Murder at the Foul Line

by Otto Penzler

  “Hey, fine thing,” Billy said, leaning down to kiss her hair.

  It came out “thang,” the way it did sometimes when Billy wanted to brother himself down a little.

  Gary wondered if he called them “fine thing” as much as he did because he wasn’t sure of their names, either.

  “Hey,” he said to Gary.

  “Big man,” Gary said.

  To the girl, Billy said, “My man Gary treatin’ you good like I told him?”

  His man.

  One that brought the girls.

  Shit, Gary Hall thought.

  The girl tried to look sexy as she looked at Gary and took a sip of her Cosmopolitan and then licked her big lips.

  “He’s nice,” she said.

  “The best,” Billy said. “Like my own Secret Service.”

  Now Billy said to Gary, “You want to go wait at the bar? Or go someplace your own self? I’ll call you on the cell by and by, you can meet me outside the hotel?”

  “I know the drill,” Gary said.

  “We got it down, don’t we, dog?”

  “There’s a jazz club not too far. I may go over there, have a real drink, kick back for a little bit.”

  “Keep the phone on,” Billy said, “I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

  He always got more bossy at this hour of the night, not even hearing the snap in his own voice.

  Gary shook his head on the way to the door, thinking about what he’d talked about with Jayson Miles, how Billy obsessed on Monica the way he did, then thinking he could be out and about like this, grab-assing his way through life, telling people the girl just wanted to have a drink with him, or have her picture taken with him, if somebody did take a picture and it ended up in the papers.

  Gary didn’t go to the jazz club, just walked into the first quiet bar he saw, on Horatio Street, nursing a Scotch until the phone buzzed about one. Gary paid his check and got into a cab and got to the Pierre before Billy did, shot the breeze a little bit with the guy from security who helped him set things up, then walked up Central Park South, past Mickey Mantle’s, where he knew the limo would pick him up.

  When the car showed up, he got into the front, then it eased its way east on Fifty-ninth, uptown on Madison, back over to Fifth, and the front entrance to the Pierre. Gary got out and opened the back door for the girl, and the two of them walked through the lobby like a happy couple, Gary even putting his arm around her. There were simpler ways to do this, Gary told Billy that all the time, but he didn’t give a rat’s ass, this way was his way now, and his way was all that ever mattered.

  Thinking he was being as careful as he was with the ball with ten seconds left.

  Billy showed up a few minutes later in what was supposed to be the safe room, the one between his and Gary’s, the one he was sure was safe, tonight’s do-me girl getting herself ready for him in the bathroom.

  Gary checked the room one last time, made sure everything was all right, then he was out the door as soon as Billy was in, Gary not even bothering to say good night.

  They clinched home court for the playoffs, the Magic did, with a week to go in the regular season. Mostly, Gary knew, the rest of them watched as Billy did it, that was the truth of things, Billy doing it to the Wizards all by himself in that new MCI Center in downtown Washington, part of one of those urban fix-ups that mostly fixed up the owner of the team moving into a place like MCI. Billy Cash went in there and dropped his fifty-eight points on the Wizards and gave the Magic the best record in the NBA, east or west, carving those points into the young guys trying to stay with him the way you’d carve your initials on the side of some tree.

  Billy didn’t want to go out after the game, even though D.C. was one of his favorite cities to go clubbing in the whole league. “Gary, my brother,” he said in the locker room, “I believe I’m just gonna take my shit back to the Do-It Room over there to the Four Seasons.” That’s what he liked to call his fuck room at these expensive hotels. The Do-It Room. He’d been out in L.A. one time when he was a kid, visiting Wilt Chamberlain’s famous house in Bel-Air, and he’d come up on a room that was just water bed and mirrors, no real floor to it, and outside was a little plaque, next to the door, saying THE DO-IT ROOM.

  Billy told Gary to go pick up Sharon, the girl from Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms he’d met at lunch after the shoot-around, bring her over there.

  Billy said, “And tell her not to worry, the only illegal weapon I’m packin’ is the one I got right here,” he said, grabbing himself under his towel.

