March Of The Mustangs
A Xara Smith Mystery By Bill McGrath
Copyright 2007 Bill McGrath
Smashwords Edition
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Xara Smith Mysteries By Bill McGrath:
January Juggling The Jentons
February At Feldman’s On Fifth
March Of The Mustangs
April At The Antique Alley
May Might Mean Murder
June Jumping the Jaguar
July Jill's Justice
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.
CHAPTER-01.
I looked at the electronic clock at the bottom of the television screen and it told me there were one point one seconds left. On the sideline at mid-court the boy dressed in the red uniform number fourteen took the ball from the ref. He slapped the ball once and his team mates all went into motion. His team; the Mustangs, were behind by a single point. I was sitting at the bar in my favorite restaurant staring at the big screen flat panel television above the bar. The restaurant was jammed but it was completely quiet in the place. Not a single diner tapped his fork on his plate. No waitress lifted a tray or set one down. The bartender, Joe Stepho, did not pull on the tap to fill the next empty beer stein. Even the help in the kitchen was, at least for the moment, silent. When number fourteen slapped the ball his four team mates jumped to motion. It was a choreography that had been hastily scrawled on a chalkboard during the previous time out and never before rehearsed, yet the four red clad warriors danced their individual parts expertly. One of the opposition dressed in blue and gold, the uniform of the DePaul Blue Demons, did frantic jumping jacks in front of number fourteen trying to screen off his view of his team mates. DePaul had been good for a time even winning the collegiate national championship in 1961, but they had not been a competitive team in the last decade. A low rumble from the television slowly built but the restaurant patrons maintained their silence. I was not breathing and I doubted any others were either. The four red clad boys ran patterns on the hardwood floor followed closely by four blue and gold’s trying to interfere with their play without fouling a Mustang which would allow him free-throws which would likely win the game for the red team. Number fourteen had exactly five seconds to throw the ball onto the court but the official time, the one point one seconds, would not start counting down towards zero until one of the boys on the floor touched the ball. It was one of the many intricate rules that governed the game. Red double zero reached the top of the key, which is the round circle painted around the free-throw line, and came to an immediate stop followed closely by a blue and gold warrior who bumped into him from behind. Number double zero must have been expecting the blow because he firmly held his spot on the floor at the top of the key. As the collision occurred one of double zeros red team mates wearing number twenty-two whizzed by him followed closely by his own chosen blue and gold defender and passed right in front of double zero in the direction of number fourteen who still held the ball out of bounds. A zebra stripped referee could be seen using his right arm to count off the allowable five seconds but it was unclear how many seconds he had already counted. Number double zero stuck his chest and stomach out just an inch or so as twenty-two passed him and that knocked twenty-two’s defender off of his track by only millimeters but perhaps it would be enough. As the blue and gold boy doing jumping jacks in front of fourteen reached his pinnacle with his arms stretching towards the sky and his legs spread cutting of as much view as his body could, fourteen bounced the ball on the floor between the outstretched legs. Red twenty-two snatched the ball off the bounce in both of his hands. The electronic counter in the bottom-left corner of the huge video screen started it’s swift countdown from one point one downwards to it’s inevitable zero. The blue and gold clad defender doing the jumping jacks turned towards number twenty-two abandoning number fourteen as no longer important. The original blue and gold defender assigned to guard red twenty-two reached from behind and disregarding the potential foul placed the palm of his hand in the middle of the back of twenty-two and shoved hard. Red twenty-two and his two blue and gold defenders all jumped into the air at the same instant as their bodies collided. At the top of the leap twenty-two flipped the round ball in a high arc towards the goal even though his back was to the goal itself so he did not have a good view of his target. As the ball reached the peak of it’s arch a loud buzzer came from the television screen and the rumble of the crowd instantly turned silent. I took a quick look at the bottom left of the viewing screen and the electronic counter read zero point zero. The three boys all hit the ground awkwardly turning their bodies so they could observe the flight of the ball. The other players on the floor as well as the three referees stopped what they were doing and watched the ball fly it’s course. No players were seated on the benches along the sideline because each and every one of them as well as the coaches were standing along the side line pointing at the ball and watching it’s trip through the arena’s air. I licked my lips and my hand gripped very hard on my half empty beer stein. Somewhere to my right I briefly saw someone in the restaurant wearing a red jersey do the sign of the cross on himself. The ball edged it’s way through empty space until it met only the net part of the goal and made a very audible and expected sound. “Swish.”
The crowd at the restaurant and the crowd at the nearby Moody Coliseum at Southern Methodist University (SMU) erupted as one. On the giant television people swiftly spilled out of the stands crowding onto the basketball floor. Here at Feldman’s on Fifth the man to my right, whose name I did not even know grabbed me and kissed me full on the lips spilling the remainder of my beer as he did so. I had enjoyed a really good seat for the game as my fat ass was parked on the barstool directly across from the center of the huge plasma screen but at this instant I judged the position a little less than desirable as I found myself the center of a huge group hug. I am happy I was not wearing my best outfit because my own beer was not the only thing spilled at that instant.
