Tough Lessons Read online

  Joseph didn’t want to put an end to his friend’s cheery mood but Ardo had clearly not considered the possibility that the keys in the bushes were merely a copy of the set he had left hanging on his nail in the boiler room. That was the obvious conclusion but he saw no point in ruining the janitor’s day. It was more important right now to find out how the keys had come to be in the bushes that night. To discover that, Joseph would have to make one more visit.

  15

  Philip Geller lived in a small, crumbling house in a bad part of town. It wasn’t as rough out here as in the projects but it had to be a comedown for a former staff sergeant in the Marine Corps. Joseph waited at the door for a long while. He sensed someone was home but he knocked three times and received no answer. He was about to give up when the door was finally pulled back by a skinny middle-aged woman who regarded him as if he might be a criminal come to ask her permission to rob the place. “Whatever it is you’re selling, we ain’t buying,” she said firmly in a southern drawl. This had to be Mrs. Geller.

  “I’m not selling anything,” assured Joseph, and before she could say more, a shadow appeared behind her.

  “It’s all right, Lillian,” a deep, male voice said. “It’s one of the parents.”

  “Stopping by the house?” she asked tetchily, before admitting Joseph with no words of welcome, then going about her business.

  “Please excuse my wife, she’s tired.”

  “I’m tired all right,” she said, like she was spoiling for a fight. “Tired of this neighborhood. These days when I open the door I never know who is going to be standing there.”

  “Lillian, please,” pleaded Geller.

  Joseph felt momentarily sorry for the coach as his wife walked away from him and up the stairs announcing firmly. “I’m going to lie down.”

  Joseph was ushered into a small sitting room, passing a solid wooden gun rack along the way. It was locked but there was enough space behind its doors to house assault rifles. Geller was probably one of those survivalists, convinced the world is going to implode any day now and already planning for the moment when it happens. He likely had a cellar filled with tins of baked beans and a homemade water filtration system. Joseph began to wonder if the Soyinka’s was the only home in the South Bronx that didn’t have a gun in it.

  Geller offered Joseph a seat. “Please forgive Lillian. She’s had it tough since we came here. It’s not what she’s used to. Some of the tours of duty I did, we had it pretty good.” Then he added proudly, “Marine Corps looks after its own. I’ll just be a moment,” and with that he left Joseph alone.

  The room was sparsely furnished. One of the few personal touches were the photographs of Geller’s military career that adorned a small table in one corner. Geller saluting in full dress uniform, complete with the immaculate white-peaked cap and gloves of the United States Marine Corps, Geller on leave in some hot spot with Lillian, him in uniform and her in a cocktail dress, hanging off his arm like the dutiful wife, and finally Geller in civilian attire with his arms round a couple of army buddies in a bar—brothers in arms. Hung above the fireplace, dominating the room, was a large framed print of the famous Joe Rosenthal photograph of five Marine Corps men raising the Stars and Stripes on Mount Suribachi, high above the captured island of Iwo Jima. Joseph had seen a documentary on the History Channel about that decisive battle in World War Two, and he knew what that victory had cost. The route to that summit was strewn with the bodies of almost seven thousand US Marines, which must have made its memory a particularly sacred and poignant one for men like Geller and his former comrades. The whole room was a shrine to the life this high school football coach once knew. Joseph got the impression he missed it all, badly.

  When Geller returned he had two bottles of beer with him, their tops already removed. “Thought we’d have a cold one.” He thrust out a muscular arm toward Joseph and handed him one of the bottles, and then he said, “Unless you…er…don’t.”

  “No, it’s fine,” said Joseph. “I have a beer from time to time.”

  Geller looked relieved that he hadn’t broken some religious or ethnic taboo and he released the bottle into Joseph’s care and then he sat down in the opposite armchair and took an enormous swig of his own beer. “I guess you come to see me because of Yomi,” he said confidently as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Mad at me, right?” There was a definite challenge in the tone, like he was proud to be the kind of guy who never shirked a confrontation.

