Hoosier Hoops and Hijinks Read online

  “Look,” Snow told him, “I know you have a job to do, but the young man probably needs to be seen by a doctor. And what about the person who assaulted him? Shouldn’t you be looking for him?”

  The officer eyed him suspiciously, then went back to the diary. “This is interesting. Apparently someone named Gary has been bullying him.” He flipped through the pages, scanning. “And it’s been going on for weeks.” He skipped to the end. “Here’s the last entry. It says he plans to confront Gary about the things he’s been doing.”

  Garrett sucked in a breath. He was starting to piece things together now. These people knew. They knew that Al had asked him to come to the barn that night, meet him alone. Or were they guessing?

  “There’s no diary,” he said.

  The officer held up the book. “Then what do you call this?”

  Garrett wanted to snatch it out of his hands and check it, but he didn’t want his fingerprints on it. God, he had to think. Even if they had his diary, Alan couldn’t have made an entry that told what happened. Alan had died that night. He saw it.

  “I don’t believe it’s a real diary.”

  Charlotte said, “It’s as real as the scar on Gary’s face.”

  She brought up the scar. Did they know Alan had carried a knife? Had he mentioned anything about it in the diary?

  The officer didn’t wait for him to respond. “Let me summarize what I’ve learned here. Al LeBlanc,” he motioned toward the prone intern, “has bruises all over his body, which would be indicative of someone bullying him over a long time. We have witnesses to the fact that at least in part this punishment was inflicted by a large man named Gary, who was seen repeatedly knocking him to the ground. One of Gary’s noticeable features is a long scar on his face. Plus, we have Al’s diary which logs the continued bullying by this Gary. Is that correct?”

  “What do you mean by witnesses?”

  “These two ladies are witnesses to what happened.”

  “And we have proof,” said Charlotte.

  “You don’t have proof of anything.”

  “But we do,” she insisted. “We have the diary, and we have photos of the bruises which prove what Al has written in the diary.”

  Snow’s mind raced. He thought his dad had taken care of the medical records. But what if he hadn’t? Or what if the doctor had made copies? Or what if Al’s parents had taken photos of the bruises? And what if they’d surfaced after all these years? If Al named him in the diary for all the things he’d done to him, and there was no reason to believe he hadn’t, could they link the bullying to him and perhaps to the death?

  “You don’t know what happened,” Snow said.

  The officer was quick to counter. “But you do?”

  Snow stewed about that. He did know what happened. And it was clear they didn’t. They were fishing with this little charade, hoping to trip him up. But he hadn’t killed Al that night. Not physically. Al had tried to talk to him about how he’d been hurting people and what it had made them feel like, and Al actually expected him at the end of this little lecture to show some respect. Snow had ridiculed him instead. Berated him and told him he’d never be anything more than a loser. Al had gotten so riled he’d pulled out a knife. The move caught Snow off guard, and Al slashed him across the cheek. Snow disarmed him and beat him around a bit. Dominated him. Humiliated him.

  And then the damned kid ran up to the rafters where there was a noose waiting and he hanged himself while Garrett watched. A final shot at revenge.

  Snow was horrified at first. But then he realized—he hadn’t killed Al. Al was just weak, like so many other people he’d known. He pushed it out of his head, covered his tracks, and went home. Al wouldn’t get to him.

  But he knew today’s world was different. Not everyone would see it the way he did. If these people could link him to Al’s death with photos and a diary, it didn’t matter that LeBlanc really did commit suicide. He would be as guilty of killing Al as if he had shoved his head in the noose and dropped him off the top beam.

  “Let’s face it,” Charlotte said. “This Gary is guilty of severe bullying. And we can prove it. We have the diary. We just need to get him.”

  Francine wondered when this little improv skit would ever end.

  “Yes,” she said, thinking that she might be able to help it along. She nervously held up her iPhone. “We have the photos.”

  Snow gave her a scowl that made her swallow hard. Maybe she should have kept her mouth shut.

