Murder at the Foul Line

by Otto Penzler

  Right now, on this bright December morning, his voice sounded strange to me: tight, strained. “Hey, Tony, long time,” I said. “I’m okay, what’s up with you?”

  “I’m in trouble,” Tony said.

  Twenty minutes later I was giving my name to a receptionist who gave me back a practiced, impersonal smile, and a minute after that, I was being led through the high-rise maze of a Midtown law firm to a partner’s glassed-in office. The paralegal who’d brought me closed the door and retired with the gravity of a butler.

  Tony and his lawyer, a dark, quick man named John Sutton, both stood when I came in, shook my hand, thanked me for coming. Tony was blond and broad-shouldered and usually looked better than this: his face was ashen under his skier’s tan, the skin around his eyes tight, like a man trying hard to focus because he didn’t understand what he was seeing. Tony was shorter than I and Sutton was shorter than both of us, jacket off, shirtsleeves rolled up, ready for some serious work here. He pressed a button on his desk, asked someone to bring us coffee, and I found out what the work was about.

  “Damon Rome,” Tony said. He leaned back in his chair, crossed one leg over the other, uncrossed it right away. “You heard about it?”

  “I heard. Everybody in New York heard.”

  “Yeah,” said Tony. “Well, until last week, I did his security.”

  I glanced from Tony to Sutton. “You’re not saying you think that makes you responsible?”

  “Christ, no.” Tony shook his head, sounded despairing, as though I’d missed the point entirely, might be no use after all.

  Sutton leaned forward on his big glass desk. “Tony’s about to be arrested for Damon Rome’s murder.”

  A young woman came in with a coffee beaker, mugs, cream and sugar. She left them on a space Sutton cleared on his desk. We each took our coffee, did what we wanted to it, sat back again.

  “Did you kill him?” I asked Tony.

  “I don’t want—,” Sutton began.

  But Tony said, “Jesus, John,” and then to me, “No. Goddammit. No. Good enough?”

  “If it’s true. If you did, I’d want to know why.”

  “I didn’t. He was a fucking asshole. But you’ve had this gig. Sometimes you work for assholes.”

  “So what do they have, then?”

  “All circumstantial,” Sutton said promptly. “None of it any good. They just need an arrest, fast.”

  “If none of it were any good,” I said evenly, “you wouldn’t have called me.”

  “Hey, John,” Tony said wearily. “Save the speeches for the jury, okay? Bill’s on our side. I think?”

  I nodded. “Tell me.”

  Sutton leaned back in his desk chair, leaving it to Tony but ready to jump in and protect him from his own mistakes, if he made any.

  “He fired me,” Tony said.

  “Why?”

  “I was fooling around with his wife.”

  Yvonne Rome: a former model who, in the months since Damon Rome had been with the Knicks, had burst like fireworks upon New York’s black-tie charity scene. You’d see her photo two or three times a week on the society pages, at parties and galas, on the arm of her famous husband or, if he’d had a game, flashing her wide smile at whichever of his close friends had gallantly escorted her.

  I said, “That was stupid.”

  “Tell me about it.” Tony rubbed his eyes. “But sometimes… you know?”

  I let that go. “What happened?”

  “A week ago, in that bar he owns, Shots? After the game.”

  “That’s where he was leaving last night, when he was killed.”

  “Yeah. It’s mostly where he goes.”

  “Okay. So a week ago…?”

  “Yvonne came to meet him, like sometimes she does. He was waiting. Turned out he was setting me and her up.”

  “How’d he know?”

  “I guess we weren’t real careful.”

  “Both of you weren’t? Or one of you was and the other screwed up?”

  Tony shrugged. I read: he’d been careful, Yvonne Rome had screwed up.

  “Go on.”

  “He started in on us as soon as she got there. Man, that s.o.b. knew words I never heard.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Told him to calm down. Stood there and took it as long as I could. Whole freakin’ bar was watching. Ended up, four other guys had to keep me and Damon from punching each other’s lights out.”

  “You threaten to kill him?”

