Murder at the Foul Line (18 page)

He frowned, looked up at me. There were tears running down his cheeks. “Why you doin’ this?”

I didn’t have an answer. I couldn’t say “It’s my job,” because it wasn’t. And I couldn’t bear to say something clunky and
holier-than-thou like “Because it’s right.”

I turned and motioned to the door, where Sergeant MacAullif was waiting. He came in, introduced himself to Coach Tom, and
delivered what had to be the calmest Miranda warning in the history of the NYPD.

Richard was dumbfounded. “Grant Jackson’s a homicide?”

“That’s right.”

“His coach killed him because he would have made the team too famous and cost him his job?”

“That’s a bit of an oversimplification.”

“But he’s under arrest?”

“That he is.”

“Which makes it a brand-new ball game.” Richard rubbed his hands together. “Suddenly everyone’s liable again. The coach, the
college, the doctors. Maybe even the police.”

“Let’s not go overboard,” I said. I could envision MacAullif’s blood pressure if he got named as a defendant.

“You signed this woman up. Even though I told you not to.”

“I admit I exceeded my authority.”

“Yes, you did, and it couldn’t have worked out better. You’re even entitled to the hundred-and-fifty-dollar initiative bonus
for bringing me a new case.”

“Two hundred and fifty.”

“What?”

“It went up to two hundred and fifty last year.”

“Are you sure?”

“That kid, Patrick, who worked here for a month, brought you a case and wouldn’t give it to you for less.”

“That was a special case.”

“Oh, come on. You’re trying to justify paying a kid out of college more than the investigator who’s worked for you for years?”

Richard paused, considered, probably realized the number of cases I brought him could be counted on the fingers of one hand.
“Of course not, Stanley,” he said magnanimously. “Two hundred and fifty bucks it is. And a damn fine job.” He riffled through
the fact sheet I’d given him. “The woman has nine dependents, no husband, lives on welfare, has no other visible means of
support. Cruelly deprived of her only source of income. The insurance companies are going to fall all over themselves trying
to settle this.”

I figured that was probably true. Richard’s reputation as a fearsome litigator was well known. Opposing counsel were used
to throwing large sums of money at him to keep him out of court.

“So,” Richard said, “you get your bonus, I get a nice case, and a woman with nine dependents gets some much-needed relief.
All in all, it couldn’t be better.”

I sighed.

I was thinking of Coach Tom, down on his hands and knees, meticulously, lovingly replacing the boards of his parquet floor.

“Yeah,” I said flatly. “Couldn’t be better.”

Laurie R. King

Y
ou girls got the balls,” Lauren shouted at the girls on the court. Marisol bumped against Pilar with a stifled giggle while
their coach pretended not to notice. This was a long-established, straight-faced game she played with her teams, or maybe
with herself, an important part of which was keeping them in doubt as to whether their repressed spinster of a coach actually
intended these outrageous double entendres, or if she was just a complete tongue-klutz.

This particular Monday afternoon, the game was proving something of an effort. Lauren’s heart wasn’t in rude jokes. It wasn’t
even in the practice, which at the moment involved an intricate figure eight pattern of dribbling and passing, an exercise
two of the players had worked out themselves following the Globetrotters field trip the spring before. The girls had come
up with the idea, but it needed close supervision to keep it from disintegrating into a pileup, and frankly, their coach wasn’t
up to it today.

The third time the tight configuration of weaving figures (one, two, three, and pass; one, two, three—) had collided and
dissolved into chaos and irritation, Lauren gave up and set them to a simpler shooting practice. That was better. The rhythm
and noises of their shoes and voices soothed her, allowing her eyes and mind to follow their skills and personalities, looking
at both with an eye to the beginning of the season in a couple of weeks. Saturday’s informal preseason game, she saw, had
helped draw them together, given them the unity of purpose she’d hoped for. The day had been a disaster in other ways, but
in this it had been a success.

After a while, she called them over for a brief talk about strategy (which boiled down to
Teamwork!
), then allowed them a short practice game before dismissing them for the day. She watched them snag their bags and chatter
their way out the doors to their waiting rides, feeling pride and affection despite her grinding fatigue. Good team, she thought.
Good bunch of girls. God, I’m tired.

At the dinner table that night, bent over her solitary plate of overcooked pasta, Lauren squinted through gritty eyes as she
made notes about the team. Her job was teaching social studies and history, but her love was coaching, especially basketball.
It was not the girls themselves that gave her pleasure, although she had no doubt that they speculated furiously about her—she
was scrupulous about avoiding physical contact, just in case. She was, however, not a lesbian. She was something far more
rare, a twenty-nine-year-old virgin, and the pleasure she took in her girls was not for their bodies, but for their freedom.
She craved their overheard conversations about hair and parents and boys, much as a prisoner craves a window, and if her own
iron bars were made of emotional distance and a firm concentration on the game, she nonetheless secretly reveled in the social
interaction of teenagers such as she had never been.

She also drew comfort and pride in knowing that she was, if not exactly liked, then at least respected and (although they
might not realize it, or admit it if they did) needed. Junior high school girls were so vulnerable, so adrift on a sea of
hormones and insecurities, confusion and energy, that giving them a team to cling to was far more important than just something
healthy to do after school. Lauren gave them self-respect and a sense of their own strength, as individuals, as a group, and
as a sex. She was aware, always, of the irony involved in their learning this from her, of all people. Hence, for her own
amusement, the were-they-or-weren’t-they jokes, those faint overtures from the Lauren who might have been.
Marisol coming on nicely
, she noted on her pad:
cocaptain? Tina
, on the other hand, was getting just a bit too self-important for the team’s good:
sit the bench for a while?

