Half Court Press

by A. J. Stewart

  “But the PBSO is looking into it?”

  “In a manner of speaking. You heard of this new guy, Crozier?”

  She shrugged. “Some. In from Alabama or somewhere.”

  “He doesn’t seem too concerned.”

  “Then maybe there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Is that what you hear about him?”

  “I hear he’s put a few noses out of joint. Why?”

  “I’m working on a case at the request of a cop because he doesn’t feel like the PBSO is giving it their full attention.”

  “You want me to speak to someone?”

  “No, it’s all right.”

  “It sounds like someone’s just trying to get whatever little they can.”

  “A hundred grand isn’t a little—not in Riviera Beach.”

  “I know that. I’m just saying it doesn’t sound like it’s organized crime or anything.”

  “You don’t think?”

  Danielle sipped her beer. “Who’s in your suspect pool?”

  “So far? The father is implicated in the letter, and word is he has money issues. He’s a recovering alcoholic.”

  “Doesn’t make him a bad guy.”

  “No, it doesn’t, and he doesn’t come across as a bad guy. Then there’s various hangers-on who I haven’t yet got a bead on. Except for this L’nita.”

  “And she’s an old friend?”

  “School colleague rather than friend. At least, that’s the feeling I get.”

  “And she’d know where Tania lived.”

  “For sure.”

  “And she could get into the women’s locker room at the club.”

  “I would think so.”

  “But how does she get into the actual locker? Was it locked?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “Padlock,” I said. “I saw Tania unlock it with a key.”

  “Was it locked before the graffiti message or after?”

  “Both.”

  “And are there any other keys?”

  “Not according to Tania, but those things can be defeated. It’s not that hard.”

  “Not for a PI, but for a woman who hangs out front of the movies?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So you’ll keep digging.”

  “I will. In your experience, who should I be looking at? Most likely?”

  “In general, extortion is done by someone well known to the victim. I mean, they need to know they have the money, right? In cases like this one, I’d be looking at the parents and their financial situation. They might not actually want to harm the girl, but they might not think making threats is all that serious, if they’re desperate enough. Next most likely is someone close enough to know that she has come into money, but not close enough to be the beneficiary of it. Think cousins, friends, work colleagues.”

  “She doesn’t have work colleagues. She just finished college and got drafted.”

  “So she has former teammates who didn’t get drafted and might hold a grudge.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “It’s all possible, but you’ve got to make the list and then cut it back, right?”

  I nodded. My brain functioned as well as the next guy’s, but I always saw things more clearly when I talked them through with Danielle.

  She finished her beer and I offered her another. She glanced at the table and the untouched bottle in front of me, and she declined.

  “I’m pretty beat,” she said again. “You mind if we hit the hay?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t mind, and I also didn’t pick up any hint she was suggesting anything other than sleep. I waited while she went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth, and when she came out, she was wearing an old T-shirt and underpants.

  “All yours,” she said.

  I watched her slip into bed, and I smiled at her as I walked into the bathroom. I did my thing and when I came out, Danielle was snoozing softly. I slipped off my T-shirt and shorts and got into bed next to her. I could hear a motorcycle rumbling somewhere nearby. I put my hands behind my head and stared at the popcorn ceiling like an astronomer studying the craters of the moon. I must have stayed like that for hours.

  Chapter Eight

  Danielle was in the kitchen when I woke. She was drinking coffee I could smell across the room.

  “Morning,” she said. “Coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  She poured me a cup and walked it over to me. She was already dressed for work.

  “Thanks,” I said, sitting up and sipping the coffee. “You heading out?”

  “Got to get a jump on things.”

  I nodded.

  “Listen, I’m sorry about last night,” she said.

  “What happened last night?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So . . . why the apology?”

  “We haven’t seen each other in almost two weeks and nothing happened last night.”

  “Oh, that. You were tired.”

  “I was.” She trailed off as if there was a lot more to those two words than the obvious. She took a long, deep breath and then let it out even slower.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  She half-nodded and half-shrugged. It ended up looking like a shimmy.

  “I’ve got to get to work. You in town today?”

  “I am.”

  “Staying tonight?”

  “I can. If you’re around.”

  She smiled. “I don’t have any plans.”

  I slipped out of bed and met her at the door. She laid a long, deep kiss on me.

  “I’ll see you tonight,” she said. “Properly.”

  She opened the door, shot me a wink, and walked out.

  That wink was like a shot of adrenaline, and I instantly felt better. I didn’t bother with the rest of my coffee. I put on some clothes and strode down to Little Havana and stopped at a coffee shop that was doing a roaring trade through its takeout window. I sat at a table on the street and had a heart-starter Cuban coffee and a pastry. The place was hopping with people about to embark on their day, and the mood was easy. I didn’t hear much English, but I didn’t expect to. It wasn’t called Little Havana for nothing.

