Murder At the Foul Line

SHOTS by S. J. Rozan

I’d been following the Knicks all season, but I didn’t see Damon Rome’s last game. I was down at Shorty’s that December evening, with a beer and a bunch of guys who, like me, could have been drinking at home, where the liquor’s free and the TV tuned to whatever you want. But the liquor’s the excuse, not the reason. And at Shorty’s, the TV over the bar is on so the silent drinkers have something to keep their minds off whatever brought them here alone, and the ones who want to talk to each other have something to talk about.

It was late in the football season, still plenty of time left for basketball, so the TV was tuned to the Giants and the talk was interceptions, rushing, bad knees and bowl chances. Close to halftime, waiting for a commercial to pass, someone ordered another Rolling Rock and brought up the Knicks, how hot they were, and other guys, working on their own beers, shook their heads over it. Who’d have thought? The Knicks unstoppable heading for the playoffs, a real shot this year at taking it all, in a season when Nathaniel Day played only ten games.

It was that new kid, Rome, one guy said, nobody liked him but everybody knew it, damn punk, ball hog, head case, but shit, he could play. Knicks should have grabbed him up when he came into the league two years ago, they’d have their rings by now. Grabbed up an asshole like him, what are you, crazy? said someone else. What they’re paying him, they could have gotten three veterans, guys who want to play ball more than they want to see their name in the papers. A third guy said, Ah, Rome’s just the spark plug anyway, he just embarrassed them, they’ve been riding Nathaniel’s coattails for too long and now he’s hurt they’ve all got to step up, play the game for a change. Nathaniel, by him being so good he might actually be bad for the Knicks, anyone ever thought of that?

But you can’t knock Nathaniel Day in a bar in New York without half a dozen guys telling you you’re full of shit. Day’s the franchise, one guy said, and another said he’ll be back next year and the Knicks can’t go anywhere without him, watch, they’ll fold in the playoffs. The anti-Nathaniel guy downed a handful of peanuts and said, Hell, they been folding in the playoffs for eight years with him, and come on, a guy who’s coached by his sister?

But the sister thing didn’t fly. Everyone knew it was Nora Day, five years older than Nathaniel and barely three inches shorter, who’d gotten him through Christ the King as an All-American, through Seton Hall as the most draftable center in the college game, through his first, stunning season with the Knicks, when he was unanimous choice for Rookie of the Year. From then on, Nora had sat courtside, with a shrewd eye to what was missing from the Knicks’ game and how she could coach Nathaniel to provide it: rebounding, foul shooting, the fade-away jumper that made him as big a threat from the outside as the inside. She made him indispensable and she made him the franchise; the coaches organized the offense around him and he did the work, pre- and postgame practices, offseason conditioning, weight training, whatever it took, with his sister his personal coach. And, one of the pro-Nathaniel forces said, and you know he wouldn’t have without her pushing him all the time. Natural talent like that, but too nice a guy for his own good, you see it all the time. No killer instinct, that guy. I had that kind of skills, catch me helping other teams’ players back up, after I knocked ’em on their ass. You had any skills at all, another guy said, you wouldn’t be sitting here right now on your ass. Yeah, well, you watch, the guy without skills said, she’ll have him in rehab the minute the cast comes off, he’ll be better than ever next season.

That was the way of it and everyone knew it: Nathaniel was who he was because Nora was who she was, and Nathaniel was the first to say so. Nathaniel could afford to be a nice guy, easygoing, because Nora was driven. Nora didn’t take vacations, Nora didn’t spend time in the country until the off-season-though Nathaniel had bought her a house, because she liked gardens-and as far as anyone knew, Nora didn’t date. Nora had a full-time, overtime, all-the-time job, and that was Nathaniel.

The other thing everyone knew was that Nora Day would have been twice the player Nathaniel was if there’d been a woman’s pro game when she left college. But there wasn’t and hey, one of the beer drinkers said, that’s how it goes, too bad for her, but guess Nathaniel and the Knicks lucked out, huh?

