Cover-up Read online

  Brennan looked surprised, but shrugged and said, “Sure, I guess. Right now?”

  Stevie nodded. “Maybe we can just walk down the hallway for a minute in whatever direction you need to go.”

  Brennan looked at Blanton. “Dewey, we’re done, right?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Blanton, who had his cell phone out. “There’s a car waiting for you at the exit down the hall past our locker room.”

  “Like yesterday? Okay, fine. I’m just going to talk to Steve for a minute while we’re walking. I’ll see you later at the hotel.”

  Blanton told whomever he was talking to on the phone to hang on for a minute and then said, “Perfect. Steve, he’s got a meeting in thirty minutes, so don’t hold on to him for too long, okay?”

  “Not a problem, I promise,” Stevie answered.

  Freed from their microphones, he and Brennan headed to the door. As soon as they were in the hallway, two of the security guards started walking ahead of them while the other two fell into step just behind.

  “So what’s up?” Brennan asked as they started walking.

  Stevie glanced uneasily at the yellow jackets surrounding them. “I need to be sure no one else hears this,” he said.

  Brennan gave him a quizzical look, but braked to a halt. “Fellas, give me a minute alone with my friend,” he said. The four men, who Stevie guessed had an average weight of about 250 pounds—which would have made them small for offensive linemen—peeled away, giving Brennan and Stevie some space. Brennan appeared to be looking straight down at Stevie, which reminded him that even though Eddie didn’t look all that big when he was in the huddle, he was six foot five.

  “Okay, we’ve got privacy,” he said, for the first time appearing just a tad impatient. “What’s the big scoop?”

  That was an interesting choice of words under the circumstances. Stevie took a deep breath. “Do you know Dr. Snow?” he asked.

  “Tom Snow?” Brennan said. “He’s one of our doctors. Sure, I know him.”

  “Good guy?” Stevie didn’t want to rush into this.

  Brennan smiled. “He’s okay. Why?”

  Stevie looked around to make sure the security guys hadn’t crept any closer. They hadn’t. One of them was lighting a cigarette.

  “He was at a party last night. He was talking to my friend, you know, Susan Carol?”

  “The pretty girl from USTV. Your ex-partner. Oh God, don’t tell me he got out of line with her?”

  “Well, not exactly. But apparently he had been drinking.”

  Brennan shook his head in disgust. “No surprise there. Jeez, how bad was he?”

  Stevie took another deep breath. “Well, this bad: he told Susan Carol that your entire offensive line tested positive for HGH after the NFC Championship game.”

  Stevie could see all the color drain from Brennan’s face. For a moment, he said nothing. Then he said, “Snow told Susan Carol that? He actually said that?”

  Stevie was almost hoping Brennan was going to say that Snow was nothing but a drunk and a show-off. But he didn’t. Instead, he balled his right hand into a fist and punched his left hand with it, saying through gritted teeth, “That dumb, drunken SOB.”

  “So it’s true?” Stevie said.

  Brennan looked at him almost as if he’d forgotten Stevie was standing there. “I don’t know,” he said. But his eyes were now darting around the hallway. Stevie’s gut told him Eddie was lying. He took a chance.

  “Yes, you do,” he said. “I can tell by the look on your face.” He decided to throw out one more idea: “And you know there’s some kind of cover-up going on.”

  Brennan gasped. “Oh jeez, he told her that too?”

  Stevie almost said, “No, you just did,” but he kept up the act.

  “So it’s all true then,” he said.

  “You aren’t going to write it, are you?” Brennan said, looking panicked.

  “I can’t write something that a drunken letch said to impress a girl,” he said. “But if it’s true, you shouldn’t be part of the cover-up. You need to tell the truth.”

  Dewey Blanton was walking down the hall, a smile on his face. “Hey, Steve, my guy needs to get going.”

  “We’re done, Dewey,” Brennan said. “Don’t worry.” He lowered his voice again. “You still have my cell number from yesterday?”

  Stevie nodded.

  “Call me later. We’ll talk more.”

