Murder At the Foul Line

MRS. CASH by Mike Lupica

They were inside the blue and white Academy tour bus, on their way down Fifth Avenue from the Pierre, on their way to the Garden, and Billy Cash was talking about Monica again.

Somehow it always came back to Monica these days, even when he was talking about all the other girls in his life, the ones Billy said he wanted to fuck, not have it be the other way around. Didn’t matter where they were, either, or who was listening. They could be talking about whether or not the Magic-Billy’s team-could hold off the Nets and Sixers for home court in the playoffs. Or whether Billy could score enough points the last two weeks of the season to hold off that little tattooed shit from Memphis, Taliek Moore, to win another scoring title, which would make it only ten in a row.

Billy didn’t even seem to pay much mind to his injured foot, that fascia deal he had going, whether or not he could mess himself up good by playing on it between now and when the playoffs started.

He was fixed on his wife. Mrs. Cash, he called her most times. At least when he wasn’t calling her “that bitch.” The former Monica LaGuerre. Most times Billy talked about her like she was some defender he couldn’t shake, not even with the famous step-back move he liked to use right before he shot his patented fade jumper. Or that move he’d make starting to his right, then planting his right foot-the one hurting him so bad now-so that the guy guarding him would go flying past just before Billy’d make another fifteen-footer, the ball usually hitting the net like hair hitting a pillow.

“You see that guy in the lobby last night, we got back from the club?” he said to Gary Hall.

Gary said, “Course I saw. You pay me for that, right, dog? To see shit?”

Billy Cash leaned back in the first seat on the left, behind the driver, the one that was always his seat, on the way to a shootaround or a game or to the airport in the night. Gary was where he always was, across the aisle.

“He coulda had a camera on him,” Billy said.

“Yeah,” Gary said, “he coulda. So could the room service waiter. Or the woman from housekeeping they keep on call twenty-four hours a day when you’re in town, in case you decide your pillow feels as hard as your dick or some such. Or the bellman brings your brushed suedes back looking all new after you smudged them someplace and they’ve been botherin’ you ever since.”

Only Gary could talk to him that way. Not even the Magic coach, Tommy Clayton, could. There’d never been a coach Billy Cash had in his life, all the way back to Wake Forest, who had any real juice with him. Or any coach Billy trusted. But he trusted Gary Hall, his bodyguard, the man in charge of what Billy liked to call his all-around situation, the ex-undercover cop from New York City he’d hired to permanently have his back, in season and out, work his surveillance, watching out for Billy Cash the way he had when he was chasing bad guys, going over every single hotel room Billy stayed in like it was in one of those crime scene shows on television.

Only the job was more than that now, Gary knew. All of a sudden, these last months, the full-time job was listening to this nonstop shit about Monica and how he was sure she was having him followed so it would be no problem when she divorced him to get half.

That and taking care of the girls.

Billy Cash said, “That your way of tellin’ me you checked him out? The guy in the lobby?”

“I talked to security. They said he was just a driver, wanting to be right there when his man, some Saudi asshole, came off the elevator, probably coming down from doing the same bad things in his suite you were about to go up and do in yours.”

“Speaking of,” Billy said. “We good for later?”

“With the MTV girl?”

“Uh-huh.”

Billy Cash leaned back, smiled. “MTV,” he said. “Maybe we’ll make our own damn video.” Then he closed his eyes and with them still closed said to Gary, “You see that driver guy in the lobby again, the one with the towel-head, you act like you’re with hotel security, check him out your own damn self.”

“After I get Miss MTV squared away,” Gary said. “As part of my ever-expanding duties.”

Billy wasn’t even listening, Gary saw that he’d put his headphones on, was probably listening to some of that thump-thump-thump rap he said got him going.

So this was another time when Gary stopped short of telling him that he didn’t sign on to be a pimp, that he didn’t know when he signed on with Billy Cash that his job would turn into getting the girls into the hotel and then out, after Billy had finished his business.

That and watch out for all the private eye shit Billy was sure Monica was putting on him, looking to have him by the balls when she filed, something Billy was sure was going to happen soon.

Billy took the headphones off and said, “You ought to get yourself a girl of your own, you wouldn’t act so fucking pissed off all the time.”

“So I can be as happy as you and Monica?” Gary said.

“I’m talkin’ about one who’ll love you for yourself, not for the cold cash,” Billy said. Always looking for another play on words when it came to Monica.

The Academy ran into some traffic, turned right on Forty-fifth, on its way over to Broadway.

“My life’s complicated enough,” Gary said, “watching out on your life.”

“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 night 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.

“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.