The anti-Nathaniel guy just shook his head and drank his beer. Still, someone said, be something if the Knicks finally got their rings in a season with Nathaniel on the bench. Yeah, well, you got that right, someone else said. It’s a damn shame, almost, and a worse shame we were gonna have to be grateful to a trash-talking, cornrowed, skirt-chasing asshole like Damon Rome. And another guy said, Yeah, but he’s our asshole now. Everyone laughed, and the commercial ended, and the Giants snapped the ball.

I didn’t see the Knicks game and I didn’t hear who won, and I didn’t hear until I hit the diner for breakfast the next morning that after the game was over, after the fans had all filed out and the players had left and the Garden was deserted and silent, someone who was not grateful had stepped in front of Damon Rome on an empty New York street and put a bullet through Damon Rome’s heart.

I read about it in the papers and talked about it with the other guys at the diner counter as I drank my coffee, with the waitress as I ordered eggs and, as I paid my check at the register, with the owner, a Greek who’d first learned English from baseball radio broadcasts forty years ago. I talked about it, but I didn’t get into it until, on the street on my way home, my cell phone rang.

“Smith.” I stopped in the cold, clear light, moved closer to a building to get out of the way.

“Tony Manelli, man. How you doing?”

It had been maybe a year since I’d heard from Tony Manelli, longer since I’d seen him, but that didn’t mean anything. Young, sharply muscled, an ex-marine, Tony had worked for me years back. He was working investigation because he needed the state license, but his goal was protection; I’d worked both and gave him what help I could. In the years since, our paths sometimes crossed, more often didn’t, but the few times I’d needed someone to fill out a security detail I’d hired Tony and had no reason to complain.

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.”

“I just want to know what happened last night.”

“Last night I lost seventy-eight thousand dollars.”

“Sounds like a bad night.”

“Average. My goal is to win more than I lose, but there are those other nights.”

“We all have them.”

“My stroke of good fortune was that Damon had no bets down, so of the pitifully small pile of money I did win, none of it was his. Seeing the kind of night Damon had, that would have been a bad night.”

“Damon Rome was a gambler?”

Lee grinned. “Shocking, right?” He stuck out his hand. “Randall Lee, oddsmaker.”

“You were his bookie?” I said as we shook.

“You,” Lee said, “are right on top of things. I like to see that.”

“Why would it have been a bad night if you’d won Damon’s money?”

Lee frowned. “Could it be I was wrong about you? Think, sonny. Damon’s gone. The missus feels very little sense of obligation about Damon’s debts, and I’d hardly be one to lean on her in her tragic circumstances.”

“Sensitive of you.”

“To my own good name, my boy. Word would get around. It wouldn’t do. Nonetheless, I’m already in the unenviable position of writing off twelve thousand dollars in Damon’s paper. Damon, you see, had very little sense of obligation either.”

“He died owing you money?”

“If I stretch my imagination I can think of it as a marketing expense. Sadly, I don’t have the imagination to handle much more than twelve thousand.”

“Twelve thousand dollars sounds like a lot of marketing expense to me.”

“It most certainly is. I’m not happy about it. But I suppose your next question would be, did I shoot Damon because I was sick and tired of his deadbeat ways? Did I do him dirty because he wouldn’t pay up?”

“I’m not sure I would have asked that. But go ahead and answer it.”

“Let me tell you something about my business, sonny.” He leaned close, as though I was about to hear a trade secret. “Dead men don’t pay.”

Lifting his eyebrows to indicate our new brotherhood of esoteric knowledge, Randall Lee bit into another petit four.

I said, “But if Damon’s debt was no good anyway, I could see writing him off, too. That way other people would have gotten the message.”

Randall Lee wagged his finger. “That’s the old way. In my business we have new paradigms now. Like I mentioned, Damon’s debt was a marketing expense.”

“Meaning?”

