Tough Lessons

by Chris Freeman

“But how many other kids got feet the same size as him that could have climbed right up there and hid the knife before you came along? Wouldn’t stand up in any court you and I been in. I mean, Jesus Christ, this is Yomi we’re talking about. You even talked to him about it yet?”

  “Couldn’t find the words,” admitted Joseph. “I know, I know, I’ll speak to him. I’m just choosing my moment. What with Hernando Lopez getting stabbed at the same time…”

  “Surely you don’t think Yomi had anything to with that?” asked Eddie.

  “No, of course not. Anyhow, the police found the knife that killed Lopez. I meant, it just wasn’t a good time to talk to him about it.”

  “You’re right,” conceded Eddie. “Maybe he ditched the knife because he realized how it would look if he was caught carrying one, what with his teacher dying and all.”

  “Or maybe he just didn’t want the cops asking him difficult questions. What do you hear about the Lopez thing?” Joseph knew Eddie would have heard all about the stabbing. He always knew everything that happened in their neighborhood.

  “That it was most likely a kid from the school with a beef against his teacher.”

  “It’s what they are saying, but…”

  “But what? If that’s what they’re saying, then it’s most probably true. You were a cop; you know how it works. The word on the street is usually the way it is. You always got to listen to the street, Joseph. Proving it is the hard part. Me, I believe in Occam’s Razor. The simplest solution is nearly always the best.”

  “And I believe in an old Nigerian saying,” said Joseph. “A tree does not move unless there is wind.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means a kid would have to have a real good reason to go into a school on his own after-hours and knife his teacher to death. This wasn’t some heat-of-the-moment exchange, a row that ends with a knife being pulled and someone dying by accident. This was planned, premeditated murder and for what? The word on the street has yet to come up with one important thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A motive.”

  “Huh, believe me, Joseph, a lot of these kids, they don’t need a motive. It’s all about respect with them. It’s respect this and respect that, ’cept they don’t know the true meaning of the word. If you look at them and they don’t like it, you just disrespected them and they will kill you for it without giving it a thought. It’s how they get their big-man reputations.”

  “An interesting point,” said Joseph quietly. He was thinking about the gang tag on Eddie’s door.

  “Well, while you’re mulling that one over, I’ll pour us a drink. Looks like you could use an early one tonight, and the kids are out.”

  Joseph didn’t protest, so Eddie climbed out of his chair and shuffled over to the cabinet. He took out a couple of tumblers and poured two generous measures from the bottle of Bushmills he had brought with him. The two men savored the whiskey together for a while and, since Eddie had been so forthcoming with his opinion on Yomi, Joseph felt he could now be equally forthright.

  “So, old man, are you going to tell me what you’ve gotten mixed up in, or are we going to carry on pretending that a gang hasn’t made you its public enemy number one?”

  Eddie sighed wearily, took a little sip of his whiskey, and put the glass down on the rickety old table between them, then looked Joseph directly in the eye. He seemed to be contemplating how much to tell his friend. “I keep telling you it ain’t nothing. Just kids.” Joseph frowned and Eddie shrugged. “Okay, I moved some of them on is all.”

  “You moved them on, from where?”

  “You know that little row of rundown lockups that backs on to George Washington Square?” Joseph nodded. He also knew that no one put cars in those garages any more as they were liable to be gone the next day. “I noticed kids using it to store some stuff, so I spoke to them.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “The usual, TVs, DVDs, laptops. I watched ’em from one of the landings and I could see them unloading stuff from the lockup into a pickup truck.”

  “Why didn’t you just call the cops?”

  Eddie pretended to contemplate that for a moment. “Mmm, let me see, ring the precinct and tell ’em that, amazingly, there is some stolen shit being offloaded out of a derelict garage in the Highbridge Project. I reckon their reply would be, ‘You don’t say? Call us back when that shit don’t happen, maybe on a day without a Y in it.’ Even if they were interested they wouldn’t come down here ’less they was mob-handed and tooled up like a SWAT team. You know they treat our neighborhood like it’s a no-go area these days. They’ve lost control of it.”

