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