by Mike Lupica
DiMaggio shook his head. Still a rooster.
Hannah kept whipping her head around, trying to keep up with all this guy stuff.
There was a whole roomful of it. They were all talking at once, like she wasn’t even there in the suite with the big view of Central Park that Harvey Kuhn, the high-rolling lawyer, had rented for the day.
Kuhn had been Marty Perez’s idea. Then Jimmy had joined in. He had always been great at going along. Hannah went along herself this time. She was doing it a lot, she decided. Sometimes she wasn’t even sure if the idea about the press conference was hers anymore. Now she sat there by herself on the couch, in this suite that was like some elegant drawing room. She was feeling light, a little dizzy, like she was being carried along, riding on top of something, afraid to look down.
Marty Perez stood there in a cloud of cigar smoke. “I’m telling you, I wrote some of it and I couldn’t wait to hear what she was gonna say next.” He went over to the bar and poured two Scotches, came back, and handed one to Harvey Kuhn. They clicked glasses and Kuhn said, “This could be the beginning of a beautiful goddamn friendship.”
Jimmy Carey, his back to Central Park, outlined against the first small explosions of color out there, said, “A beautiful reading is what it was. When she finished, I wanted to say, ‘Send everybody else home, she’s got the part.’ ”
Hannah couldn’t decide which one was enjoying himself more. Guy stuff. She wondered if guys got hard even when they were around each other, when they got going on some kind of ball game or something, or telling about some business deal where they’d kicked somebody’s ass.
Hannah was thinking she’d have to get out of here soon, starting to feel a little sick, wondering whether it was just Marty Perez’s cigar or all the testosterone or both.
It always came down to some kind of guy stuff eventually. Guy shit, she thought. Adair and Richie Collins, that was one kind. This was another. She was just along for the ride. She wanted to yell at them, tell them the whole point of the press conference had been for people to see her. But that was the kind of thing Hannah always kept inside, even with Beth.
“You think it would be all right if I left now?” she said. “This has taken a lot out of me.”
Perez looked at her like she was some room service waitress who was waiting for a tip.
Even her brother seemed surprised that she was still there. Jimmy Carey said, “You want me to show you the way out through the service entrance?”
“I think I can handle it,” she said. “You guys seem like you have a lot to talk about. I’d just be in the way.” It didn’t come out as sarcastic as she wanted.
Kuhn came over and sat down next to her on the couch. As he set his drink down on the coffee table, Hannah stared at his fake hair. It was curly and jet black and came too far down his forehead and even with that, Hannah could see this line of sweat at the edge, even in the cool suite. She imagined the rug like some dam, holding back all this water from spilling down into his eyes and all over his face.
When Kuhn turned back to her, giving her what must have been his courtroom face, she made sure to look him in the eyes.
“Before you go, we need to discuss one more thing,” he said.
“What would that be?”
Kuhn said, “Hollywood.”
“Hollywood.”
From across the room her brother said, “I forgot to mention it maybe.”
“Forgot to mention what?”
“We’ve had some preliminary inquiries from some movie people,” Kuhn said.
“They called me,” Marty Perez said, “and I put them with Harvey.” Perez tried to look humble, Hannah thought, and didn’t do much of a job at it. “Just trying to do the right thing,” he said.
Jimmy came over and sat on the arm of the couch. “We’ve got to at least hear them out, Sis. For the option money alone.”
Hannah said, “Can we back up for just a second?” She stood up and moved to the center of the room, the way she did sometimes with Beth, when she started to feel cornered by all her questions.
“Let me get something straight,” she said. “They’re talking about making a movie of this before … before there’s even an investigation?”
“In a word, yes,” Harvey Kuhn said, popping “yes” in there pretty good. “You want Hollywood? There it is. They don’t wait. They wait, somebody cuts the line. You know how they’re always saying the deal is everything out there? Forget it. The idea is everything. They like the idea, what can I tell you? Maybe the Tyson story was too black for them, black guy, black girl. This one jazzes them all up: Hannah the beautiful victim and Fresh Adair, the Willie Mays of basketball or whatever the hell he is.”
