Sudden Death fk-7

by William X. Kienzle

  “No, no. It is terribly important that you continue to keep this to yourself.” Harris was unsure how most effectively to extend the embargo on the knowledge of Hunsinger’s colorblindness. He decided to tread lightly; Murray seemed likely to react better to trust than to threats. “We can’t reveal the reason for this secrecy just yet. But it is most important to our investigation that you go right on keeping it a secret.”

  Murray nodded, as if he had turned a key in his brain. The Hun’s secret defect would remain unrevealed by him.

  “One final thing,” said Ewing, “can you tell us what you did yesterday?”

  “Ummm. . I can. I think. Let’s see; we got up about half-five; went to six o’clock Mass. It’s over by seven. . no sermon, ya know. Too early. Left home about quarter past seven. Got to the inn just at eight. Had the pregame meal. Got taped up. Attended the special team’s meeting. Then it was out to the stadium. Got suited up. Then there was the warmups and the game.”

  “And after the game?” Ewing had not bargained on such detail.

  Murray blushed slightly. “Well, then, I shoulda gone straight home. But I didn’t. .”

  “Oh?”

  “Some of the lads convinced me we all needed some-what did they call it? — comin’ down from a high. So they took me to this party in Grosse Pointe. And I ‘m afraid I had a mite too much to drink.” He decided to omit the girl and the cocaine. After all, they had not passed the stage of being temptations, and he hadn’t actually used either one. “But then, before I did anything more foolish, Bobby Cobb came by and took me home where the wife got in her licks as well.”

  Ewing looked up. He’d been taking notes. “That pretty well covers the whole day, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s what you asked for, wasn’t it?” Murray seemed embarrassed, as if he had revealed more than was required. “You wanted to know what it was I did yesterday, did you not?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Ewing. “That’s what we wanted to know.”

  “Will that be all then?” Murray had worked up a sweat while running and wanted to take a shower before catching a chill.

  Ewing dismissed him with an admonition to remain available for further questioning.

  Murray trotted down the incline toward the locker room. Hindsight told him, especially now that the Hun was dead, that all his suspicions about his relationship with Hunsinger had been accurate. Even that bit of advice the Hun had given before the field goal in yesterday’s game. Murray had been bothered on and off since then, wondering whether it might be a sin to think of doing it with your wife without actually doing it. He thought he’d ask some priest. He was pretty sure what the priests back home would say. But the priests over here appeared to be more liberal. Maybe he’d get a chance to ask that Father Koesler. He seemed to be the sort of priest you could trust.

  “How about that!” said Ewing. “The only one so far who admits he knew Hunsinger was colorblind. . and he’s got an alibi for all day.”

  “Do you take his word for it?” Koesler asked.

  Ewing smiled. “Oh, no. Not any of them. We’re just gathering statements. Then we’ll check each one’s story. Somewhere in this crowd is the murderer. And the murderer will lie. He-or she-has to. But we’ll break it down and get whoever it is.”

  “We’d better get to the trainer before he closes shop for the day,” said Harris.

  “Right you are.”

  The three men walked toward the locker room. There was an eerie stillness in the huge, empty stadium. Koesler was relieved to leave it.

  It wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fair. That was all the boy could think. His father agreed, but that was not his only thought.

  The doctor had just been in the boy’s room and delivered the prognosis. The boy had a heart murmur so pronounced and so potentially threatening that there could be no thought of strenuous exercise in his future.

  That was what was not fair. Young Jack Brown had been destined for a life of sports stardom. Everyone agreed on that. His father had pushed him along that trail from preschool days. When Jack reached the fourth grade, he was already bigger and stronger than his classmates. By bending a few rules, he played on the seventh- and eighth-grade extramural athletic teams from the time he was a sixth grader. By the time he was in the eighth grade, a Dallas high school coach thought enough of Jack’s ability that the coach moved the Brown family into his school district so that Jack could play there.

