Half Court Press

by A. J. Stewart

  “You don’t, huh?”

  “You’re here to look into my situation.”

  “What situation would that be?”

  She started walking away, but then she stopped and turned back.

  “Come on,” she said. “You need to see something.”

  Chapter Five

  I stepped down the bleachers and followed Tania across the court and into the hallway, where I held the heavy gym door for a group of struggling old folks.

  Tania led me to the girls’ locker rooms. She walked inside and I stopped. I’m not going to say I haven’t ever done it, but I don’t make it a habit of wandering into the ladies’ bathrooms. I waited until Tania reappeared.

  “Are you coming?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “There’s no one in here.”

  “I’m not sure that’s the point.”

  “Come on.” She didn’t wait to argue but turned and walked inside, so I followed.

  Women’s locker rooms are pretty much the same as men’s locker rooms. There are more cubicles in the bathroom area, and more mirrors, and they smell decidedly better, but other than this, they’re still locker rooms.

  Tania led me to a locker at the end of a row, near the showers, which were mercifully vacant. She removed a large padlock and then opened the locker door. Inside was a lot of junk. Sweaters and underwear and socks, shampoo and conditioner, a half-eaten granola bar. She turned and looked at me.

  “What?” I said.

  Tania stepped back. Then I saw it. A message, spray-painted yellow on the inside of the locker door.

  Do the right thing. I know where your mother lives.

  I read the words twice over and then looked at Tania. She wore a neutral expression.

  “I take it you didn’t put that there,” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “And when did that appear?”

  “Four days ago.”

  “Did you tell anyone?”

  “No. I thought it was a prank.”

  “So why are you showing it to me now?”

  “You’re a friend of Detective Ronzoni.”

  I thought friend was probably a big call, but I just nodded.

  “He’s brought you in to help. I don’t know if you’re an off-duty cop or what, but I’m not stupid and I’m not deaf. Everybody’s talking in whispers around me. Mom won’t say anything; Dad won’t say anything; I know Mr. Kressic is playing dumb. So I’m asking you. What’s going on?”

  She was right. She wasn’t stupid, and she wasn’t some fragile waif that was going to need smelling salts after fainting at the news. But I wasn’t going to have this conversation in the girl’s locker room.

  “You like ice cream?” I asked.

  I took a photo of the message and told Tania to lock up, and then I led her from the locker room and out into the parking lot. She carried a gym bag and I opened the back of my SUV to put it in.

  “You think I’m just going to get in your car?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Good point. Smart thinking.”

  “I don’t even know your name.”

  “I’m Miami Jones.”

  “Tania Bryson.” She offered her hand and I shook it. It was soft and thin-boned, but larger than the average.

  “Miami Jones?” she repeated. “I know you.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. Well, no. I know your name. You went to University of Miami.”

  “I did. A long time ago.”

  “Your name is still on the wall in the workout room.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes. You won the World Series.”

  “The College World Series.”

  “Yes. I remember seeing it. I went to UM, too.”

  “I heard.”

  “And you know Detective Ronzoni.”

  “I do.”

  “Okay,” she said, and she tossed her bag into my car.

  I drove a short way to a Baskin-Robbins on Blue Heron Boulevard. I got a cup of rocky road and Tania got a cone of something called bubblegum. We sat by the window overlooking the parking lot.

  “You don’t look that old,” she said.

  “Compared to what?”

  “Compared to how old you act.”

  “How old do I act?”

  “We’re at an ice cream stand.”

  “You don’t like ice cream?”

  I really didn’t care if she liked ice cream or not. I had been to this rodeo before. I didn’t talk to young women—whether they were witnesses, suspects, or clients—in private places. I preferred public locations, where I could ask questions but questions would not be asked of me later. And I didn’t do it in bars, even if I would have preferred a beer over ice cream almost every time.

  “I like ice cream fine,” she said. “So who are you, exactly?”

  “Like you say, I’m a friend of Ronzoni’s. He’s asked me to ask around about the little messages you’re getting.”

  “Messages. So there are others.”

  “I think you know the answer to that. Tell me about the graffiti in your locker.”

  “What about it?”

  “It appeared four days ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “How would I know?”

  “I mean, were you there early? Late? Tell me what happened.”

  “I came in early to shoot some hoops. Gerry, he’s the janitor at the club, he sometimes lets me in before hours, while he’s cleaning.”

  “Okay. So what happened?”

  “I shot some hoops.”

  “Did you go to your locker first?”

  “Yes. I put my stuff in there and then went to the gym.”

  “And the message wasn’t there.”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “It’s hard to miss, don’t you think?”

  “People can miss the obvious, especially when their mind is on something else.”

  “No, it wasn’t there.”

  “Okay. So you played hoops.”

  “Shot hoops. I didn’t play. There was no one else there.”

