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I had to grin back. “That’s true. Okay, tell me more about di
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 gri
“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 Yvo
“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 pi
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.