By the time the hug relaxed the television was already doing the super-slow-motion replay of the shot and the replay would be repeated over and over for an hour with every commentator who could get to a microphone shouting to be heard above the crowd. There never really was any debate. The rules clearly stated that as long as the ball was in the air before the buzzer started it’s peal the shot would count. The replay could and did use stop motion to prove beyond doubt that the ball had left twenty-two’s hand when the electronic counter said zero point four. Using all kinds of technology they were able to run the shot frame by frame so that we saw the ball at the peak of it’s flight right when the counter hit zero point zero and we also simultaneously heard the sound of the buzzer proving beyond any doubt that the shot was legal. In one of the dozens of replays some clever video engineer had been able to sink up several pieces of videotape so that we could watch the ball and the clock but also one of the referees making a signal similar to the old German Heil Hitler stance which was the official umpire body language for “the shot counts.”
The replay verified what everyone at Feldman’s and everyone at the arena already knew. The SMU Mustangs had won it’s last game giving themselves twenty-eight wins against a meager twelve losses elevating it to the very last of the sixty-four college teams that would be invited to the post season NCAA tournament to determine the national championship of basketball. It was March first. Let the madness begin.
A dozen years or so ago I was quite a basketball player myself being the star of both the women’s basketball team and the women’s volleyball team all through high-school. Unfortunately for me girl B-Ballers getting huge college scholarships was still a few years in the future when I graduated.
My name is Xara Smith. I am a young thirty years old. I stand six foot three. I run my own detective agency. I am athletic rather than curvy, but I am quite blonde. I had not come to Feldman’s on Fifth to view the Mustang game but I had easily fallen into the revelry. I had come in for a little dinner with my friends Joe Stepho the restaurant owner and sometimes bar-tender, and his daughter Jill Stepho who was my friend as well as my partner/client on my last case. That case had come to conclusion just three days ago and I now considered myself on vacation. For us private detectives, “on vacation” means we have finished one case and have not yet been hired to work on our next one.
Being a Tuesday night the crowd quickly thinned with the end of the game. Half an hour later there were but two tables in the restaurant that still had diners finishing up their meals, and I was the only customer left at the bar. Joe drew me another stein of beer as his cute little daughter Jill slid herself onto the barstool to my right.
“Crazy night” Jill said.
“How ‘bout them Mustangs?” Joe pitched in.
“Anyone know how the Lady Mustangs did?” I asked.
Personally, I despised the name “Lady Mustangs” but it was, in fact, what they were called. Why wasn’t the boys team called “The Gentlemen Mustangs?”
The Mustang team the women athletes were on had played against the female team of the DePaul Blue Demons earlier that day but the game had not been televised. The Lady Mustangs were rated as the fifth best female college basketball team in the entire nation and had qualified for the NCAA tournament four weeks ago, but they didn’t even rate television coverage. Go figure. The best I could do was revel in the fact that Title Nine had been passed which meant that if Southern Methodist University wanted to field a competitive boys team they were at least forced to offer scholarships as well to a dozen or so female glandular cases like myself so the girls got to be something besides cheer leaders.
“You have anything down on the game?” Joe asked.
“What” said Jill.
“He means did I have a bet on the game” I answered her, then I turned towards her father and said “No. How did you do?”
Joe told me that he had bet half a yard on the Mustangs but he had to give up three and a half points. That meant that his bet was for fifty dollars and he had wagered that the Mustangs would win, which they did, but he lost the bet because as a condition of the bet the Mustangs would have to win by more than three points and even though they won the game, they had won by only a single point, therefore Joe had lost the bet. He was not unhappy about it though as he really enjoyed the game and his rowdy customers had more than made up for it on what normally would have been a quiet Tuesday night hardly worth keeping the restaurant open for.
I would like to tell you that I am not a gambling woman but that wouldn’t be exactly the truth. I, myself, did like wagering on sporting events. My profession as a licensed private investigator though demanded that I keep a clean record, so publicly accepting a wager for cash was something I simply could not afford to do. On the rare occasion when I did bet it usually ended up being something like if I won the bet the loser would have to clean my kitchen but if I lost the bet I would perform some similar task for the winner.
My six year old Taurus was parked in the restaurant lot on south Fifth Street in the Dallas suburb known as Irving, Texas. I have lived here seven years now and been in business as a P.I. for the last three. I live in my house/office on an access road off of highway 183 in Irving, so I carefully piloted my car the three and a half miles and parked in front. As expected the key to my front door worked just fine as I let myself in and the little green light on my phone was flashing in the darkened house indicating that there was at least one message awaiting me.
There were a total of four messages but only one of importance. Detective Eric Samuels of the Dallas Police Department, a friend of mine for almost three months now, had left me no information about why he had called other than to request that I call him back as soon as possible. His message was left just after six and it was now nearly nine P.M. but I tried his office number anyway and he surprised me by picking it up on the first ring. He wasted no time at all and requested that I meet him at Parkland Hospital which is a big medical center in nearby Dallas. I told him how much time it would take me to get there and he gave me a room number on the fourth floor.