  “You won’t try to duck me?” Stevie said, worried he might not get another chance to talk to Brennan if he let him go now.

  “I promise,” he said. He turned and began walking quickly down the hall, the security guards chugging to try to catch up with him.

  Blanton walked up to Stevie just as Brennan turned a corner that Stevie knew led to a loading dock, where the car was no doubt waiting for him.

  “Gee, I didn’t mean he had to run,” Blanton said. “Did you get what you needed?”

  “I think so,” Stevie said. “Thanks for everything.”

  “Anything I can do to help,” Blanton said. “You’re a talented guy, Steve. I wish you the best.”

  Blanton headed off down the hall. Stevie watched him go, wondering if he would wish him the best if he knew what Stevie had been talking to Brennan about. He hoped Dewey Blanton wasn’t part of the cover-up. He wondered how many people would know something like this. The doctor, Eddie…the whole team? Their “God’s been good to me” coach? What about their smug little owner?

  It was time to find Kelleher. Stevie needed to talk to him about a story for the day. And a lot more.

  10: GAME PLANNING

  THE RAVENS WERE JUST COMING ONTO THE FIELD, each of them wearing game jerseys with their names and numbers on them, just as they had done the day before. Bobby had explained to Stevie that this was another example of the NFL understanding the public relations game: “They know that most people can’t recognize anyone except the stars unless they’re wearing a uniform. So they put them all in uniform tops to make it easy to identify them.”

  Stevie worked his way across the field and found Kelleher talking to a short, dark-haired man wearing a black golf shirt with the Ravens’ logo on it. “Stevie, this is Kevin Byrne,” Kelleher said. “He’s the Dewey Blanton of the Ravens.”

  “Wrong,” Byrne said with a friendly smile. “Dewey is the Kevin Byrne of the Dreams. Nice piece this morning, Steve.”

  “Thanks,” Stevie said, wondering how everyone seemed to manage to read everything.

  “So, Stevie, I’m leaving you with Kevin, who will take you to Pam Lund, who is going to take you to your story today,” Kelleher said. “I have to chase Jonathan Ogden because he grew up in D.C. and he’s still one of the best left tackles in football.”

  “What am I doing?”

  “Steve Bisciotti,” Kelleher said, starting to walk away. “Kevin will explain.”

  Byrne laughed. “Pam will be here in a second. She’s Steve’s assistant and she’s going to take you to him. He hates doing interviews, because he thinks the focus should be on the team, not the owner. He’d be perfectly happy if Donny Meeker was the headline maker all week, not him. But he and Bobby are pals, so he’s agreed to talk to you.”

  Stevie was amazed by Kelleher’s connections. A fashionably dressed woman with an easy smile approached them.

  “Is this our guy, Kevin?” she asked.

  “Steve Thomas, this is Pam Lund,” Byrne said. “She’s the person who actually runs the Ravens. But we humor Steve.”

  Pam Lund laughed. “Especially when he’s writing the checks,” she said. “Steve, are you ready to go meet Steve? He’s upstairs in one of the luxury boxes.”

  “I guess so,” Stevie said. Things seemed to be moving awfully fast this morning. It was only 10:35 and he had done two TV interviews, terrified the starting quarterback for the Dreams, and was now about to meet the owner of the Ravens. He followed Pam Lund off the field, down another hallway to an elevator. It was, naturally, manned by a security guard, but it wa
sn’t one of the yellow jackets; it was a man in a suit.

  “Good morning, Vernon,” Pam Lund said as they approached the elevator.

  “Hiya, Pam,” Vernon answered.

  “Stevie, this is Vernon Holley. He’s part of our security group.”

  Stevie shook hands with Holley. “You mean teams have their own security people?”

  Lund nodded. “Absolutely. They work at our practice facility, they’re on the field during games, and they deal with any kind of strange mail or phone calls we might get. You’d be amazed. Vernon’s a retired homicide detective. He knows what he’s doing. All our guys do.”

  The elevator arrived and Stevie and Lund got on. There were no floor buttons, just a keypad. Lund pressed several numbers and the elevator rocketed upward.

