The Code (6 page)

Seventeen-year-old Billy Mays Jr., the Peterborough mayor, and Giuseppe Visicale were going to be dropping the puck for the photo-op opening faceoff, and it was the ironing-boardstiff Waspy mayor and the glowering, gold-chained Sicilian who looked star-struck. On the sidelines applauding were the mayor's enablers, the geriatric town councillors, and Visicale's posse, a couple of thumb-breakers and his
consigliere
. The applause for the mayor and the hockey boss was polite. A thunderous roar
went up for Mays, and he gave a wave that made it seem like he'd done this all his life.

Standing on the blueline while they rolled out the red carpet, I got a laugh out of Hank Royden, a scout for Montreal. “What's wrong with this kid that he can't sing the anthem?” In the folds of scar tissue under his visor Royden rolled his eyes. “Too pretty to play this game,” quoth he. The gods of the game won't punish Royden, for he knew not what he was saying.

Those teenagers who are destined for a big place in the game get it. They do the right things. They say the right things. They know the dressing-room etiquette like they wrote it. Polite. Deferential. Comfortable in their own skin. Well turned out in appearance. Social. So it was with this kid. Meeting the legends pre-game, he didn't walk around the room so much as glide. Tomlin buddy-buddied him, acting like he'd been the kid's best friend going back to kindergarten, and the kid suffered it—
nota bene
, this high school kid wasn't impressed by Tomlin and knew that he shouldn't be. That's genius-level social intelligence needed to handle all the crap that's inevitable when you convene a couple dozen egos on a daily basis with millions at stake.

He was accompanied on the tour of the room by his father, William Mays Sr., who had once been a player in Peterborough and was now a player of a different sort: a guy who wore ten-thousand-dollar suits and stared out smugly from the cover of business magazines that promised to reveal the secrets of his investment successes. On this count they failed, but they did manage to fully portray his vanity (dramatic changes in appearance that might be traced back to a plastic surgeon's office, a syringe full of testosterone, and a bottle of Grecian Formula), his ostentatious lifestyle (an over-the-top mansion on Post Road that had riled powerful neighbours enough that it ended up as a landmark city bylaw case), and his love of the usual expensive
toys (a collection of vintage sports cars and a Rolls to run household errands in).

William Mays knew how one company could swallow up another for fun and profit and, if his critics were to be believed, how a CEO could raid a pension fund. I don't know about that, but he did know hockey. He had gone around the room, knew our names. It seemed like millions and billions demanded that work never stop—he had fumbled a file folder and a vibrating iPhone, spilling his coffee on my sweater, when he extended a thick right mitt for a vise-like handshake. He posed for pictures standing beside each of us: He was being tailed by a photographer and an authorized biographer for what was sure to be the bestselling business book of the coming season. He went up on his tiptoes just before the flash.

I find it hard to be impressed by a kid who grows up with all the advantages, but I was by Billy Jr. He was snagged by the local radio reporter for an interview and sounded more professional than the guy asking the questions (and, it goes almost without saying, than Harley Hackenbush). He went into great detail about his shoulder, sprained and bruised “but no damage to the rotator cuff. This sling is strictly precautionary. I could be out of it this week after I go in for an assessment.” He won the league's academic award last season and was a lock to win it again. Carrying a full load of math and science. Story goes that he finished in the top ten of the provincial high school math competition. Fluently bilingual. Christ, why don't we just make the kid the commissioner and be done with it? (A: overqualified.)

His father had played for Red Hanratty and scored fifteen goals in his one season in junior. The old man did get full marks for turning out a kid like this, though. Maybe the mother was a player—happens more than you know. Either way, I figured, you had to give sire and mare a lot of credit for turning out this colt.

After the game I snagged Spike, the long-time Peterborough trainer, for an icepack for the road and dropped Mays's name. If you ever want the unvarnished truth, the most likely source, the one without an agenda, is a team's trainer. This, however, was a testimonial. I swear, Spike's tears flowed as a rivulet along an eighty-four-stitch scar where he caught a skate blade in his playing days. “As good as he's been for us, it'll be hard to see him move on, but there's nothing more we can do for him here,” he said. I figure I could spend two lifetimes in the game and never meet another trainer going wistful on me.