Short, fifty years old, serious looking, Eric Samuels was one of the most powerfully built men I had ever met. He works out almost daily and can pump iron with the best of them. He met me at the nurses station on the fourth floor and squeezed my hand in a standard hand shake. The tough old nurse on duty wasn’t intimidated by him or his badge and went about her duty seriously and slowly but eventually we won her permission to visit the patient. I would have been able to find the room even without the room number because there were two armed officers in blue flanking her doorway.
If not for her skin tone and hair color Lisa Pattela could have passed for my twin. She was my height, she was my build, she was my age. Her hair though was short and curly and in color well matched the shade of her flesh which was a rich deep dark chocolate. She was wide awake and coherent laying on her back on a gurney. She was probably naked but bandages covered her mummy-like from neck to the very top of her thighs. Casts took over at the top of each thigh and stretched to just above her ankles. Her feet were bare. Her arms were bare as well but also sporting several small bandages. One was strapped down and the other held an I.V. which was admitting a clear liquid into her one drop at a time. Her once gorgeous face was freshly battered with one eye puffed to closing. Through her opened eye she looked right at us and said “Who the fuck are you?”
Detective Samuels held his badge up where Ms. Pattela could easily see it and handled the introductions. While they briefly chatted I took a look at her chart. A break to the thigh bone is very rare and there are a couple of reasons for that. The thigh bone is the biggest and strongest bone in the human body. Pound for pound and inch for inch the thigh bone is stronger than concrete. Therefore it takes a massive blow to break it. Further more, the thigh is attached to the knee and the hip both of which joints are not very strong at all so any direct blow to the thigh generally dislocates one or both of the joints before the bone itself will yield. Practically the only way to break a thigh bone is for it to take a direct hit that crushes rather than snaps the bone. A broken thigh bone is a very painful injury and rarely heals well enough, without a bone graft, for a full recovery that would allow the patient to walk. Lisa Pattela had two broken thighs. They were only a part of her injuries. They had been caused when she had been held down on a concrete floor and a sledge hammer had been deliberately used to break them. One had been done, and a little later, the other was also purposefully broken. Surprisingly none of her many injuries were life threatening. They had tried to cause her pain, and succeeded.
Twenty minutes later we were four miles closer to downtown Dallas crammed in Samuels’ small office. That is where I heard the story of Lisa Pattela and the role I would play.
“Have you ever heard of Monica or Sharon Miller?” Samuels asked me.
“Sure” I answered, “They are twins that go to SMU. Sharon plays point guard and Monica plays center. Between the two of them they score about eighty percent of the Mustangs’ points and they are the reason the team is rated fifth in the nation.”
“Right” Eric answered.
“What do they have to do with this?” I urged him on with his explanation.
“Lisa Pattela is employed” he continued “as an assistant basketball coach for the Lady Mustangs of Southern Methodist University. She is in the second year as assistant coach. She had spent the seven years prior to that coaching on the high-school level. She also happened to be an alumni of SMU and had played not only on the team when she was a student, but for the same woman who was then an assistant but was now the head coach, Dolly St Petersen.”
The story he told me was mainly based on what Lisa had told him in the last four hours, and she had been on a steady morphine drip the entire time so he was cautious about it’s credibility, but it was all he had so far. An anonymous phone call had sent the EMTs to a warehouse in West Dallas where they had found Lisa Pattela battered and bleeding. She had been approached by some people who had wanted her to fix a basketball game by coming up with an excuse to hold one or both of the Miller twins out of the game. The Mustangs were heavy favorites for almost all of their games so the betting always favored them. By betting heavily on their opponents one could make a bundle should they actually lose the game. She had taken their payment to fix the game which had been played the previous Friday, and then not kept the Millers out. The Lady Mustangs had won the game last Friday by twenty-three points. She had been grabbed this morning as she left her apartment on her way to the campus, and the gamblers had expressed their displeasure in her actions.
Detective Samuels had no information about who had beaten the Pattela woman. He had asked Lisa and she wouldn’t or couldn’t say who was involved. He had crime scene analysts looking over the warehouse, and they had found the sledge hammer that had caused the broken bones, but no finger prints had been lifted. He had even interviewed the EMTs hoping Lisa had told them, but she had not. They had traced the 911 call back to a throw-away cell phone that had no registration.
Finally we got down to the business of why I had been called. Eric Samuels was currently working a joint task force that was looking into the increasing amount of violence associated with sports gambling in the Dallas area. That is why he had been called in. As I urged him on he looked directly at me and said “The Lady Mustangs are going to need a replacement for their assistant coach, and need her in a hurry. You know a little about basketball, don’t you Xara?”
CHAPTER-02.
Six A.M. comes early when you go to bed at three. I had left Detective Samuels’ office right after midnight, gone directly to my home, and gotten on the internet to do research.
