Murder at the Foul Line (14 page)

Glen stood quite still, looking at the mess in the corner. The hockey sticks for street hockey on the asphalt, the soccer
balls, Frisbees, baseball gloves, baseballs, and footballs. “That’s right,” he said. “My grandkids come up here, they sure
like to play with other stuff. They get tired of Grandpa beating them on the basketball court.”

Colter laughed and just as he was getting ready to leave, just as he was getting ready to step out of the room, he said, “Oh,
one more thing.”

Oh, how fake, Glen thought. How fake can you get? “Sure, what is it?”

Colter’s smile disappeared. “I’d like to take a look around. If you don’t mind.”

“Here? The house?”

A crisp nod. “Yes. Your house. If you don’t mind.”

He certainly did mind but he shrugged and said, “Go ahead. Knock yourself out.”

So they spent the next fifteen minutes as the chief went through the closets, checked out the attached utility room that held
the water heater and oil furnace, went back into the living room and kitchen and then upstairs. The cottage had no basement.
More poking through the closets and in the bathroom and the master bedroom and the two spare rooms—“Marcus spent the night
in this one,” Glen said, pointing out the spare room that had a view of the lake—and then they came to the last room in the
small house, at the end of the hallway.

Colter said, “What’s in here?”

“My office, that’s all.”

“I’d like to take a look at it, if you don’t mind.”

Glen said, “It’s just an office. Nothing in there at all.”

Colter said, “Please. Open the door, Mr. Jackson. Or I’ll come back here with—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, here,” Glen said, opening up the door. “Look as much as you want.”

The office was small, another spare room that had been converted. There was a desk and office chair and filing cabinets, and
a closet that the chief looked into. Glen stood perfectly
still. Near his desk was his ego wall, a twin of the one back home, in his larger office. Framed certificates, photos and
plaques, and one large framed uniform from his last season with the Celtics. Colter closed the closet door and then looked
up at the ego wall. Glen did not move, tried not to show a thing. Colter said, “Lots of photos up there.”

“Yeah, well, you tend to get those over time.”

Colter stepped forward and Glen closed his eyes, imagined the questions that would come his way once Colter looked at the
photos and the inscriptions and what was there, but Colter said, “Hey, I recognize this guy. Red Auerbach, am I right?”

Glen opened his eyes. “Yes. You’re absolutely right.”

Colter turned away from the wall and said, “Well, I guess it’s time to go.”

Another handshake outside and then Colter headed to his cruiser. “Thanks again for your cooperation, Mr. Jackson, and for
the history lesson. You’re not offended that I’m not a basketball fan, are you?”

Glen tried to keep the relief out of his voice. “Not at all. Tell me—I’m heading home to Boston tomorrow—can you keep me informed
on how the investigation is going?”

“Sure,” he said, “but… well, I don’t know. It just seems so damn strange, like the earth just opened up and swallowed him.
Quite strange.”

“Yeah,” Glen said. “Strange.”

Twelve hours after the police chief had left him, Glen was out on his powerboat, alone, just past midnight, in the middle
reaches of Walker’s Lake. He had slowly motored out here and then waited, and switched off the engine and the running
lights, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. He sat on the seat and leaned back and looked up at the stars. It was a quiet
night and the water was still, and he had no worries of drifting or being swamped.

Out in the distance a loon called out to its mate, the trilling sound making the back of his hands tingle, and he thought
of Marcus’s wife, back there in Queens, alone and wondering what had happened to her husband.

He sighed, shifted some in the seat, and then stood up, the boat weaving back and forth. He said in the darkness, “I bet she
misses you, though I don’t know why, you rotten son of a bitch.”

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.

Parnell Hall

H
e 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?”