5
Staring down the barrel of the gun, Theo thought for a moment about releasing Auggie’s wrists and letting him fall. He might break his leg, maybe an ankle. But a broken leg was better than getting shot.
Before he had a chance, though, Auggie had worked one hand free and used it to brace himself and adjust his weight again, shifting his center of gravity toward the inside of the room. The old guy raised the gun a little.
“Why don’t you let me get out of the window?” Auggie asked. “That’ll make things less awkward, you know?”
After a moment, the man nodded. He had to be in his sixties, barrel chested, with a shock of gray hair. More hair poked up through the half-placket opening of his sweater. It was impossible to miss the Brooks Brothers sheep above his breast, which was kind of the whole point. Theo put the gun, which was his main interest, at a .45. Big enough to blow holes the size of a grapefruit in him and Auggie.
Auggie squeezed Theo’s wrist, and it recalled Theo to the moment. He helped Auggie back into the room. Then, avoiding Auggie’s eyes, he put himself between Auggie and the man. Auggie let out a small huff, but Theo didn’t look back at him.
“Who are you?” Theo asked.
“Who am I? I’m the one with the gun. Who the hell are you?”
“Theo Stratford.”
“And I’m Auggie Lopez.” Auggie tried to come around Theo’s side, but Theo pushed him back. There was no mistaking Auggie’s sound of annoyance. “Could you tell us what’s going on, sir? You gave us a scare.”
For a moment, the man was silent, and there was something in his eyes like recognition. “Gave you a scare, huh? Well, what did you expect, coming in here, robbing the place? You thought I’d just hand over the keys?”
“We’re not here to steal anything,” Theo said.
“We’re here because we’re trying to figure out who killed Suemarie Gilmore,” Auggie said.
Theo fought the urge to squeeze his eyes shut. Instead, he focused on the man, on his body language. The guy had obviously been powerfully built once, but age had taken its toll, and although he held the .45 in both hands, it wavered in his grip. He had his finger inside the trigger guard, and his mouth hung open slightly because he was taking shallow breaths through his mouth.
Theo stood a little taller, one arm still out to the side in case Auggie got any bright ideas, and said, “Put the gun down. You’re not going to use it, but you might hurt someone on accident.”
The man let the muzzle drop until he held it pointed at an angle toward the floor. His finger slithered out from the trigger guard.
“Is this your house?” Auggie asked. “The neighbor called you; was that it?”
“It’s not my house.” His chest puffed up a little. “Bobby Beers. I’m president of the Varsity Club. This is the Varsity Club’s house. And yeah, Ellen called. She saw the two of you poking around, and she wanted to know if we’d changed our minds about letting people use this place.”
“You’re not using it anymore?” Theo asked.
Bobby’s gaze moved instinctively to the bed before he dragged it back to Theo. “You’re looking for someone who killed Suemarie Gilmore, is that it? Well, you must not have heard: she killed herself. So, you can clear out of here. Try anything like this again, and I’ll call the police.”
Auggie squirmed around Theo, pushing his arm down when Theo tried to block his way. He looked at Bobby and said, “I know someone wanted it to look that way. I’m the one who found her.” He glanced at Theo. “We did, I mean.”
Bobby studied them anew. “That was you? Shit, boys, I thought I’d have heard from your lawyers by now. One of you gets his head pounded in, the other one got something in his drink, and then you find—” He stopped himself. “Well, what the hell are you doing here anyway? You found her, didn’t you? There’s nothing left to see, God rest that girl’s soul.”
“You’d be surprised,” Theo said. “We’ve already learned a few interesting things. Like what the players were using this room for.”
The older man flinched.
“You knew,” Theo said.
“Now, hold on—”
“You knew they were getting girls drunk, drugging them, bringing them up here, and recording the whole thing. What’d you get in return? Did you use this room a few times yourself? Did they share the videos?”
Drawing himself up, Bobby said, “Boy, I’m a church-going man, a husband, and a father. Say something like that again, and I’ll knock the words right out of your mouth.”
Auggie’s brow furrowed. “But you knew something.”
