by Otto Penzler
“From a little bird.”
“I fucking hate birds. You know what’s the trouble with birds? They shit all over.”
“Business was fine?”
He sighed. “You any good?”
“As an investigator? Fair.”
“Should I bother to lie to you?”
“It would save time if you didn’t.”
“Okay, then. Business stank. We just inked a deal, Nike, terrific, I’m talking multiyear, multo dinero. Suddenly, Damon’s telling me Adidas makes a better shoe. Springier, he tells me, more bounce to the ounce, who the hell knows?”
“Well, if it’s better—”
“Better? Shoe? Nothing to do with the shoe! Look at these feet.” He waved his biscotti around again, this time at the gleaming loafers and wingtips holding down the carpet. “Guys that size, feet that size, they custom-make the shoe. Damon wants more bounce, more grip, he wants the thing to squeal like a pig or sing like a canary, Nike’ll put it in for him. Had nothing to do with the shoe. It was extortion.”
“He was holding Nike up?”
“Goddamn right. Add a few million or I sign with Adidas.”
“Didn’t he have a contract?”
“Oh, sure, he had a contract. But you’re Nike, you don’t want to be on the short end of a news story that the great Damon Rome wants out of an endorsement deal because he doesn’t like your fucking shoe.”
“So it would have worked?”
“Yeah, for him.”
“Not for you? Ten percent of a few more million doesn’t sound so bad.”
“It would have fucked me over, is what it would have done for me. I got other clients, you know. I represent major players, all sports. Who’s gonna sign a deal with any of my guys, Damon pulls this shit? No point in negotiating with Landau, he can’t control his clients: it would be everywhere.”
“And last night you tried to talk him out of it?”
“Right.”
“And?”
Sam Landau gave me a long look. “You ever pee in the ocean?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Made you feel better, right? But it didn’t matter a damn to the ocean.”
I asked Landau the same question I’d been asking everyone else: where he was when Damon Rome died.
“On my way home.”
“You and he left Shots together?”
“Are you kidding? I was so pissed I got up and stomped out. Small satisfaction but you get ’em where you can.”
“Anyone see you on your way home?”
“How the hell do I know? I drove, probably not.”
“Where was your car?”
“Right there. Garage around the block.”
Landau ate a few more cookies and I asked a few more questions. His answers put him right where I’d been hired to put people, right where I’d been able to put the others. He had a reason to be furious with Damon Rome and no alibi for the time of his death. He didn’t give any more than a philosophical shrug to the implications of my questions, but he didn’t seem sorry to see me walk away either.
Nathaniel Day hadn’t stirred from the white sofa, nor had his sister, but the seat next to Nathaniel was empty. I went over, offered my hand.
“Bill Smith,” I said. “I’m investigating Damon Rome’s death. I’d like to ask you a few questions. But first I want to tell you what a big fan I am of yours.” I turned to Nora Day. “And of yours. I watched you play in college.”
Ice in her voice, Nora Day said, “Long time ago.”
Nathaniel Day was not a handsome man, but his wide smile and crooked nose had dominated the sports pages, and occasionally the front pages, of New York’s newspapers for so long that it was hard not to think of him as someone I knew, could just sit down and chat with, talk plays and ball handling, ask for tips on my hook shot. Nathaniel’s nose had been broken, famously, in a high school tournament game he’d refused to come out of. He’d claimed it didn’t hurt, was just a bump. Then, because he was afraid a doctor would forbid him to play, he put off seeing one until the tournament was over. The first time New York had seen that wide smile was two weeks later, when Nathaniel Day, a sophomore at Christ the King and already a star, waved the trophy over his head.
He gave me a smaller version of that smile now, offered the seat on the sofa beside him. His sister gave me a cold look, one that: said easygoing friendliness was not a coin with much value in her realm. I was familiar with that look, too, had seen it on TV, as Nora Day followed the games.
I sat, shifted to face the two of them. Nora Day, her voice as chilly as her look, said, “I thought I heard they arrested Tony Manelli this morning.”
