Malice

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Dark-haired and clean-cut, Karp had a round, Slavic face. His gray, gold-flecked eyes were somewhat slanted, as if one of his Jewish ancestors in Poland had been ravaged by an invading Mongol. On the other hand, O’Toole’s ancestors were from Ireland and he had the wild mane of red hair, freckles, and sea-green eyes to prove it. A native of Mississippi, his southern drawl stood in sharp contrast to Karp’s Brooklynese.

  The difference continued beyond their looks and accents. Karp was a good student—thanks in part to his schoolteacher mother and his own drive to excel at everything he did, whether it was on the court or in the classroom. If something did not come naturally—a right-handed hook shot (he was a leftie) or calculus—then he worked at it until it did. He actually enjoyed practice and brought the same intensity level he did to games.

  O’Toole, on the other hand, saved himself for game day. He had, perhaps, more natural ability than Karp, but he didn’t work at it. He also was always on the verge of academic ineligibility, not because he wasn’t intelligent, but because he placed a higher priority on chasing coeds and chugging beer. But during a game, O’Toole was a natural force, a dribbling, shooting, shot-blocking thunderstorm of a power forward.

  Despite the differences in their personalities and personal habits, Karp and O’Toole had become fast friends, and then evolved into something more like brothers. Karp’s college basketball career ended one day during a game when a tumble with another player resulted in a knee so badly damaged that the surgeon who opened him up said the joint “looked like a turkey leg after Thanksgiving.” Nothing was still attached where it was supposed to be.

  When he was laid up in the hospital, it was O’Toole who sat with him for hours to keep his spirits up. At one especially low point when Karp was lamenting that his basketball career was over, O’Toole grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “Hey pal, my basketball career was over the day you walked onto the campus,” he said. “At some point we all have to hang up the Chuck Taylors and get on with our lives. It might be because of a lack of talent or maybe old-fashioned laziness, like me, or because of an injury like you…or maybe you just get too goddamned old, but it happens to every one of us. The only question is what are you going to do about it? The way I see it, you are meant for more important things than even the NBA, and basketball was just going to delay you from getting down to the real business of your life.”

  O’Toole had, of course, been right and with that Karp had turned his energies to getting through college and then law school. And O’Toole was the first to call and congratulate him after he passed the New York State bar exam and went to work for the DAO.

  O’Toole had gone his own way. He graduated with a degree in physical education with the sole intent of coaching basketball at the college level. Over the years, he’d gradually worked his way from a small two-year community college program to an NCAA Division II team that he’d led to the National Invitational Tournament championship. That had landed him a job as the assistant coach of a Pac-10 Division I program. Then, when the head coach retired, O’Toole was the overwhelming choice to replace him.

  In the basketball-crazy Pac-10, O’Toole’s university had been a perennial basement dweller for at least ten years before he took over. In his first year as head coach, they’d played well enough to get an invitation to the NCAA’s Big Dance. The next year, they got as far as the Sweet Sixteen.

  Next year, the Final Four, and then who knows, he said when Karp called to congratulate him on getting as far as he had.

  Life in general seemed to be going well for both friends. Karp was an up-and-comer in the District Attorney’s Office and had met and married Marlene, with whom he’d had three children.

  As for O’Toole, he’d fallen in love and married Jenny Dunlap, a pretty blond cheerleader at Berkeley. A bit on the wild side herself, Jenny had been a good match. They’d had no children of their own, but had pretty much raised Fred’s kid brother, Mikey, eleven years younger, after the O’Tooles’ parents were killed in an automobile accident during Fred’s junior year.

  If Fred O’Toole had one particular fault as a coach, it was that he spoke his mind and sometimes forgot who was listening. After another loss in the Sweet Sixteen, he’d complained in front of a sports reporter that it was hard to compete against some of the teams from back East because they were supported by mob money and that the NCAA, he believed, wasn’t doing enough to counter it.

