.

  “Sure,” I said. “Why the interest? Patrick’s just a junior. He’s only started one season. He’s as raw as they come. He didn’t even play high school football his first two years.”

  “You think I don’t know that? I know all about Patrick. He’s got a rare gift. Trouble is he doesn’t know it. He’s more interested in going out for the winter Olympics. Thinks he can medal in the halfpipe. What a freaking waste.”

  “It’s all about competition,” I said, echoing something my longtime friend Johnny Cleary liked to say.

  “No, it’s all about money,” Roper answered. “Look, here’s the deal. Patrick got involved in some rough stuff. He lives with a bunch of guys in some animal house near campus. There was a, well, how do I put this, an incident last week. Him and his housemates roughed someone up. It’s okay, the guy was a burglar. But the thief is making some serious allegations. Beating, torture, imprisoned against his will, real ugly crap. If charges get filed, Patrick’s career is toast. The NFL won’t touch him. And SC will kick him out of school, too. They don’t mess around anymore.”

  “And you want me to find out if it’s true.”

  “I want you to fix the freaking thing is what I want!” Roper hissed, the volume of his voice falling in the same way the intensity was ratcheting up. “Do you know how many tens of millions of bucks this kid stands to make? Sheesh, what do I have to do to get through to you?”

  I shook my head. The memory of past headaches while working for Cliff Roper were returning to me in full force. “I don’t do cover ups,” I finally managed.

  “You don’t have to cover anything up. Just investigate. Make things whole if you can. You used to coach at SC, I figure maybe you still have some influence. I’ll pay your ridiculous daily rate. But I’ll pass you another twenty grand if Patrick goes pro next month and signs with me. Call it a bonus.”

  I looked up at the sky. The thought of a lucrative assignment was attractive. I had made great money as a football coach, but a private eye’s income was a step down and then some. The thought of working for Cliff Roper again, however, made me blanche. My job was full of tradeoffs, and I surmised that was why they called it work.

  “Here’s what I can do,” I said. “I’ll look into it. I’ll see what actually happened. And if it’s nothing serious, I’ll see how I can help. But if it the allegations are true, there may not be much I can fix. And there’s only so many things I’ll do for money.”

  Roper shook his head. “People like you confound me.”

  “Imagine what people like you do to me.”

  “Hey, hey, hey. I’m not going to warn you again.”

  “I’m really scared. Look. I’ve got a little extra time, I can squeeze this in and take the case. I charge fifteen hundred a day,” I said, adding some money in for combat pay. “We’ll see what comes up. I know Patrick, and he’s a good kid. Some of the guys he lives with, well, I don’t know about them. You want I should swing by your office on Monday?”

  “No,” he said, “I want to move on this. What are you doing tomorrow?”

  “Spending time with my family,” I said involuntarily, suddenly thinking I also needed to spend time looking for Tyler Briggs.

  “Good, you’ll be free after noon. I’ll send a car around for you at 12:30pm.”

  “Car? To go where?’

  “To go where. To the Charger game! They’re playing the Raiders. Do I really have to lay everything out for you? Sheesh. Good help really is hard to find,” he said, and turned and began walking to the other side of the practice field before I could respond. I watched him go for a long moment, and then I turned to see if I could find a familiar face, hopefully one that wouldn’t leave me shaking my head in disgust. He finally materialized, seemingly out of thin air, but unlike Cliff Roper, this guy seemed genuinely happy to see me.

  “Coach B,” exclaimed a clean-cut young man wearing a light blue golf shirt and carrying a clipboard. He had short blond hair, a freckled face, and was bursting with the unabashed enthusiasm that only a person under the age of 25 could muster.

  “Derek,” I said, and gave him a bear hug. “Good to see our analytics guy found a job after college.”

  “It’s worked out great for me,” he gushed. “What brings you here? I heard you became a detective, that’s so cool. You’re not looking to get back into coaching, are you?”

  “Nope. Just here on some business,” I said. “How’re the Chargers treating you?”

  “Good, real good. I love it here. Didn’t think I’d find something as great as SC, but this job may be even better.”

  Derek Altman started out as one of our USC team managers, carrying water bottles, fixing equipment, shagging punts, doing just about anything we asked of him. He was majoring in math, and we had him keep the statistics for a while, but he also showed remarkable acuity in breaking down game film and understanding opposing players’ tendencies. He quickly gleaned when a play would be a run or a pass by the manner in which certain offensive linemen dropped into their stance. He understood a running back might wiggle his fingers when he knew the ball was about to be handed off to him. The little tendencies, or tells, could often be the difference between winning or losing a close game. Some guys just had the gift of insight, and Derek was one of them.

  “Glad to hear it,” I said, motioning for us to walk down the sidelines to a more private spot a few yards away. “Mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”

  “Okay,” he said, looking at me curiously.

  “You’re not in any trouble,” I smiled. “But I wanted to ask you about Coach Briggs.”

  The smile disappeared from his face. “Oh. Yeah. That didn’t work out very well.”

  “What happened? He was only here one season.”

  “That was more than enough,” Derek said, shaking his head. “It started off okay. We were 4-2 after our first six games. Then we dropped a couple of close ones and things just went off the rails. Coach Briggs started losing control of the team, players weren’t respecting him. Once we started losing and got out of playoff contention, guys started playing to pad their stats. Make themselves look good for negotiating their next contract.”

  “The team went on a bad losing streak,” I recalled.

  “Bad doesn’t fully describe it. We lost our last 10 games. It was tough. The drinking made it worse.”

  I frowned. “Tell me about that.”

  “It was kind of an open secret. Coach Briggs would keep a case of beer in his office fridge all the time. Made me restock it. Got to the point where I was going to the store every other afternoon. A few times he even started putting it away before practice. He hid the drinking for a while, but you know how it goes. Drunks get sloppy. Our final game, I swear he had a few before opening kickoff. I think by then the owner caught on and pulled the plug on him. Too bad. Coach Briggs was really smart. He was a great play caller when he was sober. But he had his demons. Couldn’t keep ‘em at bay.”

  “Anyone stay in touch with him after he got fired?”

>   “Yeah, Anthony Riddleman probably did. He was Briggs’s QB coach with the Jets, known Tyler for years. Tyler was the one who hired him here.”

  “Any way I could get to speak with Anthony?”

  Derek shook his head. “Probably not. The team’s going straight to the hotel after this. I can let him know, maybe ask to call. Anthony’s a good guy, he’ll probably follow up. I think he’s still close to Tyler, he mentioned going over to his house a few times this year. Anthony was one of the few coaches they kept on after they let Tyler go.”

  “They kept you on, too,” I reminded him.

  “Yeah,” he said a little shyly. “I don’t get paid a lot, so I can fly under the radar. But maybe someone noticed my hard work. It’s like Johnny Cleary once told the team at SC. Character is what you do when you think no one’s watching. Turns out someone was watching me here. They not only kept me on, but gave me a promotion. I’m starting to work on things like salary cap space, trying to calculate who’s worth how much. It’s interesting. Putting my math skills to work. I might have a shot to be a general manager one day. That’ll be a ways off, though.”

  “Great,” I smiled. “I always love to hear someone doing what they’re good at.”

  “Never dreamed it would work out like this. When I started at SC, I thought I’d end up going to work for Facebook or something. This is a thousand times better.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “So, is something going on with Coach Briggs? I know he took a year off of football. Everything okay with him?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, lowering my voice to a whisper. “This is confidential. I’m trying to find him; he didn’t make it home last night. Any thoughts where I might hunt him down?”

  Derek Altman looked down at the turf. “There’s lots of bars in L.A. It’ll take some doing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s hanging out at one of them.”