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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.”
Yvo
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…?”
“Yvo
“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, Yvo
“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 Yvo
“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 Yvo
“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 Yvo
I called, used Tony’s name and problem to get past an assistant who thought I was press. Yvo
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 Yvo
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 Yvo
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.” Yvo
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.