by Mike Lupica
DiMaggio started playing piano again that year, even with every no-good thing catching had done to his hands, catching and the arthritis that had gotten worse every year. After the Yankees released him at the end of October, he traveled around Europe for six months, alone, without any real itinerary, starting in London and finally ending up in Barcelona, living in a small apartment that looked out on the statue of Christopher Columbus, studying for the law boards and playing the piano nights in the little bar downstairs. He came home and passed and started going to Fordham Law the next September. He also took piano lessons from this crazy Polish woman who lived down at Sheridan Square. DiMaggio remembered how after they’d finish on Thursday afternoons she’d pour them glasses of vodka, and they’d drink it and listen to tapes of Horszowski, the woman crying sometimes as if DiMaggio wasn’t there.
His first job, the dirty low lawyering job of the world, the rookie league of lawyering, was in New York, at Valerio and Cowen. One of the big shots there was a big Yankee fan and a friend of George Steinbrenner, the owner. The big shot, named DeLuca, acted like he was doing DiMaggio a favor by getting him in there with the other drones, all those young Ivy League dickheads who came to work half asleep because that was the time in New York when cocaine started showing up everywhere and the Ivy Leaguers had been out all night. DiMaggio lasted seventeen fun-filled months, then it was down to Washington, ending up on John Dowd’s staff. One of the lawyers at the Players Association knew DiMaggio was looking to make a move. He also knew Dowd was going to be handling the Pete Rose investigation for baseball. He got DiMaggio an interview, and Dowd jumped at the chance of having an ex-player on his staff.
Suddenly, lawyering wasn’t just sitting behind a desk. Suddenly, he wasn’t waiting anymore. Waiting for his father. Waiting for the big leagues. Waiting for a chance to get into the game. Waiting for real cases. This was a real case, with real action. Some of the other guys on the case were in awe of Rose, felt sorry for him because they’d grown up watching him play his ass off and get all those hits. They wanted to buy into the bullshit mythology, too. Shit, he’s Charlie Hustle, he can’t be betting on baseball! They were like everybody on the outside, amazed that their heroes could fuck up.
DiMaggio came at it all differently, after all the years on the inside. DiMaggio was long past thinking line drives made you smart or noble or good. There’d always been drunks, there’d always been guys taking dope, there’d always been gambling going on. Guys beating their wives. Now it just happened to be the guy who ended up with more hits than anybody in history.
“You’re not trying to make a case against Pete Rose,” Dowd would tell them. “You’re just trying to make a case against some guy who may have broken the baseball law.” Sometimes DiMaggio thought he was the only one who got it, all the way up until Dowd got Rose.
Dowd offered him a permanent job in D.C., and DiMaggio thought about taking it. He had an apartment he liked in Georgetown, he had drifted into an affair with a producer from National Public Radio, he felt settled for the first time since he’d left Commack to play ball. Then Dowd got the call from Jupiter that changed everything.
The man’s name was Ness Florescu. DiMaggio was vaguely aware of him from watching gymnastics at the Olympics. He had been coaching the Romanian women for years, and the Romanian women had won a pile of medals, and finally Florescu had moved to the United States and opened his own academy in Jupiter, Florida, about a half hour north of Palm Beach. Parents brought girls from all over the country to Florescu because he was supposed to be a kid’s best shot at a gold medal. His best shot at a medal that year, 1992, was a sixteen-year-old named Kim Cassidy. But a few weeks before, Cassidy had been mugged and nearly raped outside one of Florescu’s dormitories. In the process, the attacker had ruined the kid’s knee to the point where she needed surgery.
It turned out Florescu was a baseball fan, so he knew all about the Rose investigation. Florescu called John Dowd and said he didn’t think what happened to Kim Cassidy was an accident. He didn’t want to press charges if he was wrong because he figured that would finish him in gymnastics. But the Olympic trials were coming up and now that Cassidy couldn’t compete, the favorite for the gold medal was another kid from Houston who’d been Cassidy’s rival from the time they started competing against each other when they were eight.
