by Gare Joyce
“There was nothing going on in the parking lot either,” the security guard said. “For a game like this I have to keep an eye on the VIP parking lot, make sure no one sneaks in there to try and steal a hubcap or get an autograph or something.”
“We sat there for hours watching those goddamn tapes. We hadda ID everybody who went in and out of the offices, the dressing rooms, and whatever,” the Zamboni driver’s assistant said. “It was just about the worst night for it ’cause you had the mayor and all the rest in there.”
“’Course the detectives know a lot of ’em already. I mean, they’re well-known and all,” the guy on the security detail said. “I couldn’t figure out who all the old-timers were. Y’know, they don’t look like their hockey cards at all anymore …”
This came as no news to me, but they were blissfully unaware. “… Others, you know, I don’t know all their names or anything, but I know who they are, like the Italian guy from Toronto and the thugs who are his wingers.”
“So what came out of it?”
“Only a few went out to the VIP lot before or right around when Red and Doc were out. But most went out two or three or four at a time and, y’know, they had alibis or whatever.”
“Red was smashed,” said the Zamboni driver. “Doc had to be driving him home. He went out to start the car up. It didn’t even look like Red was gonna be able to make it to his car on his own.”
I took a professional curiosity in the investigation. But more immediately, I just wanted to get an idea of the wringer I’d be rolled through that afternoon. The account they gave me made it sound like I could be sitting in front of the video screen for hours.
I EXCUSED myself from Peterborough’s version of the Algonquin Round Table and speed-dialed Ollie Buckhold.
“Brad, my friend, great to hear from you,” Buckhold said. “I’ve put in a call to the young man and left a message about your request. I’m sure that everything is going to be all right. Would noon be good?”
“Noon’s good.”
I had no reason to suspect it wouldn’t be.
I RE-ENTERED the conversation between the arena workers in mid-sentence and motioned to the waitress to refill my cup with that coffee-like fluid that she used to deter all but the ironstomached customers from overstaying their welcomes.
“… so like I say, there wasn’t anyone who we couldn’t out and out say shouldn’t of been hanging around the exit. No one who shouldn’t of been in and out of the dressing rooms or coach’s office. And, like, the team is awfully, awfully tight with those VIP passes for parking …”
“… team makes so much of their money from the parking lot …”
Including five bucks of mine that night.
“… Yeah, they issue parking passes on a night-to-night basis for everybody ’cept Red and Doc. Even Spike the trainer never gets one. We get a list each night and the detectives took it from that night.”
The security guard shook his head and took a deep, nervous breath. He seemed shaky.
“The detectives kept asking me if anybody could of got by me. I told them there was no way. I didn’t leave my booth all night. I hit the pisser before I opened the gate and never left until I made my rounds and Red’s and Doc’s bodies were found.
“I figure it had to be someone in that lot, someone who had a pass. Nobody went into that lot from the arena.”
Out of the mouths of the unqualified came a conclusion that concurred with the detectives’.
I looked out at the arena from the window. The way the parking lot was set up, the area around the door into the arena was in a blind spot from the booth at the gate where the security guard checked passes. So Hanratty’s parking spot would have been hidden from view. He’d arranged it that way to avoid out-of-town fans egging his old Cadillac.
I believed the security guard, even if the detectives were looking for holes. He didn’t have many options in life, I figured. Employment opportunities in Peterborough would have been limited for a guy like him. He would have lost possibly the only job he was qualified for if Red Hanratty had been ambushed in the parking lot for nothing more than an autograph. No matter how much he professed to be a man of the people, the Ol’ Redhead was a one-strike-and-you’re-out guy. Yeah, nobody got by the security guard.
NOON. STILL NO CALL or email from Ollie Buckhold. I wasn’t going to wait any longer. I speed-dialed him.
