by Gare Joyce
I took a run at the kitchen next. I thought Ma Storms might be charged with keeping tabs on Junior’s prescriptions. Nothing on the counters and shelves. Nothing in the glass bowl on the kitchen table or the ceramic one on top of the refrigerator. It was an orderly kitchen, everything in its place. There was no way that a pillbox would have fallen behind a bag of flour or a can of soup. Not even five minutes had passed. I knew I was now on the clock. There was every chance that one of the neighbours had called local law enforcement to alert them to the fact that a stranger was on Rainy Road. I went down to the basement apartment.
It was as I expected, an incomplete mess. One bed made, one not. Clothes, the less expensive ones, were strewn on one side of the room but not the other. Shiny sweats in garish colours with indecipherable words emblazoned were scattered like phosphorescent throw rugs.
I checked the bedside tables. Markov’s had a couple of Russian magazines on top, young celebs from Muscovite high society glaring out from their covers. Markov must have hoped that hockey would someday deliver him to that space or, better, deliver him one of the cover girls. I looked over to the table beside Mays’s bed. Copies of The Hockey News, Time, Newsweek, and Bloomberg Businessweek. Hockey News I could get. Even Businessweek I could get. There was probably some mention of Senior’s company or an article hyping his motivational courses. But Time and Newsweek I couldn’t figure out. Junior had to be the only self-respecting teenager who reads news weeklies. Maybe he started them in a doctor’s office and brought them home to finish.
I checked the drawers of Junior’s night table. Bingo. Three little brown plastic pill containers and one larger one, all with white caps. There was a snag, though. None of the containers were labelled. That was too curious to be kosher. Peterborough might be a throwback on every other count but the pharmacy had to be computerized. Even the local druggist would have labelled the scrips. There was a plain white paper bag, no scrip stapled to it. The drugs would have been from a chain store. One by one I opened up the plastic vials and put a pill from each in a Kleenex I pulled from a box on the night table.
I had what I wanted. I beat a retreat. I went back upstairs, grabbed my clipboard, and walked out the front door. I stopped on the sidewalk, leaned against the Rusty Beemer and speed-dialed Hunts. I didn’t tell him what I was up to, just that I was in Peterborough doing a little background on Junior. I could have made the call on the road, but I did it on the sidewalk to keep up appearances. I didn’t want to be seen making a quick getaway. I looked over my shoulder and saw a set of Venetian blinds snap shut.
45
* * *
I went to the L.A. database and looked up our team’s physician. I phoned him. No answer. I messaged him.
Can you ID pills if I send them along? Analysis or something like that …
I didn’t get a response for four hours. He must have just set out on the back nine. Finally I got a message back.
Why?
I dialed his cell at that point and he picked up.
“Humour me,” I said. “There are these four pills that this kid is taking and I want to know what they are.”
“Are you thinking they’re steroids or amphetamines?”
“I have an open mind about almost anything at this point except that I don’t think they’re for acne. The kid’s complexion is like a bar of Ivory soap.”
“What do they look like?”
“One little pink tablet, one little brown one, a bigger pink one, and a blue gel pill, sort of clearish.”
“You don’t have anything else to go on?”
“The kid passed out during a workout and they took him to the hospital.”
“That’s not a lot to go on.”
“I did say, ‘Humour me.’”
I heard him shout over his shoulder, “I’ll be right there.” I figured it had to be his designated driver.
“You can send them, but the little pink pill, wet your index finger and press on it a little and then press it against your tongue.”
I did as instructed. It tasted like canary shit. I told him that and said I didn’t think it was the right time to be playing practical jokes.
“No, no joke there, Bradley. It’s strychnine.”
“You’re trying to poison me.”
“No, it’s a blood thinner. The player is taking a blood thinner.” I uttered a profanity and repeated it. I can’t remember which one.
“The player has some sort of cardiac issue. Send me the pills if you want and I can probably piece it together for you.”
“I might do that. I’m gonna see if my father knows someone from the force who does this sort of stuff. If I can’t come up with anything, I’ll let you know.”
“You don’t know how delighted I am to be your second choice,” he said and then shouted, “Okay, okay, okay!” to his impatient ride. He hung up without a goodbye.
46
* * *
I didn’t want to ask Sarge. I didn’t want to compromise him in any way. I wanted to keep him out of it, but I needed him. I talked around it with him when we went out for a beer at the Merry Widow on a Monday afternoon. The junior season was over, but I had been making the rounds, catching our farm club in the playoffs go all the way to the finals and seeing if there were any minor-league journeymen who might be decent adds for next season. It was largely a time-wasting exercise. I didn’t have a game to work that night and my reports for the draft were 99 percent complete. The one remaining percent was what I was working on at that moment. I tried to make it seem like I wasn’t working. I offered up hypotheticals.
“If a guy was looking to figure out what a pill or two was, where could he go to get them analyzed?”
“University lab, I guess,” he said, biting down on a chicken wing with suicide sauce.
