Offside Trap Read online

  “So there were clean players? What did they think?”

  “How would I know? If they were good enough not to need drugs, they were still in the program, I guess. They’d turn a blind eye like everyone else.”

  “Like you.”

  He looked at me again. “I’m not a bad guy.”

  “No. You’re a prince among men. Parents all over the country send their kids into your care. And you turn a blind eye.”

  I turned to the door. I’d had enough of the stench.

  “What are you going to do?” he said. His voice shook.

  “I’m going to find out why Jake Turner died. Then I’m going to find out who did it. Then I’m going to turn a mirror on the lot of you, and watch you burn.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  I LEAPED OUT of the coaches portable and dashed across the road. What I should have done was walk over to the baseball field, stand on the pitcher’s mound and take some deep breaths. But the red mist had descended. I was being used, and that had my hackles up big time. I marched straight by my car into the gym building. Ignored the pretty little thing behind the gym desk and strode upstairs three at a time. Down the hall and pushed open the door marked Athletic Director. The kid in the polo was behind his desk. He looked up and watched me cross the room.

  “Excuse me, sir.”

  I didn’t bother to respond. I punched the door to the inner office. I marched to the middle of the room before I noticed the office was empty. I looked around and could practically hear the echo of crows calling.

  “She’s not here,” said the assistant from the doorway.

  “Where is she?”

  “Gone for a run. She’ll be back in a little while. Would you like to wait?” He stepped aside to open up the doorway. I sat down on the sofa in Kim’s office.

  “I’m sorry, I meant out here in the waiting room.” He smiled.

  “I’m good.”

  “I can’t let you stay in here, I’m afraid.” He lost the smile.

  I glared at him. “What you can’t do is stop me.”

  “Well, I’ll have to stay in here with you.”

  “Do what you gotta do, kid.”

  I sat on the sofa and took the breaths I should have taken on the pitcher’s mound. I didn’t want to. I wanted to be angry. To let my emotions do the talking and not be dissuaded from my words. The kid leaned from toe to toe, fidgeting. He was bored, he had work to do and he was too young to know how to wait.

  “I’m going to do some work,” he said. “I’ll leave the door open.” I just raised my eyebrows. I waited ten minutes. Every tick of the clock lowered my heart rate. By the time I heard the outer office door open I was positively Zen.

  “He’s in there,” I heard the kid say.

  Kim Rose breezed into the room. She smelled like her name. Her short hair was freshly washed. She wore body-hugging tan trousers and the obligatory polo with a panther on it. She glanced and smiled at me as she strode to her desk.

  “Miami, hi. I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “No,” I said by way of witty retort.

  She stopped behind her desk and dropped her gym bag. “I hate to run out on you but I have a boosters meeting. How can I help?” She tapped at her computer.

  “Tell me again about performance-enhancing drug use on campus?”

  She ceased her tapping and looked at me. Then she strode back across the room and closed the door.

  “Didn’t we have this conversation?”

  “We did, sort of. But there’s a problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You lied to me.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “Excuse me? I’ve never lied to you in my life.”

  “Then you’re lying to yourself.”

  “I don’t know where you think you’re going with this, but I don’t like it.” She marched back to her desk. I stood and wandered over to face her.

  “Jake Turner was providing performance-enhancing drugs to teammates. Let’s start there.”

  “You need to tread carefully with comments like that.”

  “I’m quite comfortable dancing in a minefield with comments like that. Unless I start getting some straight answers.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That line seems to be the university motto. So let me fill you in. Your star lacrosse player provided steroids, HGH and goodness knows what to make his teammates as good as him. NCAA title good. He also supplied athletes in other sports, and the coaching staff know about it. And a win-at-all-costs culture like that doesn’t create itself. It comes from the top.”

  Kim picked up a leather folio and came around the desk.

  “Miami, I need to get to a meeting, but I can assure you this is news to me. You know me. I don’t abide drug use. If what you say is true, then I will see that the perpetrators are called to account, be they students, coaches or administrators.” She put her hand on my arm and walked toward the door. If I were a sheep, I might enjoy being shepherded, but last time I checked I wasn’t that woolly.