  “Mad at you?” asked Joseph, genuinely perplexed. “Why would I be mad?”

  “On account of how I switched him from quarterback to running back.”

  Joseph was dimly aware of the change in Yomi’s football position but, in truth, it had hardly registered with him. The nuances of American football still eluded him, for he had played what the Americans scathingly referred to as soccer when he was a boy. For his part, Joseph couldn’t understand how a game that involved throwing a ball around and crashing into each other in padding could ever be described as football. In any case, his son had not exactly been devastated. If anything, Yomi seemed glad to be out of the spotlight. Joseph had certainly never dreamed of interfering with the coach’s grand vision for the team.

  “Quarterback got to be a leader,” continued Geller, “and to tell you the truth I don’t see that in your son right now. You’ll forgive me if I’m blunt. It’s just my way. Always has been.”

  It was a statement, not a question, and Geller seemed inordinately proud of his own frankness. Joseph wasn’t sure whether he would forgive Geller or not. He hadn’t come here for a discussion about his son’s shortcomings and he wasn’t sure how much of a leader the boy was supposed to be at twelve.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Boy’s a follower right now, takes training too lightly to be a winner. I want to show Yomi he’s got to earn his place in the team, has to fight for it, claw it back, got to want it bad, real bad. When he can show me that and then maybe we’ll have ourselves a quarterback.” Geller’s eyes were shining like an evangelist now. He obviously thought he had just dangled the most tantalizing carrot imaginable in front of Yomi’s father.

  To Joseph, this sounded like the kind of rhetoric he might expect to hear from a coach in the upper reaches of the NFL. Geller might think it was halftime in the Super Bowl with everything to play for but Joseph was far from convinced. Instill that mentality into a young boy at his age and you were setting him up to feel like a failure when he was eventually told, as he inevitably would be, that he wasn’t as good as the boy next to him. It might not happen for a few years, but it was bound to hit him all the harder when it did.

  “To tell you the truth, Coach Geller,” said Joseph, “I just want my boy to enjoy playing a little sport, that’s all.”

  “Nothing more than that?” asked Geller, not even trying to fake his disappointment. “Football can give you a whole lot more than you think. Discipline, self-sacrifice, teamwork…”

  “What about fun?”

  “Excuse me?” asked Geller, as if he was unfamiliar with the word.

  “Fun. Enjoyment. Sportsmanship,” he added, before concluding with, “Learning to lose well.”

  “Learning to lose?” Geller reacted as if Joseph had just added sodomy to the end of his list. “Show me a good loser and I will show you a loser.”

  “But not everybody can win, Coach Geller, so where does that leave us? With a nation of angry, frustrated young men, all seething with resentment because they lost a football game? If they can’t cope with that, then how are they supposed to manage if they lose their job, their girlfriend, or don’t finish top of the class every time they sit a test? How can they ever learn to succeed if they don’t know how to fail? What happens to all the losers? Where do they go?”

  “You’re gonna think I’m being harsh,” said Geller confidently, “but, years from now, they are the guys who’ll be pumping your gas and flipping your burgers.” />
  The arrogance of the man was breathtaking. Joseph doubted if Geller considered driving a cab any nobler a profession than pumping gas. Yet here he was sitting in his crumbling house in a bad part of town, with a job in a low-ranked junior high school, acting like he was part of some alpha male, upper echelon, charged with wheedling the weak and underachieving kids out of society. Men like Geller were dangerous, scarring kids, burdening them with unrealistic expectations, and then tossing them aside as soon as they failed to live up to some mythical standard most grown adults would struggle to attain. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious.

  “So if you’re not mad at me for switching Yomi, then why exactly…” He didn’t need to finish the sentence, the perplexed frown was enough.

  “Am I here? I wanted to talk to you about Hernando Lopez.”

  “Really?” asked the coach and there was a long pause while he waited for Joseph to explain himself. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I understand why you and I should be talking about that. Have I missed something here?”

