Jump

by Mike Lupica

  But it wasn’t the shit work that made her give it up finally, even as Jimmy kept going. Jimmy used to tell her to hang in there, he had enough confidence for both of them. Only they both knew that was a lie. What little Hannah had, what little her mother had left her with, was completely gone at the end. She would go to these miniature casting theaters, reading for television movies. The casting people would be there, the director, sometimes the writer. They would hand her the page and she would read what she was supposed to read, and there would always be that moment she dreaded when she was through, when she’d look up at them, see the awkward smiles, and feel like some dog outside the back door, begging.

  God, she hated that.

  It was one of the things she hated most about the night in Fulton, the way she ended up begging …

  The movie with Mary Stuart went to six o’clock. Hannah turned to the news. Wednesday night, she had gone crazy with the switcher watching the eleven o’clock news, like Jimmy watching football games on Sunday afternoons. She’d gone from channel to channel to see how they handled Marty Perez’s first story.

  Hannah didn’t even know what channel she had now, but there was Jimmy Carey rolling around in some parking lot with Richie Collins, then being pulled off by DiMaggio, who looked bigger than he had in the backseat of the car, big enough to throw Jimmy inside a door and drag Collins in there, too.

  What was Jimmy doing in Fulton?

  She hit the display button for the set. It was Channel 2. She didn’t recognize the anchorwoman in the studio. There was just a split screen, and the woman was talking to a reporter in the field, and underneath the reporter in the field it said, “Live, Fulton, Connecticut.”

  The reporter in the field, a kid with a lot of hair, said, “Bryne, one minute we were trying to get a comment from Collins, Ellis Adair having already gone inside, then the accuser’s brother seemed to appear out of nowhere. We thought he was trying to get an autograph. Then the other man jumped in.”

  The kid with the hair said the Knicks were going to make some kind of official statement. Then the anchorwoman said they, meaning the media, were in an awkward position because identifying the attacker would be another way of violating the victim’s right to privacy.

  The kid with the hair smirked and said, “Accuser, not victim, Bryne.”

  Hannah said “Screw you” to the television now, wondering what the kid with the hair would think about rape, what any man would think, if it ever happened to them.

  The phone rang. Hannah hadn’t been answering it when she was in Jimmy’s apartment alone, just letting his machine pick up.

  Hannah grabbed for it, thinking it might be Jimmy.

  “Hannah, is that you?”

  Mother.

  Without waiting, she said, “My God, it’s you, isn’t it? The rape? You couldn’t even tell your own mother, all this time? Where is your brother, disgracing me on television that way in front of the whole world.”

  It was always about her and always about the whole world.

  Hannah said, “Is there one question in there you’d like me to address first? Or should I just start anywhere?”

  She knew she shouldn’t take that attitude, any kind of sarcasm was lost on her mother. But sometimes Hannah couldn’t help herself.

  “You think people aren’t going to recognize your brother on the television?”

  “Would you listen to yourself please? What do you think they’re saying right now, ‘Richie Collins and the other basketball player raped the sister of the guy in the cat food commercial’? It’s not like Collins got tackled by Kevin Costner, Mother.”

  She stood there holding the phone, wondering why she’d picked it up in the first place. I need this right now, Hannah thought. First Jimmy on television and now her mother’s review.

  Her mother said, “I saw it on Channel Three. Was it on in New York?”

  She had moved to Litchfield, Connecticut, when she finally remarried, but she still didn’t think the news counted unless New York had it, too. If she’d found out about the Gulf War on a Connecticut channel, she would have called Hannah on West End Avenue to confirm it.

  Sheila Carey was about the four silliest women Hannah had ever known. Silly about tennis, thinking she was actually going to be somebody with her boring little baseline game, silly about marriage and men and money.

  Silly about everything.

  Even Hannah could see that.

  Her mother wasn’t saying anything now. She always liked to wait Hannah out. It didn’t matter because they both knew where this was going: Hannah would end up feeling like shit for getting herself raped and upsetting her mother this way. Hannah had the television remote in her hand. She idly switched channels, the mute button on, finally hitting Jimmy again, and Collins, and DiMaggio in his blue suit, then a different reporter in the field, Asian this time.

  “Hannah?”

  “I’m here, Mother.”

  “Is this true?” She ran this little shiver through her voice the way she still could. She seemed to think it made her girlish somehow.

  “Is what true?”

  “They …”

  “Raped me. Go ahead and say it.”

  “On television, they said it was a year ago.”

  “Almost exactly. They actually get things right sometimes.”

  “They said on Channel Three that because it took you so long to come forward, people were going to question—”

  Hannah cut her off.

  “They’re already questioning, Mother. You really should try reading a newspaper once in a while.”

  “Oh, let’s not turn this around.”

  What had they done with Jimmy?

  “I was afraid to come forward, in answer to your question. Do you really want to talk about this?”

  “I’m your mother, Hannah. If you were raped—”

  “I was raped.”

  “You were raped, of course I want to know. You confide in your brother just the way you always did, and now I have to find out about this on television.”

  “I’m sorry, Mother.”

  That always worked.

  “I want to hear all about it. I want to understand, Hannah.”

