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The Code Page 15

by Gare Joyce


  I wanted to get a sense of the arc of Mays’s development and a read on how he’d changed over the couple of years in Peterborough. I asked him about the first conversation he had with Hanratty.

  “He told me that he was going to be fair and that everyone started with a blank slate,” he said. “I didn’t think anything different, really. That’s the way it has been everywhere else and how I’ve always been treated. I didn’t want anything special, just a chance to play and make a positive impact.”

  “What about your father’s experience?”

  “My father has never talked about his time in Peterborough much. I think it was hard for him, though. I imagine that it’s hard to see your career wind down in junior.”

  I didn’t bother to break to the kid that, if it winds down in junior hockey, you really haven’t had a career.

  “What about your last conversation with your coach?”

  “Yeah, I remember it really well. It was strange and I think about it every day. It was almost like he knew something was coming. Maybe that was just because he’d had a couple of beers. But he told me, ‘You’ll go on to great things, hockey or not.’ And he told me, ‘You’re part of this team even when you’re not on the ice. You get this Russian kid goin’, will you. You’re the only one who can reach him.’”

  I looked behind us. Markov was still tailing us, head down, messaging frantically.

  “I figured he was always at him. Calling him Ivan the Terrible and stuff like that. But I think he was frustrated. He could see all this talent but couldn’t coach him. And Busher always said the coach’s biggest problem was when he couldn’t coach a kid … ‘When he can’t coach ’em, he forgets about ’em or ignores ’em.’ But Spike also said Coach had changed over the years and that he was okay with things changing.”

  THE TAKEAWAY: Hanratty’s last words to Captain Fantastic were a succinct scouting report on the kid’s character and leadership.

  I made notes of it in my workup on Mays in our database. What really stuck with me, though, was his thinking that Hanratty knew something bad was going to happen. Or already had happened. I would have put it down to a kid’s imagination in ninety-nine other cases out of a hundred, but not with Mays, not completely anyway. He was a pretty clear-eyed kid. And he thought that Hanratty was saying goodbye to him. I’d be thinking about something like that every day too.

  28

  * * *

  After seeing the kid off, I called William Mays Sr.’s number. Straight to voicemail. I hung up. I’d be way down his list of priorities.

  I messaged him. Mr. Mays, is there any way I can come in and talk to you about your son and our team? Let me know what will work for you. Automatic out-of-office reply that said he would be in meetings the next two days.

  I was about to throw in the towel, but within a minute I had a reply. I’m available any time today. I will be at the Scarborough Hunt Club for a late tee time today. If you’d like to meet for lunch or even get in a round, let me know.

  Lunch I was good for. I let him know. Declining to play eighteen at an exclusive course wasn’t going to impress him. The oak panels in the clubhouse and expensive stogies weren’t going to impress me either.

  MAYBE MY MESSAGE wasn’t clear enough. I was coming up to interview him. I was coming up as part of a get-to-know-you. He must have read my message as a sign-up for one of his business seminars. Rather than talking about his son and the game, he spent the entire hour giving me a summary of his Seven Keys of Turning Maybes into Wills™. I felt like the first stop on his book tour. When I tried to budge him off this line, he found a way to segue. When I tried to talk about our team, he said that his lesson plan could put us on a championship course. When I tried to talk about his son, he said that Billy Jr. was but one happy by-product of a life dedicated to the Seven Keys™. I felt like I had been put in a cage and restraints and forced to watch late-night infomercials. I expected him to tell me that telephone lines were open and to call in the next thirty minutes.

  The creepiest thing, though, was Mays calling the kid “my creation.” A lot of parents get a vicarious thrill from their sons’ games but this one crossed every line.