  The senator bent down to talk to Charlotte. “What do you want?” he said through gritted teeth.

  Charlotte looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t be obtuse. You want something. What will it take for you to get skinny boy to a doctor and forget all about this alleged incident?”

  Francine tried to stay in character. She was more baffled than ever about what was really going on, but she knew she should be shocked at the direction this skit was taking. “Are you saying you had something to do with the condition of this young man? And you’re trying to bribe us?”

  Charlotte gave a cough that covered what Francine thought was a laugh. She was annoyed by Charlotte’s reaction, but she couldn’t stop looking at Snow, whose smoldering anger was clearly building.

  “I’m admitting nothing,” he told her, “and you know you can’t prove the thing you’re trying to prove. I just want the door closed and you out of here.”

  Once again Francine was confused. She had no idea how to respond. Whose line is it anyway? she thought.

  Charlotte cocked her head back and studied Snow pensively. “I’m not saying there’s an answer here to past sins, Gary. But I do think you should stop trying to reinvigorate an old system that gives big schools the opportunity to bully smaller ones in the almighty name of sports.”

  He stared at her. Reached toward her, then stopped. And stared some more. Francine thought it was a good thing this was improv. Or that an officer was there. Or that maybe they were being filmed. Or all three.

  “That’s what you want?”

  “So little,” Charlotte responded, “for what you’ve done.”

  Snow pointed at the door. “Go.”

  Charlotte said, “Then you’ve agreed?”

  “Just go.”

  Charlotte smiled. “Francine, let’s get this boy to a doctor.”

  Francine already had Alan by one arm. Charlotte took the other and they walked out the Senator’s door, exited the secretary’s empty office and down the hall. The officer followed.

  Before they got too far down the hall, Snow stuck his head out the door and said, “The IHSAA principals weren’t going to change their minds anyway.”

  Charlotte turned around. “You legislators need to stop distracting the public with stupid issues like single-class basketball. If you want to be useful, tackle the real problems, the ones we elect you to handle.”

  The officer guided them down the stairs. They slowly made their way out of the Statehouse to a dark sedan waiting in the parking lot. Francine helped Alan into the backseat.

  “I’m okay, really,” he told Francine once he was seated.

  “This is Alan Thompson,” Charlotte said by way of introduction. “He’s really the grand nephew of Al LeBlanc.”

  “And Al LeBlanc is?”

  “He was my friend,” the officer said. “Please hold these.” He gave Francine his radio and earpiece.

  They were surprisingly light. Francine turned them over in her hand. They possessed amazing detail, but they were nothing more than plastic reproductions, the kind someone who had access to film-studio props might obtain.

  The officer pulled off his mustache and the hairpiece. The plentiful hair had made him look twenty-five years younger. He took glasses out of his pocket and put them on. “Mel?” Francine exclaimed. “You were the police officer?”

  Charlotte’s brother waved a finger at her. “Not a police officer. Impersonating a policeman would have been too risky if things had g
one badly. So I tried to look like one without really being one. We figured as long as we kept Garrett off balance he wouldn’t notice.”

  The large young man who played the young Gary skipped down the steps to the Statehouse and folded himself into the seat next to Al. “This is my friend Pete,” Al said. “He and Mel went in this morning dressed like janitors.”

  “Why did you do this?” Francine asked.

  Mel raised an eyebrow. “You know how interested you are in checking off bucket list items? I just took care of my longtime #1.”

  He explained that Al LeBlanc had been his friend during freshman year in high school. Both of them had been bullied by Gary Snow during Coach Crumley’s dreaded PE class, but Snow had taken particular pleasure in Al’s misery.

  “Why did it bother him so much and not you?” Francine asked.

  “Al was an athlete who was reaching puberty late. He didn’t like it that Gary didn’t respect him. I, on the other hand, was short, skinny, unathletic and named ‘Melvin.’ I’d lived with that kind of stuff all my life.”

  “My family made some mistakes in letting the senator’s father bury the truth in exchange for helping my uncle Al cope with what Snow had done,” the young Alan said. “But it was working fine until the sectional game.”

