Murder at the Foul Line (23 page)

Thinking he was being as careful as he was with the ball with ten seconds left.

Billy showed up a few minutes later in what was supposed to be the safe room, the one between his and Gary’s, the one he was
sure was safe, tonight’s do-me girl getting herself ready for him in the bathroom.

Gary checked the room one last time, made sure everything was all right, then he was out the door as soon as Billy was in,
Gary not even bothering to say good night.

They clinched home court for the playoffs, the Magic did, with a week to go in the regular season. Mostly, Gary knew, the
rest of them watched as Billy did it, that was the truth of things, Billy doing it to the Wizards all by himself in that new
MCI Center in downtown Washington, part of one of those urban fix-ups that mostly fixed up the owner of the team moving into
a place like MCI. Billy Cash went in there and dropped his fifty-eight points on the Wizards and gave the Magic the best record
in the NBA, east or west, carving those points into the young guys trying to stay with him the way you’d carve your initials
on the side of some tree.

Billy didn’t want to go out after the game, even though D.C. was one of his favorite cities to go clubbing in the whole league.
“Gary, my brother,” he said in the locker room, “I believe I’m just gonna take my shit back to the Do-It Room over there to
the Four Seasons.” That’s what he liked to call his fuck room at
these expensive hotels. The Do-It Room. He’d been out in L.A. one time when he was a kid, visiting Wilt Chamberlain’s famous
house in Bel-Air, and he’d come up on a room that was just water bed and mirrors, no real floor to it, and outside was a little
plaque, next to the door, saying
THE DO-IT ROOM
.

Billy told Gary to go pick up Sharon, the girl from Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms he’d met at lunch after the shoot-around,
bring her over there.

Billy said, “And tell her not to worry, the only illegal weapon I’m packin’ is the one I got right here,” he said, grabbing
himself under his towel.

Gary said he’d be sure to pass that along.

Sharon. At least he had a name to put to the girl this time. Went outside where the limo was waiting next to the players’
entrance, drove to the address nearly all the way out of town, got her back to the hotel in Georgetown a little bit before
Billy would be showing up after finishing with his media and whatnot. Took her up there, showed her around, called room service
and ordered some of the champagne Billy liked, his big fruit platter. And whipped cream. Fresh-whipped and kept on ice. Lot
of it.

Gary smiled.

The shit you did for love.

The second-to-last game of the regular season was in Philadelphia, so the Magic were just going to bus up there in the early
afternoon, Thursday afternoon, since they weren’t playing until Friday night.

The phone rang in Gary’s room at the Four Seasons a couple of minutes after eleven.

“Get down here now,” Billy said. “I got a situation.”

“Your room or the other?”

“Mine.”

“You still got the girl here?”

“Got Monica here,” Billy said, and hung up.

Billy was wearing a white Magic T-shirt, baggy gym shorts. He was on one couch in the living room of his suite. Monica was
across from him on the other couch in the room. She wore a sharp-looking navy-blue pantsuit, one leg crossed over the other,
showing off some big heels on her black shoes. She had a black leather purse next to her. On the coffee table between her
and Billy was a thick manila envelope and the kind of thick binder you used to carry to school. And a shoe box that had
PRADA
written on the side.

By now, Gary knew that Monica would rather go barefoot than wear something other than Prada on her size 7 feet.

“Monica,” Gary said.

“Gary Hall.”

He hung back, over where the room service table was, pouring himself a cup of coffee. Waiting to see how it would play out,
now that they were all finally down to it.

Here, Gary thought, in the real Do-It Room.

“She’s servin’ me,” Billy said in a dead voice.

“Just a different kind of serving than went on next door,” Monica said. “Kind always goes on next door.”

“This is how you do it?” Billy said. “Blindside me this way?”

Monica said, “One of us was blind, Billy. From the start.”

“You said the papers were in the envelope,” Billy said. “What’s the rest of it?”

“Aren’t you even a little bit curious?” Monica said.