“I’m pleased they’re so pleased with me,” Hannah said. She turned to her brother, feeling him staring at her, the excitement of all the movie talk making his eyes wide and bright and a little crazy, like he had taken some kind of pill. “Sis,” he said, making himself go slow, trying to keep himself down, “I talked about this with Marty and Harvey already. Here’s what we decided.”
“What you decided,” she said, getting it in there fast.
“Here’s what we talked about,” he said. “We all came into this knowing there was a chance the cops might not bring charges against these two bastards. So say that happens. That happens, then we move on, you know we do, and address the possibility of a civil suit. Now play that one out for a second. We could win that, and there still might not be any bucks in it for you.”
Hannah said, gently, “Who ever said this was about bucks, Jim?”
“No one did. No one did. It’s the one thing we’re not supposed to talk about, leastways in front of you. So Marty and Harvey and I, who are looking out for you no matter what you might think sometimes, talk about it. Okay? Say the cops do bring charges. Say we go to trial and lose there, the way the woman lost to the Kennedys in Florida. Didn’t just lose, got her hat handed to her. Then what? Where are you then, Sis? It’s time to pay Harvey’s fee and the bastards are innocent and you’ve been dragged through the mud and you don’t have a nickel to show for your trouble. My question to you is this: Is getting them to trial, just that, going to be enough for you? That and everybody telling you how brave you were to come out the way you did in the first place?”
Hannah didn’t say anything because she didn’t know the answer to that one yet.
Jimmy said, “So who does it hurt if we just listen to what these movie people have to say? Are people going to say you committed a crime here because you made some money on this?”
“You’re saying they would start writing a movie now?” Hannah said. “Who would write a movie like that, not even knowing how it all comes out?” She had this picture all of a sudden of some fat movie mogul with a big cigar running in and tossing a script on the table in front of them.
“They mentioned something to me about writing it,” Marty Perez said, offhandedly. “I told them that was a little premature.” Perez sipped some Scotch, said, “But I have to tell you, kiddo, your brother’s making pretty good sense here. You ought to walk away from this with more than the good wishes of your feminist sisters, if you know what I mean.”
Hannah couldn’t help it, couldn’t even put up a fight, so she just let the smile come. It was for all of them, brother, lawyer, the newspaper guy. It was for them and the whole situation, the turns it was taking, spinning everybody further and further away from the night in Fulton when it all happened.
“What’s so funny, Sis?”
Hannah, still smiling, said, “I was just thinking that Richie Collins started telling me the first night that I should be a better sport.”
Nobody said anything at first, not wanting to get anywhere near her on that one. Finally, Harvey Kuhn said, “Are you saying we can move forward a little?”
Hannah nodded.
“Bingo!” Kuhn barked.
Marty Perez was back over at the bar—Hannah hadn’t even seen him make his move.
&n
bsp; “You know what they say?” Perez said. “If you die with money in the bank, you miscalculated.”
14
Brian Hyland had been putting him off for a week. The first time DiMaggio called, Hyland said, “Are you calling to help me?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” DiMaggio said.
“You’re a high-priced big-time investigator, you should be able to figure it out. I’m asking you if you’re coming up here to help me. Because if you’re not, then I just look at you the way I look at everybody else these days.”
DiMaggio said, “Which is how?”
“Some asshole in from out of town to get in my way. Call me in a couple of days.” And hung up. DiMaggio called him in a couple of days. Hyland didn’t return the phone call. Now it was Thursday, the day after Hannah Carey’s press conference, a little more than a week since DiMaggio had come up from Jupiter. He had taken a shot about seven in the morning. Hyland was already in his office. When DiMaggio told him who it was, Hyland said, “You don’t discourage very easily.”
Hyland said, “How much time are we talking about?”
“Half an hour, tops.”
“My office, ten o’clock,” Hyland said, hung up.
