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I am a New Yorker.
But I was talking about the boy.
And here I have to be careful. A word I shouldn’t use for an African American. Just as I shouldn’t use girl to refer to a young woman. But it was hard not to think of him as a boy.
He was only eighteen.
Grant Jackson was six foot ten, 280 pounds, all muscle. He collapsed and died during a preseason practice of the varsity basketball team of Cedar Park College, a small Brooklyn school with big aspirations. Without Grant the team had rarely posted a wi
That would not happen.
It was up to me to find out why.
“No, it isn’t,” Richard Rosenberg insisted. He got up from his desk, hooked his thumbs in his suspenders, and strutted back and forth as if he were making an argument in front of a jury.
Richard Rosenberg was the negligence lawyer I work for. A little man, with an inexhaustible source of nervous energy, he loved beating opposing attorneys down. With none in sight, he was happy to pick on me.
“ Stanley,” he said, “I don’t know how to impress this on you. Your job is not to find out why this happened. Your job is simply to record the fact it did. Take down the information. Have the mother sign the necessary release forms. That’s the reason you’re there. To get her to sign the retainer. So see that she does.”
“What about the father?”
“If he’s there, sign him. It’s the mother who called. I think it’s a single mother. I certainly hope so.”
“Richard.”
“Well, I’ll get a bigger settlement. A poor woman, raising her children alone. Trust me, there won’t be a dry eye in court.”
“I’m sure there won’t. Pardon me, Richard, but just who do you intend to sue?”
“I don’t know. The school, the coach, the EMS, the doctors, the hospital. That’s not your problem, that’s my problem. Just sign the kid up. There’s always someone to sue. Now, get going before Jacoby and Meyers gets wind of this and aces me out.”
Grant’s mother lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant in one of those housing projects I always dread and always seem to get. Steel outer doors with smashed locks and windows, dimly lit lobbies, and odd/even elevators, at least one of which was never working, invariably the one I wanted. In this case it was the odd, a sure thing, since the Jacksons lived on seven. I rode up to eight in the company of a young man in a do-rag wearing half the gold in Fort Knox, who looked as if he’d like to mug me if it weren’t for the nagging suspicion I might be a cop. I walked down a stairwell that reeked of urine and stale marijuana, then tried to find apartment J, not an easy task since the letters had fallen off half the doors. Eventually I located apartment F and counted down. I rang the bell, heard nothing, tried knocking on the door.
It was opened by a young black man with the word hostile tattooed on his forehead.
“You the lawyer?” he demanded.
A moment of truth.
Richard Rosenberg’s TV advertising, besides promising “free consultation” and “no fee unless recovery,” boldly proclaims, “We will come to your house.”
He wouldn’t, of course. He would send me. I would come walking in in a suit and tie, saying, “Hi, I’m from the lawyer’s office,” and if people wanted to assume I was an attorney, that was just fine, and it didn’t really hurt anybody, since a lawyer couldn’t do any more than I could at that juncture anyway. But I never lied to the client, I never claimed to be a lawyer, and if directly asked, I would explain that I was actually the investigator hired by the lawyer.
Only, this didn’t seem to be that time. The gentleman, whoever he was, was not the client, and it occurred to me it was probably not wise to get into a philosophical conversation with him. So I tried a simple deflection. “Hi,” I said, “I’m Stanley Hastings. I’m here to see Mrs. Jackson. I believe she called Rosenberg and Stone.”
While that did not appear to please him, it worked. He turned, hollered, “Hey, Ma, is the lawyer,” and walked off, giving me the choice of standing there like a jerk or trailing along behind.
I followed him into a living room where a large black woman sat on a couch bouncing a baby boy on her knee. In a playpen in the corner, a baby girl was chewing on a Miss Piggy doll. A third small child was building a tower on the rug.
The room reeked of poverty. The furniture could have been gathered off the street. Only the children’s toys looked new. And the baby’s diapers were fresh Pampers. Clearly all money was spent on the kids.
“Mrs. Jackson?” I said.
She looked up at me with big brown eyes. Hurt, pained, yet still polite. “Yes?”
“I’m Mr. Hastings from the lawyer’s office.”
“Oh, yes. Come, sit down.”
She patted the couch next to her, which would have been my first choice. For one thing, she had to sign papers. For another, I wouldn’t have to look at her, see her grief.
I sat down, put my briefcase on the coffee table, snapped it open, took out a fact sheet.
“All right, Mrs. Jackson,” I said. “Your son’s name was Grant?”
“That’s right.”
“Grant Jackson?”
“Yes.”
I filled his name in the blank. Grant Jackson, though dead, was still the client. His mother was filing suit in his behalf. I put down his particulars, then hers.
As Richard had surmised, Grant’s father had left the family picture years ago. I inquired of the brothers and sisters, all of whom would benefit in the event of a successful suit. There were nine, ranging in age from the baby on her knee to the young man who had opened the door, whose name turned out to be Lincoln. Indeed, the chronological list of Mrs. Jackson’s children mapped a cultural evolution, from Grant and Lincoln to Jamal and Rasheed.
The preliminaries out of the way, I took a breath. “All right,” I said. “Can you tell me what happened?”
Mrs. Jackson snuffled once, bounced the baby automatically. “Grant was at practice. He always at practice. He work him hard. Too hard.”
“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?”