  “Yet you go wandering down there on your own.”

  “I had my reasons.”

  “Are you gonna tell me them? Or do I got to guess?”

  “You’re finally talking like a New Yorker. How long’s it been, two years?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “Okay,” he said and he sighed. “Couple of days went by and I see this young boy, maybe thirteen, fourteen years old, standing outside that same lockup like he’s a lookout or something, which means they’re doing it again. Now, police or no police, I’m not having that go on in our backyard, Joseph, not on my watch. But this kid, well, what can I tell you, he’s usually okay. I’ve known him and his family a long time. I watched him grow up round here and he ain’t had a chance in hell. His father barely stuck around long enough to see him born before he was pulling down another sentence for peddling dope. His older brothers and sisters are all in gangs and his mother can’t control any of them. I think she’s about given up trying, but this kid, he’s different. He ain’t so bad and he’s a great young football player, goes to the same school as Yomi incidentally.”

  “What’s his name?” asked Joseph.

  “Jermaine Letts.”

  “I’ve seen him play. He’s good. He’s two or three years older than Yomi but they’ve got the same coach.”

  “That hard-assed Marine?”

  “Coach Geller, that’s the one. He seems to think Jermaine has the talent to go a long way.”

  “Yeah, he could,” agreed Eddie. “So anyhow, I go right down there and I say to this kid, ‘I’m doing this as a courtesy to you, you go and see whoever has got you working here and you tell them to shift their shit out of the project like now. ’Cos if they don’t, I’m gonna call up some old police buddies who’ll come down here and bust up the entire operation and all of you along with it.’”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Not too much. He mostly took me at my word. The next day the whole stash had gone and all that’s left of that lockup was a broken door hanging off its hinges.”

  “But a day or so later you get a gang tag sprayed on your door.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And that don’t worry you?”

  “Joseph, I spent forty years busting up gangs, cracking heads, and tangling with wise guys all over New Jersey. You always seem to forget that.”

  “I hadn’t forgotten it.”

  Eddie seemed a little irritated by his friend, but he leaned forward and poured him another measure of the Irish whiskey anyway.

  “You ever hear of Big Joey Moretti?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you sure as hell would have if you hadn’t been a boy in Nigeria at the time. Hell, I’m surprised they ain’t heard of him even over there. He was one big, tough, hard wise guy, a solider in the Patroni family. Anyway, he tangles with me this one time and, like he always does, he tells me he’d kick my sorry ass if I wasn’t wearing a uniform. Well, I’d had just about enough of this wise-cracking asshole and that day, don’t ask me why, something made me stop, turn round, and take off my tunic. And you know what happened?”

  “You kicked his ass.”

  “I kicked his ass! In front of all of his crew. Then I put my shirt back on and went for a beer with my p
artner. I tell you something, Joseph, that fight made me a legend in Jersey, a fucking legend, and I beat him fair…well, mostly. I mean I banged his head off a fire hydrant but it ain’t like we got rules about these things. There’s no Marquis of Queens, you know what I’m saying. These were hard, hard men.”

  “And your point is?”

  “My point is you think I’m going to move out of my home ’cos some young punk-ass kid who thinks he’s a gangster sprays a fucked-up cartoon on my door. Get the fuck out of here!”

  “I hear you, my friend, and I understand, but be careful. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you are the first to tell me you ain’t quite the same as when you was a cop, physically I’m saying. I mean when was that fight? The sixties?”

  “The sixties?” Eddie was incredulous. “Shit no. It was the goddammed seventies. Seventy-eight if you must know and I’m still the man I was then,” he snarled defensively. “It’s just my damn joints, that’s all.” Joseph realized he had adopted the wrong approach. “You think I’m some old man doesn’t know what he’s doing? How would you have made out without me when you came up against those dope-peddling lowlifes from Claremont last year?”

