I nodded, said to Nathaniel, “Luke McCroy and Holly March were there? And Randall Lee and Sam Landau?”
“That’s right.”
“Anyone else?”
“No.”
“Did Damon have a new security detail?”
“No. He said bad enough a guy tried to beat your time, you didn’t have to pay him for it.”
“What happened after dinner?”
“After? I went home kind of early. Had to put my damn leg up. Holly left, and Luke, just before me. Randall Lee was long gone.”
“Anyone see you after you left?”
Nora cut into her brother’s answer. “Wait-what are you saying?”
“My job is to find out what happened last night,” I said.
“You cannot-cannot-be saying Nat may have shot Damon?”
“No,” I said. “I’m asking if anyone saw him after he left. Did you?”
“Me?”
“Don’t you have apartments in the same building? Did you see him coming home?”
“I didn’t stay in New York last night,” Nora admitted grudgingly. “I went to Connecticut, to my house. But there’s no way Nat-”
“Come on, calm down, Nora. It’s the man’s job,” Nathaniel said soothingly. Nora, her glare fixed on me, didn’t seem soothed. Nathaniel turned to me. “I took a cab, went straight to my place,” he said.
“You take down the cab number, keep the receipt, anything like that?”
“No. But you want to, I’ll bet you could find the driver. I’m a little hard to miss.” He gave me the grin again.
I had to grin back. “That’s true. Okay, tell me more about dinner. Was anyone acting strange? Upset, on edge?”
Nathaniel shook his head cheerfully. “Only me.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Nat!” Nora snapped.
“Hey, it’s true.”
“Why were you?” I said.
Nathaniel lifted his aluminum cane, pointed to his immobile leg. “Sometimes I get pissed off.”
“Must be frustrating,” I agreed.
“Frustrating?” Nora Day looked at me as if I’d told her that water was wet or fire could burn. “He’s out for the season,” she explained carefully, as though I must not have known that or I’d never have said anything so patronizing and dumb.
“It’s not that bad,” said Nathaniel calmly. “I’ll be back next year. Could’ve been worse, could’ve been serious. Just sometimes I get pissed off.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I saw you fling a chair the other night.”
Nathaniel’s smile turned abashed. “When Shawan missed that alley-oop?”
“You’d have made it.”
“That’s why I threw the chair. Told him I was sorry, later. Wasn’t him. He said he knew that. Nice guy, Shawan.”
“What about Damon? I hear he wasn’t a nice guy.”
“Damon was okay. He was just young. He just needed to understand what it is about a team.”
“Meaning what?”
“My brother,” Nora Day said between clenched teeth, “thinks it’s his job to make Knicks out of jackasses.”
“I’m sorry?”
Nathaniel said, “Some young guys, they come into the league, they think it’s all about them. Damon was a great player. So far he was carrying us, nobody even missed me.”
“That’s just wrong, Nat!” His sister’s coffee cup rattled as she put it down. “You’re the man. You’re the one they need!”
“I think she’s right,” I said. “Everyone’s waiting for you to come back.”
“Well, thank you.” He grinned again, and Nora looked at me as though, in a move that had caught her completely off guard, I’d finally said something intelligent. “But what I mean,” Nathaniel went on, “Damon loved the spotlight. If he kept on the way he started, hogging and hotdogging, team was going to fall apart, right around the playoffs. I wanted to make him see that.”
“Did he?”
“He was coming around. I was working on him for a while. He was getting better.”
“I just talked to Coach Wing. He doesn’t think so. He said Damon was ruining the team.”
“Great coach, Coach Wing. Guess he can be a little blind sometimes, though. Damon was coming along. You saw that, right?” He turned to Nora.
“Damon,” she said, “was a nasty, selfish, ball-hogging child. That’s all he was.”
Nathaniel turned back to me, winked. “Coming along.”
“Well, thanks,” I said. “Anything else you can tell me?”
“No. Got to say Tony’s okay, though. I’d be surprised, turned out he did kill Damon.”
“Is there anyone you wouldn’t be surprised to find that out about?”
After a hesitation Nathaniel shook his head. “Surprise me, anyone I know does turn out to be the one. Walk up to a man, middle of the night, pull a trigger on him? That’s cold.”
Nora snorted. “ You think. Most people wouldn’t have trouble with that.”
“Anyone in particular?” I asked her.
“I barely knew him,” she told me. “But it seemed to me a lot of people wanted a lot of things from Damon, and everywhere except on the court, he was a big disappointment.”
I stayed at Yvonne Rome’s for a few hours more. People came and went, and I talked to them all. Most of them had disliked Damon Rome, some mildly, some intensely. Most of them didn’t have much in the way of an alibi for the middle of the night. After the game the players had gone to get dinner or driven back to their suburban homes or taken limos or cabs to their city apartments. Some had walked, the way Damon was doing when he was killed. Some had no doubt been seen, but it wasn’t my job to find the people who’d seen them. On my way out I talked to Yvonne Rome’s doorman and garage attendant, and I went over and talked to the guy at the garage where Sam Landau’s car had been. I called Dan Wing’s wife and went up to Randall Lee’s building and later that night I spoke to the concierge at the hotel where Holly March had hooked up with Luke McCroy. I checked gun registrations: two of the Knicks owned.38s, though neither was a Smith & Wesson, and five others owned other guns, and those were just the New York permits. I looked at arrest records, too, and found one assault, a few drunk-and-disorderlies, one or two DWIs. No convictions except for Shawan Powell, thirty days’ suspended sentence on one of the D &Ds from his pre-Knick days. I called John Sutton the next morning, gave him a preliminary report.
“Sounds like a lot of people wanted a lot of things from Rome that they didn’t get,” he said.
“Seems to have been Rome ’s specialty,” I agreed.
“Also seem to have been a lot of people who didn’t like him, wandering around loose in the middle of the night.”
I followed the preliminary up with a detailed package by the end of the day. Sutton called me that evening to say charges against Tony Manelli had been dropped, “pending further police investigation.” Which, according to Sutton, had started up already, cops swarming the Garden, interviewing Knicks and trainers, wives and girlfriends. Beer guys and janitors, too, probably.
“You want me to stay on it?” I asked. “I’ve got a list of things I didn’t do yet, stuff I’d have gone into deeper if I’d been looking to solve the case, not just muddy the waters.”
“I’ll let you know, but I don’t think so. I don’t really care what they find as long as they don’t come back at Tony again. We embarrassed them, let’s leave them alone for now. Go ahead and send your bill.”
“Forget it. Professional courtesy, for Tony.”
“That won’t make him happy.”
“Someday I’ll need him, he can do the same.”
When I hung up I did some paperwork, cleaned up some loose ends on other cases. About eight I went down to Shorty’s, sat at the bar, drank bourbon and listened to the talk. The Knicks game, on the TV over the bar, was the topic, and the opinion of everyone was the same: they stank.
They were at the Garden, playing Indiana. They wore black ribbons on their shirts and Dan Wing wore one pinned to his lapel. The dancers, including Holly March, wore them on their spangled leotards. I wondered if Sam Landau and Randall Lee were wearing black, too.