“He’s waiting for your call,” Vince says, and gives me Karas’s direct phone number.
“Vince, this is great. I owe you big-time,” I say.
“You got that right. That reminds me, I set up the meeting with Petrone.”
“For when?”
“Eight o’clock tomorrow night. They’ll pick you up in front of your office.”
“Thanks, Vince. I really appreciate all of this.”
Click.
Since Vince is no longer on the phone, I hang up my end and call Karas at the number Vince gave me, which turns out to be his cell phone. We’re only ten seconds into our conversation when I catch another break: He’s on his way home to Fort Lee and offers to meet me for a cup of coffee.
We meet at a diner on Route 4 in Paramus, and Karas is waiting at a table when I arrive. I recognize him because I watch all those idiotic sports panel shows that he’s on. I introduce myself, then say, “I really appreciate your meeting me like this.”
“Vince told me he’d cut my balls off if I didn’t talk to you,” he says.
“He’s a fun guy, isn’t he?”
He nods. “A barrel of laughs. Does this meeting have something to do with the Schilling case? Vince wouldn’t tell me.”
His question is a little jarring on a personal note. I keep forgetting that the Schilling case, more than ever before, has at least made me nationally recognizable, if not a celebrity. The truth is that more people in this diner would know who I am than the “famous” sportswriter I’m having coffee with.
“It may. It depends on what you have to say. But I have to tell you that this is on background… off the record.”
He’s surprised by that. “Am I here as a journalist?”
“Partly,” I say. “But I need assurance that you won’t use it as a journalist, at least for the time being.”
He thinks for a few moments, then reluctantly nods. “Okay. Shoot.”
“A man that was working for me as an investigator was murdered last week. His name was Adam Strickland. Did he contact you around that time?”
Karas’s face clouds slightly as he searches for a connection to the name. It’s disappointing, but that disappointment fades when I see the light go on in his eyes. “Yes… I think that was the name. My God, that was the young man that was murdered in your office?”
“Yes. You spoke to him?”
Karas is quiet for a few moments, either trying to remember the conversation or trying to deal with this close brush with someone’s sudden death. “He didn’t tell me he was working for you… he just said he was a private investigator. I assumed he was working for some tabloid rag…”
“Can you tell me specifically what he asked you?”
“He was interested in the days when I did some freelance work for a magazine called Inside Football. I put together a high school all-American team, and we ran it as a large spread.”
“Is that the team that Kenny Schilling and Troy Preston were on?”
He nods. “Yes. That’s what he was asking me about.”
“What specifically did you tell him?”
He shrugs. “Really not much. I told him that we picked players from all over the country. It’s not an exact science; these are high school kids, playing against all different levels of competition. We looked at their size, their stats, how hard the big-time colleges were recruiting them, that kind of thing.”
I nod; as a sports degenerate I know something about this stuff. Great high school basketball players are far easier to spot than their football counterparts. Kids that stand out in football in high school often can’t even cut it on the college level.
“Did he ask you for a list of players that were there?”
He nods. “Yeah, I wasn’t going to go to the trouble of finding it, but he seemed like a decent guy…”
“He was a very decent guy,” I say.
“I could tell. Anyway, I keep good files, so I faxed it to him.”
I’m now close to positive that we’re on to something. The list was faxed to Adam, it was important to Adam, but it was nowhere to be found in his possessions. The killer almost certainly took it, and I don’t know any drug gang killers that like football quite that much.
Karas tells me about the weekend the players spent in New York, and I ask him if he can recall anything unusual about it, especially anything concerning Schilling or Preston, but he cannot.
“I wasn’t a chaperone, you know? There were around twenty-five guys, and most of them had never been to New York, so they weren’t too interested in me telling them stories.”
He thinks some more, then adds, “We rented out the two upstairs private rooms in an Italian restaurant that Saturday night. I think it was on the Upper East Side. Divided it up, offense in one room, defense in the other. I must have been with the offense, because I remember Schilling being there.”
He has nothing more to add, so he asks me a few questions about what this is about and how it relates to the trial. I deflect them, but promise he’ll be the second to know, after Vince. Knowing Vince as he does, he understands.
I thank him for his help, and we both leave. He promises to fax me the list tonight, and I tell him the earlier the better.
That list could answer a lot of questions-and raise new ones. We’re getting somewhere; I can feel it.
I go home and tell Laurie what I’ve learned, and I can see the excitement in her face as she hears it. It’s not the look of a woman who wants to go to Findlay and plan a schedule for the school crossing guards, but I don’t say anything like that. I don’t want to blow it.
Laurie and I spend the next hour and a half watching the fax machine not ring. I take advantage of the time to think about the trial, which is weirdly running on a parallel track. When we learn more about the mysterious deaths, I’m going to have to find a way to bring those two tracks together. That’s not going to be easy.
The fax machine finally rings, and it seems as if it takes a little over a week for the paper to come crawling out. It turns out there are two pages, and the first is a note from Karas. He writes that he’s just remembered that at the Saturday night party the offensive players asked him to leave the room for a brief time. They said they were going to have a “team meeting.” He considered that a weird thing to request and feared that they had brought some drugs that they were going to use once he left. Not too long later they invited him back in, and to his relief he saw no evidence of drug use.
The second faxed page is the list of high school players who were brought to New York that weekend. Laurie and I compare it to the names of the deceased young men, and we make a stunning discovery.
Seven of the eight who died were members of the offense, the same group that included Kenny Schilling and Troy Preston. The same group that asked George Karas to leave the room so that they could have a team meeting.
Kenny Schilling was close enough geographically to have killed each of those people, though they were spread out across the country. Kenny played professionally, and he traveled extensively, and those young men died at times when Kenny was nearby. Darryl Anderson, the Asbury Park drowning victim, is not on the list.
But there is another name on that list, and if Kenny was there, he was there as well. I’ve been viewing him as a victim, and there’s still a good chance of that, but I’ve just adjusted my view.
I am talking about Bobby Pollard, high school all-American, Giants trainer, friend of Kenny’s.
Possible victim, possible serial killer.
* * * * *
MY CLIENT IS INNOCENT. I am almost positive of that now. It would be nice if I had known it sooner, since I might have been able to develop an effective strategy to defend him. A secondary but significant benefit would be that Cesar Quintana would not be hell-bent on killing me.