  Joseph had to concede he had a point. Eddie had helped him clear his friend Cyrus’s name when he was framed for a shooting by a drug dealer. Without the former cop’s experience and his contacts in the NYPD, things might not have worked out so well. For Cyrus or Joseph.

  “Don’t take offence, Eddie,” he urged.

  “What do you expect me to take? You think you’re the only one allowed to interfere when there’s something going on you don’t like? I told you not to mess with TJ and Baxter’s crew and did you listen to me? No. Did you get yourself killed? No, not this time, but you was lucky. It could easily have happened, so you ain’t the guy to lecture me about being careful.”

  “You’re right, Eddie,” said Joseph simply. “I apologize.”

  “Apology accepted,” he said, but it sounded as if he was still far from happy.

  Joseph tried to lighten the tone. “So, what happened to Big Joey Moretti?”

  “He got wacked,” said Eddie sourly. “Shot in the head about five years later outside of a trattoria called Parmenteris.”

  “Really? Why’d they kill him?”

  “I hear he disrespected an older made guy,” said Eddie archly.

  Joseph made a mental note never to tell a proud old man he is not what he used to be, because, even if it’s true, he certainly doesn’t want to hear it.

  5

  Joseph was standing and looking out across the school’s sports field when he heard her call.

  “Typical man,” said Brigitte, drawing alongside him. “Watching sports all day.”

  “Aren’t you s’posed to be marking books or did you just give everybody an A-minus today, Miss De Moyne?” answered Joseph, smiling back at her.

  Brigitte had changed into a sweatshirt and jeans now that the school day was at an end. The more casual look suited her and Joseph had to remind himself not to look too closely at her legs.

  “I’ve been marking books for over an hour, thought I’d take a break and come join you.”

  “How are you, Brigitte?” He meant since the death of her friend and colleague, and she understood.

  “What are you gonna do?” she asked. “Gotta keep going. Life goes on, I guess,” she offered uncertainly, and she looked out onto the sports field at the disorderly clump of boys all trying to dive onto the same foul ball. “Are we winning?”

  “This is just practice.” He gestured toward the man in his midforties who was standing in among the boys, bellowing instructions. “Coach Geller’s instilling a little discipline.”

  “That sounds like the clean Marine,” she said.

  Geller made no secret of his Marine Corps background, revelled in it in fact, right down to the number-one, buzz-cut style he always sported, which left little more than a thin, fuzzy layer of hair on the top of his head. The man may have retired from “the Corps,” as he called it, but Joseph felt his heart was still very much on the parade ground.

  “So why are you here,” asked Brigitte, “if it’s just practice?”

  “I’m a cab driver, remember?” He smiled. “Yomi’s personal cab driver. I’m taking him home afterward. Plus, I get to drop a couple of his friends on the way, too.”

  Brigitte smiled. “That’s nice. I’ll bet he thinks he has the coolest dad around.”

  “I’d say that’s unlikely. Anyway I’m not the only one.” Joseph raised a hand and received a slow, hesitant wave across the pitch in return from Merve Williams. The last time he had seen the big man with his youngest daughter, Laura, they had been standing outside the school and she had been in tears. Now they were watching her brother, Chris, go through his paces with some of the older kids.

  Laura was almost exactly the same age as Yomi, and Joseph had assumed they were still friends, but for some reason his son had pretty much blanked the girl when they had all arrived at the field together. Joseph had virtually forced him to say hello when she had said, “Hi, Yomi.”

  Laura was probably bored out of her mind watching this display, thought Joseph, but her father seemed deeply interested in the training session. Coach Geller had boys from three different age groups all practising moves together in different quarters of the playing field. They watched as the coach put the boys through their paces. Geller was a big man with a barrel chest that bulged out against a faded, old military-issue tracksuit in army green. His legs were as muscular as his torso, but his face was lined and aging and Joseph had never seen it once crack into a smile while scrutinizing his charges on the football field.

