traction on the highly polished wood floor.
‘What a klutz,’ Lou said. ‘I’m sorry!’ He bent down to retrieve the
papers, pens, microscope slides, and other paraphernalia and bumped into
Laurie in the process.
‘Maybe it’s best you just sit down,’ Laurie suggested with a laugh.
‘No, I insist,’ Lou said.
After they’d gotten most of the contents back into the briefcase, Lou
picked up the videotape. ‘What’s this, your favorite X-rated feature?’
‘Hardly,’ Laurie commented.
Lou turned it over to read the label. ‘The Franconi shooting?’ he
questioned. ‘CNN sent you this out-of-the-blue?’
Laurie straightened up. ‘No, I requested it. I was going to use the tape
to corroborate the findings when I did the autopsy. I thought it could
make an interesting paper to show how reliable forensics can be.’
‘Mind if I look at it?’ Lou asked.
‘Of course not,’ Laurie said. ‘Didn’t you see it on TV?’
‘Along with everyone else,’ Lou said. ‘But it would still be interesting
to see the tape.’
‘I’m surprised you don’t have a copy at police headquarters,’ Laurie
said.
‘Hey, maybe we do,’ Lou said. ‘I just haven’t seen it.’
‘Man, this ain’t your night,’ Warren teased Jack. ‘You must be getting
too old.’
Jack had decided when he’d gotten to the playground late and had had to
wait to get into the game, that he was going to win no matter whom he
was teamed up with. But it didn’t happen. In fact, Jack lost every game
he played in because Warren and Spit had gotten on the same team and
neither could miss. Their team had won every game including the last,
which had just been capped off with a sweet ‘give and go’ that gave Spit
an easy final lay-up.
Jack walked over to the sidelines on rubbery legs. He’d played his heart
out and was perspiring profusely. He pulled a towel from where he’d
jammed it into the chain-link fence and wiped his face. He could feel
his heart pounding in his chest.
‘Come on, man!’ Warren teased from the edge of the court, where he was
dribbling a basketball back and forth between his legs. ‘One more run.
We’ll let you win this time.’
‘Yeah, sure!’ Jack called back. ‘You never let nobody win nothing.’ Jack
made it a point to adapt his syntax for the environment. ‘I’m out’a
here.’
Warren sauntered over and hooked one of his ringers through the fence
and leaned against it. ‘What’s up with your shortie?’ he asked.
‘Natalie’s been driving me up the wall asking questions about her since
we haven’t seen nothing of you guys, you know what I’m saying?’
Jack looked at Warren’s sculpted face. To add insult to injury, as far
as Jack was concerned, Warren wasn’t even perspiring, nor was he
breathing particularly heavily. And to make matters worse, he’d been
playing before Jack had arrived. The only evidence of exertion was a
tiny triangle of sweat down the front of his cut-off sweatshirt.
‘Reassure Natalie that Laurie’s fine,’ Jack said. ‘She and I were just
taking a little vacation from each other. It was mostly my fault. I just
wanted to cool things down a bit.’
‘I hear you,’ Warren said.
‘I was with her last night,’ Jack added. ‘And things are looking up. She
was asking me about you and Natalie, so you weren’t alone.’
Warren nodded. ‘You sure you’re finished or do you want to run one
more?’
‘I’m finished,’ Jack said.
‘Take care, man,’ Warren said as he pushed off the fence. Then he yelled
out to the others: ‘Let’s run, you bad asses.’
Jack shook his head in dismay as he watched Warren amble away. He was
envious of the man’s stamina. Warren truly wasn’t tired.
Jack pulled on his sweatshirt and started for home. He’d not won a
single game, and although during the play the inability to win had
seemed overwhelmingly frustrating, now it didn’t matter. The exercise
had cleared his mind, and for the hour and a half he’d played, he hadn’t
thought about work.
But Jack wasn’t even all the way across 106th Street when the
tantalizing mystery of his floater began troubling him again. As he