The staff of the Lady Mustangs had been four women. As stated Dolly St Petersen was the head coach. She had a trainer whose name was Teri Lang. She had an assistant coach who was in charge of offensive strategy and whose name was Bernadette Michigan and called “Coach Mitch.” She was also assisted by Lisa Pattela who, until the previous morning, was in charge of the defense and whose place I would be taking. There were eleven girls on the team lead by the Miller twins. Seven of the eleven girls, including the Millers were seniors, and then there were two juniors, one sophomore, and one freshman.
The team had an interesting ethnic mix. The Miller twins were Caucasian beauties that looked like very tall prom queens or rather hefty runway models. The two juniors were Caucasian and would probably be the team captains next year after the seven seniors graduated. Six of the others were African-American, and the lone freshman was an African from Senegal who was seven feet one inch tall but horribly thin. She was not very coordinated and got almost no playing time at all because she could hardly run the length of the floor, however, in games where the Mustangs were ahead by a point or two with just seconds left they would put her in on defense because of her extremely long arms.
The team enjoyed it’s current national ranking mostly due to the star power of the Miller twins and was likely to fall from the ranking when the season closed and the Millers graduated. That made it a make it or break it year for coach St Petersen who was currently in the fourth year of a five year contract.
The team had improved it’s record each of the past four years that the Miller twins had been at the school. They had gone to high-school in Iowa and been heavily recruited but there was little I could find on the internet about why they had chosen SMU for college.
I smacked the alarm clock, rolled out of bed, and put on my workout clothing. I work out on a regular basis jogging or pumping iron, and just a year or so ago I had played in a softball game, but I hadn’t had a basketball in my hands since high-school. Samuels had made an appointment for me with Dolly St Petersen for noon, so I figured I better get out and toss a ball at a basket which is why I was awake so early.
There is a Wal-Mart just south of the DFW airport on highway 183 which is just three exits west of my house. Even at this early hour I found Wally World open and they had a nice inexpensive basketball, but I had to buy a hand pump as well. I worked my way north along Esters Avenue stopping at one apartment complex after another until I found one with a basketball court.
With the sun just coming up at my back I stood at the free-throw line, bounced my new ball three or four times, took careful aim, and shot my first free throw in a decade. There must have been some fierce swirling winds that I hadn’t counted on because I missed by several feet. Fortunately nobody was watching. Within an hour I had the free-throw back and was swishing points from almost anywhere on the court. It came back in a hurry. Of course it would be different with a seven foot guard in my face but hey, I wasn’t going to play, just coach.
The workout had felt wonderful so I stopped at a drive-thru and loaded up on calories. After a nice breakfast eaten out of a paper bag at my desk at home I stripped bare and hopped into my shower. I cleansed both my body and soul in the hot water, dried off, put on clean clothes, and felt ready to tackle the world.
I met Detective Samuels in the parking lot of the Moody Coliseum on the SMU campus just before noon. It was a Wednesday on a college campus and I had expected to see ivy league looking studious young people walking peacefully across the quadrangle on their way to class loaded down with heavy text books dressed in cardigans. Wrong! No one had really expected the boy Mustangs to get into the NCAA tournament so the party that followed last night’s game was still going strong. I could hear two different bad garage bands playing bad music from two different directions but I couldn’t see either band.
Samuels and I headed off towards the athletic building which was behind the Coliseum. Hundreds of kids were running back and forth screaming mostly dressed in red and virtually all carrying large plastic cups containing a golden liquid that smelled a lot like beer. I saw several discarded small souvenir basketballs like the kind they throw to the crowd at half-time. We made it to the huge new athletic center out front of which had been erected a temporary stage. There was a huge mob of students and faculty crowding around the stage as the men’s coach shouted into a squeaky electric megaphone introducing his players who each got a round of thunderous applause.
As we skirted the crowd and went past the huge building the older much smaller athletic building came into view. We continued in it’s direction. When we were about fifty feet from the doorway three lovely short blonde girls wearing red basketball jerseys and carrying two beers each came running by. The one in the lead tripped and landed flat on her face spilling the beer and proving to the world that the jersey was the only thing she was wearing. Eric Samuels was kind enough to get the young lady on her feet but he couldn’t do anything about her spilled treasures. I really hoped the three were not my star athletes but none were tall enough to be basketball players.
We entered the old athletic building that had generously been allocated to the women for their sports soon after the dedication of the new building which housed the boy’s sports endeavors. The halls were lined with trophy cases from many different sports. I would have enjoyed slowly looking over the awards and savoring each story, but we had an appointment so we just walked past the shiny mementos. The building was four stories tall and the offices had been doled out in some fashion that awarded first floor honor to Golf, Tennis, and thankfully; Basketball.
I would have preferred to meet Ms. St Petersen alone and then, one at a time, met her assistants, but Samuels and I were led to the conference room where the entire coaching staff was assembled. They were all seated around an oval conference table but they stood in unison as we entered the room. Briefly I wondered what the introduction did to the ego of Eric Samuels. I mean he is not a tall man to begin with, and was a full three inches shorter than the trainer, Teri Lang. Lang in turn was a full three or four inches shorter than any of the rest of us. My six feet and three inches fit in quite well with the two assistants and the head coach. Poor little Eric must have felt like a toddler in a forest of mommies.
