Tough Lessons Read online

  Whatever Eddie had found down there, it had only served to put him on the wrong end of a severe beating. Eddie was still a big man but the muscle he had been so proud of in his youth had softened with age and he was no longer all that mobile. The former tough guy would have been easy prey to a young and ruthless gang with a beef against an interfering ex-cop.

  Pacing, Joseph was far from alone in the waiting room. By the time they had got Eddie into the hospital emergency department it was late afternoon and patients were coming in from all corners, victims of industrial accident, domestic abuse, or any number of fights and mishaps caused by an afternoon’s drinking. There were so many people there that relatively minor problems were being dealt with by a cursory examination and a seat in the waiting room alongside the relatives of the more severely afflicted. A girl who may or not have been a junkie was hugging herself in a corner while she sobbed and rocked back and forth, looking like she was about to go out of her mind with worry at the fate of a friend or lover. There was a large, stubble-faced guy dressed like a construction worker who was trying not to show too much concern at the big, blood-soaked bandage he was pressing against one eye. Somewhere through the double doors a small child was screaming for his mummy while the doctors tried to examine a broken bone. His anguished cries were enough to make anyone feel for the poor little guy.

  Joseph tried to ignore the screams and the sobbing around him. Instead, he stared straight ahead at the double doors Eddie had been wheeled through, feeling like a failure. He was no good as a father, clearly hadn’t been good enough to get into the NYPD, and, to cap it all, he had now proven a dead loss as a friend. All he could do was wait and he did, for hours, while the poor old guy was in surgery, under the knife in a desperate bid to save his life. Joseph knew it didn’t look good. He could tell by the grim-faced, no-nonsense way the ER team had spirited Eddie away on the gurney, moving as swiftly as the hospitals shiny floors would allow them. That had been hours ago. The light had long since gone and the numbers in the waiting room had diminished until there were but a few left around him. There were one or two able-bodied people and he wondered who they were waiting for, what road accident or mugging their loved ones were the victim of, and their likely odds of survival. He thought about odds and statistics. If their loved ones survived, would that diminish Eddie’s chances of pulling through? He knew that was nonsense. They would just as likely all make it, or none of them would.

  Finally, a harassed-looking young doctor walked out through the door and called his surname, mispronouncing it as always.

  Joseph had been waiting so long that he almost did not respond to his own name.

  “Yes,” he replied dumbly, and the doctor came over and spoke to him in a discreet whisper.

  “Your friend has a suspected fractured skull and severe concussion, a couple of broken ribs, and a fracture of the right kneecap. That’s the bad news. The good news is he is still with us and it’s now just a question of waiting for him to wake up, so we can see what effect the blow to the head has had on him. That might be some time and your friend’s age is obviously a factor that will hinder his recovery. My advice to you would be to go home now and get some rest. If you leave a number at the desk, someone will call you when we have more news.”

  “Thank you, doctor,” said Joseph, and he climbed wearily to his feet. He left his number with the lady on the admittance desk and walked out into the cold night air to ponder Eddie’s chances of recovery. He had taken quite a beating but he was a tough old guy, a fighter, and it sounded like he had a fair chance of making it. Right now, after the shock he had received when he saw Eddie lying lifeless on the concrete, Joseph would settle for that.

  Joseph returned to his apartment. He didn’t bother to disturb Yomi, who would be tucked up on Marjorie’s put-me-up sofa in her apartment by now. He had called the old lady to ask her if she would look after his son as soon as he had arrived at the hospital and they had wheeled Eddie away. Her reaction had been to let out a long series of imaginative curse words at the “motherfuckin’, low-life dick wads” who had done this to their friend. It was impressive stuff from an eighty-year-old lady who always dressed like she was on her way to church on Sunday. She had agreed to take Yomi in an instant as she always enjoyed his company. Yomi never displayed any attitude when he was round her place, probably because he didn’t want to imagine the tongue-lashing he would get from the old girl if he did.

  To his credit, Yomi had been shocked to hear about Eddie, when his father had called them both later to report on the old man’s condition. Joseph still had no way of knowing if the incident would put him off the idea of carrying a knife, or merely reinforce his view that they all lived in a horrible place and he would need all the protection he could get. Joseph made himself a sandwich and poured a larger than average glass of whiskey. He ate less than half the sandwich and then pushed it to one side, too weary to eat it all. Instead, he topped up his glass with a little more Bushmills then stared out of the window, wondering how his life in America had ever become so complicated.

  The next morning, Joseph got a call on his cell phone from a lady at the hospital who gave him the good news. Eddie was awake and showing no sign of brain damage. “Unless you include a foul mouth and a sassy attitude with some of my staff,” she told him pointedly. The patient was apparently strong enough to receive visitors, so Joseph went right over there.

  When he arrived on the ward, Eddie was sitting up in bed, propped up by two enormous pillows, with his head lolling back like it would involve way too much effort to raise it. He looked all in, too exhausted even to give Joseph some of that famous attitude.

  “How you feeling?” Joseph asked his friend.

  “How am I feeling?” he repeated weakly. “How do you think? Stupid, that’s how I’m feeling. Should never have let them creep up behind me like that. They got the drop on me, didn’t they? Got a bang to the head and that’s all I can remember. Everything else must have happened when I hit the ground.”

