by Otto Penzler
“I sound paranoid about her sometimes, don’t I?”
It made Gary smile, he couldn’t help himself “Ya think?” he said. Trying to remember a time when there wasn’t this kind of standoff between Billy and Monica, her holding on to the title of Mrs. Cash, the celebrity it gave her, the way he held on to his money.
“You know what they say, dog,” Billy Cash said. “Just ’cause you’re paranoid don’t mean the motherfuckers ain’t out to get you.”
Billy Cash was Jordan after Jordan. Not the Michael who couldn’t stay unretired and came back and retired wearing the funny Wizards uniform. The Chicago Michael, the one who won everything and made all the money. Billy said he’d gone to Wake, not North Carolina, where Michael’d gone, or Duke, because those schools didn’t need him, they’d already won all their national championships. So he went to Wake, in the same neighborhood down there, and won his Deacons two NCAAs, his sophomore and junior years, came out before his senior year to play for the Magic, even though everybody’d known he was ready for the pros after high school. Only he said he’d win more titles in college than Michael, so that’s what he went and did. Now it was Billy Cash on the Wheaties box, Billy selling his cell phones and his Gap clothes and those high-def TVs and Suburbans. It was Billy in the Disney commercials, more visible for Disney than the fucking mouse.
It took him a while to win in the pros, six years, but then the Magic had finally broken through and he had won two titles in a row there. Then some of the guys he played with got tired of being his “supporting cast,” which he’d accidentally called them one time same as Michael had with the Bulls, started leaving for free agency, moving on for cash of their own. So the people running the Magic had brought in a younger supporting cast and Billy kept scoring and finally, the year before, they’d won again. And were on their way to another, all the TV experts agreed, as long as that sore foot of Billy’s made it to the end of June. It should have been enough, Gary Hall knew, to have Billy Cash feeling as if he had his skinny-assed self sitting on top of the world, keeping his eye on the prize.
Problem was, he kept looking over his fucking shoulder for Monica.
He’d met her at the Guest Relations desk at Disney, some appearance he made right after the Magic had drafted him and the mouse-ear people had signed him up to be their smiling pitchman, shooting the first commercial the day the Magic had picked him first in the draft. Where you goin’, Billy Cash? I’m goin’ to Disney World! One of those deals. Gary wasn’t with him yet, having just made detective, assigned to a surveillance detail with the Seventeenth Precinct, Manhattan. But he’d heard the story about how Billy and Monica had met so many times he could recite it by now like he could the Pledge of Allegiance.
“I’m Cash,” he said to Monica that day, a snappy little dish in her Disney colors and Disney clothes, giving him a look.
“Fast Cash?” she said.
“Hard Cash.”
Then Monica had said, “Your next question should be where I’m gonna be after you get done waving from the back of your convertible in the afternoon Disney parade.”
They went out that night and every night that week and when she told him she’d missed her period two months into his rookie season, they eloped to Las Vegas on an off-day between playing the Clips in L.A. and the Kings in Sacramento, like they were just a couple of crazy kids. “Just so’s the math would be close enough for all them at Disney corporate later on,” Billy said.
They had a boy and then a girl the year after that and became the happy People-magazine-cover couple—sitcom Negroes, Billy liked to say to Gary—even though the whole time, from the day they got married in the tacky Vegas chapel just for laughs, Billy Cash was still fucking everybody who’d stay still long enough. If Monica knew, at least in the first years Gary’d gone to work for Billy, she never let on to him. She was into the full swing of being Mrs. Cash by then, working the charity circuit hard, fighting for Afghan women and land-mine victims with that pretty blonde that Paul McCartney’d married, the one with one leg; somehow putting herself in the middle of all the 9/11 shit even though she’d been having her picture taken with the kids at Splash Mountain when the planes hit; going up to the White House what felt like every couple of months to Gary for another luncheon or photo op with the First Lady.
Little Monica from Guest Relations, living large.
