“Not many liked him,” McCroy said simply.
“Why?”
McCroy shrugged. “He was the man. He was the great Damon Rome. With Damon, wasn’t about the game.”
“What was it about?”
“Damon’s stats. Damon’s picture in the papers. Damon’s endorsement deals. He was a damn ball hog, worse than guys on the playground.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a teammate.”
“Damon didn’t never understand the word ‘pass,’ wasn’t coming out of his own mouth. Dude could say, ‘Give me the damn ball,’ but someone else said it, he couldn’t hear it.”
“But you went to dinner with him. And so did Nathaniel.”
“Nathaniel, he hangs with the new guys. Thinks it’s his job, show us the ropes. Hangs with me, with Damon. Don’t nobody piss Nathaniel off, off the court.”
“And you? Damon didn’t piss you off either?”
“Sure he did. I like the ball, too, sometime.”
“So why did you go?”
McCroy smiled up at Holly March. “Other considerations.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I have to ask this. I was under the impression, Ms. March, that you were seeing Damon Rome?”
She smiled. “Who told you that?” she asked gently, as though she was worried my feelings would be hurt when I found out how wrong I was.
“It’s just something I heard.”
“Well, we did date a little bit. A while ago. But Damon wasn’t faithful. I like faithful men.” She smiled again at McCroy, dipped her head so her curls hid her face.
Feeling very much like I was cutting in on their dance, I said, “You dated Damon Rome before he got married?”
She looked up at me, tilted her head like she was trying to figure out where I’d gotten that idea. “No,” she said. “This fall, when the season started.”
It seemed it hadn’t occurred to her that a married man who’d date her was by definition not a faithful man. “Was it a problem for you two, when you… became interested in each other?” I asked them both. “I mean, did Damon object?”
“Well,” Holly March said, “maybe if Damon had known.”
“He didn’t?”
“That’s why I went to dinner with him, and things,” she explained. “He thought we were still seeing each other.”
Holly March’s definition of “faithful” was, I decided, fairly unique. I turned to Luke McCroy to see if he had anything to add.
Luke McCroy stared at me in silence, and then, once again, he shrugged. “Ball hogs,” he said, “they don’t share well.”
I asked a few more questions: when had they left Shots, where had they gone? They’d left within minutes of each other, not together, they said, but had hooked up as planned in a hotel lobby on the next block. From then on until the next morning they were each other’s alibi. Holly March smiled gently at me and Luke McCroy beamed at her. They seemed to have run out of things to say to me, and they obviously had a lot to say to each other. I thanked them and stood.
I was thinking to talk to Nathaniel next and I had just started over there when the housekeeper opened the door to let in someone: a white man shorter than the tall-tree Knicks around me, taller than I, with a face I knew. When he’d played, Dan Wing had been as big as you’d expect, six-four, average for the NBA in his day. But his day was twenty years ago and the players were bigger now. If he were still playing he’d be a little guy, but he was the head coach of the New York Knicks and that made him as big as anyone in the league.
I watched as Wing strode into the room, his jaw thrust forward, his brows knit, wearing that glowering look you saw courtside during the games and in front of the banner at the press conferences afterward. It was the look he’d worn as a player, too, pure concentration and intimidation. I’d always thought of it as his game face, and maybe it was, but it occurred to me now that there were people who never took their game faces off.
When Wing came in, a change seemed to come over the players, tiny shifts in stance and expression, a sense of sharpened alertness. They greeted him, nodded in his direction, went back to the conversations they’d been having, but I got the feeling that each of them knew where he was all the time, and the air became electric. Wing was a famous disciplinarian, a my-way-or-the-highway kind of coach who had taken a team of talented but not, with the exception of Nathaniel Day, brilliant players and pounded them into fiercely loyal troops, championship contenders every year he’d coached them. He put up with Nora Day because Nathaniel’s contract said he had to, but he made no secret of the fact that she was a thorn in his side.
Damon Rome, acquired over Wing’s objections by the Knicks’ management as soon as it was clear Nathaniel was out for the season, had been another.
I waited for Wing to ask about the widow and be told she was resting. I met him at the sideboard. He poured himself a cup of coffee, picked up a crustless cucumber sandwich and glared at it.
“Coach?” I said.
Wing snapped me a suspicious look, devoured the sandwich in one bite. “Who’re you?”
“Bill Smith. I’m investigating Damon Rome’s death.”
That didn’t seem to improve his mood. “You a cop?”
“No.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“I’m working for Tony Manelli’s lawyer. We think they’ve got the wrong man.”
“You do? Who do you think the right man is?”
“I don’t know.”
“Smith.” He picked up another sandwich. “Don’t fuck with my team.”
“Is there a reason I should?”
“No, there’s a reason you shouldn’t. I can still pull this out but I’ll need the men focused. They think someone thinks one of them killed Damon, they lose focus. You get it?”
“What if one of them did?”
Wing gulped some coffee. “Would have been a public service.”
“You didn’t like him?”
“You read the papers?”
“I understand he was disruptive.”
“He was fucking uncoachable. He was a goddamn time bomb that kept going off.”
“The price of a shot at the championship?”
“Screw that. I’ll tell you something. Papers this morning are screaming without Rome we got no chance this year. I say with him we never had one. These guys”-he waved his coffee cup to indicate the men around us; one or two of them turned their heads-“they make a fuck of a lot more money than I do but they know who’s boss. Even Nathaniel and that head-case sister of his know. Rome never knew. He thought he was paid the big bucks because he could think, not because he could shoot and rebound and mow guys down. He was pissing the other guys off and this team would have shaken itself apart before the playoffs if he kept on. I didn’t want him, I won’t miss him, and I don’t want you fucking with anybody’s head.”
Wing’s famous glower burned through me. “If I didn’t know better,” I said, “I’d think that was a motive.”
“To kill him? Are you crazy?”
Wing’s voice had gotten louder and a couple of Knicks turned their heads to see what was up with their coach and this stranger.
“Can you tell me where you were last night?”
He gave me the red-faced, unbelieving stare I’d seen him give refs when the call went against the Knicks. “Where I was? I was at the Garden until two o’clock in the fucking morning, going over game tapes, is where I fucking was.”
“Anyone with you?”
“Douglas and Pontillo”-two of the assistant coaches-“left around midnight. You can’t be serious?”
“No one saw you after that?”
“I got home about three. My wife and kids were asleep. I can’t believe I’m even talking to you about this.”
“I appreciate it, Coach,” I said. “My job is to make sure Tony Manelli doesn’t get nailed for something he didn’t do. I’m going to keep at it. But,” I added, “I’m a Knicks fan. Have been for years.”