Samuels though lost no time at all getting right to the point. He started with a wrap up of Lisa’s current condition and then quickly spun into an explanation of why her attack had occurred. The first emotions that the coaches showed were surprise and denial that any of them could have possibly been involved in organized gambling and purposefully throwing a game. The denial melted into acceptance rather quickly though. In total the meeting lasted about fifteen minutes and ended with Detective Samuels explaining what I was there to do and how my role must be kept secret. It was, of course, Detective Samuels plan to place me as a coach hoping that the gamblers would make another attempt to foul the Lady Mustangs so that I could gather some evidence and help him solve the crime he was assigned to solve. Being basketball staff the women around the table were allocated free room and board, and their apartments were probably a little better than dorm rooms, but women’s sports was not a high profit cost center for the university so in addition to the room and board they were being paid about two hundred and fifty dollars a week in salary. I did not choose to tell the fine ladies that I had accepted the assignment for my standard fee which was four hundred dollars a day plus expenses.
Samuels finished his introduction with an appeal to the ladies to be forthcoming with me as it would be the only way to punish the people who had severely beaten their friend and also protect the team from organized crime. I am sure they could have figured that out for themselves.
Once Samuels left the real assessment began. It is not like the coaches were rude or anything, but I surely felt like an uninvited guest. I guess I could see their point. First of all they were a small tight-knit community of three professional women who were in charge of guiding a sports team in a national title hunt. They had already done almost all of the work of getting the team into the tournament and there was little a high-school player who hadn’t been in a competitive contest for ten years could offer to help at this late date. In addition it was their dear friend and confident that was laying bloody in a hospital bed. Furthermore, Lisa’s actions would surely cast a bad shadow over the program, and they would have to fight against that.
Dolly St Petersen was their leader and she took the opportunity to cut the tension in the room by bringing up the one subject that we all had in common and that at least three of us four would be passionate about; basketball. They tested my knowledge by going over some of the teams very basic plays.
Since I was to take the place of the defensive coordinator the drill worked like this. First Dolly, the head coach would set the scenario. For instance she might say “One minute left, team A is ahead by one point and has the ball out of bounds full court. Both teams have one time out remaining. Team B had three players with four fouls.”
Coach Mitch (Bernadette Michigan), being the coach in charge of offense would then suggest what type of play she would have team A run. I would then tell them how I would have team B defend the play. Following my efforts Mitch would then switch to another play she might run for the same scenario. After three or four plays from Coach Mitch, Dolly would switch the scenario and we would start over.
They must have been impressed with my first several efforts because they ran the drill for quite a while with the scenarios getting more and more complicated and the plays Coach Mitch suggested getting slightly more sophisticated. The trainer, Teri Lang, proved she was more than a pill pusher with her helpful suggestions concerning the personalities and physical abilities of the individual team members. For instance, on one of the scenarios which would have team A in-bounding the ball with a long pass she suggested that I switch my defensive plan to have Sharon Miller guard the team member most likely to receive the in-bound pass because Sharon was the fastest player we had so for a long pass play she would have the best chance of intercepting the pass.
We finally agreed on a plan though that would include Dolly and Mitch doing all the actual coaching aided by any data Teri might be able to supply while I sat at the end of the bench making absolutely sure that any player coming off the court was given a fresh dry towel.
After the test, I was shown the locker room and issued a locker. I met a few other people who were instrumental to the team but not players. Each was a student at SMU and earned a little scholarship money helping out by doing things like keeping the locker room and practice court clean and making sure there were plenty of basketballs available. I tried to pay attention as I was introduced to each of these helpers but there were too many of them and my head was not in it. I knew that any one of these could be the crucial link to the gamblers who had approached the victim, but none of them was likely to approach me on a first meeting anyway.
Dolly gave me a map of the campus and a note allowing me to a room. I was to check into the room and it would be my home for the duration of my mission. The room itself was in a building way across campus in a twelve story dorm. Since I was not a student but a coach my room was on the top floor with the other adults where the rooms were larger and more luxurious. Yea, right. Before she sent me off to find my room Coach St Petersen told me to show up dressed for practice which would start at 5:00 P.M. According to my watch I had two and a half hours to trudge my way across a campus in the middle of a party, turn a dorm room into a home/office, rest, and work my way back to where I was ready for a strenuous work out.
The room itself was dismal but it did have one advantage over floors one through eleven in that it had a private bath room. It had been cleaned with industrial strength chemicals that still lingered, and the windows simply were not built for opening. There was no refrigerator in the room and no cooking of any kind permitted, not even a coffee pot. Fortunately there was both a Starbucks and an Arbys on the first floor just a long squeaky elevator ride away. The room was high-tech though so it had a high-speed Internet connection for my lap top. I had this little program some computer wiz had given me that allowed me to share all the files on my big office computer over the Internet so I used my few spare minutes getting electronically connected and reading my e-mail.