  Charlotte picked up the story line. “When Al had the chance to show up Coach Crumley’s team, he jumped on it. He’d become a decent basketball player with a wicked outside shot. That night his shooting was inspired. But in the last minute Gary bullied him again and he fell apart.” She told her about the “Snowplow.”

  Mel sat down in the driver’s seat. “His collapse haunted him. I could never find a way to pin his suicide on Gary, but I knew he was a big part of it. Today’s little victory against his pet project to reinstate single-class basketball doesn’t fully satisfy, but I think it’s the best revenge I’m going to get.”

  “And my family could get,” Alan said. “I couldn’t believe it when I applied to be an intern and was assigned to him. We were selling the old family farm and had just found the diary, so it was like the heavens opened. Charlotte’s been like an aunt to me and she had known Al, so I went to her. She enlisted Mel.”

  Charlotte buckled in the passenger seat up front. “The unfortunate part was that the diary was a mixed bag. Al’s writing was often illegible, and when it wasn’t, it didn’t make a lot of sense. You got a sense of the pain, but often he expressed forgiveness. We only knew from the last entry that he planned to talk to Gary privately. Wanted to confront him with how he was hurting people and ask for his respect. We had to work around those unknowns. If we could have gotten some kind of confession out of Snow, that would have been perfect, but we didn’t expect it. He’s a pretty cagey politician.”

  Francine buckled in next to Al’s friend. “I understand why all of you are involved, but why me? Why didn’t you clue me in?”

  “You were our ‘out,’” Charlotte said. “We needed one person who could be counted on to testify to the truth in case it blew up in our faces. We all had an agenda. You didn’t. A judge would listen to you.”

  “And by the way,” Mel added. “You were great.”

  Francine glared at Charlotte. “I don’t feel great. I feel like I was used.”

  Charlotte turned to look at her from the front seat. “But just think about how Gary must feel. You were only buffaloed. He got snowplowed.”

  Bobby Leonard

  Brenda Robertson Stewart

  William Robert (Slick) Leonard played high school basketball at Terre Haute Gerstmeyer and played collegiate basketball at Indiana University under coach Branch McCracken. In 1953, Leonard hit the game-winning free throws giving Indiana the NCAA national championship. After college, he played four years for the Lakers in Minnesota and one year after the team moved to Los Angeles. He spent two years with the Chicago Zephyrs where he served as a player and coach the second year. The team moved to Baltimore and Leonard served as coach for one more year.

  Leonard became coach of the Indiana Pacers, an American Basketball Association team, in 1969 and served in that capacity for 12 years, the last four after the ABA-NBA merged. He led the Pacers to three ABA championships.

  In 1985, Leonard returned to the Pacers as a color commentator first on television and then on radio where he remains. In March, 2011, Leonard suffered a heart attack following the Pacers road victory over the New York Knicks and was given an indefinite period of time to recover before he returned to the radio.

  Leonard is a member of the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame and was the first person inducted into the Indiana University Sports Hall of Fame. He was honored as a member of Indiana University’s All-Century Basketball Team.

  Leonard’s trademark phrase is “Boom, baby!”

  BLEEDING PURPLE

  D. L. Hartmann

  Muncie, Indiana

  March 20, 1954

  Suellen shuddered at John’s decorating. Inside their three-bedroom, bath & half ranch house, large purple ribbons decorated the lamps on end tables, the window frames, and just about everything else. A large sign in purple letters covered the mirror over the couch: “Muncie Loves Her Bearcats.” But Suellen left everything in place. John would take it all down after the game; at least she hoped so.

  The telephone shrilled. With a sigh, she scooped the purple ribbon up so she could hold the handset. “Hello.”

  “Hello, sweetie. It’s your favorite aunt.”

  Suellen gripped the phone. “What on earth are you doin’ calling me in the middle of the day?” she asked. “Is Mama all right?”

  “Oh, you silly girl, don’t you worry. Your mama is fine as frog hair. She’s off to church cooking for a funeral dinner tomorrow.”

