Murder At the Foul Line

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-ski

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 I