  She wasn’t being a mother here. That had always required too much effort. This was like some conversational shorthand, her mother imagining what a mother would say.

  Her mother said, “I may not always have been there for you the way you’d hoped, but I’m certainly here for you now.”

  “I’d rather not talk about it right now. On the phone, I mean.”

  Hannah could feel the relief in her voice. “I’ve got to run right this minute, there’s a party. We’ll talk tomorrow?”

  “Call me here, I’m not staying at my apartment right now.”

  “I love you, Hannah,” and then before Hannah could reply, not taking any chances, because she never did, said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  And hung up.

  They were watching it again, this time on one of the smaller Connecticut stations, Channel 61, Marty Perez couldn’t remember whether the guy had said Hartford or New Haven. They had just switched over from the top of Channel 9’s ten o’clock news show, which had led with Jimmy Carey’s tackle of Richie Collins. They were at the Marriott Courtyard on Route 7, just down from the Burger King, right off the Merritt Parkway extension. They were in the room Marty had rented there; he figured he might need it, depending on how everything played out. He’d just filed his Jimmy Carey column with the News, typing it out on the new Toshiba laptop he’d taken from the wire room, then hooking the phone jack into the back, getting ready to let the Toshiba do its deal. Every time the column got through, Marty Perez felt like he’d performed some microchip miracle.

  The laptop even dialed the phone number. Then the column would scroll past him on the screen, and that was that. Just because Marty could do the drill now, it didn’t make him feel any less old. Most of the kids coming into the business, hotshots, they’d neve
r used a manual typewriter in their lives.

  The column was in, that was what mattered. They’d ask him sometimes at the bar afterward if the column was good, and Marty Perez would say, “Good and done.”

  Which became the title of his first collection.

  First collection. Even Marty Perez had to smile at that shit. As if there were going to be a second collection.

  Jimmy Carey, sitting there eating a cheeseburger at the room service tray, said, “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” Marty told him.

  “They like the column?”

  “Front page again. The headline’s going to be something like IN HIS OWN HANDS. Then a nice picture of you trying to choke the bastard.”

  Jimmy drank some Heineken out of a bottle, eyes full of the scene. “I just thought of it as an acting exercise. Something you’d do in class, like. An expression of rage, but controlling it at the same time. Trying to keep the top on it. The desire to kill losing out, in the end, to common sense. That part of it was real, you know? Two warring sides of the same personality.”

  Marty came over and got a beer for himself out of the ice bucket, shutting off the television in the little suite. Channel 61 had gone to a game show.

  Marty said, “Whatever your motivation was, you were great.” He hoped the compliment would shut him up. Marty had called Jimmy Carey Wednesday night, after Hannah was in bed, and said they should meet for a drink. They went for a beer at some place called Iridium.

  After a couple of beers, Marty had pitched the idea of a scene to Jimmy Carey, explaining that stories like this usually only had a certain shelf life, and you had to help them along sometimes.

  The kid had gone for it right away, the on-the-make actor in him stepping right in front of the brother without any problem. Marty helped him along by telling him more people would see him on the news than ever saw him at some nice off-Broadway theater over by the Lincoln Tunnel.

  Now, after the fact, the column in the midst of being edited back in New York, Marty had to say the kid took direction like a dream. But he was like every actress Marty had ever known, the ones he had dated or the one he actually married, you couldn’t shut them up afterward, whether it was a performance they were talking about or sex.

  Not that there was much of a difference. Everything was a performance for them, if you thought about it.

  Not that he should talk.

  “The only time I had to improvise,” Jimmy said, “was when that guy pulled me off and threw me into the gym.”

  Marty said, “DiMaggio.”

  “You said you used to know him, when he played for the Yankees.” Jimmy hadn’t changed clothes. He was still wearing jeans, a white button-down shirt, and some old Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers, tanned. There was dirt on the front of the shirt and on the shoulder and a tear at the right knee of the jeans, which were so dark-blue, shiny almost, they had to be new.

  “He couldn’t play much,” Marty said. “By the time he got with them his hands were pretty much shot. Arthritis or some fucking thing. He could call a game, though, the bastard, I have to give him that. The pitchers loved his ass. But a real smart-ass in the clubhouse, all these books in his locker. And this big tape player, playing Sinatra and Tony Bennett all the time. He thought he was smarter than everybody. Not just the other players, the writers, too.”

  Jimmy opened another beer. “Hey, we forgot Channel Five, they’ve got a ten o’clock news, too. Maybe I’ll be in there.” He used the remote control, and the picture came back up. There was some blond woman, smiling with a mouthful of teeth that were like some giant headlight.

  Jimmy stared at the screen, locked, and said, “This DiMaggio guy, you say he’s some kind of big-time investigator?”

  “You follow sports at all?”

  “Not too much. My mother was a tennis player, I guess I mentioned that.”

  “It was in the first column.” Jimmy Carey didn’t stay too interested once the subject got off Jimmy Carey, Marty had noticed.

  Jimmy said, “In the end, tennis was about the only thing Hannah hated more than her.”