CHAPTER-03.
There were eleven nice tall young women on the basketball team called the Lady Mustangs. Eleven is a prime number, and that proved to be my biggest challenge over the next several practices. The word prime means that the number can not be evenly divided by any other number besides itself and one. You see, in Basketball practice, just like the practice for most other competitive team sports one rarely actually scrimmages in a game-like situation. Surely a small portion of every practice would be spent with five girls on each side going over actual game strategies and doing a little team competition, but much more of the practice time is spent on specific drills designed to improve one aspect of the game or another.
For instance, let’s say you wanted to practice passing the basketball from one girl to another. Twelve, not being a prime number would be good, because you could take out six basketballs and have the girls pair up so that one plays catch with only one other and all twelve could get practice using the six balls. Unfortunately, we did not have twelve girls so if they paired up one would be left out and not get to practice at that drill. The solution, of course, was to have the newest coach participate as one of the players just for that drill. In other words; I became not the third coach but rather the twelfth player.
Later, after passing drills, when it got to be time for other drills it became expedient to break the girls into groups of either three or four. Any of you who are good at math are already way ahead of me here but no matter how you try to divide eleven girls up you either have leftovers, or you have to add that one extra player. I did two on two passing drills. I did three on three passing drills. I did three on three weaving drills. I did four on four weaving drills. I almost passed out doing three on three fast break drills, but held it together through the four on four fast break drills. I had to guard Sharon Miller for the two on two perimeter shooting drills and she practically scored at will. Finally they settled into free-throws drill. Something I was actually quite good at, but that is a one player at a time drill so they really didn’t need any of my help for that.
We did finish with a scrimmage, and for almost all of it I was able to sit on the bench and watch. Eventually the scrimmage wound down and it was time for every body’s favorite drill, and that was wind sprints. Coach Dolly and Coach Mitch decided I could handle it by myself so they left one student assistant as my aide and they told me to join them in the coaches office after giving the girls a dozen doubles.
I got the girls all lined up at one end of the court and blew my whistle. They sprung to life and ran the entire floor as fast as they could. As soon as they were at the other end the student assistant got them lined up and her whistle sent them flying back my way. They were all gasping for air and they were only done with the first of twelve. I took my charge seriously and got them lined up and sent them on their way. After four doubles most were dogging it a bit. After six they started pleading for mercy after eight I almost gave in. They all had heard the coach say twelve and every one of them could count but by the time we got to ten they successfully convinced me they had done their twelve. I figured letting them out of their last two sprints would endear me to them. Boy was I wrong about that. It never was a fair fight. Six of them grabbed me and two each grabbed a basketball. They shoved the two huge balls into my shirt making it look like I had real world class stripper titties, and from somewhere they produced several cell phones that had cameras. Snap, snap, snap. The players fled to the relative safety of the locker room and I had survived my first initiation prank. How many more there would be I could only guess.
The locker room was pretty much what you would expect. There were five rows of lockers each row with a bench and eight lockers. The coaches got the first row as you entered the room from the gym, and the players were spread out across the other rows in some haphazard hierarchy. There was a large shower room at the far end of the room that proved that it was originally built for boys because it was just a large tile rectangle with a dozen shower nozzles sticking out. No partitions, no privacy. There was a small office to one side of the lockers with a huge glass window so the coaches could keep an eye on the athletes, and there was a medical room crammed in between the office and the shower.
To avoid the coaches and student athletes from showering together the coaches all gathered in the office and plotted game strategy while they were waiting for the team to shower, dress, and vacate. That meant that the small little office really stunk, but that was practically expected.
Of course by the time I made it into the coaches office the story of the prank had already spread and one of the Miller twins was gracious enough to lend us her cell phone so the other coaches could see my big boobs. Half an hour later the players were gone and I was naked with the trainer and two coaches relishing the hot water pouring down on me. At least the new coach did not draw the duty of picking up all the wet towels left laying all around.
I was starving when I got back to my dorm so I stopped at the Arbys and bought enough to feed three or four adults. I carried it all to my room and it was almost nine o’clock by the time I had the door closed and the phone in my hand. I called Eric Samuels and spent five minutes telling him what had happened that afternoon, then I called my friend Jill and spent almost an hour gabbing with her while I was stuffing roast beef into my mouth.
The practice work out was the most intense I had suffered in a couple of years so with a full tummy, and completely gossiped out, I turned the lights out at ten and was fast asleep by ten oh two. I did sleep quite well though.
CHAPTER-04.