  “It’s just like Principal Decker says, we all owe Mr. Lopez. We owe him to think long and hard about what happened and to try and help the police investigation in any way we can. So I’ve been doing some of that long, hard thinking and I thought I’d better speak to you first before I talk to the police.”

  “The police?” It wasn’t Joseph’s imagination. The coach’s mouth was definitely dry. “Why should this involve me?”

  Joseph shrugged like it was no big deal. “A couple of reasons. I keep hearing how you and he didn’t get along.” Joseph was going out on a limb. It was purely a hunch on his part that the ex-Marine and the liberal schoolteacher might not exactly share the same values. Conflict would have been likely and he was trying to draw Geller out.

  “I had no beef with Lopez.” He spoke defensively but then softened. “Okay, we didn’t always see eye to eye but it don’t mean I’d want to kill him. It’s just he was a water walker, if you know what I mean.”

  “I don’t think I do.”

  “One of those guys who’s always looking to give a bad apple a second chance, even when the rotten kid don’t deserve it. When he took that knife off Jermaine, he should have marched that boy straight down to the principal and he would have been gone, out of there, no appeal. Instead, he lets him off with a warning and…well, we all know what happened next.”

  “You’re saying Jermaine Letts murdered Mr. Lopez,” countered Joseph. “But no one believes that anymore, not even the cops. They let him go.”

  “Excuse me? They had to let him go because there was insufficient evidence. Don’t mean the little punk didn’t do it and it don’t mean the cops are happy about it neither. Let me tell you something about the world you and I live in, the real world. See that?” Geller pointed through the screen door at the rear of his house that overlooked the yard. An old Mercury was parked out back. “I can’t even keep it in the street no more, not if I want it to be there the next day.” He shook his head ruefully. “Too many punk kids round here got too much time on their hands and no role models to look up to.”

  “I guess the army would sort a lot of them out, would you say?”

  “No,” said Geller to Joseph’s surprise. “I wouldn’t say. Army’s got to be professional. A country’s armed forces got to be filled with people who want to be there. Good men, prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice so we can all sleep safe in our beds at night, not some juvenile offender sent there by a court, who starts bleating about how unfair it is when the bullets start flying. You think I want someone like that as my buddy, covering my lily-white ass when the shit hits the fan in Iraq or Afghanistan. If some rag-head gets a bead on me, I want someone I can trust to take him down? No, sir. Army don’t want ’em.”

  “An interesting point, so what should we do with these young punks?”

  “Put ’em to work. Make ’em clean the streets, repair the damage they caused, fix up their own shitty neighborhoods. Like a chain gang only without the chain. I ain’t an unreasonable man. But make it clear, say, ‘Son, it’s either this or jail, so you got to get with the program.’ I guess you think I’m old-fashioned. Well, maybe I am. I believe in God, unit, Corps, and country. I guess that makes me unfashionable these days.”

  They had drifted from the topic of Hernando Lopez and it had been Geller who had carefully steered the conversation away from him. He was definitely hiding something. Joseph was sure of it. The coach had not seemed unduly aggrieved when Joseph had suggested that he and Lopez had been at loggerheads, even when he had made the link between that perceived conflict and a possible motive, however tenuous.

  Joseph stayed silent for a while and waited for Geller to speak.

  Eventually the coach said, “So run it by me again, will you? You came down here because you heard Lopez and I banged heads from time to time and now you’re going to tell the police you think I murdered him, that it?” He tried a forced laugh, as if the whole thing was absurd.

  “That wasn’t the only reason.”

  “Well, let’s see what else you got, shall we. Is it this?” He pointed to the print of Iwo Jima. “Or this?” He waved a hand at the framed photos of army life. “The guy was in the Marines. That’s just got to make him a suspect. He’s a trained killer after all.” He sneered at Joseph. “That’s like saying every man who steps in a boxing ring is likely to get in a fight outside a bar, but it don’t happen and you know why? Discipline.” He shook his head. “You know what really pisses me off?”

