The Hustle (34 page)

His murder is still technically an open case. The investigation is the responsibility of the cold case unit, which has the task of looking into unsolved murders—mainly through using advances in DNA technology—committed between 1969 and 1999. The unit started in 2000 with three hundred homicides to investigate; so, far it has cleared about twenty-five. Mike Scott's is one of the approximately 275 remaining.

One case the unit has solved is the 1990 murder of a thirty-eight-year-old Central Area woman who worked in the produce section of a grocery store. She was found on her couch, her dress pushed up over her stomach, stabbed thirty times with a pair of scissors. DNA technicians, working at the request of the cold case detectives, matched semen found inside her body to Trenino Rollins. In 2006, Rollins went on trial in King County Superior Court for first-degree homicide. It ended in a hung jury after a ten-to-two vote to convict. Rollins eventually pled guilty to second-degree homicide, for which he received an additional fifteen years on top of the time he was serving for Tyrell's murder.

While Rollins is still in King County Jail awaiting transport back to prison in Tucson, Arizona, where Washington State has farmed him out to a corporate-run penitentiary, I go to visit him. When he comes into the visiting area and takes the phone on the other side of the bulletproof glass, he looks almost dignified—pushing fifty, he has a shaved head, round face, and a goatee flecked with gray.

He nods when I tell him I'm writing a book about a bunch of guys I once played basketball with, and that one of them was Tyrell Johnson. I tell him I want to know what happened on the night of the murder. Rollins nods again, and then tells me he doesn't want to talk about it at the moment. He says to try him again when he's back in prison. “In a couple of years, the truth about this whole thing is going to come out,” he tells me.

For the next few years, I send Rollins an occasional letter asking if he's willing to talk, but hear nothing back. In the fall of 2009, I contact the public information officer of the prison in Arizona. He relays my request for an interview to Rollins, who tells the prison officials to let me know he has “no intentions” of talking to me, ever.

One Saturday morning, I sit in the gallery of a King County courtroom. On the other side of a panel of bulletproof glass, a judge is arraigning a black teenager accused of auto theft. I've arrived a few minutes before the morning break, and when the judge finishes with the alleged car thief and steps down from the bench, the courtroom guard rushes out and greets me. A tall, slender, middle-aged man with a broad smile, he enthusiastically shakes my hand and ushers me through the court and into a tiny breakroom. We sit at a table topped with gray Formica, the smell of percolating coffee mingling with the cigarettes on his breath. Now retired from his job as a detective, Hank Gruber tells me he works part-time as a bailiff because it lets him keep his health benefits and still have enough time to go deer hunting.

Gruber sets a thick, black binder on the table. The case, he says, was one of those that just stick in your head. On this type of thing, the family doesn't expect much from the police, so you feel good if you can nail somebody. “You come out and you're white and you solve the murder and they think you're a hero,” he says.

Gruber tells me the likely motive was to steal the money that Mike Scott had won gambling. The police, he says, think that Rollins did the murder with a partner and mentions the name of the other suspect, who was later convicted of murder and rape in a separate case and is now serving a life sentence in prison. There wasn't enough evidence to press charges against the other man, Gruber says, but it was a “two-person-type murder.”

The binder holds a collection of murder scene photos that Gruber used when he taught about crime-scene investigations at the police academy. A remarkably chipper man, he opens the book and takes on the air of someone showing photos of his grandchildren as he flips the pages, which display snapshots of suicides, accidental deaths, and murders. Each one evokes a memory—the particulars of the case, the challenges, how it was eventually solved.

Eventually Gruber gets to Tyrell's section. He opens the book to a photo of police and forensic investigators gathered on a wooded road. They hunch over something swaddled in white sheets. Gruber flips a few more pages. Each photo shows another layer of the bundle removed—the sheets are unwrapped to expose a couple of black garbage bags, which are pulled away to reveal a blue blanket. “You sure you're OK with this? I know this guy was a friend of yours,” he asks before turning the page one more time.