“She sure as hell knew what she was doin’ when she had her relations with this guest,” Billy bitched all the time. “ ‘Specially when she forgot to take that damn pill she swore she was on and just didn’t work that one time.”
Gary had met Billy in New York one night when the Magic were in to play the Knicks. Billy’d gone clubbing with some of his teammates, a lot of the ones who’d move on later, and they’d picked up some girls who wanted to go to Elaine’s and see if there was any movie stars up there eating fried calamari. They got there about one in the morning. Gary was drinking with some other cops at the bar, because for all the shit you read in the papers about Woody Allen and movie stars and other celebrity dinks going to Elaine’s, it was a cop bar, too, especially late at night. Elaine liked her celebrity crowd because it was good for business, but liked drinking and hanging around with cops just as much, from the commissioner on down.
Gary saw Billy Cash’s crowd come in the Second Avenue door, watched the fuss everybody made, saw the stroke the room gave him once he got his big table, the one Woody liked in those days, back there where you made the men’s-room turn. Then Gary went back to his drink and the two waitresses from Hanratty’s up the block he was talking up didn’t pay Billy Cash any more mind until the fat drunk actor decided to call Billy out.
The actor, some guy who used to be in the movies but was working on some ABC soap—all this time later, Gary couldn’t remember whether or not it was All My Children or One Life to Live—had some drunk friends with him. So it made him whiskey-brave enough to tell Billy that they should take whatever it was had started between them outside. And Billy, who Gary would find out later usually laughed assholes like this off, didn’t think it was so funny this time.
Plus, the girls he was with wanted a show.
Gary, leaned on the bar near the front window, thought it was all bullshit, that it was a playground face-down and nothing more, and once the air hit them they’d settle it before anybody threw a punch. But then he watched through the window as the actor set his hands as if he’d boxed some in his life. Or maybe played a boxer in the movies. And before Billy Cash knew it, he’d been hooked solid on Second Avenue above his ear and was down on one knee.
The fat actor was lighter on his feet than Gary thought he could be, as much gut he was showing against his white shirt, and as Billy started to get up the actor clipped him again, another left, same place above the ear. Gary couldn’t hear what was happening, just saw the guy’s friends laughing and cheering him on and probably telling him to finish Billy off.
It was then that Gary excused himself from the Hanratty’s girls, came through the door as Billy was getting to his feet, finally having enough sense to get his hands up.
One of the friends said, “Oh, look, the faggot brought a playmate.”
Gary took a fistful of the friend’s long stringy hair with his left hand, pulled out his badge with his right, then pulled the guy close to him and said, “Give us a kiss.”
The fat actor said, “This is between me and him.”
“Unless I say it’s not,” Gary said. “That would be another way of looking at things.”
The actor took a step at Gary now, like he was going to do something about it, badge or not, and as soon as the left hand came forward Gary caught it the way you would a softball in a mitt and said, “The next move anybody makes here will be me breaking that pretty nose of yours.”
It ended right there. The actor and his buddies got into a cab. Billy told the girls to get back inside with his teammates, who somehow managed never to leave the table. Billy started to introduce himself to Gary that n
ight and Gary said, “I know who you are.” Billy told him to come in, join the party, and about a half hour later he said, “How much you make? With the cops, I mean.” Gary couldn’t think of a reason not to tell him, so he did, right down to the thirty-seven cents at the end of it after everything got taken out. And right there, straight out that night, Billy said, “How’d you like to come work for me?”
Gary asked him what that meant, and Billy pretty much laid out what the job would be. Leaving out the parts about the girls. And Gary Hall said yes, just like that, the answer coming out of how tired he was of counting off the days and months and years to his pension, setting up his cameras across the way from some club where the mob boys had watched too many movies, life with Billy Cash sounding like more high life than Gary had ever known, all the way back to growing up under the el on Roosevelt Avenue in Corona.
After that, nobody fucked with Billy Cash and got away with it.