  Philip Geller liked to tell the boys he believed in three things: discipline, discipline, discipline. Yomi disliked Geller for his strictness, and Joseph privately held his own doubts as to whether a retired Marine Corps noncommissioned officer was the right man to be teaching twelve-year-olds how to play football. Weren’t they supposed to still be enjoying the game at that age instead of being bawled at by Sergeant Rock? The school probably felt a man like Geller was needed to keep control of their team and knock some of the older boys into shape. Like most American schools, Antoinette Irving Junior High took its football very seriously.

  The boys were all gathered round the coach now in a respectful semicircle, some of them panting for breath from the exertion of the latest moves he’d put them through. Yomi was out there, too, bent double with his hands on his knees. Even from the touchline, Joseph could clearly make out most of Coach Geller’s exhortations to work as a unit, get in there and scrap for your buddies, hold the line and break hard, trample the other guys, and don’t give them a second chance.

  To Joseph it all sounded a bit too much like a military campaign. When he was Yomi’s age, he’d have been kicking a battered old football round the side streets of Lagos with his friend Cyrus, dreaming of playing for the national side, the Super Eagles. There were no coaches or tactics, no training runs or lifting weights, and no referee. The goal would have been an irregular chalk line, drawn onto the back wall of an old garage. Things had certainly changed since he was a kid.

  Geller suddenly stopped speaking and looked up just as a silver Honda Accord flashed past them all. It was heading down the dirt track at the side of the football field at an improbable speed. There was a harsh scraping sound as the tires spun against the loose gravel and everyone turned to see the cause of the disturbance. The driver sounded the horn a couple of times. Joseph turned toward the commotion in time to see a flash of blonde hair and an imperious wave from the driver’s seat.

  “Who was that?” he asked.

  Brigitte sighed and spoke low so as not to be overheard. “That shy and retiring figure is Macy Williams, Merve William’s eldest, driving her daddy’s old hatchback, since he got him himself a new one. I used to teach her. Like most of the seventeen-year-olds round here she gets her manners from reruns of Jerry Sprin
ger and her values from MTV.” Joseph laughed. “I’m not joking. I once asked a classroom full of thirteen-year-olds to name a good role model and straightaway one of the girls said Britney Spears. When I asked her why she said, and I’m quoting here, ‘’Cos she does what she wants and don’t take no shit from nobody, uh-huh.’ I thought she was going to call me ‘girlfriend.’ I had to explain it’s a little harder to live like that if you don’t have a bank account with several zeros, but I fear my words may have fallen on stony ground.”

  On the pitch in front of him the coach had recommenced his team talk.

  “Maybe they just don’t understand things at that age,” offered Joseph.

  But Brigitte would not be placated. “The girls in this school don’t want to be Hilary Clinton or Condoleezza Rice. They want to be J-Lo or Lindsay Lohan. The female role models of today are pop-trash teen-queens, stepping out of cars with no panties on and not caring a damn when their tushies are posted all over the Internet afterward.”

  “And who did you want to be when you were fourteen-years-old, Brigitte? Nancy Reagan? Mother Theresa? Dian Fossey, hanging out with the gorillas in the jungle?”

  She blushed a little. “Point taken.”

  “No, come on, I’m curious.”

  “Well, if you must know, I wanted to be Meryl Streep.”

  “Really?”

  “Passionately. I used to imagine myself accepting an Oscar for some worthy film role set in Africa or Poland.”

  “What a serious little girl you were. Nothing more frivolous than that?”

  “Well, I’ll admit to one if you’ll tell me yours.”

  “Deal.”

  “When I was thirteen I wanted to be Tiffany.” And she giggled, which Joseph couldn’t help but find endearing.

  “That girl who sang in shopping malls? We even got her on the TV in Lagos.”

  “That’s the one. I used to stand in front of the mirror for hours singing into my hairbrush.”

  “And what happened to those ambitions of fame?”

  She pulled a face. “Turns out I can’t sing and I can’t act.”