Offside Trap Read online

  “Hi,” I said. My voice was swallowed by the emptiness. I wasn’t even sure I heard it myself. We stood for a moment looking at each other, like half-formed thoughts in our minds, and then bit by bit the white disappeared and the girl stepped slowly away from me and vanished. I didn’t chase her. In fact I didn’t move. I didn’t see the point. I kicked around for a bit in the darkness, sweeping my foot across alternate patches of grass and dirt. I didn’t expect to find anything, and nothing is exactly what I found. I made my way back to the green ramp. The dull day felt bright in comparison. I walked up the ramp to look at the bleachers again. The girl was gone. No one was sitting high in the stands contemplating life, physics, baseball or anything else. I wandered back down the ramp and away from the baseball field. I suddenly wished to be somewhere bright and cheery. Somewhere they served beer. I didn’t get either wish.

  Chapter Three

  I GOT ABOUT halfway back to the speed hump in the road when I noticed an old fiberboard building that looked something between a California bungalow and a portable classroom. It was a gritty cream color with green moss growing inches up from the ground. I stopped to look at a poster in the window. It was an angry cartoon panther holding what looked like a large fly swatter. Under the big cat were the words Panther Lacrosse. I stepped up a cracked path to a fly screen door. It creaked angrily when I opened it. I pushed open the wooden door behind it and stepped inside. The building was divided into four rooms of more or less the same size, with a tight corridor down the middle. Two rooms faced the baseball diamond, the other two faced the open playing fields. The space smelled of wet grass and sweat. It was more humid inside than out. I wandered past two doors with plastic nameplates that said they were coaching offices, one baseball, the other women’s soccer. I kept walking to the door of the office I figured housed the Lacrosse poster. The door behind me had no nameplate; the door in front read Coach McAllister, Lacrosse. Having been a college athlete myself, I knew the drill. I knocked a quick double tap, and then waited for the call of come.

  Coach McAllister’s office was the same sort of chaos I’d seen in every coach’s office, from my football and baseball coaches at the University of Miami to every coach or manager I’d played for in the minor leagues. It was just the quality of the junk that changed. McAllister’s desk was a bonfire in waiting. No coach worth his salt liked the paperwork. In bigger programs they had staff for the administrative stuff. Clearly Division II lacrosse didn’t qualify. The balding man behind the desk finished what he was scribbling before he looked up. He was a thick man, barrel-chested with lumberjack’s arms covered in dense black fur. His face had the topography and color of a walnut shell. I couldn’t have guessed his age, but he certainly wasn’t young. He looked up at me with expectation, like a stranger walking through his door was a regular occurrence.

  “Coach McAllister,” I said.

  He pulled at his polo shirt to show me the embroidery under the Black Panther. In prosaic script it said just those words.

  “Miami Jones,” I said.

  “You’re a little out of town, aren’t you?”

  “I live near West Palm, so I guess so.”

  “No, I meant Miami. You know. Forget it.”

  I already had. Standup wasn’t this guy’s gig. “I’m looking into the Jake Turner thing.”

  He leaned back in his chair. He was wearing a whistle on a lanyard around his neck.

  “I know,” he said. “Miss Rose said I might expect you.”

  I noticed a touch of New York in his accent, but there are so many New York accents in Florida, fugedaboudit was like the local vernacular.

  “Where you from?” I asked.

  “New Paltz,” he said. “You?”

  “Connecticut. How long you been down?”

  “Five years. You?”

  “Since college.”

  “You must like it.”

  “I do,” I said. “It’s home. You don’t?”

  “It’s hot. But my wife hates the winters in New York, so here we are.”

  He hadn’t offered me a seat, and I knew the program, but I figured he wasn’t my coach so I helped myself to a chair.

  “What can you tell me about Jake Turner?” I said.

  He blew out a big breath and his lips vibrated. “Where do I start?”

  “At the end,” I said.

  “Well, it’s a shock, I’ll tell ya that. Drugs. I never would’ve picked it.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Jake was a good kid.”

  “He’s not dead.”

  “Not far off it is what I hear. I went to the hospital but they only wanted family. I told ’em there weren’t no family here but they didn’t care. Now the family says they want no one from the school to visit.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “Like I say, good kid.” McAllister unrolled a mint and tossed one into his mouth. He offered me the pack and I shook my head. He took a couple of sucks before continuing. “He can sure play lacrosse. He’s one of those kids, you know. Could play anything. Our best player. But a smart kid too. A leader. That’s why I made him captain.”

  “Where’s the family from?”

  “New England. Massachusetts, I think. He had one of them accents, you know?”

  “I do. So how do you think a star athlete winds up under the bleachers?”

  McAllister shook his head. “No idea. Honestly. The wrong crowd I guess. It happens, don’t it. Terrible waste though.”

  I let him ruminate on that for a bit—then, “Who did he hang out with? Teammates, friends? Girls?”

  “The team mostly. I mean we’re not Division I or anything, but we work plenty hard. Between practice, games and classes, not a lot of time for much else.”

  “Time to fall in with the wrong crowd.”

