“I just want to know what happened last night.”
“Last night I lost seventy-eight thousand dollars.”
“Sounds like a bad night.”
“Average. My goal is to win more than I lose, but there are those other nights.”
“We all have them.”
“My stroke of good fortune was that Damon had no bets down, so of the pitifully small pile of money I did win, none of it was his. Seeing the kind of night Damon had, that would have been a bad night.”
“Damon Rome was a gambler?”
Lee grinned. “Shocking, right?” He stuck out his hand. “Randall Lee, oddsmaker.”
“You were his bookie?” I said as we shook.
“You,” Lee said, “are right on top of things. I like to see that.”
“Why would it have been a bad night if you’d won Damon’s money?”
Lee frowned. “Could it be I was wrong about you? Think, sonny. Damon’s gone. The missus feels very little sense of obligation about Damon’s debts, and I’d hardly be one to lean on her in her tragic circumstances.”
“Sensitive of you.”
“To my own good name, my boy. Word would get around. It wouldn’t do. Nonetheless, I’m already in the unenviable position of writing off twelve thousand dollars in Damon’s paper. Damon, you see, had very little sense of obligation either.”
“He died owing you money?”
“If I stretch my imagination I can think of it as a marketing expense. Sadly, I don’t have the imagination to handle much more than twelve thousand.”
“Twelve thousand dollars sounds like a lot of marketing expense to me.”
“It most certainly is. I’m not happy about it. But I suppose your next question would be, did I shoot Damon because I was sick and tired of his deadbeat ways? Did I do him dirty because he wouldn’t pay up?”
“I’m not sure I would have asked that. But go ahead and answer it.”
“Let me tell you something about my business, sonny.” He leaned close, as though I was about to hear a trade secret. “Dead men don’t pay.”
Lifting his eyebrows to indicate our new brotherhood of esoteric knowledge, Randall Lee bit into another petit four.
I said, “But if Damon’s debt was no good anyway, I could see writing him off, too. That way other people would have gotten the message.”
Randall Lee wagged his finger. “That’s the old way. In my business we have new paradigms now. Like I mentioned, Damon’s debt was a marketing expense.”
“Meaning?”
“Another secret you might want to know is, people are sheep,” Randall Lee told me. “Randall Lee partied with Damon Rome, We ate and drank and fondled the girls. People saw us and said, ‘Who’s that?’ and when they found out, they said, ‘I want to lay off money with the guy Damon Rome lays off money with.’ ”
“Were you the only one?”
“Only bookie Damon had? Odds are, I am.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Damon bet dumb and lost. Then he didn’t pay up. I made it back in exposure: I took in more in sucker bets from his groupies than Damon owed me. Who else was hanging around? Who else was getting a public relations benefit-or anything else-from Damon, to make it worth putting up with his cavalier attitude towards his responsibilities?”
“Who was?”
“Well, now,” Randall Lee said, “because you’re a hardworking boy, and because I didn’t kill Damon, I’ll tell you who wasn’t, lately.”
“Okay.”
He spread his arms. “Sam Landau.”
“Damon’s agent?”
“You see him here?”
“I wouldn’t know him.”
“Exhibiting good taste on your part. But his client’s dead and he’s not here to pay respects. I rest my case.”
“Was he at dinner with Damon last night?”
Randall Lee peered at me. “A sneaky way of asking was I at dinner with Damon last night?”
“Were you and Landau at dinner with Damon last night?”
“Yes. Both of us. And Nathaniel.” He indicated an ivory leather sofa across the room supporting Nathaniel Day’s broad-shouldered bulk, his leg in its high-tech brace resting on a matching hassock. “And Luke McCroy,” Lee said, pointing, “and Holly March.” He nodded at the thin young woman in the skimpy skirt. “When she was an exotic dancer she called herself Holly Ivy. Personally, I prefer to think of her as Holly Cow. But brave, to show up in the widow’s own lair. Where is the widow, by the way?”
“In the garden,” I said. “Nora Day wasn’t there? At dinner?”
“Nora wasn’t a regular at Damon’s table. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and Damon was a fool. It’s a shame, because I rather enjoy her company. She’s a decisive young woman, and surrounded as I am in my professional life by waverers, doubters, coin tossers, and second-guessers, I find her a breath of fresh air.”
I asked Randall Lee another question or two, and his answers didn’t cross him off my list. He’d been the first to leave after dinner last night, had taken a cab to his Upper West Side apartment, where he lived alone. If he was fibbing about the bookie business being run along new paradigms these days, he could be said to have had both motive and opportunity. I thanked him and left him by the window admiring the view
I wanted to talk to Sam Landau, who wasn’t here, and to Nathaniel, and to Holly March and Luke McCroy, and, one by one, to the rest of Damon Rome’s teammates. Nathaniel, on the sofa beside his sister, was talking to the Knicks’ backup center, Shawan Powell. Powell had racked up more minutes these last two months with Nathaniel out than he had in his first three years in the NBA. He wasn’t bad, but no one thought for a minute he had anything but a supporting role in he Knicks’ run at the playoffs, a run that had starred the now-gone-forever Damon Rome.
I figured Nathaniel and Powell would keep for a while, and turned my attention to Holly March and Luke McCroy, he on a leather recliner, she on the arm. He said something and she gave him a soft, teasing smile. She poked him in the shoulder and said something and he laughed. He was handsome and she was beautiful and they both seemed to be admirably handling the death of Damon Rome.
They handled my approach well, too, with polite, interested looks, handshakes as I offered my name and my errand. There being no other chair in the vicinity, McCroy swung his long legs off the hassock and I sat there. Holly March stayed where she was. A sweet scent floated on the warm air, the complicated delicacy of expensive perfume.
“I understand you both went to dinner with Damon after the game last night,” I said.
“That’s right,” said McCroy. Holly March nodded, her mahogany eyes wide to show sincerity.
“Can you tell me about it?”
“Not much to tell,” said McCroy. His shaved head reflected the sunlight. “We went to Shots for some of those good steaks they have there-”
“Except for me,” Holly March put in, her voice breathy and high, like a little girl’s. “I had pasta. I’m a vegetarian.”
I nodded; McCroy waited, eyebrows raised, in case she had more to say, but she smiled at him and looked down, as though to apologize for usurping his storytelling prerogative.
He took her hand, went on. “Then we left. Damon stayed to finish his conversation with Landau.”
“Sam Landau? His agent?”
“Yeah. Damon said he needed to talk to him, privatelike.”
“You know about what?”
“Uh-uh. Damon and me, we wasn’t close like that.”
“Can you tell me who else was at dinner?” I asked that, though I already had Randall Lee’s list, just to see what McCroy would say. He said the same. Holly March used wide-eyed silence to signal agreement and traced her scarlet fingernail across the back of McCroy’s hand to signal something else.
“From what I hear, not many of Damon’s teammates hung out with him,” I said.