Playmates (4 page)

Lennie was tipping his beer glass delicately toward his lips when I slid into the booth opposite him. He held the glass with his thumb and first two fingers. His ring finger and pinkie were extended. He drank only a little of the beer and set the glass back down.

"Spenser," he said and made a gesture to the bartender.

"Lennie, you've moved into the age of tomorrow," I said.

The bartender brought over a shot of whiskey and a draft beer in a tall thick glass. I hated a shot of whiskey, but every time I saw Lennie he ordered it for me. Over the years the shot had upgraded. Now it was Irish whiskey, at least. When I first knew him it was Old Thompson.

"Computer's a wonderful thing, buddy. Got all my files in there, plug it into a phone jack, dial up everything I need. I have to close quickly, I just unplug it, fold it up and off I go."

"You think it's immoral, Lennie, to take a nap during the day?"

Lennie shook his head. "Hell, no. I take one every afternoon. I get home about four thirty, lie down for an hour, on my back, peaceful, get up, take a shower, couple a highballs, sets you up for the night, you know? Take the old lady to Jimmy's, maybe, Doyle's in JP, fish dinner, bottle a wine. The nap's the key to it."

"I need to know the line on every Taft basketball game this year," I said. "And the final score."

Lennie looked at me for a little longer than was comfortable.

"You think somebody's been dicking with the spread over there?"

"I don't know. I'm trying to find out."

"You know something you got to tell me," Lennie said. "It's business, you know. I mean if something's not kosher I could get flushed on one of those games."

"I know. All I got now is rumors. Everybody connected with the team denies it. I come up with anything, I'll tell you. In confidence."

"Confidence is part of being a bookie, buddy, you know that. I don't talk about anything I don't need to."

"Can you get me the line?" I said. "I can get the scores from the newspaper file at the library if I have to."

"You come to the right place," Lennie said. "I can get you both in about ten minutes." He tapped the gray screen. "I used to have it all on slips of paper."

"Hard to flush that thing down the toilet," I said.

"No need. Unplug it and there's nothing on me. No evidence unless they search my home and access the computer." Lennie grinned. "Besides, cops don't try too hard with me."

He turned on the machine and punched in a few codes. The screen turned black and printing came up on it in star wars green. Lennie gazed at it for a moment, took another delicate sip of beer, put the glass down carefully and punched some new keys.

Lennie reached under the table and came up with a slim, tan briefcase. He opened it, took out a yellow legal-sized pad, selected a pen from among the several that were clipped to one of the pockets. He put the pen on the table top beside the pad, closed the briefcase, put it back under the table and punched some more keys. This time he copied down the information on display, punched some more, wrote some more. After about fifteen minutes, Lennie had a couple of columns of dates and numbers on his pad. He put the cap on his pen, put it down, punched away the display, turned off the terminal, and the computer screen went gray.

"Okay," Lennie said. "This column the date of the game. This column the point spread. This column the score."

A bartender came over with a fresh glass of beer for Lennie and took away the empty glass. Lennie took the cap off his pen and ran down the columns of numbers like an accountant scanning a tax form.

"Here," he said, and put a check mark next to one of the dates. "And here," he said, "and here." When he was through there were six games checked.

"Here's the games where they beat the spread," Lennie said. "Could happen, and be legit. Basketball's hard to handicap."

"I know," I said. "The Nets beat the Celtics at the Garden this year."

Lennie nodded vigorously. "Exactly," he said. I finished off my whiskey and stared at the beer. My head was beginning to feel thick and my face felt a little separate from the world, as if there were a transparent layer of insulation on it. Be a nice title for a novel, I thought, Boilermakers in the Afternoon. I took the sheet of yellow paper and folded it and put it into my shirt pocket.

"You still with that Jewish broad?" Lennie said.

"Susan," I said. "Susan Silverman."

"You gonna get married?"

"You never know," I said.

"You marry a Jew, and you and me be like kinsmen."

"Oy vay," I said.

I had to promise Ms. Merriman the right of first refusal on my sex life, but I managed to get her to call the athletic director on my behalf and tell him that the President wanted me to have tapes of six Taft basketball games. The A.D. told her that Dixie would have a fit if he found out, and Ms. Merriman said that Coach Dunham worked for the University and not the other way around and should he hear of it and complain he should be directed to her.

