by Mike Lupica
“I told the police what happened.”
“I know,” he said. “I come into this believing you. Thinking they did it.”
Hannah Carey gave him a sarcastic “Thanks” for his effort.
Rudy hadn’t stopped, but she didn’t seem too worked up. She had her hands back on top of the bag and was looking out the window. So DiMaggio kept going. “The Knicks aren’t necessarily on their side. And I’m not on anybody’s side. I just wanted to meet you, talk to you.”
“Why?”
“I’m going to be around. I don’t want you to think of me as the enemy.”
“Why can’t the police handle this?”
DiMaggio stared at her. You couldn’t help it. Hannah Carey was better-looking in person, blond hair cut even shorter than it had been in the picture Salter had given him. Her blue eyes were so light they seemed to have faded somehow, like old denim. He stared and tried to see her with Adair and Collins, wondering how it came to that.
As if looks ever had anything to do with it. DiMaggio thought: No wonder women think we’re such assholes. Now he said, “Because these things are a bitch for the police. Because a lot of time has passed. Because the police may come out of this convinced that it happened just the way you said it happened and still throw up their hands, say, ‘We can’t make the case.’ I don’t have to worry about that. The people who run the Knicks, they don’t want the case. They want the truth.”
“They have it. It’s in the report. It’s all over the papers now.”
DiMaggio said, “I’m going to be the second opinion.”
They got to Central Park West. Rudy said, “Do you still want me to stop?”
She said, “Yes.”
DiMaggio said, “You don’t live here.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
“I’d like to talk to you again.”
Rudy had come around, giving her the full treatment. He opened the door and Hannah Carey got out, not saying anything. So DiMaggio got out, too.
“What do you say? A cup of coffee sometime. Anything you don’t want to tell me, blow me off, don’t tell me. I’m easy.”
Hannah, studying him now, said, “I don’t think so.”
DiMaggio shrugged.
“Think it over. I’m at the Sherry-Netherland. Like I said, I’m going to be around.”
“I’ll think it over.” She gave him a quizzical look. “Mr. Second Opinion DiMaggio.” She walked north on Central Park West, the park on her right, swinging her bag in her right hand, like a kid. DiMaggio watched her until she was out of sight. He told Rudy to find him a rental car place, he wanted to drive himself up to Connecticut in the morning.
“She seem like an actress to you?” DiMaggio said, and Rudy said, “Don’t they all?”
7
DiMaggio took the Fulton College exit off the Merritt Parkway. It put him on Route 7, which didn’t look like Connecticut at all to DiMaggio, just some kind of anywhere fast-food drag, Burger King and McDonald’s and Taco Bell and Roy Rogers, until everything finally settled down and he got into the town of Fulton, with its small-town movie-set library and all its beige designer brick. DiMaggio thought they just should have called it Town Beautiful.
It didn’t take long to go all the way through downtown Fulton. The directions said take a left when he could see the train station. DiMaggio did that and then went up a hill, past a pretty white-frame Congregational church, following signs to a town called Ridgefield, exactly the way Salter’s secretary said. He wasn’t even a mile out of town and already he felt like he was in the country, with elegant old houses set back from the road and huge fenced-in areas with horses. He took a right off the road to Ridgefield, went down a hill this time, and saw Fulton College spread out below him.
Salter’s secretary told him he couldn’t miss the huge stone arch that served as the front gate. You went through the arch, and then about a hundred yards down was a security booth. She said his name would be left with the guard there. She promised that the guard could direct him to the gym, all the way in the back of the campus.
It took him almost half an hour to get from the stone arch to the booth with the security guard. DiMaggio counted fifteen cars and vans ahead of him. Most of the vans had spaceship satellite dishes coming out of their tops. The guard was stopping everyone, DiMaggio could see him, busting balls, checking his list, then waving them through.
When DiMaggio got to the front of the line, the guy took him through the same drill, looking at the first page on his clipboard, flipping to the next page, running his finger down the long list, making a small check mark. DiMaggio figured him for about seventy in his blue-and-orange Knicks windbreaker. He was more of a greeter than a private cop. Maybe it was working at the college. He wore a denim shirt and some kind of flashy tie with what looked to be basketball players jumping all over it. His white hair was brushed back and curled down over the collar of the denim shirt.
