Murder at the Foul Line (41 page)

Deputy Warden Ezekiel Buchanan rakes me over the coals. Him and Coach Poole, who’s also, technically, a deputy warden.

“You started the fight,” Buchanan tells me. He has a thin face and a long nose and unnaturally red lips. “Can we agree on
that?”

I’m thinking,
If I was still in Attica, the screws would be working me over with ax handles
. I’m thinking,
That’s exactly where you’re going, dickhead, back to Attica, where your life is on the line every minute of every day. Say
good-bye to paradise
.

“Coach,” I finally respond, “I didn’t have anything to do with… with what happened to Spooky. I was on the floor every minute,
which you know because you were there. For me, that’s an alibi.”

Coach Poole doesn’t respond. He looks devastated, like a jilted lover. His ebony skin has a grayish cast and his small chocolate
eyes are shot through with jagged red veins.

“You wanna answer me, Bubba? Answer the question I asked you?” Buchanan’s a patient guy, a twenty-year man who’s worked a
dozen institutions, and he also thinks he’s been betrayed.
That’s because he personally recruited the Menands’ basketball team from some of the worst prisons in the system, choosing
very carefully from the pool of eligible talent. In the process, he’d put his reputation on the line.

“The only point I wanna make,” I say, “is that the entire team was on the court when this went down. I don’t see how you can
blame us.”

“I asked you if you started the fight.”

“It was the moron threw the first punch.”

“After you elbowed him.”

“This is prison basketball, Deputy, which, as you know, is characterized by aggressive defense. You want us to play nice,
you tell the officials to start callin’ fouls. They’re your officials, right?” Again, I’m thinking,
If you talked like that to a deputy warden in Attica, they’d find pieces of your body in Montreal
.

Now I’ve got two goals. I want my coke back and I want to finish my bit at Menands, where life is easy, where the food is
edible, where there are no rats, where the screws don’t begin every conversation with
Hey, you piece of shit
.

“Jones flies into the cheap seats. You start a fight. Jones disappears into the locker room, where he gets killed. Am I supposed
to believe this is all coincidental?”

“I didn’t start the fight, Deputy. And I didn’t see when Spooky took off for the locker room. But anybody in the stands could’ve
followed him and nobody would’ve noticed.”

We go around and around for another hour. I’m polite and respectful, but I stick to my guns. Fights, I insist, are common
under the best of circumstances and this was the New York Prison League’s championship game. High feelings were to be expected
and the refs were allowing us to play. Thus, when the very predictable confrontation finally went
down, person or persons unknown had taken advantage of the resulting chaos.

Coach begins to perk up toward the end. I’m giving him an out and he knows it. Sure, Menands is a minimum security prison,
but it’s still a prison. Assaults among the populace are uncommon, but they happen. Murders are quite rare, but they also
happen. I mean, if a murder occurs in the dining hall, do you blame the cook?

When Buchanan finally dismisses me, I plant a seed. “Coach, we’re gonna play a makeup game, right? This is for the championship
and we were tied.”

I’m back in living unit 8, locked down, me and the rest of the starting five. Hafez Islam, our starting two-guard, is busting
my balls, which I don’t need. Hafez is a prison-converted Black Muslim, the only one at Menands, which has a majority-white
population. I’ve never seen him when he wasn’t angry about something, and from time to time (when that anger was directed
at me) I was tempted to slap his mouth shut. Unfortunately, our stay at Menands depends as much on our nonviolent behavior
off the court as on our game-day ferocity. Which meant that I mostly have to eat it.

“I know you up to somethin’, Bubba,” he tells me. “You coulda took that rebound, only you tipped it out. What’s up wit’ that?
You fuckin’ wit’ us?”

“What I’m up to is none of your Allah-damned business, Hafez. In fact, you’re disrespecting me by asking the question.” I
pause long enough to let the message hit home. “And you better think about something else. If Warden Brook decides that we
had anything to do with Spooky gettin’ capped, he’s
gonna ship us back where we came from. In your case, if I remember right, that was Green Haven.”

I gather my troops for a team meeting and explain that there had to be five hundred people watching us when Spooky was killed.
“You all are just feeling guilty because you’re criminals and you expect to be accused of any crime that takes place in the
neighborhood. I want you to put that kinda thinking out to your minds because a week from today we’re most likely gonna be
playing a makeup game. And this game, my brothers, we’d best not lose. Understand what I’m tellin’ ya? We cop the trophy,
Warden Brook ain’t gonna send us nowhere. But if we lose, we’ll be on the bus before we take a shower.”

Somber nods, sober looks. Now we’re all on the same page.

At eight o’clock, before I have a chance to meet with my surviving partners, Roger “Road” Miller and Hong “Tiny” Lee, I’m
called to the office of Warden Odell Brook. Brook was a Notre Dame shooting guard who’d been drafted in the second round by
the Detroit Pistons, only to blow out his knee in a schoolyard game before he signed a contract.

“You start that fight, Bubba?”

It was the same question Deputy Buchanan had asked, but this time I put a different spin on it. “I had a bad game, Warden.
Real bad. And the moron was in my face from the opening tip.”