“Brad, my friend, I’m glad you called. I’ve tried Billy and the young man must have turned off his phone while he’s in class. You know he’s an outstanding student and plans to do his degrees by correspondence while he’s playing in the league …”
If I let him go on with the testimonial I’d be late for my appointment with Detectives Madison and Freel.
“Ollie, I’m going to be tied up from two to four. Leave a message for me and ask your client if I can meet him off-site or at his billets or something.”
My patience was fast running out. Buckhold had to sense it.
I had Mays the Elder’s card. I called through to his voicemail.
I emailed him. I asked him to give me a shout. Maybe Superboy was back at home unbeknownst to the agent. If he was still in Peterborough, maybe the father would have better luck getting the son to pick up than the agent had.
I drove over to police headquarters and checked in at the front desk.
“COFFEE, BRAD?” Detective Madison asked.
“No thanks. I’ve been sitting all morning in Tim’s. My date stood me up and I held out hope.”
Madison, who’d soon be familiar enough to answer to Maddy, and Freel, who preferred Detective Freel and Sir, sat across from me.
“Brad, we could use your help with the IDs on the old-timers going out to the parking lot, but first we have a few questions. When did you leave the arena?”
That was the first of about twenty consecutive questions without comment on my answers. Who saw you? Where did you go? Then what? And then what? All in Joe Friday’s monotone. If I wasn’t a suspect, they made it seem I was going in. As they’d tell me later, they decided that for the sake of fairness they’d treat me like everybody else, a cold-blooded killer until my alibi convinced them otherwise. Which it did pretty quickly. Yeah, I went out into the lot before the Ol’ Redhead and Bones, which could have given me access, but I hadn’t stuck around a minute, didn’t even warm up the Rusty Beemer. Nobody saw me leave, but I arrived at the Merry Widow just twenty minutes after the time of deaths. I was certifiably out of the area code when Hanratty and Doc departed this mortal coil.
We spent ninety minutes going over the IDs of the guys lugging their hockey bags and sticks, of others coming and going in the security camera videos. Arena workers had identified most but not all. I tried to fill in the blanks as much as I could. We started with the view outside the coach’s office before the game.
“Him?” Maddy said. A lanky guy going into the coach’s office before the game and leaving quickly.
“The ref,” I said. “Johns. Don’t know his first name.”
“Him?” A pudgy guy waiting outside the coach’s office only to be blown off when the Ol’ Redhead made a beeline for a television camera.
“Harley Hackenbush. Disgruntled Times employee. If purple prose were a crime, he’d be your man.”
Maddy fast-forwarded the video. A blur of a guy going into Hanratty’s office, a freeze-frame of him exiting. He was carrying a file folder. He had on the handiwork of an Italian designer.
“Him?”
“William Mays Sr., a not-quite-self-made millionaire whose son will make his first million single-handedly before he buys his first razor.”
“Him?” A guy walked through the frame, though not out the exit.
“Double J. Jackie Jameson. Long-time scout based here, known mutt.”
Freel tapped his fingers on the tabletop impatiently. It seemed he didn’t much care for my running commentary, so I stuck with the straight, unadorned answers thereafter. There were some I didn’t know but I
was sure that the detectives would be able to fill in the holes. Between those I knew and those I just saw, not a one seemed reasonably inclined to want to rid the world of the winningest coach in the history of junior hockey.
Then we went to the after-game, the camera looking out at the exit to the secure parking lot.
“Him, him, and him?” Freeze-frame. Several hundred dollars’ worth of sleeve were draped over the shoulders of a tall blond kid and a shorter, thick-bodied kid who didn’t own a comb.
“That’s William Mays again, in the middle, Junior on his right, and Markov on his left.” The video rolled forward. The old guy let loose the headlocks. He shook Markov’s hand and wrapped his left hand around the Russian’s wrist as if he were trying to hold him in place.
Markov turned and headed out the door to the parking lot. The Mayses walked toward the main entrance, where fans would have been milling around.
“Okay, that’s you,” Maddy said.
