Without Chase

Without

Chase

by

Jo Frances

Copyright © 2015 by Jo Frances
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2015

Chapter One

Chase

If Chase had known that by the end of that day, his life would be changed forever, he would have made it a point to remember every precious thing that happened. Instead, the day started out like most. He woke up to the pleasant feeling of his girlfriend Jamie spooned up against him and nuzzled her awake.

“Hey.”

Her blue eyes fluttered open and she turned over, nestling into his shoulder. “Hey, baby.” she said softly. “I missed you.” Jamie had been in Rio for the past week working, and the week before that he had been away on a road trip.

“I missed you too. I missed you a lot.” Their separations were getting harder to bear. Jamie’s modeling career, launched the night he was drafted into the NBA, had been successful from the beginning. But now it was beginning to take on a life of its own as she was being offered acting roles, and work with instantly recognizable designers. Terms such as All-American beauty captured her blonde hair, large blue eyes and lush lips. But the long legs that held up her nearly six-foot frame, and a feminine but athletic figure made Jamie a rarity in that she appealed to both the fashion people and the mass market alike.

Chase drew her closer, tugging off the tee shirt she wore. “I know we’ve been together almost two years, but come on, it isn’t time to start wearing sweats to bed yet,” he teased her as the shirt came off.

“I was cold last night,” she said. Chase ran his hands all over her skin as she talked, golden from her time on the Rio beaches. “Maybe you shouldn’t keep your windows wide open.”

“Maybe you should just sleep closer to me.” He buried his face in her hair. “I’ll keep you warm.”

“We won’t get much sleep that way.” She smiled up at him as he lowered his body into hers.

An hour later, Chase reluctantly left his warm bed for the Waves’ practice facility. As he pulled into the parking lot, he was surprised to see the team owner and General Manager’s cars in their designated spots in front of the building. David Patton had made his fortune in technology and had bought the Waves basketball team as a business investment. He barely showed up to the home games, yet the black Lamborghini was definitely his. Chase felt a flutter of dread as he strode into the building.

Jim, one of the assistant trainers met him in the locker room as he was getting dressed. “Uh, hey, Chase,” Jim spoke in a low voice. “Hold off on suiting up. The big boss wants to see you.” The flutter had now turned into a full size anxiety attack. Chase looked around the room at his teammates, most of whom had their backs to him. A meeting with the owner usually meant a player was about to be cut, or traded and none of the other players wanted to be associated with whatever player that was.

Still, this sort of thing was usually done in the management offices downtown. Not before a team practice. Chase knew this meeting couldn’t have been about his performance. His point averages were among the highest on the team, and he had a good chance of making the All-Star team. He had to be secure…

In a small conference room overlooking the court, David Patton and Bill Carona, the team GM’s were waiting for him. He hated to shake their hands in greeting, knowing it must have been clammy with fear.

“Hey, Chase, how are you?” Patton was going to lead this meeting.

“Not that good, apparently.” If Chase was about to be traded, he didn’t want to waste time with pleasantries.

Patton nodded appreciatively. “OK, lemme get to the point. I got a visit from the NBA commission yesterday. They got a tip that you’re involved with a gambling ring.”

Chase laughed with relief. A simple misunderstanding. “David, I don’t even go to Vegas.”

Bill Carona shot him a sympathetic look and interjected. “Yeah, we know that, Chase. But what they’re saying is that you threw a game for them. That you helped this gambling ring beat a point spread in the Panthers game.”

A rush of understanding filled Chase and he struggled to keep from reacting. Too late, Patton caught the expression on his face.

“If there’s something you want to tell us, Chase…”

Chase stood up. “I think it’s time for me to talk to my lawyer.”

In the parking lot, Chase called his agent Steve Green and told him what had just happened. Steve was furious. “They shouldn’t have met with you like that,” he told him. “They know you’re just a kid, and they were trying to catch you off guard, get you to say something you didn’t want to---”

Chase didn’t answer. He may have been young, and he may not have been brought up in a family like Jamie’s, but after years of watching his mother deal with creditors and the law, he knew when and how to keep his mouth shut.