He munched away. I looked at playoff highlights on a flat screen. I thought for a second I must be getting a load on, but then realized that another of Nick’s TVs was in need of repair. I waited too long for a follow-up.
“Are you gonna ask me or not?” Sarge said.
“Ask what?”
“I don’t know what it is, but you haven’t invited me out for a beer on a Monday afternoon in your life and then you ask me about pills out of the thin blue sky. I don’t know about the quality of the people you work with and work for, but, Jesus, you mustn’t have to worry about being too obvious.”
My distance from him, my line of work, and my intelligence. Sarge got off a three-punch combination. I didn’t flinch.
“I’ll explain it to you later.”
“You can explain it to me now and pick up the tab.”
I did both. I gave him the story with as many details as I had at the time. I told him I had concerns about Junior. I told him that there had been an incident. I told him that my job and Hunts’s were riding on us not screwing up a first-round draft pick, a fourth overall pick to boot. I left out the bit about my inviting myself into Ma and Pa Storms’s chateau and putting the wood to DDoris. That would have invited another heaping helping of shame.
“I’ll just take it to my pharmacist.”
“That’s it?” I said.
“That’s it. He’ll do a favour for me. If you’re straight with people they’ll do you a favour. One. Just one. I don’t suspect that I’ll ever have to ask for another one from him. You don’t have a pharmacist who’d do you a favour?”
“Sadly, no.”
“You should be a little more sociable.”
Sarge wasn’t much on lectures but was willing to make an exception here. I drained my pint of Guinness and didn’t savour it.
I WENT WITH Sarge to the small neighbourhood family pharmacy where he’s done his business since he enrolled in the academy. The short-back-and-sides old guy in the white jacket and nicely knotted tie greeted Sarge. It was a good thing that the old guy was on and not one of his kids or younger assistants. It would have been much tougher to finesse a favour out of a less familiar figure. The limits of Sarge’s sociabil
ity weren’t going to be tested here.
“It’s a little unofficial investigation,” Sarge said. “We’re wondering if you could ID these pills.”
The pharmacist peered at them through his thick bifocals. “What do you know about the fellah who’s taking them or who prescribed them?”
“Blank page,” Sarge said.
“We think that one’s a blood thinner.”
The pharmacist did the same taste test. Same bird flew into his mouth and defecated. “Coumadin, blood thinner,” he said. “So much for my coffee.”
He walked into the back washroom, poured his takeout cup down the sink, and then rinsed his mouth out.
“I owe you a coffee,” Sarge said.
“The guy who took these collapsed,” I said.
Sarge gave me a dirty look. He thought I had quickened the pace too much to be sociable. It didn’t matter, though. The old pharmacist went behind the back counter and moved around. Unseen drawers and containers were opened and shut. This was going to be less work than Sarge and I had anticipated. I’d envisioned that the samples would have to be sent away.
“This one is amiodarone,” the pharmacist said. He pushed the big pill across the table.
“He had a lot more of those than the others,” I told him.
“That would make sense,” he said. “The fellah was probably on a higher dosage. This is a 200 mil, and at the start of treatment you’d take 400 or 600 mils daily. After that you’d drop down to one pill a day. I see a lot of scrips for this. The cardio clinic is next door.”
“What’s it for?” I asked.
“He’ll get around to it,” Sarge said.
“It regulates heart rhythm,” the pharmacist said. “This one is a beta blocker, something that slows the heart rate down. The other lowers blood pressure, gives the left ventricle less resistance, as it were, just makes it easier to pump out blood. This is basically what you’d see for someone who has an arrhythmia—an irregular heartbeat. Co-morbidities might be heart enlargement or things along those lines. The blood thinner prevents clots if the blood flow isn’t what it should be.”
I didn’t need just the standard product advisory. I needed to know how this was going to play out, what it would mean down the line for Junior, for the team that was looking to take him.
“So if you started out on these …”
“You could feel very nauseated with the amiodarone, that’s for sure.”
“Even an athlete?”
“Even an athlete.”
“What could you do if you started out on this stuff?”
“Bed rest would be best, but you’d have to take it easy until you were finished with the loading. Sometimes the heart kicks back into rhythm and it’s a one-off. Could there be more to it than that? Sure, but I’m in no position to say.”
“If he’s an athlete, it might be a risky condition,” I said.
“It might be anything,” he said. He was tired of speculating.
Sarge gave me a look. I had to ask, though.
“So it might be a problem for his athletic career going forward,” I said. I offered it up. The old pharmacist hit it like a piñata.
“It might be a problem for his life going forward. It’s a heart issue.”
It was the best I could do without a doctor, probably a specialist, and the lab work. I could get a specialist. Our team doctor could refer me to one. The lab work was another issue. At that moment I knew that I had seen it from a distance. It had to be the file that William Mays Sr. carried out of Hanratty’s office, that caused him to spill his coffee, that he dumped in the trash. What it contained was a question. One guy who knew the answer was the one who gave it to Senior that night and drew his last breath a few hours later. It had to be something less than a clean bill of health.