  “We threatened to kill each other.”

  “And he ended up dead first.”

  Sutton, at his desk, nodded. Tony said, “Yeah. Damon said, he ever saw me and Yvonne together again, he’d waste us both. I said, he laid a hand on her, he was a dead man. He fired my ass, told me to beat it out of the bar. I asked her to come, but she stayed. Next day, Seattle comes to the Garden, she’s not there.”

  “Where was she?”

  “Lenox Hill, getting her arm set. Broken in three places.”

  “Did you mean it? That you’d kill him?”

  “When I said it. If I’d known about Yvonne, maybe I would have. But I didn’t.”

  “Didn’t kill him?”

  “Didn’t know. No one told me.” He shook his head. “Wish to hell someone had.”

  “Why? So you could have killed him?”

  He stared. “Because I’m in love with the lady.”

  “That true? Or you were just fooling around with Damon Rome’s wife?”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  I shrugged. “She’s classy, gorgeous, rich, married to a pain-in-the-ass basketball stud who expects everyone, including you, to jump when his fingers snap. You’re a bodyguard.”

  “Hey!” Tony started, but the deep red color in his face told more truth than whatever he could have said.

  “Forget it,” I said. “Doesn’t matter. What do you want me to do?” I asked Sutton that, not Tony, because strategy was the lawyer’s, not the client’s.

  “Last night,” Sutton said, “Tony was home. Alone. All night.”

  “That’s hard to prove.”

  “We have the night doorman saying he didn’t see him go out after eleven. That’s good but it’s not enough. Tony was heard threatening Rome and he had what could sound like a motive to kill him. I didn’t know Rome, but from what I’ve heard, there must be a dozen other people who did, too.”

  “You want me to find them?”

  “Right. As I said, everything the D.A. has is circumstantial. If the same circumstances—motive and opportunity—also apply to other people, they’ll have a lot more trouble indicting. Right now they have it in their heads it was Tony, so they’ve stopped looking. I want to kick-start them.”

  I finished my coffee. “They have the weapon?”

  “A Smith & Wesson .38. The number had been filed off. No prints. They found it in a Dumpster up the block.”

  “In your face, NYPD.” To Tony: “What do you carry?”

  I thought he’d be insulted by the question, but he just looked surprised, as though I should have known the answer. “A .38, man,” he said, pulling back his jacket, showing me. “It’s what you taught me.”

  John Sutton gave the NYPD detective on the case a call. I spoke to him first, just to find out what he had, to let him know what I was doing. His name was Mike Beam and he was a young guy but his words were ageless cop words: “Don’t screw up my case.”

  “We think you have the wrong man,” I told him.

  “No, you think you can keep me from proving I have the right man. Don’t mess with my witnesses, keep out of my way.” He said that, but without any teeth, because I was working for the defense and as long as I stayed on the right side of the line, he knew he couldn’t stop me. He told me they had witnesses to the near-brawl in Shots last week and that the widow and Tony had both admitted to the affair. He said Tony had no alibi for last night, and the recovered gun was Tony’s weapon of choice, though he couldn’t prove it
was Tony’s. I knew all that, and then he told me something else I knew. “The whole city is watching this, Smith. Whoever shot Rome shot up the Knicks’ chances, and people are pretty much pissed off about that. Including,” he added, “me.”

  I told him, “Me, too.”

  Then Sutton took the phone, arranged, now that they’d hired me, to bring Tony in. His last call, before we all left his office, was to a bail bondsman.

  My first stop was Yvonne Rome. The battered wife, publicly humiliated, her lover canned by her abusive husband. She should have plenty of motive, and opportunity.

  I called, used Tony’s name and problem to get past an assistant who thought I was press. Yvonne Rome received me in a duplex high in Trump Tower. A gray-uniformed housekeeper asked me to wait and I did, looking around.