Florescu sat in Dowd’s office with Dowd and DiMaggio and told them he thought the attack on Kim Cassidy might have been arranged.
“I don’t want to be the official sports snoop,” Dowd said after Florescu left. “Besides, this guy sounds crazy. Nobody’s been whacking out the competition since they used to do it in boxing back in the fifties.”
“What if it’s true, though?” DiMaggio said.
“You want him, he’s yours,” Dowd said.
It took him six weeks in Jupiter and Houston, most of the time spent in Houston. It wasn’t a mugging, and it wasn’t an attempted rape. It was a hit on the Cassidy girl, ordered by the stepfather of the Houston gymnast, an ex-con named Verne Maywood. There was finally a night in one of Maywood’s favorite honky-tonks. DiMaggio had been drinking there a week, watching Maywood get shit-faced, even buying him a couple of rounds of drinks. This night he followed him out and got into the parking lot in time to watch a guy step out from behind Maywood’s pickup and start beating him with a tire iron.
“You owe me sixty-five hundred, boy,” Tire Iron said. “And as you have probably guessed, you’ve officially worn my ass out with your excuses.”
Maywood was rolling on the ground, whimpering, still covering up against blows that had stopped for the time being. He said something DiMaggio couldn’t hear.
“Yes, right here,” Tire Iron said. “Right here and right now, goddamnit.”
“I promise you,” Maywood groaned. “A check tomorrow.”
Tire Iron got into a beat-up Grand Prix and drove off. DiMaggio was able to get the license plate. The car belonged to another ex-con, this one named Bobby Ray Bonner. It was easy enough to find out he and Maywood had been in prison together. DiMaggio called the Jupiter police in the morning, Jupiter called Houston. By the next day, Bobby Ray had given up Verne Maywood, and that night there was some wonderful television footage of the two dumb asses screaming at each other in front of a Houston courthouse.
The next Sunday night, 60 Minutes devoted a whole show to the attack on Kim Cassidy, built around DiMaggio’s investigation. Now he was the sports snoop. He was the one you called when you had the kind of problem the Knicks had now with Ellis Adair and Richie Collins.
So Ted Salter, the president of Madison Square Garden, had called. And now DiMaggio was in New York trying to catch a glimpse of a rape victim, feeling like some shitheel reporter himself, all because he’d let Salter talk him into it.
Salter was the Yankees’ vice president in charge of broadcasting the one year DiMaggio played there. When the Madison Square Garden cable network bought Yankee games, Salter moved over there, finally ending up president of the network. DiMaggio was vaguely aware that the Garden once belonged to Paramount Communications, along with Paramount’s movie and television companies and publishing houses. Then there were takeovers and sales and finally the last company to buy everything kept the movie and television companies but sold the Garden, the Knicks, and the New York Rangers hockey team to the Fukiko Corporation of Tokyo. DiMaggio seemed to recall that Fukiko was the product of some big Japanese merger. Salter went with Fukiko and became president of the Garden.
He called DiMaggio in Jupiter the night he found out about the charges against Adair and Collins. He was moving fast, he told DiMaggio. “Remember?” he said. “I always liked to move fast.”
“Find somebody else,” DiMaggio said. “Fukiko must have people who do this sort of thing.”
“I don’t really know the Japs yet,” Salter said. “I’m not saying I don’t trust them. Hell, what they’re paying me, I’d do the geisha thing, walk on their backs if they asked. But I don’t know them.
And I certainly don’t know their lawyers. I’ve got to have somebody I can trust here, so I make sure I look like I’m on top of this fucking thing. I’m not asking for a lot of your time here. Remember that time in Florida, that woman saying those three Mets jumped her booty? I don’t remember the exact dates, but it seems to me it started in spring training and the whole thing was wrapped up before Opening Day.”
“Cops did that.”
“I’m not putting the Garden and my basketball team in the hands of the Fulton Fucking Connecticut Police Department.”
“Then hire yourself a private investigator.”
