Cover-up (8 page)

“Susan Carol,” Stevie said. “She's fourteen now and a TV star.”

“Yeah, I know,” Wilbon said. “But being a TV star is vastly overrated.”

He turned toward Patrick's interview area. Stevie waved goodbye and walked a few steps down the hall until he reached another large banner with the Sporting News Radio logo. Merkin was standing there next to Chip Graber. When Graber saw Stevie approaching, he raced up to him and wrapped him up in a hug. “Look at you!” he said. “You look like you've grown six inches since New Orleans!”

Then Graber grinned. “So how tall is Susan Carol these days?”

“Eight foot six,” Stevie answered.

Graber laughed. “Don't worry, you'll catch up.”

At that moment, Susan Carol's height was the least of Stevie's worries.

Merkin introduced Stevie to Tim Brando, the network's midday host. The interview was, for the most part, routine. Chip talked about the video game and adapting to life in the NBA. Brando asked Stevie about being “let go” by USTV. Stevie was happy to be able to report that even though USTV didn't think he was pretty enough to share a set with Susan Carol, CBS thought enough of him to hire him for the week.

“That's a nice comeback,” Brando said.

“Well,” Stevie said, “I may not be able to sing like Jamie Whitsitt, but I can complete a whole sentence without using the word
dude
.”

That got a big laugh from Brando and Chip. When they were finished and Merkin had thanked them, Chip walked him back down the hallway. There were so many celebrities walking around that Chip, dressed in one of his “disguises”—droopy sweatshirt and baseball cap—went completely unnoticed.

“Look over there,” Chip said, pointing to a corner where a gaggle of reporters, Minicam operators, and photographers was trying to get close to someone who looked familiar although, right at that moment, Stevie couldn't place him.

“Tom Cruise,” Chip said, seeing the puzzled look on Stevie's face. “He's got that movie deal with the owner of the Redskins.”

They paused at the escalator. “So, are you really okay?” Chip asked.

“Oh yeah,” Stevie said.

Chip looked at him closely. “I'm not so sure. How has Susan Carol been with all this?”

“Oh, she's fine with it,” Stevie said before he realized how sarcastic his tone was.

Chip smiled. “Let me guess, she likes Whatsitt or Whitsitt.”

“Uh-huh. She thinks I'm being mean because I made fun of the fact that he's a dope.”

Chip was smiling now. “Uh-huh. And you're not being extra hard on him because you're jealous?”

“Well…”

“You two will work it out,” Chip said. “You're good together.”

He looked at his watch. “Damn,” he said. “I've got to get to some store to sign autographs. This is more work than playing.” He gave Stevie a hug. “Hang in there, kiddo,” he said.

With that, he was gone, heading down the escalator. Stevie hoped he wouldn't have to hang in for too long.

Dinner wasn't all that different from Stevie's walk through radio row. Bobby and Tamara took him to a place called St. Elmo Steak House, which Kelleher explained was
the
place to eat in Indianapolis and one of the best steak houses in the country. The minute they walked in the door, it was clear Kelleher was right.

Wayne Gretzky, arguably the greatest hockey player in history, was sitting at the bar with Mario Lemieux, who had to be in the top five himself.

“What are
they
selling here?” Tamara asked when she spotted them.

“Hockey fantasy camps,” Bobby said.

As they were led back to their table, Stevie's head was on a swivel. He spotted Jim Nantz and Phil Simms (his new colleagues) sitting at a large table, and Fred Couples and Davis Love—the golfers—seated right behind them.

“Okay,” Tamara said after Bobby stopped to say hello to Couples and Love. “What are
they
selling?”

“Nothing,” Kelleher said. “They like football and they're buddies with Nantz.”

As they followed the hostess, they came to a door being guarded by several large men. “Who's in there?” Stevie asked the woman as they turned the corner and went into another room that was much larger than the one they had just been in.

“Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods,” she said in a hushed voice.

“Did you know Jordan was into motocross?” said Stevie.

“No—really?”

On instructions from Kelleher, Stevie ordered a shrimp cocktail. When he tasted the sauce, his eyes began to water and he thought he might faint. “Oh my God!” he gasped. Bobby and Tamara laughed. They had seen this before.

“Want to stop?” Tamara asked.

“God, no,” Stevie said, recovering. “I might want seconds.”

“You wouldn't live through seconds,” Kelleher said.

The porterhouse steak Stevie ordered was equally good. Throughout dinner, more celebrities passed by, some of them stopping to say hello to Kelleher and Mearns. A few recognized Stevie.

“Don't let the TV people get you down,” counseled David Wright, the New York Mets' star third baseman. “Good things happen to good people. You'll be fine.”

Stevie realized it would now be tough for him to root for Wright to strike out when the Phillies played the Mets once the season began.

