A FATHERLESS DAY

DETROIT —  They had talked by phone, the son in Diamond Bar visiting friends on a still-young evening, his father with acquaintances at midnight at a Northwest night club.

“Just to see how he was doing,” Chris Claiborne says of the conversation.

Less than two hours later, at 1:50 a.m. on April 21, Emmitt Claiborne was lying in a concrete alley between a row of parked cars behind Will’s Place and a small brick house with a Neighborhood Watch sign in front, shot to death at 51.

“That’s the last time I spoke with him,” Chris Claiborne recalls quietly after a day’s work with the Detroit Lions, who drafted him a year ago after his junior season at USC and employ him as an outside linebacker.

At the end of the team workout, Claiborne runs alone, trying to shed four pounds to get to 255. He can’t shed the memories.

Claiborne has been alone a lot since April 21.

“Going home to an empty apartment is hard sometimes,” he says. “The thing was that I could have easily been with him that night, because he and I did a lot of stuff together. We went out together. Not only was he my father, he was a good friend.”

Police say it was a robbery gone wrong, that Emmitt Claiborne had left the night club to escort a woman to her car in a neighborhood that had experienced a spate of robberies lately.

After walking away, Emmitt was accosted by a man and an argument ensued. Words were replaced with gunfire heard inside the club.

“Emmitt was a friend of mine,” says a man who calls himself only Will and refuses to acknowledge a last name. “Emmitt was the kind of guy you could talk politics with, you could talk sports with, anything.”

Will heard the shots and went into the alley with others, too late to see the car speed away with the shooter and driver. He is angry about the shooting that cost him a friend, angrier for the unwanted attention that has cost him business.

“People don’t want to come to some place where people get shot,” Will says. “This is nothing that had anything to do with my place. He had been gone from my place for a long time before it happened.

“It was a tragedy, but I don’t want to keep harping on it.”

He wants people to come back to his bar, where karaoke is the Tuesday night feature, where valet parking is offered, where you can get anything to drink but where the favored libations are sweet, rum concoctions.

Where he takes on all comers in electronic darts in the afternoon.

Chris Claiborne still hasn’t been there since the shooting. The memories are too strong.

He’s only 21, with fame and most of a $4-million signing bonus invested, but without a father that he was only learning to know.

The phone call that night was nothing unusual. When Chris wasn’t checking on Emmitt Claiborne, Emmitt was checking on Chris, his son and roommate in a three-bedroom apartment in Auburn Hills, near the Pontiac Silverdome.

Emmitt had missed most of Chris’ career at USC and at Riverside North High. He was away with the Marines and living with Joslyn, Chris’ stepmother, in Las Vegas. He had last lived with his son when Chris was 2, and he had given 30 years to the Corps, the last as a Master Gunnery Sergeant.

It was Chris’ turn, he told Joslyn, who agreed. Away from home for the first time, Chris needed the guidance and steadying influence of a father.

Emmitt needed to make up for lost time.

“The fact that he came to live with me was special,” Claiborne says. “The fact that I got to live with him for a year and understand his ways is important. He was helping me grow as a man.”

Emmitt paid his son’s bills and cooked his meals, with teriyaki chicken and fish as specialties. He taught Chris to handle the Internet, to send and answer e-mail.

Stories of fathers living through and on their famous-athlete sons are legion and make all such relationships suspect, at least on the surface. That’s particularly true in cases of absentee fathers who are suddenly present when the money is.

This one, says Claiborne, is different.

“We were really close,” he says. “He had been at a distance because of the military, but he was always a great father and did stuff for us and made sure we had certain things. I definitely have to give a lot of respect for who I am and how I feel to my mother because she was there living in the house with us. She actually had to make the decisions.”

But Emmitt, though off in the service, then in another marriage, was around too.

“He would come to a game or two every year [at USC] and he would stay in my apartment. He would say, ‘I don’t want to stay in a hotel, I want to stay with you. Stay with my boy and take care of him.’

“It was like that here. Guys from the team would come over to my house. He would invite them. And we would go to the city with him.”

What could have been an awkward family situation was made less so by Claiborne’s parents.

“A reporter was talking with me the other day and said, ‘I’m sorry about your dad. He really helped me,’ ” Claiborne says. “I guess he’s going through a divorce and my dad talked with his wife and told her about how he and my mom were divorced but kept things together for their kids. Sometimes you have to put your differences aside and work things out. I’ve also learned that from them.”