  “What’s important now is that we find out who was responsible for what happened to Jake. But the need for discretion hasn’t changed. A lot of people could get hurt unfairly if Millet gets his hands on it.”

  “A lot of people are getting hurt right now.”

  “So get to the bottom of it, Miami. I know you can do that for us.” She dropped her hand from my arm. “I’m at an AD’s conference for the next couple of days. We’ll talk when I get back. I promise,” she said, and then she turned to her assistant.

  “They’re in the conference room,” he said. She nodded to him, then turned and nodded my way. I watched her disappear in a flash of burgundy and tan. The kid smiled at me, and then focused on his computer screen. I wandered out. I wanted a pithy departing remark, but one didn’t come. I was too busy thinking about Kim. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe McAllister was the problem and he was trying to lay the blame. Maybe, maybe, maybe. I ambled down the stairs to the gym and past a wall of mirrors. I stopped and looked at myself. I looked tired. My eyes moved across my reflection, head to toe, and then back. Checking to see if my body had formed a bow to it. Because despite everything, I couldn’t help feeling that someone was playing me like a fiddle.

  Chapter Seventeen

  IT HAD BEEN a long time since I’d been to a college party. I found myself listless during the afternoon, so I went home, showered and put on my favorite palm tree print shirt. By the time I got down to Lauderdale I was still way too early, so I went for a drink instead. I drove back to the cinderblock Latino bar that Jake’s teammate Christian had taken us to. The shutters were up as they had been and the small bar was open to the mild afternoon. A couple of Mexican guys were at the bar, smoking. The same woman who served us last time was inside the horseshoe bar. She was staring up at a television that sat on top of a refrigerator. Mexican soap opera. The smell of charred meat wafted through the space as it had before. I felt my stomach growl like an angry bear as I sat at the bar. The woman turned from her soaps.

  “Cerveza?” she said, with a glint of the gold tooth.

  “Si,” I answered. She opened a can of Tecate, apparently the house beer. I nodded at the two guys on the other side of the bar. They were digging into plates of tacos. I looked at the woman.

  “Lo que esta en los tacos,” I said in my broken Spanish.

  “Carne asada,” she said, pointing to the smoking grill sitting on the sidewalk beside the bar.

  “Me gustaría alguna,” I said, hoping I hadn’t just asked for the right to marry her favorite goat. She smiled, nodded, took some meat from the grill and disappeared into another room. When she came back she carried a plate of soft tacos, with shredded onion, lettuce and salsa. The tacos were sensational. I had a second beer. When the sun started to go down the woman flicked the television over to Mexican football and muted the excited commentary, and then turned on a stereo with Latin rhythms. More people arrived. Most
were surprised but not disappointed to see a gringo at the bar. I chatted with two young guys who worked as plumbers for a company that managed apartment rentals. Apparently there was no end to the amusing stuff that got stuck in toilets. Everything from false teeth to Barry Manilow CDs. The guys’ girlfriends arrived. Both girls spoke flawless English. An impressive achievement, given they were both products of the Florida state school system. I enjoyed their company very much and didn’t want to leave. But I had another party to get to.

  I drove back to the campus and called Angel on the way. She directed me to a residence hall on the opposite side of campus from the sports fields. The building was a couple of years old and done in a Spanish style, with white walls and faux terracotta roof. I found Angel’s room. There were four twin-share rooms facing out onto a common kitchen/lounge area. Angel answered the door in black trousers and bra over ample breasts.

  “That’s what you’re wearing?” she said. I didn’t understand people who looked down on palm trees on shirts.

  “Right back at ya.”

  “Just give me a minute. Come in.”

  “I’ll wait out here.” I sat on a microfiber sofa that was in desperate need of a vacuum or a Labrador. A few minutes turned out to be twenty. Angel came out looking just as she had twenty minutes before, with the addition of a white silk shirt that did almost nothing to hide the bra beneath.