It sure as hell explained Hanratty’s last words to Junior: You’ll go on to great things, hockey or not. You’re part of this team even when you’re not on the ice. The kid thought Hanratty was saying farewell, like he had some sort of fatalistic foreknowledge. Nix. The Ol’ Redhead was just trying to soften Junior’s landing with the imminent end of his career. Bones and Hanratty probably didn’t want to tell the kid on his own because Junior didn’t turn eighteen until July. He was still a minor, and with something as major as a serious cardiac issue, a doctor and even a crusty old coach wouldn’t have wanted to break the news to him without a parent present. And probably they’d have wanted to tell the father first so that he could figure out how to tell his son that it was game over and the first day of the rest of his life.
The file: Senior takes the file saying that he wants to break the news to Junior away from the arena. Or maybe he says that he wants to take the test results to a specialist for a second opinion. I’m leaning toward Door Number One. I liked the idea of Senior telling the two old guys that he wanted to have a heartto-heart with Junior about his heart.
Was Senior capable of a show of bogus compassion? Probably the only kind of compassion he was capable of.
47
* * *
“What more can you tell us?”
I winced. I had gone through the story of Mays’s meds with our team doctor and a heart specialist who was a member at the same golf club and had never been to a hockey game in his life. They were on speakerphone. I had given them all the details, as much as I knew them. I had given them the files but I had blacked out Mays’s name. That didn’t matter to them, and it mattered to me to keep the circle as small as possible. The drugs as identified by the pharmacist. The sequence of events: Junior’s collapse, his hospitalization, the ordering of tests, the shutdown from training, his complaints about nausea and fatigue.
“Everything but a smoking gun,” the specialist said.
“Or a blood-stained cinder block,” I said.
“What?” the specialist said.
I didn’t explain. The whole deal seemed like too much of a coincidence for me. It smelled, no reeked, of cover-up for motive. But all we had was the kid being on these meds. Not a diagnosis.
“It could well be a single irregular episode,” the specialist said. “The treatment seems aggressive, but maybe it’s been effective.”
Our team doctor chimed in. “Brad, I have the reports from the combine and I’ve shown them to Stan. It says the kid’s heartbeat is regular. The blackout episode isn’t noted. Not an arrhythmia. No mention of it. As for the drugs, no mention of them.”
Yeah, I supposed that mention was in the file folder and in the trash.
“Brad, is there anything more you can tell us?”
“Let me think,” I said. I felt like I was on the clock on Jeopardy! and had gone into brain lock. I thought back to my last medical. Back to the questions that I’ve been asked. They’ve all been pretty mundane. Drinking yeah, smoking no, drugs no. Going back, going through some unfortunate by-products of the magnetic force generated by sports celebrity, a pocketful of cash, and reasonable looks, I was asked about sexual activity. The problem was a treatable infectious condition. The truth was less than the interviewing doctor expected. He wanted a little vicarious entertainment, but the source was hardly hot- and cold-running women. It was something that I’d picked up from the mother of my child after she’d been on location with the junkie actor who took my place.
My mind raced but I was on a treadmill. I was getting nowhere. I thought again about that condition. I felt a little twist in my boxers. I thought that stress might have been causing the long-dormant condition to break out again. Maybe it was a late gift from DDoris. And I felt the existential dread that maybe, maybe, it was a condition I had regifted to Sandy. Thankfully, no, my boxers were just bunched up. As Sarge would say, my knickers were twisted.
DDoris. She talked about the way William Mays smothered little Billy when she thought she deserved her husband’s undivided attention. She talked about how William thought he should have had a career in hockey and that Peterborough had been an awful experience. It was DDoris who wanted and needed the smothe
ring. I was off the treadmill.
“The kid’s mom told me that his grandfather on the father’s side died young,” I said. “Bad heart.”
The specialist waited a second to process this information. “Bad heart? Exactly what?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, that’s interesting,” the specialist said. I imagined him doing the physician’s chin stroke on the other end. He sounded detached and bemused, as if he had been contemplating a crossword, One Across, five letters with the clue being The stakes in l’affaire Billy Mays Jr. and he had been given the first letter of m. If he cheated and looked it up he would have found the solution: my job. If One Down were six letters with the clue being What an adverse diagnosis might explain in Peterborough, he’d have been left puzzling over a couple of words until more letters came in. As it stood, the word could have been either motive or murder.
“I’m not worried about a hard and fast diagnosis, Doc,” I said. “I just need to know what we’re looking at on the scale, y’know, from the possible to the probable to the very likely.”
The specialist took a deep breath, feeling the safety of not being held accountable or liable. I guess he needed that out of the way. In his day-to-day job he could take a wild stab when it came to putting the paddles to a guy’s chest or doing an angioplasty or worse.
“Well, it has to be something, obviously, just taking the medication into consideration,” the specialist said. “They’re very strong drugs with significant side effects. They aren’t prescribed loosely. Certainly with amiodarone, you don’t want to keep anyone on it for any length of time as it can cause liver damage. So it’s something. Was it a one-time cardiac incident? I’d put that in the possible category. With family history, though, it would take follow-up …”