“Nice job, son. I knew you could do this,” I said when we were safely stopped in Fordham Prep’s parking lot thirty white-knuckling minutes later. “See you at dinner, kiddo.”
“Wait, Dad. Actually, Coach Downey wanted to talk to you about something. He was going to send you an e-mail.”
Coach Keith Downey, Fordham Prep’s athletic director, was also an old friend. I checked my phone and saw that he wanted to know if I could pop into his office one morning this week.
“He mention what it was about?” I asked Brian.
Brian shrugged as he shouldered his bag.
No time like the present, I thought, getting out and following Brian into the school bu
ilding. It sounded pretty suspicious.
It turned out it was pretty suspicious. I found Coach Downey in the library, making copies.
“Mike, hey, thanks for stopping by,” the short and amazingly stocky Irish American said, smiling widely.
Coach Downey and I had gone to St. Barnabas grammar school in Woodlawn, where we grew up. He was a couple of years younger than I was, but I’d worked with his older brother busing tables at Villagio’s, the only Italian restaurant in the predominantly Irish neighborhood.
“Hey, Keith. What’s up?”
He put down the stack of papers in his big hands and looked me in the eye.
“No bullshit, Mike. I got a favor to ask you. If you can do it, great. If you can’t, that’s fine, too. It’s about Marvin Peters. You know how he carried the football team last year?”
I nodded. “Talented kid.”
“Three-letter athlete,” Coach Downey continued. “One of the best this school has ever seen. What you might not know is that he lives in a shit project in Morrisania.”
My job had made me familiar with that section of the Bronx for all the wrong reasons. It was a crime-ridden area dominated by drugs and prostitution.
“His aunt Althea was keeping him on the straight and narrow, but as Brian probably told you, Marvin’s aunt died two weeks ago. So another relative is scheduled to come up from the Carolinas to live with him, but it’s going to take a couple of weeks. He’s looking at foster care until then unless we get him set up somewhere.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “You want to know if there’s any room at the old detective who lives in a shoe’s place?”
“Hey, sorry for asking, Mike. I know things are pretty tight at the Bennett villa. I’m actually asking everybody I can think of. I don’t want to let this kid fall through the cracks, you know?”
“Two weeks?” I said as I took out my phone.
“Three, tops,” Coach Downey said, putting his hands together in prayer.
“Hey, Mary Catherine,” I said, and explained the situation to her. “Thanks,” I said a minute later, and hung up.
“Well?” said Coach Downey.
“Tell him to come home with Brian today. Hope this kid likes togetherness, not to mention leftovers. Turns out there’s one last free bunk in the old shoe after all.”
Chapter 18
Two hours later, I was at my morning’s second academic meeting.
Unfortunately, this one wasn’t so benign.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come back later, Detective?” an annoyed thirtysomething personal assistant asked me from the other side of the stately high-ceilinged wood-paneled office I was sitting in.
“I’m absolutely positive,” I said, crossing my feet as I flipped through a Columbia University directory for the third time. “It’s okay. Don’t worry about me. I have all the time in the world.”
I was at Columbia, trying to track down everything I could about the decedent, professor–drug dealer Rafael Arruda. I couldn’t stop thinking about the professional way he had been hit. And that it might have something directly to do with the president’s shooter on the MetLife Building.