“I saw that,” Brook admits. “He was disrespecting you big-time.”

“And I didn’t answer back, right? Even though I was tossing up bricks. Even though he was goin’ right by me.”

“Yeah, fine. You were an angel.” He waves a long blunt
finger in my direction. “But that rebound, Bubba. You coulda taken it down. You know that.”

I nod agreement, then feed him the line I should have fed Hafez Islam and which I’d made up on the way to the warden’s office.
“It was late in the game and we were tied. I wanted to start a fast break, see if we could get some numbers on the other end.”

“Bubba, there was nobody within ten feet of that tip-out.”

“What can I say, Warden? I mean, nothin’ went right for me the whole game. Somehow I thought Spooky was there. I thought I
saw him.”

“You’re so full of shit it’s leaking out of your ears. I can smell it, Bubba. It’s stinkin’ up my office.”

Ever the humble convict, I lower my head before disagreeing. “Swear on my mother, Warden. When I saw the tip go out of bounds
I flipped out. Like, it’s the championship game and I’ve been fucking up and now I fucked up the worst of all.” I raise my
eyes, meet his gaze. “You know what I’m sayin’ here because you been there, too. I took it out on the moron, all my frustration,
everything he said.” I ball my fists, don the most fearsome scowl in my repertoire. “I wanted to kill him, Warden. I wanted
to put the motherfucker
down.
”

I’m six inches taller than Warden Brook’s six-three, and, at 270, eighty pounds heavier. Still, he’s unimpressed by my ferocity.
“You gonna have a bad game next week, Bubba? You gonna tip the ball to a phantom teammate?”

“Does that mean we’re playing?”

“If Spooky…” He pauses, starts again. “If the incident had nothing to do with the basketball game, I don’t see why we should
punish the players and the fans. It doesn’t make sense.” He contemplates his hands for a moment. “As for the fight…
well, you say
he
threw the first punch and he says
you
did. The officials didn’t see what happened and neither did anyone else who counts. I think the league’s gonna be inclined
to call it a wash.”

So far, the conversation’s gone pretty much the way I expected. Menands is populated mainly by white-collar crooks: lawyers
who raided a client’s trust fund, bankers who robbed their own banks, doctors who plundered Medicaid, boiler room operators
who hung around a little too long. These are folks with money; they love to bet on sports and the persistent rumor is that
the cons making book in the yard pay off to a certain deputy warden who pays off to Warden Brook. I don’t know if the rumor’s
true, but when I finally respond, I’m definitely hoping.

“If you’re worried about the game, Warden, there’s something you might wanna try. You know, to help the team along.”

“And what would that be?”

“Well, you could put a little bug in the ears of the officials. I’m not talkin’ about high pressure here. I’m talkin’ about
very low-key so it doesn’t get around.”

“Bubba, you wanna make your point.”

“Okay, Warden.” I lean a little closer, drop my voice. “The way it looks right now, what with all the bad attitude out there,
the first hard foul next week and somebody’s gonna go off.
Unless
the officials take control of the game in the first two minutes. Unless they call a few touch fouls, a few offensive fouls.
Unless they send a clear message.” I lean back. “Later on, the refs wanna let us play, that’ll be great.”

Though Warden Brook says, “Bubba, you don’t have a redeeming bone in your body,” his smile, as I read it, is purely admiring.

It’s after midnight when I’m finally hunkered down with Road Miller and Tiny Lee in the day area of our housing unit. There’s
a forty-watt bulb over the door, enough light for the three o’clock count, but not enough for me to read the messages in my
partners’ eyes.

“Talk to me,” I tell Road. “Tell me what’s on your mind. ’Cause I know you been thinkin’ about it all night.”

Roger “Road” Miller is our starting power forward. He’s a little too light for the position, especially on the defensive end,
but he can elevate on the jumper and he rolls to the basket with determination. I’ve always wondered if Road’s mother deliberately
named him after a white country singer. Road is ebony-skinned and proud of his heritage, but he’d once admitted to me that
his nickname was derived from the Roger Miller hit “King of the Road.”

“Freddie is what’s on my mind,” he tells me. “As in Freddie fucked us.”

Freddie Morrow is the team drudge. He does everything from stacking the equipment to washing our dirty uniforms. I knew when
I recruited him that he was the weak link in the chain, but I had no other way to get the coke out of the locker room.

“Freddie was sitting on the bench when Spooky went down,” I point out. “Plus, he hasn’t got the balls of a canary.”

“I didn’t say nothin’ to nobody,” Road insists, “and Tiny didn’t say nothin’ neither. We ain’t stupid enough to brag on our
business, not when we ain’t done it yet.”

“What about Spooky?”

“No way.”

“And me? What about me?”

“Don’t be an asshole,” Tiny Lee declares. Tiny’s our point guard. He’s five-eight and doesn’t weigh more than 150 pounds.
Meanwhile, he fears nothing. “If Spooky got whacked over some beef with another con, the coke would still be there. It wasn’t
and that means somebody had to tell somebody else. There’s no way around it.”