Excepting Monica.
In the early times, those first years, Billy never treated Gary like an employee, some kind of walk-around guy. “My brother,” is the way Billy would introduce him, “just from another mother.” That would be when they were clubbing or riding around in a limo or playing gin in the back of the team plane. It only changed over time, subtle at first, gradual, Gary not really noticing it, Billy helping himself to as many girls as he ever did but worrying about it more as he got older, as he started to lose a step even as he still kept getting his points, worrying more and more about his sponsors, letting them run his goddamn life as though playing ball had become some kind of moonlighting deal with him, some kind of side thing, that all that really mattered to Billy Cash now was the money.
Now he just wanted to hold on to as much of that money as possible when Monica and her lawyers came after it, sure that Monica was secure enough in her own celebrity now, her own deal, to think she could stand alone as Mrs. Cash without him now.
Once she got her half, what people said could be close to half a billion.
It was why the last couple of years Gary’s main job had become organizing all the logistics of the girls, setting up this whole elaborate floor plan with the three rooms at every hotel they stayed at, it never occurring to Billy to slow down. He just thought he needed to be more damn careful.
The fool losing a step on the court, but obsessed with staying one step ahead of Mrs. Cash.
There was a reporter from that new ESPN magazine Billy Cash ran with sometimes, a sharp-dressed young guy about forty, shaved head, named Jayson Miles. Miles also did some on-air work for ESPN and managed to act like an insider without busting balls the way some of the other TV experts did. Over time, he had managed to get tight with the right stars in the league, especially the hip-hop do-rag kids with their hair and their tattoos, gaining their trust in a way most other guys couldn’t, white or black. It was Miles being on television that allowed him to lamp with the ballplayers the way he did, nobody gave a shit what he wrote in some magazine. By now, hanging with Billy Cash as long as he had, seeing Billy Cash’s world from the inside, Gary understood that the only ones in the media who had any status with players were the ones they knew from the TV. The only time some player cared about the newspapers was when one of his boys—and they all had their boys—told him some writer was trying to mess with him.
Gary had seen Jayson Miles a few times on one of those shows where they all sat around and argued about everything. And when it came down to it, and the others were yelling about how these kids made too much money and didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything except themselves, Jayson Miles, in his cool way, would find a way to stick up for the young stars of the league, say they weren’t all that different from basketball stars all across history, it was just that the fat white guy sitting there watching with his beer and his Cheez Doodles didn’t like all the graffiti up and down their arms, and their Sprewell hair. So Miles was officially on the inside now, dressing like a dude, talking the talk even if he had been to Stanford as an English major, moving through this world as easily as if he were the one knocking down the midrange Js.
Gary was standing with Miles now in the hallway outside the visitors’ locker room at Madison Square Garden, Gary leaning against a wall next to this big mounted color photograph of Frank Sinatra. Miles was wearing a camel sports jacket, beige mock turtleneck sweater, two-toned shoes that probably cost as much as everything Gary had on, Gary’s black jeans and black leather jacket and gray pullover sweater.
Miles said to him, “Word is, your boy’s getting careless.”
Gary shrugged. “He keeps saying he’s all worried about Monica stalking him with her investigators and her picture-takers, having me do everything except sweep the room for bugs before he’ll even walk through the door. But he still thinks he can turn himself invisible every time his dick gets hard.”
“You remember what it was like in the old days,” Miles said. “He had so many of his logistics getting the girls in and out of hotels, I wondered if he forgot sometimes what room the one he was supposed to fuck was in.”
“I’m the one invented those logistics,” Gary said.
“Forgot.”
Gary said, “What are you hearing?”
“He got seen in the men’s room in that new club down in D.C. You know it? Jump, it’s called. Last time in New York, one of the waiters saw him getting it on, no shit, in a function room at the ’21.’ That’s the short list, trust me.”