  “All right, and then what?”

  “I went back to the locker room to shower, and I found the message painted on the door.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I freaked out a little bit, that’s what I did.”

  “Understandable. Did you leave?”

  “Yes. I didn’t shower. I went home to do that.”

  “But you normally shower at the club?”

  “Yes.”

  “And who else was there? Just this Gerry guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So maybe it was him.”

  “It wasn’t Gerry.”

  “How do you know?”

  “If you knew Gerry, you’d know. He was vacuuming the rooms where the kids do homework after school.”

  “But you were in the gym. He could have slipped in and done it.”

  “It wasn’t Gerry,” she said, sternly.

  “All right, if you say so. But no one else was there.”

  “Not that I know of, but obviously there must have been.”

  “Have you asked Gerry if he saw anyone?”

  “No. After I got home I figured it must have been a prank, and I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction, so I let it go.”

  I ate some ice cream. It was rich, and two bites was all I could stomach.

  “When you showed me the locker before, there was a padlock on it. I take it that’s new.”

  “No. I’ve had that for a while.”

  “Was it locked during the time the graffiti appeared?”

  “Yes.”

  “And does anyone else have a key?”

  “No.”

  I sat back in my seat. That was a curly one, but I knew from personal experience that no padlock was unbeatable.

  “I didn’t see too many padlocks on lockers in there,” I said.

  “There aren’t.
I mean, there are when people are using them, but the lockers aren’t available for overnight use.”

  “But you leave your stuff in there.”

  “The club lets me have one permanently . . . You know . . .”

  She looked sheepish.

  “Because you’re a number one draft pick.”

  “Because I’m there a lot.”

  I shrugged. I could see she knew she was getting special treatment because she was a star, and I could also see it didn’t sit comfortably with her.

  “So this message. What do you think do the right thing means?”

  “I don’t know. Like I said, I told myself it was a prank. But if it means something, I guess it means to play ball and look after everyone.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Yes. Mom, Dad, you know.”

  “Everyone,” I said. “Have there been people coming out of the woodwork, looking for their pound of flesh?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  “How would you put it?”

  She shifted in her seat and looked out the window.

  “You don’t know what it’s like to live around here.”

  “I do live around here,” I said.

  “You do?”

  I nodded. I didn’t mention it was on Singer Island.

  “Well, you don’t know what it’s like growing up black around here.”

  “You got me there. So how is it?”

  “It’s not easy.”

  “It’s hardly inner-city Harlem.”

  “I don’t know about that,” she said.

  I shrugged. “I don’t, either, as it happens.”

  She smiled. I wasn’t sure if it was at my honesty or stupidity.

  “This isn’t the worst place to grow up, but it’s not the best, either,” she said. “Everything’s just a little less, you know? The schools get a little less money, and the people make a little less. Not many people leave this area to go to the Ivy League. Not that many even go to college. People aren’t dirt poor, but they’re not buying up properties on Palm Beach.”

  “I get that.”

  “Do you? Do you really?”

  “I think I do.”

  “Maybe you do, I don’t know. The Palm Beaches are mostly white, right? And they’re mostly the kind of white people who do care that black people suffer from racism. It’s not in your face. It’s not Selma. But it’s there. People want you to graduate high school, but they don’t really care if you don’t. And they want you to go to college and get a good job, but they want people to serve them at the drive-through, too. They just don’t expect much from us, so we learn not to expect much from ourselves.”

  I made to take more ice cream, but I didn’t want it. I just didn’t have anything to say.

  “So when someone gets out, breaks through? Can you blame others for wanting to chase the light, too? To ride whatever coattails they can?”

  “No. No, I don’t blame them for that.” I said it, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. I believed that hard work was the answer. I hadn’t been handed anything on a platter. My mother died when I was in middle school and my father descended into drinking. I worked hard to make sports work for me, and I earned a scholarship fair and square. And there were plenty of black guys on my team who did the same. I wasn’t accepting anyone on my coattails. But then, I couldn’t think of that many who had tried.

  “Threatening to harm someone isn’t cool,” I said.

  “I’m not saying it is. I’m just saying, I don’t know . . .”

  “When you’re left with no other choice, you get desperate.”

  “Something like that.”

  “But sometimes it’s just laziness, entitlement. People think they’re owed a living. But they’re not. You’re not, and you knew that.”

  “Not everyone is built that way.”

  “Exactly my point.”

  We both sat and stared at our ice cream for a while.

  “So why did you choose UM?” I asked.

  “You didn’t like it?”

  “I loved it. I love Florida.”

  “So do I.”

  “But Miami’s a top-tier football and baseball school. I don’t recall the basketball team ever making the NCAA Tournament.”

  “We did when I was there.”

  “That might have had something to do with you. But otherwise, I mean.”

  “They offered me a scholarship, so I went.”

