“Who worked him hard?”
“Coach Tom.”
“Who’s Coach Tom?”
“The coach.”
“What’s his name?”
“Coach Tom.”
I didn’t want to get impatient with a woman in her grief, but I wasn’t making much headway. “Does Coach Tom have another name?”
“Suppose. But everyone call him Coach Tom.”
“He was Grant’s basketball coach?”
“Yes, and he work him too hard.”
“Ma, take it easy,” Lincoln warned. He was prowling the room as if suspicious I might be trying to rip his mother off.
She pierced him with her eyes. “Easy? I should take it easy? My boy. My poor boy.”
“Grant collapsed during practice?”
“That’s right. He had a bad heart. No, not a bad heart. A weak heart. And Coach Tom knew. That’s the thing. Coach Tom knew.”
“Grant had a heart condition?”
“Yes, he did.”
“He’d been to the doctor for this?”
“Tha’s right. Said he had arrhythmia. Not bad if he careful. If he don’t play ball.”
“Not what he say,” Lincoln contradicted. “He don’t say don’t play ball. He just say take it easy.”
“Same thing. Shouldn’t have played. I tell him that. I tell him don’t play. Grant, he don’t listen.”
“Did your son play ball before? In high school?”
“Course he did. Course we don’t know. We don’t know nothin’ wrong. Till the physical. The college physical. Doctor find out what the pediatrician miss.” Her voice quivered in outrage. “Can you believe that? Pediatrician see him every year, don’t know a thing.”
“What’s the pediatrician’s name?” I asked. It occurred to me Richard was right, there were a lot of people to sue.
She gave me the information and I wrote it down.
“So what’d the doctor say? The one who found the arrhythmia?”
“The doctor say he can play. He got a heart condition, but he can play. He just gotta take it easy. How you take it easy playin’ ball? I tell him, Grant, don’t do it. I tell him no. My boy, he got a big heart.” She broke down. “Oh, why I say that? But it’s true. He had a plan. Can’t talk him out of it. Gonna be a star, claim hardship, jump to the NBA. Signin’ bonus, get us outta here. I tell him no, but he won’t hear. He won’t hear.”
A sob racked her body, and her eyes filled with tears.
It was a relief when my beeper went off. It startled the baby, made him cry, snapped his mother back to the present.
“Wha’s that?” she said.
“Sorry. It’s the office, paging me. I have to call in.”
“Phone’s inna kitchen. Lincoln, show the man.”
I got up, followed Lincoln Jackson into a kitchen where cockroaches scurried about in plain sight. I picked up the receiver of the wall phone, punched in the office number.
“Rosenberg and Stone,” came the voice of Wendy/Janet.
Wendy and Janet were Richard’s switchboard girls. They had identical voices, so I never knew which I was talking to.
“It’s Stanley. What’s up?”
“Where are you?”
“Grant Jackson ’s apartment, signing up the mother.”
“Forget it,” Wendy/Janet said. “I got a case for you in Queens.”
I blinked. “Excuse me?”
“A case in Queens. The guy’s waiting for you. Head out there now.”
“I’m just getting started here.” I lowered my voice. “She hasn’t signed the retainer vet.”
“It doesn’t matter. We’re dropping the case.”
I blinked again. “Why?”
“I don’t know, but Richard said to send you out to Queens.”
I groaned. Besides a voice, Wendy and Janet shared an intelligence. Between them, they had the I.Q. of a fireplug. I had learned from bitter experience any fact they gave me was apt to be wrong.
This had to be one of them.
“I’ll have to hear it from Richard,” I said.
“Very well,” Wendy/Janet said acidly, taking my request for the rebuke it was, and put me on hold.
Moments later Richard Rosenberg came on the line. “ Stanley. Why are you giving the girls a hard time? Take down the information and get out to Queens.”
“I’m not done here.”
“Yes, you are. We’re dropping the case.”
“How come?”
“It’ll be on the evening news. A friend of mine leaked me the autopsy report. Grant Jackson died of a drug overdose.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not at all. Pretty stupid, huh? A guy with a weak heart shouldn’t be messing around with cocaine.”
I looked up, saw Lincoln standing there staring at me.
“You wanna run that by me again, Richard?”
“Of course,” Richard said sarcastically. “God forbid you should merely follow instructions without making me justify my decisions. The point is, Grant Jackson with a bad ticker made the rather unwise career choice of mainlining a rather large dose of rather pure coke. Under the circumstances, the number of people I can sue has dropped from everybody and his brother to one, the guy who sold him the drugs. Whom I would suspect of being unlikely to be found. So I’m dropping the case. So wrap it up and get out to Queens. Hang on, I’ll transfer you back, you can get the address.”
Wendy/Janet came back on the line and gave me the info. A Frederick Tucker of Forest Hills had tripped on a crack in the sidewalk and broken his leg, giving him a cause of action against the City of New York. I took down the details, told Wendy/Janet I’d get right on it.
I didn’t.
I figured a guy with a broken leg wasn’t going anywhere. Frederick Tucker could wait. First I finished signing up Mrs. Jackson.
“That’s awful,” Alice said as we watched the report on the evening news.
“It certainly is,” I told her.
“So there’s no case, but you signed it up anyway? Just so you wouldn’t have to tell the woman Richard had turned her down?”
“That’s right.”
“As a humane gesture, to spare her feelings?”
“No,” I said. “As a cowardly gesture, not wanting to be the one to tell her.”
“Instead you spent a half hour filling out forms.”
“Fifteen minutes. No big deal.”
“So the woman’s signed up?”
“Yes, she is.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means she’ll have to get a note from Rosenberg and Stone, telling her we’re no longer handling the case.”
“I don’t think so.”
I looked at Alice. She was lying on the bed propped up on her elbow. She looked bright, attractive, alluring, fetching, radiant.
I was in trouble.
I took the zapper, flicked the TV on mute. Leaned back in the overstuffed chair. “ Alice, what am I missing here?”
“You told me all about this woman and her umpteen children and her squalid apartment. Her dead son wanted to get her out of there. She wants to get out of there. That’s why she wants to sue. You know the reason that won’t work. You knew it, but you signed her up anyway.”
“I told you why.”
“Yeah, but I know you. You’re a nice guy. You see this woman with her kids, and you wanna help her. You figure maybe there’s a loophole even Richard doesn’t know. You figure there’s gotta be a way.”
I’m not entirely sure I figured all that. As I grow older and more cynical, any resemblance between me and a knight in shining armor is entirely coincidental and not to be inferred. If asked for an objective self-evaluation, I would have said I chickened out. Being a devout coward.
Of course that goes double for my wife. Don’t get me wrong-I don’t mean she’s a coward-I mean when confronted with her, that’s what I become. Anyway, faced with Alice ’s placid assurance that my motivation was clearly to help the woman, I found myself, as I usually do when dealing with my wife, ill equipped to contradict her. In short, helping the woman had become the coward’s way out.