“Another secret you might want to know is, people are sheep,” Randall Lee told me. “Randall Lee partied with Damon Rome, We ate and drank and fondled the girls. People saw us and said, ‘Who’s that?’ and when they found out, they said, ‘I want to lay off money with the guy Damon Rome lays off money with.’ ”

“Were you the only one?”

“Only bookie Damon had? Odds are, I am.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Damon bet dumb and lost. Then he didn’t pay up. I made it back in exposure: I took in more in sucker bets from his groupies than Damon owed me. Who else was hanging around? Who else was getting a public relations benefit-or anything else-from Damon, to make it worth putting up with his cavalier attitude towards his responsibilities?”

“Who was?”

“Well, now,” Randall Lee said, “because you’re a hardworking boy, and because I didn’t kill Damon, I’ll tell you who wasn’t, lately.”

“Okay.”

He spread his arms. “Sam Landau.”

“Damon’s agent?”

“You see him here?”

“I wouldn’t know him.”

“Exhibiting good taste on your part. But his client’s dead and he’s not here to pay respects. I rest my case.”

“Was he at dinner with Damon last night?”

Randall Lee peered at me. “A sneaky way of asking was I at dinner with Damon last night?”

“Were you and Landau at dinner with Damon last night?”

“Yes. Both of us. And Nathaniel.” He indicated an ivory leather sofa across the room supporting Nathaniel Day’s broad-shouldered bulk, his leg in its high-tech brace resting on a matching hassock. “And Luke McCroy,” Lee said, pointing, “and Holly March.” He nodded at the thin young woman in the skimpy skirt. “When she was an exotic dancer she called herself Holly Ivy. Personally, I prefer to think of her as Holly Cow. But brave, to show up in the widow’s own lair. Where is the widow, by the way?”

“In the garden,” I said. “Nora Day wasn’t there? At dinner?”

“Nora wasn’t a regular at Damon’s table. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and Damon was a fool. It’s a shame, because I rather enjoy her company. She’s a decisive young woman, and surrounded as I am in my professional life by waverers, doubters, coin tossers, and second-guessers, I find her a breath of fresh air.”

I asked Randall Lee another question or two, and his answers didn’t cross him off my list. He’d been the first to leave after dinner last night, had taken a cab to his Upper West Side apartment, where he lived alone. If he was fibbing about the bookie business being run along new paradigms these days, he could be said to have had both motive and opportunity. I thanked him and left him by the window admiring the view

I wanted to talk to Sam Landau, who wasn’t here, and to Nathaniel, and to Holly March and Luke McCroy, and, one by one, to the rest of Damon Rome’s teammates. Nathaniel, on the sofa beside his sister, was talking to the Knicks’ backup center, Shawan Powell. Powell had racked up more minutes these last two months with Nathaniel out than he had in his first three years in the NBA. He wasn’t bad, but no one thought for a minute he had anything but a supporting role in he Knicks’ run at the playoffs, a run that had starred the now-gone-forever Damon Rome.

I figured Nathaniel and Powell would keep for a while, and turned my attention to Holly March and Luke McCroy, he on a leather recliner, she on the arm. He said something and she gave him a soft, teasing smile. She poked him in the shoulder and said something and he laughed. He was handsome and she was beautiful and they both seemed to be admirably handling the death of Damon Rome.

They handled my approach well, too, with polite, interested looks, handshakes as I offered my name and my errand. There being no other chair in the vicinity, McCroy swung his long legs off the hassock and I sat there. Holly March stayed where she was. A sweet scent floated on the warm air, the complicated delicacy of expensive perfume.

“I understand you both went to dinner with Damon after the game last night,” I said.

“That’s right,” said McCroy. Holly March nodded, her mahogany eyes wide to show sincerity.

“Can you tell me about it?”

“Not much to tell,” said McCroy. His shaved head reflected the sunlight. “We went to Shots for some of those good steaks they have there-”

“Except for me,” Holly March put in, her voice breathy and high, like a little girl’s. “I had pasta. I’m a vegetarian.”

I nodded; McCroy waited, eyebrows raised, in case she had more to say, but she smiled at him and looked down, as though to apologize for usurping his storytelling prerogative.