“You’ll tell me,” Billy said. “You always did like being the smart one, even when you were little Miss Congeniality behind
your Disney desk, unbuttoning enough buttons on your blouse to show yourself off.”

Monica said, “The binder’s my black book on you, Billy. You got your black book, with all your little whores in it? Now I’ve
got mine. The shoe box has got cassettes in it, you can keep them if you want, watch yourself instead of the dirty hotel movies.
All of it’s why we’re going to do this nice and easy, which means you can take that pre-nup you had me sign and throw it right
out that window over there. I could’ve had somebody else serve you, but I wanted to do it myself. Put it all on the table,
so to speak. We’ll call it irreconcilable differences. Maybe throw in a little mental cruelty on the side, just so it sounds
more official. Then we smile and call it painful but amicable.” Monica smiled now. “Before I get my half.”

Billy opened up the binder, saw that some of the pages had black-and-white pictures under plastic.

He took the picture out, stared at it.

“Goddamn,” he said. “This here is Charrisse. From last week in New York. The one from MTV.”

Billy looked over to Gary and said, “How’d somebody get a fucking camera in the room?”

“It’s easy, you know where to hide it,” Gary said. “If you can’t have a practical application of all they made you learn with
surveillance from the cops, what’s the point?”

All you could hear now in the suite was the hum of the air conditioner, some kind of soft music playing from the bedroom.

“You?” Billy said to him.

From the couch, Monica said, “Us.”

Billy turned and stared at her, then back to Gary, then back at the picture of him and Charrisse in the Do-It Room at the
Plaza. Dropped that and pulled out another one. “Selena,” Billy said. Kept going through them and not saying the names now,
just saying Cleveland and San Antonio and Phoenix and Detroit. Like he remembered the cities better than he remembered the
girls.

Billy Cash stopped finally and looked hard again at Gary, more hurt now than sad, or at least playing it that way. “Why?”
he said.

“Got tired of being the boy bringing the girls. Once you do that, all you are is somebody’s boy.”

Monica stood up and said, “You know what they say, don’t you, Billy? My people will call your people.”

Gary Hall walked over then and put his arm around her.

“You two…?” Billy said.

“Us,” Monica said.

Gary Hall said, “Remember you’re always telling me to get my own girl? I did.”

“Rich one, too,” Mrs. Cash said.

Michael Malone

A
ll of a sudden Dr. Rothmann, the foreman of my jury, says she wants to talk to the judge. She gives me a look when she walks
by the defendant’s table, straight in my eyes, and I nod back at her but I can’t tell what she’s thinking because there’s
so many different feelings in her face. But behind me my Mawmaw stands up and bows her head to her. The judge and the jury
get up too and they crowd each other out of the courtroom and just leave us sitting here. My lawyer leans over and says, “Charmain,
you have got to change your mind and take the stand.” And I tell him, “No thank you.”

Mr. Snow goes, “This is Murder One, Charmain. You just cannot kill your husband in the state of North Carolina if he played
ACC basketball.”

I go, “Well, this is Charmain Luby Markell and I’m not talking about my personal private life to a bunch of strangers in a
court of law and have them turn it all into lies against me and mine.”

I got this lawyer? He’s young, just two years more than me, and halfway through our first talk in the jail I can tell he hasn’t
had a lot of Life Experience, which, between you and I, I’ve already had way too much. Tilden Snow’s his name, Tilden Snow
III, and I think it’s lazy for a family to use a name three times in a row when there’re so many nice new names out there
you can choose from. They even got little
Names for Your Baby
books at the checkout counters, which is where I got my Jarrad’s name. That’s what I call my little boy, jarrad Todd Markell,
even though his birth certificate says Kyle Lewis Markell, Jr., totally because my husband’s mother worships the ground her
son Kyle walks on. Well, did walk on before I shot him.

So Mr. Snow wanted me to get up on the witness stand and tell why I shot my husband in the head and set him on fire in our
backyard.

