“Yeah, well,” I said, “as soon as Giorgio opens a store in Outlet City, I’ll be wearing designer duds, too, but at half the price. So there.”
Before Denny could reply, the buzzer sounded and the game started again. Matt was a pretty good player. Of course, when mom and dad both went to UCLA on athletic scholarships, it tends to give you a genetic leg up in the sports world. The best kid on the court, though, was clearly number 4 on the other team. He was probably about twelve years old, but he played more like sixteen or seventeen. I assumed he was in sixth grade, and I was speculating whether, given the current state of affairs in professional sports in this country, the coming year would take him to seventh grade or early entry in the NBA draft, when Denny’s phone rang. He brought it up near his face and said, “Wilcox.”
Thirty seconds later, he said, “Be right there,” hung up and looked over at me.
“The Center,” he said. “Links and Gates. Shots fired.”
Chapter 30
The Garfield Community Center, called simply the Center by everyone who uses the place, is actually a large complex a few blocks from Franklin High School. The main building houses a full-size gym, a swimming pool, three racquetball courts and several rooms with collapsible walls that can be reconfigured to accommodate anything from a small committee meeting to a full-blown neighborhood holiday party. Outside there are two basketball courts side by side, a tennis court and one of those childproof playgrounds with soft surface coverings everywhere. There are also a couple of small structures where they keep sports equipment, maintenance vehicles and tools, etc. The whole place was built with a variety of federal and state grants about twenty years ago, the idea being that if you gave people a reason to stay in the city, they wouldn’t move to the suburbs. Depending on your perspective, the Center could be looked upon as a huge success, because the population of the Garfield area had basically been maintained since the Center opened, or a colossal waste of taxpayers’ dollars, since all the other East End communities had suffered substantial losses in population over that same period. The Center’s detractors, almost all of whom lived outside Garfield, claimed that unless the mayor planned to put one of the complexes in every neighborhood in the city, what was the point? The Center was nothing more than an incredibly expensive example of a future that Pittsburgh could never afford. On the other hand, the Center’s supporters, including the local and state legislators who just happened to live in the area, said it showed that there was a way to slow the drain on the city’s population. One thing everyone agreed on, though, was that the Garfield Community Center was one of the few places in the East End that had managed to escape the gang violence that had been so pervasive in the early nineties, making it all the more disconcerting that the facility was home to tonight’s shooting.
Denny and I got to the Center pretty quickly, mainly because he had a flashing light on the dash of what he called his work car, a black Lincoln Navigator that could double as a tank in case Pittsburgh was ever attacked by an army of crazed Cleveland Browns fans. I’d asked Denny once why he drove something that looked like the refined younger brother of one of those monster trucks, and he told me that if he ever got involved in a crash with the bad guys, the Navigator, and by extension Denny, wouldn’t be absorbing most of the energy of the impact. Denny was always big on physics.
Denny parked in the middle of the street about half a block from the Center, and I pulled in right behind him. As we walked past the dozen or so police vehicles that were scattered along Garfield Avenue, Denny held up his gold shield so the cops who didn’t know him personally would let us through without any questions. As we approached the Center’s parking area, I saw Paris Soloman standing next to the open doors of a city paramedic van. He saw Denny and me and motioned us over. When we got there, I saw Asaan Witherspoon stretched out on a gurney inside the van, lying on his stomach. His pants were pulled down past his knees, and one of the medics was sticking a needle in Asaan’s rear end. When Asaan looked up and saw us, he grimaced and said, “So much for détente, huh?”
Denny looked at Paris and said, “Thanks for the call. JB was with me when I got it.” Turning to Asaan, he said, “What happened?”
“I was just telling Detective Soloman about it,” said Asaan. “I been trying to get these kids to calm down a little, get’em back on track as far as peaceful coexistence goes, you know, so I organized a get-together here at the Center. It’s always been neutral territory, so I figured it’d be a good place for me to talk to both sides about a truce, especially at the school.”
The medic finished swabbing something on Asaan’s backside, then looked at Paris and said, “Couple more minutes, Detective, then we gotta roll.”
Paris nodded and then looked back at Asaan, who said, “Okay. I’m just about finished anyway. Things were going all right for a while. I actually had kids from both gangs talking about the Steelers-Cowboys game last week. Then T-Man showed up, got into an argument with some of the Gates over nothing. I told him to cool it, and for a minute I thought things were okay again, but then all hell broke loose. Kids were fightin’ all over the place. It spilled out into the parking lot, and somebody fired a gun, so I ran out here and heard another shot and felt a pain in my ass. End of story. Except for this souvenir I’m carryin’