Steve told him to fly out to New York to meet with him immediately. “Do not say anything to anyone. We need a plan before this shit blows up.”

Chapter Two

Chase came home to find Jaime still in his house, cooking. She looked up, surprised. “Back so soon? I thought you had practice.”

He wanted nothing more than to take her back to bed and pretend this had all been a dream. Instead he asked her roughly, “what are you still doing here?”

Jamie frowned at his tone. “What am I still doing here? I wanted to make some dinners for your freezer, that’s what I’m doing---” She took one look at his face. “Chase, what’s going on?”

If he allowed himself this one small indulgence----to turn to his girlfriend and cling to her---if he allowed his emotions to come through, he knew he would never be able to muster the strength to keep them in check again. He would be a prisoner of his weakness. Just like his mother was a prisoner of hers.

“Nothing. I---you gotta go.”

“Did you just tell me to leave?” Jamie laughed in disbelief.

“I’m serious. You have to leave me alone right now, OK?”

Her hurt expression was almost more than he could bear. “Chase---” she took a step towards him, but Chase turned away from her.

“I’m flying out to New York,” he said, as if that would explain everything. “I’m going to go upstairs and pack.”

He ran upstairs to his bedroom and locked the door. A few minutes later, he could hear Jamie on the other side, listening as he changed and threw a few things in his suitcase. He paused, and she tapped softly on the door.

“Please tell me what happened.”

“No.” He took a deep breath, steadying himself. “Damn it, can you just back off?” He heard her gasp and he struggled to keep from throwing open the door and apologizing. Softening his voice he said, “I’ll---I’ll call you, OK?” Chase stood by the door, listening until he heard the front door slam behind her.

The next day, Chase realized that walking into Steve Green’s office with the aura of scandal around him was certainly different than walking in as a member of the NBA with a multi-million dollar contract. Steve’s assistant Carla Mattarazzo, or “Matty” as Steve and his clients called her, was polite but distant, refusing to make eye contact with him.

“Hey, Chase. Have a seat.” She led him into the small private sitting room outside his office. “He’ll be right with you.” This was the first change. Steve had never kept him waiting before. Matty paused. “Would you---can I get you some water?”

“No, I’m good.”

Matty nodded and scurried off, relieved the pleasantries were over. A minute later, the door opened and Steve led him into his office. “Sorry about the wait, Chase. Come on in.”

Chase sat down on one of the large couches in the room. “How’s it going?”

An uncharacteristic flash of anger appeared in Steve’s eyes. “How’s it going?” he repeated sarcastically. “How do you think it’s going? I’ve been on the fucking phone all day with the Commissioner and the Feds. You tell me how it’s fucking going.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

Steve paused and squeezed his hands together as if to keep himself from throwing one of the framed pictures on his desk at Chase’s head. “Chase, do you know why the really good agents like me are lawyers?” Another pause. “So that when one of our clients; a client such as yourself, gets into trouble we can advise him. And besides knowing what we’re actually talking about, one of the advantages---one of the ways we earn our cut---is that as a lawyer, conversations between our clients and ourselves are considered attorney-client privilege.” He paused again. “Which means that anyone else in your life that you talk to can be subpoenaed, and under penalty of perjury they have to tell the truth. But whatever you tell me, stays with me.” Steve’s voice rose. “So maybe you should start telling me. The. Fucking. Truth.”

Normally, Chase would have walked out of any meeting with anyone who talked to him like that. But he knew that Steve would be the one person who could help him, so he continued. “It was…it was my mom was the one who made the deal.”

A silence fell in the room. Steve nodded slightly in his direction as if giving him permission to go on. “My mom called when we were playing Orlando and said she wanted to meet with me. So I went to where she was staying, and there were these two dudes there. They told me she had been gambling and now she owed them some money---that she had signed over the house I bought her over to them.”

“What the fuck--” Steve interrupted him. “How much did she; do you--owe on the house?”

“About sixty grand, I think.”

“And she signed over a house worth
half a million dollars
to cover a sixty thousand dollar debt?”