“You're good on the air,” Bob Costas said, pumping his hand after chatting with Kelleher and Mearns. “But I'm not sure you won't find writing more gratifying.” That was interesting coming from someone who had made millions on TV.

By the time dinner was over, Stevie's spirits had lifted considerably. He was about as full as he could ever remember being, and he was amazed at all the famous people they had encountered. As they were leaving, Tamara, who seemed less impressed with all the stars than anyone, stopped dead in her tracks. “Bobby, look,” she hissed, pointing at a small man with curly, graying hair sitting in the corner. Kelleher's eyes went wide too. “Jeez, I never thought I'd see him here,” he said.

“Big sports fan,” Tamara said.

“Who?” Stevie demanded as they walked out the door. “Who is that?”

“You don't know?” Tamara said. “That's Billy Joel.”

“Billy who?” Stevie said. “Who does he play—”

“Not who—what. Piano.”

Then it came to him. He'd heard one of his songs when his father categorically refused to change the station in the car.

“You guys like him?”

“Like him?” Kelleher said. “The man's a genius.”

Time to go home, Stevie thought. Kelleher and Mearns were morphing into his parents.

The long day had worn him out and he went right to bed once he got back to his room. He set his alarm for seven o'clock because there was a message from someone at CBS asking that he report to the CBS work area at eight to discuss his assignment for the day. Kelleher had already suggested they meet for breakfast at 7:45. Stevie decided he'd go down a few minutes earlier than that and tell them he had to leave ahead of them to walk to the Dome.

He fell asleep quickly, and when the alarm went off, he was still in a deep sleep. He couldn't believe it was already morning. He forced his eyes open, stunned that it was already seven o'clock. He was reaching out to turn off the alarm when he noticed the time: 1:42. He half sat up, trying to shake the cobwebs from his head. That was when he realized the alarm wasn't going off. It was the phone that was ringing, not the clock.

He fumbled for the phone in the dark, suddenly fearful that maybe something bad had happened at home.

“Hello?” he said, finally getting the receiver to his ear.

“Stevie, we need to talk.”

“Huh? Whaa?” He was about to say “Who is this?” when his ears made the connection to his brain. It was Susan Carol, sounding both breathless and a little bit hysterical.

“Need to talk? When? Isn't it the middle of the night?”

“Yes, it is. And we need to talk
now.
What room are you in?”

Now Stevie was awake. “Room? Me?”

“Yes, Steven, you. What room are you in? I'm on my way over there now.”

“Now?”
he said, awake but still somewhat stunned by the call and the conversation. He was trying very hard to remember his room number. Finally he got it. “I'm in twelve-forty-eight,” he said, actually proud of himself for remembering.

“I'll be there in ten minutes.”

The line went dead. Stevie sat there looking at the phone. He rubbed his eyes, wondering if he had been dreaming. Apparently not. It was 1:45 in the morning and Susan Carol Anderson was on her way to his room. He had to be dreaming. Except he was now wide awake.

8:
PASS DEFLECTION

STEVIE PULLED ON SOME SWEATS,
walked into the bathroom, and decided that brushing his teeth and combing his hair was a good idea. He was nervous—although he wasn't sure why. He couldn't imagine why Susan Carol would call him in the middle of the night and insist she had to see him right away. Guilt? Anger? Either one could wait until morning.

He checked himself in the mirror. “You're no Jamie Whitsitt,” he murmured, just as he heard an urgent knock. He took a deep breath and, without checking to see who it was, opened the door.

Susan Carol was standing there, bundled in a coat that went to her knees. He stared at her until she said, “Are you going to let me in?”

“Oh yeah, sorry,” he said. “Come on in.”

As she walked past him into the room, Stevie felt as if she had grown a couple of inches since that morning. Maybe he was so sleepy that he was slumping. But as she took off her coat, he glanced down and saw the reason for her growth spurt: she was wearing high heels. Forgetting that she was clearly in a state of high anxiety, he pointed at them and said, “What's the deal with the shoes?”

She gave him an annoyed look and then looked down at her feet. “Tal Vincent,” she said. “We had to go to this big muckety-muck party tonight with a bunch of NFL corporate contributors and some people from the league and some players.”

“Players? Don't the players have curfews and—”

“Not players from the Dreams or Ravens,” she said. “Other teams. Peyton and Eli Manning were there; Terrell Owens was there—”

“Terrell Owens, I thought everyone hated him—”

“Will you stop interrupting?! Vincent told me to wear the damn shoes, okay? He's a jerk. You've got him pegged right. Now, can I sit down somewhere and tell you what's going on?”

“Please do,” he said, pointing to a chair next to the bed. The idea of getting her to sit was appealing. He was getting a little bit dizzy trying to look up at her.