“Going with a private investigator I don’t know is the same as going with lawyers I don’t know,” Salter said. “I know you. And I know I can trust you. You were a schmuck when you were a player. You were with the Yankees ten minutes and you were running all that union shit in the clubhouse like you were Jimmy Hoffa. But everybody said you were an honest schmuck.”
“Honest has nothing to do with it,” DiMaggio said. “It’s all juice. Jurisdiction. You’re not listening here. When I was with Dowd on the Pete Rose thing, we were the cops. Baseball commissioners used to run baseball like the commies ran Russia. People had to talk to me. You talk about the Mets thing? The ballplayers that girl accused, they still haven’t talked to the cops. Your guys aren’t going to help the cops, and they’re sure as shit not going to help me.”
“They work for me,” Salter said. “I’m old-fashioned enough to think that still counts for something.”
DiMaggio said, “That’s not the way these assholes look at it. They think you’re just another rich guy put on this earth to take care of them.”
They went around and around, Salter saying he wasn’t going to hire a private investigator, he didn’t trust goddamn lawyers, he wanted a pro. Salter saying he’d want DiMaggio to work alone, he didn’t want the whole thing turning into the leak-a-thon—Salter’s expression—the O. J. Simpson case had been from the start. And Salter finally saying he’d overpay if he had to, at least fly up from Florida and talk to him in person. Which DiMaggio finally said he’d do. Salter had been out in California when he called; he flew back on the Fukiko jet. DiMaggio caught the early Delta out of West Palm. They met in DiMaggio’s suite at the Sherry-Netherland. DiMaggio always stayed there. There were flashier New York hotels, but he liked the suite they always gave him at the Sherry, one of the two they had with a piano. Sometimes DiMaggio had to travel with his little pack-up baby Yamaha keyboard if he wanted to play, but he didn’t like to use it if he didn’t have to, it always made him feel like some dufus accordion player with Lawrence Welk.
Salter sat at the dining table and sold him on taking the case.
Salter said, “I’m not looking for you to acquit or convict. I don’t need something from you that will stand up in court or in front of a jury or as some kind of show on Court TV. I want to know what happened that night. If Adair and Collins did it, I want to be able to hand them your report at the end and say, ‘Here it is.’ And I want to make sure that my Japs are prepared in the event this woman brings some kind of civil action against us down the road. If they didn’t do it and you can prove it to my satisfaction, I want as much ammo as possible.”
Salter moved his coffee cup out of the way, leaning forward, cuff links making clicking noises on the glass tabletop, like he’d had this sudden rush of being earnest, the big guy playing the big guy now in the Sherry. He had blond hair slicked back and tiny round tortoiseshell glasses and what looked to DiMaggio to be a tanning-salon tan.
DiMaggio thought: another one of the yuppie gangsters who had taken over sports.
Salter said, “Adair is as much a representative of Fukiko as the star of any television series. He has a cartoon show of his own on Saturday mornings, for chrissakes. NBC did a prime-time special last season built around his goddamn birthday. So you have my backing on this, and the parent company’s. Richie Collins is just a sideman here, believe me. A nobody. We’re worried about Adair. If you can prove he raped this woman to our satisfaction, he’s out of here. We’ll get somebody else to dunk the fucking ball.”
“There’s something you ought to know,” DiMaggio said. “They probably don’t think of it as rape, even now.”
“Then what the hell do they think it was?”
“One Thursday night with laughs last October. Something to break up the monotony of training camp.”
Salter reached down, snapped open a thin Vuitton briefcase, took out a manila envelope, handed it to DiMaggio. “There’s a picture of her in there.”
DiMaggio said, “Where’d you get this?”
“We got it,” Salter answered. “Hannah Carey, age thirty-one. Didn’t make it as an actress. Waitressed for a while, then went to work as a trainer for the Vertical Club. Her mother was a professional tennis player. Brother’s an actor, too. Jimmy Carey. Did a soap one time. Does commercials. No one seems to know whether Hannah Carey’s working right now, but she still works out at the Vertical almost every afternoon. We talked to the guy who runs the place.”