  “This elevator goes right to the owner’s box,” she said. “Since the Colts are an AFC team and we’re the AFC representative, Steve gets to use it on game day. Apparently Mr. Meeker is furious because he’s in a regular luxury box, which ‘only’ seats twenty-five people.”

  “Poor guy,” Stevie said.

  Pam Lund smiled. The elevator door opened and they walked directly into a room about the size of the gym at Stevie’s school. That was where the similarities ended. The owner’s box had thick carpeting with a giant Colts logo in the middle of it. There was a long bar on one side of the room and couches and armchairs scattered around. Steve Bisciotti was sitting at the bar with a bottle of water in his hands, staring at a television set that hung from the ceiling behind the bar. He was dressed casually in a long-sleeved blue work shirt and khaki pants. When he saw Stevie and Lund, he turned off the TV and walked over to greet them, hand outstretched.

  “Steve Bisciotti,” he said, a wide smile creasing his face. He didn’t look to be fifty yet.

  “Steve Thomas,” Stevie said. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Bisciotti.”

  “Call me Steve,” Bisciotti said.

  Bisciotti offered him something to drink and they sat in comfortable armchairs overlooking the field, where they could see the Ravens and the media going through a second day of parrying with one another. “Look at Billick,” Bisciotti said, gesturing down at the podium where the Ravens’ coach was standing. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone more comfortable on stage than Brian.”

  That was a perfect setup for Stevie to ask Bisciotti about his desire to not be on stage. “The only reason I hesitated when I had the chance to buy this team was that I didn’t want to give up my family’s privacy,” he said. “But I understand that owning a football team makes you a public figure. I try to walk that line of living up to the responsibility I have to the public, but not jeopardizing my family’s privacy.”

  He talked easily and comfortably. Bisciotti’s theory on how to be an owner was clearly quite different from Don Meeker’s. “I look at it the way I look at my business,” he said. “Just because I’ve made money doesn’t mean I’m an expert on football. So I try to hire people who I think know football and know how to deal with people—because coaching is as much about communicating with people as it is about knowing football. I think we’ve got a great general manager in Ozzie Newsome and a great coach in Billick, and I leave it to them to hire the best possible people to work for them. I run the business side of the team—I let them take care of the football side.”

  He smiled. “I always tell Ozzie if he’s making a big deal to please just let me know about it in advance so I don’t get a call from one of my buddies telling me my team has just traded its first-round draft pick. That would make me unhappy.”

  Stevie realized as Bisciotti talked that Kelleher had again handed him a good story that would be easy to write. Tomorrow, he decided, he would come up with his own idea.

  Bisciotti glanced at his watch. “Have you got enough?” he said. “I told Brian I’d come down and see him before they leave for practice.”

  “Plenty,” Stevie said. “But if I have a follow-up question, is there some way for me to reach you today?”

  Bisciotti smiled. “Spoken like a veteran reporter.” He took out a piece of paper and scribbled something. “That’s my cell. If you don’t get me, it’s because I’m on it. Leave a message and I’ll get right back to you.”

  Stevie thanked him and they rode back down the elevator together. “Do you ever look around and think, ‘Wow, this is amazing that I’m here’?” Stevie asked—mostly because it was how he felt at the moment.

  Bisciotti nodded. “Every day,” he said.

  The Ravens were heading out when Stevie got back to the field. He spotted Andy Kaplan and his two cameramen standing on the 50-yard line. As he walked over, he noticed Susan Carol and her crew set up a few yards away. When Susan Carol saw him, she put down her microphone, unhooked herself from her earpiece, and jogged over to Stevie. As soon as she did, Tal Vincent followed her. Stevie sensed more trouble coming.

  “Hey,” she said, a tad breathless. “I’ve been looking for you all morning.”

  “I’ve been flat-out—but I talked to Eddie.”

  “Really?”

  “We should talk as soon as we’re done here.”

  She was about to respond when Tal Vincent put a hand, not so gently, on her shoulder. “We’ve got work to do.”