  I really had nothing to do with my day, so after breakfast I drove out to the marina at South Beach to catch up with Lucas. He was—according to the kid in the office—out at the shipbuilder’s looking over an engine replacement for a client’s boat. I wasn’t sure what kind of boat went to a shipbuilder’s, but I imagined it was a big one. I told the kid to let Lucas know I had dropped by, and I went for a walk along the docks, looking at all the boats and wondering where all the damn money was coming from.

  That thought stuck with me as I drove down to Coconut Grove that afternoon. I had many questions about Tania Bryson’s situation that I couldn’t answer, but most of all I realized I knew very little about the world of the WNBA. I did, however, know someone who might be able to set me straight.

  Penny Morgan was a realtor, although calling her a realtor was kind of like calling Jackie Robinson a baseball guy. Penny handled high-end real estate, which in Miami usually came with a price tag north of ten million smackers, and was often thirty or more floors in the air, or bigger than ten thousand square feet, or both. I had met Penny through Ron’s wife, the Lady Cassandra, and her Palm Beach connections. I had found myself at a very dull party at one of the crusty clubs on the island, and had the good fortune to be introduced to Penny. Several tequila shooters later, she confided to me that she had a buyer flying in to look at a $30 million compound on Star Island, but he had requested tickets to a Dolphins game as part of the visit. Despite her extensive Rolodex, or whatever it was such people kept their contacts in these days, Penny had been unable to fix up said tickets because of a scheduling anomaly that saw the Dolphins having a bye weekend. When I suggested Jacksonville as an alternative, Penny almost collapsed, having not considered that it was an NFL game rather than the Dolphins specifically that the client
wished to see. As good luck and happenstance had it, I knew the quarterbacks coach in Jacksonville from my college days and was able to secure fancy box seats to a Jags–Raiders game, which Penny matched with a Gulfstream jet from Miami to Jacksonville. I neither met the buyer nor got to lay eyes on the box in question, but Penny sold a chunk of real estate that day and never forgot it.

  So it was that I found myself walking into the Four Seasons Miami residential tower. I was glad I had worn my long pants. Penny had left my name with the concierge for her professional open house, and he sent me off with a bellboy to operate the elevator, on the off chance I had never used one before.

  The apartment in question was a penthouse with an asking price in excess of $25 million, which garnered sweeping views of Biscayne Bay and Key Biscayne. If I squinted I was pretty sure I could see Bimini.

  Penny was chatting with some other realtors in the kitchen, which was conveniently cut off from the rest of the house so guests wouldn’t have to watch the help baste the turkey. Despite this fact, the kitchen still had a killer view of the Western Sahara. Penny excused herself and came over. She was blond and tanned—but not too much—and wore a suit that looked like it had been woven from gold.

  “Miami, how are you?”

  We did the air-kiss thing that always weirded me out.

  “Not so bad. You.”

  “Hanging in there. Listen, I have to do some schmoozing here, but help yourself to some food. There’s champagne.” She winked at me. “I’ve got some tequila stashed away for later.”

  With a smile she was gone, chatting up her fellow top-end realtors, who would then go back to their Rolodexes or smartphones or the damned Yellow Pages and find Penny a buyer, in return for a hefty commission.

  I took a little sandwich and a Perrier and stepped out onto the balcony. I knew two things about the buyer of the condo before they even stepped through the door. They were loaded, and they weren’t afraid of heights. It was a serious drop to the pavement below. I nodded at a few of the realtors who ventured out for the view, but spoke to none. Some of them looked at me like my khakis didn’t fit the vibe and a couple of others looked like they would be putting together a dossier on me in case I was either a new competitor or quiet money.

  Penny stepped out onto the balcony about an hour later. She had two glasses of champagne.

  “It’s open, no point wasting it,” she said, handing me one.

  We both sipped the bubbles. She looked out at the view like it still amazed her. I looked at her. She was about forty, but in a town where so many forty-year-old people looked like discarded raisins, she looked good, and she still had the tall, lithe body of an athlete. Before Penny had become a realtor, she had been a basketball player. A very good one. A WNBA MVP and Olympic gold medal winning one. So I figured if there was anyone able to educate me on that world, it was Penny.

  “How’s the investment apartment going for you?” she asked.

  I frowned. “Investment apartment?”

  “The studio in Little Havana, or do you have a portfolio now without telling me?”

  “Oh, that. No, actually, Danielle’s living there.”

  “Living there?” Penny snarled like the champagne had gone bad. “Don’t tell me you’re having problems.”

  “No, nothing like that. She’s working out of the office here in Miami, so . . .”

  “Miami Jones, why I ought to—”

  “What have I done now?”

  “You didn’t say she was going to live there. You said it was an investment.”

  “It was, I mean, it will be. She’s just there for now.”

  “Oh, Miami.” Penny finished her champagne. “It’s getting windy out here, let’s go inside.”

  Penny led me in through the living room, back into the kitchen, where a crew of waitstaff were cleaning up.

  “I would never have let you buy that place if I knew you were planning for her to live in it. That’s no kind of place for a young woman.”

