Murder at the Foul Line

by Otto Penzler

  “Absolutely,” Holly said. “I will need to report to the national council. But, of course, it will go no further.”

  “I have learned some things recently that modify the original events, and we will need to consider an action.”

  Holly didn’t say anything.

  The lawyer studied her for a moment, then she looked at Wilma Trent.

  “Go ahead, Wilma,” the lawyer said.

  Wilma looked straight ahead. No eye contact.

  “It was a sorority initiation,” she said.

  “Really?” Holly said.

  “Taft is, as you may know, our archrival. The Chowder Kettle tournament is coming up. And it will be between us and Taft.”

  “Exciting,” Holly said.

  “When Tricia pledged Omega Omega Nu, her initiation quest was to do something that would increase North Atlantic’s chance to win the Chowder Kettle.”

  “So Tricia decided to get Jamal Jones suspended,” Holly said.

  “He is their best player.”

  “Did the sorority suggest it?” Holly said.

  “No. Tricia was required to think of the prank.”

  “And it was a prank, Tricia?”

  Tricia nodded her head.

  “Did Jamal put his hands on you?” Holly said.

  Tricia shook her head.

  “I want to hear you say it,” Holly said. “The truth. Sisterhood.”

  “Jamal never touched me,” Tricia said.

  “And the sorority knew this?” I said.

  “We never knew,” Wilma said.

  “Was she credited with fulfilling the quest?”

  There was silence.

  “Truth,” Holly said. “The sisterhood is strong only if it is truthful.”

  “We accepted it,” Wilma said.

  Wilma’s pale cheeks had two red splotches. Her bony hands were clasped tightly in her lap. She was wearing a cashmere sweater and tweed shorts.

  For God’s sake, she even wore pearls.

  “So you were willing to flush Jamal Jones’s life,” Holly said. “To pledge Omega Omega Nu?”

  “I don’t condone this,” Evelyn Akers said. “Mistakes were mace. But these are still kids, and the mistakes were kids’ mistakes. I’m hoping we can find a way to work this out so that it doesn’t impact negatively on Tricia or Omega Omega Nu.”

  “It just got out of hand, Ms. Gilmore,” Wilma said.

  “Nowhere near as far as it’s going to,” Holly said.

  “Excuse me?” Evelyn Akers said.

  Holly picked up her purse and took a small electronic device from it and set it on the table.

  “That’s a transmitter,” Holly said. “My husband is outside in the car with a receiver recording everything we say.”

  The three Omega Omega Nu women stared at her. Holly smiled at them. Then silence.

  “You can’t do that,” Evelyn Akers said. “You have no right to record us without our permission. We had a reasonable expectation of privacy. You’ll never be able to use that in court.”

  Holly nodded.

  “Court, shmourt,” Holly said. “We can use it in the press and at Taft. And maybe in the dean’s office here at good old North Atlantic U.”

  Tricia started to cry again. The red blotches spread on Wilma’s pallid cheeks. Evelyn Akers opened her mouth and closed it and opened it again.

  “Who the hell are you?” she said.

  “My name is Holly West. I’m a detective. And I represent Jamal Jones.”

  “You’re not from the national,” Wilma said.

  “No.”

  “You are here under false pretenses,” Evelyn Akers said.

  “Very,” Holly said.

  “What kind of deal can we make?” Evelyn Akers said.

  “No deal required,” Holly said. “I have what I need.”

  She put the receiver back in her purse. And stood. And walked out of the room.

  The rain against the big picture window was persistent. They sat in the quiet bar looking through the rain at the water, gray and uneasy and dappled by the rain. Nick had on a dark suit and Holly wore a small black dress. His shirt gleamed whitely in the dim bar. She was wearing her hair down today and it moved softly when she nodded.

  “A goddamned sorority prank,” Nick said.

  “Did you talk to Jamal after he was reinstated?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was he grateful?” Holly said.

  “No.”

  “Maybe he was,” Holly said, “and didn’t know how to say it.”

  “Maybe.”

  The cocktail waitress brought martinis. Straight up with olives for Holly, on the rocks with a twist for Nick. They clicked glasses.