  “What about other schools? UConn, for example.”

  “Who wants to live in Connecticut?”

  “I grew up in Connecticut.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I chose to live here. But it’s a pretty good women’s program.”

  “Sure it is. But I’m happy with the choice I made.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t argue with logic like that. Everything in life is an opportunity cost. To do one thing, you have to give up on doing another. When we’re young, we don’t get that. Time seems infinite. Eventually we learn that it’s not. What seemed crazy to me was how many people I saw get older and then give up, just say “I missed my shot and time’s up,” rather than letting the ticking of the clock light a fire under them to do as much as possible while they still could. I wondered if I was doing that. I loved Singer Island, I loved the Palm Beaches, but my fiancée lived in Miami and I was still doing the same job I had been doing a decade earlier. I drank at the same watering hole, with the same people. I mean, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But suddenly I wasn’t sure if I was really sucking the marrow out of life.

  I looked at Tania.

  “Your agent says you could have declared for the draft last year. Why didn’t you?”

  “I wanted to get my degree. You didn’t get your degree?”

  “I did, but that’s pretty normal in baseball.”

  “It’s pretty normal in basketball, too. Women’s basketball, anyway.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought most basketballers barely did a year. Especially the good ones like you.”

  “You don’t know much about the women’s game, do you?”

  “Evidently not.”

  “It’s not the NBA. WNBA rules say we can’t be recruited until we’re twenty-two.”

  I didn’t say anything to that, but it made me think I didn’t know half as much as I thought I did, and I resolved to learn more.

  “But you graduated halfway through this academic year.”

  “I did.”

  “So why aren’t you playing in China right now?”

  “I’ve never played a professional game, Miami. I’m not ready for that.”

  I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I let it go.

  Tania looked at her phone, and then at me.

  “Do you think you could give me a ride to the mall?”

  Chapter Six

  We cruised up I-95 to the shopping mall capital of the Southeast, otherwise known as Palm Beach Gardens. Large office blocks were interspersed with malls like varieties of plants in a formal garden.

  “You don’t have a car?” I asked Tania.

  “No. I don’t have a driver’s license.”

  “How can you not have a driver’s license?”

  She shrugged. “What for?”

  “To get around?”

  “There are too many cars already. It’s killing the planet, you know.”

  I didn’t disagree but I still didn’t understand it. When I was a boy, getting your license was a rite of passage. Kids would start taking lessons as early as possible, and most took their driving test on the day of their sixteenth birthday, or at worst the day after. Having a license represented freedom. It didn’t always result in freedom, as most of us had to borrow our parents’ cars, and I’d found that once I had the legal right to drive, I didn’t really have anywhere to go. But that wasn’t the point. Did kids today not feel a need for freedom? Did they not dream of taking to the open road and getting the hell out of town with the Eagles
or Jackson Browne or Tom Petty blaring from the speakers?

  “What happens if you want to go somewhere?”

  “I walk, or I get a ride, or I get a bus or do a rideshare.”

  “A rideshare? You mean like a van full of strangers?”

  “No, I mean from an app. You’ve done rideshare, surely?”

  “I’ve shared a ride, and I’ve given people rides, but that’s usually from Longboard’s—no app required.”

  “You really are an old man.”

  I was starting to agree with her.

  We reached the particular mall she wanted, and I pulled around and stopped by the entrance to a multiplex cinema. A gaggle of girls—or perhaps young women was the term—were hanging around the entrance, sharing a cigarette. I figured that was good economy. Those cancer sticks had gotten expensive, and I imagined there might be some benefit in sucking on fewer of them.

  The girls watched us stop. I couldn’t imagine why. My vehicle was a stock-standard SUV, a Cadillac to be sure, but not your father’s Caddy. It looked like the sort of car you would expect to pull up beside the cinema with a load full of teenagers. I resolved to reassess my vehicle choices.

  Tania made no move to get out. She looked at the girls.

  “Friends of yours?” I asked.

  Tania shrugged, but I got the sense it was involuntary.

  I waited a moment and when she didn’t respond, I asked if she was okay. She turned to me and smiled. It wasn’t the megawatt smile I’d seen earlier.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure? Because all of a sudden you don’t seem so keen to get out of the car. Are those the friends you’re supposed to meet?”

  “Them? No.”

  “So who are they? You clearly know them.”

  “Girls. You know. From school.”

  “As in high school?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That was almost five years ago.”

  “I know.”

  “And they’re still hanging out at the mall?”

  “Like I said, most people don’t go far from the neighborhood.”

  “I don’t have an issue with that. It’s Florida. Half the country comes here for vacation. If you already live here, why leave? But that doesn’t explain why you’re not getting out of the car.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and she made to open the door.

  “I’m not telling you to get out, Tania. Given your current situation, I’m curious about anyone who makes you pause like that.”