by Mike Lupica
Hannah felt herself smiling. It didn’t happen too much in here. Maybe because it was the truth-telling place.
Beth said, “It won’t be enough for them, Hannah. You have to understand that.”
“Maybe not. But the way it’s set up now, it’s not enough for me. It’s crazy. Maybe it’s crazy that Adair’s name is out there and Collins’s name is out there. But if people are going to talk about me, let them talk about me. Let them see who I am.”
Beth did the head-tilt, looked quizzical.
“It’s important to you, people knowing who you are?”
Looking straight at Hannah, with pale green eyes. It was the way babies looked at you, eyes wide and direct, as if they could somehow see everything.
“I don’t want to be famous, if that’s what you mean.”
“Who said anything about being famous?”
Hannah, feeling a little defensive all of a sudden, off balance, said, “If you’re suggesting I’m in this for the publicity, you’re wrong. I don’t need those things.”
“Those things?” Beth said, brightening. “Could you be more specific?”
“The stroke,” Hannah said. “The attention. Walking into places for the first time in my life and having people say, ‘There she is.’ ”
“Yet you want to put your picture on the front page of the newspaper and on every news show.”
Hannah stood up again.
“I don’t want to be the victim anymore.” She made a brackets motion with her fingers after “victim.” “I’ve done some reading the last couple of days. I don’t want to be another episode in the series. Patty Bowman Desiree Washington Hannah Carey. I don’t want to feel like I’m behind some stupid dot on Court TV.”
“You’re not on television yet.”
Hannah said, “But don’t you understand? The dot’s already there. In place. It’s all supposed to be for my benefit, and it’s as humiliating as anything. You know what I was thinking when they chased me at the Vertical Club? I was wondering if the dot travels.”
“ ‘As humiliating as anything,’ you said.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No one knows the Central Park jogger’s name to this day, Hannah.”
“That’s different.” She saw her own reflection in the window behind Beth.
“How so?”
“Oh, come on, it just was. That was about some pack of wild animals. She was going to have the public’s sympathy. She wasn’t up against the happy face from the cereal box and the Fresh Air sneakers commercial.”
“You said most of the media has been sympathetic to you. Why would you think people in general wouldn’t be?” She wrote something down.
“I think most people are going to take their side. Have you seen what the sportswriters are writing?”
Beth, pursing her lips, frowning, said, “Why in the world would you care what sportswriters think?”
“I believe they speak to the way most men think about something like this. And so many women it would surprise both of us.”
“It’s not a sports story.”
“Yes,” Hannah said, “it is.”
The clock, a small travel alarm, was facing Beth. It started to make light beeping sounds, one a bit louder than the next. They were out of time.
Beth said, “Will I see you again before you make up your mind? Or was it made up before you came here today?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What are you really thinking about doing?”
“Calling a press conference.”
There it was.
Beth got up and came around the desk, brushing past her, opening the door, not even five feet tall. “Well then,” she said, and Hannah said, “To be continued.” They shook hands the way they always did, all business, and then Hannah was out on Eleventh Street, thinking: She doesn’t get it.
She started to walk toward Sixth, then started jogging. She had decided this would be her run today, even through city streets, all the way to Jimmy’s. If she saw anybody who looked like media, Jimmy had showed her the back way into the building.
Hannah ran and thought to herself, When had anybody gotten it?
Ever?
He was sitting on some steps leading up to a brownstone next to her brother’s building, wearing sunglasses and some kind of long-billed baseball cap with no logo on it that Hannah could see, so she didn’t get a very good look at his face. Not that she wanted one. He was just this skinny guy in jeans, part of the scene on West Seventy-first, until he got up and started walking toward her, casually, tossing the newspaper in a wire bin behind his back.
Hannah didn’t realize it was Richie Collins walking toward her until he took the cap off, pulled the sunglasses away from his eyes.
That was when she dropped the Food Emporium bag, hearing the bottle—apple juice? fruit punch Gatorade?—shattering on the sidewalk, sounding to her as if the bag had been tossed off a roof.