  29

  * * *

  A friend of a friend of a friend knew the brother of one of the Peterborough players’ fathers and reported back to me that the former Mrs. Mays was a well-preserved former finalist for the title of Miss Canada. By this same very reliable fourthhand report, Mrs. Mays would have had a better chance at the crown if she had been given the opportunity to show her true gift in the talent competition. Other beauties might have been able to warble or play a fiddle, but she had an almost unmatched aptitude for separating rich men from their sometimes hardearned millions. She had a way of making wealthy but otherwise normal men feel like Mr. Canada.

  Mrs. Mays had one practice marriage before meeting Mr. Mays, and she must have taken the view that their union had to be demonstrably consummated because Billy Jr. was the only foal in her storied career. The three subsequent attempts at something approaching holy matrimony only further padded her assets. As much as Billy Jr. ever stood to make playing hockey, it’s likely he would have to be a first all-star five times before his net worth caught up to the trust funds of his mother’s lawyer’s children. And they were only in grade school.

  By all accounts, Mrs. Mays was only an occasional presence at Peterborough games. She spent most of the winter in the Caribbean and other time in Saint-Tropez. She had taken no role in her son’s development as a hockey player—though she was a shoe salesman’s daughter and grew up in a humble bungalow a block away from Ted Reeve Arena on Toronto’s east side, she considered hockey rinks intolerably proletarian. When Mays was taking little Billy to the rink, the then Mrs. Mays absented the abode for the racquet club, where the tennis pro served up what her husband couldn’t, not that the detectives he eventually hired could prove it.

  I guess I could have minded my own business, but if I were so inclined I’d be better in another line of work. The background noise of a messy family life can fog the minds of thirty-year-olds, never mind a kid barely out of high school who is about to be handed millions of bucks. I had to root around this other branch of Billy Jr.’s family tree.

  The former Mrs. Mays’s current husband, an only partially disgraced scion to a meat-packing empire, had to return to Toronto for a board meeting, an emergency session prompted by an outbreak of listeria. Presumably the production line was spoiled by a batch of swine with herpes or syphilis. I presumed, rightly, that the former Mrs. Mays would put in an appearance at the tennis club just to jangle her jewellery and catch up with the ponytailed Spaniard who gave her lessons. In some other more bawdy sense, she returned the favour.

  I knew one member of the Toronto Lawn Tennis Club: M.T. Smith, a former Los Angeles teammate. M.T. was a different cat. He was the only guy in the league who went by initials rather than a Christian name, and he was the only player in L.A. who took up surfing. He ended up with small bits in Hollywood films, the by-product of friendships he struck up at tennis clubs in SoCal. In fact, he even landed a role in a movie of the pro tennis tour. He played a Swedish middle-rank player with a booming serve. M.T. played the guitar and tennis. He always had something going on, bucks in a golf course here, a housing development there, a new line of equipment with his name. He made millions in the league and millions more in real estate back in the city of his birth.

  We’d been in a couple of jams off the ice and somehow talked our way out of them. I had managed to get him inside a couple of Hollywood parties with a simple “He’s with me” back when “me” counted for something in movie circles. I didn’t have to call in a favour to get him to bring me along as a guest to the club. He even went as far as to find out when the former Mrs. Mays had booked a lesson.

  “That’s her there,” M.T. said.

  “Jesus,” I said. “How does she get two hands on her racquet?”

  “Yeah, I know, it looks like she’s wearing tw
o deployed airbags.

  Her first husband was a plastic surgeon and she was his invention. Doris. We all say that’s ‘Double D Doris.’”

  “No wonder the kid turned out to be Superboy. The breastmilk he scarfed down was poured through a silicone filter.”

  M.T. and I hit a few balls on a neighbouring court. I never picked up a serious interest in the game, even when my ex had a supporting role in a romantic comedy that was set at a tony tennis club. I don’t have tennis whites or even a racquet of my own and I had to blow the cobwebs off my Adidas Stan Smiths, but still I could pass for an occasional player. Between points I managed to give her a “good shot” and a smile. She didn’t get five husbands plus à la carte items by ignoring flattery. She had a neediness that neither the Miss Canada title nor even Miss Universe could temporarily sate.

