Murder at the Foul Line (22 page)

Gary asked him what that meant, and Billy pretty much laid out what the job would be. Leaving out the parts about the girls.
And Gary Hall said yes, just like that, the answer coming out of how tired he was of counting off the days and months and
years to his pension, setting up his cameras across the way from some club where the mob boys had watched too many movies,
life with Billy Cash sounding like more high life than Gary had ever known, all the way back to growing up under the el on
Roosevelt Avenue in Corona.

After that, nobody fucked with Billy Cash and got away with it.

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-skinned
black this time, long straight hair, another one thinking that looking as skinny as a scaghead was a good look for her.

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 Inn one time. Then they’d leave and Gary would say to Billy, “When
were you in Jamaica, I must’ve forgot.”

Billy would say, “Never, that’s when I was in Jamaica.”

Then he’d smile and say, “Aw, man, you know what it is by now. They’re just trying to come up with creative ways to say ‘Please
fuck me.’”

The car pulled up to Ray’s, the new hot club, at least for the time being, this one way down in the West Village. They sat
down at the table they had reserved for Billy and Gary ordered one of those nonalcoholic beers that tasted like real. The
girl ordered a Cosmopolitan that came in a huge martini glass. They sat there feeling the loud beat of the music as much as
listening to it until Billy made his big entrance about an hour after the Magic had beaten the Knicks, which Gary knew already
from making a call when he’d gone to the men’s room, knowing the final was 112–100 and Billy had gone for forty-three on them.
Now Billy did his usual at Ray’s, kissing on a few please-do-me girls at the bar, giving the manager his Billy hug even though
you could barely notice him stopping him to do it, bopping his head in a cool way to some inner beat, acting as if he had
all the time in the world before he got to the table where Alicia or Nykesha or whoever the hell she was was watching him
with this heavy-eyed dreamy look, like she was ready to go right now.

“Hey, fine thing,” Billy said, leaning down to kiss her hair.

It came out “thang,” the way it did sometimes when Billy wanted to brother himself down a little.

Gary wondered if he called them “fine thing” as much as he did because he wasn’t sure of their names, either.

“Hey,” he said to Gary.

“Big man,” Gary said.

To the girl, Billy said, “My man Gary treatin’ you good like I told him?”

His man.

One that brought the girls.

Shit, Gary Hall thought.

The girl tried to look sexy as she looked at Gary and took a sip of her Cosmopolitan and then licked her big lips.

“He’s nice,” she said.

“The best,” Billy said. “Like my own Secret Service.”

Now Billy said to Gary, “You want to go wait at the bar? Or go someplace your own self? I’ll call you on the cell by and by,
you can meet me outside the hotel?”

“I know the drill,” Gary said.

“We got it down, don’t we, dog?”

“There’s a jazz club not too far. I may go over there, have a real drink, kick back for a little bit.”

“Keep the phone on,” Billy said, “I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

He always got more bossy at this hour of the night, not even hearing the snap in his own voice.

Gary shook his head on the way to the door, thinking about what he’d talked about with Jayson Miles, how Billy obsessed on
Monica the way he did, then thinking he could be out and about like this, grab-assing his way through life, telling people
the girl just wanted to have a drink with him, or have her picture taken with him, if somebody did take a picture and it ended
up in the papers.

Gary didn’t go to the jazz club, just walked into the first quiet bar he saw, on Horatio Street, nursing a Scotch until the
phone buzzed about one. Gary paid his check and got into a cab and got to the Pierre before Billy did, shot the breeze a little
bit with the guy from security who helped him set things up, then walked up Central Park South, past Mickey Mantle’s, where
he knew the limo would pick him up.

When the car showed up, he got into the front, then it eased its way east on Fifty-ninth, uptown on Madison, back over to
Fifth, and the front entrance to the Pierre. Gary got out and opened the back door for the girl, and the two of them walked
through the lobby like a happy couple, Gary even putting
his arm around her. There were simpler ways to do this, Gary told Billy that all the time, but he didn’t give a rat’s ass,
this way was his way now, and his way was all that ever mattered.