Fall from Grace (26 page)

“But as a friend, Leo, I have to warn you that despite your efforts to reduce any chance of a retaliation, take care of yourself,” he continued. “A large number of EPS members, including myself, won’t like it when this story runs. Our reputation sucks at the moment; it’s going to suck even worse when this shit hits the fan. And certain members will blame the messenger rather than look deeper.”

“Excuse me, Detective Whitford,” Weinel said with indignation. “Are you threatening Mr. Desroches here? Because if you are, then—”

Whitford cut her off. “I am in no way threatening Leo with anything. I’m not that kind of cop. However, I am not blind to how some members function, and since Leo is a friend of mine of sorts, I’m just making him aware of the possibilities. He’d be stupid not to understand that.”

31

As per Karen Weinel’s suggestion, I contacted the Public Affairs Department of the police, told them in detail the information I had, and asked for someone, hopefully the chief, to respond. A day later, he did, agreeing to a sit-down interview in his office. We were not alone. In the room with us was the head legal counsel for the police department, the manager of public affairs, the chief’s personal lawyer, and Karen Weinel.

The chief was blunt, yet respectful toward my questions. He stood up for the members of his department, denied any personal wrongdoing, and chided Gardiner for his sloppy detective skills, his lack of professionalism, his theft of police property, among other things. Although he didn’t mention Gardiner by name, he said that my source was a disgruntled ex-detective with a history of disciplinary charges on his record, most for insubordination.

He also said that since no charges had been filed in the past, there was no reason to investigate further. The police counsel added that even if the police did investigate, most of the charges claimed in Gardiner’s report were past the statute of limitations.

I interviewed the head of the police union, who supported his members; more vocal members of the Police Commission who suggested that the chief might have to resign, a Crown Prosecutor who said the investigation looked flawed, and a criminal lawyer who said the investigation seemed fine and that charges should have been laid.

I tried to contact people Gardiner had named in his file but they referred any questions about the case to Public Affairs and the chief. I contacted the mayor, and while he also declined to comment, he noted that he supported the chief and the good job he was doing.

I wrote up all of this, along with Gardiner’s accusations, and waited two days while Karen Weinel and her legal department dissected the story. The changes they made were minor, the removal of a name and a couple of quotes from the Police Commission politician that could be deemed libelous.

When that was completed, Larry rubbed his hands together with glee as he sent the page off to the printer. The story broke the next day and we waited for the city to come to a grinding halt. It didn’t.

Sure, the other media outlets covered the story and there were even a few requests from other media to interview me, but we rebuffed those. I hated talking to reporters. They had so many questions and I really didn’t have all the answers. And while there were calls of outrage from various sides of the story, it didn’t seem to bother the average Edmontonian.

Maybe it was the fact that Edmontonians were very forgiving of their leaders. One mayor, William Hawrelak, had not only been forced out of office twice for shady business dealings, he had been reelected seven times, becoming Edmonton’s longest-serving mayor. The city’s largest and most popular park was even named after him.

A few other things worked against the story. The Oilers had won only two games in their first ten, the local CFL team, the Eskimos, was heading to a Western Final, and the temperature had dropped into the minus twenties with nary a hint of snow. It didn’t matter what news was breaking, sports and weather will always trump it. Especially in a city like Edmonton where the two major topics of conversation at this time of the year are sports and weather.

I, too, had more important things to worry about. After the Gardiner story faded, I asked Larry if there was any way the paper could spot me some tickets to an Oilers game. He contacted Bill King, who sent down two tickets in the paper’s corporate box, left over from the time it had been a minority partner in the team. Normally, the folks in ad sales had dibs on these seats to reward advertisers, but when Bill King found out I was looking for tickets, he sent down the corporate seats.

I then contacted Joan and set up the hockey date with Peter. We met at the same coffee shop, but this time Peter was glad to see me. He was wearing a brand-new Oilers jersey and a bright smile.

That smile got bigger when he discovered that we were sitting in a corporate box. “Fuck!” he gasped. And then he quickly apologized.

I gave him a cliché ruffle of his hair. “Don’t worry about it. We’re just two guys at a hockey game so if we feel like swearing, no one’s going to give a shit.”

His face was one of shock and glee at that statement. When I was a kid, I loved those times when I used to hang out with my dad when my mom and sisters weren’t around. Dad figured he could turn his filters off and swore the way he did at work, which was a lot. I thought it was one of the greatest things ever; too bad our times like that were few.

And when the Oilers scored the first goal of the game, after Peter and I celebrated with the rest of the crowd, he looked at me and smiled his beautiful smile, his whole face shining brighter than the fake fireworks they shot off after the goal. “The guys at school are going to fucking die when I tell them about this,” he said. “This is fucking awesome, Dad.”

When he called me Dad, I realized that there were some things bigger and stronger than any of my other addictions. I knew then that I had to do what I could to get him to call me that again and again. If I could achieve that, then all would be fine in the world. But even if I screwed up and never saw him again, I would at least have had that one moment.

But when the first intermission came up, something inside of me kicked in. When I heard that buzzer go and the sound of the Zambonis coming out to clean the ice, I was transported back in time, to when I was a kid and my dad had taken me to a hockey game.

Back then, there were no Edmonton Oilers, no NHL hockey team in the city. In fact, the only NHL team in Western Canada was the Vancouver Canucks. And even then, most Canadians still weren’t used to it. The idea that cities like Edmonton and Calgary would have NHL teams was a dream that no one really had even started to imagine.