He took her hand, went on. “Then we left. Damon stayed to finish his conversation with Landau.”

“Sam Landau? His agent?”

“Yeah. Damon said he needed to talk to him, privatelike.”

“You know about what?”

“Uh-uh. Damon and me, we wasn’t close like that.”

“Can you tell me who else was at dinner?” I asked that, though I already had Randall Lee’s list, just to see what McCroy would say. He said the same. Holly March used wide-eyed silence to signal agreement and traced her scarlet fingernail across the back of McCroy’s hand to signal something else.

“From what I hear, not many of Damon’s teammates hung out with him,” I said.

“Not many liked him,” McCroy said simply.

“Why?”

McCroy shrugged. “He was the man. He was the great Damon Rome. With Damon, wasn’t about the game.”

“What was it about?”

“Damon’s stats. Damon’s picture in the papers. Damon’s endorsement deals. He was a damn ball hog, worse than guys on the playground.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a teammate.”

“Damon didn’t never understand the word ‘pass,’ wasn’t coming out of his own mouth. Dude could say, ‘Give me the damn ball,’ but someone else said it, he couldn’t hear it.”

“But you went to dinner with him. And so did Nathaniel.”

“Nathaniel, he hangs with the new guys. Thinks it’s his job, show us the ropes. Hangs with me, with Damon. Don’t nobody piss Nathaniel off, off the court.”

“And you? Damon didn’t piss you off either?”

“Sure he did. I like the ball, too, sometime.”

“So why did you go?”

McCroy smiled up at Holly March. “Other considerations.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I have to ask this. I was under the impression, Ms. March, that you were seeing Damon Rome?”

She smiled. “Who told you that?” she asked gently, as though she was worried my feelings would be hurt when I found out how wrong I was.

“It’s just something I heard.”

“Well, we did date a little bit. A while ago. But Damon wasn’t faithful. I like faithful men.” She smiled again at McCroy, dipped her head so her curls hid her face.

Feeling very much like I was cutting in on their dance, I said, “You dated Damon Rome before he got married?”

She looked up at me, tilted her head like she was trying to figure out where I’d gotten that idea. “No,” she said. “This fall, when the season started.”

It seemed it hadn’t occurred to her that a married man who’d date her was by definition not a faithful man. “Was it a problem for you two, when you… became interested in each other?” I asked them both. “I mean, did Damon object?”

“Well,” Holly March said, “maybe if Damon had known.”

“He didn’t?”

“That’s why I went to dinner with him, and things,” she explained. “He thought we were still seeing each other.”

Holly March’s definition of “faithful” was, I decided, fairly unique. I turned to Luke McCroy to see if he had anything to add.

Luke McCroy stared at me in silence, and then, once again, he shrugged. “Ball hogs,” he said, “they don’t share well.”

I asked a few more questions: when had they left Shots, where had they gone? They’d left within minutes of each other, not together, they said, but had hooked up as planned in a hotel lobby on the next block. From then on until the next morning they were each other’s alibi. Holly March smiled gently at me and Luke McCroy beamed at her. They seemed to have run out of things to say to me, and they obviously had a lot to say to each other. I thanked them and stood.

I was thinking to talk to Nathaniel next and I had just started over there when the housekeeper opened the door to let in someone: a white man shorter than the tall-tree Knicks around me, taller than I, with a face I knew. When he’d played, Dan Wing had been as big as you’d expect, six-four, average for the NBA in his day. But his day was twenty years ago and the players were bigger now. If he were still playing he’d be a little guy, but he was the head coach of the New York Knicks and that made him as big as anyone in the league.

I watched as Wing strode into the room, his jaw thrust forward, his brows knit, wearing that glowering look you saw courtside during the games and in front of the banner at the press conferences afterward. It was the look he’d worn as a player, too, pure concentration and intimidation. I’d always thought of it as his game face, and maybe it was, but it occurred to me now that there were people who never took their game faces off.

