Chapter Sixteen
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Ben adjusted his tie for the fifth time since he’d entered the elevator.
He couldn’t wait to finish this job. Not only could he stop pretending he knew anything about hockey, he would also be able to come clean about his identity and figure out what to do with Charlie.
When the world found out who he was, surely even Charlie would understand they couldn’t keep living with Phil.
Which was good, because Ben didn’t know how long he could keep from falling into Phil’s magnetic grasp.
Over the course of the last week, he’d tried to keep his distance and his sanity, but he was man enough to admit Phil had eroded both with every sweet word and casual touch.
Or not so casual touch.
As two decades of failed Mormonism attested to, Ben was shit at resisting temptation.
He’d spent many nights in Phil’s bed, too tired after balancing Charlie’s increasingly complicated school-and-hanging-out-with-the-shelter-kids schedule with his own hockey-and-investigating-white-collar-crime schedule to protest when Phil turned those wide, pleading eyes on him or, worse, sucked him off.
For a man who had recently identified as “not gay,” Phil really enjoyed giving blow jobs.
And Ben was useless after—syrupy and weak as putty and willing to acquiesce to whatever Phil wanted.
If Phil had renewed the marriage proposal with Ben a naked puddle of satisfaction in his bed, Ben wouldn’t have been able to keep resisting.
It was only a matter of time. And then Ben would give himself over to whatever Phil had to offer, and everything would go to shit, from the investigation to the hockey team to their living situation.
In total, the imminent end of this extremely confusing period of Ben’s life meant only good things.
He could remove himself from temptation, by which he meant Phil, and he could secure Phil’s future with the Sea Lions by ceding the coaching position to him.
And as an upside, when he finished this job, he’d also finally be able to stop wearing ties every day.
It felt like being strangled by a very weak person.
Finally, he arrived on the twenty-sixth floor.
The building belonged to an investment company, the same company Maxwell Van Giesing had made his fortune with.
For the team’s owner, the San Francisco Sea Lions were one of many business ventures, and they’d turned out to be a losing one in terms of viewership and sponsorship, at least in comparison to the greener pastures of the NFL or the NBA.
A security guard stood watch outside the door.
Ben’s heart rate spiked.
It wasn’t as though he wore a wire. He was a journalist, not an action hero. His only tools comprised the open voice memo on his phone to record this meeting and the screenshots he’d backed up on the Cloud. He hoped like hell the security guard didn’t ask to take his phone.
But when the guard gave him a perfunctory pat down, Ben realized he was looking for weapons.
What had he gotten himself into? He’d never seen a gun; he didn’t want to go into a situation where people might bring them.
Ben gave the guard a shaky smile. He couldn’t back out now. After speaking to Trout and Van Giesing last week at the New Year’s party, they expected him to jump into their betting scheme with both feet. If he pulled out, at best he’d wasted months of work. At worst, they’d get suspicious.
“So,” Van Giesing said after Ben entered the office. His leather chair was even bigger and more impressive than Ben’s. “A betting man, eh?”
Ben affected his best devil-may-care smirk. “What can I say? A man’s gotta have vices.”
“Amen. Now, how much has Mr. Trout told you?”
“He told me if I’m interested in lucrative bets while I’m on the Sea Lions payroll, you can cut me in.”
“Good. Benjamin—it is Benjamin, right?”
Ben nodded.
“Would you call yourself a God-fearing man?”
He almost laughed. “Depends on what you mean by God-fearing, sir.”
“You think your sins get punished in the afterlife?”
Unsure whether Van Giesing wanted him to be religious or not—but guessing this was the reason Pulvermacher had never made it to the inner circle—Ben said, “Better in the afterlife than in this one.”
Van Giesing nodded imperiously. “That’s what I want to hear.
Here’s how it works.” He proceeded to describe the basics of the scheme.
It was simple, nothing Ben hadn’t expected but also nothing he’d been able to prove without this conversation.
Trout would feed him information from the locker room, Van Giesing would bankroll a bet on an event only an insider to the team could know, and Trout would place the bet and take a cut of the proceeds.
“With you involved, we can aim for higher complexity, of course. Bet on healthy scratches or on trades.”