  The party house was a two-story minimansion in Country Estates off 818, where civilization butted up against the Everglades. The lots were large and the houses well apart. We parked down the street, at the end of a procession of pickups and sports cars. There was a large concrete circular driveway, where an impromptu game of three-on-three hoops was taking place under harsh white spotlights. The entryway was two-story, marble tile. A chandelier hung from the ceiling. The house was buzzing. People were everywhere. I was the oldest person in the place by a disturbing margin. The home seemed to have built-in speakers, because the same drone-like so-called music was blaring from every wall. Clumps of people were bouncing up and down in a living room. All the furniture had been pushed to the walls.

  Angel led me through to the kitchen, where two guys were tapping a fresh keg. There was a burst of foam into a bucket, and then one of the guys started pouring heady beers into red Solo cups, using a gun attached to a hose, like he was watering the house plants. Angel passed me a beer, and then proceeded to a bar in the dining room to pour herself a vodka tonic, heavy on the vodka. We wandered through the party to say hi to people. The music was too monotonous to allow for conversation. Angel paraded me around like a trophy wife. I started out feeling like any woman who has ever gone out on the arm of Donald Trump. I ended up feeling like Michael Jackson’s chimpanzee.

  A group of girls were drinking on the back patio and lunged inside to recruit Angel to their gaggle. She clawed at me to join them. I pointed at my red cup like I wanted to refill and winked. I walked through the kitchen without bothering to get more warm beer, and then around through the dancing to the entry foyer. In my experience, anything that should not be happening at a party will be happening upstairs.

  I wandered up the staircase, stepping over a brace of couples necking on the steps. The first bedroom I came to was closed. I pushed the door open. A group was in a tangle on the bed. I counted five bodies, but I could have been wrong. The room was dark and the mass of bodies fluid. They paid me no mind, so I left them to their business. The second bedroom was open. A half dozen kids lay around smoking joints. A sweet fog hung in the air.

  “Hey, man,” said a kid with a scraggly beard, sitting on a child’s size rocking chair. He offered me his joint. I stepped into the room and sat on my haunches, taking the joint. I took a drag, and then handed it back.

  “Good stuff,” I said.

  “Mmm,” said scraggly beard.

  “You know where I can get some?”

  He held his joint out to me again.

  “Some more,” I said.

  The guy took a slow drag, blew out a small cloud of smoke, and then pointed in the general direction of the window.

  “Jo Jo,” he said.

  I nodded. “Thanks, man.” I left the room, looking for Jo Jo. At the end of the walkway that overlooked the marble foyer was a double door. I ambled past the chandelier. There was no dust on it. A professional job. I got to the double doors to what I guessed would be the master bedroom. I put my hand on the lever and pushed down. The door flung open, revealing a tall, dark man with a smooth head, pink gums and yellow teeth. His eyes glowed in the dimly lit room, and he wore a leather vest over his hairless, ebony chest. He eyed me up the way a Rottweiler eyes up a juicy bone. He must have had a little over six inches on me, which put him at a disconcerting six-eight.

  “What?” he said with a tuneless baritone voice.

  “Jo Jo,” I said.

  He looked at me some more. I did not want to play poker with this unit. He could have been watching a sitcom or considering an ax murder—it was impossible to tell. I tensed my body, ready to punch or run, or maybe both, as needs demanded. The big man stepped back a half a pace and nodded his head toward the depths of the room. I edged past him, and picked up a hint of tobacco as I did. The room was lit by a solitary bedside lamp. It was a massive room. Bigger than most New York apartments. The focal point was a California king bed. A tall boy and an armoire that each looked the weight of a baby elephant were pressed against the wall. There was a lounge suite, with a sofa and two chairs, near the window. Even then there was enough space left in the room to play eighteen holes of mini golf. French doors led to a large balcony. The doors were open. So I walked through. At a teak outdoor table sat a sporty-looking kid in a yellow polo shirt. He had perfectly coiffed hair and pale skin, and the collar of his polo was flicked up at the back.