“DiMaggio?” he said, turning it into a question, leaning forward to take a better look inside the car. DiMaggio just waited with the window down, looking past him at the campus, which looked beautiful, cut out of woods, hills, and sky. Some of the roofs had red tile on them, like Stanford. If you were going to steal, steal from the best.
The white-haired greeter said, “It’s a little crowded over there at the gym today, which is straight down to the end of this road and then to the right. My advice is to take the first space you see and then just walk from there or the Knicks’ll be all done and—”
The white-haired greeter stopped. A Cherokee, black, was pulling around DiMaggio’s rented Taurus, going up on the grass, spitting dirt and rocks, coming so close to DiMaggio on the passenger side he could feel his car move a little bit. The guard looked up and said, “Hey,” then seemed to recognize the black Jeep. He gave a sheepish wave, and the Jeep gunned its way past them.
DiMaggio said, “Who was that?”
“Right there? Right there was Mr. Adair and Mr. Collins. Themselves.” He smiled. “ ’Course this time of year, that’s not what they’re known as around here.”
DiMaggio could see a couple of the cars ahead of him start chasing after the Jeep. He said to the guard, “What are they known as around here?”
“The Dick Brothers.”
Ellis said to Richie, practically screaming, “Take the service road behind the library. Cut back up that little dirt road next to the soccer field.” He was turned around in the front seat, looking back at the reporters, somehow feeling like they were chasing them with ropes and torches. “Get me the fuck inside that gym.”
Richie slowed down, let two girls pass. The first one, with real short black hair and a nice body on her, waved at Richie like she knew him.
Ellis said, “Not now, man. Shit.” He turned around again. There was a TV reporter and his cameraman, on the dead run, maybe a hundred yards behind them. “Fuck it,” Ellis said. “I ain’t practicing today, I can’t deal with this shit. Tell Gary I’m having some of that tendinitis behind my knees again.”
Richie didn’t say anything back. Sometimes he could position Ellis, they both knew it, get Ellis to do something he didn’t want to do. But Richie also knew there were times when you shouldn’t push. Richie knew better than anyone: Push too hard and you couldn’t move Ellis Adair in a million fucking years.
Richie understood something else along the same lines, dealing with how hard-ass Ellis could get when he had to: Guys didn’t get out of Booker T. just because they were some asshole who could jump.
Most white guys, sportswriters especially, made that mistake all the time with black ballplayers. Ellis explained it to Richie one time when they were both still in high school, and Richie never forgot it. Ellis told him there were a lot of guys who could play, play just about as well as him, but who never got out of the projects or off the corner. Never got off the playground. Ellis had said, “I call them Idas.”
Richie had said to him, “Now what the fuck is an Ida?”
&nbs
p; Ellis smiled and said, “Idas are the bitches always telling you what they coulda been if they’d just applied themselves. ‘If Ida done this, I could have made the NBA.’ ‘If Ida done that, I’d be the one making three million dollars a year.’ Idas, Rich. Those bitches are on every street corner in Jersey City.”
In the front seat now, Richie said, “If Ida done somethin’ wrong, I’d listen to you. But we didn’t do anything, we’re not going to act guilty. And if you don’t show at practice today, that’s what these little TV cocksuckers are going to say, that Fresh was afraid to show, maybe he’s got something to hide.”
He was driving through campus now a little slower than he usually did, like he was buying time, trying to settle Ellis down.
“Wasn’t talking about guilty or innocent,” Ellis said, “just about not being able to deal with this shit yet.”
“Listen to me,” Richie said. They were passing the registrar’s building, coming up alongside the quad, all green in the sun. “It’s like I told you yesterday. We don’t even address any of this shit.”
Gary Lenz had fucked the reporters yesterday, giving Ellis and Richie the day off, even though it was the first week of camp. But then Donnie Fuchs, their agent, had thrown a shit fit, saying he didn’t want it to look like they were hiding. So now here they were, Ellis more upset than Richie that they were being chased to practice by a goddamn posse.