“We need to talk,” he said. “Or whatever.”
Hannah stood there, not wanting to stoop for the bag at her feet. She looked down there, saw the puddle beginning to form. Red. It had to be the Gatorade.
It’s the middle of the day, she told herself. It’s the middle of the block, the sun’s out, people were all around them.
She didn’t know what to do, though.
She couldn’t make herself go anyplace.
It was Collins who bent over, cap stuck in the back of his jeans now, sunglasses in the pocket of the T-shirt, surveying the mess on the sidewalk, trying to pick up the bag, hearing the broken glass in there. He held the bag in front of him. The Gatorade was dripping out the bottom.
“Yo, I think you busted something in here,” Collins said. Hannah stood there, staring down at the back of his head, which seemed to be shaved almost bald. A Spanish-looking guy in some kind of blue custodian’s outfit walked past them, whistling. Then a blond woman, with groceries of her own, and behind her a black kid with a basketball under his arm, the kid wearing a T-shirt that came down all the way to his knees and baggy shorts that showed a little under the T-shirt, not even noticing that it was Richie Collins down there taking things out of the Food Emporium bag: salad in a plastic container, Baggie filled with fresh plums, Newman’s Own salad dressing. A blue box of goddamn maxi pads. With the wings.
Collins lined them up on the sidewalk, then walked over to the garbage bin, emptied the broken glass into it, gave the bag a good shake. Hannah stood where she was, in the sun, right here on Seventy-first Street in the middle of the day, wondering why she couldn’t make a scream.
Hannah wondered why she couldn’t even say anything to Richie Collins, right in front of her, chatting with her like they were neighbors.
“I just wanted to talk, you know, before you went ahead and made a mistake,” he said. The words came out a couple at a time, like a radio signal breaking up, every time he would take something off the sidewalk and set it back in the white plastic bag. Sometimes he would look up at her.
Hannah: her mouth feeling dry. Finally, she said, “No.”
Then: “You get away from me, or I’ll scream. I swear to God, I will fucking scream.”
Collins stood up, everything back in the bag, holding on to it. She was taller than he was. Hannah hadn’t noticed before.
“Relax,” he said.
Hannah thought: All you have to do is walk away. Walk right inside the building. That would be the end of it. She looked over. The doorman, Ernesto, smiled at her, gave her a wave.
“You frankly don’t need to do anything,” Collins said, softly.
He pushed the bag toward her. She backed away from him a step, but took it. Collins reached behind him, and then he was sticking the cap back on his head. He took the Top Gun glasses out of the pocket, put them on one-handed.
Back in the disguise?
“How?” Hannah said.
He looked at her, confused. “What?”
“How dare you come near me?” she said, wanting
to yell at him, but hearing herself in some kind of rough whisper. “You sonofabitch.” She started to cry. “You raped me, you sonofabitch.” She put her hand up, to wipe her face, and it was Richie Collins now who backed up a step, as if afraid Hannah might hit him.
She wanted him to be afraid.
He said, “I don’t want a scene here. I just wanted … I thought we could have a chat or something. Before things got out of hand.”
“So you can get to me?”
“You know what happened,” he said, almost pleading. “You know. You were drunk, oh sure. But you know.”
“I know. The police know. Everybody knows about you.”
Hannah started to say something more. Collins held up a hand. “Let me finish, then I’m gone.” He took a deep breath, let it out fast. “It wasn’t like you said, and you know it wasn’t, and I’m just here to tell you, for Ellis and me, before this whole thing gets really fucked-up, for everybody, that if you drop it now, maybe something can be worked out. This isn’t from any lawyer. Just Ellis and myself.”
“You’re offering to pay me?”
“What I said, something could be worked out.”