We were living in Calgary at the time and the closest thing we had then to a professional hockey team was the Calgary Centennials, a scrappy Major Junior A team. Major Junior A hockey was the pinnacle of amateur hockey in Canada, similar to the NCAA in the U.S. for sports like basketball, football, and so on, but without all the academic trappings.

The players were between sixteen and twenty years old and many were NHL prospects. And prior to the NHL expansion in the eighties, Major Junior hockey was the best hockey one could find in Western Canada.

Going to a live Junior A hockey game with all the noises, the smell of popcorn, frying fat of the concessions, and the overlying haze of cigarette smoke was intoxicating to a seven-year-old kid. And even though they were still only teenagers, the players were stars. With no professional hockey in town, local sports coverage in the winter focused on the Centennials. Players like John Davidson, Danny Gare, Bob Nystrom, and Mike Rogers, players who would later go on to great careers in the NHL, were known throughout town.

At the game, I was just like Peter, bouncing in my seat, shocked that I was actually here. The game was held at the Stampede Corral, an old brick hockey arena seating about six thousand people located in the middle of the grounds where the annual Calgary Stampede was held. Although the building was much dated even then, being in it made me feel as if I was at bigger and more famous rinks like the Forum in Montreal or Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.

Coming to the game with only my dad was a rare treat for me. Almost everywhere I went with my dad, even to see Stampede Wrestling at the Victoria Pavilion, just right next door to the Corral, my sisters always had to tag along. But even though they had insisted on coming to this game, my old man stood his ground.

“Sorry, girls. This is a man’s thing,” he said. “If Leo wants to play in the NHL then he’s going to have to see how the big boys play.”

So I was overjoyed beyond belief being not only on an outing with just my dad, but in the stands of the Calgary Corral to see the Centennials take on their provincial rivals, the evil Edmonton Oil Kings. So many years later, I remembered little about the game itself; I couldn’t even recall what the score was or who won.

My biggest memory of the game was my dad buying me a Coke and one of those boxes of Lucky Elephant popcorn and then us finding our seats for the start of the game. The sounds of the game was something else, the buzz of the crowd, the thundering organ with its traditional hockey songs, the sharp scrape of the skates on the ice and the crack of the puck as it careened off the boards after a shot from the point.

I also remembered the speed, the quickness with which the game developed. Although the hockey was not up to the caliber of the NHL, most of us in the stands had only seen the NHL on TV. And the one thing that TV can’t do, even in these high-definition days, is capture the speed of the actual game. I made a mental note, as much as I could at seven years old, that if I wanted to play in the NHL, I’d better work on my skating.

Those first five or seven minutes of the first period were pure joy. And then my old man shrugged, said he had to take a leak, slapped me on the shoulder, and left. For the first few minutes, I was so into the game, I barely registered that he was gone. But after a while, I began to notice he had been away longer than it normally took to take a piss. Okay, he had to take a dump, my seven-year-old mind theorized. My old man loved to take a long time taking a dump at home so this was no different.

When the buzzer sounded for the end of the first period and the old Zamboni came out at the east of the rink, I realized that he wasn’t coming back. He hadn’t left me behind for the night; I knew he was out there somewhere in the stands, in the concourse, talking and smoking and drinking with his friends, and he would drive me home after the game, but he wasn’t going to spend any more time with me.

I got my ticket to the game, my drink, my popcorn, my quick first part of the first period with him, and that was it. I would get nothing more. Even at the age of seven, I had come to know my dad and his habits pretty well.

But that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt.

And that’s what I kept going over and over again, during my time with Peter at the Oilers game. I never left his side, except to briefly go to the bathroom and to refill our drinks and food, and I engaged him in brief conversations about the game and the Oilers generally, but I wasn’t really present. Most of the time I was a seven-year-old, back in the Calgary Corral.

On the way back to the coffee shop, I was on edge. I knew he had to get back, that Joan was waiting, and if I was too late, she would end it all, cut me off from contact with my family. But there was something else I needed to do. I needed to purge my body of that memory, needed to find someplace I could go and bring things to a head, but there was no way I could show up at a casino with Peter. They wouldn’t allow him in and I couldn’t leave him in the car. There was only one other place I could go, and leaving him in the car wouldn’t seem so bad because it would only take a few minutes.

“You know, Peter, we should get back to your mom ASAP, but I’ve got a headache, and if you don’t mind, I need to stop at a store somewhere and get some Tylenol or something,” I said as casually as I could. “However, I could drop you off with your mom first, if you want?”

Peter, being the wonderful kid that he was, shook his head. “That’s okay, Dad, get what you need. It shouldn’t be no problem.”

But there was a bit of a problem. Since it was a Saturday, most bank branches weren’t open. And even though I knew that, I kept looking. I gave Peter excuses about the other strip malls not having a drugstore or something stupid or whatever. He may have thought that something was out of sorts, but to be honest I wasn’t really paying that much attention to him. I was too focused on what I thought needed to be done.

At the third strip mall, I found a kind of replacement, one of the payday loan places. It probably had money just like a bank, and since it was a chain, I figured it probably gave similar training to its staff concerning robbery.

I parked the car, leaving the engine running and climbing out. “You hang tight here, Peter, I won’t be long,” I said. And before he had a chance to argue and to ask to come with me, I dashed away. I made like I was heading to the drugstore but I had parked facing the street so he couldn’t really see the storefronts.

As I made my way to the payday loan store, I pulled my ball cap out of my pocket and slipped it onto my head. I pulled the brim down to partially obscure my face. I pulled the outside door and was about to step in when I stopped.

That seven-year-old boy during that hockey game years ago came back to me and I saw myself sitting all alone in that big hockey rink while my old man was doing his own thing. And then I saw Peter in the front seat of the car, innocently waiting for me.