Murder at the Foul Line

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  “I just want to know what happened last night.”

  “Last night I lost seventy-eight thousand dollars.”

  “Sounds like a bad night.”

  “Average. My goal is to win more than I lose, but there are those other nights.”

  “We all have them.”

  “My stroke of good fortune was that Damon had no bets down, so of the pitifully small pile of money I did win, none of it was his. Seeing the kind of night Damon had, that would have been a bad night.”

  “Damon Rome was a gambler?”

  Lee grinned. “Shocking, right?” He stuck out his hand. “Randall Lee, oddsmaker.”

  “You were his bookie?” I said as we shook.

  “You,” Lee said, “are right on top of things. I like to see that.”

  “Why would it have been a bad night if you’d won Damon’s money?”

  Lee frowned. “Could it be I was wrong about you? Think, sonny. Damon’s gone. The missus feels very little sense of obligation about Damon’s debts, and I’d hardly be one to lean on her in her tragic circumstances.”

  “Sensitive of you.”

  “To my own good name, my boy. Word would get around. It wouldn’t do. Nonetheless, I’m already in the unenviable position of writing off twelve thousand dollars in Damon’s paper. Damon, you see, had very little sense of obligation either.”

  “He died owing you money?”

  “If I stretch my imagination I can think of it as a marketing expense. Sadly, I don’t have the imagination to handle much more than twelve thousand.”

  “Twelve thousand dollars sounds like a lot of marketing expense to me.”

  “It most certainly is. I’m not happy about it. But I suppose your next question would be, did I shoot Damon because I was sick and tired of his deadbeat ways? Did I do him dirty because he wouldn’t pay up?”

  “I’m not sure I would have asked that. But go ahead and answer it.”

  “Let me tell you something about my business, sonny.” He leaned close, as though I was about to hear a trade secret. “Dead men don’t pay.”

  Lifting his eyebrows to indicate our new brotherhood of esoteric knowledge, Randall Lee bit into another petit four.

  I said, “But if Damon’s debt was no good anyway, I could see writing him off, too. That way other people would have gotten the message.”

  Randall Lee wagged his finger. “That’s the old way. In my business we have new paradigms now. Like I mentioned, Damon’s debt was a marketing expense.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Another secret you might want to know is, people are sheep,” Randall Lee told me. “Randall Lee partied with Damon Rome, We ate and drank and fondled the girls. People saw us and said, ‘Who’s that?’ and when they found out, they said, ‘I want to lay off money with the guy Damon Rome lays off money with.’ ”

  “Were you the only one?”

  “Only bookie Damon had? Odds are, I am.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Damon bet dumb and lost. Then he didn’t pay up. I made it back in exposure: I took in more in sucker bets from his groupies than Damon owed me. Who else was hanging around? Who else was getting a public relations benefit—or anything else—from Damon, to make it worth putting up with his cavalier attitude towards his responsibilities?”

  “Who was?”

  “Well, now,” Randall Lee said, “because you’re a hardworking boy, and because I didn’t kill Damon, I’ll tell you who wasn’t, lately.”

  “Okay.”

  He spread his arms. “Sam Landau.”

  “Damon’s agent?”

  “You see him here?”

  “I wouldn’t know him.”

  “Exhibiting good taste on your part. But his client’s dead and he’s not here to pay respects. I rest my case.”

  “Was he at dinner with Damon last night?”

  Randall Lee peered at me. “A sneaky way of asking was I at dinner with Damon last night?”

  “Were you and Landau at dinner with Damon last night?”

  “Yes. Both of us. And Nathaniel.” He indicated an ivory leather sofa across the room supporting Nathaniel Day’s broad-shouldered bulk, his leg in its high-tech brace resting on a matching hassock. “And Luke McCroy,” Lee said, pointing, “and Holly March.” He nodded at the thin young woman in the skimpy skirt. “When she was an exotic dancer she called herself Holly Ivy. Personally, I prefer to think of her as Holly Cow. But brave, to show up in the widow’s own lair. Where is the widow, by the way?”

