“Loss.” Yvonne Rome cocked her head, as though considering a new thought. Then she shrugged, the strap of her sling rising, dropping back. “Come with me.”
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.
“Damon hated this room,” Yvonne Rome told me, crossed her long legs as she sat on a wicker chaise. “He wouldn’t come in here. You know Tony and I were having an affair?”
“He told me.”
“The whole world probably knows, because Damon made that scene at Shots. Damon loved scenes. When he made one everyone looked at him.” She leaned across her cast to slip a cigarette from a silver box beside her, held it in a languid hand. I stood, lit it for her, lit my own. Her eyebrows rose. “You smoke? No one smokes anymore. This was the only room in this whole place I was allowed to smoke.” She shook her head, streamed out a plume. “Allowed. In my own house. How pathetic is that?”
“Where were you last night?”
“Where was I?” Her eyes widened with amusement. “This is Tony’s plan, to find someone else to pin it on? Me?”
“My plan. Tony wouldn’t do that. He says he loves you.”
She shot an arrow of smoke into the room. “He’ll get over it.”
“Do you love him?”
“Of course not.”
“Did you love Damon?”
“When I married him. You know,” she said, “when we were dating he never hit me. Not once. Isn’t that interesting?”
“When did he start?”
Tapping the cigarette into a silver ashtray, she said, “On our wedding night. He couldn’t get it up. Not”-she gave me a sly smile-“that that was the first time. But now that we were married, it was my fault. Damon Rome,” she said, leaned back on the rose-patterned cushions of the chaise, “superstud. The truth is, he wasn’t very good in bed. In fact, there were times I thought about shooting him because he wasn’t. You think maybe I did?”
“If I were you I might have shot him because he wasn’t very nice.”
She looked steadily at me, pulled on her cigarette again. “Well, you’re not me,” she said. “I was here last night. Ask Maria.”
“That was Maria who answered the door? Would she know if you went out late?”
“My,” she said, lifted her head, sank back again. “I have no idea. But ask the doorman. Ask the kid at the garage. Go ahead, ask whoever you want.”
“I will. Tell me, what would have been Damon’s routine, after the game?”
She used her good hand to wave away any interest in the question. “Dinner.”
“At Shots?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes he’d grace some other lucky place with his glamorous presence.”
“Alone?”
“Are you serious?”
“With other guys from the team?”
“Some. Most of them don’t like him, you know. I believe ‘grandstander’ was one of the kinder words they used. Hot dog? Is that something basketball people say?”
“If it fits. Who went with him, then?”
“The really important people in Damon’s life. His agent, Sam Landau. Those whores from the halftime show. I’m sorry, dancers. I think one of them is here right now, as we sit here and speak. And Randall Lee.” She flashed the famous smile, made up of teeth too perfect for anyone to have been born with.
“Who’s Randall Lee?”
“He’s right out there.” Again the indolent hand. “Go ask him.”
“But not Damon’s teammates?”
She shrugged. “Some of them sometimes. Nathaniel didn’t mind Damon. Nathaniel’s too nice a guy for this world, if you ask me, but of course you didn’t.”
“His sister Nora?”
“Sometimes. More to make sure that Nathaniel left at a decent hour and didn’t drink too much than because she enjoyed the company.”
“She didn’t like Damon?”
A faint smile lifted her lips. “First of all, no one really liked Damon. Second, Nora doesn’t like any of them, except Nathaniel. She’s permanently angry at God and the world because they’re playing and she’s not. I understand she was as good as her brother. I mean, I don’t know anything about basketball, of course, but that’s what I’ve heard.”
Being married to Damon Rome, I imagined, you’d have to go pretty far out of your way not to know anything about basketball. “She was better,” I said.
“Oh. Well, then, I suppose it’s a shame. Maybe the Knicks should try her out. To replace Damon? If she’s that good. They’d still have a shot then. Everyone would be so pleased.” Her tone said everyone but Yvonne Rome, who couldn’t have given less of a damn.
“She was a point guard when she played,” I said. “Damon was a forward.”
Yvonne Rome shrugged off such petty distinctions. She tapped her cigarette against a crystal ashtray. “I thought, when I first came here,” she began, but trailed off.
“You thought…?”
She pinched a tiny brown leaf off an otherwise perfect ivy. “The other wives and girlfriends, they’re really into the game. I have nothing to talk about with them. But Nora, I’d heard she liked flowers.” She pulled her hand back into her lap and looked at me. “But she’s more into the game than anyone else. Even with Nathaniel out, the team’s chances are all she cares about. I should have known.” She took a draw on her cigarette, blew a smoke ring. It drifted past a drawing of two bonneted little girls walking arm in arm.
I ground my own cigarette out. “Did you go to dinner with Damon?”
“Sometimes,” she said.
“Did you go last night?”
“No.”
“You didn’t see him after he left for the game?”
“Or before. I’ve been avoiding him. I know it’s hard to believe, avoiding someone as exciting and magnetic as the great Damon Rome. But, you know, he did break my arm.”
Motive and opportunity: that was my job. Nothing Yvonne Rome had told me eliminated her from my list. I left her among the wicker and the plants and joined the somber crowd in the living room. Two more Knicks had arrived, raising the average height of the population another few inches.
At a table spread with sweets, I poured myself a cup of coffee and looked around. I spotted two unfamiliar faces. One was sweet, toffee-colored, smoothly perfect. That face was on a thin young woman in a black suit that would have been appropriate to the occasion if the skirt had been more than two inches long. She was tossing glossy curls and sharing sad thoughts about Damon Rome, or at any rate sharing something, with Luke McCroy, the Knicks’ rookie shooting guard just out of Georgetown. The other strange face was much darker, belonged to a walnut-skinned man who stood alone by the window in a black suit, black silk shirt, black tie. The corner of a black handkerchief rose from his breast pocket, and his black shoes shone. His hair and mustache were salt-and-pepper. I had three or four inches on him, and he had ten or fifteen years on me, which made him the shortest and oldest man in the room. But his look held its own. I took my coffee and headed over.
“Randall Lee?” I asked.
“Well, now, that’s right.” He turned from the vast view, gave me a smile and raised eyebrows. “Who might you be?”
“Bill Smith. I’m investigating Damon Rome’s death.”
“Well, now,” he said again, “that would make you not an officer of the law, wouldn’t it? From what I hear, the official investigation is over and done and the bodyguard’s been fingered.”
“There are still some questions.”
“He doesn’t confirm, he doesn’t deny,” Lee mused, as though talking to a third person. He bit into a white-frosted petit four from a plate of them he held. “So I’m right. And you’ve come to talk to me. Look out, Randall Lee, you’re being investigated.”