  Then, during summer vacation between sophomore and junior years, he was stricken with polio. In 1944 many who contracted polio died. So young Jack Brown was extremely fortunate to be alive. That was the thought uppermost in his father’s mind.

  Yes, it was not fair that such a budding athletic career should be ruined by a chance exposure to that dread disease. At the same time, they were lucky to have Jack still with them.

  In due time, Jack was released from the hospital and returned to his school. Not long after the scholastic year began, football practice commenced. Jack could do no more than stand on the sidelines and watch his former teammates go through the drills. It hurt. But by then, he had pretty well adjusted to a life without the heady joy and challenge of athletic competition. He had no idea what he would do with that life.

  The coach had a difficult time concentrating on practices with his best player reduced to a spectator. One day he asked Jack if he would accept the position of team manager. After talking the offer over with his parents, Jack took on the job. At least it would keep him close to the sports he loved.

  There had never before been a team manager for this south Dallas school. So the job became defined as Jack performed it. He took care of the equipment, brought drinks onto the field, applied iodine and calamine lotion, and made some bandages. There was a scarcity of tape because of the war.

  It was the beginning of a new career. Jack was awarded a partial scholarship at the University of Houston to act as assistant trainee in the university’s sports program. In 1951 he graduated with a degree in physical science.

  Finding a job as a professional trainer was a larger problem than Jack had anticipated. He might not have caught on anywhere had it not been for a few Texas coaches and trainers-friends of Jack’s-and their interest in and intercession for him. But through them and their sports contacts, Jack uncovered several promising leads. Nothing outstanding, mind; after all, he was just a fresh college grad with no professional experience.

  Interviews with some Canadian football teams proved largely unproductive. Some offers were made, but the money was always less than he needed for sustenance as well as to satisfy debts he had incurred while attending college.

  Finally, he was hired as an assistant trainer for the New York Rangers hockey club. It was a sport with which he was largely unfamiliar, but hockey players needed conditioning and incurred injuries just as did football players. Hockey players, since they were on skates, did not hit, clutch, and hold each other as violently as did footballers, but there were the boards around the rink into which the skaters were regularly slammed. And in those days, players did not wear the helmets and masks popular today. Pucks traveling around a hundred miles per hour wreaked their own special damage on exposed heads and teeth.

  It was while Jack was with the Rangers that he met and grew to admire Gordie Howe, the durable and memorable winger of the Detroit Red Wings.

  It was also while in New York that Jack met several of the better boxing trainers, known more popularly as corner men. New York then was the world capital of prizefighting. Some of the trainers were generous enough to teach Jack how they taped their fighters’ hands; how to get the protection where it was needed without cutting off circulation or restricting movement; how to slip the strips between the fingers. From that time, Jack’s football players would have their hands taped after the fashion of prizefighters.

  After serving his apprenticeship with the Rangers, Jack was hired by Ball State University through the good auspices of then assistant coach Buck Bradford, who ha
d followed Jack’s career from his high school days. Bradford, who had great confidence in Jack’s ability, integrity, and understanding of athletes, took him along as Bradford became head coach at Texas A amp; M, then Oklahoma, and now the Cougars.

  Jack Brown watched his profession evolve over the years he practiced it. In his early days, it was carrying water and fixing bandages over cuts. Then it moved on to ice packs, towels, hot packs, and massages. Trainers were expected to acquire something of a pharmacist’s expertise in pills and linament.

  Then came the National Athletic Trainers Association and its board of certification. At one time, the title, Certified Athletic Trainer, was, in an exercise of cronyism, passed on to a very few veteran male athletic trainers. Now, the initials AT,C after one’s name were highly sought after and awarded only after long and demanding scholarly study and practice.

  Those associated with Jack Brown professionally knew that he admirably fulfilled the responsibilities of an up-to-date athletic trainer, whose functions were to prevent athletic trauma and treat any conditions that might adversely affect the health or performance of an athlete. Such functions included management-first aid, evaluation, treatment, and rehabilitation-of athletic trauma or other medical problems that affected the athlete, as well as counseling the athlete in such health-related areas as nutrition, relaxation, and tension-control and personal health habits.