  Gary said he’d be sure to pass that along.

  Sharon. At least he had a name to put to the girl this time. Went outside where the limo was waiting next to the players’ entrance, drove to the address nearly all the way out of town, got her back to the hotel in Georgetown a little bit before Billy would be showing up after finishing with his media and whatnot. Took her up there, showed her around, called room service and ordered some of the champagne Billy liked, his big fruit platter. And whipped cream. Fresh-whipped and kept on ice. Lot of it.

  Gary smiled.

  The shit you did for love.

  The second-to-last game of the regular season was in Philadelphia, so the Magic were just going to bus up there in the early afternoon, Thursday afternoon, since they weren’t playing until Friday night.

  The phone rang in Gary’s room at the Four Seasons a couple of minutes after eleven.

  “Get down here now,” Billy said. “I got a situation.”

  “Your room or the other?”

  “Mine.”

  “You still got the girl here?”

  “Got Monica here,” Billy said, and hung up.

  Billy was wearing a white Magic T-shirt, baggy gym shorts. He was on one couch in the living room of his suite. Monica was across from him on the other couch in the room. She wore a sharp-looking navy-blue pantsuit, one leg crossed over the other, showing off some big heels on her black shoes. She had a black leather purse next to her. On the coffee table between her and Billy was a thick manila envelope and the kind of thick binder you used to carry to school. And a shoe box that had PRADA written on the side.

  By now, Gary knew that Monica would rather go barefoot than wear something other than Prada on her size 7 feet.

  “Monica,” Gary said.

  “Gary Hall.”

  He hung back, over where the room service table was, pouring himself a cup of coffee. Waiting to see how it would play out, now that they were all finally down to it.

  Here, Gary thought, in the real Do-It Room.

  “She’s servin’ me,” Billy said in a dead voice.

  “Just a different kind of serving than went on next door,” Monica said. “Kind always goes on next door.”

  “This is how you do it?” Billy said. “Blindside me this way?”

  Monica said, “One of us was blind, Billy. From the start.”

  “You said the papers were in the envelope,” Billy said. “What’s the rest of it?”

  “Aren’t you even a little bit curious?” Monica said.

  “You’ll tell me,” Billy said. “You always did like being the smart one, even when you were little Miss Congeniality behind your Disney desk, unbuttoning enough buttons on your blouse to show yourself off.”

  Monica said, “The binder’s my black book on you, Billy. You got your black book, with all your little whores in it? Now I’ve got mine. The shoe box has got cassettes in it, you can keep them if you want, watch yourself instead of the dirty hotel movies. All of it’s why we’re going to do this nice and easy, which means you can take that pre-nup you had me sign and throw it right out that window over there. I could’ve had somebody else serve you, but I wanted to do it myself. Put it all on the table, so to speak. We’ll call it irreconcilable differences. Maybe throw in a little mental cruelty on the side, just so it sounds more official. Then we smile and call it painful but amicable.” Monica smiled now. “Before I get my half.”

  Billy opened up the binder,
saw that some of the pages had black-and-white pictures under plastic.

  He took the picture out, stared at it.

  “Goddamn,” he said. “This here is Charrisse. From last week in New York. The one from MTV.”

  Billy looked over to Gary and said, “How’d somebody get a fucking camera in the room?”

  “It’s easy, you know where to hide it,” Gary said. “If you can’t have a practical application of all they made you learn with surveillance from the cops, what’s the point?”

  All you could hear now in the suite was the hum of the air conditioner, some kind of soft music playing from the bedroom.

  “You?” Billy said to him.

  From the couch, Monica said, “Us.”

  Billy turned and stared at her, then back to Gary, then back at the picture of him and Charrisse in the Do-It Room at the Plaza. Dropped that and pulled out another one. “Selena,” Billy said. Kept going through them and not saying the names now, just saying Cleveland and San Antonio and Phoenix and Detroit. Like he remembered the cities better than he remembered the girls.

  Billy Cash stopped finally and looked hard again at Gary, more hurt now than sad, or at least playing it that way. “Why?” he said.