Bobby’s eyes cut back and forth. On the wall behind him, Theo saw a series of marks he hadn’t noticed before. They were almost at the ceiling. Tallies, he realized. He could see it in his head, the girl still half out of her mind, one of the players scratching another conquest.
“Listen—” Bobby said.
Theo shook his head. “This ought to be good.”
“Boys will be boys, all right? I mean, I played football—not just high school, but for Wroxall, if you can believe it. I know what goes on in a locker room, how guys talk. And I know what it’s like when you’re young and you’re a star.”
“On a D3 team,” Auggie said under his breath.
“The Varsity Club looks out for our players; that’s the whole point. We make sure they’ve got the best equipment, the best facilities, the best food. If the college is too cheap to spring for a good coach, we chip in. And when it comes to partying, I tell them I’d rather have them do it here, where we can keep an eye on it, than God knows where.”
“I’ve been to a party here,” Theo said. “Nobody was keeping an eye on anything.”
Auggie nodded. “There definitely wasn’t anybody keeping an eye on the girls they brought up here.”
More of the color had leached out of Bobby’s face. He was gray around the nostrils now, gray under the eyes. A thin sheen of sweat slicked his upper lip. “I laid down the rules. I told them they had to keep everything aboveboard.”
“Oh Jesus,” Theo said. “You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s your angle? I told them to be good boys, and now I’m shocked they were recording sexual assault on the property. How do you think that’s going to hold up in court? You’d better believe some of that liability is going to attach to the Varsity Club when the first girl files a complaint, and once one of them does, the rest are going to come out of the woodwork.”
Bobby’s hand holding the pistol dropped until it rested against his leg. He wiped his mouth and jerked a thumb at the door. “Get out of here. And don’t come back.”
“Was Suemarie one of the girls they brought up here?”
“I don’t know.” He wiped his mouth again. “I told you to get out of here.”
“That’s what they wanted us to believe,” Auggie said, “whoever killed her—that she came back here because of what the players had done to her. Did Harley think that’s what they’d done to his daughter?”
“Who the hell knows what Harley thought?” The words boomed in the tiny space. “God Almighty, he was like a different man over the summer. I mean, he’d always been nuts, always drinking too much and popping pills, everybody pretending they didn’t know, but he was the kind of nuts you knew how to deal with—he was hard on his players, harder on himself, and you couldn’t count on that man to do anything but show up for practice and games. And then, over the summer, you couldn’t even count on that. He was missing practices. A few at first. Then a lot. He was a wreck, he—”
“He what?” Theo asked.
Bobby shook his head. In a weaker voice, jerking his thumb again, he said, “I asked you to leave.”
“What was wrong with Harley?” Auggie asked. “Nobody’s said anything about this to us yet.”
“Of course not. First, he was missing. Then he was dead. Nobody was going to speak ill of our dead coach. Ask any of the players, hell, ask half the fans, and they’ll tell you the man’s halfway to sainthood.” Bobby raised the hand with the gun and then looked down at it, as though he’d forgotten he’d been holding the weapon. He stared at it. The way his chinos hugged him, you could tell he was one of those big guys who somehow ended up with chicken shanks at the end of their life. “He was drunk. Day drunk, I mean. At practices. And then at staff meetings. And then at Varsity Club meetings. He fell down a flight of stairs once, the two of us walking down from the box. That’s when I started asking questions, and back then, people were happy to talk. That’s the kind of thing people love to talk about. I tried talking to him about it once, and he told me it was personal, he was handling it. I thought, ok, he’s handling it. Then—”
When the silence gaped open again, Auggie said, “Then he wasn’t.”
Bobby shook his head.
But Theo had heard something else in the broken-off speech, and he asked, “What happened?”
Bobby shook his head again.
“Yeah,” Theo said. “I think you’re going to tell us. I think you know you need to tell us.”
“I’ve said more than I wanted to say. Harley Gilmore was a good man, and his death and his daughter’s death are tragedies. I meant what I said about the police—”
“You,” Auggie said. “It was you. At Gilmore’s house. You took all those papers.”
