Half Court Press

by A. J. Stewart

  “Can someone drive in behind?”

  “No, I watch for that.”

  Ronzoni thanked the guy and then pulled away, and we headed down onto Blue Heron Drive.

  “So what do you think?” he asked.

  “I don’t think Camille and Draymond are a fairytale ending.”

  “No.”

  “What’s their story?”

  “I didn’t know them when they got divorced but I sensed that it was pretty ugly, or at least, that Draymond didn’t handle it well. He took to the drink.”

  That last phrase sounded like something my grandfather would have said, but I let it slide.

  “He wasn’t in the best place, but he went to AA, got cleaned up. Now he’s good. He’s in a relationship, got himself a place not far from the Boys and Girls Club.”

  “And what about this restaurant?”

  “It’s about to open. It’s one of those franchise places. Listen, I need to head back to work. You want me to drop you off at your office?”

  “Sure.”

  Chapter Four

  Ronzoni dropped me out front of the courthouse, which sat across a parking lot from my office building. I didn’t go to the office. I had some more questions for Draymond, so I jumped in my SUV and headed straight back to Riviera Beach. I hoped the guy might be more forthcoming without Ronzoni in tow.

  I parked in the same spot where Ronzoni had parked earlier and wandered inside. There weren’t as many people around and those that were seemed to eye me with less suspicion than before. I wondered if it was Ronzoni they’d been concerned about earlier. I went straight to the gym and pushed open the heavy door.

  The games had finished. On one half of the court a group of women were setting up tables and chairs for some kind of meeting. At the other end, I saw Tania Bryson. She was moving briskly around the three-point arc, picking up basketballs that had been placed along the line, and then spinning in place and shooting. She moved fluidly, like a ballerina, and didn’t miss a basket. When she had shot all the balls, she collected them, and as she lined up her balls for another round I looked for Draymond. He wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

  There were only two people in the bleachers at the end of the court. One was a lean guy with a killer tan and a sharp suit. He couldn’t have looked more out of place if he was wearing a space suit. He was sitting next to a tall Asian-looking guy in track pants and a polo. They were chatting as they watched Tania arrange her basketballs.

  I stepped over to the bleachers and sat down on the third one up. It was habit, or something like that. When I’d played in college, and later in the minors, I would often wander up into the empty bleachers after a game or training, to sit and think about my game or my life or nothing at all. I would always sit three-quarters of the way up the stand. I don’t know why, but it stuck.

  The bleacher in the gym was only four rows high, so it was hardly the nosebleeds. Tania glanced at the dude in the suit and the Asian guy, and then she took a quick look at me as she strode over to her starting position in the corner of the court.

  A mental gun must have gone off in her head, because, without notice, she took off like a greyhound. She ran to the first ball, picked it up, spun around, and then shot it high for a three-point bucket. She was already moving away before the ball hit the basket, and she repeated the process—collect, spin, shoot—with balls right around the three-point arc.

  Tania didn’t wait to catch her breath. She collected the balls and set up again. It wasn’t hard to see that she was something special. The special ones are like that. You can see their talent is above and beyond within five minutes of watching them. But it takes a little more observation to see what truly makes them extraordinary.

  Because talent only goes so far. I played a lot of baseball and a lot of football with a lot of talented guys. Guys who could run or throw or tackle, guys who could read defenses like most people read the morning paper. There were guys who could deadlift small cars and leap over fences—pure athletic machines. But I also saw many of those guys not make it. Once you get to college—especially in a Division I program, where most everyone is on a scholarship—everyone is a good player. Once you get to the pros, everyone is in the top 1 percent of athletes. But those guys—and in the case of Tania Bryson, those girls—who get to the very top, who become the champions of the champions, those guys are the complete package. Not just talent, but work ethic. And not even just work ethic. They bleed the game. I could tell, sitting in the third row of four bleachers in a local gym that catered to kids who had nowhere else to go, that Tania Bryson was in that company.

  You didn’t have to be Nostradamus. I watched the ladies setting up chairs at the far end for a moment, and then went back to Tania. I could guess that she was the best player in this club through pure talent alone. But now that everyone else had left, gone home or gone out or just gone, Tania was still here, alone, practicing drills, using whatever scrap of court she could get on while chairs got set up at the other end. I had to remind myself that she wasn’t just some hungry kid trying to learn a few tricks. She had just been selected first in the draft, and yet here she still was.

  I have a little bit of time for people with talent—in any field—but I have a lot of time for people with work ethic. Those are the ones I want on my team.

  I was so focused on Tania that I didn’t notice the tan in the suit wander up to me. I glanced at him. He had his hands in his pockets and his back to the court.

  “Can I help you?” he asked me.

  I grinned, in a friendly sort of way, although I wanted to give him the are you serious with that suit in this gym? face. To be fair, I might have ended up somewhere between the two.

  “No,” I said, returning my eye to the court.

  “This is a closed session,” he said.

