by Mike Lupica
Fuchs probably thought he could dunk if he had to.
And they always thought it was their money. Fuchs probably thought of the money Adair and Collins got to spend as their allowance.
DiMaggio said, “The woman making the charges is the enemy here, not me. They work for the Knicks, I work for the Knicks. We’re on the same side.”
Fuchs tried to smile and looked like a fish, his lips not so much seeming to open up but pull back.
“Go run that kind of bullshit up somebody else’s flagpole. You work for a great American named Ted Salter, who works for the big boys at Fukiko. And the big boys from Fukiko, who are not great Americans, would forget Ellis Adair’s name if they thought he jumped some girl who didn’t want him to.”
Fuchs stole a quick look at Collins. “They’d forget Ellis and Richie existed if they thought they did this thing,” he said. It was a way of correcting himself. He couldn’t leave the other client’s name out, even if they were talking about rape. DiMaggio was impressed. Fuchs was fast. He didn’t want Richie Collins mad at him.
Fuchs said, “How long did it take Pepsi to get rid of Michael Jackson after the little boys started to come forward? How many Hertz commercials did you see O. J. in after they threw his ass in jail? You think the same thing couldn’t happen to me?”
DiMaggio said, “I could turn up something that might help you.”
“Such as?”
“Such as something that would break down her story.”
“The cops do that.”
“Not as well as I do.”
“Point?”
“You’re talking about small-town understaffed cops here. They’ve never had a case this big, they’re going to be under a lot of pressure. Is there any physical evidence?”
It couldn’t hurt to take a shot.
Fuchs said, “No comment.”
DiMaggio said, “Physical evidence can be everything in a case like this. But how much can there be a year later? So say they’ve got none of that, or very little. They can go look at the crime scene, but what are they going to find there all this time later? Next they go asking questions of people about a night a year ago, and who can remember that? The cops look for somebody to back up her story then. The word they use is ‘consistency.’ I’m sure you’ve been reading the papers the last couple of days. Where are all the friends of the victim coming forward to back her up? There’s an excellent chance this boils down to Adair’s and Collins’s word against hers.”
“There you go,” Fuchs said. He looked down, frowned, noticed a button of the paisley shirt was undone, fixed it. He had small hands, pudgy fingers, like a baby’s. Even across the desk, DiMaggio could smell some kind of cologne. Maybe it was the same kind his boys used.
DiMaggio said, “If they give it to the state’s attorney, which is how they do it up here, and he says, ‘No charges,’ people will say the cops rolled over because it’s the Knicks, and they’ll have the National Organization for Women camping out in front of the Fulton police station. If they bring charges, there’s going to be people saying that they’re making an example of them because they’re ballplayers, and there’ve been so many cases like this lately. Remember that in Florida, they said that if the kid’s name didn’t have Kennedy in it, the case never gets past probable cause. Remember that woman that said half the Cincinnati Bengals raped her? That should have been much more sensational, but it wasn’t because they didn’t have a star in the whole bunch. This one has stars. Fulton is a small town, but it’s close enough to New York, everybody will be looking over the cops’ shoulders. It might be easier for me to find out what happened, even working it alone.”
Fuchs stood up, walked around to the front of Crittendon’s desk, sat down on it, crossed his legs. DiMaggio wondered why he’d even brought Adair and Collins in here. So far they were just props.
“Suppose I am innocent,” Fuchs said. “Suppose she made the whole thing up. Or suppose there was some sort of sexual, ah, encounter, but she gave it up willingly to either Ellis or Richie or both of them? Hypothetically speaking. Say those are the facts as I know them. How does you finding them out all over again help me?”
“Because it’s not you saying those things, it’s somebody from the outside. Somebody without an agenda.”
“But you do have an agenda, see, that’s the thing. If Ted Salter and Frank Crittendon really think I’m innocent, they don’t bring you in here in the first place.” Fuchs shook his head sadly. He was sweating a little, up where his hairline would have been if he had any hair left. “No, they have brought you into this because they think she is telling the truth, which means that in their minds Ellis and Richie are guilty until you can prove them innocent. Fuck that.”