“When that kid came down with mono last fall he wanted to be on the ice the next day,” Spike said. “We had to fight 'im to get 'im to rest like he was supposed to. When he came back, he played as hard as any two kids in the league. Just an unlucky break, him doing up his shoulder and all. Maybe it was for the best. He was working real hard—skating, the bike, lower-body work that no kid would get through—to get ready for the playoffs, and I guess he wasn't really over the mono when he came back in November. They had to shut him down cold the other day. I dunno when he's back.”

Work ethic, three check marks. I asked Spike what the downside was, because there always had to be one. “Meddling father and a divorced mother who's a piece of work,” he said. It meant nothing to me. Every coach or trainer thinks a kid has meddling parents unless he's an orphan. As for the mother being a piece of work, Spike would never be up to the job with any skirt. Given his trade, days pass without a woman speaking to him unless she's asking him, “More coffee?” His bosses were old men, his charges teenage boys, and women were on the other side of the Plexiglas. Alas, a lot like the found-ins at the Muddy Waters.

Barside, I tried to encapsulate the background check in 140
characters or less. I looked at the draft taps and saw the handle of the Irish brew that's my private stock at my local.

I heard the kid fart and it sounded like a harp.

I hit Send and looked up at the widescreen. A fight between two knuckleheads in the league. Oh yet again, the elemental soul of the game, I thought. Just at that point my eyes drifted down to the news scroll at the bottom of the screen. I wanted to see who'd scored for us against Calgary. The scroll of game scores and goal scorers gave way to a news flash.

BREAKING NEWS: JR. COACH RED HANRATTY RUSHED TO HOSPITAL.

I didn't think much of it, really. The old guy overcome by a toxic level of nostalgia, I figured. Maybe he was laughing so hard at some old joke that he choked on his cigar and needed his stomach pumped.

I'
VE NEVER
been a good sleeper. Guys in the league generally play, eat, chase skirts, and sleep, that being in ascending order. They can nod off on command, like a volunteer drawn up to the stage by a hypnotist. A snap of the fingers and they're out like a light. I've seen guys grab a quick zees on a ten-minute bus ride from the team hotel to the arena. Guys might be able to play without skate laces but not without an afternoon nap.

I have no idea how they do it. In the bus leagues I couldn't sleep on overnight rides. On red-eyes there's only one light on in the cabin and I'm sitting there hoping in vain that a historical bio will help me nod off. I know guys in the league who've struggled every once in a while but eventually straighten it out in a day or two. I'm a disaster when it comes to sleep. I guess it's some rogue gene that prevents me from ever getting my circadian rhythms
back in beat. Some people have vivid memories of great views they've seen in their travels. Me, I bring back indelible images of smoke detectors and sprinklers on the ceilings above the hotel room beds.

Three pints brought me down only so far after the old-timers game and the ninety-minute drive back to Toronto. I knew there was no point going straight to bed. I knew there'd be a couple of messages on the phone but they would have to wait. Nothing I'd hear would help me sleep any better. I went to my laptop and opened my sked for games to scout over the last weeks of March.

Given my GM's interest in Mays, it seemed incumbent on me to book a couple of extra viewings of the wunderkind when he made it back from an injured shoulder, preferably not back in Peterpatch. Nothing against the town, mind you, just that I prefer to see a player of interest on the road, where his team won't have last change so he'll face a tougher matchup. In that situation you're more likely to see best on best—any coach, Red Hanratty included, will want his best against some poor, hopelessly overmatched sixteen-year-old. And I prefer to see a player of interest in back-to-back games, even in the third game in three nights, situations that are a physical challenge. It's a good measure of their toughness, physically and psychologically.

I checked Peterborough's next ten games and saw three dates that worked for me—the first was the coming weekend, a Saturday-afternoon tilt in Oshawa (nice rivalry game on the heels of Ottawa in P'boro Friday night). The other two I logged in, but to tell you the truth I can't remember what they were. I didn't go to them the way things panned out. Things went sideways with my plans.

My phone rang. Hunts. It was 3
A
.
M
., but our last text exchange had been about half an hour before.

He never bothered with the Hi-how-are-yous. When he called you it was always like he'd been sitting beside you for four hours on the team bus. Short and disgruntled.