  “Galahad,” Holly said.

  Nick smiled.

  “There’s still a lot of trouble,” Holly said.

  “There should be,” Nick said. “But our guy’s okay.”

  “Yes, we fixed his part of it.”

  “That’s what we agreed to do,” Nick said.

  “Be nice if we could fix everything,” Holly said.

  “Which we can’t.”

  “No.”

  They sipped the clear drinks from the bright glasses. The rain traced down the glass beside them.

  “It’s what ground me down as a prosecutor,” Holly said.

  “The amount of stuff you can’t fix?”

  “Yes,” Holly said. “How do you deal with it?”

  “I think about you,” Nick said.

  Holly looked hard at him. There was none of the usual mockery. He meant it.

  “That’s sweet,” Holly said.

  Nick grinned and raised his glass.

  “Martinis are good too,” he said.

  She smiled and put her hand out on the table. He put his on top of hers. And they sat and drank their martinis and watched the rain wash down the window.

  STRING MUSIC

  George Pelecanos

  WASHINGTON, D.C., 2001

  TONIO HARRIS

  Down around my way, when I’m not in school or lookin’ out for my moms and little sister, I like to run ball. Pickup games mostly. That’s not the only kind of basketball I do. I been playin’ organized all my life, the Jelleff League and Urban Coalition, too. Matter of fact, I’m playin’ for my school team right now, in the Interhigh. It’s no boast to say that I can hold my own in most any kind of game. But pickup is where I really get amped.

  In organized ball, they expect you to pass a whole bunch, take the percentage shot. Not too much showboatin’, nothin’ like that. In pickup, we ref our own games, and most of the hackin’ and pushin’ and stuff, except for the flagrant, it gets allowed. I can deal with that. But in pickup, see, you can pretty much freestyle, try everything out you been practicing on your own. Like those Kobe and Vince Carter moves. What I’m sayin’ is, out here on the asphalt you can really show your shit.

  Where I come from, you’ve got to understand, most of the time it’s rough. I don’t have to describe it if you know the area of D.C. I’m talkin’ about: the 4th District, down around Park View, in Northwest. I got problems at home, I got problems at school, I got problems walkin’ down the street. I prob’ly got problems with my future, you want the plain truth. When I’m runnin’ ball, though, I don’t think on those problems at all. It’s like all the chains are off, you understand what I’m sayin’? Maybe you grew up somewheres else, and if you did, it’d be hard for you to see. But I’m just tryin’ to describe it, is all.

  Here’s an example: Earlier today I got into this beef with this boy James Wallace. We was runnin’ ball over on the playground where I go to school, Roosevelt High, on 13th Street, just a little bit north of my neighborhood. There’s never any chains left on those outdoor buckets, but the rims up at Roosevelt are straight and the backboards are forgiving. That’s like my home court. Those buckets they got, I been playin’ them since I was a kid, and I can shoot the eyes out of those motherfuckers most any day of the week.

  We h
ad a four-on-four thing goin’ on, a pretty good one, too. It was the second game we had played. Wallace and his boys, after we beat ’em the first game, they went over to Wallace’s car, a black Maxima with a spoiler and pretty rims, and fired up a blunt. They were gettin’ their heads up and listenin’ to the new Nas comin’ out the speakers from the open doors of the car. I don’t like Nas’s new shit much as I did Illmatic, but it sounded pretty good.

  Wallace and them, they work for a dealer in my neighborhood, so they always got good herb, too. I got no problem with that. I might even have hit some of that hydro with ’em if they’d asked. But they didn’t ask.

  Anyway, they came back pink-eyed, lookin’ all cooked and shit, debatin’ over which was better, Phillies or White Owls. We started the second game. Me and mines went up by three or four buckets pretty quick. Right about then I knew we was gonna win this one like we won the first, ’cause I had just caught a little fire.

  Wallace decided to cover me. He had switched off with this other dude, Antuane, but Antuane couldn’t run with me, not one bit. So Wallace switched, and right away he was all chest out, talkin’ shit about how “now we gonna see” and all that. Whateva. I was on my inside game that day and I knew it. I mean, I was crossin’ motherfuckers out, just driving the paint at will. And Wallace, he was slow on me by, like, half a step. I had stopped passin’ to the other fellas at that point, ’cause it was just too easy to take it in on him. I mean, he was givin’ it to me, so why not?