  She knew my buddy—he had been the realtor of record in several transactions spilling out of her divorce judgments. It wasn’t the hugest surprise that she made her way barside in the lounge after her lesson. Introductions were made. Things started to run their inevitable course. She was an equal opportunity flirt. She looked at M.T. and me and undressed us both, like she was wearing X-Ray Specs.

  “You were married to that actress, weren’t you?” she asked.

  “I was. I have a Cup ring too. Nobody asks about the ring.”

  I spied the rock on her third finger. Bigger than anything I saw in Hollywood.

  “I’ve actually watched your son play a lot of hockey this season. Our team has an interest in him. I’ve spoken to him several times. He’s a solid young man.”

  “Billy’s wonderful. I wish I could see him more than I do, but the game keeps him away so much. And in the summer, he feels he needs to be around an arena with a gaggle of like-minded kids. He told me that he couldn’t get a good game in Cape Cod in July.”

  The former Mrs. Mays had the wherewithal to make a good game happen in Cape Cod in July. She had the wherewithal to make an all-star game happen in the Netherlands Antilles on Christmas Day. She was happy that Billy was doing well at what he loved. She was otherwise happy that he did not encumber her.

  M.T. excused himself when his BlackBerry vibrated. “Better get this,” he said. “Feels like money.” Mrs. Mays air-kissed him and gave him a hug with a long stroke of his back.

  She invited me over for a drink. I told her I’d follow her car. She said it was okay to ride with her. Her driver was discreet. She hired him six months before her first implants.

  DIVORCIN’ DDORIS DIDN’T HAVE a life story, just serial resentments that she acted upon in her boudoir and elsewhere whenever she could. I originally presumed that DDoris was exploiting rich old men when she sicced her lawyer on them. Four hours after we left the tennis club I realized that she was effectively saving their lives when she pursued cancellation of their legal bond. I was pumping her for information about her son and she was plying me with martinis in her pied-à-terre, a fourth-floor walk-up downtown that she probably maintained through a Swiss bank account, a numbered company, or something or other that kept her husband of the moment utterly in the dark.

  She was under the impression that somehow I was a kept man out in Hollywood, and I did nothing to dissuade her—I figured if she saw me as a kindred spirit she’d be more willing to open up to me. “Open up” doesn’t start to cover it. After a couple of drinks Pour Us DDoris became Porous DDoris. Our tryst stretched into triple overtime, and she was at once ecstatic and unrelenting. She sat up in the saddle and rode me as if I were a mechanical bull. She was thoroughly uninhibited.

  Off in the distance I could hear a construction crew breaking up an outdated sidewalk. I figured the boys had knocked off for the day by hour four, the point at which DDoris had worked up a full head of steam and her sighs and moans had gone from porno quality to something like the MGM lion. Her pneumatic riding had lasted a good twenty minutes and the bounce of the epically constructed breasts was practically hypnotic. Pictures rattled on the walls. Unnoticed in the din was the fact that her violent thrashing was shifting the bed from one side of her bedroom to the other, a distance of fifteen or twenty feet, until it brought the headboard to an open window. For the life of me I thought the mattress was going to disassemble and I’d be skewered with a loosened spring. Thank God she didn’t knock over one of the hundred candles she lit as scene-setting for the event or the entire place would have been engulfed in flames, not that she would have noticed. At the end of her performance, her fourth orgasm in fifteen minutes, she fell onto my chest. She buoyantly rested there, her face eighteen inches above mine. At that point I heard applause from the street and then the start of jackhammers once more.

  Don’t get me wrong: I love Sandy, or something close to that. This, however, was something along the lines of taking one for the team, doing whatever it takes in the line of duty.

  “Maybe we could come to an understanding if your team takes on my son,” she said.

  I told her that would be great, something to look forward to. She probably knew the name of a good chiropractor too.

