“If it’s true. If you did, I’d want to know why.”
“I didn’t. He was a fucking asshole. But you’ve had this gig. Sometimes you work for assholes.”
“So what do they have, then?”
“All circumstantial,” Sutton said promptly. “None of it any good. They just need an arrest, fast.”
“If none of it were any good,” I said evenly, “you wouldn’t have called me.”
“Hey, John,” Tony said wearily. “Save the speeches for the jury, okay? Bill’s on our side. I think?”
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.”
Yvonne Rome: a former model who, in the months since Damon Rome had been with the Knicks, had burst like fireworks upon New York ’s black-tie charity scene. You’d see her photo two or three times a week on the society pages, at parties and galas, on the arm of her famous husband or, if he’d had a game, flashing her wide smile at whichever of his close friends had gallantly escorted her.
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…?”
“Yvonne came to meet him, like sometimes she does. He was waiting. Turned out he was setting me and her up.”
“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, Yvonne Rome had screwed up.
“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 Yvonne together again, he’d waste us both. I said, he laid a hand on her, he was a dead man. He fired my ass, told me to beat it out of the bar. I asked her to come, but she stayed. Next day, Seattle comes to the Garden, she’s not there.”
“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 Yvonne, maybe I would have. But I didn’t.”
“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 Yvonne Rome. The battered wife, publicly humiliated, her lover canned by her abusive husband. She should have plenty of motive, and opportunity.
I called, used Tony’s name and problem to get past an assistant who thought I was press. Yvonne Rome received me in a duplex high in Trump Tower. A gray-uniformed housekeeper asked me to wait and I did, looking around.
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 Yvonne Rome’s living room, four were Knicks, including Nathaniel Day, and a fifth was Nathaniel’s sister Nora. It’s not all that rare for me to be the only white person in a room, this being New York, but at six-two I don’t often get the chance to be the short guy.
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 Yvonne Rome separated herself from her guests and came to the door, though, I thought maybe she’d stopped buying that romance and glitter some time ago.
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.”