  “Got tired of being the boy bringing the girls. Once you do that, all you are is somebody’s boy.”

  Monica stood up and said, “You know what they say, don’t you, Billy? My people will call your people.”

  Gary Hall walked over then and put his arm around her.

  “You two…?” Billy said.

  “Us,” Monica said.

  Gary Hall said, “Remember you’re always telling me to get my own girl? I did.”

  “Rich one, too,” Mrs. Cash said.

  WHITE TRASH NOIR

  Michael Malone

  All of a sudden Dr. Rothmann, the foreman of my jury, says she wants to talk to the judge. She gives me a look when she walks by the defendant’s table, straight in my eyes, and I nod back at her but I can’t tell what she’s thinking because there’s so many different feelings in her face. But behind me my Mawmaw stands up and bows her head to her. The judge and the jury get up too and they crowd each other out of the courtroom and just leave us sitting here. My lawyer leans over and says, “Charmain, you have got to change your mind and take the stand.” And I tell him, “No thank you.”

  Mr. Snow goes, “This is Murder One, Charmain. You just cannot kill your husband in the state of North Carolina if he played ACC basketball.”

  I go, “Well, this is Charmain Luby Markell and I’m not talking about my personal private life to a bunch of strangers in a court of law and have them turn it all into lies against me and mine.”

  I got this lawyer? He’s young, just two years more than me, and halfway through our first talk in the jail I can tell he hasn’t had a lot of Life Experience, which, between you and I, I’ve already had way too much. Tilden Snow’s his name, Tilden Snow III, and I think it’s lazy for a family to use a name three times in a row when there’re so many nice new names out there you can choose from. They even got little Names for Your Baby books at the checkout counters, which is where I got my Jarrad’s name. That’s what I call my little boy, jarrad Todd Markell, even though his birth certificate says Kyle Lewis Markell, Jr., totally because my husband’s mother worships the ground her son Kyle walks on. Well, did walk on before I shot him.

  So Mr. Snow wanted me to get up on the witness stand and tell why I shot my husband in the head and set him on fire in our backyard.

  Mr. Snow chews at a cuticle; his nails are a mess. He sighs a long deep sigh and shakes his head at me. “Please won’t you help me here, Charmain?”

  Please won’t I help him? Who’re they trying to give a lethal injection to, me or Tilden Snow III? I go, “Mr. Snow—”

  He holds up his hand like a safety patrol. “Tilden. I keep asking you, please call me Tilden. Mr. Snow’s my Daddy’s name.” I think he was trying to make a joke so I smiled and said I’d try to call him Tilden but I wouldn’t take the stand and tell why I shot Kyle.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he says. “Well, you better hope your friend Dr. Rothmann’s telling the judge she’s going to hang that jury.”

  I say, “What does that mean, she’s going to hang the jury?” But he just pulls on his ears like he wishes they were longer and he runs off with the other lawyers after Dr. Rothmann and the judge and leaves me to sit and wait, which is what I’ve mostly been doing since Kyle died. Which I admit he did do when I shot him.

  I’m used to it now but the first time they hauled me into this courtroom, I was crying and grabbing onto my grandma Mawmaw so hard they had to prize my fingers from around her neck. I saw the way it was upsetting her how they had my hands and feet both hooked up to a chain. But Mawmaw whispered at me, “Don’t you cry, baby doll, don’t you let those folks see you cry,” and I tried hard to stop and I did. The only other time I ever went to pieces was when Mawmaw brought Jarrad into the back of the courtroom and held him up for me to look at (he’s two and a half now and he was nineteen months last time I seen him). He had a little toy basketball in his hands and I swear he looked like his daddy, maybe because he started to cry and his face turned purple the way Kyle’s did when he got mad.

  The first day I was in court the whole jury kept staring at me like somebody was going to test them in the morning. Right off I noticed this one lady on the front row, a soft pretty lady, small, with a sharp smart face. From day one, she looked right at me with her head cocked over to the side like a little hawk, sort of puzzling about me. They said her name was Mrs. Nina Gold Rothmann, except they called her Doctor. She got to be the foreman of the jury even though she wasn’t a man. And for two whole weeks of the State’s making its case against me, she’s about never took her eyes off me.