  “She’s not that young—”

  “Miami Jones, you stop digging. I won’t have her in such a place. It’s for divorced men and college students, not beautiful young ladies.”

  I said nothing. It felt like the right call.

  “And you shouldn’t be living apart. It’s no good for the soul.”

  Again the condition of my soul had entered the conversation, and I was starting to wonder if it was becoming a thing.

  “You need to be together and you need to be somewhere nice,” she said, waving her hand at the view of Key Biscayne.

  “A little out of my budget,” I said.

  “Leave it with me,” she said.

  “Penny, I don’t have another down payment.”

  “I said leave it with me, Miami.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Now what did you want to talk to me about?” she asked as she reached into a cupboard and pulled out a bottle of Rey Sol Añejo tequila.

  I gave her the short version of Tania Bryson’s situation.

  “Poor girl,” she said, pouring two shots. She held one up and I took the other and we sipped.

  “So what can you tell me about it?” I asked.

  “About extortion?”

  “No, about being the number one draft pick.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Not so long ago.”

  Penny smiled. “That’s a better answer. Are you asking did people come out of the woodwork to feel the spotlight a little? Sure. I heard from cousins I hadn’t heard from in years. But no one ever made threats. It was hardly worth the effort.”

  “What do you mean it was hardly worth the effort?”

  Penny sipped her tequila and smiled. “Your blackmailer doesn’t know Tania very well.”

  “How do you figure that? The cops and everyone else suspect a close acquaintance.”

  “Well, they can think whatever they like, but they suffer from the same problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “They don’t know her, and they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”

  I sipped my tequila. It wasn’t as rough as the tequila I was normally subjected to, and I suspected we were drinking at a different price point.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “They don’t know her, Miami, because she isn’t what they think she is.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Rich, Miami, rich.”

  I frowned and it wasn’t at the tequila.

  “Here’s the thing you need to know. You’re not dealing with the NBA. The WNBA might have those three letters in their acronym but it’s the W that’s important. The WNBA is small potatoes compared to the NBA. LeBron might make $40 million a year, but the entire WNBA doesn’t make that much.”

  “But she was the number one pick, like you.”

  “Doesn’t matter. The number one draft pick doesn’t negotiate their salary. It’s all defined in the collective bargaining agreement. And the mandated salary for a top draft pick is $50,000.”

  “Fifty, as in five-zero?”

  “Yes, Miami, the single best player in the league, the MVP winner, will make no more than about $130,000. Contrast that with the league minimum in the NBA—about $560,000.”

  “You’re telling me the best player in the women’s competition only gets about a quarter of the worst male player’s salary?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you. That guy will spend more time in his tracksuit than actually on the floor. So whoever is blackmailing Tania can’t know her that well, because they clearly don’t get her situation. It’s like blackmailing the kid who works the drive-through because McDonalds is a billion-dollar company.”

  As Penny sipped her tequila I thought about what she was saying. Despite the shock of the best new recruit earning such a meager salary, I had to agree with Penny’s logic about the blackmail. I knew from experience that people will do the worst things for very little money, but a hundred thousand did seem like a lot to as
k for if you knew she was only getting half that for the year. But if you were under the misconception that she was earning millions—or even just half a million—like the worst of the men—then it might have seemed like a reasonable amount. But who could leave both the letter and the graffiti that didn’t know the truth?

  “It’s not as bad as Minor League Baseball,” I said, “but it seems a little out of whack, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s sexism, plain and simple.”

  I had to agree. Although I could make an argument for some NBA players making more, the argument had its limits. Few people put backsides in seats like LeBron or Kobe or Jordan, and none sold as many sneakers. The audience numbers weren’t comparable. But the notion that the very best woman would earn a quarter of the average, bench-warming, backup male was actually wildly out of whack. The entire argument fell apart when I thought about my old friend, Kimberly Rose. She had been a star player for the World Cup winning national women’s soccer team, a team which after her time had kept on winning trophies in front of packed houses while the men’s side watched tournaments on television. I had read in the paper that the men were still making a good deal more money, despite almost no one I knew, including me, being able to name a single male player.

  “How did you reconcile that?” I asked Penny.

  She shrugged. “I didn’t. It sucked. I worked as hard as any man. I went to the Olympics and won. But it was what it was, and I loved playing. It beat waiting tables.”

  “No wonder her agent wants her to play overseas.”

  “That’s good money.”

  “You did that?”

  “I did. I played most off-seasons in Europe. I earned roughly double in overseas money, but it took its toll.”

  “How?”

  “Every way, sweetheart. No off-season meant no rest, and in the end, my body gave out. It also hurt my personal life. Half a year here, half a year there. Makes it hard to have any kind of normal relationship.”

  “I imagine it would.”

  “Don’t imagine, Miami. You don’t want to leave Danielle in that horrible little studio all alone. She’ll go stir-crazy.”

  “Point taken.” I finished my tequila. I didn’t want more, but I didn’t stop Penny from pouring it.