Claiborne learned of the killing after a phone call summoned him to Riverside, where Millie Perkins told him about her ex-husband and still-friend. The families are close enough to count on Chris for the wherewithal to gather for a funeral, and for him to be counted on to grow up in a hurry. It’s hard enough for a son to bury a father. When the father is a friend, it’s harder still.

“I came back here after stopping in Vegas to make sure my step-mom was OK,” Claiborne says. “We were in Vegas for a day with her. And my mom, my step-mom, my brother and I were all together. I tried to make sure everyone was fine.

“A lot of things pop up that you don’t even think about when death comes. Making sure people are financial stable. Making sure people are mentally stable.”

Lion Coach Bobby Ross excused him from mini-camp, only three days after the shooting, though linebacker coach Gary Moeller wanted him there.

“It’s a tough situation,” Moeller says. “I think he’ll get his focus back. But this has to become a thing of the past, and he has to focus on playing well for his dad in the future.”

After a visit to family in Louisiana, Claiborne returned to the empty suburban apartment in Auburn Hills. Two days later, he was back in Southern California.

“I had to leave,” he says. “I couldn’t stay here. I was scared. They said it was a robbery, but they didn’t take anything. Didn’t take the truck, didn’t take anything. I didn’t know. What was going through my head was I was scared.”

He also was angry at Detroit, which like many big cities isn’t always safe. There are 450 to 500 homicides in Detroit every year, police say. Only about 45% of the cases are closed by the woefully undermanned 40-investigator homicide squads.

“I’m all right now,” Claiborne says. “But they didn’t catch the guy, so I didn’t feel safe. You don’t know what’s out there. When there are so many questions in your head, you tend to exaggerate. But now I’m OK, ready to live the rest of my life. I don’t look at Detroit as being a bad place. I kind of did at first, because it took something away that meant a lot to me.”

Detroit is like any other city. Cities don’t kill people, people kill people.

“I figure I’ve met a lot of good people in Detroit,” Claiborne says. “Everybody can’t be bad. Where my dad hung out I know there are good people.”

Across the street from Will’s Place, at Little Caesar’s Pizza, there’s a picture of Emmitt Claiborne in the window, with an offer of “a $10,000 award for the “Best” information leading to the ‘Arrest and Conviction’ of EMMETT CLAIBORNE’s assailant.”

Chris Claiborne put up the money.

Patrons at Will’s say they believe something will happen soon, and police have suspects.

“We feel confident that we will have an arrest in this case,” police Lt. John Morell says.

Claiborne has told them not to bother him until they do. He wants the closure he figures will come with apprehension of the killer, but he has to work now, with a season ahead.

“Some days at work are better than others,” he says.

He has sold the truck his father was driving that night, and moved to a smaller apartment because the other was too big, too full of pictures and mementos of one year with his father.

“The hardest thing for me right now is getting adjusted to doing everything for myself,” he says. “I’m learning to cook, but it was so much easier having him cook, clean the kitchen, do everything. He was on top of everything. I went from being independent in college, to dependent on my dad, to being independent again.

“In college, I did everything. Then I came here and he did everything. He said, ‘I just want you to concentrate on football.’ Then he dies, and boom, you’ve got to be a man again. That’s just the way it is. A lot of people can’t handle it, but that’s the way it is. You live with it. You work with it.”

There is help available, but no one can know.

“I’m just working with God about it, trying to ask him questions,” Claiborne says quietly. “People are all trying to give me opinions, their honest opinions, to try to keep your spirits up. But you have to just enjoy life today.

“A lot of people are waiting for me to break down. They want to question my way of dealing with things, but that’s me. July and August come around, and I will keep working. I don’t want to be a good football player. I want to be a great football player. That’s my goal. That’s how I deal with everything, just work. Don’t get burned out. Anybody can tell you what you should do, but only you know.”

Playing a season in Emmitt’s memory, of dedicating play to his father are cliches that coaches call upon in attempts to inspire. In this case, they might even backfire.

“Everybody says you’ve got to live for him, but it’s kind of hard because I really didn’t get a chance to mourn him,” Claiborne says. “I had to take care of everything, make sure stuff got done. It’s hard to come back here because he lived with me my whole rookie year. Not having him in the house is hard.”

Not having him in his life is harder. Claiborne admits that he was slightly overweight last season, one in which he had 97 tackles, fourth on the Lions. He blames both himself and the fact that he is playing outside linebacker after playing middle linebacker since high school.

He has adjusted to the position. Adjusting to the rest of his life is harder.

“It happened,” he says. “The shocking thing is that you never really look at it until it gets close to home. You hear about it. You grew up in it, people getting killed. But it’s totally different when the violence hits close to home.”

Especially when the people making that home are just getting started at being best friends.