Obvious to all of us and faintly striking up a memory that I had suppressed. William Mays did the same double-up on the handshake and then, well, a hug. I was uncomfortable but not surprised. I remembered reading an interview with him in an investment magazine. He was touting a new businessmanagement book with the theme of “instant intimacy.” He claimed that “first impressions are lost opportunities” for you and me, but not for him. He claimed that “knocking down the walls between us” was the key to his success. He also claimed that “delegating was the anti-empathy” and that the smart executive should get to know the lives of “those whom others would call ‘the little people.’”
William Mays was challenged on one news show about this idea, but he backed it up. A dogged newsman walked Mays through his office and down to the street and he aced the ambush test, to the blow-dried baritone’s unmistakable disappointment. Mays knew the names as well as the life histories of not only his buxom secretaries, which is to be expected, but also the beaten-down woman who came around to clean his office, the minimum-wage security guards on the ground floor of the business tower, the nose-pierced baristas pouring his coffee at the nearest Starbucks, and the old, internet-obsolete guy flogging newspapers on the sidewalk. And they seemed to like him. To love him, really. I wasn’t feeling it. His hands patted my back and mine his. We were like two seals wrestling and I was trying to tap out a submission.
“Awkward,” I said.
“Yeah,” Freel said. He smirked.
I watched myself head out the door and William Mays turn back inside and walk out of the frame. “He said he had to go to the can before he started the drive back.”
Involuntary memory is sometimes almost too vivid.
“Too much information,” Freel said. The video advanced. A couple of minutes later Mays did exit the lot. He was followed by a few other old-timers who all vouched for each other. About half an hour later Hanratty and Doc. Fifteen minutes later, the security guard who found the bodies.
Maddy bade me farewell. Freel nodded. I made my exit.
I HAD TURNED my BlackBerry off while in police headquarters. When I powered it up in the visitors’ section of the parking lot I had no new messages. No voicemail from Buckhold or Mays the Elder. No replies to emails out. Once more into the breach.
“Brad, I’m glad you called,” Buckhold said. “I haven’t been able to reach the young man, but I promise you when I do, he’ll be in touch. He might be involved in an after-school event or perhaps one of the charities he works for in Peterborough. He knows that you’re out that way, and I’m sure that he’s sorry for any inconvenience he’s caused you. I know he respects you as a former player. He told me that he has your hockey card. And I know he really respects Hunts and your organization. He’s talked about L.A. as one of the teams he hopes to be drafted by.”
I tapped the steering wheel once for each lie in a cascade of them. As the volume of bullshit built up, so did my sense of Buckhold’s desperation. The one bit of truth: He was having no luck in getting a hold of Billy Mays Jr. For Buckhold, the worry was not that I was going to be stiffed. No, the worry was that the kid’s failure to return calls might be an omen of the agent’s worst nightmare: a star client who defects before signing his first contract. If an agent gets a client a contract or two before he defects, at least the agent has come away with his piece of the action. But if Mays or some other teenager bolts before signing his first deal in the league, the agent has done a lot of chasing and hand-holding for nothing. It would be a wasted investment of time and resources, a lot of bad coffee cake scarfed down, a lot of undeserved flattery extended, and, in some cases, dough advanced that, off the books and on the honour system, would likely never be repaid.
Charities, respect for me, the hockey card, the hopes of being drafted by L.A.: All of it was fiction. What was real, though, was Buckhold’s desperation. Losing a client like Junior would be embarrassing, but he’d be a laughingstock in the trade if his fresh-faced client showed up on the side of a milk carton.
I tried William Mays Sr. again. By phone, I had no luck, straight through into voicemail. By email, I caught a break, a reply in two minutes.
In meetings all day. Can’t discuss. Billy is in Peterborough. He hasn’t been home for a couple of days. Messaged me that he won’t be back until the weekend. Try Ollie to get in touch. He has the details.