  The story made for an instant scandal. But O’Toole had no proof. Stung and angry, the NCAA had called him on the carpet where he was “charged” with conduct detrimental to the college athletic community and especially that of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

  O’Toole’s university had hired a lawyer familiar with the NCAA to represent him. The lawyer had assured him that if he kept his mouth shut at the hearing, except to apologize, the worst that would happen was he’d have to make the apology public and get suspended for a few games. But the NCAA wanted blood. O’Toole and his lawyer had sat in stunned silence when the hearing board handed down their punishment: Coach Fred O’Toole would be prohibited from coaching at the college level for seven years.

  O’Toole wanted to fight it and demand a public hearing, or even take the NCAA to court. But the same lawyer had advised him to accept the punishment “for now.”

  “We’ll let this die down,” he said, his arm draped around O’Toole’s shoulders. “Then when there’s a few different faces on the board in a couple of years, we’ll come back and convince them that the punishment was far too severe. But if we fight it now, the good ol’ boys with the NCAA will make you pay. Those suckers can carry a grudge,” the lawyer further opined, “and their word is law when it comes to college athletics. However, go along, don’t say anything inflammatory to the press, and it will actually work in your favor. Those same boys will see that you can be a ‘team player,’ and they’ll be more sympathetic after you’ve done a little penance.”

  Karp had only learned of his friend’s treatment and the lawyer’s recommendation to take his medicine after the fact. “You should have called me,” he’d admonished O’Toole.

  “I didn’t want to bother you,” O’Toole replied. “This other lawyer has spent his entire career handling cases with the NCAA and seemed to know what he was doing.”

  “But that’s part of the problem,” Karp had growled. “You were being advised by someone who has a stake in not upsetting the powers that be with the NCAA. He has to deal with them a lot, which means picking his battles carefully, hoping they throw him the occasional bone. He’s not about to buck the system.”

  “What do you think I should do?” O’Toole had asked.

  “You fight them,” Karp replied. “There’s no guarantee they’re going to be any fairer in two years than they are now. From what you’ve told me, the NCAA board is the arresting cop, judge, jury, and executioner. They follow their own rules, no meaningful due process, no constitutional protection, which translates into precious little fairness.”

  O’Toole thanked him for the advice, but in the end he’d gone with the counsel of his attorney. The next time he and Karp talked, he tried to explain that if he stirred up a lot more press, it might be tough to find a job of any kind in coaching. He had the sound of a defeated man when he called a couple of weeks later to say that he’d accepted a position teaching physical education and coaching the boys’ basketball team at a high school in Mississippi.

  “It’ll be fun,” O’Toole said, trying to put on a brave face. “It will give me a chance to get back to teaching the basics.”

  Karp heard the lie in his friend’s voice. Fred O’Toole was never going to be content to be a high school basketball coach. His dream was to coach a college team into the finals of the NCAA tournament and win it. Karp couldn’t put his finger on it, but his friend’s seeming acceptance of his punishment filled him with a sense of foreboding.

  However, this was a time when they both had their families and careers to manage. S
ometimes months went by between telephone calls and letters. Then it was mostly catching up through Christmas cards with an O’Toole form letter, and telephone calls to wish each other a happy birthday, which always ended with vows to not let so much time go by before they talked again.

  O’Toole had waited three years before appealing his suspension to the NCAA. But it was rejected without even a hearing. Two more years passed. Another appeal was made and rejected. The good ol’ boys really were carrying a grudge, so O’Toole thought.

  Then came the Christmas when no card or letter arrived. Karp waited until early January and then called to see what was up.

  “Jenny’s dead,” O’Toole said, his voice sounding hollow. “Ovarian cancer. They found it in October and she died the day before Christmas. Sorry…I just haven’t had the heart to let everybody know.” He’d then broken down and cried while Karp, two thousand miles away, could do nothing more than offer condolences.

  The death of his wife left O’Toole alone except for his brother, Mikey. The two of them had come to visit the Karp-Ciampi clan in New York, where Butch got a chance to get to know the younger O’Toole. A polite, soft-spoken young man, Mikey had been a good student, “more like you than me in that regard,” Fred had said, but instead of basketball, he’d been a college baseball player.

