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She had been little more than a baby, too immature to make any sense of what her eyes had witnessed, too young to remember this confusing event in a confusing world. Until the cat had dropped in front of her and shaken loose her father’s deed.
Lauren looked up at the rattle of the curtain being pulled back. Min Henry’s kind face was pinched with concern.
“The sound was an oar,” Lauren told her without preamble, reaching out for the therapist’s hand. “I was too young to make any sense of it, but it was an oar, hitting the head of a man in the water. A man named Arty, my father’s manager, whom I loved, and used to follow around like a shadow. I think my mother was having an affair with him. My father set him up, made it look like Arty was the one who stole the company into bankruptcy. When Arty was never found, everyone assumed he had fled to Mexico.”
It explained an awful lot, Lauren thought, about what I became. When I was two and a half years old, a young man with spiky hair passed in front of me, and was gone.
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 fu