I decided that I’d try to cut out the middlemen. The league keeps a database with information on the top draft-eligible players. League-supervised measurements of height and weight so that we get the straight dope on a player rather than the exaggerated numbers you see in the programs or on game broadcasts. The league gets them to fill out questionnaires. It’s cursory stuff really: father’s and mother’s occupations, their school, any family ties to the game or other pro sports. One section lists contact information. This includes addresses, summer being the family homes and winter being the billeting homes. Phone numbers are given for each.
I strained my eyes to read the details on my BlackBerry’s tiny screen. I opened the PDF of Mays’s form. Some of the questionnaires can serve as indictments of our school system, rife with spelling mistakes and written in a first-grader’s scrawl. Thankfully, Mays’s was filled out in clean, uniform penmanship worthy of an architect or cartographer.
The billets’ address was listed: 23 Rainy Road, Peterborough. Their names and home phone number were alongside: 705-555-9189, Sarah and James Storms. His cellphone was listed further down the page: 647-555-2729.
I decided to go out to the billets’ home. I wasn’t about to count on someone picking up with call display. And with an answered door knock, I could tell if I was getting the straight goods. I figured that, unlike Ollie Buckhold or Madison and Freel or, for that matter, the late Red Hanratty or me, the folks at 23 Rainy didn’t have to lie for a living.
THE STORMS WERE retirees and had been ensconced for a half century in their comfortable four-bedroom home overlooking the river. Their children and the town were grown. When the last of the younger Storms blew out of Peterborough for better things in a bigger city, Sarah and Jim started taking in players. They’d later tell me that Billy Mays Jr. was their favourite one ever and that Markov was the quietest. That would be relayed to me down the line, on about my fourth visit in my background checks. On my first trip they couldn’t offer me much.
“Billy should be back in the city, I think,” James said. “We haven’t seen him for a couple of days.”
“Three,” Sarah said.
“Usually he’s good about letting us know what his schedule is, but since his injury he’s really back and forth a lot, seeing specialists about his shoulder, in to see his agent and other people.”
Sarah jumped in. “He had to do a television spot the other day down in one of those studios in Toronto.”
“We haven’t spoken since then,” James said. “We figured he just stayed on at his father’s place.”
“Yes, he wouldn’t have been at his mother’s. I believe she’s in … where is that place, Jim?”
“Turks and Caicos,” he said.
I gave them a very brief outline of my plight. They were sympathetic and tried to be helpful, but said that they really didn’t know much more than they’d already told me.
I tried to small talk them for any faint leads.
“How many billeting players have you had this season?”
“We started with two, the Russian boy and Billy, who was with us last year as well,” she said. “It’s so quiet now with neither of them around.”
“How did you find out about the Markov boy going back to Russia?”
“We had no idea. Billy and the Russian boy came home late after that game at the arena the night Coach Hanratty and the doctor were killed, but we didn’t stay up. He and Billy had breakfast but we weren’t here. We left them here because we had some morning errands to run. Billy went to school. The Russian boy would usually have been at home at lunchtime, but he wasn’t. His things were gone.”
James jumped in. “He couldn’t tell us anything, dear,” he said. “His English was very limited. We got by with just a few words here and there. He spent a lot of time on the computer. Sometimes he got in touch with his agent, a guy in New York, who could do some translation for him. Like when he didn’t know the words for ketchup or Aspirin.”
They said that they had heard nothing more from him or about him since.
“How did Billy take it?”
“Coach Hanratty’s death or the Russian boy leaving?”
The latter, I told him.
“He didn’t talk about it.”
“Didn’t like to talk about it,” she said.
“I think Billy was bothered,” he said. “He did like him and he wanted him to do well. Billy thought they could go to the finals this year if he stayed healthy and the Russian boy could play up to his ability.”
“Probably true,” I said. It was a reach, but I didn’t want to come off mean-spirited.
“Billy told us that he’d be back,” she said.