“I’m working for his lawyer. We think they have the wrong man.”
“Why?” She sipped her coffee. She was darker skinned than her brother, and better looking, but even seated, her height and her don’t-mess-with-me eyes created the sense of more space around her, perhaps, than there actually was.
“For one thing, he says he didn’t do it.”
She gave a scornful laugh. “Do people often say they did?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes they find they didn’t count on the guilt.”
“Well,” she said, “maybe Tony doesn’t feel guilty.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he’s not. Can I ask you some questions?”
Nora sipped more coffee, didn’t answer.
Nathaniel said, “Don’t mind her.” He grinned good-naturedly, a younger brother who’d known, and shrugged off, his older sister’s moodiness all his life. “What do you want to know?” Nora rolled her eyes, an older sister who’d known, and been short-tempered with, her younger brother’s affability since he was a baby.
“You went to dinner with Damon last night?”
“Sure.”
“And you,” I said to Nora, “didn’t?”
She turned her icy gaze on me, said, “I don’t go out after the games.”
I nodded, said to Nathaniel, “Luke McCroy and Holly March were there? And Randall Lee and Sam Landau?”
“That’s right.”
“Anyone else?”
“No.”
“Did Damon have a new security detail?”
“No. He said bad enough a guy tried to beat your time, you didn’t have to pay him for it.”
“What happened after dinner?”
“After? I went home kind of early. Had to put my damn leg up. Holly left, and Luke, just before me. Randall Lee was long gone.”
“Anyone see you after you left?”
Nora cut into her brother’s answer. “Wait—what are you saying?”
“My job is to find out what happened last night,” I said.
“You cannot—cannot—be saying Nat may have shot Damon?”
“No,” I said. “I’m asking if anyone saw him after he left. Did you?”
“Me?”
“Don’t you have apartments in the same building? Did you see him coming home?”
“I didn’t stay in New York last night,” Nora admitted grudgingly. “I went to Connecticut, to my house. But there’s no way Nat—”
“Come on, calm down, Nora. It’s the man’s job,” Nathaniel said soothingly. Nora, her glare fixed on me, didn’t seem soothed. Nathaniel turned to me. “I took a cab, went straight to my place,” he said.
“You take down the cab number, keep the receipt, anything like that?”
“No. But you want to, I’ll bet you could find the driver. I’m a little hard to miss.” He gave me the grin again.
I had to grin back. “That’s true. Okay, tell me more about dinner. Was anyone acting strange? Upset, on edge?”
Nathaniel shook his head cheerfully. “Only me.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Nat!” Nora snapped.
“Hey, it’s true.”
“Why were you?” I said.
Nathaniel lifted his aluminum cane, pointed to his immobile leg. “Sometimes I get pissed off.”
“Must be frustrating,” I agreed.
&
nbsp; “Frustrating?” Nora Day looked at me as if I’d told her that water was wet or fire could burn. “He’s out for the season,” she explained carefully, as though I must not have known that or I’d never have said anything so patronizing and dumb.
“It’s not that bad,” said Nathaniel calmly. “I’ll be back next year. Could’ve been worse, could’ve been serious. Just sometimes I get pissed off.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I saw you fling a chair the other night.”
Nathaniel’s smile turned abashed. “When Shawan missed that alley-oop?”
“You’d have made it.”
“That’s why I threw the chair. Told him I was sorry, later. Wasn’t him. He said he knew that. Nice guy, Shawan.”
“What about Damon? I hear he wasn’t a nice guy.”
“Damon was okay. He was just young. He just needed to understand what it is about a team.”
“Meaning what?”
“My brother,” Nora Day said between clenched teeth, “thinks it’s his job to make Knicks out of jackasses.”
“I’m sorry?”
Nathaniel said, “Some young guys, they come into the league, they think it’s all about them. Damon was a great player. So far he was carrying us, nobody even missed me.”
“That’s just wrong, Nat!” His sister’s coffee cup rattled as she put it down. “You’re the man. You’re the one they need!”
“I think she’s right,” I said. “Everyone’s waiting for you to come back.”
