You got yourself into a mess here, didn’t you?” the lieutenant asked, lighting a cigarette.
“Yessir, I did.”
Grimsby offered a Marlboro to Washington, who shook his head. “I read that story about you. In the Times. How you take care of your mother and grandmother. You go home regularly to see them. You stay off drugs and out of those gangsta clubs in Midtown. You lead a good life… Why’d you get mixed up with Cabot?”
“My team was going to fire me and I-”
The lieutenant gave a sour laugh. “You believed that? Cabot and Pettiway faked it all. That memo in there? Cabot probably wrote it himself.”
“What?”
“The team’d be crazy to drop you. They find another two-guard could shoot like you?”
“Why’d Cabot do that?”
“He had to make you mad at your team so you’d agree to throw the game. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have, right?”
“Course not.”
“They had their bets all lined up in Atlantic City and Vegas. Put a ton of money on the Lakers. They stood to win two million if your team lost.”
Washington ’s face twisted into an angry frown. “And they fooled me. Damn! That’s why they picked me, ’cause I’m stupid. Oh, man, now what’m I gonna do?”
“You never been in any trouble with the law before?”
“No, sir.”
The lieutenant smiled sadly. “My son and I go to nearly every game. We love watching you make those shots.”
“I love making ’em.”
The cop’s eyes took in the cheap, stained wallpaper, focused on the corpse of a spider crushed against the wall a long time ago and never cleaned off. “Danny, your name’s not on the warrant. There’s a possibility I may be able to make this go away-if you promise you never get in any trouble with the law again.”
“Lord, sir, you’ve got my word on that.”
“But it’ll cost you.”
“Cost me?”
“I’ll have to take care of those other cops who were here, Harvey and his partner. Officer Randall too. Then I’d have to make sure the evidence gets lost-permanently. And then the judge who issued the warrants is going to wonder why nothing ever happened with the case. If he asks questions I’ll have to pay him off. His clerk too.”
“You can do that?”
“I wouldn’t otherwise, Danny, but you’re a legend here in town. A lot of kids look up to you.”
“I like it when there’re kids in the bleachers. If I disappointed them ’cause of this, man, I’d feel so bad… How much money would it take, you think?”
“Probably all of your savings.”
“Man, I’m using that money for my family back in Maryland. My mother and grandmother… My nieces-I’m making sure they’re going to college.”
Grimsby shook his head. “Well, Danny, you’re going to have to make a choice here. You don’t have to get me that money but then you’ll go to jail. And what’re your mother and grandmother going to do then?”
“Man, that’d be terrible.”
“And if you stay out of jail,” Grimsby pointed out, “you’ll be able to make more money.”
“That’s true. I will. What about Cabot?”
“Have to let him go too. But this probably shook him up bad. He may just change his ways-at least for a little while. So what’s it gonna be, Danny?”
The big man looked down at his hands for a long moment, then held up the cuffs for Grimsby to unlock.
Three hours later Teddy Grimsby walked up the sour-smelling hallway of Andy Cabot’s apartment building.
The duffel bag he carried was heavy and he was out of shape. Still he moved quickly; you don’t want to dawdle when you’re carrying a million dollars in cash through Hell’s Kitchen. Washington had come through. They’d met at his gym an hour ago and the player had-almost tearfully-given Grimsby his entire savings account.
Grimsby now came to Cabot’s apartment. The door was open and the man walked inside, to find himself in the middle of a celebration. Cabot was pouring Asti Spumante into Styrofoam cups and passing them out to the crew from Ernie’s-Mike O’Hanlon and Sedd the Greek, who’d pretended to be Harvey and his partner, the vice cops. Here was Tony Benotti, who’d swallowed his Queens drawl long enough to play “sort of” sports agent Pettiway from L.A.
Sitting on the couch was T. D. Randall, who’d spent all night rehearsing his critical role by shouting, “I need backup, now!” and leaping up from a table in his Brooklyn apartment about fifty times.
“I got it,” Grimsby said, gasping from the effort of carrying the money. He opened the duffel bag and dumped a portion of the contents out onto the table. The packets spilled across the stained wood and onto the floor.
“Jesus,” Randall muttered, picking up one and smelling it. “Ain’t that pretty.”
“The big dumb shit… Know what he did?” Grimsby asked, taking a cup. “I meet him in the middle of the locker room of his gym, right? And he says, right in front of everybody, ‘Hey, Detective, I got the money.’”
“I’ll bet somebody’s got to tie his Nikes for him,” Cabot said, and started distributing stacks of Washington ’s million dollars.
It had been Cabot and Randall’s idea to lay the scam on Washington. So they split $600,000 between them. The others divvied up the rest but nobody complained-they were all just punks and barflies, mostly in debt, and were delighted to be involved in a deal that both made good money and featured a victim who wasn’t going to go to the cops.
As Cabot dug the last of the cash out of the bag, he frowned and said, “Hey, what’s this?”
He lifted a little black box from the bag.
“Looks like a pager,” Grimsby said. “It’s Washington ’s bag. Must be his.”
Pettiway took the device. “Naw, it’s no pager.” Then his eyes grew wide in alarm. “Hell, it’s a GPS tracer!”
“Oh, shit,” Cabot spat out. He leapt up, just as, for the second time that day, the door to his apartment burst open. This time, however, the law enforcement officers who pushed inside were very real.
And far more numerous than before.
In sixty seconds the gang was cuffed and sitting on the floor. A detective from the real Midtown South Vice Unit read them their rights while the crime scene team started collecting evidence: Randall’s “informant” tape, the fake badges, the guns, the phony contract and letter from the coach, the briefcase containing the signing bonus-which wasn’t $500,000 at all but stacks of play money, each one topped with a single hundred-dollar bill. One cop started counting Washington ’s cash.
A moment later a furious and frightened Andy Cabot heard heavy footsteps on the stairs and two men entered the room. One was Danny Washington. The other was a middle-aged man in a suit. His ID card identified him as Detective Tim Getz. “Are these them, Danny?” the cop asked.
“Yeah. All of them. Those two played they was detectives. And he was an undercover cop, the one with the tape recorder. That guy there, Pettiway-he was playing at being some agent or something for the Lakers, and”- Washington angrily pointed at Cabot-”he was playing at being a asshole.”
Cabot muttered to Grimsby, “What the hell did you do to tip yourself off?”
“Nothing!” the faux cop protested. “I did just what you told me to!”
Getz ignored the bickering. He said to Washington, “The whole thing was a setup, Danny. From the start. They tricked you into agreeing to throw the game, they tricked you into thinking you were arrested, they tricked you into giving up your savings as a bribe. It almost worked too. Except you had the guts to come to us. A lot of people wouldn’t have.”
The cop inventorying the money finished and looked up. “The serial numbers on the first million match.” He looked around. “Where’s the rest?”
“Rest?” Cabot’s head turned slowly to the duffel bag.
“The other five million.”
“What six million?” Grimsby asked. “ Washington only gave me a million.”