Murder at the Foul Line (15 page)

“I’m Mr. Hastings from the lawyer’s office.”

“Oh, yes. Come, sit down.”

She patted the couch next to her, which would have been
my first choice. For one thing, she had to sign papers. For another, I wouldn’t have to look at her, see her grief.

I sat down, put my briefcase on the coffee table, snapped it open, took out a fact sheet.

“All right, Mrs. Jackson,” I said. “Your son’s name was Grant?”

“That’s right.”

“Grant Jackson?”

“Yes.”

I filled his name in the blank. Grant Jackson, though dead, was still the client. His mother was filing suit in his behalf.
I put down his particulars, then hers.

As Richard had surmised, Grant’s father had left the family picture years ago. I inquired of the brothers and sisters, all
of whom would benefit in the event of a successful suit. There were nine, ranging in age from the baby on her knee to the
young man who had opened the door, whose name turned out to be Lincoln. Indeed, the chronological list of Mrs. Jackson’s children
mapped a cultural evolution, from Grant and Lincoln to Jamal and Rasheed.

The preliminaries out of the way, I took a breath. “All right,” I said. “Can you tell me what happened?”

Mrs. Jackson snuffled once, bounced the baby automatically. “Grant was at practice. He always at practice. He work him hard.
Too hard.”

“Who worked him hard?”

“Coach Tom.”

“Who’s Coach Tom?”

“The coach.”

“What’s his name?”

“Coach Tom.”

I didn’t want to get impatient with a woman in her grief, but I wasn’t making much headway. “Does Coach Tom have another name?”

“Suppose. But everyone call him Coach Tom.”

“He was Grant’s basketball coach?”

“Yes, and he work him too hard.”

“Ma, take it easy,” Lincoln warned. He was prowling the room as if suspicious I might be trying to rip his mother off.

She pierced him with her eyes. “Easy? I should take it easy? My boy. My poor boy.”

“Grant collapsed during practice?”

“That’s right. He had a bad heart. No, not a
bad
heart. A
weak
heart. And Coach Tom knew. That’s the thing. Coach Tom knew.”

“Grant had a heart condition?”

“Yes, he did.”

“He’d been to the doctor for this?”

“Tha’s right. Said he had arrhythmia. Not bad if he careful. If he don’t play ball.”

“Not what he say,” Lincoln contradicted. “He don’t say don’t play ball. He just say take it easy.”

“Same thing. Shouldn’t have played. I tell him that. I tell him don’t play. Grant, he don’t listen.”

“Did your son play ball before? In high school?”

“Course he did. Course we don’t know. We don’t know nothin’ wrong. Till the physical. The college physical. Doctor find out
what the pediatrician miss.” Her voice quivered in outrage. “Can you believe that? Pediatrician see him every year, don’t
know a thing.”

“What’s the pediatrician’s name?” I asked. It occurred to me Richard was right, there were a lot of people to sue.

She gave me the information and I wrote it down.

“So what’d the doctor say? The one who found the arrhythmia?”

“The doctor say he can play. He got a heart condition, but he can play. He just gotta take it easy. How you take it easy playin’
ball? I tell him, Grant, don’t do it. I tell him no. My boy, he got a big heart.” She broke down. “Oh, why I say that? But
it’s true. He had a plan. Can’t talk him out of it. Gonna be a star, claim hardship, jump to the NBA. Signin’ bonus, get us
outta here. I tell him no, but he won’t hear. He won’t hear.”

A sob racked her body, and her eyes filled with tears.

It was a relief when my beeper went off. It startled the baby, made him cry, snapped his mother back to the present.

“Wha’s that?” she said.

“Sorry. It’s the office, paging me. I have to call in.”

“Phone’s inna kitchen. Lincoln, show the man.”

I got up, followed Lincoln Jackson into a kitchen where cockroaches scurried about in plain sight. I picked up the receiver
of the wall phone, punched in the office number.

“Rosenberg and Stone,” came the voice of Wendy/Janet.

Wendy and Janet were Richard’s switchboard girls. They had identical voices, so I never knew which I was talking to.

“It’s Stanley. What’s up?”

“Where are you?”

“Grant Jackson’s apartment, signing up the mother.”

“Forget it,” Wendy/Janet said. “I got a case for you in Queens.”

I blinked. “Excuse me?”

“A case in Queens. The guy’s waiting for you. Head out there now.”

“I’m just getting started here.” I lowered my voice. “She hasn’t signed the retainer vet.”

“It doesn’t matter. We’re dropping the case.”

I blinked again. “Why?”

“I don’t know, but Richard said to send you out to Queens.”

I groaned. Besides a voice, Wendy and Janet shared an intelligence. Between them, they had the I.Q. of a fireplug. I had learned
from bitter experience any fact they gave me was apt to be wrong.

This had to be one of them.

“I’ll have to hear it from Richard,” I said.

“Very well,” Wendy/Janet said acidly, taking my request for the rebuke it was, and put me on hold.

Moments later Richard Rosenberg came on the line. “Stanley. Why are you giving the girls a hard time? Take down the information
and get out to Queens.”

“I’m not done here.”

“Yes, you are. We’re dropping the case.”

“How come?”

“It’ll be on the evening news. A friend of mine leaked me the autopsy report. Grant Jackson died of a drug overdose.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Not at all. Pretty stupid, huh? A guy with a weak heart shouldn’t be messing around with cocaine.”

I looked up, saw Lincoln standing there staring at me.