Hannah nodded, as though thinking it over. Collins seemed to relax, until he heard her saying, “Oh, you’re going to pay all right. You’re going to pay.” Now her voice was rising. “You’re going to pay for raping me and for coming here today.” She was crying again, letting it all go. “You want to pay? You’ve come to the right place, you piece of shit, you come near me again I’ll kill you, you sonofabitch bastard.”
Collins stayed calm, not seeming to work at it. “Why are you doing this? You want to tell me that?” Shaking his head. “Shit.”
“What?”
“If it’s not about money, which I have a lot of and Ellis has a lot more of, what is it about?”
He smiled at her.
Hannah said, “Get away from me.”
He put his hands up in front of him, still smiling, like a bad boy, caught.
“Lying bitch.”
She had the bag against her with her left hand, and now Hannah tried to swing at him with her right, only Collins was too fast for her, snapping his head back, moving away from her as he did. Collins shook his head sadly and started walking toward Amsterdam. He looked back at her, over his shoulder. Stopped and turned around, the way Columbo always did in those television movies. Ernesto, the doorman, had come out to see if everything was all right, was standing right next to her by now. Hannah heard him saying something, but she was listening to Richie Collins.
“Who is fucking who here?” Collins said.
13
DiMaggio was in the back of the ballroom at the Plaza Hotel, standing on a folding chair against a wall so he could see everything. Feeling like he did as a kid, trying to see over the parking lot fence behind the bull pen at Shea Stadium. Only this was a press conference at the Plaza, with all the trimmings, for a rape victim nobody knew anything about a week ago. This was New York City. Where shit happened. Late one night when he was with the Yankees, DiMaggio had somehow ended up drinking beer with Willie Nelson at Elaine’s and Willie Nelson had said, “You know, you can pretty much turn New York up to any speed you want to.”
DiMaggio looked over the cameras and photographers and reporters to where Hannah Carey sat on the stage they’d set up for her. She wore a flowery-type blue dress and a single strand of pearls. The still cameras kept going off, that was the big sound in the room, all the motor drives and shutters. DiMaggio kept watching Hannah Carey, who didn’t seem to be blinking very much at any of it. If she was surprised at the turnout—the late-coming overflow was in another ballroom down at the other end of the ornate hall, watching on closed-circuit television—she wasn’t showing anybody. She sat there the way a model would between shots, back straight, eyes empty. DiMaggio couldn’t help it, he kept trying to picture her with Adair or Richie Collins or both of them, in some kind of pile, and could not. He’d had five minutes in the car with her. Read everything about her there was to read. Now he was watching her get ready to make her statement and still could not put her with them no matter how hard he tried. Couldn’t see her in some kind of two-on-one porno scene.
DiMaggio had been talking to people for one week exactly, Wednesday to Wednesday. He had spoken briefly to Brian Hyland, the Fulton cop, on the telephone, and to some of the trainers from the Vertical Club and a couple of the ball boys; he had hit some of the bars in Connecticut. He had tried calling Hannah Carey, without success. He found out who Jimmy Carey’s agent was and got an address for him on West Seventy-first; DiMaggio had left messages for Hannah there, heard nothing, started to wonder if she’d really left town the way Marty Perez had written. Now she had turned up at the Plaza.
DiMaggio wondered if there had ever been a coming-out party for a rape before.
The press conference was scheduled for noon. Ted Salter had called DiMaggio at the Sherry to tell him, DiMaggio sitting at the piano, fooling around with Mancini’s original arrangement for “Moon River.” He had planned to go up to Fulton, to talk to some of the other Knicks. Then Salter called and said, “She’s coming out.”
“Who’s coming out?” DiMaggio had cradled the receiver against his right shoulder, his left hand lightly touching the keys.
Salter said, “The rapee, that’s who. Do you believe this shit?” Salter didn’t wait for an answer, saying, “I just got a call from the news director at Channel Two. He used to work for our network here. Our girl is holding a goddamn press conference.”
Now it was twelve-twenty. Hannah’s lawyer stepped to the microphone, introduced himself as Harvey Kuhn. He was a short bulldog guy looking stupid in a double-breasted suit, but not as stupid in the suit as he did under one of those full curly Burt Reynolds wigs.