  She wanted to know about Hollywood. Everything. I suppose she wanted to add a mogul to her collection of former husbands. Getting on TMZ and in the tabs would be like her hanging out a shingle. It would open a whole new field of rich men who would covet her and young men who could change her oil.

  I opted for candour. I figured I’d give something up to get something back.

  “No matter how full it looks, it’s an empty place and people change on you,” I said. “Those you think you know best sometimes change the most. That’s what happened with me. Met a girl who was a military brat, then a small-town girl, then the teenage sweetheart on an after-school show, then a struggling movie actress. She gets one breakthrough role and files for divorce the day after getting an Oscar nomination.”

  “Looks full for her,” she said.

  “Does now, but wait. You walk into any respectable dinner theatre in SoCal and you can find an actress with an Oscar nomination on her credits and crow’s feet. Too much like hockey, I guess. You hang on until you forget what you’re hanging on for, something you’d never figure on when you’re in the clover.”

  “I want to be young forever,” she said, up to her earlobes in clover. “I work at it.”

  “Clearly, though it doesn’t seem like you go at it like it’s work.” I tried to push our discussion toward her second husband, father of her son. She didn’t conceal her distaste.

  “An angry little man,” she called him. This might have struck some as strange, given that the guy stands almost six feet tall. DDoris didn’t measure in inches, height-wise anyway. She measured in millions. William Mays counted his by tens, her most recent two husbands by hundreds. I supposed DDoris left a trail of angry men, big and small, as well as an exit line of satisfied boy toys who indulged her surreptitiously, at least to whatever degree you can keep her Sensurround earth-moving and banshee-wailing on the down low.

  “It was doomed, of course it was,” she said. “He had no special place for me, at least not until our son came along. After that, he spent all his time with him and that silly game. He always said that he wished to be the father that he never had. His father died of a heart attack when he was twelve. Dead away in a second. But he clung on to things, memories, in the worst way. He had these awful tin and plastic trophies left over from his own youth that he insisted on putting on the mantel beside Billy’s, like they were brothers. It was all so tasteless. Even when Billy was six or seven I thought the relationship, if that’s the word, was unhealthy. He didn’t do it for Billy. Billy wouldn’t fight him. He’d go to the rink, but at age three or four or five he was hardly in a position to put up any resistance …”

  I imagined a little more maternal involvement might have established a more balanced childhood, but I also imagined that she was astraddle a clay-court specialist from Madrid, a pro from the golf club who won the long-driving competition, or a busboy from the Granite Club.

  We c
ould have talked and frolicked all day but at 3 P.M. my BlackBerry pinged with a reminder. I had the promised date at Vito’s that night. I had to go.

  SHE LIT A SMOKE, my cue to bid farewell. My loins felt sandpapered but I was otherwise refreshed. As I was slipping my shoes on, I saw a tortoiseshell-framed photograph on the mantel: left to right, DDoris, Junior, and Ollie Buckhold. I didn’t think it remarkable at a glance. Buckhold was going to play a large role in her somewhat beloved son’s life. I remarked, “Ollie’s a good man.”

  “He’s a wonderful man,” DDoris said, lingering over the first syllable of “wonderful.” This was no standard character reference or testimonial.

  I shot her a sideways glance.

  “You like Ollie,” I said, “as an agent.”

  “I love him in every way imaginable,” she said.

  I was having trouble picturing him at the top of the list with regard to DDoris’s intimate feelings toward the opposite gender. She left no doubt with the way her eyes glazed over. She sighed.

  “I wish I had met him long ago. So much could be so different …”

  I held off saying that his innate sexuality might have been one of those never-to-be-changed items. I let her continue with her delusions, but they were better founded than I expected.

  “I recommended to my son that he sign with Oliver after we met privately,” she told me. “We have struck up a bond. Ollie is a regular visitor. As I hope you will be too.”

  I wasn’t about to explain the differences between Ollie and me, though anyone in hockey could have told you what Item Number One was.

 

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