  Now I looked at him. His shirt was crisp and his hair was gelled to perfection, and his tan was a work of art. He wore a pocket square in his jacket and lines at the corners of his eyes, which made him look older than he probably was. Tanning will do that. It’s a Florida hazard.

  “Then you probably shouldn’t have held it in a public gym,” I said.

  He looked me up and down, but mostly up, because he was standing below me. I do a lot of work in Palm Beach, so I know when someone is giving me a condescending look. I didn’t particularly care—I’d given his wardrobe due consideration, so I was fair game—but I also knew from experience that guys with pocket squares didn’t understand guys in palm tree-print shirts and khaki shorts. We were like different branches of the genus tree.

  “Do I need to call the police?” he asked.

  “Only if you want them to come tomorrow.”

  He took a deep breath. I could see from the tight lines on his face that this kind of thing didn’t usually go this way for him. He was an alpha male, or at least he considered himself one. He clearly believed that clothes made the man. I agreed with him on that, but in a very different way.

  “It’s a little strange to be sitting in a gym watching a young woman train,” he said.

  “Especially in a natty little suit,” I replied.

  “Oh, I have a legitimate reason for being here. You, however . . .”

  Then it hit me. I should have seen it straight away. Only one kind of person hangs around a near-empty gym in a suit, waiting on an athlete to finish their training.

  “You’re the agent,” I said.

  He jutted his chin out some, as if these words ignited his superpowers.

  “I am.”

  “Come up here,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”

  For a moment he hesitated. There are a lot of alpha males in the agent business. There are a good number of alpha females, too, come to think of it. They generally don’t respond well to being ordered around, but I knew something about them that they rarely knew about themselves. They were wrong. In a room full of alpha males, there really can be only one. All the others are pretenders. They can talk loudly, boast about everything
and slap you on the back like they’re performing the Heimlich maneuver, but it’s all bluster. So I figured I’d see what I was dealing with.

  The agent stepped up the bleachers so he was closer to me, but he stayed standing in order to hold the high ground.

  Pretender.

  “You got a name?” I asked him.

  “Kressic. Mark Kressic. And you are?”

  “Miami Jones.”

  “And I’m supposed to know who that is?”

  “No. What do you know about the threat against Tania Bryson?”

  He frowned. It was all in the eyes. His forehead didn’t move. I knew Botox when I saw it.

  “Who are you?”

  “Asked and answered. The threat—what do you know?”

  He looked at me, puzzled.

  “Are you a cop?”

  I raised an eyebrow. I couldn’t have looked less like a cop if I’d tried. I might have passed for a former cop who came to Florida to open a bar, but that was a different thing entirely.

  “No, I’m not a cop. I’m a private investigator. I’ve been retained to look into the extortion threat.”

  “Keep your voice down,” he whispered.

  “I asked you to come up here for a reason, pal,” I said. “What do you know about the threat?”

  “I know that Camille got a letter.”

  “How do you know that?”

  He frowned the frownless frown again. “Camille told me. Who hired you?”

  “That’s not important. Has she had any threats like this before?”

  “No.”

  “You seen threats like this with other athletes before?”

  “It happens, from time to time.”

  Tania was running and spinning and shooting again.

  “What agency do you work with?”

  “Bannerman Associates.”

  I nodded. As I had told Camille, I knew them. One of the biggest agencies, they handled plenty of NFL, NBA and MLB players. A few tennis and golf pros, too.

  “Big house,” I said.

  “No one better,” said Kressic.

  “So you’re in with this plan to keep Tania in the dark?”

  “It’s better this way. Athletes need to focus, not be distracted by something like this.”

  “She could be in danger.”

  “Do you really think that?”

  “I don’t know. But threats on paper can get real.”

  “And that’s why she has me, and you it seems.”

  “You gonna protect her?” I asked.

  “That’s my job.” He smiled, and then he said, “It’s better that you’re here.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s better to keep this in private hands. Not involve the police.”

  “You don’t like the cops?”

  “They have a job to do, but it isn’t always to protect my client.”

  That was true enough. I wasn’t sure I was on board with keeping Tania in the dark about the threat, but then again, I didn’t know her, or how she might react to it, so I had to defer to those better placed to know such things. But I did know that the sheriff’s office would see their job as solving and preventing crime, not necessarily worrying about the temperament of a basketball player.

  “How long have you been Tania’s agent?” I asked.

  “Technically, since she graduated last semester.”

  “Technically?”

  “There are rules about these things.”

  “I know all about the rules.”

  “Do you?”

  “I do. I was a student-athlete once.”

  He looked me over. “A while ago.”

  I didn’t bite. I was realistic about the passage of time. There’s really no other way to be. You beat most things with hard work and perseverance, but you can’t beat time. And I knew I was still in pretty good shape. I wasn’t my playing weight, and tossing a few pitches would see me moaning about my shoulder for a week, but Danielle kept me focused on staying healthy, if not trim. I let the silence grow uncomfortable.

  “What did you play?” he eventually asked.

  “Baseball and football.”

  “Where?”