“Well, thank you.” He grinned again, and Nora looked at me as though, in a move that had caught her completely off guard, I’d finally said something intelligent. “But what I mean,” Nathaniel went on, “Damon loved the spotlight. If he kept on the way he started, hogging and hotdogging, team was going to fall apart, right around the playoffs. I wanted to make him see that.”
“Did he?”
“He was coming around. I was working on him for a while. He was getting better.”
“I just talked to Coach Wing. He doesn’t think so. He said Damon was ruining the team.”
“Great coach, Coach Wing. Guess he can be a little blind sometimes, though. Damon was coming along. You saw that, right?” He turned to Nora.
“Damon,” she said, “was a nasty, selfish, ball-hogging child. That’s all he was.”
Nathaniel turned back to me, winked. “Coming along.”
“Well, thanks,” I said. “Anything else you can tell me?”
“No. Got to say Tony’s okay, though. I’d be surprised, turned out he did kill Damon.”
“Is there anyone you wouldn’t be surprised to find that out about?”
After a hesitation Nathaniel shook his head. “Surprise me, anyone I know does turn out to be the one. Walk up to a man, middle of the night, pull a trigger on him? That’s cold.”
Nora snorted. “ You think. Most people wouldn’t have trouble with that.”
“Anyone in particular?” I asked her.
“I barely knew him,” she told me. “But it seemed to me a lot of people wanted a lot of things from Damon, and everywhere except on the court, he was a big disappointment.”
I stayed at Yvonne Rome’s for a few hours more. People came and went, and I talked to them all. Most of them had disliked Damon Rome, some mildly, some intensely. Most of them didn’t have much in the way of an alibi for the middle of the night. After the game the players had gone to get dinner or driven back to their suburban homes or taken limos or cabs to their city apartments. Some had walked, the way Damon was doing when he was killed. Some had no doubt been seen, but it wasn’t my job to find the people who’d seen them. On my way out I talked to Yvonne Rome’s doorman and garage attendant, and I went over and talked to the guy at the garage where Sam Landau’s car had been. I called Dan Wing’s wife and went up to Randall Lee’s building and later that night I spoke to the concierge at the hotel where Holly March had hooked up with Luke McCroy. I checked gun registrations: two of the Knicks owned .38s, though neither was a Smith & Wesson, and five others owned other guns, and those were just the New York permits. I looked at arrest records, too, and found one assault, a few drunk-and-disorderlies, one or two DWIs. No convictions except for Shawan Powell, thirty days’ suspended sentence on one of the D&Ds from his pre-Knick days. I called John Sutton the next morning, gave him a preliminary report.
“Sounds like a lot of people wanted a lot of things from Rome that they didn’t get,” he said.
“Seems to have been Rome’s specialty,” I agreed.
“Also seem to have been a lot of people who didn’t like him, wandering around loose in the middle of the night.”
I followed the preliminary up with a detailed package by the end of the day. Sutton called me that evening to say charges against Tony Manelli had been dropped, “pending further police investigation.” Which, according to Sutton, had started up already, cops swarming the Garden, interviewing Knicks and trainers, wives and girlfriends. Beer guys and janitors, too, probably.
“You want me to stay on it?” I asked. “I’ve got a list of things I didn’t do yet, stuff I’d have gone into deeper if I’d been looking to solve the case, not just muddy the waters.”
“I’ll let you know, but I don’t think so. I don’t really care what they find as long as they don’t come back at Tony again. We embarrassed them, let’s leave them alone for now. Go ahead and send your bill.”
“Forget it. Professional courtesy, for Tony.”
“That won’t make him happy.”
“Someday I’ll need him, he can do the same.”
When I hung up I did some paperwork, cleaned up some loose ends on other cases. About eight I went down to Shorty’s, sat at the bar, drank bourbon and listened to the talk. The Knicks game, on the TV over the bar, was the topic, and the opinion of everyone was the same: they stank.
