Resisting an impulse to smack him, I started collecting balls from around the floor. I let him hang on to the one he was playing with, but I put the rest in the equipment room. If I didn’t lock them up at once they evaporated, as I’d learned to my cost: we’d lost two when friends and family were milling around the gym after my first practice. I’d scrounged four new ones from friends who belong to tony downtown gyms. Now I keep all ten balls in a padlocked bin, although I’ve had to share keys with the boys’ coach and the PE teachers.

While the girls finished changing, I sat at a tiny table in the equipment room to fill out attendance forms and progress reports for the benefit of the mythical permanent coach. After a moment, a shadow in the doorway made me look up. Josie Dorrado, April’s particular friend on the team, was hovering there, twisting her long braid around her fingers, shifting from one skinny leg to the other. A quiet, hardworking kid, she was another of my strong players. I smiled, hoping she wasn’t going to bring up a time-consuming problem: I couldn’t be late to my meeting with the By-Smart manager.

“Coach, uh, people say, uh, is it true you’re with the police?”

“I’m a detective, Josie, but I’m private. I work for myself, not the city. Do you need the police for some reason?” I seemed to have a version of this conversation with someone at every practice, even though I’d told the team when I started coaching what I did for a living.

She shook her head, eyes widening a bit in alarm at the idea that she herself might need a cop. “Ma, my ma, she told me to ask you.”

I pictured an abusive husband, restraining orders, a long evening in violence court, and tried not to sigh out loud. “What kind of problem is she having?”

“It’s something about her job. Only, her boss, he don’t want her talking to no one.”

“What—is he harassing her in some way?”

“Can’t you just go see her for a minute? Ma can explain it, I don’t really know what’s going on, only she told me to ask you, because she heard someone at the laundry say how you grew up down here and now you’re a cop.”

Romeo appeared behind Josie, twirling the ball on his fingertip à la the Harlem Globetrotters. “What does your ma need a cop for, Josie?” he asked.

Josie shook her head. “She don’t, Mr. Czernin, she just wants Coach to talk to her about some kind of problem she’s got with Mr. Zamar.”

“What kind of problem she have with Zamar that she wants a dick on his tail? Or is it the other way around?” He laughed heartily.