By ten o’clock she was aching with fatigue and her eyes felt as if she’d been through a sandstorm. Pushing away the twinge
of apprehension, she filled her cat’s bowl, set up the coffeemaker for the morning, and went to bed.

And for the third night running, came awake within the hour, heart pounding over the noise that wasn’t there. She fumbled
for the clock and groaned at the reading of its luminous hands. What the hell was going on, anyway? She hadn’t had insomnia
for years, but for the last three nights she had. Ever since the cat.

With thought of the cat, all hope of sleep shriveled up and crept into a corner to hide. Lauren threw off the covers, felt
for her slippers, and pulled on her warm robe as she passed through the dim hallway to the kitchen. By the light of the open
refrigerator door she filled a mug with milk and stuck it in the microwave for a minute, added a splash of cheap brandy
and a shake of nutmeg, and went to turn on the Weather Channel on the television.

Storms lay over the nation, although it was calm enough here. Timson, her arthritic Siamese, grumbled in to ask what the hell
she was doing up this time of night. He sniffed in disapproval at the corruption of the good honest milk in her mug, curled
into her legs, and went to sleep.

The other cat had been black, or maybe a dark tabby. On the fateful Saturday morning, not even seventy-two hours ago, she’d
been driving through San Jose with four of her girls, heading for a preseason meet with a middle school up in the Bay Area
that was famous as the home of three actual, real-life professional women players. Somewhere behind Lauren’s car was a minivan
with the rest of the team, driven by one of the moms. It was a clear, sunny autumnal morning: ho hum, another beautiful day
in the paradise that was Northern California, and the girls were pretending to scorn the sixties and seventies rock of Lauren’s
tape collection, although they seemed to know most of the words. Traffic was moving easily enough to allow the driver’s mind
to wander, moving forward to the coming game, then back to the meeting she’d had a few days earlier with a prospective sponsor
for the team. She was mulling over his proposal to grace their new uniforms with the name of his software company in letters
larger than the girls’ own when the cat appeared.

And it did simply appear, on the road ahead of her, as if it had been dropped from the cloudless blue sky—or more probably,
she realized much later, launched from the bowels of the plumber’s truck two vehicles ahead of her. The truck was big and
red and bristling with cranes, nozzles, storage tanks, and various fixtures whose purpose Lauren couldn’t begin to guess.
For one cat, however, one dark, bedraggled, desperately bewildered feline, the truck had been a place of refuge against the
chill of the previous night, its nooks and crannies welcome shelter.

Until the truck reached sixty on the freeway and started to bounce and rattle.

The animal hit the ground running, or trying its damnedest to run, all four feet skittering across the concrete at sixty miles
an hour, its paws working automatically to find some kind of traction that would enable it to lunge for safety. It was not
tumbling head over heels; its head was bolt upright, revealing eyes popped and staring with astonishment, fur spiked awry
with wet or grease. Every fiber of the creature’s being was fighting to make sense of the impossible concrete and steel maelstrom
into which it had been ejected, every sinew and cell in its body battling valiantly to stay upright, to find the safe haven
that it knew had to be there somewhere in the hell bearing down on it, to gather itself up from the loud/fast/huge confusion
and leap in haven’s direction, to survive, to
live
.

All this—its attitude and its youth, the wide-staring eyes and the state of its dark fur and the way its delicate paws were
trying for something they could comprehend—printed itself on Lauren’s mind in about two seconds. The cat simply materialized—it
hadn’t wandered out across two lanes of traffic from the shoulder, that would have been impossible—it just appeared, having
passed miraculously without harm under the rattletrap old Chevy that separated Lauren from the plumber’s truck, skating down
the roadway between that oblivious car’s four tires and shooting out from under the back bumper like some macabre version
of Bambi on ice. It had not been afraid, she decided on the tenth or hundredth time those two seconds
replayed themselves in her mind’s eye: it wasn’t fear that had bugged those eyes and given such desperate strength to its
fragile muscles. Somehow she knew that there had been no time for fear in the moments allotted to it, just astonishment wedded
to a frantic and determined hunt for solution. She also knew, queasily, that had there been a vehicle in the next lane, half
a dozen cars and a girl’s basketball team would have come to wrenching, steel-tearing grief on top of the cat. Fortunately
there had been no car to meet her unthinking yank on the wheel.

The girls hadn’t seen the cat, just shrieked in reaction to the abrupt swerve and started gabbling questions at her. Lauren
did not answer. She clenched the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands, slowing so dramatically the car behind her blared
its horn in protest, and she kept her eyes glued to the rust-speckled bumper of the rapidly retreating Chevy. She did not
look into the rearview mirror; she did not have to. She knew what her eyes would see there if she did look, knew that the
only possible ending to the cat’s story had borne down on it with metal teeth bared and rubber wheels pounding, to give the
animal’s valiant efforts a casual, two-ton swat and drive on. Lauren kept her own wide-staring eyes fixed on the road ahead
of her and turned deaf ears on the demands of the girls, moving with infinite caution into the exit lane, off the freeway,
and into the first convenient parking lot.

Her four girls were gibbering frantically; in a moment the minivan carrying the rest of the team swerved behind them into
the lot. All the occupants of both vehicles went abruptly quiet when Lauren flung open her door, stumbled over to the ivy
strip bordering the lot, and vomited up her breakfast.

The girls subsided and let the other adult take over. Gwen
jumped out of the minivan and trotted over to Lauren’s side, where she stood with one hand on the coach’s sweating back until
she was sure the spasms were finished. Then she went back to the van, dug a bottle of water from the cooler, and came back
to hand it to Lauren.