“You wanna run that by me again, Richard?”

“Of course,” Richard said sarcastically. “God forbid you should merely follow instructions without making me justify my decisions.
The point is, Grant Jackson with a bad ticker made the rather unwise career choice of mainlining a rather
large dose of rather pure coke. Under the circumstances, the number of people I can sue has dropped from everybody and his
brother to one, the guy who sold him the drugs. Whom I would suspect of being unlikely to be found. So I’m dropping the case.
So wrap it up and get out to Queens. Hang on, I’ll transfer you back, you can get the address.”

Wendy/Janet came back on the line and gave me the info. A Frederick Tucker of Forest Hills had tripped on a crack in the sidewalk
and broken his leg, giving him a cause of action against the City of New York. I took down the details, told Wendy/Janet I’d
get right on it.

I didn’t.

I figured a guy with a broken leg wasn’t going anywhere. Frederick Tucker could wait. First I finished signing up Mrs. Jackson.

“That’s awful,” Alice said as we watched the report on the evening news.

“It certainly is,” I told her.

“So there’s no case, but you signed it up anyway? Just so you wouldn’t have to tell the woman Richard had turned her down?”

“That’s right.”

“As a humane gesture, to spare her feelings?”

“No,” I said. “As a cowardly gesture, not wanting to be the one to tell her.”

“Instead you spent a half hour filling out forms.”

“Fifteen minutes. No big deal.”

“So the woman’s signed up?”

“Yes, she is.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means she’ll have to get a note from Rosenberg and Stone, telling her we’re no longer handling the case.”

“I don’t think so.”

I looked at Alice. She was lying on the bed propped up on her elbow. She looked bright, attractive, alluring, fetching, radiant.

I was in trouble.

I took the zapper, flicked the TV on mute. Leaned back in the overstuffed chair. “Alice, what am I missing here?”

“You told me all about this woman and her umpteen children and her squalid apartment. Her dead son wanted to get her out of
there.
She
wants to get out of there. That’s why she wants to sue. You know the reason that won’t work. You knew it, but you signed
her up anyway.”

“I told you why.”

“Yeah, but I know you. You’re a nice guy. You see this woman with her kids, and you wanna help her. You figure maybe there’s
a loophole even Richard doesn’t know. You figure there’s gotta be a way.”

I’m not entirely sure I figured all that. As I grow older and more cynical, any resemblance between me and a knight in shining
armor is entirely coincidental and not to be inferred. If asked for an objective self-evaluation, I would have said I chickened
out. Being a devout coward.

Of course that goes double for my wife. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t mean she’s a coward—I mean when confronted with her, that’s
what I become. Anyway, faced with Alice’s placid assurance that my motivation was clearly to help the woman, I found myself,
as I usually do when dealing with my wife, ill equipped to contradict her. In short, helping the woman had become the coward’s
way out.

Cedar Park was a small college nestled within a single city block. Its facilities consisted of a series a crumbling stone
buildings, all of the same vintage and architectural design. Clearly no wealthy graduate was springing for a new theater or
science lab.

The gymnasium turned out to be on the fourth floor of the history building. I determined this by going in what appeared to
be the administration building and looking in vain for any sort of office, then going back outside and asking some students,
who were leery of me, making me for a cop. Eventually I got the right building, found the stairs. Halfway up the last flight,
I was rewarded by the sound of a bouncing basketball.

The Cedar Park College basketball court was small, as I’d expected, but surprisingly well maintained. The parquet floor gleamed.
The keys and three-point lines had been stenciled on with care. The wooden backboards were freshly painted white. The orange
rims were new, as were the white and blue nets.

The court was about three-quarters of the length of a regulation floor. There were no bleachers for fans, just a single row
of benches along the narrow side walls, which might have led me to believe this was just a practice gym, were it not for the
score clock on the wall. The clock looked older than me, which cast doubts as to whether it actually worked. Taken together,
a pair of depressing thoughts.

There were ten men on the court, playing a practice game. Five wore red pullover jerseys, five did not. All were black. Most
were lithe and thin. Some were tall. Some were broad. All had moves. None were dominant.

Watching the action was a wizened old black man with horn-rimmed glasses, a whistle in his mouth, and a perpetual frown. As
I watched, he blew the whistle, stopped action, strode onto the court.

“No, no, no!” he complained, shaking his head. He addressed a lanky young man with an open mouth and a
who, me?
expression. “Clyde, what was that play? That was a pick-an’-roll. You pick, but you din’t roll. Floyd got the ball, two defenders
on him, nowhere to go. All you do is bring another man to cover Floyd. Now, is that
helpful?
Is that
useful?
Is that what you were
tryin’
to do?”

Players from both teams grinned and snickered while Clyde shuffled his feet and muttered, “No.”

“No,” the man with the whistle said. “Tha’s right, Clyde. Good answer. So we learnin’ here. So the next time you pick an’
roll, you
roll
.”

Play started up again.

I moved around the court, approached the man. “Coach Tom?”

He spoke without looking or taking the whistle out of his mouth. “Yes?”

“I’m here about Grant Jackson.”

He exhaled hard enough to blow the whistle slightly. Heads turned on the court, but he waved it off. “Play on.” He turned
to me, aggrieved. “What about him? Not bad enough I lose my star player, I gotta answer questions too?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It must be hard. But it’s harder for his family. For their sake, could you help me out?”

Coach Tom squinted up his eyes and turned his back on the action on the court. “Just what you mean?”