  Trainers were expected to be able to manage and operate such therapeutic agencies and procedures as hydrocollator, hydrotherapy, dinthermy, ultrasound, cryotherapy, cryokinetics, contrast bath, paraffin bath, and infrared, manipulative, and ultraviolet therapy.

  In short, Jack Brown exemplified the modern athletic trainer who has made the long journey from water-bucket brigade to just this side of a medical degree.

  But of all the expertise he had acquired in his years as trainer, that of which he was most proud was, oddly, taping. No mean skill, it involved not only the routine taping of ankles-required even for practices-but the building of castlike pads, made of fiber glass, covered with a protective layer of foam rubber and held together with tape.

  Like most trainers, Brown was dedicated to his players, to their conditioning and rehabilitation. He could never forget the disease that had robbed him of a playing career and from which, for him, there had been no rehabilitation. He found no greater joy than to nurse an athlete from a position on the shelf to a spot in the active lineup.

  That was why he simply could not understand Hank Hunsinger. Brown had encountered bad-tempered people in his long career. He had known athletes who were the antithesis of the grateful lion from whose paw Androcles had pulled the thorn.

  But Hunsinger-bent to destroy other athletes-was something else. Brown had never taken any courses in psychology, and had never regretted the lacuna until he met Hunsinger. The Hun was sick, Brown had at length concluded, but it was a sickness that was impervious to massage, a whirlpool bath, or the panacea of taping. And while Brown fretted over what to do about this condition, Hunsinger roamed about seeking teammates to devour.

  Most recently, the victims were the two rookies, Hoffer and Murray. Hoffer, after a bad start, seemed to be handling Hunsinger adequately. But Murray seemed to be more easily led into Hunsinger’s world of wretched conditioning, debauchery, and chemical dependency.

  There was no turning away from it; something had to be done. But what? Since the bad influence Hunsinger was having on the team resulted in poor conditioning and, as a result, in injuries, it seemed to Brown it was up to him to rectify the situation.

  That would mean, as far as he could figure, something would have to happen to Hunsinger. But after all these years of repairing and healing bodies, could Brown bring himself to a denial of everything he stood for?

  Harris, Ewing, and Koesler stood outside the training cubicle wherein a player was consulting with Brown.

  Koesler studied the closed door. A series of cartoons had been taped to it. Many had turned yellowish-brown with age. Two were at his eye level. Both were by an artist named Cochran and looked as if they had been clipped from USA Today. One showed a coach admonishing a huge player, saying, “You’re a sadistic bully who has no compassion for his fellow man, Foswell. I like that in a linebacker.”

  The other depicted a coach saying to a trainer on the sidelines, “Jones has a broken leg. Go out and spray it.”

  He could abide someone who lived his life by cartoons. Koesler felt he himself frequently did.

  Shortly after he had asked them to wait until he had finished, Brown dismissed the player and invited them into his office.

  The initial interrogation of Brown proved predictable. He knew of Hunsinger’s obsessions, his astigmatism, that he showered again at home after the games, and that he had a supply of strychnine in his apartment. Brown gave no indication that he knew of Hunsinger’s colorblindness.

  Neither Harris nor Ewing expected any more. The only real surprises so far had been Hoffer’s explanation of how Hunsinger had acquired the strychnine, and Murray’s admission that he knew the dead man had been colorblind.

  One more question and they would move into the second phase of the interrogation: getting the subjects to talk about each other.

  “One more thing,” said Ewing, “would you tell us what you did yesterday? Be as complete and thorough as you can.”

  Brown reflected momentarily. “I got to the inn about six-thirty in the morning. I always get an early start, especially on game days. The guys started showing up about seven-thirty. We had something to eat. Then I started taping. The guys take turns eating and getting taped. Then about ten, I came here to the stadium to get ready to apply the special braces, get out the medication-things like that.