"What if Dixie calls you up and yells at you," I said.

"We are not here to service the basketball team," Ms. Merriman said.

"Good to know," I said.

"Yes," Ms. Merriman said.

By early afternoon I was lying on Susan's bed in her place watching the tape of late January's game between Taft and Seton Hall, on her VCR. Taft had been favored by seven and had won by three. I tried to watch away from the ball, at who was blocking out, who was rebounding, who was tight up on his man in the pressure man-to-man that Dixie insisted on in the age of zone. It's hard to watch basketball that way, even if you've played, even if you know the game. We are conditioned by television so to watch the ball. We tend not to notice weak side help, and who doubles down in the middle.

I watched the game through once without seeing anything that got my attention. This was going to take awhile. I watched the game through again, focusing for a while on one player, then another. The films were scouting films, not television, so they showed more of the court and spent less time fixed on the ball, and they didn't cover the time outs or half time, so the films only took a little more than an hour to watch. By three in the afternoon I'd watched Seton Hall twice and had concluded that I needed help. Also lunch.

For help I called a guy I knew named Tommy Christopher. He'd played at DePaul and then with the Celtics and had coached for six years at Providence College. When he was playing he'd had a good business manager and now Tommy mostly played golf, and a little poker, did a few commercials, and worked out at the Harbor Health Club, where he and I and Hawk now and then did some steam together.

I called the Harbor Health Club and left a message for Tommy to call me at Susan's.

"What's going on?" Henry said. "An afternooner?"

"More deadly than the adder's sting," I said, "is the foul mouth of an unusually short gym owner."

"I'm not unusually short," Henry said. "I'm just muscular for my height."

"Hell, yes," I said. "If you weighed twenty pounds you'd be just right."

We hung up and I looked into lunch. Susan seemed to me the most beautiful and intelligent woman I'd ever met. She had great warmth and compassion and humor. She had a top-of-the-line body, and strength of character and an appropriate sexual appetite. But as a larder keeper she ranked somewhat below Old Mother Hubbard. In her refrigerator was a plastic bag of raw cauliflower, a half empty carton of Dannon tropical fruit yogurt, a single round of whole wheat Syrian bread, which was unwrapped and had begun to fossilize, a jar of mayonnaise and a lemon. In her cupboard was a package of Rye Wafers, a jar of instant decaf, a loaf of whole wheat bread and, shamefully, a jar of all-natural peanut butter.

"Ah ha," I said. I boiled some water, made two peanut butter sandwiches, poured the hot water over a spoonful of decaf crystals, stirred twice, put the spoon in the sink and settled down at Susan's counter. Bon appetit.

While I was enjoying my second sandwich, Tommy Christopher called.

"Henry says you want to see me," Tommy said. "Said you needed help. I said you needed more help than I could give you."

"Susan's working on that," I said. "I need you to watch some basketball with me."

I explained what I had and what I wanted and Tommy said he'd come over.

"How many games are we going to watch?" Tommy said.

"Six," I said.

"I'll bring some beer," Tommy said.

Susan got through with her last patient at six and came upstairs from her office to find Tommy and me sprawled on her bed staring at the tapes. I had a notebook and wrote down what Tommy said.

"See that," Tommy was saying, "run it again. See Woodcock, he holes the forward on the weak side, and the guy comes in and takes the rebound and jams it."

"This is what you do all day?" Susan said. "I thought you were out fighting crime."

I hit the pause button. "Things are not what they seem," I said.

"I've heard that," Susan said.

WE stopped watching after another hour that night and ate Chinese food that Susan had called out for and I had fetched. Then Tommy went home, and I stayed. Two nights in a row. Zowie.

Friday, Tommy came in at nine and we settled in on the bed again and watched Taft against Pittsburgh.

"There," Tommy said. "Tubbs didn't fill the lane on the break, see on the left. So Davis takes it to the basket and draws the defender and has no place to lay it off and gets stuffed. He shouldn't have gone up in the air until he knew he had something to do with the ball, but it's reasonable to expect somebody to be filling that left hand lane. Then they'd have had a three on two." I scribbled in my notebook.

