Murder at the Foul Line (21 page)

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
funny Wizards uniform. The
Chicago
Michael, the one who won everything and made all the money. Billy said he’d gone to Wake, not North Carolina, where Michael’d
gone, or Duke, because those schools didn’t need him, they’d already won all their national championships. So he went to Wake,
in the same neighborhood down there, and won his Deacons two NCAAs, his sophomore and junior years, came out before his senior
year to play for the Magic, even though everybody’d known he was ready for the pros after high school. Only he said he’d win
more titles in college than Michael, so that’s what he went and did. Now it was Billy Cash on the Wheaties box, Billy selling
his cell phones and his Gap clothes and those high-def TVs and Suburbans. It was Billy in the Disney commercials, more visible
for Disney than the fucking mouse.

It took him a while to win in the pros, six years, but then the Magic had finally broken through and he had won two titles
in a row there. Then some of the guys he played with got tired of being his “supporting cast,” which he’d accidentally called
them one time same as Michael had with the Bulls, started leaving for free agency, moving on for cash of their own. So the
people running the Magic had brought in a younger supporting cast and Billy kept scoring and finally, the year before, they’d
won again. And were on their way to another, all the TV experts agreed, as long as that sore foot of Billy’s made it to the
end of June. It should have been enough, Gary Hall knew, to have Billy Cash feeling as if he had his skinny-assed self sitting
on top of the world, keeping his eye on the prize.

Problem was, he kept looking over his fucking shoulder for Monica.

He’d met her at the Guest Relations desk at Disney, some
appearance he made right after the Magic had drafted him and the mouse-ear people had signed him up to be their smiling pitchman,
shooting the first commercial the day the Magic had picked him first in the draft.
Where you goin’, Billy Cash? I’m goin’ to Disney World!
One of those deals. Gary wasn’t with him yet, having just made detective, assigned to a surveillance detail with the Seventeenth
Precinct, Manhattan. But he’d heard the story about how Billy and Monica had met so many times he could recite it by now like
he could the Pledge of Allegiance.

“I’m Cash,” he said to Monica that day, a snappy little dish in her Disney colors and Disney clothes, giving him a look.

“Fast Cash?” she said.

“Hard Cash.”

Then Monica had said, “Your next question should be where I’m gonna be after you get done waving from the back of your convertible
in the afternoon Disney parade.”

They went out that night and every night that week and when she told him she’d missed her period two months into his rookie
season, they eloped to Las Vegas on an off-day between playing the Clips in L.A. and the Kings in Sacramento, like they were
just a couple of crazy kids. “Just so’s the math would be close enough for all them at Disney corporate later on,” Billy said.

They had a boy and then a girl the year after that and became the happy
People
-magazine-cover couple—sitcom Negroes, Billy liked to say to Gary—even though the whole time, from the day they got married
in the tacky Vegas chapel just for laughs, Billy Cash was still fucking everybody who’d stay still long enough. If Monica
knew, at least in the first years Gary’d gone to work for Billy, she never let on to him. She was into the full swing of being
Mrs. Cash by then, working the
charity circuit hard, fighting for Afghan women and land-mine victims with that pretty blonde that Paul McCartney’d married,
the one with one leg; somehow putting herself in the middle of all the 9/11 shit even though she’d been having her picture
taken with the kids at Splash Mountain when the planes hit; going up to the White House what felt like every couple of months
to Gary for another luncheon or photo op with the First Lady.

Little Monica from Guest Relations, living large.

“She sure as hell knew what she was doin’ when she had her relations with this guest,” Billy bitched all the time. “ ‘Specially
when she forgot to take that damn pill she swore she was on and just didn’t work that one time.”

Gary had met Billy in New York one night when the Magic were in to play the Knicks. Billy’d gone clubbing with some of his
teammates, a lot of the ones who’d move on later, and they’d picked up some girls who wanted to go to Elaine’s and see if
there was any movie stars up there eating fried calamari. They got there about one in the morning. Gary was drinking with
some other cops at the bar, because for all the shit you read in the papers about Woody Allen and movie stars and other celebrity
dinks going to Elaine’s, it was a cop bar, too, especially late at night. Elaine liked her celebrity crowd because it was
good for business, but liked drinking and hanging around with cops just as much, from the commissioner on down.

Gary saw Billy Cash’s crowd come in the Second Avenue door, watched the fuss everybody made, saw the stroke the room gave
him once he got his big table, the one Woody liked in those days, back there where you made the men’s-room turn. Then Gary
went back to his drink and the two waitresses from
Hanratty’s up the block he was talking up didn’t pay Billy Cash any more mind until the fat drunk actor decided to call Billy
out.

The actor, some guy who used to be in the movies but was working on some ABC soap—all this time later, Gary couldn’t remember
whether or not it was
All My Children
or
One Life to Live
—had some drunk friends with him. So it made him whiskey-brave enough to tell Billy that they should take whatever it was
had started between them outside. And Billy, who Gary would find out later usually laughed assholes like this off, didn’t
think it was so funny this time.

Plus, the girls he was with wanted a show.

Gary, leaned on the bar near the front window, thought it was all bullshit, that it was a playground face-down and nothing
more, and once the air hit them they’d settle it before anybody threw a punch. But then he watched through the window as the
actor set his hands as if he’d boxed some in his life. Or maybe played a boxer in the movies. And before Billy Cash knew it,
he’d been hooked solid on Second Avenue above his ear and was down on one knee.

The fat actor was lighter on his feet than Gary thought he could be, as much gut he was showing against his white shirt, and
as Billy started to get up the actor clipped him again, another left, same place above the ear. Gary couldn’t hear what was
happening, just saw the guy’s friends laughing and cheering him on and probably telling him to finish Billy off.

It was then that Gary excused himself from the Hanratty’s girls, came through the door as Billy was getting to his feet, finally
having enough sense to get his hands up.

One of the friends said, “Oh, look, the faggot brought a playmate.”

Gary took a fistful of the friend’s long stringy hair with his left hand, pulled out his badge with his right, then pulled
the guy close to him and said, “Give us a kiss.”

The fat actor said, “This is between me and him.”

“Unless I say it’s not,” Gary said. “That would be another way of looking at things.”

The actor took a step at Gary now, like he was going to do something about it, badge or not, and as soon as the left hand
came forward Gary caught it the way you would a softball in a mitt and said, “The next move anybody makes here will be me
breaking that pretty nose of yours.”

It ended right there. The actor and his buddies got into a cab. Billy told the girls to get back inside with his teammates,
who somehow managed never to leave the table. Billy started to introduce himself to Gary that night and Gary said, “I know
who you are.” Billy told him to come in, join the party, and about a half hour later he said, “How much you make? With the
cops, I mean.” Gary couldn’t think of a reason not to tell him, so he did, right down to the thirty-seven cents at the end
of it after everything got taken out. And right there, straight out that night, Billy said, “How’d you like to come work for
me?”