  McAllister nodded. “True enough. Look, I wasn’t the kid’s minder. He was popular, charismatic even. I guess there were parties and stuff, but I never heard of any trouble. None of my players have ever turned up drunk or drugged to practice. They know they’d be out if they did.”

  “Nothing in drug testing?”

  “Never. I’ve never had a positive result.”

  “Neither did Lance Armstrong.”

  McAllister shrugged.

  I stood and brushed my khaki trousers. I’d chosen a button-up shirt with vertical stripes that made me look even taller than I was. It seemed on this campus I should have worn a polo. Coach McAllister stood and shook my hand. I made it to the door before I turned around again.

  “What do you make of your President Millet?”

  McAllister shook his head. “No good. Wants to get rid of us all. I mean, what the hell is a college without sports?”

  “What indeed. Thanks for your time.”

  “Anything I can do. He’s a good kid.”

  I left McAllister to his bonfire preparation and wandered back out onto the road. The cloud showed no mood for breaking but the day had warmed up some. I got to my speed hump across the divide back to the main campus. A car crawled toward me. I turned away and kept walking until the car reached me. It was a police cruiser. Not campus cops, the local town variety. I wasn’t sure what they were doing on campus, but it may have been a reaction to the Jake Turner situation. The cruiser slowed to walking pace and stayed beside me. I kept walking. There’s nothing that a patrol cop loves more than being ignored. We continued for about twenty paces before the cop got sick of waiting for me to take the hint and gave me a bleep on his siren. I stopped. The cop kept going a few feet before noticing I wasn’t alongside. He waited for me to walk up to the car until he figured I didn’t get that hint either, and he threw it into reverse and rolled back until the passenger window was opposite me. The driver’s door flung open, and the cop unfurled himself from the car. He was a hard-looking unit with a square head.

  “You Miami Jones,” he said.

  “I am.”

  “Get in,” he said. So I did. I am nothing if not a law-abiding citizen. />
  Chapter Four

  THE COP’S CAR was a police spec Dodge Charger, a couple model years old but impressively clean inside. It smelled of Pine-Sol. The cop filled the driver’s seat completely. He wore cologne and gave off a minty scent. I sat in the front with him. He didn’t seem too fazed by it, so I assumed I wasn’t in any kind of trouble. If a cop thinks you are in any kind of trouble, you sit in the back, no questions asked. We drove in silence around the campus, and then he cut in toward the center of a phalanx of buildings. We drove around the quad, modeled on Harvard Yard or Brown or some such, with concrete pathways cutting across the lawn, under the cover of trees. Only difference was instead of ancient oaks, the trees were palms, and offered next to no shade. But I liked it. There’s something about the naked trunks and jaunty throngs of palms that makes me feel at home. The cop stopped his car outside a gleaming glass and concrete building that could have been a bank or an office for some technology firm. Concrete steps led to the large mirrored frontage. On one side of the steps a sign declared the building to be Johnson House, Administration. On the other side of the steps, a newer sign read Office of the President.

  The cop got out of the car, so I followed. We walked up the steps to a revolving door. The cop stopped and ushered me in with a wave of his hand.

  “You first,” I said.

  He shook his head. Not even a smile. I might not have been in any kind of trouble, but he wasn’t going through a revolving door with anyone behind him. I stepped in and spun around. He waited until I got into the lobby before following. As he came through I got a look at his nameplate. Black letters on gold told me his name was Steele. That seemed about right. His jaw was all sharp lines and set firm. He walked me to the elevator. We waited in silence for the elevator to come. I rocked back and forth on my heels. Steele stood at attention. He was only a touch under six feet, so I looked down on him by an inch or two, but he was bigger in every other way. The elevator dinged and two young women got out. We waited for them, and then stepped in. The buttons gave a choice of one, two or three. Steele hit three. The door closed and the gears clunked and whirred and that silence that people observe in elevators descended upon us. Not that things had been particularly chatty up to that point.

  “Any clues?” I said.

  Steele turned his head slowly and stared at me. “Excuse me?”

  “Where we going?”

  He turned his head back to face the door.

  “The president wants to see you.”

  I had to admit for a second, thoughts of CIA and international espionage flew across my mind. Then the elevator dinged again and the doors opened and I found myself in a large foyer. The floor tiles, furniture and lamps were all cream-colored. The walls were wood paneling, some expensive and nearly extinct hardwood from South America. In the middle of the space a huge hole opened up revealing the second floor below. An ornate balustrade encircled the hole in the floor, and above a stained glass dome filtered colored light across both floors. Offices fed off the balcony that ran around the atrium. On our right was a reception desk. Steele deposited me there.

  “Mr Jones,” he said to the receptionist. She was short and wore way too much makeup for someone not appearing in Japanese opera. She reminded me some of my own office manager, Lizzy.

  “Thank you, officer,” she said. Steele turned on his heel like he was changing the guard. He marched back to the elevator without a word.

  “Would you like to take a seat?” said the receptionist, gesturing to some waiting chairs that looked like mini Swedish sofas.