"Woodcock again," Tommy said. "You can see that play's set up for a pick. Stop, run it back. See the guard with the ball. He's yelling out a play. Okay, see, he comes out of the corner, loops around the perimeter, looking for the pick, and Woodcock is slow setting it. So Davis's got to back off and set up something else, and, see, they don't make the forty-five-second clock."

Benefiting from yesterday's learning experience, I had laid in a supply of smoked turkey sandwiches from the Mt. Auburn Market, and at noon we broke for a couple of them, each, with Cape Cod potato chips and Sam Adams beer; and back to the tapes.

"See, there's the same play that Woodcock fucked up this morning against Pittsburgh," Tommy said. "Look at this pick. Jesus Christ!"

I was sitting up on the edge of the bed so I wouldn't nod off.

"Okay, now here's another one. Run this back about ten seconds. Okay, there. Okay. It's Woodcock again. Simple give and go. The guard, what's his name, Davis, is going to find Woodcock in the corner, and then, the simplest play in basketball, he cuts for the basket. See. He loses his man. Amazing how often it works. He's free, the Temple center is too far toward Woodcock. And Woodcock holds the ball."

"Did he see him?"

"Spenser," Tommy said. "They've run that give and go twenty times in these tapes. They've run it twenty thousand times in their lives. Guy in the corner knows, knows there's going to be a cutter."

I turned it back and ran it again.

"See," Tommy said. "The minute he gets the ball, he dips his shoulders like he's going to drive. He never looks for the cutter, even though he's double teamed, and Taft has to pull it out and start over."

"Wouldn't any coaching staff see this reviewing the films?"

"If they were looking for it. And, face it, if you're coaching Taft, you're not looking for Dwayne Woodcock as a key to your loss, you know. He's probably the best player in the country."

"But if you did notice it," I said.

"You write it off as 'Dwayne's a known head case anyway.' Passing off is not the strongest part of his game."

"And," I said, "unless you see it as part of a pattern, and you were looking for the pattern, it wouldn't seem like anything but a break in concentration."

Tommy nodded. The tapes rolled on.

At four fifteen in the afternoon we finished the last tape.

"I say it's Woodcock," Tommy said. "And he's smart about it. He's not missing lay ups and foul shots. He's just slowing down their game, keeps the score a few baskets lower. And he's so good that if they are in danger of losing because of that he can explode for five hoops in a row. I mean there isn't anyone in college ball that can stop him when he makes up his mind to drive."

"What he's doing is keeping his teammates from scoring as much," I said.

Tommy nodded approvingly. "Exactly," he said. "That's exactly what he does. Misses a pass, sets a sloppy pick, doesn't roll to the basket, doesn't block out underneath, is a step slow filling the lane. Usually the result is that another guy doesn't score."

"And," I said, "since they're winning most of these games, no one is questioning the outcome. Anyone else?"

"Maybe number eleven, what's his name."

"Davis," I said.

"There's nothing here I can swear to," Tommy said. "Can't take shit like this into court, but Woodcock, for sure. Maybe the other kid."

Tommy and I had one more beer and talked about the kinds of picks Wayne Embry used to set, and Wes Unseld. Then he went home and I packed the tapes back to the A.D.'s office at Taft.

It had gotten dark as I drove home. The commuter traffic was headed the other way. Susan was having dinner with friends tonight. I was playing a Matt Dennis tape in my car and planning supper. Fresh crabmeat, maybe, sauteed in olive oil and white wine with red and yellow and green peppers, and mushrooms, and served over rice. Or I could pound out some chicken thigh cutlets and marinate them in lemon juice and tarragon and a drop of virgin olive oil and cook them on my new Jenn-Air indoor grill. I could have a couple more beers while I waited for them to marinate, and I could eat them with some broccoli and maybe boiled red potatoes. I'd put a honey mustard dressing on the broccoli. Or maybe some tortellini ... I parked in front of my place on Marlborough Street and went in. It was still and a little close. I opened the living room window a crack and ran through my choices again. I opted for the crab. Later there was a movie on cable, Zulu, one of my favorites. And the Celtics were playing Milwaukee, if I could stand any more basketball. The apartment echoed with a kind of spacious stillness, and the smell of spring evening seeped in through the open window. I'd been alone a lot in my life and I never tired of it.