Murder at the Foul Line (28 page)

“Ms. Gilmore,” Evelyn Akers said, “this is very strange. Could you leave us alone for a moment?”

“Of course,” Holly said. “I assume my purse is safe here?”

“No one will steal it,” the lawyer said.

Holly left the room and stood in the small hall outside it.

Is there anything in the world as silly as sororities?

Holly looked at her watch. Two minutes.

Yes, fraternities.

She leaned against the wall and made a mental list of silly things.

After fifteen minutes Evelyn Akers came to the door and
gestured for Holly to come back. Tricia was still sniffling when Holly sat back down.

“We are all Omega Omega Nus,” the lawyer said.

Holly’s purse was where she’d left it. It hadn’t been stolen.

Holly nodded.

“Omega Omega Nu is, of course, a secret society,” Evelyn Akers said. “And we have all agreed to that.”

Holly nodded again.

“So what is said here stays here?”

“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.

George Pelecanos

WASHINGTON, D.C., 2001

D
own 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 4
^th
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 13
^th
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 had 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
every
thing, 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.”