They were at the Garden, playing Indiana. They wore black ribbons on their shirts and Dan Wing wore one pinned to his lapel. The dancers, including Holly March, wore them on their spangled leotards. I wondered if Sam Landau and Randall Lee were wearing black, too.
The Knicks were bad. They fell apart. Some of the fans wore black ribbons or black armbands, and one of the guys at the bar wondered aloud if those were for Damon or for the Knicks. The team had been built around Nathaniel Day, guys pointed out to each other, and they hadn’t had much trouble learning to feed Damon Rome and get out of his way, but now they had no star and Wing’s adjustments, his furious coaching, the players’ hunger, it just wasn’t enough. Without a franchise player they didn’t know what to do; they were lost, and it showed.
I didn’t know what to do either; I was lost, too.
It wasn’t good enough, this business of finding other people with as much motive and opportunity as Tony Manelli had. Good enough for Tony and his lawyer; they just wanted Tony free. And good enough, it seemed, for most of the people I’d spoken to. None of them seemed particularly bothered about the question of who’d killed Damon Rome. His death had consequences in everyone’s life and they were all handling those as they had to, but no one had liked Damon enough that they were burning with a need to know what had happened to him.
I hadn’t known him, and I probably wouldn’t have liked him. But I didn’t like walking away in the middle like this.
Not your job, Smith, I told myself. I sipped my drink, tried to settle back, tried to watch the game. I saw the Knicks falter, surge forward, fail. They were never really in the game; they lost. I finished my drink, said my good-byes, went upstairs.
The Knicks began a road trip the next day, three games in four days, and I saw the games, watched them lose two of the three, pull the last one out as a squeaker against an under-.500 team they hadn’t lost to in three seasons. I wondered whether the NYPD sent cops along to question potential suspects or just waited for the team to come back to town, because at what these guys were being paid to play they weren’t much of a flight risk. I wondered how the young detective, Mike Beam, was doing under the
ferocious glare of Dan Wing. The day the Knicks came back to town I called him, to ask.
“You’re not a guy I’m happy to hear from,” he told me.
“I’m feeling guilty.”
“Why? Your guy did it and you’re ready to give him up now?”
“He didn’t. But I know Wing worried a long investigation would make the players lose their focus and I’ll bet you’re even less popular at the Garden right now than I’d be in your squad room.”
“That would be a toss-up.”
“You getting anywhere?”
“You call just to give me a hard time?”
“No,” I said. “You may not buy this and there’s no reason you should, but this thing is eating me. Nobody liked the guy and the only ones who miss him are Knicks fans, but somebody walked up to him on the street and shot him. It wasn’t Tony Manelli but I’d like to know who it was. If I can help, let me know.”
in a guarded voice he said, “I have the report you gave Manelli’s lawyer. You know anything that’s not in it?”
“No.”
“Then you’ve been enough help, thanks.”
“Sorry.”
“Listen,” he conceded, “you could be right. Rome seems to have let down a lot of people on a lot of fronts. When I find the one fed up enough to kill him, that’ll be my guy. Your guy’s not out of the running, by the way.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I figured. Okay, just thought I’d call.”
We hung up, neither of us sure what I’d wanted. Beam went back to the business of investigating Damon Rome’s murder and I went back to the business of doing other things. That night when the game came on I didn’t go down to Shorty’s. I poured myself my own bourbon and sat on my couch and watched the Knicks take on Houston. It was no contest; they were disorganized, had no rhythm, nothing worked for them, and by halftime they were getting slaughtered. The cameras showed Wing glowering, Nathaniel on the bench shouting and pounding chairs. Nora Day, behind him, silently followed every play, as usual. Luke McCroy had stepped up and was playing well, and so were Shawan Powell and a couple of others, but it wasn’t enough. The dancers, led by an almost frantic Holly March, tried to get the crowd into it, but the crowd saw what I saw and wasn’t having any. I watched the start of the third quarter, the miscommunicated passes and the turnovers, heard the boos from the crowd at the rushed shots that wouldn’t drop, the easy layups missed, and all of a sudden, in the kind of shift that makes figure become ground, ground become the sharp center of focus, I knew what had happened.