“I know it's late but I knew you'd be up and even if you weren't I'm your boss.”

“That's yes, yes, and yes,” I said. It didn't register. Like so much of my side in our conversations. But the GM knew me well enough not to slow down to parse it.

“So what happened?”

“How far do you want me to go back? To the big bang theory?”

“Asshole. What happened tonight?”

“I was the youngest guy on the ice and I'm hurting worse than any of them right now. I'm ready to upgrade to Tylenol 3.”

“Not you, asshole. What the fuck happened with Red Hanratty?”

“You got me.”

Pause. I heard guys shouting in the background and then realized it was the chatter of his car radio. Hunts always listened to the hockey station on satellite radio on the drive home.

Then my memory kicked in to the bulletin on the scroll.

“I guess they took him to hospital.”

“They just said Red Hanratty died.”

I gave my head a shake. Cobwebs off.

“Who is ‘they'?”

“The
HockeyCentre
guys. Didn't say the cause. It's already out there on Twitter.”

“You're shitting me.”

“I'm not shitting you. You didn't know?”

“I just left after the game. Drove home.”

“Makes me wonder what else you miss in your reports.” He paused, like he was waiting for the rimshot.

“What's the big shock. He's seventy-something …”

I continued in the present tense because this didn't sound like a done deal. It might have been a bad rumour in a business rife with them.

“… and his diet has been fortified by cigars, kegs of beer, and ten thousand bags from Rotten Ronnie's after-game dining. It's a miracle he was breathing, never mind coaching.”

Another pause. That's the GM's business-conversation style. I kept going. “Maybe it was something that they knew was coming. Maybe that's why they had that game, knowing he had some health deal …”

“Hold on, gotta take this.”

Since he landed the corner office in L.A. we've never had a conversation that wasn't interrupted by an incoming call, a message from the field, whatever. I heard my refrigerator gurgle. That's not good, I thought.

A minute later he came back on the line.

“You might have to rethink, sleuth,” he said.

“How's that?” I said.

“The natural causes thing. They found him on the asphalt beside his car in the parking lot. Supposedly beaten up. Likewise the team doctor. Dead as doornails, too. That doesn't exactly sound like some health deal, Sherlock.”

Key word, I thought:
supposedly
. I had nothing to say at this point. Hadn't really processed this. I should have seen where the conversation was going.

“Look, if Hanratty is dead, this is gonna be a big deal and every team in the league will be sending somebody to the funeral to represent them …”

Yeah, I know the drill. I didn't get it at first but it's a professional courtesy that guys in the game notice. If you want your team to get respect, you have to show it sometimes. If you're a GM or an AGM of a team, you don't want to do business
with another outfit that is a herd of asses. No, you want to do business with guys who are good citizens of the game. I did a mental inventory of the L.A. staff and none of us had played for Hanratty. About half our staff came up in the Western league— our Prairie GM looking after his own. In fact, my small connection to Hanratty was more direct than anyone else's.

“… I'm up to my asshole in alligators out here and I'm not sure the owner would want me missing one of our games. I gotta get you to go to the funeral.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. I had no great enthusiasm and didn't bother pretending. I have to drive an hour and a half each way so that I could mourn a guy who didn't even recognize me. But I have to admit that my antennae were twitching: Who would have iced the Grand Old Man of the Game?

A stick is all sharp edges. A skate creases your flesh and you're at the hospital getting 137 stitches. (The skates that Spike sharpens in Peterborough are sharper than the one that left a seam in his grill thirty years ago.) Hockey has a lot of things but there's a surfeit of blunt objects. And a blunt object is what the Peterborough police said brought about Hanratty's demise. A blunt object that added a part to the then-living legend's trademark brushcut. The same blunt object that the perp used to open up the old doctor's scalp right down to the medulla oblongata. The blunt object being a cinder block that provided a low stool for the jockey-sized maintenance man on smoke breaks. These tidbits I picked up at the funeral home a couple of days after the grisly fact. Not what I pumped out of anybody, just what I picked up while I was being politely ignored and while Grant Tomlin rubbed shoulders with league executives who to a man knew that he was a complete fraud. Effin' ghoul. Oh well, his preoccupation with dredging up rumours for his trade-deadline show spared me another of his “Shadow?” routines.