Chase shook his head and shrugged in frustration. “She spent all her life worrying about meeting eight hundred dollars in rent. All this stuff---titles, deeds---she doesn’t understand it.”

A flicker of pity across Steve’s face told Chase he believed him. “Go on.”

“They said they’d tear up the contract if I did one thing for them.”

“And that was?”

“They wanted me to short the spread on the Panther game. The line on the Panther game was that they would lose by eight, and they wanted me to make sure to do what I could to lose by less than that. ‘
Just miss a few free throws late in the game
’, they said. I told them no. You know, if my mom lost her house, then that was her fault.” Chase closed his eyes at the memory. “And maybe it was because I already had it in my head, but it happened just like they wanted it to. I was at the free throw line twice in the last five minutes of the game, and I missed all four free throws. That’s practically fucking impossible for me. I didn’t mean to, but it was like, I was trying so hard to make the shots---”

“That you ended up missing them and the Panthers only lost by seven points. And whoever bet against the eight point spread, won.” Steve finished for him. He sat in silence for a minute, considering. “The League can’t prove that any money changed hands, which is the only thing that’s keeping your ass away from a lifetime ban.”

Chase felt a wave of genuine fear come over him. “A lifetime ban? I didn’t know they could do that---”

“For point fixing? Hell yeah. You could kill someone and not get banned. But gambling, or point shaving---that impacts the entire League’s bottom line and they are not going to let anyone or anything fuck with that.”

The logic behind this was clear, and Chase realized he was in a lot of trouble. “But like I said, I didn’t do it. And,” he added hopefully, “like
you
said, I didn’t take any money.”

Steve made a dismissive sound. “Yeah, but you met with them, there’s a video surveillance tape of you meeting with them, and because of you, they made a lot of money that night.” He nodded as if to himself. “I think we can get this case against you dropped if you testify against the people you met.”

As Chase’s shoulders slumped with relief, Steve raised a cautionary hand. “But you’ll have to come clean with everything.”

“I’ve got no problem with that.”

“You’ll have to tell them about your mom.”

Chase sat up in alarm. “What does that mean? What can happen to her?”

“The FBI may investigate.”

“And?”

Steve met his eyes. “If they find enough evidence, they may open a case...against her.”

This time his refusal was without condition. “There is no fucking way I’m going to do that.”

Steve knew it wouldn’t do any good, but he tried anyway. “Chase, come on…this is your career we’re talking about here,” he said without much conviction.

Chase stood up. “I’d let her lose her house because I’ll always make sure she has a roof over her head. But this? Do you really think I’d send my own mother to jail?”

Steve nodded, defeated. “I know. But I had to tell you the offer.” He looked at his client pacing restlessly around the room like a caged animal. “Look---sit down, Chase, will you?” After a moment to consider, Chase sat down, and Steve continued. “The most important thing is to get the Feds to dismiss their case against you. But what this means is that as of right now, you stop talking to anyone and everyone. Because if you tell anyone who isn’t your lawyer what happened, the Feds can subpoena them, do you understand? And if there’s one thing this post 9/11 world has taught us all, it’s that you don’t fuck around with a government investigation. So whoever it is that you care about---if you want to protect them, you tell them nothing. Got it?”

“I wouldn’t anyway,” he said incredulously, wondering why this even needed to be said. Then he understood.

“The only way to prove that is if you don’t talk to them at all, because they’ll go after the people you were close to. They may not even believe these people have any information. But they can believe that if they hassle the people in your circle enough, you’ll talk just to protect them.”

Chase had to grudgingly respect such a strategy because it
would
work. Jamie, her brother, his college teammates---he would do just about anything to protect them. It was they who had been his family these past few years while his mother Evelyn was just someone who called him when she needed money. Which was frequently. As if a door slammed shut somewhere inside him, Chase knew that as of this moment, his old life was over. He turned, and Steve Green could see that the light was gone from his eyes.

“Yeah. I got it. I have to cut everyone close to me out of my life.”

Steve patted his shoulder awkwardly, but in genuine sympathy at his plight. “You should call Jamie” he said.

Chase waved him off, irritated that Steve was giving him advice about his relationship.