  “In the garden,” I said. “Nora Day wasn’t there? At dinner?”

  “Nora wasn’t a regular at Damon’s table. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and Damon was a fool. It’s a shame, because I rather enjoy her company. She’s a decisive young woman, and surrounded as I am in my professional life by waverers, doubters, coin tossers, and second-guessers, I find her a breath of fresh air.”

  I asked Randall Lee another question or two, and his answers didn’t cross him off my list. He’d been the first to leave after dinner last night, had taken a cab to his Upper West Side apartment, where he lived alone. If he was fibbing about the bookie business being run along new paradigms these days, he could be said to have had both motive and opportunity. I thanked him and left him by the window admiring the view

  I wanted to talk to Sam Landau, who wasn’t here, and to Nathaniel, and to Holly March and Luke McCroy, and, one by one, to the rest of Damon Rome’s teammates. Nathaniel, on the sofa beside his sister, was talking to the Knicks’ backup center, Shawan Powell. Powell had racked up more minutes these last two months with Nathaniel out than he had in his first three years in the NBA. He wasn’t bad, but no one thought for a minute he had anything but a supporting role in he Knicks’ run at the playoffs, a run that had starred the now-gone-forever Damon Rome.

  I figured Nathaniel and Powell would keep for a while, and turned my attention to Holly March and Luke McCroy, he on a leather recliner, she on the arm. He said something and she gave him a soft, teasing smile. She poked him in the shoulder and said something and he laughed. He was handsome and she was beautiful and they both seemed to be admirably handling the death of Damon Rome.

  They handled my approach well, too, with polite, interested looks, handshakes as I offered my name and my errand. There being no other chair in the vicinity, McCroy swung his long legs off the hassock and I sat there. Holly March stayed where she was. A sweet scent floated on the warm air, the complicated delicacy of expensive perfume.

  “I understand you both went to dinner with Damon after the game last night,” I said.

  “That’s right,” said McCroy. Holly March nodded, her mahogany eyes wide to show sincerity.

  “Can you tell me about it?”

  “Not much to tell,” said McCroy. His shaved head reflected the sunlight. “We went to Shots for some of those good steaks they have there—”

  “Except for me,” Holly March put in, her voice breathy and high, like a little girl’s. “I had pasta. I’m a vegetarian.”

  I nodded; McCroy waited, eyebrows raised, in case she had more to say, but she smiled at him and looked down, as though to apologize for usurping his storytelling prerogative.

  He took her hand, went on. “Then we left. Damon stayed to finish his conversation with Landau.”

  “Sam Landau? His agent?”

  “Yeah. Damon said he needed to talk to him, privatelike.”

  “You know about what?”

  “Uh-uh. Damon and me, we wasn’t close like that.”

  “Can you tell me who else was at dinner?” I asked that, though I already had Randall Lee’s list, just to see what McCroy would say. He said the same. Holly March used wide-eyed silence to signal agreement and traced her scarlet fingernail across the back of McCroy’s hand to signal something else.

  “From what I hear, not many of Damon’s teammates hung out with him,” I said.

  “Not many liked him,” McCroy said simply.

  “Why?”
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  McCroy shrugged. “He was the man. He was the great Damon Rome. With Damon, wasn’t about the game.”

  “What was it about?”

  “Damon’s stats. Damon’s picture in the papers. Damon’s endorsement deals. He was a damn ball hog, worse than guys on the playground.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much of a teammate.”

  “Damon didn’t never understand the word ‘pass,’ wasn’t coming out of his own mouth. Dude could say, ‘Give me the damn ball,’ but someone else said it, he couldn’t hear it.”

  “But you went to dinner with him. And so did Nathaniel.”

  “Nathaniel, he hangs with the new guys. Thinks it’s his job, show us the ropes. Hangs with me, with Damon. Don’t nobody piss Nathaniel off, off the court.”

  “And you? Damon didn’t piss you off either?”