  Abundant sprays of flowers and baskets of fruit gave the cream-carpeted living room the look of a Renaissance still life. The scattering of subdued people drinking coffee added to the effect. Still Life with Moors, I thought. Very tall Moors: of the seven guests in Yvonne Rome’s living room, four were Knicks, including Nathaniel Day, and a fifth was Nathaniel’s sister Nora. It’s not all that rare for me to be the only white person in a room, this being New York, but at six-two I don’t often get the chance to be the short guy.

  The view through the floor-to-ceiling windows was terrific, south down Fifth Avenue, west to the Hudson. Dirt and traffic, trouble and noise stayed on the far side of the glass. The romance of rooftops and the glitter of sun on the river were all the New York you could see from here.

  When Yvonne Rome separated herself from her guests and came to the door, though, I thought maybe she’d stopped buying that romance and glitter some time ago.

  It wasn’t only the cast on her arm or the lump on her forehead, not just the startling white patch of bandage against the ebony skin of her jaw. It was a flatness in her eyes, an indifferent distance in her voice as she said, “So you’re the detective who’s supposed to get Tony out of it?”

  “Bill Smith,” I said. “I’m sorry for your loss. But Tony says he didn’t kill your husband.”

  “Loss.” Yvonne Rome cocked her head, as though considering a new thought. Then she shrugged, the strap of her sling rising, dropping back. “Come with me.”

  I followed her elegant model’s slouch into a small room filled with sunshine and wicker furniture, gauze curtains and lush potted plants and watercolors of children handing each other flowers. The air was tinged with a spicy scent rising from crystal bowls of potpourri. Brick paved the floor as though this were a sunroom, a place you could just walk out into the garden from, be on solid ground, but of course it was thirty stories above Manhattan and the windows were sealed.

  “Damon hated this room,” Yvonne Rome told me, crossed her long legs as she sat on a wicker chaise. “He wouldn’t come in here. You know Tony and I were having an affair?”

  “He told me.”

  “The whole world probably knows, because Damon made that scene at Shots. Damon loved scenes. When he made one everyone looked at him.” She leaned across her cast to slip a cigarette from a silver box beside her, held it in a languid hand. I stood, lit it for her, lit my own. Her eyebrows rose. “You smoke? No one smokes anymore. This was the only room in this whole place I was allowed to smoke.” She shook her head, streamed out a plume. “Allowed. In my own house. How pathetic is that?”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “Where was I?” Her eyes widened with amusement. “This is Tony’s plan, to find someone else to pin it on? Me?”

  “My plan. Tony wouldn’t do that. He says he loves you.”

  She shot an arrow of smoke into the room. “He’ll get over it.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Did you love Damon?”

  “When I married him. You know,” she said, “when we were dating he never hit me. Not once. Isn’t that interesting?”

  “When did he start?”

  Tapping the cigarette into a silver ashtray, she said, “On our wedding night. He couldn’t get it up. Not”—she gave me a sly smile—“that that was the first time. But now that we were married, it was my fault. Damon Rome,” she said, leaned back on the rose-patterned cushions of the chaise, “superstud. The truth is, he wasn’t very good in bed. In fact, there were times I thought about shooting him because he wasn’t. You think maybe I did?”

  “If I were you I might have shot him because he wasn’t very nice.”

  She looked steadily at me, pulled on her cigarette again. “Well, you’re not me,” she said. “I was here last night. Ask Maria.”

  “That was Maria who answered the door? Would she know if you went out late?”

  “My,” she said, lifted her head, sank back again. “I have no idea. But ask the doorman. Ask the kid at the garage. Go ahead, ask whoever you want.”

  “I will. Tell me, what would have been Damon’s routine, after the game?”

  She used her good hand to wave away any interest in the question. “Dinner.”

  “At Shots?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes he’d grace some other lucky place with his glamorous presence.”

  “Alone?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “With other guys from the team?”

  “Some. Most of them don’t like him, you know. I believe ‘grandstander’ was one of the kinder words they used. Hot dog? Is that something basketball people say?”

  “If it fits. Who went with him, then?”

  “The really important people in Damon’s life. His agent, Sam Landau. Those whores from the halftime show. I’m sorry, dancers. I think one of them is here right now, as we sit here and speak. And Randall Lee.” She flashed the famous smile, made up of teeth too perfect for anyone to have been born with.