When Wing came in, a change seemed to come over the players, tiny shifts in stance and expression, a sense of sharpened alertness. They greeted him, nodded in his direction, went back to the conversations they’d been having, but I got the feeling that each of them knew where he was all the time, and the air became electric. Wing was a famous disciplinarian, a my-way-or-the-highway kind of coach who had taken a team of talented but not, with the exception of Nathaniel Day, brilliant players and pounded them into fiercely loyal troops, championship contenders every year he’d coached them. He put up with Nora Day because Nathaniel’s contract said he had to, but he made no secret of the fact that she was a thorn in his side.

Damon Rome, acquired over Wing’s objections by the Knicks’ management as soon as it was clear Nathaniel was out for the season, had been another.

I waited for Wing to ask about the widow and be told she was resting. I met him at the sideboard. He poured himself a cup of coffee, picked up a crustless cucumber sandwich and glared at it.

“Coach?” I said.

Wing snapped me a suspicious look, devoured the sandwich in one bite. “Who’re you?”

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

That didn’t seem to improve his mood. “You a cop?”

“No.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“I’m working for Tony Manelli’s lawyer. We think they’ve got the wrong man.”

“You do? Who do you think the right man is?”

“I don’t know.”

“Smith.” He picked up another sandwich. “Don’t fuck with my team.”

“Is there a reason I should?”

“No, there’s a reason you shouldn’t. I can still pull this out but I’ll need the men focused. They think someone thinks one of them killed Damon, they lose focus. You get it?”

“What if one of them did?”

Wing gulped some coffee. “Would have been a public service.”

“You didn’t like him?”

“You read the papers?”

“I understand he was disruptive.”

“He was fucking uncoachable. He was a goddamn time bomb that kept going off.”

“The price of a shot at the championship?”

“Screw that. I’ll tell you something. Papers this morning are screaming without Rome we got no chance this year. I say with him we never had one. These guys”-he waved his coffee cup to indicate the men around us; one or two of them turned their heads-“they make a fuck of a lot more money than I do but they know who’s boss. Even Nathaniel and that head-case sister of his know. Rome never knew. He thought he was paid the big bucks because he could think, not because he could shoot and rebound and mow guys down. He was pissing the other guys off and this team would have shaken itself apart before the playoffs if he kept on. I didn’t want him, I won’t miss him, and I don’t want you fucking with anybody’s head.”

Wing’s famous glower burned through me. “If I didn’t know better,” I said, “I’d think that was a motive.”

“To kill him? Are you crazy?”

Wing’s voice had gotten louder and a couple of Knicks turned their heads to see what was up with their coach and this stranger.

“Can you tell me where you were last night?”

He gave me the red-faced, unbelieving stare I’d seen him give refs when the call went against the Knicks. “Where I was? I was at the Garden until two o’clock in the fucking morning, going over game tapes, is where I fucking was.”

“Anyone with you?”

“Douglas and Pontillo”-two of the assistant coaches-“left around midnight. You can’t be serious?”

“No one saw you after that?”

“I got home about three. My wife and kids were asleep. I can’t believe I’m even talking to you about this.”

“I appreciate it, Coach,” I said. “My job is to make sure Tony Manelli doesn’t get nailed for something he didn’t do. I’m going to keep at it. But,” I added, “I’m a Knicks fan. Have been for years.”

Dan Wing’s glare made it clear that he’d have benched me now and traded me tomorrow, if only he could. He stalked away. A couple of players stared at me. I tried a cucumber sandwich myself, decided the bread was too soft. I checked the room again, in case someone new had arrived while I was talking to Wing.

Someone had, and he stood out even more than I did. As white as I was, as old as Randall Lee, balding and chubby, he glanced at his watch when Maria told him the widow was resting and not to be disturbed. I thought he might turn and leave, but he narrowed his eyes, peered around the room, headed for the coffee urn. I waited for him to arrive.

“Sam Landau?”

He gave me a once-over, stirred sugar into his coffee and said, “Who wants to know?” When I told him, he said, “What’s to investigate? I hear Tony did it.”