  “Sure he did. I like the ball, too, sometime.”

  “So why did you go?”

  McCroy smiled up at Holly March. “Other considerations.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I have to ask this. I was under the impression, Ms. March, that you were seeing Damon Rome?”

  She smiled. “Who told you that?” she asked gently, as though she was worried my feelings would be hurt when I found out how wrong I was.

  “It’s just something I heard.”

  “Well, we did date a little bit. A while ago. But Damon wasn’t faithful. I like faithful men.” She smiled again at McCroy, dipped her head so her curls hid her face.

  Feeling very much like I was cutting in on their dance, I said, “You dated Damon Rome before he got married?”

  She looked up at me, tilted her head like she was trying to figure out where I’d gotten that idea. “No,” she said. “This fall, when the season started.”

  It seemed it hadn’t occurred to her that a married man who’d date her was by definition not a faithful man. “Was it a problem for you two, when you… became interested in each other?” I asked them both. “I mean, did Damon object?”

  “Well,” Holly March said, “maybe if Damon had known.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “That’s why I went to dinner with him, and things,” she explained. “He thought we were still seeing each other.”

  Holly March’s definition of “faithful” was, I decided, fairly unique. I turned to Luke McCroy to see if he had anything to add.

  Luke McCroy stared at me in silence, and then, once again, he shrugged. “Ball hogs,” he said, “they don’t share well.”

  I asked a few more questions: when had they left Shots, where had they gone? They’d left within minutes of each other, not together, they said, but had hooked up as planned in a hotel lobby on the next block. From then on until the next morning they were each other’s alibi. Holly March smiled gently at me and Luke McCroy beamed at her. They seemed to have run out of things to say to me, and they obviously had a lot to say to each other. I thanked them and stood.

  I was thinking to talk to Nathaniel next and I had just started over there when the housekeeper opened the door to let in someone: a white man shorter than the tall-tree Knicks around me, taller than I, with a face I knew. When he’d played, Dan Wing had been as big as you’d expect, six-four, average for the NBA in his day. But his day was twenty years ago and the players were bigger now. If he were still playing he’d be a little guy, but he was the head coach of the New York Knicks and that made him as big as anyone in the league.

  I watched as Wing strode into the room, his jaw thrust forward, his brows knit, wearing that glowering look you saw courtside during the games and in front of the banner at the press conferences afterward. It was the look he’d worn as a player, too, pure concentration and intimidation. I’d always thought of it as his game face, and maybe it was, but it occurred to me now that there were people who never took their game faces off.

  When Wing came in, a change seemed to come over the players, tiny shifts in stance and expression, a sense of sharpened alertness. They greeted him, nodded in his direction, went back to the conversations they’d been having, but I got the feeling that each of them knew where he was all the time, and the air became electric. Wing was a famous disciplinarian, a my-way-or-the-highway kind of coach who had taken a team of talented but not, with the exception of Nathaniel Day, brilliant players and pounded them into fiercely loyal troops, championship contenders every year he’d coached them. He put up with Nora Day because Nathaniel’s contract said he had to, but he made no secret of the fact that she was a thorn in his side.

  Damon Rome, acquired over Wing’s objections by the Knicks’ management as soon as it was clear Nathaniel was out for the season, had been another.

  I waited for Wing to ask about the widow and be told she was resting. I met him at the sideboard. He poured himself a cup of coffee, picked up a crustless cucumber sandwich and glared at it.

  “Coach?” I said.

  Wing snapped me a suspicious look, devoured the sandwich in one bite. “Who’re you?”

  “Bill Smith. I’m investigating Damon Rome’s death.”

  That didn’t seem to improve his mood. “You a cop?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “I’m working for Tony Manelli’s lawyer. We think they’ve got the wrong man.”

  “You do? Who do you think the right man is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Smith.” He picked up another sandwich. “Don’t fuck with my team.”

  “Is there a reason I should?”

  “No, there’s a reason you shouldn’t. I can still pull this out but I’ll need the men focused. They think someone thinks one of them killed Damon, they lose focus. You get it?”