Both the boys team and the girls team were in a ten day period between their last scheduled game of the season and the post season NCAA tournament. Had they failed to qualify for the post season play the seasons would be over and the coaches would be focusing on recruiting for next years squad. Since they had both qualified for the tournament though it would become an intense ten days of practice as well as media moments all worked in around class schedules and other campus activities. Once the tournament started it would be an even more intense orgy of basketball games. There would be sixty-four girl teams so there would be thirty-two games played in the first round with the thirty-two winning teams moving on to round two and the losing teams going home. That meant that no matter how many games the teams won or lost during the regular season, all of that was thrown out, the teams all started off even, and the next team to win six games in a row would be crowned the national champions. The time reference was really compressed with the first games being held just thirteen days before the final game so about all the teams would do for that thirteen days is play and travel. There would simply be no time available for anything else.
The format of the girls tournament was slightly different than that of the boys tourney. In the prescribed format for the girls the first three rounds of play would occur on the home court of the team with the higher ranking, but the last three rounds of games would all be held on neutral courts. By the time they got down to the last three rounds there would be just eight teams left so that meant only four neutral sites to host what would be round four, two sites for the two games in round five, and of course only one site for the final two teams lucky enough to survive into round six.
There would be a lot of money to be made for the cities hosting those final games due to television revenue, hotel rooms, etc. Like many other sports fans I knew a lot more about the boys teams and how there tournament worked than I did about the girls. For instance I knew that the city of Dallas would be one of the host cities for round four in the boys tournaments, and the city of Atlanta Georgia was the lucky town hosting the final four remaining teams which would include both round five games and the final round six this year, but I had no idea where the girls final rounds would be played. I was also able to find a schedule on the internet that clearly showed the sixty-four boys teams already paired up with the teams they would be playing all the way through their six rounds, but I could not find one for the girls teams.
There were two things we did know for sure. The boys team was ranked as one of the poorest in the tournament, therefore they would be pitted against one of the best teams in the country for their first game, and they would have to play that game on the opponents home court. They would not be favored to win that game so everyone expected that their dreams would be crushed during the first round and they would watch the final five rounds on television. On the other hand the Lady Mustangs were currently ranked as the fifth best women’s team in the country so they were not only expected to stay in the tournament through the first three rounds at least, but they also had the luxury of playing at least the first two rounds and probably the first three rounds on their home court.
Unfortunately, leading and guiding a team of women to glorious victory through the NCAA tournament was not my mission, it was my cover. There were two phases to my actual mission which Detective Samuels reminded me of every time we talked. It was unlikely that Lisa Pattela had been bribed by casual gamblers. But with her not talking we really had nothing to go on so the first phase of my mission was to get out into the student community and find out what I could about betting on the sporting events particularly the girls basketball games. It was unlikely that I would actually uncover anything at all to help us, but it was something I could put effort into and make headway on. The second phase of my mission was a bit less tangible. The second phase was that we hoped the people who had approached Lisa would not give up their quest simply because she had refused to play by their rules. We were hoping they would consider trying their plan again by approaching one of the other coaches one of which was me. The actual coaches had been well briefed on what to do if they were approached, but my job was to make sure that as many people as possible knew I was one of the coaches and, in fact, Lisa Pattela’s replacement in a hope that the bad guys would approach me with a bribe so we could set up a sting. So far though, no one had asked me to fix a game.
The pranks continued on my second day of practice. In high-school I had participated in many initiation pranks myself so I knew they were mostly harmless. I knew they were a good way for the girls to practice team work. I knew it was a good way for the girls to blow off some steam and de-stress, so I sort of just prepared myself to be the butt of their jokes. What I hadn’t counted on was decoy pranks. You know, one prank done so that I thought the prank of the day was complete so that I would not be vigilant against any more pranks that day. The first one I was ready for and it happened in the locker room before practice. In my jeans and sweater I sat on the bench in front of my little locker. I worked the combination on my lock and as I did I noticed several of the players finding excuses to be up at the coaches end of the locker room. I noticed more than one had her camera-phone in her hand. I told myself not to react when I opened the locker door. I expected the locker would be filled with rubber snakes or dead fish or something like that. I played my part well. Slowly I opened the locker door and sure enough when I got it open a huge plastic spider sprung out at me. It was obviously a Halloween decoration that didn’t look anything like a real spider but had eight big stringy legs and a top hat. I calmly picked the cute little stuffed toy up off the floor, stuck his head all the way into my mouth, bit down on it, and turned to mug for the cameras. A cute little prank, I thought, and the girls were actually sort of disappointed that they hadn’t scared me. Oh well. As I said though it was just a decoy.
When I was dressed Dolly St Petersen called me into the small office and asked me how things were going. I told her all was well and faithfully reported that they were pulling the pranks on me. Dolly apologized for her girls and begged me to understand that it wasn’t personal. I assured her that I was cool with it as long as it didn’t get out of hand. She assured me it wouldn’t. Then she got down to the real point of our conversation. She wanted me to take a special interest in one of her players.
Moki Soshubu was the seven foot one inch freshman from Senegal. Dolly had noticed that my free throws were pretty good and mentioned that Moki couldn’t hit a free throw to save her life. She asked me to, at the end of practice, take Moki aside and give her some extra help in that area. I, of course, agreed to this.