  “No,” I said. I stood by her desk and watched her work for a couple of minutes. I generally find support staff hustle things along when they have someone hovering over them like a vulture. She picked up the phone three times to rouse the president. He must have been on the phone himself because it took a fourth try before she got through. She asked me to follow her. It wasn’t a long journey to the door next to her desk, and I felt confident I could have made it on my own, but it seemed that pomp and ceremony were a thing around here. I wondered if a lone bugler played taps in the quad at sundown.

  “Mr Jones, sir,” said the receptionist, and she stood aside to let me pass. The room wasn’t Florida at all. It wasn’t even New England. It was old England. A twenty-foot ceiling allowed for two tiers of books to wrap around the room. I didn’t see too many John Grishams in there. Just a lot of brown leather. A large round table sat to my left, under a window that looked out onto the quad. The table was burgundy-colored wood and looked like it would have been at home in Windsor Castle. Green leather upholstered chairs ringed it. A massive book lay open on the table. It looked as big as the King James Bible but could have been the Magna Carta for all I knew. A man stepped around a large dark desk that looked like it was once part of a city wall. The man smiled a butler’s smile. He wore a beige cotton suit that clashed with the room. I expected pinstripes. He had a neat, close-trimmed gray beard that was as well manicured as the greens at Augusta National. His hair was cropped and the gray-white color of cigarette ash.

  “Mr. Jones,” he said, extending his hand. I didn’t take it. I just kept looking around the office.

  “I thought your office was an oval,” I said.

  He had a forehead as smooth as Formica, and it barely rippled as he frowned. Then the penny dropped, and he gave me the butler’s smile, all form, no substance.

  “I see, the Oval Office,” he said. “And me being the president.”

  I smiled and put my hands in my pockets.

  “So,” he said, turning back to his desk. “I am Dr. Stephen Millet and I am president of this university. But you know that.”

  I love it when people with PhDs refer to themselves as doctor. It always feels so warm and friendly.

  “Actually I didn’t know that. Your name that is. Everyone around here just refers to you as the president.”

  “Universities can be such formal places,” he said, sitting behind his desk and gesturing to a visitor’s chair that looked like a museum piece. I wandered over to the wall of books. They were the kinds of books one didn’t touch, lest one crease the spine. Call me old-fashioned, but if I’m going to bother buying a book, I figure I might as well give it a read.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Millet?”

  “It’s Dr. Millet. And I heard you were on campus, so I just wanted to let you know how horrified we are with what has happened.”

  “With what has happened.”

  “Yes. I can assure you that this university takes drugs in our student community very seriously, and we are doing our utmost to assist local law enforcement with their inquiries.”

  “You are.”

  “Of course. Now unfortunately I haven’t been able to get to the hospital personally as yet, but I do hope you pass on our thoughts and prayers to Jacob’s family.”

  “You a religious man, Mr. Millet?”

  He coughed and rubbed his hands together like he was cold.

  “Well, it’s Dr. Millet, and please just pass on that we are thinking of him.”

  “I’m sure you are. Can you tell me why a town PD cruiser picked me up? Where are the campus cops?”

  “We don’t have a separate campus law enforcement department. Our size doesn’t make it efficient.”

  “You mean it’s cheaper,” I said.

  “Well no, it’s just with our population, it works better for everyone if we contract that work out to the city.”

  “You pay the city to have their cops patrol your campus?”

  “That is correct.”

  “What about security?”

  He rubbed his hands more. I was going to be able to see my reflection if he continued much longer.

  “We have our own security director.”

  “And who works for him?”

  “Mostly the local law enforcement officers also help out with campus security. You know, when they are off duty. We find it to be an excellent system.”

  “Not so excellent f
or Jake Turner.”

  “Mr. Jones, I can assure you that this is an isolated instance, and we are moving heaven and earth to find out how this happened.”

  “Many other drug problems on campus?”

  “Of course not. But we are looking at the relevant programs to ensure any bad apples are not allowed to poison the barrel, so to speak.”

  “What relevant programs?”

  “Well, I can’t say too much until the investigation has been completed, but sports programs often have such problems at other schools.”

  “Sports programs? Like lacrosse?”

  “All sports programs. That’s why the USADA exists. I can assure you there is no such body required to test our physics students.”

  “More’s the pity. Someone should have tested the guy who came up with string theory, that’s for sure.”

  “Be that as it may, we are looking into these programs, as are our law enforcement authorities. Now whilst I appreciate that Jacob’s family want answers, and we will as such accommodate you and your inquiries, I do hope you appreciate that our authorities are best placed to investigate this matter, and will allow them to do so unfettered.”

  I wasn’t completely sure what it was Millet had just said, but my babel fish was translating it something like stay the hell out of our way. Which wasn’t going to do at all. I just didn’t feel like saying that. What I wanted was to be away from this stuffed shirt of a man and on a comfy stool with a cool one in my hand.

  “Understood,” was what I said. I told him it was good to meet him, and he got up from his throne and walked me to the door.

  “If there is anything I can do to help, or any news on Jacob, please call on me.” He offered his hand and this time I took it. I was expecting it to be a cold, wet fish but was surprised to find it firm and warm-blooded.