Material Witness

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  He made a little speech to the small group of assembled journalists and TV crews in which he expressed his pleasure in inviting one of New York’s finest young men—well, he wasn’t that young—har-har—to play with the Hustlers. While Karp writhed, Chaney went into a sentimental flight about how it was never too late for a dream, how Karp represented all the good school players of the past who never got a crack at the pros, all the schoolyear champs who thrilled …

  The questions were even more embarrassing. Somebody brought up Bill Veeck’s old stunt of hiring a midget to play for the St. Louis Browns, a man supposedly guaranteed a walk every time up because his strike zone was so small. Did Mr. Chaney feel that it was the same kind of stunt? Chaney laughed and said something about show business being show business and that he had always admired Bill.

  It was inevitable that the Simmons case should come up. A man from CBS asked if putting a D.A. on the team was part of the investigation. To Karp’s surprise, Chaney answered, “Why don’t we let Butch answer that himself?”

  Karp explained that he was on leave of absence from the New York D.A., was not interested in pursuing any investigation officially, and that, in any case, the Queens D.A. was in charge of the case. Somebody asked how he felt when the Chelsea Ripper had claimed his last victim. Karp ignored him. The News guy asked nastily whether he seriously thought he could compete in the N.B.A. Karp said, “No, I don’t. Neither can twenty per cent of the players in the N.B.A. I’m not here to start. I’m here to fill a twelfth man slot, and I think I can do it.”

  Murmurs and snickers, but something about Karp’s carriage and perhaps something in his eyes stayed any further sneering attacks. He was not after all a midget. After a few more questions directed at Chaney and Nadleman, the conference began to break up. Karp walked out without another word to anyone.

  Three hours later, Karp arrived for his first practice at the appointed three p.m. to find the stadium locked and deserted. He hung around in the doorway, questioning his sanity, until let in by the trainer, a hefty, balding man, a little past three.

  The Hustlers, it seemed, did not start practice on the dot.

  “You the new twelfth man, huh?” said the trainer, unimpressed, and issued Karp a red practice uniform. Karp undressed, wrapped his bad knee in an Ace bandage, put on the uniform, took a ball out of a net bag and walked onto the court.

  Karp did stretches and one-footed deep knee bends. The problem joint was holding up nicely. It hurt, but just enough to let him know it was there. Then he picked up his ball and started throwing it through the basket.

  He was still sinking shots, still deep in the semi-trance this sort of practice induced in him, when he became aware of other people moving about the court.

  The Hustlers, all eleven of them, had drifted onto the court. The five starters, John Bryan, Barry Croyden, Doobie Wallace, Fred James, and Jim Lockwell, were wearing white uniforms. The remaining six were dressed, as Karp was, in red. Nadleman came onto the court wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and electric blue sweatpants. He spotted Karp and nodded, and then there appeared on his face a puzzled frown, as if he had forgotten that Karp was really going to be on the team.

  Not precisely playing on the team, of course. An N.B.A. roster has twelve men on it, although even practice scrimmages require but ten on the court at any one time. The two extra warm bodies exist to fill the place of their betters when these are bushed or injured. On this particular day, the first and second teams were in the pink of health. Karp and the other spare guy, a thirty-year-old journeyman named Chas McDoul, were required for the first drill, which involved three groups of four doing two-on-two, pick, pass and shoot, and then toward the end of the practice they got to take their place on the line to shoot fouls. Otherwise, they sat on the bench, and waited for someone to pull a muscle.

  The practice, as it unfolded, confirmed and helped to explain Karp’s prior analysis of the New York Hustlers. The team had no cohesion, no spine, and the players knew it. There was little (so to speak) hustle; nobody dived for the loose ball. The four-man drill had been conducted at a pace that Karp thought inferior to what you could pick up any Saturday at the 4th Street playground.

  Nadleman yelled advice from time to time, but it was clear that his heart wasn’t in it. Karp had to admit that his friend did not have the moral dominance that a coach needed to make a bunch of good athletes into a winning team.

  The scrimmages were the proof. Scrimmaging with one’s own team is in many ways harder than playing an opponent. All the plays, all the endemic weaknesses are known. That is, in fact, the point of scrimmaging—to make you play with no advantage, to push you against yourself, like boxing with weighted gloves.