  Mikey had no illusions about taking his game to the pros after graduation. Instead, he’d followed his brother’s footsteps and became a coach, paying his dues at small schools until being offered the position of head coach at the University of Northwest Idaho in Sawtooth. It was a small Division II university, but had become a respected regional baseball school under Mikey O’Toole.

  Meanwhile, Fred tried to make the best of coaching high school boys, as the NCAA had shown no sign of relenting. Seven years finally passed, but even with his suspension over, it was clear that Fred O’Toole’s name was mud in college basketball circles.

  The day before Christmas, on the fifteenth anniversary of his wife’s death, Fred arrived back at the campus of the Pac-10 school he’d been forced to leave. He walked across campus to the gym and at center court blew his brains out with the gun he’d hidden in his waistband.

  There’d been a sympathetic story about Fred O’Toole in Sports Illustrated, in which a bitter Mikey O’Toole was quoted as saying that his brother had been blackballed and treated as a pariah because he’d dared to question the NCAA about an allegation issue “everyone knows is true.”

  “The worst part is that there are rules and even laws being broken on college campuses every day that are far worse than anything my brother might have said,” Mikey O’Toole went on. “But the NCAA will do anything to save itself from embarrassment or taking a good hard look at itself.”

  A spokesman for the NCAA had been quoted as saying the association felt for Mikey O’Toole, but also that he was wrong. “The NCAA had a duty to maintain the integrity of the system. Coach Fred O’Toole impugned that integrity and paid the price for it.”

  The last time Karp had seen Mikey was at his brother’s funeral. Five years later, Karp was reflecting on a telephone call that, as Yogi Berra once quipped, was “like déjà vu all over again.”

  Mikey O’Toole told him that he’d been accused of recruiting violations and then suspended by the university pending a hearing before the American Collegiate Athletic Association, which governed the conference to which the University of Northwest Idaho belonged.

  The ACAA hearing in Boise, Idaho, a short time later was “over before it began,” O’Toole complained. He’d had an attorney with him—a friend from Sawtooth named Richie Meyers—but no opportunity to defend himself from the charges “or even a chance to have a public hearing at the university so that I could clear my name.”

  Instead, the hearing panel had immediately voted to suspend him for ten years, after which the university had fired him. Meyers had since filed a civil lawsuit with the U.S. District Court in Boise, seeking reinstatement and damages. “But more important to me is the chance to prove I didn’t do what they said I did,” O’Toole told Karp. “If we don’t win it, I’m ruined. No one will touch me. I’m damaged goods.”

  “Are you guilty?” Karp had asked.

  “Hell no,” O’Toole replied. “I’m being set up by a player I kicked off the squad for, among other things, raping a young woman. I think the ACAA’s interest in going after me is in part because of my brother and also what I said at his funeral; they’re a stepchild of the NCAA, abide by all of the association’s rules and regulations, and they also get some of their funding from National Big Brother. There’s also something funny about the university’s attitude, too, that I can’t quite figure out.”

  “So how can I help you?” Karp asked.

  O’Toole cleared his throat, clearly nervous. “Well, to be honest, Richie and I were wondering if we could visit with you in New York,” he said. “Richie’s a good friend—he’s been doing this on contingency to help me out. He’s also a fine lawyer, but he’s in private practice, which in Sawtooth mostly means divorce cases, DUIs, and property disputes. He’d be the first to tell you that he hasn’t done a lot of litigation, and none at the federal court level. Meanwhile, as you can imagine, the ACAA has pulled out the big guns—some suit with a tough rep named Steve Zusskin—and the university has someone else as a co-counsel, too. Richie’s game, but he’s also feeling a bit in over his head. He knows you by reputation, and when he heard you were a friend of the family, he asked if maybe I could arrange it for him to run what we have past you.”

  Karp hesitated. He wanted to help, but didn’t want to insert himself into a case where he really had no business. “Well, you know, most of what I’ve done is prosecute criminals,” he pointed out. “I’ve done a little litigation, but there are more qualified civil attorneys.”