  “What if one of them did?”

  Wing gulped some coffee. “Would have been a public service.”

  “You didn’t like him?”

  “You read the papers?”

  “I understand he was disruptive.”

  “He was fucking uncoachable. He was a goddamn time bomb that kept going off.”

  “The price of a shot at the championship?”

  “Screw that. I’ll tell you something. Papers this morning are screaming without Rome we got no chance this year. I say with him we never had one. These guys”—he waved his coffee cup to indicate the men around us; one or two of them turned their heads—“they make a fuck of a lot more money than I do but they know who’s boss. Even Nathaniel and that head-case sister of his know. Rome never knew. He thought he was paid the big bucks because he could think, not because he could shoot and rebound and mow guys down. He was pissing the other guys off and this team would have shaken itself apart before the playoffs if he kept on. I didn’t want him, I won’t miss him, and I don’t want you fucking with anybody’s head.”

  Wing’s famous glower burned through me. “If I didn’t know better,” I said, “I’d think that was a motive.”

  “To kill him? Are you crazy?”

  Wing’s voice had gotten louder and a couple of Knicks turned their heads to see what was up with their coach and this stranger.

  “Can you tell me where you were last night?”

  He gave me the red-faced, unbelieving stare I’d seen him give refs when the call went against the Knicks. “Where I was? I was at the Garden until two o’clock in the fucking morning, going over game tapes, is where I fucking was.”

  “Anyone with you?”

  “Douglas and Pontillo”—two of the assistant coaches—“left around midnight. You can’t be serious?”

  “No one saw you after that?”

  “I got home about three. My wife and kids were asleep. I can’t believe I’m even talking to you about this.”

  “I appreciate it, Coach,” I said. “My job is to make sure Tony Manelli doesn’t get nailed for something he didn’t do. I’m going to keep at it. But,” I added, “I’m a Knicks fan. Have been for years.”

  Dan Wing’s glare made it clear that he’d have benched me now and traded me tomo
rrow, if only he could. He stalked away. A couple of players stared at me. I tried a cucumber sandwich myself, decided the bread was too soft. I checked the room again, in case someone new had arrived while I was talking to Wing.

  Someone had, and he stood out even more than I did. As white as I was, as old as Randall Lee, balding and chubby, he glanced at his watch when Maria told him the widow was resting and not to be disturbed. I thought he might turn and leave, but he narrowed his eyes, peered around the room, headed for the coffee urn. I waited for him to arrive.

  “Sam Landau?”

  He gave me a once-over, stirred sugar into his coffee and said, “Who wants to know?” When I told him, he said, “What’s to investigate? I hear Tony did it.”

  “Tony’s been arrested for it. There’s a difference.”

  “Not to me. Yesterday I had ten percent of Fort Knox. Today I got ten percent of bubkes. You know what’s bubkes?”

  “Chickpeas?”

  Landau snorted. “Only looks like chickpeas. It’s goat turds. Listen, Tony wants to tell his story, have him call me.” Landau handed me his card.

  Just what Tony wants, I thought, but I pocketed the card. “Can I ask you about dinner last night?”

  “The cops already asked me. New York’s Finest.”

  “Just to clear a few things up.”

  Landau picked some cookies for his saucer. “Why not? Go ahead, ask.”

  “Who was there?”

  By now I knew the litany, but I waited to hear it. “Lee. Nathaniel. McCroy. That pretty little girl.” Landau pointed people out one by one with a chocolate biscotti, then dipped it in his coffee.

  “Anyone seem unhappy to you? Any tension?”

  Landau bit off the biscotti’s dripping end. “Damon stole Nathaniel’s headlines. McCroy stole Damon’s girl. Lee was out a pile of dough and Damon said yeah, yeah, he’d get around to it. Sound like a happy party to you?”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “You and Damon stayed after everyone else left, to talk. About what?”

  “Business.”

  “I hear business wasn’t so good.”

  “You hear that where?”