  “The team started getting here about noon. We did the final taping. Then there was the game. After that a few guys needed some first aid. I checked out some injuries that would need the doc’s attention. Then there was the cleaning up.

  “I left here about eight, eight-thirty and went right home and had some dinner.”

  “I see,” said Ewing. “Was there anyone at the inn when you got there at. . uh. . six-thirty?”

  “My assistant got there just a few minutes after I did.”

  “How about when you left here last night at about eight or eight-thirty?”

  “Again, my assistant.”

  “How about that period in midmorning?” Harris asked. “What was it-you said you left the inn to come here about ten and the players didn’t get here till about noon. Anybody with you then?”

  “No, I came alone.”

  “Nobody here when you got here? Anybody here at all between ten and noon?”

  “No.”

  “Anybody see you come in?”

  “Maybe. But I don’t remember seeing anybody.”

  “So you were alone here for a couple of hours, but there isn’t anybody can attest to that?”

  “I guess so. I had to get things ready here for the game. . like I told you. Is there anything wrong with that?”

  “Not yet. Did you notice any of the players show up late at the inn yesterday morning?”

  “Sure. There’s almost always a few.”

  “Hoffer and Cobb among the late arrivals?” Ewing resumed his questioning.

  Brown nodded. “Near as I can remember, Hoffer said something about going to church, and Bobby had a flat. Didn’t matter. Coach chewed ’em out.”

  “How did Cobb and Hunsinger get on?”

  “Okay, I guess. There’s always a kind of special relationship builds up between a quarterback and his receivers. The longer they stay on the same team, a kind of-whatchamacallit-ESP builds up.

  “See, like during a play, a pass play, let’s say the blocking breaks down and the receiver has already run his pattern. They could be separated twenty-thirty yards, but about then a good quarterback may want the receiver to come back for the ball. The receiver, if he’s on the same wavelength, sort of senses this and comes back for the ball. It’s amazing. I�
��ve seen it work quite a few times. It worked between Bobby and the Hun. But Bobby is a good quarterback and the Hun is-was-a good receiver.

  “’Course, there wasn’t a helluva lot of love lost between them. That happens. But they were able to communicate on the field.”

  “So,” Ewing tried to sum up, “you’d say they were able to anticipate each other.”

  “Kinda.”

  “How about Hunsinger and Hoffer?”

  “Well, Hoff played behind the Hun, so that didn’t make for all that friendly a relationship. In the beginning of this season, seemed like the Hun tried to take Hoff under his wing, but it seemed Hoff wasn’t havin’ any of it. ’Course, Hoff played behind guys in the past-high school, college. Even tried out with a couple of pro teams before this year. So he knows what it is to have to wait your turn.”

  “How about the owner, Jay Galloway. . and the general manager. How’d they get along with Hunsinger?”

  Brown shrugged. “They don’t get taped.”

  In spite of himself, Ewing smiled. “I know you’re not as close to them as you are to the players, but it’s a team; you must have some opinion on their relationship with Hunsinger.”

  “Depends on what time of the season you’re talkin’ about. Around contract time, Mr. Whitman didn’t think too kindly of the Hun. He drove a hard bargain, a real hard bargain.”

  “And Galloway?”

  Brown put the adhesive tape he’d been toying with on the shelf. “Pretty well known Mr. Galloway wanted the Hun on the field at all possible times. Thought a goodly percentage of the fans came out to see the Hun. Mr. Galloway’s probably takin’ this pretty hard.”

  “You agree with him? About all those people coming out to see the Hun?”

  Brown shook his head. “Guess I’ve seen too many come and go. Franchises somehow survive the players.”

  “And how did you and Hunsinger get on?”

  Brown paused, then shook his head. “The Hun was no malingerer. He took his licks-gave some too-and came back for more. He knew there were lots of strong, fast kids out there achin’ for his job. He was a good player, far as that went.