Richie took a right after the quad, going down the tree-lined street with some of the frat houses on it. He’d lost the reporters, now there was just this one Taurus behind him, making the same turns he was making.
“You just let me do all the talking when we get to the gym. Look at me, Fresh.” Richie talked sharp to him sometimes, cracked the whip, never doing it unless it was something important and he needed for Ellis to listen up. “Just say something like, ‘If you want to talk about anything except basketball, talk to Mr. Collins.’ Don’t smile or act like what the woman’s saying is just jive because that’ll piss off women. Don’t come across like some smiley-boy homey. Just give them that smile of yours and a little shrug, like you wish you could say more.” Richie said, “I’ll take it from there.”
“What does that mean, ‘take it from there’? You know what Donnie said.”
Fuchs had come up from Washington last night and laid it all out for them, the way only Donnie could. Ellis had started to explain about that night, saying it wasn’t anything like it was coming out in the papers. Donnie had cut him off, “Ellis, listen to me: I don’t give a shit.” Ellis said, “Don’t you want to know what really happened?” and Donnie had said, “As a matter of fact, I don’t. What happened isn’t relevant. What’s relevant is how we handle it from here.” This was one of those times that Donnie said the D.C. after Washington stood for Damage Control.
“I heard what Donnie said,” Richie said. “And I’m going to do what he said. I’m going to tell them I can’t talk about this, and I’m not going to talk about this, but as soon as there’s a time when I can, they won’t be able to shut me up.” Richie pulled over and let the Jeep idle for a minute in front of a red-barn-looking house with a porch in front. “We just got to make sure we don’t act fucked-up about this, Fresh. We can’t come off cockylike, but we can’t go hide under the bed either, ’cause we didn’t do anything.”
Ellis said, “But—” and Richie said, “We didn’t do anything criminal.” Ellis, edgy, not sitting still, turned around again. The Taurus had passed when he pulled over, now it was coming back the other way. There was a guy in a blue suit behind the wheel, acting like he was lost, staring at some of the houses on the other side of the street.
“Trust me,” Richie said.
“You think this bitch is setting us up?”
“Donnie does. Donnie thinks the phone will ring any day now, and it’ll be the bitch’s lawyer, expecting some money to change hands.”
Ellis said, “Then what do we do?”
Richie smiled. “It’s like Donnie said. We tell her she should’ve asked for money that night, I would’ve given her a hundred.”
Donnie thought everybody was like him. Richie’d fix Donnie up with strange sometimes, and it made them laugh, he couldn’t even enjoy the hand on his dick because he was worrying about the other hand maybe ending up on his wallet.
Richie said, “That’s Donnie. The thing that bothers me is, she waits a year. What is that? I understand, maybe she looks at Anita Hill—”
Ellis Adair stopped him right there.
“Anita who?”
Richie just nodded, like it was an obvious question, Anita who?
“You remember her. When they were trying to get that brother nominated for the Supreme Court, then this bitch comes forward and testifies about pubic hairs and that porno movie Long Dong Silver? I made you watch on television.”
Richie did this, drew pictures for him.
Richie said, “Anyway, this Anita Hill, she goes on to become the queen of the man-haters, even though the brother made the court. Donnie says she makes like ten thousand bucks a pop now, going around giving speeches about women rising up, kicking the shit out of men. The women all cheer, then she goes on to the next city, gets another ten thousand.”
“I remember her now,” Ellis said. “You think that judge really did it?”
“That’s just the point I’m trying to make here. All this time later, people still wonder if he tried to jump her or not. We got to play this better than he did, so when this is all over, people aren’t saying, ‘You think Ellis Adair gang-banged her?’ ”
Putting it all on me, Ellis thought. He didn’t say anything, not out loud, but to himself he repeated, Ellis Adair gang-banged her.