The second thing she mentioned was actually something I had been expecting. There would be a lot of media interest now that the girls team was getting to the tournament with a high national ranking. We fully expected the media to focus on the boys team but knew there would be some media attention given to the women’s team. SMU, like so many other college campuses these days, had their own student run television station. The sports editor of the student station had asked Dolly for an interview with some of the players, and Dolly had refused but offered up one of her assistant coaches instead which the student interviewer had agreed to. Dolly made it clear that she would be happy to send Coach Mitch to do the interview but offered it to me if I thought it might be a good way to get my face in the news as a way to help me on my mission of finding Lisa’s gambler friends.
Although I really didn’t think I was ready for national media coverage, I was sure I could handle the local student broadcasters. I thanked Dolly for the opportunity and assured her that offering it to me was exactly the right way to help Lisa.
The drills we ran during this practice were quite similar to the drills we had done the previous day, and my sorry old legs had to do just as much running and jumping. Finally it was the time of practice where they were shooting free throws. Ten girls and two coaches gathered around one goal and I took Moki and a student assistant down to the other end of the court.
Moki really was a big girl. I am six feet three inches tall which is statistically very tall for a woman so I was quite use to being the tallest woman and often even the tallest person in a room. Moki was a full ten inches taller than me. I told her to toss up a few throws and I watched. Her mechanics were all quite good. She had obviously been well coached. She just didn’t well hit the target. I spotted two things that were probably causing the problems. The first was simply confidence. Building her confidence would be difficult. Most of the seniors on the team were twenty-two or twenty-three years old. The lone sophomore was nineteen and just about to have her twentieth birthday. Moki had come from a country where organized school was quite different than here in the good old U.S.A. The Catholic nuns running the mission school in her village had taught her all they could by her fifteenth birthday. She knew English quite well but spoke it with a British accent. She could both read and write in English, and knew a lot about the Catholic saints, but could hardly be called a world class scholar. She had been sent to the U.S. to get into the women’s professional basketball league so that she could make big money and send it back to her family in Senegal, but she simply was not yet good enough to play in the WNBA. I do not really know the full story about how she had landed at SMU, but I was sure she would get four years experience in college ball and then enter the professional draft. She had no hope of actually earning a college degree, and her scholarship was likely funded by some private foundation connected with the government of her home country. I am sure she was doing her best to fit in with the other young women on the team, but, let’s face it, she didn’t know who Brittney Spears was, she didn’t own a single Douney & Boorke, and didn’t drive a Beemer. All in all she would be lucky to survive her collegiate years and her only two possibilities in life were as a Senegalese root farmer, or a WNBA star.
The second thing I noticed was her vision. She seemed to be squinting a bit at the rim before each shot. Surely they had tested her vision? I told myself that I would talk with Coach Dolly about it just to make sure.
She worked hard at the free throw line for thirty minutes with me making slight corrections to her shot and the student assistant shagging the rebounds for us. When I thought we had done enough practice I told her to gather up her equipment and hit the showers. I took the ball over and handed it to the equipment manager and when I turned around Moki was standing there with a tear in her eye. She stood right in front of me with the single tear now slowly rolling down her cheek and thanked me for helping her with her free throws. Then she took her two huge hands and placed one on each side of my head gently holding my cranium between them. She tilted my head forward just slightly and placed her wet lips right on my forehead. She held the kiss for a full five seconds then let me go and once again thanked me for the individual help. My heart almost broke for the poor giant misfit.
The student sports editor grabbed me by the elbow and took me over to the scorers table where they were all set up for my interview. They had a camera set up facing the table. I was told to sit next to the on-camera reporter and shown which microphone to speak into. The editor would stand off camera furiously writing questions on a tablet for the interviewer to ask me and I would answer them. They asked me to not give short answers but to feel free to say anything that came to mind. They said that the more they had the more they could edit out so I should not worry about what I said so much as I should just focus on saying plenty.
The interview continued as the other girls finished up their free-throw practice at the other end of the court. Some of the girls, of course, went right into the locker room after the practice ended but a couple of them came over and stood behind the camera so they could watch my interview wind down.
None of the questions were very difficult and I had more talent in my left pinky than the talking head sitting next to me. Finally the producer had enough tape so he thanked me for my interview and sent me on my way.
I was quite surprised to see all the athletes hanging around the coaches end of the locker room when I walked in but as I did they broke into a pleasant round of applause that I assumed was for the interview I had just skillfully completed but then one after the other of the girls burst out laughing and I knew I was in trouble. I worked my way into the small coaches office where I found the trainer and the other two coaches giggling and hardly able to keep their composure.
“How did the interview go?” Dolly giggled out before bursting into full laughter.
Teri Lang, the trainer, handed me a small mirror and I looked into it. My blonde hair had two huge black streaks in it. I have no idea what Moki had dipped her huge hands into just before she held my head in her hands and gently kissed me but whatever it was she had played her part well and I looked like a skunk with black hair and a fat blonde streak running from front to back. I must have looked a complete fool for the interview which was now on tape and would probably be aired across the small campus that evening.