  “It started with Pete Rose,” Marty said. “You’ve heard of him, right? They thought he was gambling on his own team when he was managing. That’s the one capital crime they’ve got, worse than dope or rape or anything. Anyway, the baseball commissioner at the time, Giamatti, he’s dead now, hired this big Washington lawyer, name of John Dowd, to investigate. Well, it turns out he investigates the nuts right off of Rose, who gets kicked out of baseball. Dowd’s a big star, and he handles a couple of other cases for baseball, but he’s on his way to bigger and better things.” Marty looked at him. “You want to hear this?”

  “Sure.”

  “Dowd ends up defending one of those cheap politicians in that savings-and-loan deal a few years ago, the Keating Five?” Jimmy was staring at him, as if he was speaking Spanish all of a sudden. “Whatever. DiMaggio worked for Dowd on Rose. He was a lawyer by then, ex-jock, perfect. The Times did a big piece on him, and all of a sudden he’s about two hundred times more a star than he ever was as a player. ¡Madre de Dios!” He stopped and explained, “Mother of God, it means. Now he’s into business for himself. And now here he is in our mother-of-God business.”

  Marty got his cigarettes out of his jacket pocket, unfiltered Camels. He smoked them once in a while, just to remember how great they were. He always told people if the big one, the big bomb was going to hit, and Marty knew he had an hour to live before everything went up, he’d go buy a carton of Camels, sit on the curb, and just start smoking.

  He said to Jimmy Carey, “Try to remember again. Did he say who he was working for here? It could be the players, it could be the team. Maybe even the league.”

  Jimmy shook his head. “I told you, he got me inside, he gets both of us inside, then he tells Collins to get the fuck out of there and go practice. Collins says something, like, ‘I’m going to nail this asshole’—meaning me—‘on a fucking assault rap.’ So DiMaggio goes, ‘That’s what you need right now, a chance to sit down with the cops. Think it over, Rich.’ Which is what Collins does, eyeballing me the whole time. Then without saying a word, he gives me a little shove and leaves.”

  “Just like that?” Marty said.

  Jimmy said, “I’m telling you. Then he turns to me, DiMaggio turns, and asks what my name is. I tell him. He goes, ‘You’re really her brother?’ I say, ‘No, I made it up, asshole.’ To tell you the truth, I didn’t say ‘asshole.’ He asks me then how I got here, and I told him my car was parked off campus. He tells me to go out the side door of the gym, away from the press, and go get in my car and get out of there. Oh yeah, then he said he ran into my sister and that I’d be hearing from him, too. But I’m not quite ready to go. So I say, ‘What if I don’t want to go anywhere?’ You know, just letting the scene play out a little more.”

  Actors. Marty closed his eyes, saw himself making the sign of the cross, just so he wouldn’t scream. He wanted to remind this schmuck that he wasn’t being interviewed for Entertainment Weekly. Marty was amazed Jimmy Carey’d kept his end of the deal, actually left without holding a press conference, and remembered to meet Marty at the Marriott.

  “That was when he told me, I think I mentioned this before, that he was not someone to be fucked with.”

  Marty said, “He’s not.”

  Then Marty told him they were going to do the Chronicle show the next night. Jimmy wanted to know if they were going to do the gray-dot thing, and Marty, with a sigh, explained that they covered the victim’s face, not the next of kin.

  “Besides,” Marty explained, “one of the objects of the game here is to make you a star, right?” He sucked in some Camel, feeling the little burn. “If we play this right, we don’t just see that justice gets served. Everybody can come up a star.”

  Jimmy said, “Let’s get drunk, what do you say?” and Marty nodded. The room was paid for, and where the hell was he going, anyway? The story was right here. He’d
cornered the market, at least for the time being. So what if he had to listen to Jimmy Carey all night?

  Get him drunk and keep him away from the opposition.

  “Let’s go downstairs to the bar,” Marty said. “You ever drink Puerto Rican rum?”

  9

  From one case to the next, DiMaggio forgot what punks they could be.

  It didn’t matter what sport it was or what color they were. White or black or Hispanic, they had become the celebrity homeboys of American life, looking at you the way the real homeboys looked at you, eyes half closed, bored, like they were almost too exhausted even to show you an attitude. What could you possibly say that could interest them? What did you have to offer them? It was like dealing with gang members, except everybody in this gang was rich. DiMaggio had seen it when he was a player, but it had gotten worse now. The only way you could get their attention was to find something they wanted. People had been giving them things their whole lives, from the time when they could hit a ball harder than the next kid, get up closer to the basket, run through the line. Now they thought they deserved it all, and who the fuck were you?

  Adair and Collins sat in Frank Crittendon’s office. Donnie Fuchs, the bald-headed agent, sat behind Crittendon’s desk, trying to look like one of the boys. He wore a paisley silk shirt buttoned all the way up, baggy slacks, brand-new white Reebok sneakers that looked to DiMaggio like nurses’ shoes.

  Fuchs had done almost all the talking so far.

  “There’s only downside for me,” Fuchs was saying after Crittendon left them with DiMaggio.

  Me. He sounded the way fight managers did, talking about his fighter in the first person. I won the fight. They robbed me. It happened to a lot of these guys eventually.