At the words, Bobby’s whole body stiffened. Then, in a stilted voice, he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t ever take up poker,” Theo said. To Auggie, he said, “The financial papers? The Varsity Club ones you were looking at in Harley’s office?”
“Yep. The ones with all those payments and transfers and cash withdrawals.”
“Huh. What about that, Bobby? Did you need to get those papers back?”
“I told you.” The sweat had spread to his cheekbones now. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Theo considered him for a moment. Then he nodded. “All right. Maybe you’re telling the truth. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, those papers disappearing, and then Suemarie found dead in the Varsity Club’s fuck pad. I guess we’ll see what the police think when we show them the copies of those documents. Excuse me.”
Theo took a step toward the door, angling his body to slide past the older man. Auggie was clutching Theo’s shirt at the small of his back, and although he’d played it cool, the tightness of his grip told Theo a different story.
“What copies?” Bobby asked. He cleared his throat. “What are you talking about, copies?”
“We took pictures of those documents. The ones you don’t know anything about and didn’t take. The police can blow them up and read them, no problem. I bet they’ll let you take a look at them too, now that I think about it. They’ll definitely have some questions.”
Breathing labored, Bobby rubbed his free hand across his chest. Theo made to move again, and Bobby put his palm out. “Hold on, now just hold on a minute. Let me think.” When it seemed clear that Theo wasn’t going to sprint past him, he went back to rubbing his chest. He blew out a breath. “All right. I was at the house. What you said, about the papers. That was me. It’s nothing for the cops to worry about.”
“You’re going to have to explain more than that.”
“Harley was embezzling from the Varsity Club, wasn’t he?” Auggie asked. “How long had you known about it?”
Bobby laughed, his hand freezing on his chest. “Harley wasn’t embezzling. I’d have preferred embezzling to being a drunk and a drug addict. He still could have coached the hell out of our team if it was only embezzlement.”
“I saw the statements,” Auggie said. “Harley was funneling money from the Varsity Club accounts and taking it out in cash.”
“Sure, he was. We told him to.”
Theo cocked his head. “But it wasn’t embezzlement. What was it? Some sort of slush fund for coaching expenses?”
“More like…a retention program. Or an incentive program. Call it whatever you want.”
Auggie nodded slowly. “He was giving it to the players.”
“I told you, we take care of our boys. The school gives them tuition and room and board, but that’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” Auggie said. “Trust me. Better yet, ask my brother.”
Bobby shook his head. “Our boys can’t live on that. And the NCAA won’t let them do anything to make real money.”
“They could get a job,” Theo said drily. Then he glanced at Auggie and added, “Good luck trying to make them, though.”
Auggie grinned as color brightened his cheeks.
“It’s not a lot of money,” Bobby said. “It’s nickel-and-dime stuff compared to what those boys ought to be making. Hell, it’s candy money compared to what the players at the big schools get. Fat envelopes donors pass them at parties. Cars they get to ‘borrow’ for four years. You wouldn’t believe it.”
“So, what?” Theo said. “Harley wasn’t stealing. Something happened. What?”
Bobby was rubbing his chest again, his hand closed into a fist now, and his eyes were dark and pinched. “I was cutting through the locker room. I had to get out to the field; Harley was supposed to show me the new seats in the booster section, and I knew he was only doing it to humor me, but hell, I cut the checks, and I ought to get something for doing it. And I saw it plain as day. I stopped. I made sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing, and trust me, I was—just sitting out in the open, not one of them ashamed of it. I tore into Harley because I knew he had to be behind it, gave it to him with both barrels, and he gave it right back. Told me it was none of my business, and if I didn’t want to see how the sausage was made, that kind of thing.”
“What?” Auggie asked.
But Theo already knew.
“Drugs,” Bobby said. “That performance-enhancing crap. Bottles and vials and baggies. Harley could tell me they were scrips, doctor’s orders, that kind of thing, but like I said, I know locker rooms, and I know what that crap looks like. All of them. They had it in those damn safes, doors standing open like they didn’t care who saw. And the captains? They were the worst ones.”
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