DiMaggio looked at the old black-and-white publicity picture of Hannah Carey. Short blond hair, huge eyes, great smile. Classic features all around, nose and cheekbones and jaw. Hannah Carey looked the way beautiful models used to look, before the famine.
Salter clapped his hands. “You’re supposed to be the best,” he said. “So go be the best.” Then he told DiMaggio to use his town car for the rest of the day if he wanted. Salter said he was going to walk back to the Garden, it would give him an hour when nobody could find him.
When DiMaggio got downstairs fifteen minutes later, the car was at the front door, next to the Sherry’s big clock. He told the driver, Rudy, to take him to the Vertical Club. Now they had been sitting in front of the Vertical since two o’clock, watching the media crowd grow on Sixty-first Street: photographers, minicams, kids with press cards clipped to the breast pockets of their blazers, most of the kids in jeans, DiMaggio surprised there seemed to be as many women as men.
He was starting to think about giving up on Hannah Carey, taking a ride up to Fulton instead, when everything started to happen across the street. The media crowd started to move, and then he saw Hannah Carey running toward Second Avenue.
“Go!” DiMaggio snapped at Rudy.
“Where?” Rudy said, pulling his cap down as if by reflex, half turning to DiMaggio as he did.
DiMaggio pointed to Hannah. “Get up alongside her before the dinks catch up.”
DiMaggio opened the door to the backseat when they started to catch up to her. Told her he was the good guys.
Hannah Carey, feeling dizzy and disoriented, hesitated.
“What is that supposed to mean?” she said. “You’re the good guys?” Still not making any move to get into the backseat.
The guy nodded past her, at the crowd. “You sure you don’t want to talk about this in the car?” Then he made some room for her.
Hannah looked over her shoulder, made up her mind, jumped into the backseat next to him, slammed the door behind her. The light was changing up ahead. The driver gunned the car and beat it. Now they were heading toward Third. Hannah twisted around in her seat, taking one last look. They were back on the other side of Second, pointing the minicams at the car like they wanted to open fire.
The guy smiled. “We should be able to make it over the mountains and into Switzerland from here.”
“This isn’t funny,” she said. “How do I know …?”
“You’re safe? You don’t. But you are. I’ll drop you at the next corner if you want.”
Hannah, still catching her breath, got herself turned around on the seat so she was facing him. Her dark-haired rescuer. Not bad-looking in his blue suit.
“Who are you?” she said.
“I told you,” he said. “My name’s DiMaggio.”
“I mean, what are you doing here?”
“Don’t get out of the car at the next corner and I’ll tell you.”
> “But if I want to …”
“All you have to do is tell Rudy here to stop.”
Hannah leaned back, away from him, tucking herself into the corner. Maybe she should be as scared of him as she was of the bastards chasing her. But she felt safe all of a sudden in this car, for some reason she couldn’t understand.
“I’m listening,” she said.
She sat there studying him, seeming to relax a little bit. “I’m listening,” she said, and that was it. She had long, elegant fingers, resting on top of the gym bag in her lap. DiMaggio always noticed people’s hands.
They were waiting for the light at Lexington Avenue. DiMaggio said, “Where to?”
“That’s your idea of an explanation?” She made a halfhearted move for the door handle.
“I just wanted to give Rudy some idea …”
“West Side,” she said. “Do you have a first name, Mr. DiMaggio?”
“I don’t like to make a big thing of it.” He smiled at her, then told her his first name. “Do you follow baseball?”
“No.”
“No use explaining then.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Don’t try. Usually when people press me, I tell them to look it up in The Baseball Encyclopedia, if it’s that important.”
Giving her a routine, just to keep talking.
Keep her in the car.
“What do you want from me?”
“The Knicks have hired me.”
She leaned forward as soon as he said it. “Hey,” she said to Rudy. “Hey, you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rudy said.
“Pull over anywhere, please.” She leaned back, said, “The Knicks, Jesus.”
“Lady, we’re in the park,” Rudy said.
“I don’t care. I’ll walk.”
DiMaggio said to her, “Just listen to me for one second before you get out. I’m working for the Knicks because they want to know what happened.”