  The Hustlers’ scrimmage resembled a badly organized playground game. Fouls everywhere, shoving, cursing. The second team was putting somewhat more into it than the starters, obviously trying to impress the coach: Karp thought Ed Murphy showed more hustle than John Bryan, his starter opponent at point guard. Phil Kravic, the big forward, had nowhere near the raw athletic talent of Fred James, but he seemed anyway to be snagging more rebounds.

  Sutter Blanding, the second center, and at seven-one the team’s tallest player, was nothing like the whiz on D that Barry Croyden was, but he would at least move without the ball and try to hustle plays. Stu Elmore, the second team’s shooting guard, was a terrific defensive player, guarding Doobie Wallace with an aggressive intensity that made sweat skitter off his shaved skull and stuck a permanent scowl on his face.

  Not that it did a lot of good. Wallace was just a better player, a better ball handler, a devastating shot from twenty feet out, and, to Karp, the most interesting player on the court. He threw convincing three-pointers too. Karp had to admit that as a shot, Wallace was as good as Karp, and with legs besides: he was releasing his jumpers from nine and a half feet in the air.

  The result of this talent was that Wallace was often good for thirty-odd points a game, Fred James for a bare twenty, the rest of the Hustler starters around a dozen each, and with various contributions from the subs, the Hustlers were regularly scoring ten to twenty points too few to win games in the N.B.A.

  After five minutes of scrimmage, Karp also knew how to fix the team. Wallace was the key. An outside shot as good as Doobie Wallace was like a knife in the heart of any opposition team. He simply could not be allowed to shoot at will, and so whenever he got the ball he would draw defenders like a magnet pulling paper clips.

  By the ineluctable, but eternally neglected, arithmetic of B-ball, two men guarding Doobie meant that one Hustler was being guarded by zero men. Passing to the open man was the obvious move, but the passing was not working. The open man wasn’t moving to Wallace’s passes, and the passes were to the wrong man or wide or slow.

  But worse, besides wasting Wallace’s talent, the Hustlers were also wasting the talents of Fred James, because they were not using him in intelligent alliance with Wallace. James had no ball-handling skills to speak of, but if he was given the ball anywhere in the lane he would fly through the air unstoppably and drop it into the basket.

  A dead shot and an airborne penetrator should have been a decisive combination. That they were not, that the team could not coalesce into an effective unit, puzzled Karp; it annoyed him, like a loose thread in a suspect’s story. He glanced over at his neighbor. McDoul was deep in a prep book for the New York state real estate broker’s license. Karp sighed. It was, after all, not his concern. His wave-making days were over; let Bernie run the team. But what a shame!

  The scrimmage ended. They took a short break. The Hustlers ignored Karp pointedly, except for McDoul and Wallace, who at thirty were the team’s oldest members (besides Karp himself) and remembered Karp’s college career. Wallace had played at Oregon State, and so had been on teams whose older players recalled Karp’s Pac-10 glory very well.

  Wallace seemed fascinated by Karp’s background; he thought his belated return to the world of big-time ball was a sketch.

/>   “So how come Bernie let you on the team?” Wallace asked. “He lose a bet?”

  He would learn, thought Karp, when he read the papers tomorrow. “Something like that. He saw the thing in the papers. We knew each other from Pac-10 ball. He looked me up. I was tired of being a lawyer. He needed a twelfth man, and the rest is history. Oh, yeah, Mr. Chaney thought it was a good gimmick.”

  “A gimmick? Oh, like a girl or a guy with one arm.” Wallace didn’t appear surprised. He laughed and said, “Yeah, well, you were great then, is what they say. Hey, just don’t make us old bastards look bad out there, give the owner ideas.”

  “Not that I’ll get to play,” said Karp.

  “Who knows?” said Wallace, bulging his eyes and waving his hands like a stage wizard. “Anything can happen in the mysterious world of the Big Time.”

  The coach called the team together for a brief talk about the game with the Knicks that night in the Garden. Karp couldn’t fault Nadleman’s strategy, although it was not at all clear whether he had the authority to enforce it.

