Bruce DeSilva - A Scourge of Vipers

Parisi tended to be tight-lipped with the press, usually taking at least five seconds, and often more, to frame cautious responses to my questions. I’d learned to wait him out.

“Jesus,” he said. “You’re still driving that piece of crap?”

“Stop it,” I said. “You’re eroding Secretariat’s self-esteem.”

“Only women and assholes name their cars.”

“You left out vigilant watchdogs of the fourth estate.”

“Like I said. Assholes.”

“So how’s the Alfano investigation going?” I asked.

Five seconds, and then, “What Alfano investigation?”

“The one about him offering bribes to public officials.”

Another pause. “Bribes? Where’d you hear that?”

“Some of the people who talked to you have been talking to me.”

Five seconds again, and then, “Alfano’s dead.”

“I know that. It was in the paper.”

“So any investigation, and I’m not confirming there was one, would be dead now, too.”

“You’re not curious about who he was working for?”

Ten seconds this time. “Do you know?”

“I’m working on it.”

“If you find out, be sure to let me know,” he said, and started to roll up his window.

“Hold on,” I said.

“What?”

“Besides the five names on Alfano’s list, did he offer bribes to anyone else?”

Five seconds. “What list?”

“The one Oscar Hernandez showed you.”

Ten seconds. “Off the record?”

“Sure.”

“If such a list exists, and I’m not confirming that it does, there could be reason to suspect it is not complete.”

“How incomplete is it?”

Five seconds. “Hard to say.”

“Come on, Captain. Give me something to go on.”

Twelve seconds this time. “I don’t know what I don’t know. Could be a lot of others. Could be just one or two.”

“Meaning there’s at least one more for sure?”

Five seconds. “If I were in your position, that would be my assumption.”

Parisi wasn’t giving me much to go on, but I was betting this meant McCracken’s client, whose name was not on the list, had taken the P.I.’s advice and called the state police.

“Can you lighten up and give me the damned names?”

There was no delay this time.

“Get that broken headlight fixed,” he said, “or next time I’m going to give you a ticket. Oh, and when you see Hernandez, tell him I said he’s got a big fucking mouth.”

With that, he cranked the ignition and peeled out of the lot.

Not bad for Parisi, I thought. He’d tossed me a morsel and suggested there might be a next time.

I was on my way back to Providence when the cell phone played my ringtone for Chuckie-boy. I ignored it. He kept calling. Finally, I pulled over in a KFC parking lot and picked up.

“Mulligan.”

“Where the hell are you?”

“At the doctor. I’ve had a relapse. Looks like I came back to work too soon.”

“Bullshit. Get your butt back here right now.”

“I don’t think so, Chuckie. The doc says I need to go home and lie down. You don’t want me too weak to try out for the Vipers on Saturday, do you?”

“I’m going to need a doctor’s note.”

“No problem,” I said.

Doc Israel was a fan. A few months back, he’d given me a short stack of his stationery for just such eventualities.

The men in mismatched T-shirts and basketball shorts lined up single file along the sideline so Coach Derrick Martin and his two assistants could look us over. By my headcount, there were sixty-two of us, and we were mostly a sorry lot.

There was Ruben Mendoza, a twenty-five-year-old Providence playground legend with what looked like needle tracks on his arms. And Butch Bowditch, a slow-footed center who’d packed on twenty pounds of fat since his graduation from Brown University two years ago. And Chris Sears, an All-Big East shooting guard who’d been cut from the PC squad last December after getting caught stealing laptops from dorm rooms for the third time. And the unfortunately named Freddie Krueger, a former URI power forward who might have been drafted in the second round two years ago if he hadn’t torn his ACL to shreds in a snowboarding accident. And Marvin Benton, a dazzling former PC point guard who’d been ignored in last year’s draft because he was only five foot eight. And twenty-year-old Keenan Jefferson, so dominating at Hope High that he was being compared to Kevin Durant until he dropped out two years ago to marry his pregnant girlfriend and take a job slinging burgers.

Earlier, as I laced my Nike All Stars, I watched Krueger strap a brace on his surgically repaired knee while Sears prowled the overcrowded locker room and talked trash.

“You ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of has-beens and never-weres. I’m gonna burn the lot of ya.” Then he spotted me and snarled, “And what the fuck are you doin’ here, grandpa?”

I grinned, peeled off my white T-shirt, and printed “GRANDPA” on the back with a Sharpie. I still figured the tryout was a sham, but I wished all of them but Sears good luck. Jefferson, the kid who’d tried to do the right thing by his girl, was the one I’d be rooting for the hardest.

As we stood on the sidelines, I stared up at 12,993 empty seats and remembered how, on those rare occasions when I got off the bench for PC, every one of them had been filled.

Coach Martin and his two assistants were strutting down the line like drill sergeants now, giving each of us the once-over. When they reached me, Martin smirked and said, “I hear they’re calling you grandpa.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I kinda like it.”

“You sure you don’t want to go on home, old-timer? Maybe fix yourself some warm milk and take a nap?”

The others laughed. I joined in. Then I broke the line, ambled over to the two carts that held the basketballs, picked one up, squared myself to the basket, and swished a thirty-foot jump shot.

“Beginner’s luck,” Sears growled.

I smiled and kept shooting until I emptied both carts. Sixteen of twenty hit nothing but net.

“Great form,” Martin said. “Any of you other wannabes think you can match that? No? Okay then. Break off into groups of five for suicides. Six times down and back.”

A basketball court is ninety-four feet long. Six times down and back meant a sprint of more than eleven hundred feet. I finished next to last in my group, well ahead of Bowditch, who jogged the last two laps. I was winded and drenched in sweat, but not bending over and gasping for breath like some of the others.

When we were done, the coaches lined us up again, asked Bowditch, Mendoza, and sixteen others to take one step forward, and told them to go home.

We spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon on standard basketball drills: the four-spot fast break shooting drill, the elbow shooting drill, the post feed/spot up drill, and the wing screen. The guys who’d played college ball mostly did okay. The unschooled playground legends struggled.

Shortly after one P.M., they lined us up on the sidelines again, told another twenty-four that they were done, and asked the remaining twenty of us, including Sears, Krueger, Benton, and Jefferson, to come back the following Saturday.

As the exhausted winners and losers trudged to the locker room, I pulled Martin aside.

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because the fix is in. The ownership is desperate for publicity, so you were gonna stick no matter what. Now that I’ve seen what you can do, I might have kept you around anyway. You’re slow, you can’t jump, and you couldn’t guard Danny DeVito if he played in a wheelchair. But your shooting form reminds me of Ray Allen. Think you can teach the rest of these clowns the proper way to stick a jump shot?”