  O’Toole took the answer the wrong way. “Oh, you’re right. Hey, you’re busy. I’m sorry to have bothered you. It’s just that my brother made me promise that if I ever got into trouble of any kind, and he wasn’t around, I would go to you.”

  “Hey, that’s not what I meant,” Karp replied. “I’m glad you called, and flattered. I’d be happy to meet with you and your attorney and give you my two cents. Maybe we can go over a little courtroom strategy…that sort of thing.”

  “That’s great!” The relief in Mikey O’Toole’s voice was palpable. “We can fly out on the nineteenth if that’s all right. And I promise we’ll make it short and sweet; then we’ll get out of your hair.”

  Karp laughed and said good-bye. But as he flipped his cell phone shut, he had a nagging feeling that there wasn’t going to be anything short and sweet about his meeting with O’Toole.

  7

  “MY BUTT HURTS,” LUCY KARP TOLD JOHN JOJOLA AS THEY walked past the front desk and into the saloon of the Sagebrush Inn on the south end of Taos. They’d just spent the day with her boyfriend, Ned Blanchet, rounding up cattle in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in preparation for moving them to their winter range on the Taos ranch where Ned was the foreman.

  Although she was getting to be a better rider—especially for a city slicker from Manhattan, she thought—she still wasn’t used to a full day in the saddle. She was looking forward to a glass of merlot and a quick dinner with Jojola at the inn’s great restaurant. Then it was shower, two aspirin, and off to bed to wait for Ned. Hey, that rhymes, she thought happily.

  “You’d think with all that padding you wouldn’t feel a thing,” Jojola joked.

  “Very funny, Jojola,” she replied, sticking her tongue out. “And if I were you, I wouldn’t be talking about ‘extra padding’—I think you’ve been packing away the frijoles yourself.”

  Jojola laughed and patted his round belly. “Indians are smart like the animals,” he said. “We put a little more on to stay warm in the winter.”

  Lucy was about to reply when she pulled up, sure that she must be hallucinating on residual peyote. At a glance, she’d thought the man sitting at a table in the cantina watching
the door looked like S.P. Jaxon, the special-agent-in-charge of the FBI office in Manhattan. But then the hallucination stood and smiled at her and Jojola.

  “Where in the heck have you two been?” Jaxon asked as he held out his hand. “We’ve been staking out the place all day waiting for you to show up. You know how much money you’re costing the taxpayers?”

  “You could have called the Taos Pueblo Police Department, but you feds probably don’t bother to do any actual investigating,” Jojola said, grinning as he pumped the agent’s hand.

  “Au contraire, my long-haired friend, we did inquire at the department as to your whereabouts,” Jaxon replied. “The receptionist said you were out, but was a little tight-lipped as to where, and she didn’t know, or wouldn’t say, if you were with Lucy. No offense, but it’s your partner there who I needed to talk to. So despite your snide comments about our abilities, we tracked down Ned Blanchet, who was still out riding the range like a good cowboy. I’m afraid we startled him some, swooping down in one of those black helicopters we’re famous for. I was worried that he was going to put a hole in the fuselage with that thirty-caliber Winchester he carries before I could let him know we were friendly. He said you two were headed here. By the way, he said to say he was still going to drop by later, Lucy.”

  Lucy blushed. She was somewhat uneasy at Jaxon’s sudden appearance following the peyote vision she’d had of him emerging from smoke and fire with an angry look in his eyes. Don’t be silly, Lucy told herself. He’s one of your dad’s oldest friends. John said the visions couldn’t always be taken literally.

  Lucy had known Jaxon essentially since birth. He’d joined the New York District Attorney’s Office a few years after her father and mother started working there and was still working there for the first few years after she was born. But “Uncle Espey” quit the DAO shortly afterward and entered the FBI Academy at Quantico. Her dad said it was because there wasn’t enough action putting criminals behind bars, “he wants to shoot some of them.”