DiMaggio looked at Collins.
“Do you believe that?”
Collins took a finger to his lips, wet it, and leaned over and cleaned a smudge off the toe of his own brand-new sneakers. DiMaggio thought they might be Nikes, but there was so much design all over them, different colors, he wasn’t sure. They looked like they’d come right out of the box. DiMaggio had heard one time that some of these guys wore a new pair every day. Collins was wearing black warm-up slacks, same as Adair, but just an old gray T-shirt that said I WILL WORK FOR FOOD.
Collins finally looked up at DiMaggio, with the attitude, as if DiMaggio were a cop coming into the neighborhood.
“Believe what? Believe you want to help me? Donnie’s right, fuck that. There’s all different levels of the Man, you understand? You’re just some guy on one of the middle floors.” He looked at Fuchs. “Yo. How much more of this we need to hear?”
DiMaggio loved it when they tried to sound black.
Fuchs said, “A couple more minutes, then we’ll go clean up, I’ll buy dinner.”
“Let me ask you something,” Collins said to DiMaggio. “How does it benefit us to tell you shit? What’s the payback? You got nothing Fresh or me want or need.”
DiMaggio noticed Collins was acting a lot tougher now in the office than he had in the parking lot.
DiMaggio said, “If I can clear you before the cops do, it will make the people who sign your checks feel a lot better a lot sooner, think of it that way.” He smiled at everybody.
Ellis Adair straightened up a little, on the couch next to Collins.
“I’m innocent,” he said casually. “That make you feel better?”
“Lose it, Fresh,” Fuchs snapped at him.
DiMaggio didn’t even look at Fuchs, he wanted to see how Adair went with that, being talked to that way by the bald-headed agent.
“I can’t tell this motherfucker I’m innocent?” Adair said.
“We went over this,” Fuchs said, realizing he might have stepped over some line some ballplayer had told DiMaggio once was the fucked-up line. “Innocent and guilty,” Fuchs continued, “only come into play when there’s a case. Maybe even innocent and guilty come into play when there’s an official investigation. But Mr. DiMaggio here, he is not official. The press, they are not official. You don’t say innocent or guilty to them because you are addressing accusations. Accusations are not charges or indictments. If you don’t have to talk to the cops, you don’t have to talk to anybody. And even Mr. Ted Salter, a man I respect, would never force you to give up your rights as a citizen. Isn’t that right, Mr. DiMaggio?”
“He said he would like them to cooperate. Within reason. But he wasn’t going to order anyone to put themselves in jeopardy with the police.”
Fuchs said, “Here’s how we’re going to help you, Mr. DiMaggio. We’re not going to get in your way. You want to talk to Ellis and Richie’s teammates, be our guest. You want to interview the whole campus, go ahead. But beyond that our response is, We have no response.”
“You don’t answer any questions about that night?”
“What night is that?” Fuchs said, grinning at Adair and Collins.
DiMaggio hands were starting to hurt, he needed to move them around some, flex them a little. He
said, “If I go back and tell Ted Salter I asked them what happened that night, and they told me, ‘No comment,’ it won’t bother you that he might see that as a lack of cooperation?”
Fuchs said, “He’s a smart guy, he’ll figure that I figured out that if you’re here, he’s not really on our side. So if you think you can make a case for Salter against me, go ahead. Same with the cops. I don’t think anybody can.” He shrugged. “But I can’t go around answering questions like some criminal.”
“You’re saying they didn’t do it.”
He made a motion like he was flicking a piece of lint off his shoulder.
“I’m saying something to you I’ve been saying to Ellis and Richie,” he said. “We’re dealing with a fly here. You want it, there it is.”
DiMaggio stood up, like he was stretching, just so he could put his hands behind him, make a couple of fists. He had to get them in some hot water.
“You ought to keep one thing in mind,” DiMaggio said. “Tyson thought he was in the clear, too.”
He left them sitting there. Let them practice the pose for each other.