  “So you didn’t get a look at any of them?”

  “What did I just say?” snapped Eddie hoarsely. “They wuz behind me.”

  “Okay, take it easy,” said Joseph. “You want some water?”

  Eddie nodded weakly, so Joseph poured him a glass from a large plastic jug by the side of the bed. He brought the glass up to Eddie’s mouth but the old man was forced to raise his head slightly to drink and the effort caused him to wince in pain

  “So,” said Eddie, “you drop by here to say I told you so? That why you came?”

  “No, I came here because I was worried about you and I wanted to apologize,”

  “Huh?”

  “For being late. I’d have been with you if I wasn’t running late so, for that, I apologize.”

  Eddie didn’t seem to know how to respond. Instead, he just muttered something unintelligible before adding in a clearer voice, “Bring any grapes?”

  “No.”

  “Good, I hate grapes,” said the old man, forgiving him in his own way. “Bring any Bushmills?”

  “Eddie, you have a fractured skull and severe concussion.”

  “So? What’s your point? All the more reason for a drink, ain’t it?” His testiness was now more in jest. “So if you ain’t brung the whiskey, what did you bring?”

  Joseph reached into the brown paper grocery bag he was carrying. “The New Jersey Observer.” He knew Eddie liked to keep up with the news from his old neighborhood. “Some donuts from Dunkin’ Donuts, and don’t worry I didn’t get you the Boston kreme ones, ’cos I know you won’t eat them on principle. These are the chocolate-glazed variety.” Didn’t all cops in America like doughnuts, reasoned Joseph? Eddie didn’t seem too thrilled though. “And a copy of I the Jury.” He handed Eddie a battered old paperback he had found in a secondhand store weeks ago and kept forgetting to give to the old guy.

  Joseph had expected Eddie’s eyes to light up at the sight of his discovery in the l
ocal thrift store. Instead, he said quietly, “Mickey Spillane, thanks. I’ll be sure and read that one, once my head stops pounding.” Even the thought of the classic tome from his favourite pulp-fiction crime writer, a man who was raised in New Jersey, couldn’t snap Eddie out of his low mood.

  They talked for a while, but Joseph could see the old man was getting tired and he decided to leave him to get some rest. Eddie was clearly not himself and something made Joseph feel that it wasn’t just the physical injuries that had taken their toll on him. Eddie’s pride was hurting. He was down, depressed even, though a man of his age and background would never use that word. Something was preying heavily on his mind though. Joseph wasn’t sure what it was. Maybe, as he had come round in the hospital bed after his beating, Eddie had been forced to finally face the unpalatable truth that he was getting old.

  Joseph had managed to keep his anger in check since the moment he discovered Eddie lying there unconscious by the lockups. Instead, he had been filled with worry for his friend. Now that there seemed every prospect of the old man making a full recovery, that worry had eased a little and was replaced by a deep, brooding anger, directed at whoever it was who had attacked an elderly victim in such a cowardly fashion. It was time to pay someone a visit.

  “I need to speak to your son,” he said.

  “And who in the hell are you?” asked Mrs. Letts, folding her thin arms across her bosom defensively.

  “Joseph Soyinka. My son, Yomi, is in the same junior high as Jermaine.”

  “Well, I don’t see your son here with you, so I guess this ain’t no play date.”

  Joseph realized that Jermaine Letts mother can’t have had things easy. With a no-account, drug-dealing husband and a bunch of children associated with a variety of gangs, petty crimes, and now even a murder case, she had clearly not had a stress-free life. The strain of a low-income existence on the periphery of society had prematurely aged her and she seemed to have just one default expression—a hard, defiant look, which she directed out against a world she was in seemingly permanent conflict with. Joseph understood all of this, but right now he had no time for her attitude.

  “Mrs. Letts, I realize you have your problems, but so have I. I just left an old man who’s in hospital with a whole bunch of broken bones and a fractured skull,”

  “That ain’t got nothing to do with my Jermaine.” She said it without hesitation, too quickly to have even considered whether her son could have been involved. It was the default position of a woman who has been quizzed a thousand times by police officers. It wasn’t my child, no, sir.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re so sure about that but my friend was attacked outside those lockups at the far end of the project, just a few days after he spoke to your son there and moved him along.”

  “Don’t prove a thing and you ain’t the cops anyhow, elsewise where’s your badge?”

  “No, you’re right, that doesn’t mean anything on its own and you’re correct that I’m not the cops.”

  She seemed inordinately please by the admission she had coaxed from him.

  “I can see you’d prefer not to deal with me on this matter so I’m going to leave here right now. Then I’m going to drive straight down to the precinct. I will then tell the cops what I just told you and we’ll see what they want to do about it, shall we? I understand the guys down there know all about your son already. I hear they let him out only a day or so ago. Guess they’ll be real pleased to see him back again. I forgot to add that my friend in the hospital used to be a cop and you know what they’re like for looking out for their own. Who knows how they will take the news that Jermaine has been dishing our beatings to retired policemen. I guess they’ll make him real welcome when they hear that. Jermaine just better hope the old man doesn’t die of his injuries.”