“No, I mean, you should call Jamie. Now. From my office.” Steve continued.

“In front of you? Why?”

“Because if they subpoena her phone records, the call will be from my office, and I can be a witness to the conversation that transpired.”

With a weary sigh, Chase took the phone Steve handed him. “You may as well tell me what I’m supposed to say.”

“Keep it brief. Tell her that you’re going to have to cease contact with her for her own good. Let her know that until this legal matter is resolved---”

“Got it.”

Jamie answered on the first ring. “Chase?” He could tell she had been crying, and the relief in her voice at hearing from him broke his heart.

He swallowed hard. “Hey Jamie.”

“Are you ok? Chase, whatever it is, I don’t care---?”

“Jamie, just let me talk, OK?” As he hardened his voice, Chase felt like he was on a rollercoaster and this was the part where the car was accelerating downwards, plunging him towards the ground. “Listen, I can’t be with you now. There’s all this shit going on, and I can’t---I’ve just gotta look out for myself right now, get my head straight.”

He heard her struggle to keep her voice steady. “That’s fine, Chase. Take all the time you need. I love you and I’ll always be here for you.”

God, he didn’t deserve her, Chase thought. With so much left unsaid, he could only respond, “Take care, Jamie,” before hanging up.

Steve quietly left the room to allow Chase a minute to pull himself together. When he returned, Chase gave him a quick nod, and the two of them got to work.

For the next hour, Chase sat in Steve’s office and listened as the agent called lawyers, public relations people and more lawyers to deal with The Accusation. It was clear that terms such as “point shaving”, or “gambling” were not going to be used. Instead, this was going to be referred to as an “accusation”, or “allegation”.

After each phone call, Steve would tell Chase a summary of who the person was and how they could help him. Then he would ask pick up the phone and make another call.

Finally, Steve had a notepad filled with names and numbers and a chart of who was going to be responsible for what. He looked across his desk at Chase. “This is going to cost you a lot of money.”

“As long as it works.”

Steve threw his hands up in a warning gesture. “Hey, no guarantees. You got yourself in some serious shit, and we just have to hope they don’t try to make an example of you.”

For the next fifteen minutes, even as they were constantly interrupted by more calls and texts, Steve laid out his plan, but basically, they were held to what the NBA commissioner decided to do, so any long term plans would have to wait.

At the end of their meeting, Steve walked Chase out to the elevators, a gesture that his assistant Matty noted with interest.

“So you’re not mad at him anymore?” she asked when Steve came back. “He’s no longer a fuck up?” Matty had met both Chase’s mother Evelyn and his girlfriend Jamie before. She had, in fact, spent a day with the two women getting them ready for the draft and her dislike for Evelyn had turned out to be well placed.

Steve paused at her desk. “No, I’m not mad at him anymore. He’s a good kid.” He looked at her and seemed to search for the right phrase. “He’s a loyal son. I want you to remember that because his world just got very, very complicated.”

Matty nodded, understanding. This wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last, that one of her boss’s clients found themselves in trouble not because of their own actions, but because of the people around them. It was usually their friends, occasionally a cousin or half-brother. But a mother betraying a son was rare.

Chase returned to his hotel room and finally allowed himself to check the messages on his phone. Not surprisingly, not one of his teammates from the Waves had reached out. He tried not to feel disappointed at their response. Guiltily, he thought of the guys who had been cut from the roster. With the exception of the one player who had been traded for a bigger contract, Chase hadn’t said goodbye to any of them, either. You could spend more time with a teammate than your own family, but if their locker was cleaned out when you went in the next day, then you just put them out of your mind. There was nothing personal about this, he knew. It was just an understanding that ultimately, each person had to look out for themselves and no one wanted to be associated with a player who couldn’t make it, whatever the reason.

Jamie had left him several messages from before he had called her. He resisted the temptation to call her back, or even to listen to his messages just to hear her voice. This mess he was in now---this life-destroying, soul crushing mess he was in was something he had to protect Jamie from. Thinking of what it could do to her and to her family if she were in any involved in federal investigation gave him the resolve to begin deleting the messages one by one.