  “Dude,” said the kid. “Who did your wardrobe? Tommy Bahama?” He gave a smug grin and looked about, as if his posse were nodding in admiration of his zinger. But there was no one else on the balcony.

  “Bang on,” I said with a smile. “Love Tommy B. I can’t get enough of it. Who did yours? Ralph Lauren’s dad?”

  He lost the grin. “What you want, old man?”

  “What you got, Joseph?”

  The kid’s eyes narrowed. “How you know my name was Joseph? You a cop?”

  “Nope. But looking at you there in your preppy little threads, you sure as hell ain’t no Jo Jo.”

  “Why don’t you take a hike.”

  “’Cause we got some business.”

  “I don’t got no bidness witch you, pal.”

  “Don’t got no bidness witch me? What is that? Russell Crowe doing Brooklyn mobster?”

  “Who the hell is Russell Crowe?”

  “Where’d you grow up? Westchester?”

  “Long Island. Look, who the hell are you, man?”

  I kicked open a seat opposite Joseph and sat down.

  “Where’s the other guy?”

  “What guy?”

  “The guy who normally does the selling?”

  “I’m the guy.”

  I shook my head.

  “The other guy resigned. Now I’m the guy. So you wanna deal, or you want me to get Carlos to throw you off this balcony?”

  I nodded my head back to the bedroom. “Carlos?”

  The kid nodded. “He’s Haitian.”

  “So what you got?”

  “What you want?”

  I rubbed my chin like I was considering this very seriously.

  “You got Maxx?”

  Joseph smiled his best Tom Cruise. “I am Maxx.”

  I suspect I was supposed to be impressed by this, so I stared at him, stone-faced.

  He dropped the smile. “How much you want?”

  “One.”

  “One bag?” he grinned.

  “One tablet.”

  Again the grin disappeared. His face was the veritable emotional roller coaster.

  “Come on,” he said. “Snappy dresser like you? Just one tab?�
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  “Call it a trial.”

  Joseph went fishing in his backpack and came out with a single white tablet in a freezer baggy. He placed it on the table between us.

  “A hundred,” he said. Now his face was emotionless.

  “Pretty steep,” I said, reaching for my wallet.

  “Trial price. Volume discounts are available.”

  I took out two fifties and pushed them across the teak table, and then I picked up the bag. The pill was small, but large enough for me to clearly see the letters M, A, X, X. Branding is everything in pharmaceuticals. I put the bag in my pocket and stood.

  “You want something for the lady?” he said.

  “What lady?”

  “It’s a party, dude. I got Rohypnol.”

  “The date rape drug?”

  “That’s ugly, man. I prefer mood enhancer.”

  I preferred throwing Jo Jo off the balcony. But I didn’t want to make a scene. The only person that would hurt was Angel. Plus there was the little matter of Carlos the Haitian. As I reached the patio doors I turned back to the kid.

  “Where’d you find this guy?” I said, jabbing my thumb in the direction of Carlos.

  “He’s an international exchange student. I kid you not.”

  I shrugged and wandered back downstairs. There were more people now. It was like a shopping mall on Christmas Eve. The music sounded something like that used to torture the Viet Cong. I bumped and felt my way through the house until I found Angel. She was on a sofa with three other girls. She saw me and smiled like I was a long-lost puppy, then she wrapped her arms around my neck and tried to pull me down into the sofa. She was strong, but not that strong. The vodka was setting in. I unlooped myself, and she fell back into the sofa with a giggle.

  I yelled at her like I was a drunk at the ballpark. “I’m going to go.”

  She shook her head. “The party’s just starting.”

  I shook my head, smiled and walked away. I find such situations are only complicated by long conversations, and I’m a big believer that the best way to avoid long conversations is to not be in the room anymore. I strolled out to my car. My ears were ringing like a flash bang had just gone off next to my head. I wasn’t thinking about the case. The ear ringing was causing vertigo. I focused on keeping the Mustang in the lane all the way back to Singer Island. I got home, poured myself a scotch and fell asleep on the sofa, dreaming of young girls, massive Haitians and guys who had resigned.