  “No, but I’ve a feeling you’re about to tell me.”

  “Damn right, I am. People like you who think the Marine Corps is the greatest thing on God’s green earth when we are out there getting our asses shot off in some far-off hellhole, defending our country and your freedom. Yet the minute we’re out of uniform, looking to make an honest living, you start acting like we’re all wild animals who’ve been let loose in your neighborhood.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Oh?” He was trying hard not to look concerned. “What then?”

  “The keys.” Joseph let the words hang in the air between them.

  There was a long pause. Finally, the coach asked, “What keys?” But his eyes told a different story.

  “The keys for the school. You had a spare set cut down at De Luca’s parts yard.”

  The coach swallowed hard. He looked like he had just been punched in the guts. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. Eventually he managed to mutter the single word “unbelievable,” but Joseph wasn’t going to let him off that lightly.

  “I’m pretty sure those were the keys they found in the bushes and I reckon right now you’re about as worried as can be that they’re gonna find some usable prints on them, maybe even some DNA. If they can, then you know you’re going to have some explaining to do.”

  Once again, Coach Geller took a long time to answer. For a moment, Joseph thought he was going to demand his lawyer.

  “What’s the matter, Coach?” asked Joseph. “You want to take the Fifth Amendment?” The question was intended to rile Geller and it worked.

  “So I got some keys cut, so what?”

  “You got some keys cut illegally. My guess is you lifted them while Ardo Piloyan was washing windows. You’d seen him do that often enough and you knew you’d have, what, half an hour, maybe even an hour. Is that why you asked Hernando Lopez to take football practice for you? It was, wasn’t it? I don’t know what you told him but it certainly wasn’t the truth. So you went to the nearest place that’d do it without a card. I don’t know how you knew that De Luca was running that kind of scam, maybe an old army buddy told you. Whatever, it doesn’t matter. You then paid over the odds to get your own set of keys cut and you were back in time for Ardo to think they’d never even left the boiler room. The only question is, why you would go to so much trouble, risk losing your job, everything you got, just so you can let yourself in and out of the
building when everyone else has gone home? I mean, it’s not as if the football coach has to stay late and mark books, now is it? So why would you do that, Coach Geller?”

  “I don’t have to tell you nothing.”

  “No, you don’t. You can tell it all to the police, instead. I just wanted to see if you had a good explanation before I approached them, but I can see that you don’t.” Joseph climbed to his feet and Geller bounced up after him, blocking his path to the door.

  “Wait,” he said forcefully and Joseph braced himself for the attack that would surely follow. Was Geller really going to try and take him down in his living room while that highly strung wife was upstairs snoozing on their bed? “I can’t tell you why I needed the keys but you’ve got to believe me when I say I had nothing to do with Lopez dying. Jesus, the guy was okay. We didn’t agree on everything. I thought he was too soft, sure I did, but I could see he had good intentions. Why in hell would I want him dead?”

  “That’s the bit I haven’t figured out yet,” Joseph conceded. Then he shrugged. “Maybe the police can.”

  “No, wait a minute.” Geller grabbed Joseph’s arm, gripping it tightly to try and prevent him from leaving. “There’s no need—”

  “Let go of my arm,” said Joseph.

  “Oh fuck,” said Geller, looking over Joseph’s shoulder and out the front window. “You called ’em.”

  “No,” said Joseph, turning in time to see five detectives climbing out of two unmarked cars that were now blocking Geller’s driveway. “I didn’t,” but it was unmistakeably McCavity who was leading the way up Geller’s path, her two favorite burly officers in tow right behind her.

  Geller sat back down in his chair and stayed there, ignoring the incessant ringing of the doorbell. Joseph didn’t want to be the one to open the door to the police so he didn’t move, either. Eventually, he heard the bad-tempered thump-thump of Mrs. Geller’s feet as she came down the stairs muttering to herself about how she had to do everything around here and never got a moment to herself. She didn’t realize it just then but her day was about to get a whole lot worse.