Tyrell is lying on his back. He wears black briefs. His left leg is sawed off just above the knee, the right leg amputated a bit higher. There is a red crease in his left shoulder where it was partially severed, too. “They were trying to dismember him but they were too lazy or it was too bizarre,” Gruber explains. It happens more often that you might think, he says—a killer starts to hack up a corpse to get it into manageable pieces but then quits halfway through.

There's not much to connect this body to the kid I once knew until I notice something around the neck. At first it looks almost as if they tried to cut his head off, too, and I begin to ask Gruber about it, until I see that the thin line is actually a gold necklace. I remember Tyrell flipping one just like it out from underneath his undershirt years before, a bit of flash to add to his basketball game.

…

I exit the freeway in South Seattle and drive east a couple of miles before pulling into the parking lot of the community center, a boxy, concrete building that sits next to a complex of athletic fields. I arrive fifteen minutes early. As I get out of the car, a dark green Ford Escort station wagon with a dent in the passenger-side door parks a few slots away. Damian climbs out in a black nylon sweatsuit and his just-purchased white high-tops. We walk into the lobby of the center, which is crowded with kids, all of them African American. A couple of teenage guys standing around the pool table call out and greet Damian as we pass.

The gym has red cinder-block walls, a sign listing rules of conduct, and a clock over the door with the requisite metal grille. On the sideline stands a row of portable aluminum bleachers.

The rest of the team begins to show up a few minutes later. Sean walks into the gym in maroon shorts, a gray T-shirt, and flip-flops, grabs a ball, and begins shooting. A few minutes later, Dino enters with Willie McClain Sr., who wears a red nylon track suit and carries a camera in his right hand. Sean walks over, gives McClain a hug, and shakes his hand.

“How you doin'?” Sean asks.

“I'm great,” McClain says.

“You look great.”

“You too.”

Sean rubs his head where his hair has receded and tilts forward to show McClain, who laughs and says, “That's all right. Better you than me.”

Sean moves over the bleachers and sits down to put on his shoes as McClain keeps talking.

“I just had a breakfast meeting and I was bragging to them about 1986 and all that we accomplished,” he says. “That should go down someplace in the books.”

Randy Finley arrives next, his bushy hair and mustache now white. He is followed by Chris Dickinson and Eric Hampton, who, when he enters the gym, throws his arms in the air in a Rocky-like gesture. Maitland, who has driven up from Oregon, walks in wearing khaki pants and a muted, green-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt. Coach McClain's youngest son, Demetrius, shows up with a friend. Eric's younger brother, Joe, also comes with a friend. Joe Miller, who was Willie McClain's assistant coach, shows up, as does Doug Thiele, a former Lakeside teacher who was hired by Randy to tutor Damian, Will Jr., and JT. Maitland's younger brother, Rob, who used to tag along to games, has flown up from Los Angeles for the reunion.

As the guys drift onto the court, the sound of basketballs thumping on the floor begins to reverberate off the walls. Willie McClain and Randy Finley huddle and talk while we warm up. Chris and Eric get together in a corner to loosen up.

“Is that going to do any good?” McClain shouts over at them. “All that stretching?”

After about fifteen minutes of chatting and shooting around, we gather in a circle at center court to reintroduce ourselves.

“I'm Doug. I'm a journalist,” I begin.

“I'm Chris Dickinson, I've got a couple kids, and I work in employee benefits.”

“I'm Eric Hampton. I am married now. I work for the city of Seattle.”

“I'm Maitland Finley. I've been working in the wine industry in Washington and Oregon. I live in a town called Yamhill down south. I'm single, and, uh, I just have a dog. That's it.”

“I'm Coach Willie McClain. I have three men now, they're not boys. I'm still in the ministry, still working with youth. I'm glad to see you all, you men, back from '86. All right!”

“I'm Damian Joseph, I am a teacher and a preacher. I'm a teacher at Zion Preparatory Academy, and it's wonderful. I love helping kids. And I'm a preacher at Greater Glory Church of God in Christ.”