She sat down, her body sagging into the chair. “Do you want something to drink?” he asked. He had not seen her look this upset since she had learned her uncle had been part of the kidnapping plot at the U.S. Open tennis tournament in September.

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you. Is there a Coke in your minibar?”

He handed her one, and after she had taken a long sip, he sat down across from her and said, “Okay, start at the beginning and tell me what in the world happened.”

She nodded and took a deep breath. “We went to this party,” she said. “I felt completely out of place as soon as we got there. It was in some private club—a really big place—and it seemed like half the men were smoking cigars and everyone was drinking. I was getting a lot of the ‘aren't you pretty' and ‘you can't possibly be fourteen' lines you've heard me get before. And all I could think was, ‘If my dad knew I was here right now, he'd kill me and he'd kill Tal Vincent.'”

“Did you think about just leaving?” he said.

She half smiled. “Yes. But I figured I'd just get through the night and then tell Tal I wasn't going to any more parties, that there was no way my parents would have let me come out here if they'd known this was part of the deal.”

“So what happened next?” he said.

She took another sip of her Coke. “I'm standing as far into a corner as I possibly can when this guy comes up. It's obvious he has no idea who I am. He just sees a tall girl in a dress. He says he's doctor somebody and he works with the Dreams. I tell him who I am, thinking maybe he'll make a connection and realize I'm fourteen and get that look off his face.

“Well, he's very impressed that I'm on TV. In fact, he says, ‘I should have known when I first saw you that you were on TV.'”

“But he's still not realizing you're fourteen.”

“No. I probably should have said something about the original concept being to put two
teenagers
on the air together. But by this time he's going on about
his
job and how close he is to all the Dreams' players, how most of them would never get on the field without his help. At one point he says, ‘I'm kind of a magician. I wave my magic needle on Sundays and everyone plays. Eddie Brennan wouldn't have seen the field the last two months without me.'

“So now he's got my attention. I ask him what he's talking about, and he tells me about all the players who need painkilling shots to play, that Brennan's had a bad knee since November, and that if not for painkillers, half the league wouldn't play in December and January.”

Stevie knew players got cortisone shots and other painkillers to play, so this was no shock, although he hadn't thought that
many
players did it. He let Susan Carol continue, though, falling back on his reporting experience, which told him to shut up and let someone tell a story when they were willing to do so.

She sighed. “I'm getting to the important part.”

He hoped so.

“I asked him a few questions about the shots, if they were legal, if the league knew how often the players got them—that sort of thing. He gives me this look and says, ‘I've never given a player an illegal shot of any kind. A player gets suspended, it isn't because of anything that comes out of my needle.'

“Something in the way he said it made me think there was something else he wanted to tell me but, even drunk, he knew he shouldn't.”

“And?”

She put up a hand to indicate Stevie should be patient, which wasn't easy for him at that moment. “So I said to him, ‘What gets a player suspended these days?'

“He laughs and says, ‘Oh, come on, sweetheart, you read the papers—HGH, the preferred drug of champions. Champion football players anyway.'”

Stevie had read about players getting suspended during the season for testing positive for HGH—human growth hormone. He wasn't all that familiar with it except to know that it was a steroid that helped players become bigger and stronger. If his memory was right, most of the players suspended had been linemen—the biggest men in the game trying to get even bigger. Or so it seemed.

Susan Carol had paused for a moment as if catching her breath. Now she plowed on. “I didn't want to act too interested, so when he brought up HGH, I just said, ‘What's the big deal? A few guys got suspended for it this season—so what?'

“He leaned in very close to me, too close, and said, ‘What if I told you not everyone who tested positive has been suspended?'

“My eyes must have gone wide because he kind of leaned back with a smirk on his face and said, ‘That got your attention, huh, gorgeous?'”

“This guy is really a sicko,” Stevie said, even though he knew the lecherous nature of the doctor wasn't the issue.

“Forget that,” Susan Carol said. “I told him I couldn't believe someone had tested positive and not been suspended, and even if they had, what did it matter now—in the middle of Super Bowl week. He laughed again and said, ‘Would it matter if a couple players—let's, for the sake of argument, say five players, maybe even five offensive linemen—were getting away with a positive test right now?'”

“WHAT?!” Stevie interrupted. “He said that?”

“Yeah, he did. Obviously, he must be talking about five of the Dreams, otherwise how would he know? I tried to bluff him. I told him I didn't believe him, that he was making it up, that there was no way something like that could stay secret during Super Bowl week.”

“What'd he say?”

“He said I would be right—unless someone was covering up test results.”

Stevie gasped. “Oh my God! Is he saying that five Dreams tested positive for HGH and the league is covering it up?”

She shook her head. “He never said
who
was covering up—I tried to get it out of him, but I think I came on a little too strong at that point, because he started backpedaling, claiming he was just trying to get my attention with a wild story.”

“You don't believe that, do you?”