Mr. Snow chews at a cuticle; his nails are a mess. He sighs a long deep sigh and shakes his head at me. “Please won’t you
help me here, Charmain?”

Please won’t I help him? Who’re they trying to give a lethal injection to, me or Tilden Snow III? I go, “Mr. Snow—”

He holds up his hand like a safety patrol. “Tilden. I keep asking you, please call me Tilden. Mr. Snow’s my Daddy’s name.”
I think he was trying to make a joke so I smiled and said I’d try to call him Tilden but I wouldn’t take the stand and tell
why I shot Kyle.

“Oh, Jesus,” he says. “Well, you better hope your friend Dr. Rothmann’s telling the judge she’s going to hang that jury.”

I say, “What does that mean, she’s going to hang the jury?” But he just pulls on his ears like he wishes they were longer
and he runs off with the other lawyers after Dr. Rothmann and the judge and leaves me to sit and wait, which is what I’ve
mostly been doing since Kyle died. Which I admit he did do when I shot him.

I’m used to it now but the first time they hauled me into this courtroom, I was crying and grabbing onto my grandma Mawmaw
so hard they had to prize my fingers from around her neck. I saw the way it was upsetting her how they had my hands and feet
both hooked up to a chain. But Mawmaw whispered at me, “Don’t you cry, baby doll, don’t you let those folks see you cry,”
and I tried hard to stop and I did. The only other time I ever went to pieces was when Mawmaw brought Jarrad into the back
of the courtroom and held him up for me to look at (he’s two and a half now and he was nineteen months last time I seen him).
He had a little toy basketball in his hands and I swear he looked like his daddy, maybe because he started to cry and his
face turned purple the way Kyle’s did when he got mad.

The first day I was in court the whole jury kept staring at me like somebody was going to test them in the morning. Right
off I noticed this one lady on the front row, a soft pretty lady, small, with a sharp smart face. From day one, she looked
right at me with her head cocked over to the side like a little hawk, sort of puzzling about me. They said her name was Mrs.
Nina Gold Rothmann, except they called her Doctor. She got to be the foreman of the jury even though she wasn’t a man. And
for two whole weeks of the State’s making its case against me, she’s about never took her eyes off me.

Now the State’s done and it’s time for our side to “shred them to pieces,” according to Mr. Snow, except I’m not going to
take the stand so there won’t be much shredding likely to get done. Maybe that’s why Dr. Rothmann’s made them all go off to
talk to the judge now. Maybe she’s in there telling the judge just give Charmain Markell the death penalty so the jury can
go on home. They must be about as sick of hearing about that
gun and kerosene and Kyle’s eleven points against Wake Forest as I am.

The first day of my trial I didn’t like Dr. Rothmann. It’s rude to stare the way she does. But after a while I kind of felt
like we was almost talking to each other. I heard all about her life at what they call the vow deer, I believe. She had to
tell about herself to get on the jury, or get off it, which a lot of them tried to because of their jobs or kids or whatever.
They said she was a big doctor at the Research Center. She told how she was working on what we’re all made up of, genomes,
something like that. When you know their genomes, you can tell people what they’re going to die of someday. Well, but I guess
I don’t need a research center to tell me that. Lethal injection. Least if the District Attorney, Mr. Goodenough, gets his
way. Anyhow, this foreman lady’s job of sorting out our genomes sounded hard but interesting and I could tell she cared a
lot about it from the way she talked. At first I smiled at her just to be polite, but later on it was sort of personal because
she was divorced and had a boy in college. And I thought that was kind of like me—I mean, I’ve got one little boy and no husband
anymore too. So a lot of days went by in court with me and Dr. Rothmann looking at each other. I started figuring out some
beauty tips I could of given her if she’d come in Pretty Woman. She had three suits that didn’t do much for her; the sleeves
were too long so she just had them rolled up. Her hands were nice though; somebody did a good job on her nails, but not us—I
never saw her in Pretty Woman and I do all their hands.