“Dino Christofilis. Married with two kids. I have my own investment firm. Glad to be here.”

“I'm Sean O'Donnell. I'm a lawyer with King County.”

“I'm Randy Finley. I was the auditioning guy. I just had a wonderful time doing it. And when the basketball season was over, it was hard to let go. That's why we started the tutoring class and got almost everybody off into high schools. Got 'em graduated and I've been hearing all kinds of wonderful things. And Willie, it's wonderful to see you again.”

“It's good to see you, too, Randy,” McClain answers.

Everyone claps after the introductions. To choose teams, we pair off, roughly by height, picking up the younger brothers and their friends to fill out the sides. McClain says, “My advice to you all: Play hard and keep it clean!”

The game starts. Chris takes the first shot. He misses, and Eric's younger brother, Joe, grabs the rebound and kicks it out to Damian at the top of the key, who nails a jumper.

Chris hits the next shot from far out on the left side of the basket.

When Dino gets the ball, just beyond the three-point line, he rises and fires a jumper that pops down through the net. He has exactly the same form he had as a kid, and, as usual, no hesitation in shooting it.

There might be an undiscovered gene that determines your basketball skills, because everyone plays in almost the exact same style he did twenty years earlier.

Even though he's gained some weight, Eric still has a rattlesnake-quick lateral step he uses to throw off defenders, drive by them, and then put up a high-arcing shot that seems to slide straight down through the basket.

Chris's shirt is soon soaked with sweat as he bangs away against Sean for position under the basket. When a teammate shoots an air ball that bounces on the floor, heading out of bounds, Chris leaps after it in an attempt to keep possession for his team.

Sean would get the prize for most improved. Still thin and with the same long limbs and wingspan, he has grown into his body and crosses the court without the awkward, robotlike movements he had as a kid.

When Damian dribbles, he pounds the ball into the court like he's trying to punish it. As soon as we start the game, he also gets deadly serious. He wants to win.

Maitland sits it out, watching from the top row of the three-level bleachers, his elbows on his knees. Later, he grabs a ball and shoots on one end of the court when everyone is on the opposite side.

Coach McClain sits on the first row of the bleachers, leaning forward, studying every play, looking totally content. As he always used to do, he occasionally erupts with admonishments: “Cut the baseline off! Step up and play defense! Come on, Damian, you gotta get that!”

My only reliable play remains the outside shot. At one point, Damian gets free at the top of the key and drives toward the hoop. I am standing a few feet away from the basket and come off my man to pick up Damian, who is barreling straight down the lane. He begins to jump, the ball in his right hand as his arm rises toward the hoop. I leap and try to block his shot. We collide in midair, both of us stopping cold, my head jolted back as I absorb the force of Damian's momentum. Willie McClain emits a loud groan from the sideline. Next time, I think, I'll let Damian have the two points.

We take breaks between the games. Players gulp from their water bottles and rest on the bleachers. Chris, smiling, comes up, knocks me on the shoulder, and tells me he loves being back with the guys. Damian makes motions like he's practicing his jump shot and calls out, “Hey Coach McClain, you were right, too! I missed him underneath.”

Dino asks Eric where his office is. “Your e-mail's on that list?” he asks. “You're working downtown? I'll hit you. We can get lunch.”

During one game, I sub out and sit on the bleachers. It's impossible not to notice that all the white players from the team are here while several of the black guys aren't—Will McClain Jr. and JT, who'd both said they were coming, haven't shown up. I miss Tyrell's smile and the suspense of knowing he might at any point pull off an outrageous, behind-the-back move. I miss Myran's running commentary and jokes.

After several games, when everyone's had enough, we head over to Zion Preparatory Academy, where we have pizza and soda in the cafeteria under the framed pictures of the Tuskegee Airmen that hang on the walls. There is a lot of catching up and reminiscing about things such as listening to Run DMC and ranking on each other during the van rides.