“He gets his urges, tells me he’s going to go walk around, smoke one of his Cubans. Winking, telling me it’s one of his long ones, one of those hour smokes he likes so much.”
Gary felt the buzzer on his cell go off, took it out of his jacket pocket, saw the callback number, ignored it.
“When he does come back, in a half hour, hour, whatever, all cleaned up, happy-looking, he right away asks if I saw anybody suspicious while he was gone.”
“You think Monica’s having him followed?”
“Yeah. I think.”
“But following the boy and getting the goods on him are two different things.”
“So he keeps telling himself.”
Miles said, “You think she’s really ready to give it up? Being Mrs. Cash?”
Gary said, “I’m just surmising, okay? Knowing her the way I do. But she might be thinking like this here: Let me get my two hundred million, or whatever it is, and I don’t give no never-mind to whether I still got him in the house or not. On account of, I’ve got his money and his name. And the kids. And the house. And whatever. Then she can finance a real nice search for a new man, one who doesn’t want to fuck around on her soon as the car pulls out the driveway.”
On the other side of the locker room door they could both hear the kind of cellblock yelling you always heard from Billy and the rest of the Magic right before it was time for them to take the court.
“You guys leaving right after the game?” Miles said.
“In the morning.”
“He got something lined up for after?”
“I’m picking her up,” Gary Hall said.
Gary didn’t even catch her name right when she got into the backseat of the limo with him. Alicia? Nykesha? And even if he heard it right, he knew he’d have no idea how to spell it, the way they all jacked around with the way they spelled their names now. It didn’t matter, anyway, he knew that, too. She was just another one with too much makeup, the girl light-skinned black this time, long straight hair, another one thinking that looking as skinny as a scaghead was a good look for her.
Short skirt on her. Long legs. Spiky heels. No eye contact. If she was much more than twenty-one or twenty-two, Gary was missing his guess.
All he knew for sure, in his ever-expanding role as pimp, is that they kept getting younger.
He’d already picked up younger than Alicia or Nykesha or whoever she was for his man, Billy Cash.
“Where’d you meet Billy?” Gary said, talking just to talk, so he didn’t have to think too much on his own
all-around situation, where it was at and where it was going.
“Club,” she said, checking her nails, painted the same bloodred color as her puffed-up lips.
“Ray’s?” he said, meaning the club they were on their way to right now.
“Was with some friends,” she said. “When Orlando was in last time? Billy was with somebody else, but the manager handled it for me.”
“Got him your number, you mean.”
“Uh-huh.”
It worked that way a lot. They’d be in L.A., out having lunch after a shootaround, and every good-looking woman in the place would somehow find an excuse to stop by Billy’s and his table. Half the time giving Billy a lot of made-up shit about how they had met him in Vancouver or Alaska or at the Jamaica Inn one time. Then they’d leave and Gary would say to Billy, “When were you in Jamaica, I must’ve forgot.”
Billy would say, “Never, that’s when I was in Jamaica.”
Then he’d smile and say, “Aw, man, you know what it is by now. They’re just trying to come up with creative ways to say ‘Please fuck me.’”
The car pulled up to Ray’s, the new hot club, at least for the time being, this one way down in the West Village. They sat down at the table they had reserved for Billy and Gary ordered one of those nonalcoholic beers that tasted like real. The girl ordered a Cosmopolitan that came in a huge martini glass. They sat there feeling the loud beat of the music as much as listening to it until Billy made his big entrance about an hour after the Magic had beaten the Knicks, which Gary knew already from making a call when he’d gone to the men’s room, knowing the final was 112–100 and Billy had gone for forty-three on them. Now Billy did his usual at Ray’s, kissing on a few please-do-me girls at the bar, giving the manager his Billy hug even though you could barely notice him stopping him to do it, bopping his head in a cool way to some inner beat, acting as if he had all the time in the world before he got to the table where Alicia or Nykesha or whoever the hell she was was watching him with this heavy-eyed dreamy look, like she was ready to go right now.