  Suellen relaxed her grip on the phone. “It kind of scared me when I heard your voice, thought maybe Mama was sick or something. So, she’s still working at the church—that’s good. I swear, that woman is a saint. I can’t wait to see you all. I’m catching the bus in the morning, so I’ll be there by dark.”

  “That’s good, sweetie. I just called to be sure you’re still coming. We’re all excited to see you. How is everything there in Muncie? Your mama thought you sounded funny on the phone on your birthday.”

  Suellen pulled the cord to let her take the phone to the couch. “Oh, everything is okay here. Really. I shouldn’t have called Mama and worried her, but I was kind of upset when we had to go to a basketball game on my birthday. You know John takes basketball real serious. Fact is, we’re having a little party here tonight so he can watch the state final game with his friends. I swear, if I left right now, John wouldn’t miss me until the game is over.”

  Mary Beth laughed. “Men. They’re all alike. Your daddy was plumb foolish over baseball.”

  Suellen gave a little snort. “I remember.” She heard the sound of a key and looked at the front door. “I got to go Aunt Mary Beth, it’s John home from the bank. Talk to you later. Love you lots. Don’t you worry about me, hear?”

  John shoved the door shut with his hip so he didn’t have to set down the case of beer. “Ready for the party,” he said. He put the beer in the kitchen and returned to pull off his overcoat and hang it up. He ran his hand through his thinning gray hair and gave Suellen a quick kiss.

  She started toward the kitchen, then stopped. “Where are the snacks? Did you pick up chips and pretzels to go with all that beer?”

  John groaned. “I forgot. I’m sorry. I stopped by the Northwest Plaza and talked to a man about a bomb shelter and it just slipped my mind.”

  “I thought you gave up on that idea, John. We’ve got all that civil defense stuff in the basement. Isn’t that enough?”

  “They have a shelter that’s all poured and ready. They just deliver it to your house and then drop it in a hole in the ground like a septic tank.”

  “Like a septic tank? What a charming picture that makes.”

  “Listen, honey, there are a lot of people in Muncie putting in bomb shelters. The patho
logist at the hospital, the Korean one, Dr. Joon Kim. Why Dr. Ball told me he went over to visit Dr. Kim and out in the garage was this big mahogany door. Dr. Kim opened it up and they went down the stairs to a fully equipped bomb shelter right there under the garage. Dr. Ball said it was something else.”

  “I just don’t know why Dr. Ball is encouraging you in this insanity. He’s not even a psychiatrist.”

  “Hey, honey,” John said, suddenly serious, “if there’s an atomic war, I want my family to survive. What’s wrong with that? We could survive for weeks in a shelter and come out when it’s safe.”

  Suellen stared at him. They’d been over this before. “Safe? It won’t ever be safe after an atomic war. The air and the water will be poisonous. We’d be in danger for years not for weeks.” She took a deep breath. “And what about Sally? What if she didn’t get home in time—would we go down the basement without her?—to survive by ourselves while everyone else outside dies?”

  John shook his head. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you tonight. I wouldn’t go into a shelter without Sally. For God’s sake, we might even have room for some of the neighbors.”

  “I wish you would just think as much about an atomic war as you do about basketball.”

  He cut her off. “I don’t need to, Suellen, I understand basketball.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “Well, I’ve got to run to the grocery and get some snacks before Monte and Barb get here.”

  She didn’t speak to him again until she had her hand on the doorknob. Her smile was tender. “John, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tease you about the game. I know how important it is to you.”

  He walked over to kiss her goodbye. “It will be a slaughter,” he said. “At least it’s Milan and not Anderson.”

  She stared at him. “What does that mean?”

  “If you were from Muncie instead of West Virginia, you would understand that when you went to Anderson for a game in the Wig Wam, you were taking your life in your hands. Those thugs attacked us in the parking lots.”

  “I know. I’ve heard the stories. Didn’t Bearcats attack the Anderson fans when they came here?”