Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“As far as you know.”

“Well, that goes without saying, doesn’t it? There’s no end of things they don’t do as far as I know, and God only knows what they do that I don’t know, and I don’t want to think about it.”

“Jennifer’s more the athlete, isn’t she?”

They talked about the girls, Kevin Parmalee’s daughters, Richard’s granddaughters. They agreed that Jennifer, the older of the two, had innate athletic ability, but lacked the desire to do anything with it. She had the height for basketball, the older man pointed out, and they talked about the emergence of that sport.

He said, “You know how the college kids play a more interesting game than the pros? Well, I’ll tell you something. The women’s game is better than the men’s.”

“College or pro?”

“Either one.”

“I know what you mean. But...”

“But it’s impossible to give a damn which team wins.”

“I was about to say it was hard to get interested in it, but you just nailed it. That’s exactly what it is. It’s like watching golf, I get completely absorbed in it but I don’t give a damn who wins. Why do you figure that is?”

“One of life’s mysteries,” Richard Parmalee said. “Here’s another. Remember how the fans were cheering earlier, rooting for the Knicks to win by more than twelve points?”

“To beat the spread. Sure.”

“It meant something to the fans, whether or not they had bets down. We talked about that earlier. But what did it mean to the players?”

“I’m not sure I follow you. What did it mean to them?”

“Why did they knock themselves out? They couldn’t have played any harder if the game was nip and tuck.”

“You think they had money on the game?”

“You wouldn’t think they’d bother, the kind of salaries they make. Other hand, I don’t suppose it’s entirely unheard of. But I can’t believe they all bet on the game, and they were all playing their hearts out.”

“They’re pros,” Kevin Parmalee said. “Playing all-out is what they do.”

“They’ve been known to dog it from time to time. Maybe they were trying to beat the spread so it wouldn’t look as though they were trying not to beat the spread.”

“In other words, if they dog it somebody might think they’re shaving points. You think that goes on in the NBA?”

“Shaving points? I don’t know. Again, with their salaries, how could you bribe them? Kev, I think you’re probably right. They weren’t even aware of the spread, and they played hard because that’s the way they play.” He picked up his coffee cup, set it down. “When you played,” he said, “were you ever approached?”

“Approached? Oh.”

“Were you?”

“God, why would anyone come to me? I was lucky to be on the team.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. You were damn good.”

“I would have been okay somewhere else. I know, Duke was all my idea, but I’ve never been sorry I went. Even if I did ride the bench for four years. I never had more than eight minutes of playing time, so there were never any guys with bent noses trying to get me to dump games.”

“And your teammates were too busy trying to get into the NBA.”

“Trying to get into the Final Four. They knew they were going to get into the NBA.”

The waiter came, and Kevin Parmalee put his hand over his cup. “Just a half a cup for me,” Richard Parmalee said, and was silent until the waiter withdrew. Then he said, “I was approached.”

“Really?”

“Not by a guy with a bent nose. His nose was as straight as yours or mine, and you wouldn’t have marked him as a gangster, not by his appearance or by his manner. Although I suppose that’s exactly what he was.”

“And he wanted you to dump games?”

“Not to dump games. ‘I would never ask you to lose a game,’ he said. It was fine with him if we beat the other team. Just so we didn’t beat the spread.”

“Did you report him?”

“No,” Richard Parmalee said. “No, I didn’t report him.”

“Oh.”

“I took the money,” he said, and raised his eyes to meet his son’s. “And did what I could to earn it.”

“You shaved points.”

“I shaved points. If we were favored, and if Harold gave me the word, I did my best to see that we didn’t cover the spread.”

“How did you do it? Miss shots that you could have made?”

“I missed shots. I don’t know that I could have made them if I hadn’t had a reason not to. Another way, I’d be wide open and I’d pass off instead of taking the shot. There are a million things you can do without being too obvious about it.”

“I can imagine.”

“I got five hundred dollars a game. And this was 1957 we’re talking about. That was a lot of money in 1957.”

“Sure, it must have been a fortune.”

“When I graduated, my first job was as a management trainee with Kaiser & Ledbetter. Starting salary was five thousand dollars a year. And that wasn’t bad money. That’s what you paid a promising college graduate in a job with a future. So every time we didn’t manage to beat the spread, I was making a tenth of a year’s salary, and that’s not counting taxes.”

“I guess you didn’t declare the money that — Harold?”

“Harold. I never knew his last name, and no, I didn’t declare it. He paid me in cash and I didn’t know what the hell to do with it. It’s funny. I was doing it for the money, but I didn’t do anything with the money. I kept it in a cigar box, and I kept moving the box around because I was afraid somebody would find it.”

“You couldn’t put it in the bank?”

“Kev, I didn’t have a bank account. I lived at home with my parents. They gave me a scholarship to play basketball, but all that covered was tuition. I thought the extra money would come in handy, but I didn’t spend a dime of it.”

“You saved it in a cigar box. What did it add up to, do you remember?”

“Forty-five hundred dollars, and how could I forget? He always paid me in twenty-dollar bills. Twenty-five of them at a time, so what does that come to? Two hundred twenty-five? Is that right? Well, it’s close enough. Not enough bills to fill the cigar box, but a good-sized handful.”

“Nine games, that would have been.”

“Nine games,” the father said. “Nine college basketball games, and all I had to do was hold back a little bit, and how hard was that? And who did it hurt? I mean, who gave a damn if we beat St. Bonaventure’s by ten points or three points? The fans didn’t care. The only people who got hurt were the ones who bet on us, and they were breaking the law in the first place by gambling on a basketball game. What the hell did I owe them?”

“It’s not as though your team lost.”

“We did lose one game. We played Adelphi at home, and we were favored, and Harold gave me the word. And I did what I could to keep us from getting too far ahead, and then in the third quarter Adelphi started playing way over their heads, and before I knew it they were out in front, and we never did catch up. Would they have beaten us anyway? The way they were playing I’m tempted to say they would have beaten the Knicks that night, but I don’t know. Maybe yes and maybe no.”

“It must have been weird, watching the game slip away from you.”

“It was awful. I never played harder in my life than in the last five minutes of that game. We were all knocking ourselves out. I remember one shot that went around the rim and out, and the look on the face of the kid who put it up. I’d had my suspicions about him, and his expression confirmed it.”

“You know, I’d been thinking you were the only one doing it, but of course there must have been others.”