  “Who’s Randall Lee?”

  “He’s right out there.” Again the indolent hand. “Go ask him.”

  “But not Damon’s teammates?”

  She shrugged. “Some of them sometimes. Nathaniel didn’t mind Damon. Nathaniel’s too nice a guy for this world, if you ask me, but of course you didn’t.”

  “His sister Nora?”

  “Sometimes. More to make sure that Nathaniel left at a decent hour and didn’t drink too much than because she enjoyed the company.”

  “She didn’t like Damon?”

  A faint smile lifted her lips. “First of all, no one really liked Damon. Second, Nora doesn’t like any of them, except Nathaniel. She’s permanently angry at God and the world because they’re playing and she’s not. I understand she was as good as her brother. I mean, I don’t know anything about basketball, of course, but that’s what I’ve heard.”

  Being married to Damon Rome, I imagined, you’d have to go pretty far out of your way not to know anything about basketball. “She was better,” I said.

  “Oh. Well, then, I suppose it’s a shame. Maybe the Knicks should try her out. To replace Damon? If she’s that good. They’d still have a shot then. Everyone would be so pleased.” Her tone said everyone but Yvonne Rome, who couldn’t have given less of a damn.

  “She was a point guard when she played,” I said. “Damon was a forward.”

  Yvonne Rome shrugged off such petty distinctions. She tapped her cigarette against a crystal ashtray. “I thought, when I first came here,” she began, but trailed off.

  “You thought…?”

  She pinched a tiny brown leaf off an otherwise perfect ivy. “The other wives and girlfriends, they’re really into the game. I have nothing to talk about with them. But Nora, I’d heard she liked flowers.” She pulled her hand back into her lap and looked at me. “But she’s more into the game than anyone else. Even with Nathaniel out, the team’s chances are all she cares about. I should have known.” She took a draw on her cigarette, blew a smoke ring. It drifted past a drawing of two bonneted little girls walking arm in arm.

  I ground my own cigarette out. “Did you go to dinner with Damon?”


  “Sometimes,” she said.

  “Did you go last night?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t see him after he left for the game?”

  “Or before. I’ve been avoiding him. I know it’s hard to believe, avoiding someone as exciting and magnetic as the great Damon Rome. But, you know, he did break my arm.”

  Motive and opportunity: that was my job. Nothing Yvonne Rome had told me eliminated her from my list. I left her among the wicker and the plants and joined the somber crowd in the living room. Two more Knicks had arrived, raising the average height of the population another few inches.

  At a table spread with sweets, I poured myself a cup of coffee and looked around. I spotted two unfamiliar faces. One was sweet, toffee-colored, smoothly perfect. That face was on a thin young woman in a black suit that would have been appropriate to the occasion if the skirt had been more than two inches long. She was tossing glossy curls and sharing sad thoughts about Damon Rome, or at any rate sharing something, with Luke McCroy, the Knicks’ rookie shooting guard just out of Georgetown. The other strange face was much darker, belonged to a walnut-skinned man who stood alone by the window in a black suit, black silk shirt, black tie. The corner of a black handkerchief rose from his breast pocket, and his black shoes shone. His hair and mustache were salt-and-pepper. I had three or four inches on him, and he had ten or fifteen years on me, which made him the shortest and oldest man in the room. But his look held its own. I took my coffee and headed over.

  “Randall Lee?” I asked.

  “Well, now, that’s right.” He turned from the vast view, gave me a smile and raised eyebrows. “Who might you be?”

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

  “Well, now,” he said again, “that would make you not an officer of the law, wouldn’t it? From what I hear, the official investigation is over and done and the bodyguard’s been fingered.”

  “There are still some questions.”

  “He doesn’t confirm, he doesn’t deny,” Lee mused, as though talking to a third person. He bit into a white-frosted petit four from a plate of them he held. “So I’m right. And you’ve come to talk to me. Look out, Randall Lee, you’re being investigated.”