  ’Bout the third time I drove the lane and kissed one in, Wallace bumped me while I was walkin’ back up to the foul line to take the check. Then he said somethin’ about my sneaks, some-thin’ that made his boys laugh. He was crackin’ on me, is all, tryin’ to shake me up. I got a nice pair of Jordans, the Air Max, and I keep ’em clean with Fantastik and shit, but they’re from, like, last year. And James Wallace is always wearin’ whatever’s new, whatever it is they got sittin’ up front at the Foot Locker, just came in. Plus Wallace didn’t like me all that much. He had money from his druggin’, I mean to tell you that boy had everything, but he dropped out of school back in the tenth grade, and I had stayed put. My moms always says that some guys like Wallace resent guys like me who have hung in. Add that to the fact that he never did have my game. I think he was a little jealous of me, you want the truth.

  I do know he was frustrated that day. I knew it, and I guess I shouldn’t have done what I did. I should’ve passed off to one of my boys, but you know how it is. When you’re proud about somethin’, you got to show it, ‘specially down here. And I was on. I took the check from him and drove to the bucket, just blew right past him as easy as I’d been doin’ all afternoon. That’s when Wallace called me a bitch right in front of everybody there.

  There’s a way to deal with this kinda shit. You learn it over time. I go six-two and I got some shoulders on me, so it wasn’t like I feared Wallace physically or nothin’ like that. I can go with my hands, too. But in this world we got out here, you don’t want to be getting in any kinda beefs, not if you can help it. At the same time, you can’t show no fear; you get a rep for weakness like that, it’s like bein’ a bird with a busted wing, sumshit like that. The other thing you can’t do, though, you can’t let that kind of comment pass. Someone tries to take you for bad like that, you got to respond. It’s complicated, I know, but there it is.

  “I ain’t heard what you said,” I said, all ice-cool and shit, seein’ if he would go ahead and repeat it, lookin’ to measure just how far he wanted to push it. Also, I was tryin’ to buy a little time.

  “Said you’s a bitch,” said Wallace, lickin’ his lips and smilin’ like he was a bitch his own self. He’d made a couple steps towards me and now he wasn’t all that far away from my face.

  I smiled back, halfway friendly. “You know I ain’t no faggot,” I said. “Shit, James, it hurts me to fart.”

  A couple of the fellas started laughin’ then and pretty soon all of ’em was laughin’. I’d heard that line on one of my uncle’s old-time comedy albums once, that old Signifyin’ Monkey shit or maybe Pryor. But I guess these fellas hadn’t heard it, and they laughed like a motherfucker when I said it. Wallace laughed, too. Maybe it was the hydro they’d smoked. Whatever it was, I had broken that shit down, turned it right back on him, you see what I’m sayin’? While they was still laughin’, I said, “C’mon, check it up top, James, let’s play.”

  I didn’t play so proud after that. I passed off and only took a coupla shots myself the rest of the game. I think I even missed one on purpose towards the end. I ain’t stupid. We still won, but not by much; I saw to it that it wasn’t so one-sided, like it had been before.

  When it was over, Wallace wanted to play another game, but the sun was dropping and I said I had to get on home. I needed to pick up my sister at aftercare, and my moms likes both of us to be inside our apartment when she gets home from work. Course, I didn’t tell any of the fellas that. It wasn’t somethin’ they needed to know.

  Wallace was goin’ back my way, I knew, but he didn’t offer to give me a ride. He just looked at me dead-eyed and smiled a little before him and his boys walked back to the Maxima parked along the curb. My stomach flipped some, I got to admit, seein’ that flatline thing in his peeps. I knew from that empty look that it wasn’t over between us, but what could I do?

  I picked up my ball and headed over to Georgia Avenue. Walked south towards my mother’s place as the first shadows of night were crawling onto the streets.