  “You just said we were five minutes away from being ready, Tal,” she said. “I’ll be back before you’re ready.”

  His hand was still on her shoulder. “You were told yesterday not to talk to him,” he said, acting as if Stevie were invisible.

  “Yes, I heard you. But USTV doesn’t get to tell me who I can or can’t talk to,” she said. “Now take your hand off my shoulder.”

  He glared at her and she glared right back. Stevie was about a split second from pushing him away from her when he removed his hand and turned away. “Two minutes,” he said. “You better be ready in two minutes.”

  She ignored him. “What a jerk,” she said. “I may have to quit before the end of the week, money or no money.”

  “I may have to kill that guy before the end of the week if he touches you again.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” she said. “Where should we meet later?”

  “How about the coffee shop at the Marriott?” he said. “I’ll catch you up and then we can decide what to do next.”

  She nodded. “Good idea.”

  Andy Kaplan was now starting to look just a little impatient—which was understandable. “Let’s get this TV stuff done and then get to work,” Stevie said.

  They walked over to their respective crews. Stevie wondered how in ten short months they’d gone from a couple of kids who were amazed to be at the Final Four to practically being bored at the thought of appearing on national TV. He thought again about what Kelleher had said about TV: “If you feel like you’re floating when you’re on camera, it’s because most of what you’re doing is lighter than air.”

  Stevie taped his introduction to the piece and then the close. “You make it look easy,” Andy Kaplan said when he was finished. “Nicely done.”

  “You’ve got all the real work to do,” Stevie said, being honest. “You’ve got to piece the whole thing together and make sense of it.”

  “It’s not hard when you’ve got good tape,” Kaplan said.

  Stevie decided that not everything about TV was lightweight. Andy Kaplan was clearly a man of substance.

  Now, though, it was time to get to work.

  He could see that Susan Carol and Jamie Whitsitt still hadn’t finished what they were doing. So he decided he’d head back to his room and start writing his Bisciotti story. Susan Carol would know where to find him.

  He put his coat on to head outside. He’d thought it was chilly in the Dome, but outside the wind had picked up and it was snowing, and Stevie was shivering after even the short walk to the hotel.

  The message light was blinking on his phone when he got to his room. He wondered who it was, since almost everyone who might call him would call his cell and he had just checke
d it for messages.

  He hit the message button on the phone and listened. The message was brief and to the point: “Steve, it’s Eddie. We need to talk. Call me on my cell after four o’clock.”

  Stevie stared at the phone for a second. At the very least, Brennan was keeping his word about not ducking him.

  He needed to get his Bisciotti story written for the Herald before the drug-testing story took over his day, so he set up his computer and dove in. He was so engrossed in what he was doing that the ringing phone caused him to jump in surprise. He looked at his watch. It was after two o’clock. He had been writing for close to two hours.

  “Stevie, I’m sorry. It took us forever to get that done.”

  It was Susan Carol. “Where are you?”

  “In the lobby. You want to come down? I’m starving.”

  “Be right there,” he said.

  He hit the count button on his computer and gasped when he saw he had written more than 1,300 words. That was about thirty-two inches—ten more than Kelleher had told him he could write. Well, he would worry about cutting it later.

  He found Susan Carol pacing up and down in the crowded lobby, looking exasperated. “I’m not sure I’m going to survive the week,” she said. “It’s bad enough that Tal has turned into such a jerk, but poor Jamie can’t do anything unless it’s put on a cue card for him. That’s why it took me so long to get here.”

  “Poor Jamie?”

  She gave him the smile. “Stevie,” she said, “Jamie is quite handsome, quite sweet, and quite dim. You should know me well enough by now to know that I may notice handsome but I like smart. There is no need to be jealous.”

  “What makes you think I’m jealous?”

  She gave him a “who do you think you’re kidding?” look.

  “Okay, maybe I’m a little jealous.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, you’ve got nothing to worry about with Jamie. Now, if we were talking about Eddie Brennan…”

  “What?! He’s twenty-five years old….”