Kuhn thanked everybody for coming, trying to be friendly, but barking like he was talking to some prosecution witness. Then he took the voice down to a growl and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s keep this simple. A brave woman … Hannah Carey.”
She got up then, at least a head taller than Kuhn, Kuhn having to give this little jump to kiss her chastely on the cheek. She produced a typewritten piece of paper from somewhere, maybe the shelf inside the podium. She set it down in front of her, smoothing out where it had been folded.
DiMaggio was surprised they didn’t have her reading it off a TelePrompTer.
“Thank you all for coming.” She smiled weakly, then cleared her throat, the sound barely audible even over the microphone, way down there underneath the motor drives and the shutters. “I’m stepping forward today on behalf of all rape victims. All women somehow made to feel ashamed and forced into hiding by the way rape is handled in this country. Somehow we—all of us, men and women—have gotten it all wrong.” She looked up. “The victim’s privacy is now violated in the name of privacy.”
She was giving it a good, solid read.
“In some people’s minds, Ellis Adair and Richie Collins, as professional sports heroes, have already become the victims. It happens all the time this way, and the result is that the real victim becomes an abstraction.”
DiMaggio wondered if she had written it herself. He looked over at the brother; Jimmy Carey was staring up at his sister solemnly, almost her twin in his light-blue sports jacket and dark shirt. DiMaggio recognized Marty Perez, not from the picture that ran with his column but from the old days in the Yankee clubhouse, when he used to strut out like the top sportswriting rooster in the bunch. Perez stood at the end of the podium, to Hannah Carey’s right, cigar in his hand, not even taking notes. Maybe he wasn’t taking notes because he was the one who wrote it for her.
How far into this was he?
Harvey Kuhn stared out at the crowd, maybe trying to read it. Maybe he was one of the jerk-off lawyers who thought he could read juries, too.
Hannah Carey kept going. “I respect the wishes of all women who have come before me. I pass no judgment on the ones who have been victims of any kind of se
xual battery in the past and then found themselves put on trial by our society. I share their pain. As I hope they share mine. But I have made the decision not to hide.” Hannah Carey took a long look now at the room, doing a slow pan, taking it from wall to wall. DiMaggio thought she saw him in the back, but couldn’t be sure. He didn’t know who was coaching her, Perez or the actor brother, but whoever it was had done the job.
“I do not choose to hide behind a gray dot, or a blue dot. I was raped last October in Fulton, Connecticut, by Mr. Adair and Mr. Collins. I was afraid to come forward at the time because I was not strong enough. Now I am. Strong enough to face all of you. Strong enough to press charges. Strong enough to see this through, not just for myself, but for all women. I am not afraid any longer, so don’t be afraid for me. This will be my last public statement until, hopefully, I will be able to tell my complete story in a court of law. Thank you.”
She folded up the paper. Kuhn popped up on one side of her, saying “No questions,” but when had that ever stopped anybody? The questions started to come from all over the ballroom, and then a lot of press in the room started to surge toward the stage. Harvey Kuhn was in front of Hannah and Jimmy Carey was behind her, but now they all bumped into each other, like some old slapstick routine from the Three Stooges. Hannah stopped to look at the swarm, not running as she did at the Vertical, but fascinated, wide-eyed, as the Plaza ballroom seemed to tip suddenly, all the press spilling toward her. DiMaggio could hear them cursing, each other mostly, and some of them yelling about publicity stunt, and then this anguished chorus, rising up out of the swarm for Hannah Carey: one question one question one question.
Jimmy Carey finally took one arm, then Kuhn took the other and they got her out of there, walking to the right, where Perez was, waving at them like a traffic cop. Marty Perez waited and let them pass, making sure the rest of the press could see him as part of the entourage, there on the inside, briefly lingering in the doorway, waving at someone, then making a strut exit of his own.