“Not for a second. I could see in his eyes that he knew he'd said too much and was trying to get out of it.”

“Okay,” Stevie said, still trying to make sense of what he had just heard, “what do we do now?”

She pointed at his computer. “We need to get online and find out more about HGH and, if we can, about how testing for it works.”

She was—as usual—right. Even if it was almost three o'clock in the morning.

The next thirty minutes were spent online. Stevie knew how important drug testing had become in all sports. He vividly remembered how crushed he had been in the summer of 2006 when it had come out that Floyd Landis, after winning the Tour de France as an unknown, had tested positive for steroids. He'd heard all the rumors about Lance Armstrong, not to mention all the stories about Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, and Sammy Sosa in baseball. According to what they read, HGH was the latest in a long line of steroids—one that could only be detected through blood testing, and even then some doctors believed the testing wasn't one hundred percent accurate. According to the NFL Players Association Web site, the players had agreed to include HGH as a tested drug only after the owners had agreed that a player could only be tested once during the regular season and that no test results would be revealed until a second, confirming blood sample had turned up positive.

“Here's the crucial part,” Susan Carol said, reading through the information. “It says here that once the play-offs begin, players on play-off teams can be tested at any time because the league
and
the union agree that any kind of drug use on a play-off team would be very bad for the league's image.”

“Didn't a Super Bowl team have a drug issue a few years ago?” Stevie asked.

“Yes,”
she said, sounding exasperated. “The Carolina Panthers.”

“Oh right, your hometown team.”

“The team my dad worked with, remember? I guess this part of the deal could be called the Panthers Rule.”

“Sounds like, if this doctor—what's his name anyway?—is telling the truth, it may become known as the Dreams Rule.”

“
If
they get caught,” she said. “His name's Snow, by the way.”

Stevie didn't hear the name. He was deep in thought. “You know what?” he said. “It may be up to us to catch these guys.”

“Whoever
these guys
are,” she said. “Or is it whomever?”

Stevie blinked at her for a moment and then laughed.

“What?” Susan Carol asked.

“Only you would care if it was ‘who' or ‘whom' at three-thirty in the morning.”

“Shut up,” said Susan Carol, though she was starting to blush.

“No, I love that about you.”

“You know, it's funny, but when I finally got away from this Snow guy, all I could think was, I have to talk to Stevie. As mad as I was at you today, I knew you were the only one I could talk to about this.”

“You didn't want to talk to Jamie the dude?” Stevie was immediately sorry he hadn't kept his big mouth shut.

“Okay, I deserved that,” she said. “I wasn't very nice today.”

“That's not important right now,” he said. “The question is, what do we do with this? We can't just go on the word of a drunken doctor.”

“You think he was lying?”

“No. But he
was
drunk and he was trying to impress you, and you know as well as I do that no one—not the
Washington Herald,
USTV, or CBS—is going to run a story like this based on so little.”

“Nor should they,” she said. “Okay. I could call Dr. Snow in the morning and ask him to go on the record.”

“You have his number?”

She smiled. “Oh yeah, he gave me his card. Said if I needed
anything
to call him.”

“My guess is ‘anything' doesn't include repeating his story for the record.”

“No kidding. Plus, we'll have tipped our hand. If we stay away from him, he'll figure I was just a silly girl who didn't really understand what he told me. If he even remembers that he told me.”

“We can only hope. By the way, how'd you get rid of him?”

“You won't like it,” she said.

“Go ahead.”

“I told him I had to leave with Jamie and that he was
very
jealous.”

Stevie shrugged. “As long as it worked.”

“Yeah,” she said. “But back to the big question: Where do we go with this? Should we tell Bobby and Tamara? I don't think this is one we can tackle by ourselves.”

“You're right,” he said. “But I
do
have an idea.”

“What?”

“Eddie Brennan. He might talk to me, at least on background.”

“Rat out his teammates? We don't even know if he knows.”

“Well, it's worth asking. He strikes me as the kind of guy who wouldn't be happy with this sort of cover-up.”

She stood up and stretched. “It's nearly four o'clock,” she said. “We both have to get some sleep. And I need to soak my feet or something. The person who invented high heels should be killed.”

She looked very tired, very stressed, and
very
tall standing there. But still beautiful. He could see why dirty old men would want to hit on her. Being tall and pretty, he decided, wasn't all good.

“We'll talk more in the morning,” he said. “I have to be at the CBS compound at eight to find out my assignment for the day.”

“Let's meet when the media sessions are over,” she said. “I'll call you on your cell and we'll figure out when and where.”

“Okay,” he said. “I'll know my schedule better when the sessions are over. I think they end by eleven.”

“They do,” she said. “We're interviewing Ray Lewis at the end of the Ravens' session. The Dreams go first tomorrow.” She paused. “I mean today.”