  Karp lined up with the others to shoot fouls. Wallace was at the head of Karp’s line, and Karp watched him flawlessly sink ten in a row. Karp had warmed to the man spontaneously. He was much like Karp physically, about the same size and build, with the same ability to concentrate his entire being on creating a perfect geometry of force, ball, gravity and the hoop. If Karp had been born black in Compton, like Wallace, and had kept his knees, he might have been standing there in Wallace’s skin, a real pro, a star.

  This thought disturbed him. He wasn’t a ball player; he was a prosecutor investigating a crime. No, actually, he wasn’t that either. He had spoken truly at the press conference. What was he doing here? He felt a queasiness of soul, a little softening of the identity. Although the sages tell us such qualms are the beginning of true wisdom, Karp was not buying any today, and as his turn came up, he lost himself instead in the discipline of the foul shot.

  He sank his ten, and then moved to a vacant basket and took some more shots. He sank twenty in a row, then missed, then sank ten more from the top of the key. He was vaguely aware that some of the other players were watching him silently as they drifted toward the showers. The court cleared out. Karp was alone, still shooting.

  Calmer after fifteen minutes of this, he went back to the now deserted locker room, showered, changed, and then found that the doorway he had used to enter the stadium was now locked. He wandered around the unfamiliar corridors for a few minutes when, attracted by the sound of voices, he mounted a flight of stairs and came to a suite of offices.

  Four doors opened off the corridor, and these were glass-fronted and labeled “PUBLICITY,” “BUSINESS MANAGER,” “COACHING STAFF,” and “GENERAL MANAGER,” of which only the last was lit. At the end of the corridor was a red-glowing exit sign and a likely way out. As Karp headed toward it, he passed the lighted door and glanced in.

  Bernie Nadleman was in the throes of a violent argument with Howard Chaney. Karp could not hear, through the glass, what the argument was about, but he could guess it had something to do with the Hustlers losing five straight games. Such confrontation was a part of pro ball that Karp didn’t care to think about, and he moved quickly past the window and out of the building.

  The dead man’s mother, Marva Simmons, lived in a large, well-kept Tudor house in the Forest Hills section of Queens, not far from the famous tennis courts. Her son had bought it for her with the proceeds from his first pro contract, making her one of the few black women in the neighborhood who was not wearing a white uniform.

  Harry Bello’s car crunched over the fallen leaves of the driveway and came to a stop in front of the two-car garage. Marlene had called him the day after their first, unhappy meeting, and asked the detective to arrange an interview. Bello had complied, without enthusiasm and without objection. Marlene had wanted to apologize to the man, but something about his desperate passivity had prevented her, as if, in retreat from his personal hell, he had placed himself beyond all human intercourse.

  Mrs. Simmons was tall, about five-ten, heavily built, and wore a black pants suit. Her hair was a tidy set of gray bristles; her yellowish face was trenched with darker lines, especially around the eyes, whose under-pouches seemed to be eroded by tears.

  She led them into a draped and darkened living room, and sat them on new plastic-covered royal blue velour armchairs. Marlene noticed that she walked stiffly, as if hurt.

  One side of the spacious room was taken up with a bookcase crammed with trophies and awards from Marion Simmons’s basketball career. A long side table held a dozen or so framed photographs of Simmons and another child, a girl, at various stages of life, from babyhood through youth. The opposite wall was nearly covered by an unnaturally bright depiction of the Last Supper, done in tapestry.

  Marlene introduced herself, disingenuously, as from the district attorney’s office. Mrs. Simmons looked at her suspiciously.

  “I already talked to them.” She had a low, hesitant voice, and her gaze flickered away from Marlene’s, darting between the Last Supper and the memorabilia of her dead boy.

  “Yes,” said Marlene, “but you haven’t talked with me yet. I’m working another angle on the case. The, ah, drug angle.”

  This was Mrs. Simmons’s cue to blaze out that her boy had never used drugs, as she apparently had done when last interviewed by Harry Bello and the folks at the Queens D.A. But she did not. Instead she seemed to shrink into herself. She mumbled something.

  “What was that, Mrs. Simmons?”