  “University of Miami.”

  “Huh. Same as Tania.”

  “She went to UM? I didn’t think it was such a big basketball school.”

  He shook his head. “You go pro?”

  “Baseball. Six years.”

  He nodded and I saw the tautness of his face relax, as if I had just gone up a small peg in his estimations.

  “So you know,” he said. “NCAA doesn’t allow agents until a student-athlete declares their intention to go pro, but once they do, they’re done being a student-athlete.”

  “Right, so guys like you kind of hang around like flies around a grill waiting until the steaks are done.”

  “Not the metaphor I would have used.”

  “So she waited until graduation to declare for the draft?”

  “She did.” He looked disappointed by this fact.

  “You didn’t agree?”

  “We had interest last year. Chicago was interested. She would have gone number one then, too. And we had a lot of interest from Europe.” He shook his head. “But she wanted to graduate.”

  “And now she’s been picked up by Atlanta?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And the gold diggers are coming out of the woodwork.”

  “It happens. Lots of these kids come from poor backgrounds.”

  I thought about Camille’s house in a gated community. It wasn’t Mar-a-Lago, but it wasn’t skid row, either.

  Kressic watched Tania return the basketballs to a wire bin and then she started to run suicides along the sideline. I glanced at the tall guy in the polo. He was watching her, too.

  “Who’s the Asian guy?” I asked.

  Kressic glanced at him and then turned back to me. “He’s the GM for a Chinese team.”

  “Chinese?”

  “Yes. Good money in the game there.”

  “And he’s interested in Tania?”

  “Very.”

  “But didn’t she just get drafted by the WNBA?”

  “She did. But lots of the girls play internationally in the off-season. Like I say, it’s good money.”

  “So this is a tryout?”

  “No,” said Kressic. “She doesn’t need to try out. He wants her. She just needs to sign. This is just training.”

  “So Atlanta is asking her to do this?”

  “No. This is all Tania.”

  I nodded and watched her run. I knew suicides. They were aptly named. Run from one end of the court to the other, touch the floor, and then run back, and then to three quarter court and back, and then half-court, quarter-court, and so on, and then go back up again. They weren’t as long on a basketball court as they had been on a football field, but they weren’t fun anywhere. I remembered summer preseason training at Miami: suicides in the August heat until guys collapsed, or vomited, or both. There were rules about that now. Apparently colleges were no longer allowed to attempt to kill their student-athletes. I’d had no such luck. But I also hadn’t done suicides on my own just for fun.

  “She trains hard.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I heard her high school used to open the gym early for her, so she could train.”

  “She’s got one hell of a work ethic.”

  He nodded. “Work ethic is certainly not her problem.”

  He said it in a way like he was going to tell me that something else was her problem and what that thing was, but he said nothing more. He watched her run to the end and then stop, doubled over, probably in pain, certainly well out of breath.

  “I have to get back to my guy,” he said, nodding at the Chinese GM.

  “Sure.”

  “You on her full-time?”

  “You mean like am I security? No. I’m not getting the impression she needs that.”

  “Let’s hope not.”

  He didn’t say goo
dbye or see you round. Alphas don’t worry themselves with such pleasantries. Even the pretend alphas. Maybe more so the pretend ones. He strode down to the floor and over to the Chinese guy, who, now that I had a frame of reference, turned out to be very tall, maybe six five. Perhaps he had been a basketball player himself, back in the day.

  Tania grabbed a towel and wiped herself off and then wandered over to Kressic. He introduced her to the Chinese guy, but I couldn’t hear what was said. Tania smiled and nodded politely, in a way that made her look like a little schoolgirl. The Chinese guy said something, and Tania responded with a slight shrug that seemed involuntary, like a girl who had just been asked to the prom by a boy she didn’t want to go with, but whom she didn’t want to hurt, either. She spoke to them for a moment, and then pointed to the door.

  They all said what I assumed was goodbye and then Tania jogged across the floor, glancing at the bleachers as she went. As she reached the door, Kressic called to her.

  “You need a ride home?” he asked.

  “No, I’m fine, thank you,” she replied, and then she jogged out.

  Kressic and the Chinese guy wandered across the court to the door, deep in conversation. They didn’t acknowledge me. Kressic held the door open for the tall man and then they both disappeared.

  I didn’t move. I watched the ladies finish setting up, and then a man in a gray uniform rolled the basketball bin away. A buffet was being set up on the side of the court, and a number of older people filed in and found seats. They weren’t exactly boys and girls, but I figured that was simply a matter of perspective.

  I was still sitting in the bleachers, thinking things through, when Tania reappeared. She had showered, and her hair was wet. She wore black track pants and a bright-pink logo T-shirt. She wandered over to the bleachers and stopped at the bottom.

  “Are you a cop?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “But you know Detective Ronzoni.”

  “I do.”

  “But you’re not a cop.”

  “No, I’m not a cop.”

  “Why are you here?”

  I shrugged. “Thinking about volunteering.”

  “You should. But I don’t believe you.”