  SERGEANT PETERS

  It’s five a.m. I’m sitting in my cruiser up near the station house, sipping a coffee. My first one of the night. Rolling my head around on these tired shoulders of mine. You get these aches when you’re behind the wheel of a car six hours at a stretch. I oughta buy one of those things the African cabbies all sit on, looks like a rack of wooden balls. You know, for your back. I been doin’ this for twenty-two years now, so I guess whatever damage I’ve done to my spine and all, it’s too late.

  I work midnights in the 4th District. 4D starts at the Maryland line and runs south to Harvard Street and Georgia. The western border is Rock Creek Park and the eastern line is North Capitol Street. It’s what the newspeople call a high-crime district. For a year or two I tried working 3D, keeping the streets safe for rich white people basically, but I got bored. I guess I’m one of those adrenaline junkies they’re always talking about on those cop shows on TV, the shows got female cops who look more beautiful than any female cop I’ve ever seen. I guess that’s what it is. It’s not like I’ve ever examined myself or anything like that. My wife and I don’t talk about it, that’s for damn sure. A ton of cop marriages don’t make it; I suppose mine has survived ’cause I never bring any of this shit home with me. Not that she knows about, anyway.

  My shift runs from the stroke of twelve till dawn, though I usually get into the station early so I can nab the cruiser I like. I prefer the Crown Victoria. It’s roomier, and once you flood the gas into the cylinders, it really moves. Also, I like to ride alone.

  Last night, Friday, wasn’t much different than any other. It’s summer; more people are outside, trying to stay out of their unair-conditioned places as long as possible, so this time of year we put extra cars out on the streets. Also, like I reminded some of the younger guys at the station last night, this was the week welfare checks got mailed out, something they needed to know. Welfare checks mean more drunks, more domestic disturbances, more violence. One of the young cops I said it to, he said, “Thank you, Sergeant Dad,” but he didn’t do it in a bad way. I know those young guys appreciate it when I mention shit like that.

  Soon as I drove south I saw that the avenue—Georgia Avenue, that is—was hot with activity. All those Jap tech bikes the young kids like to ride, curbed outside the all-night Wing n’ Things. People spilling out of bars, hanging outside the Korean beer markets, scratching game cards, talking trash, ignoring the crackheads hitting them up for spare change. Drunks lying in the doorways of the clo
sed-down shops, their heads resting against the riot gates. Kids, a lot of kids, standing on corners, grouped around tricked-out cars, rap music and that go-go crap coming from the open windows. The farther you go south, the worse all of this gets.

  The bottom of the barrel is that area between Quebec Street and Irving. The newspapers lump it all in with a section of town called Petworth, but I’m talking about Park View. Poverty, drug activity, crime. They got that Section 8 housing back in there, the Park Morton complex. What we used to call the projects back when you could say it. Government-assisted hellholes. Gangs like the Park Street and Morton Street Crews. Open-air drug markets; I’m talking about blatant transactions right out there on Georgia Avenue. Drugs are Park View’s industry; the dealers are the biggest employers in this part of town.

  The dealers get the whole neighborhood involved. They recruit kids to be lookouts for ’em. Give these kids beepers and cells to warn them off when the Five-O comes around. Entry-level positions. Some of the parents, when there are parents, participate, too. Let these drug dealers duck into their apartments when there’s heat. Teach their kids not to talk to the Man. So you got kids being raised in a culture that says the drug dealers are the good guys and the cops are bad. I’m not lying. It’s exactly how it is.

  The trend now is to sell marijuana. Coke, crack and heroin, you can still get it, but the new thing is to deal pot. Here’s why: In the District, possession or distribution of marijuana up to ten pounds—ten pounds—is a misdemeanor. Kid gets popped for selling grass, he knows he’s gonna do no time. Even on a distribution beef, black juries won’t send a black kid into the prison system for a marijuana charge, that’s a proven fact. Prosecutors know this, so they usually no-paper the case. That means most of the time they don’t even go to court with it. I’m not bullshitting. Makes you wonder why they even bother having drug laws to begin with. They legalize the stuff, they’re gonna take the bottom right out the market, and the violent crimes in this city would go down to, like, nothing. Don’t get me started. I know it sounds strange, a cop saying this. But you’d be surprised how many of us feel that way.