  “I don’t know about those drugs. I don’t know where he got them.”

  “But you’re not surprised he was using? And selling?”

  A mumble that sounded like “I knew” came from the woman.

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Simmons, but that’s not what you said earlier. When Detective Bello here interviewed you right after Marion was killed, you said you were sure he never had anything to do with drugs.”

  The woman shrugged heavily. “I was wrong,” she said. “What does it matter now, anyway? Let the boy rest in peace.”

  “Well, it matters a great deal, Mrs. Simmons, if we’re going to find the people who killed your son. You want us to find them, don’t you?”

  This was, of course, meant as a rhetorical question, and was a commonplace in the armory of prosecutors trying to get bereaved kin to give details about the less savory activities of their freshly killed relations. Mrs. Simmons, however, seemed to give the question serious thought. Or perhaps she had drifted off into a deeper trance.

  Silence hung in the room, and so they easily heard the approach of an auto, the slam of its door, the entrance of its putative passenger into the house, the approaching steps in the foyer and hall. The three of them turned toward the open doorway of the living room like an audience cued to the entrance of a star on stage.

  The newcomer had planned on a furtive entry; her head was down, her raincoat collar was pulled high, a black beret was jammed down low upon her forehead, and her booted steps were quick. But as she passed the doorway and became aware of her audience, she froze for an instant and turned to them, like a jacklighted deer.

  Marlene observed her with interest. This was obviously the daughter and sister. She was tall, about five-eight, Marlene reckoned, with her brother’s elegant long-necked grace. But she was bone thin, and her face under the beret was an unhealthy yellow-tan, with smudges under the eyes and a sore at the corner of her mouth.

  Marlene waved and called out, “Hi!”

  The young woman broke and ran for cover. They heard a door slam deep in the house.

  Marlene turned back to the mother. “That’s your daughter, isn’t it? Leona.” Mrs. Simmons nodded hesitantly, as if even this admission would open her family to further violation.

  “Would it be OK if we talked to her?”

  “No!” she shouted, so loud that Marlene jumped involuntarily in her seat. Some deep current of anger had been released by this outburst,
and Marlene found it directed at her. “I don’t want you bothering her any more, do you understand? She’s sick. She’s been through enough.”

  “What has she been through, Mrs. Simmons?” asked Marlene as mildly as she could.

  “Don’t play with me, miss! Don’t you people have any feelings? What more do you want to take from me?” Mrs. Simmons was truly agitated now, and Marlene, although completely baffled as to its cause, had interviewed enough people to know when it was time to cut and run. She rose abruptly and said, “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Simmons,” and in two minutes was out of the door, with the shuffling Bello in tow.

  “What was that all about, Harry?” asked Marlene when they were back in Bello’s car.

  Shrug. “Flipped her lid or something. It happens.”

  “Yeah, but why did she roll on her kid using drugs?”

  Shrug. “Who knows? People change their stories.”

  “And how about the daughter? You think she might have been involved with drugs too?”

  “Could be,” he said flatly. “Where did you want me to drop you?”

  “My mom’s. It’s off 97th. Take Woodhaven south. What do you mean, ‘could be’? Did you see her eyes? Her pupils were the size of neutrons.”

  After a long moment, and in a voice that seemed dragged out of him, Bello said, “I’ll try to find him. Check the sheet.”

  Marlene looked at him in astonishment. For someone who appeared until that moment nearly brain dead, it was a remarkable statement, compressing at least three logical jumps, and assuming she was capable of grasping that leap. She felt oddly flattered.

  “OK. I’ll do it,” she said.

  “It was fucking eerie, Butch,” said Marlene that evening. It was late and she had just gotten back from Queens, where she had dined at her parents’.

  “Here the guy was a rutabaga, and all of a sudden he’s talking in code. For a second I thought he had slipped his gears. I mention the sister’s got her eyes pinned, and he says, ‘I’ll try to find him.’ It took me a second. He was saying, of course the sister’s a junkie, so of course, if the bro is into drugs, she’s connected that way, so of course if he was really killed in a sour dope deal, whoever supplies her with dope has got to be a key player, so the next move is to find her pusher.”