  Mrs. Letts’s face dropped, and when she spoke all the fight had gone out of her voice. “Well, thing is, he ain’t in right now.”

  “Really,” said Joseph dryly. “Then he must have a twin,” and he glanced over her shoulder toward the worried-looking teenager standing right behind her.

  Mrs. Letts turned round and saw her son, who said quietly, “S’okay, Ma, I ain’t done nothing.” Jermaine’s shoulders were drooped and his eyes were red circles. Whatever the police had put him through, it had left him too exhausted to argue with the stranger at his door.

  “Wipe your feet before you come in here,” Mrs. Letts told Joseph by way of welcome, leaving the door open as she turned her back on him and padded off into the kitchen.

  Jermaine’s mother must have been more rattled than he expected by Joseph’s threat to involve the police for she even made them a pot of coffee. They all sat round the kitchen table to drink it and Mrs. Letts said, “So, you wanted to speak to my boy. Well, say what you got to say, then think about leaving. You can see how tired he is.”

  Joseph leaned forward so he was looking Jermaine right in the eye. “I just want Jermaine here to explain to me how and why Eddie Filan got such a beating down at the lockups.”

  “Wasn’t nothing to do with me,” said the boy firmly. “I know Eddie, known him for ever. I didn’t give that old guy no beatin’.”

  “You hear that?” Either Mrs. Letts assumed Joseph was deaf or she thought her son’s word was all that was needed.

  “But you were standing guard on those same lockups the other day when he moved you along,” continued Joseph.

  Jermaine glanced at his mother and Joseph said, “She isn’t going to answer for you, Jermaine. I know you were there. Eddie told me, said he’d cut you some slack.”

  “I guess,” conceded the boy and he looked down at his training shoes.

  Immediately, Mrs. Letts attitude changed. “Hell you doin’ that for, Jermaine? You promised me you’d have nothing to do with no gangs. You promised your momma!”

  Jermaine continued to stare down at the ground, a tough young boy cowed into submission by this tiny woman.

  “So Eddie let you off the hook and this is how you repay him?” continued Joseph. “The next time he appears at the lockups, you and your gang jump him and smash his skull in.”

  “No!” said Jermaine vehemently.

  “Tell me you didn’t do it! Swear to your momma!” Mrs. Letts was getting riled up now. It was a distraction Joseph could do without, but her disapproval might just help him to break down the boy’s resistance.

  “What you hit him with, Jermaine, a baseball bat?” asked Joseph, matter-of-factly.

  “No, I never…” He was shaking his head from side to side.

  “Did it make you feel like a big man? Smashing an old guy’s skull in and leaving him to bleed all over the ground like that?”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus!” called his mother, clasping her hands to her face and then turning her eyes to heaven. “After all I told you about your good-for-nothing father, you go and start a gang.” Jermaine was still shaking his head vehemently, but his mother had taken his admission that he was a lookout as proof positive he was mixed up in the whole affair. “How could you do this to your momma?”

  Suddenly, and to Joseph’s astonishment, tears began to flow from Jermaine’s eyes and his voice became distorted by sobs that made his whole body convulse. “I didn’t, I didn’t. Stop it, please. Leave me alone. I didn’t hit Eddie and I didn’t stab that teacher, neither.” The tears rolled down his face. “Why won’t anybody believe me? Stop saying it. Just leave me alone!”

  The strain of the relentless interrogations into the Lopez murder, followed by the probing from Joseph and his mother, must have brought Jermaine to breaking point. The boy seemed to regress into a small child right there in front of them and it took a full minute before his sobbing finally subsided, eventually turning into a pitiful whimper. One thing Joseph was now certain of. This was no gang leader.

  Jermaine’s mother seemed shocked at the sight, and then her face took on a new emotion: guilt at having doubted her son. To hide her shame and confusion
she rounded on Joseph. “You happy now?” she demanded.

  “Just a moment,” he told her, then turned his attention back to the boy’s tear-streaked face. “Okay, Jermaine, I believe you. I really do. So who did it then? Who could do such a cowardly thing to a frail, old man?”

  Jermaine just shook his head.

  “Come on, this is Eddie we’re talking about here,” and the boy seemed to get even more upset. He clammed up and was silent for a while, head down, face screwed up as he tried to stifle the tears. Joseph was just about to give up when Jermaine finally spoke, and when he did the words came out in a rush.

  “It’s not my fault. I didn’t want to go. It was Macy Williams’s fault. If it weren’t for her…”

  “Macy Williams?” asked Joseph incredulously. “What’s she got to do with this?”

  “Rihanna…” he whispered.

  “Who’s Rihanna?” and when he received no reply he looked at Mrs. Letts.

  “My daughter…” she admitted, though she was guarded again now that another family member could be implicated. Joseph recalled the girl at her side during the parents’ meeting.

  “She cut Macy out of the gang,” said Jermaine, “so they was one short. She made me watch out, instead.”

  Joseph nodded. He understood it all now. Jermaine Letts wasn’t the leader of the gang that had beaten up Eddie. It was Rihanna Letts. The gang leader was a girl.