“The school gives him the opportunity to get a free college education if he plays football and keeps his nose clean. If he doesn’t keep his nose clean, I can’t help him. You go to bars, you’re gonna get in trouble. I’m no different than Julian. I have the opportunity to stay employed if I coach football, keep my nose clean, and win. If I don’t, I’m out. People get fired from jobs every day for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all. That’s life.
“I’d like to help Julian. The school would like to help him, too. But we can’t. The NCAA is all over this and so is the press. Our hands are tied. I think Julian is a good kid and I’m glad he’s got you.”
That was a sobering assessment, Jack thought as he left Coach Maddox’s office and headed for The Swamp.
Chapter Seventeen
Jack found a table in the back corner of The Swamp and waited for his friend Ron to make his way over. It was a little after five and Ron was shaking hands and slapping backs as he worked the room. As owner of the legendary restaurant and bar, Ron was one of the best-known people in town after Coach Maddox and the basketball coach, whose name Jack couldn’t remember.
Ron made a point of looking at his watch as he approached Jack.
“You’ve been here for over an hour and you haven’t gotten that kid off yet,” he said as he gave his good friend a hug. “You’re slipping, man. You’re not at the top of your game anymore. I told you when you stopped doing it for money you were going to fall apart.”
Jack laughed. Ron was always in character as the slick-talking New Yorker who didn’t know much except a few common-sense rules such as how to remove the twenties from the cash register every thirty minutes.
“Keep it there any longer, employees get sticky fingers,” he’d told Jack on more than one occasion. “It’s an occupational disease and prevention is the only treatment. If I wasn’t here every day watching them like a hawk, there’d be nothing but nickels and dimes in the register.”
Nothing could have been further from the truth. Ron was an astute businessman who put a great deal of faith and trust in his employees and ran a first-class operation with good food as well as drinks, although he would deny those facts until the cows came home.
“I run a gin mill,” was his favorite line.
Jack and Ron had been friends since high school back in New York City. They were both poor kids, sons of immigrants. Jack’s people were Irish and Ron’s were Italian, a distinction that didn’t resonate with either of them. After college, Jack went on to law school. Ron started a business and then another one and another one until he learned the right way to do things.
“I’m an overnight success,” he would tell people. “It was just a long night.”
“So did you meet with the kid?” Ron asked after he sat down.
“Yeah. I met with Coach Maddox too.”
“And what did the great man have to say? No wait, let me guess. ‘My hands are tied’ or some shit like that.”
Jack laughed again. Ron brought out the best in him. “That’s exactly what he said.”
“It figures. They bring these kids up here, make celebrities out of them, expose them to every temptation known to man, and expect them to handle it like they’ve been doing it all their lives. I’m a big believer in personal responsibility, but this is too much.”
“That’s a problem I can’t solve. I need to find out if Julian is innocent or guilty. If he’s guilty, then he deserves to be punished. My sense after talking to him is that he’s innocent.”
“How can I help, Jack?”
“I thought you might know a little bit about the criminal investigation—who I can talk to and such.”
“The person running the investigation is a detective named Danni Jansen. She’s an old friend of mine. I’ve known her since she came on the force twenty years ago. Good person. She used to be one of our best homicide detectives but now she’s on her way out. I think she’s got less than a year to go before she retires so they’ve got her doing all kinds of stuff.”
“I need to talk to her.”
“I’ll call her right now and ask her to come by. She lives five minutes away.”