10
Frank Crittendon was sitting in the gym, bottom row of the bleachers. He wore a navy blazer and wrinkled khaki pants with cuffs and beat-up old penny loafers and thick socks that fell in bunches on the tops of the loafers. His hair, what was left of it, looked like it had been blown-dry from the back. He had a long skinny black pipe, with a narrow bowl not much bigger than a thimble, stuck in his teeth. DiMaggio thought he was asleep there at first, even with the pipe in his mouth, arms folded across his fat belly. But he straightened up when he saw DiMaggio coming across the court, turned his wrist around, and checked his watch, like some kind of reflex. DiMaggio saw he had one of those multicolored preppy nylon bands. Crittendon had turned off all the overhead lights except the ones on his side of the court. The rest of the Fulton College gym was dark.
“How’d it go?” Crittendon said.
DiMaggio sat down next to him. He said, “You’ve probably spent a lot of time with Donnie Fuchs. How do you think it went?”
Crittendon made a weary, half-assed pass at a smile. “You played ball, right?” he said. “Baseball?”
“Not so’s too many people noticed.”
“What I’m getting at, you saw things from that side. From a ballplayer’s perspective.” He took the pipe out of his mouth, laid it gently between him and DiMaggio. “So you know that in the ballplayer’s mind, it’s always us against them. Them being the manager, the general manager, the owner. Whatever. And what you mostly thought, you being the players, is that all of us were out to screw you. Am I right?”
DiMaggio said, “More or less. Theoretically, we were all on the same side, but it really only seemed to feel that way player to player and not so much there sometimes. From the low minors on, I always thought there were all these other games going on that the fans never got to see. Or’d want to see.”
Crittendon got up on his bowed legs, the pants too short, and walked out to the middle of the court, where the ref would throw the ball up. He picked up a ball that was sitting out there. “It used to be a game,” Crittendon said, his voice echoing some in the empty gym. Here we go, DiMaggio thought. Another guy all set to make sports into church.
“Used to be a game,” Crittendon repeated. “Now it’s a fight to the death with some parasite like Fuchs.” He bounced the ball hard with both hands. “I don’t think of people like Donnie Fuchs as working in this business.” He slammed the ball down again. “I think of them as growing on it. Like things that grow on a leaf.”
Crittendon dribbled the ball in a walk toward the basket to DiMaggio’s right, and now DiMaggio was surprised because he looked like he knew what he was doing. When Crittendon got to the top of the key, he took a quick look at the basket, threw up a right-handed push shot, his right arm coming up as his knee came up, and the ball floated in this big rainbow arc toward the basket and swished through. The basket was in semidarkness. DiMaggio felt like he was watching some grainy film clip out of the fifties. Frank Crittendon had played a long time ago, but he had played.
Now he walked back toward DiMaggio, saying, “They’re not going to help you, are they?”
“I didn’t expect them to,” DiMaggio said. His hands were starting to scream at him, but Crittendon had waited a long time.
DiMaggio said, “I wouldn’t have talked to me. Fuchs was right. There’s only downside, whether they did it or not.”
“I talked to Ted. You think they did it, don’t you?” Crittendon sat down, picked up the pipe. He struck an old wood match to the side of the bleachers, got the pipe going again.
“I see how it could happen, even without knowing any of the particulars, just knowing what’s been in Perez’s column. I saw what it was like when I played. I saw how it started to change at the end of my time.”
“It?” Crittendon said.
“The whole thing. Women. Sex. What you thought they wanted and what they wanted. What they were saying and what you were hearing. What you ended up getting.”
“How could it change that much? I’m forty-five years in basketball, if you count high school. I started in this league with the Rochester Royals. I’ve been a traveling secretary, PR man, scout, assistant coach. I coached in Europe one time, two seasons in Spain, just to stay in, when the ABA closed. I saw the whole thing before the shot clock. I come from when the whole thing was still played on the floor. And there’s only one thing I see that hasn’t changed, other than most points win: The women were always there.”