“Hmm. And what’s in it for me? I mean, it’s a pretty risky scheme.” It seemed politic not to agree too soon. Ben Morris, hockey coach, would care if he lost his job, his reputation, and got arrested.
Van Giesing stapled his fingers. “A cut of the pay, of course. Ten percent.”
Ben raised an eyebrow. “Ten percent of what?”
Van Giesing named a figure so ludicrously high Ben would never complain about Phil’s cleaning service again.
He haggled Van Giesing up to twelve to make himself less suspicious and then left with a promise to scratch Howie from the next game.
Van Giesing couldn’t have chosen a worse victim.
Howie’s self-confidence was a fragile flower, and his backcheck wouldn’t be improved by his belief in himself taking a hit.
Ben reminded himself he was a serious, professional journalist who did not care about hockey.
He drove to Golden Gate Park instead of directly to Phil’s.
The team knew where he lived, but none of them talked to Trout or Van Giesing.
Ben doubted this operation was deep enough to involve surveillance, but on the off chance someone had followed him, Ben didn’t want them tracking him home to Phil and Charlie.
In the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday, only Ben and eight million tourists strolled through the Japanese Tea Garden.
He walked past the tea ceremony in progress, inhaling the scent of jasmine.
In August, when Ben had arrived ahead of the start of training camp, all the trees had been a deep rich green, but by now they’d lost most of their leaves.
Even California bowed to the seasons sometimes.
He found a bench under a Japanese maple and called Pulvermacher.
“I have proof.” It would have been more satisfying to inform Pulvermacher in person, but Van Giesing and Trout would smell a rat if Ben marched straight into the GM’s office after agreeing to be a part of their scheme.
“Hello, Ben,” Martin said wearily. “You’ve caught me at a bad time.”
“Did you hear me? I have evidence. I can have a full write-up with a twenty-minute recording incriminating the responsible parties on your desk tomorrow.”
“I’m quitting.”
“What the hell?”
“Benjamin, please.”
Ben rolled his eyes. This was not the time to get prissy about swear words. “You hired me to do this job so you could stay on as GM of this team and actually start winning cups. What gives?”
“Certain events have made it clear it’s not a suitable position for me at this time.”
“Martin.”
Pulvermacher’s sigh blew a hefty gust of static over the line. “It’s all this shelter crap. My wife and her family, your family, don’t want to be involved with a team getting themselves into that sort of business.”
“That sort of business,” Ben repeated dully. Of course. His family struck once again.
It wasn’t just the Mormonism of it all, as Pulvermacher proved when he said, “You know I would ignore it, but there’s a possibility I could take over the Arizona Prairie Dogs instead, and Maude says she’d like to be closer to home.”
It was Ben’s family, relentlessly awful everywhere they went.
Nowhere in the Bible or the Book of Mormon did it say “you have to be an unmitigated homophobe,” or “if you go to bed without cleaning the kitchen from top to bottom your mother will wake you with a screaming fit,” or even “privacy is for people who don’t have secrets.
” Ben’s family chose to be bigoted and abusive, and they also happened to be Mormons, which didn’t help.
They would never change their minds or come around.
“Their team is shit,” Ben said.
“I know.”
“What do you expect me to do now?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?!”
“I won’t get the job if people find out my defensive coach has been making a fool of me for years.”
Ben opened his mouth to protest but he had no idea what he could say. He watched as a couple, wearing matching sweatshirts proclaiming they were from South Dakota and wanted to see the world, took a selfie in front of one of the pagodas. Eventually, he asked, “Am I just supposed to quit too?”
“Absolutely not.” Pulvermacher said. “Your whole work history is fake, and the next guy will spot it in an instant if you do anything suspicious. No, you have to keep coaching as long as you can. The team’s doing all right in the standings; they’re top three in the Pacific.
What more could we want? You’re earning well enough off this, anyway. ”
Ben gritted his teeth. “I put that money in a separate account. I haven’t touched it.”
“Huh. Well, touch it. Listen, Ben, I’ve got to go. I’m interviewing in Tucson this evening. Thanks for all your work. Sorry it didn’t pan out.”
Then he heard nothing but dial tone.
Ben wandered around the park until it was time to pick up Charlie from school. The fog from the Bay felt heavier than usual, rolling in faster as the afternoon wore on, or maybe his mood gave him that impression.