  Now the State’s done and it’s time for our side to “shred them to pieces,” according to Mr. Snow, except I’m not going to take the stand so there won’t be much shredding likely to get done. Maybe that’s why Dr. Rothmann’s made them all go off to talk to the judge now. Maybe she’s in there telling the judge just give Charmain Markell the death penalty so the jury can go on home. They must be about as sick of hearing about that gun and kerosene and Kyle’s eleven points against Wake Forest as I am.

  The first day of my trial I didn’t like Dr. Rothmann. It’s rude to stare the way she does. But after a while I kind of felt like we was almost talking to each other. I heard all about her life at what they call the vow deer, I believe. She had to tell about herself to get on the jury, or get off it, which a lot of them tried to because of their jobs or kids or whatever. They said she was a big doctor at the Research Center. She told how she was working on what we’re all made up of, genomes, something like that. When you know their genomes, you can tell people what they’re going to die of someday. Well, but I guess I don’t need a research center to tell me that. Lethal injection. Least if the District Attorney, Mr. Goodenough, gets his way. Anyhow, this foreman lady’s job of sorting out our genomes sounded hard but interesting and I could tell she cared a lot about it from the way she talked. At first I smiled at her just to be polite, but later on it was sort of personal because she was divorced and had a boy in college. And I thought that was kind of like me—I mean, I’ve got one little boy and no husband anymore too. So a lot of days went by in court with me and Dr. Rothmann looking at each other. I started figuring out some beauty tips I could of given her if she’d come in Pretty Woman. She had three suits that didn’t do much for her; the sleeves were too long so she just had them rolled up. Her hands were nice though; somebody did a good job on her nails, but not us—I never saw her in Pretty Woman and I do all their hands.

  After a while I decided her eyes weren’t mean, she was just thinking hard all the time, not like some folks on my jury that were taking naps with their eyes open. Not that I blame them. All that State’s evidence was boring me, and it was my life. But Dr. Rothmann, she hung in there even with that old fat Mr. Goodenough mumbling ab
out ballistics this and ballistics that for four solid hours. Isn’t it something? I could not make myself listen.

  After a week or so Dr. Rothmann got to be somebody I could kind of talk to in my mind in my cell at night, like maybe explain things to her that were all balled up inside me like string in a junk drawer, like she’d be smart enough to see how they’d look if they got untangled. When I looked at her over there in the jury box, I felt like she could see what was true. I tried to explain it to my lawyer, Tilden Snow, but he said, “I don’t trust Rothmann.” He figured the D.A. must know something or he wouldn’t have let her on my jury because he said usually the State avoids these Ph.D.’s like the plague on account of they are soft on crime.

  Yesterday I told Mr. Snow in the visiting room how, deep down, I thought the foreman lady was kind of sweet and he snorts at me, “She’s about as sweet as a jar of pickled okra.” I said I was surprised somebody rich as him even ate pickled okra but he tells me, “Charmain, I’ve got a grandmama same as you and she loved pickled okra.”

  I say, “I know you do because my grandma used to clean her house and your mama’s house.”

  He says, “I know. Your grandmama was the White Tornado.”

  “Yes, she was and still is. She quit your mama,” I say.

  He wants to know why but he’s not surprised.

  I tell him. “Your mama called her a servant and said how she had to iron your daddy’s boxer shorts. And Mawmaw’s like, ‘No thank you, Mrs. Snow, I am not your servant and I am not about to put my hands in a strange man’s underpants.’”

  Mr. Snow—I’m sorry, I don’t want to call him Tilden—laughed. He says, “I didn’t know that. And here’s something I bet you don’t know. I remember you. Your grandmama brought you to the house with her one time while she was cleaning—”

  I nod. “She brought me with her to a lot of houses because I helped her clean till I started at Pretty Woman.”

  “Well, one time when I was there visiting my grandma and I guess I was about six or seven, I asked you if you wanted to swing on my swing and then I asked you if you’d marry me. Do you remember that?”