“Tony’s been arrested for it. There’s a difference.”

“Not to me. Yesterday I had ten percent of Fort Knox. Today I got ten percent of bubkes. You know what’s bubkes?”

“Chickpeas?”

Landau snorted. “Only looks like chickpeas. It’s goat turds. Listen, Tony wants to tell his story, have him call me.” Landau handed me his card.

Just what Tony wants, I thought, but I pocketed the card. “Can I ask you about dinner last night?”

“The cops already asked me. New York ’s Finest.”

“Just to clear a few things up.”

Landau picked some cookies for his saucer. “Why not? Go ahead, ask.”

“Who was there?”

By now I knew the litany, but I waited to hear it. “Lee. Nathaniel. McCroy. That pretty little girl.” Landau pointed people out one by one with a chocolate biscotti, then dipped it in his coffee.

“Anyone seem unhappy to you? Any tension?”

Landau bit off the biscotti’s dripping end. “Damon stole Nathaniel’s headlines. McCroy stole Damon’s girl. Lee was out a pile of dough and Damon said yeah, yeah, he’d get around to it. Sound like a happy party to you?”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“You and Damon stayed after everyone else left, to talk. About what?”

“Business.”

“I hear business wasn’t so good.”

“You hear that where?”

“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.

“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.

It wasn’t what I’d been told and it wasn’t what I’d said. Damon Rome hadn’t been killed because of what he didn’t do. He’d been killed because of what he did.

I didn’t sleep well that night. The next morning, I went back to the list I had of things I hadn’t done yet, people I hadn’t spoken to. Carefully, I started doing some of those things. I checked more gun registrations, went and talked to more doormen, more garage attendants, prowled the streets near Shots and near the Garden again. I talked to winos and losers and cold-eyed kids looking for the main chance. I was hoping to be wrong but I was right. That night I watched the game, and when it was close to finished-the Knicks again in the hole-I grabbed my jacket, headed to the Garden.

Once there, I didn’t go in; I set myself at the players’ door, the place where autograph hounds wait, missing the end of the game for a chance to get near their heroes.

About an hour after I got there the heroes started to come out. Powell, McCroy, the others who’d played. Nathaniel, with his cane, surrounded by the largest crowd. Because of what had happened to Rome, security was tight, but each player had the chance to sign autographs or refuse to, to talk to his fans or duck into a waiting limo. I watched them make their choices according to their nature, watched guys sign a few and then wave as they left, or scowl and walk right past their fans, while Nathaniel stayed and signed as long as there were fans who wanted him.

When the crowds thinned out I stepped forward. Not to speak to Nathaniel, who, with the famous smile, climbed into a white limo and was gone. The fans drifted away then, and the players’ door opened again, and I was left alone with the person I’d come to see.

Nora Day, six inches taller than I, pushed through the deserted doorway and strode quickly along the sidewalk. Dawdling and daydreaming were not part of her game; she’d been tall for a point guard but magically fast in sizing up situations, creating plays, making opportunities for her teammates where you’d swear none could be found.

She did that now: I was the situation, and she sized me up, fixed me with that icy glare as I stepped into her path. “What do you want?” she asked, but I was sure she already knew.

“Team’s not doing well,” I said. “Championship shot seems to be gone this year.”

“They never had one. Not without Nat.”

“That’s not true, is it? They had a damn good shot without him and that was the problem.”

Nora Day’s eyes flashed. “What the hell do you want?” she asked again.

“Were those Damon’s last words?” I said. “Did he say, ‘Nora, what the hell do you want?’ just before you shot him?”

She regarded me silently. When she finally answered, it was in a voice as cold as the winter night we stood in. “No. No, he said, This team’s mine. You and your gimp brother ought to be looking around for someplace else to play.’”

“And that’s it? You were afraid Damon would replace Nathaniel as the Knicks’ go-to guy?”

