by Otto Penzler
But there was no reply, no sound coming back from the plastic-wrapped object in the stern of the boat, secured on both ends with concrete blocks. He went to the back of the boat and waited, still looking at the dark stretches of the shoreline. Aloud he said, “Just my luck he wasn’t a basketball fan, ol’ boy. He stood in my office and looked at my plaques and trophies, and it was staring right at him. My old nickname on the court. The Enforcer. That was me, Marcus the Enforcer, and that’s why you shouldn’t have come to see me. ’Cause I was going to enforce our agreement. Man, even somebody as young as that chief should have seen that.”
Part of the story was true, about the discussion and the beer and the barbecue, but he had left out the part when ol’ Marcus, hair gone gray and stomach gone thick, had got into a screaming match, saying screw you, screw the team, I’m on my own, it’s been thirty years, the hell with you all, and when he started storming out of the cottage, saying he was going to walk to town and catch a cab or do something to get him back home and get that silver medal in his hands, well, Glen was not going to allow it. Not for a moment. And when Marcus got to the door, he had reached into the sports gear and picked up a baseball bat and creamed the back of Marcus’s skull.
The baseball bat that he had burned in the fireplace later that night.
And dammit, if it hadn’t been for all those fishermen, hanging out all those hours, Marcus would have been gone before the chief showed up. Shit, that had been a close-run thing.
One more look around the dark waters, and then he bent down and grunted and picked up the body and dumped it into the water. It didn’t make much of a noise, hardly even a splash, and as it disappeared from view, he thought about the fall coming up quick, and then the ice, and then the long winter, and by the time spring came ‘round, Marcus would be gone.
“Thing is,” he said again to the darkness, “the chief forgot to ask me one more question. About the taste of silver. And this is what I would have told him: that the taste of silver is the taste of losers. That’s it. And I ain’t no loser.”
With that, he went forward and started up his powerboat and headed back to his cottage, thirty years later, still feeling like a winner, no matter what.
FEAR OF FAILURE
Parnell Hall
He was tall, black, and dead. A bad combination. And for an ex-Celtics fan, one that conjured up images of Len Bias and Reggie Lewis. I say ex-fan because it was about then that I stopped following the team, when Bird, McHale, and Parish retired, to be replaced by a crop of young players I did not know who did not win.
Since then I’ve followed the Knicks, an interesting exercise, to be sure, recalling just the sort of heartbreak I’d grown used to from years of watching the Red Sox. A disappointing but interesting team, the Knicks: I was in Madison Square Garden when Starks made the dunk, and watched on TV that seventh game of the Finals when he threw up brick after brick. I listen now, in the post-Ewing era, when people in the elevator of my Upper West Side apartment building maintain that while they like Marcus Camby, he’s a forward, not a center, and what are the Knicks going to do now? And I realize after twenty years I am finally assimilated.
I am a New Yorker.
But I was talking about the boy.
And here I have to be careful. A word I shouldn’t use for an African American. Just as I shouldn’t use girl to refer to a young woman. But it was hard not to think of him as a boy.
He was only eighteen.
Grant Jackson was six foot ten, 280 pounds, all muscle. He collapsed and died during a preseason practice of the varsity basketball team of Cedar Park College, a small Brooklyn school with big aspirations. Without Grant the team had rarely posted a winning season. This year they had hoped to reach the NIT playoffs.
That would not happen.
It was up to me to find out why.
“No, it isn’t,” Richard Rosenberg insisted. He got up from his desk, hooked his thumbs in his suspenders, and strutted back and forth as if he were making an argument in front of a jury.
Richard Rosenberg was the negligence lawyer I work for. A little man, with an inexhaustible source of nervous energy, he loved beating opposing attorneys down. With none in sight, he was happy to pick on me.
“Stanley,” he said, “I don’t know how to impress this on you. Your job is not to find out why this happened. Your job is simply to record the fact it did. Take down the information. Have the mother sign the necessary release forms. That’s the reason you’re there. To get her to sign the retainer. So see that she does.”
“What about the father?”
“If he’s there, sign him. It’s the mother who called. I think it’s a single mother. I certainly hope so.”
“Richard.”
“Well, I’ll get a bigger settlement. A poor woman, raising her children alone. Trust me, there won’t be a dry eye in court.”
“I’m sure there won’t. Pardon me, Richard, but just who do you intend to sue?”
“I don’t know. The school, the coach, the EMS, the doctors, the hospital. That’s not your problem, that’s my problem. Just sign the kid up. There’s always someone to sue. Now, get going before Jacoby and Meyers gets wind of this and aces me out.”
Grant’s mother lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant in one of those housing projects I always dread and always seem to get. Steel outer doors with smashed locks and windows, dimly lit lobbies, and odd/even elevators, at least one of which was never working, invariably the one I wanted. In this case it was the odd, a sure thing, since the Jacksons lived on seven. I rode up to eight in the company of a young man in a do-rag wearing half the gold in Fort Knox, who looked as if he’d like to mug me if it weren’t for the nagging suspicion I might be a cop. I walked down a stairwell that reeked of urine and stale marijuana, then tried to find apartment J, not an easy task since the letters had fallen off half the doors. Eventually I located apartment F and counted down. I rang the bell, heard nothing, tried knocking on the door.
It was opened by a young black man with the word hostile tattooed on his forehead.
“You the lawyer?” he demanded.
A moment of truth.
Richard Rosenberg’s TV advertising, besides promising “free consultation” and “no fee unless recovery,” boldly proclaims, “We will come to your house.”
He wouldn’t, of course. He would send me. I would come walking in in a suit and tie, saying, “Hi, I’m from the lawyer’s office,” and if people wanted to assume I was an attorney, that was just fine, and it didn’t really hurt anybody, since a lawyer couldn’t do any more than I could at that juncture anyway. But I never lied to the client, I never claimed to be a lawyer, and if directly asked, I would explain that I was actually the investigator hired by the lawyer.
Only, this didn’t seem to be that time. The gentleman, whoever he was, was not the client, and it occurred to me it was probably not wise to get into a philosophical conversation with him. So I tried a simple deflection. “Hi,” I said, “I’m Stanley Hastings. I’m here to see Mrs. Jackson. I believe she called Rosenberg and Stone.”
While that did not appear to please him, it worked. He turned, hollered, “Hey, Ma, is the lawyer,” and walked off, giving me the choice of standing there like a jerk or trailing along behind.
I followed him into a living room where a large black woman sat on a couch bouncing a baby boy on her knee. In a playpen in the corner, a baby girl was chewing on a Miss Piggy doll. A third small child was building a tower on the rug.
The room reeked of poverty. The furniture could have been gathered off the street. Only the children’s toys looked new. And the baby’s diapers were fresh Pampers. Clearly all money was spent on the kids.
“Mrs. Jackson?” I said.
She looked up at me with big brown eyes. Hurt, pained, yet still polite. “Yes?”
“I’m Mr. Hastings from the lawyer’s office.”
“Oh, yes. Come, sit down.”
She patted the couch next to her, which would have bee
n 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. S
he 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.