“People didn’t know shit about Clarence Thomas. The judge. They know you, though, Fresh. They want to believe you’re innocent. They don’t want to buy into some woman waited a year to yell rape.” Richie put the Jeep into gear and pulled away from the red-barn-looking house.
“You’re saying a girl can come out of this the bad guy?” Ellis said.
Richie Collins smiled. “Now you’re paying attention,” he said.
DiMaggio hated car phones usually, but you could rent them right along with your car now, and he had found that they saved him a lot of time. He called Frank Crittendon, the Knicks’ general manager, and told him they needed to talk. Crittendon said come ahead, the team didn’t practice until six on Thursdays.
Now DiMaggio was standing there in the back parking lot with everybody else to see Adair and Collins make their entrance for twenty-two television cameras—DiMaggio had counted—and three times that many other people, TV reporters, print reporters, and photographers. If something else happened in the tristate area—something minor like a nuclear attack—all the stations were going to be screwed because the cameras that weren’t in Fulton were still back at the Vertical.
DiMaggio wondered how Adair and Collins would play it. He had followed them through the campus for a while until Adair pulled over and then Collins really gave it to Ellis Adair, doing most of the talking, pointing a finger at him sometimes. Looking very much in charge.
When the Jeep pulled in, everybody swarmed it, both sides, barely leaving space for the two Knicks to open the doors. Adair got out first, smiling but acting shy, putting his hands up, as if to say, Don’t shoot. DiMaggio couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he couldn’t have said very much because right away Adair was moving toward the door of the gym. Most of the crowd moved with him. All DiMaggio could see, over all of them, was Ellis Adair shaking his head no, then disappearing. Collins was still there, smiling, looking small compared to Adair but bigger than most of the media people, coming across the way he did the few times DiMaggio had watched him play, like this cute gym rat.
Collins didn’t last much longer than Adair. They cleared a path for him, and he started for the gym door and would have made it as easily as Adair just had, except that here came this big, handsome blond guy out of the pack, jogging casually after Collins, ca
tching up to him right before the door. DiMaggio was about twenty feet away from the door, leaning against the wall. He didn’t read what was happening right away. But there was something about the blond guy, speeding up now as Collins reached for the door. Now DiMaggio moved, started for the door himself, just as the blond guy’s right hand came out of the side pocket of his windbreaker and DiMaggio heard him say to Richie Collins, “This is for what you did to my sister, asshole.”
8
Hannah was exhausted when she got back to Jimmy’s apartment. She tried to take a nap but couldn’t and put on the television instead, one of the eight thousand movie channels you got with Manhattan Cable if you were willing to pay. They were showing some movie with Mary Stuart Masterson, who had become Hannah’s spunky favorite after she saw her in Fried Green Tomatoes a few years ago. Hannah didn’t know the name of this one. Mary Stuart was a teenager and in love with some guy who thought he was in love with somebody else. Hannah stayed with it until she was sure the guy would come to his senses, which he did.
How come life never worked out that way?
Hannah was positive she was going to be a great actress. Jimmy used to joke that they were going to be the new Barrymores. He sat her down one night and made her watch this old newspaper movie, Deadline U.S.A., with Humphrey Bogart and Ethel playing the woman who owned the paper Bogart was trying to save. Hannah thought Ethel Barrymore looked like she was ninety.
“I’m not so sure I want to be Ethel,” Hannah said.
She gave it five years, though. Five hard years. When it was all over, she had made a little over four thousand dollars, total. She had done walk-ons in soap operas, including Jimmy’s. After what Hannah used to joke was her retirement from show business, she figured out that she had been in restaurant scenes on all three networks. The two stars would be having some earnest conversation and there, behind them, acting like she was talking to some guy, looking a lot more animated than she ever felt, was Hannah. Twice she played a dead body in one of those simulated murders on Inside Edition. She was in the toy store in Home Alone 2 the first time little Kevin went in there to shop. She was an extra in Scorsese movies. She actually got two lines of dialogue in a Kate & Allie; she was an admitting room nurse and Susan Saint James—for the life of her, Hannah still couldn’t remember whether she was Kate or Allie—had gotten sick on her way to some formal dance.