He needed to relight the pipe again. DiMaggio noticed Crittendon’s hands shaking this time. He thought it might be some kind of palsy. Drinkers’ hands most likely. He always wondered what it was like watching them get the first cup of coffee to their lips in the morning.
DiMaggio waited for him, the way you waited for somebody who stuttered, Crittendon finally needing three matches to do the job.
“It used to be simple,” DiMaggio said, picking it up for him. “You wanted them, they wanted you. I’m talking about the sixties and seventies. No questions asked. I wasn’t ever a star, not for a single day after they started paying me to play. But the women were there for me, too. Even in the low minors. Fort Lauderdale. Jackson, Mississippi. Columbia, South Carolina. Some wanted a ballplayer just for the sex. Some of the young girls, eighteen years old, nineteen, small-town girls in tight jeans with all these dreams, they looked you over as a potential ticket out of there, a first-class ticket out of Lauderdale or Jackson or wherever. It wasn’t just that you were young yourself, a jock, on your way somewhere. You know what I always thought part of the lure was? The thing that made it safe sex for these women before that was even in the language? They could see you work. Some guy they met at a singles bar, or at a party, he could talk about being a lawyer or a cop or working construction or pumping gas. If they didn’t know him, they had to take his word. Ballplayers were different. You could come see us. We were safe.”
DiMaggio looked out at the empty court. “At least we used to be.”
Crittendon said, “You said it changed.”
DiMaggio blew some warm air into his hands, as though he were thinking about what he wanted to say next. The air felt good. He tried to picture his hands under a faucet, not just warm water, but hot water, coming out hard.
“Everything got bigger,” DiMaggio said. “Everything got louder in sports, the fame and the money, all of it. And these dumb-jock bastards, they got more and more full of themselves, so they didn’t have time to notice that the world was changing and women were changing along with it. The jocks thought it was still cut-and-dried, meet them and get them back to the room. The volume was up, remember? They’d never heard anybody say no. It was like some foreign language. Sometimes they couldn’t hear it, and sometimes they did hear it, but they didn’t know what it fucking meant.”
“I know what you mean,” Crittendon said. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph do I know. From the time Ell
is Adair was a better jumper, had a nicer touch, than some kid from the next project over, things started to come for free. Sneakers first. Then clothes maybe. Somewhere along the line a car. Then, if they’re the one in a thousand, whatever the statistics are, and they made the pros, it’s whatever the market can bear. There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal the other day. Adair made fifteen million dollars in endorsements last year.”
DiMaggio said, “And he thinks he deserves every dime.”
“Am I answering my own question here?” Crittendon said.
DiMaggio said, “Ellis Adair isn’t any bigger than Magic or Bird or Jordan, or Russell and Chamberlain were in the old days. He’s just more available. He gives off more heat, gets more. And the one constant in his life, for as far back as he can remember, all the way back to his first hard-on, is this: Women want him. They’re one of the perks that go with everything else. Somebody telling him no? What’s that?”
“Yes,” Frank Crittendon said, making it come out like a sad blues note. “Oh yes,” he said, not talking to DiMaggio now, just talking. “I was going to be a priest. You didn’t know that, did you? Came out of the Jesuits. Now I am sixty years old, and I deal with these players who look at me like I am some worthless piece of shit. Like I am garbage. I have a teenage daughter. She used to come here to watch practice. I finally asked her to stop. Would you like to know why? Because I do not want her around when this team, these players that I assembled, look at me like I am nothing, Mr. DiMaggio.”
Crittendon got up. “I’ll walk you to the parking lot,” he said. They made their way across the court, DiMaggio trying not to think too much about his hands, talking more than he ever did. He asked Crittendon if he was any good with the Fulton police. Crittendon told him there’d never been any problems before this, it had always been minor shit, parking tickets, speeding tickets, somebody blowing his horn in the middle of the night after too many beers in one of the neighboring towns. Fulton was a dry town, Crittendon explained, so if the players wanted to have a beer and chase a little bit, they went to Westport or Fairfield, some place called Masters there or the Georgetown Saloon, up Route 7 a couple of miles. Or Gates, in New Canaan.