“Afraid?” From her height she looked down at me as she always had at the world. “No, I wasn’t afraid. New York loves Nat. When he comes back no one will remember Damon Rome ever existed.”

“Then why?”

Nora Day looked up at the darkened Garden, out at the empty street. “That ring is Nat’s,” she said. “For eight years we’ve been promising New York a championship. We’ll deliver.”

“You’ll deliver.” I nodded. “Not Damon Rome.”

“That ring is Nat’s,” she repeated.

“He’d have had one if they’d won this year. He’s a Knick, playing or not.”

“He wouldn’t have earned it. He wouldn’t have been the one to bring it home.”

“And New York would have known that. Everyone would have known the Knicks could do it without Nathaniel.”

Lights in the stairwells of the Garden began snapping off, now that the players and the fans were gone. I hunched into my jacket; a wind had come up. Nora Day said, “Everyone? You really think I care about everyone and what they know?”

I didn’t answer. A car rolled by; at the end of the block a drunk staggered, not sure where he was going. Nora said softly, “Nat would have known.”

“Would have known what? That other people can play the game, too? I got the feeling he knows that already. It doesn’t seem to bother him.”

“He would have known,” her words came slowly, “that he was expendable.”

I looked at her eyes. In my mind I saw those eyes, over the years, fixed on the weaknesses in the Knicks’ offense, the holes in their defense. I thought about how, over each season, those weaknesses had been covered and those holes filled by skills Nathaniel polished up.

“You were a great player,” I said. “A legend. But when you came out of school, you had nowhere to go.”

She stared at me steadily. A sheet of old newspaper brushed the sidewalk as it blew up to us, and then swirled past.

“Get out of my way,” Nora Day said. She cut around me, strode down the block.

I kept pace, said nothing, until finally, without slowing, she asked, “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You have nothing.”

“That’s not true. My fault, I didn’t check you out the first time around, but I did today: you have a permit for a Smith & Wesson.38. The one they found has no numbers, but still, where’s yours? Could you produce it if you had to?”

She wheeled on me, glaring.

“And your car,” I said. “Everyone in New York knows you don’t go up to the house in Connecticut during the season, but you went that night. So your doorman here wouldn’t see you come in late, right? But the car-you took it out of the garage right after the game. And then parked it on the street two blocks from here. The police can get your E-ZPass records. They’ll show what time you actually left New York.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“I have a witness. A kid who was considering jacking your car, until he saw you walking toward it. About two a.m.”

“It’s still nothing. All of this, it’s nothing.”

“That won’t take you far. The police can see what I saw, once they look. They’ll figure it out, too.”

I said that, but I wasn’t sure it was true, if I didn’t point them in the right direction. Nora Day’s face stretched into a cold smile. She turned, walked away without looking back. I stopped where I was, watched her stride, arrow-straight, down the empty sidewalk. I wondered what it felt like to know, absolutely know, what the right play was.

I never found out. At the diner the next morning I heard the news: in the middle of the night, on her way to her secluded Connecticut home, Nora Day’s SUV, running much too fast over a deserted stretch of highway, had jumped off the road, hit a tree, smashed like a tin can. Another tragedy for the Knicks, people said; my God, what are they, cursed? And it’s strange, said the guy at the counter next to me, I thought she stayed in the city during the season, only used the country place during the All-Star break, the summer, things like that. Yeah, said the waitress, pouring us both more coffee, and I read once she was a real careful driver. Nathaniel used to go nuts anytime they had to go someplace together, because of how slow and careful she took it, that’s what I read. Well, said the other guy, lucky they weren’t together last night. You can write off the Knicks this season, he said, but with Nathaniel healthy next year, they’ll be back. This’ll be hard on him, but he’s got the stuff. You think? said the waitress. I mean, she’s his sister. Well, sure he’ll miss her, the guy said, but he’ll find out he don’t need her, as a coach, I mean. They both looked at me, but I was busy with my coffee. From the cash register by the window, the owner nodded his agreement. Yeah, he said. Yeah, she was great. But she wasn’t indispensable.