Hyland was waiting for him in the parking lot behind the Fulton police station when DiMaggio got there. They shook hands and Hyland said, “Let’s take a walk.” They crossed the street in front of the police station and leisurely made their way toward the narrow river that sliced in behind the main street and ran alongside the railroad tracks. Hyland started by telling DiMaggio he had played some minor-league ball.
They always had to tell you if they ever played any ball.
Hyland said, “One year of rookie ball. Blue Jays chain. They had this team in Dunedin, where they train. I was like everybody else: the greatest player ever to come out of someplace. In my case, Fulton, Connecticut. I spent the first half of the year hitting right around a buck-eighty.”
DiMaggio thought, Buck-eighty. There wasn’t a baseball fan alive who didn’t have the language down now. Nobody just talked about baseball anymore; it’s as if they were broadcasting it on cable.
“Got hot in August, though,” Hyland continued. “You bet. Ended up at .228. I called up the scout who signed me the day after the season ended, told him I was coming home to take the police exam. Went back to the Holiday Inn, packed up my suitcase, and put my Volkswagen on 95 North and didn’t get off until the Route 7 exit.” He laughed. “If I’d known I was going to end up with the whole world on my ass with a case like this, I might’ve stuck it out.”
“Believe me,” DiMaggio said to him, “you’re better off.”
“You think so?”
“What do you like the best, giving the daily press briefing or dealing with the millionaire assholes?”
Hyland just nodded, as if he couldn’t make up his mind. Finally said, “The press briefings win going away. Forget about ball, I was better off in high school. I was sports editor of the paper. Not only did I play the games, I wrote them up afterward.”
“The perfect world.”
“A lot simpler than the one we got going right now.”
DiMaggio walked with him into a parking lot behind the ice-cream parlor Scoops.
“Listen,” he said to Hyland, “I came up here because I wanted you to know that I wasn’t going to fuck you up. I’m not looking to get in anybody’s way. If I find out something that helps Adair and Collins, whatever it is, I give it to the Knicks and I assume they give it to their lawyer. If it goes the other way, I give it to the Knicks and they probably do something bad to Adair and Collins. But I’m not looking to big-time you is all I’m saying.”
“Bullshit,” Hyland said evenly.
DiMaggio said, “No—”
Hyland didn’t even look at him, just put one of his big ballplayer’s hands up. Cop as traffic cop.
“Yeah, it is bullshit,” he said. “I’m sure you’re a swell guy, Mr. DiMaggio. Not much of a hitter, I didn’t just look your ass up in the newspaper clippings over at the library, but in the Encyclopedia. I don’t think there’s anybody ever hired you who wouldn’t say you’re an ace. But just by being here, you’re big-timing me. Because what your presence here says to me is that the New York Knicks don’t trust me. So if you’re up here under the impression that we’re going to work together, save it. We’re not.”
There was a jewelry shop up the hill from Scoops, a little restaurant called Portofino, a dry cleaner, a bank. Now they were finally along the river in a dazzling autumn sun, walking along a jogger’s track, the water of the river as clear as it could be, the smooth rocks close to the surface looking like they had somehow been painted there.
“We might be on the same side, has that occurred to you?”
“That happens to be bullshit, too.”
“You seem to have made up your mind about me already,” DiMaggio said. “Maybe I’m a little more flexible.”
“Yippee,” Hyland said.
“Maybe I like to wait before I make my mind up about a case like this. Even when I’m in it like a prosecutor.”
“I don’t give a shit, frankly,” Hyland said. “I am trying to make a case against Ellis Adair and Richie Collins. You are here to make a case against Hannah Carey, no matter how noble you try to make yourself. So I’m telling you to your face what I could’ve told you on the phone: Stay out of my way. Because if you hinder my prosecution your portfolio isn’t going to help you out up here.”
DiMaggio said, “You’ve got no case.”
“Maybe I don’t,” Hyland said. “But I’m a very optimistic person. We were going to get to know each other better, which we’re not, you could find that out for yourself.”
“Even without physical evidence?”
Hyland smiled for the first time. “Thought I had some.”
“Her dress.”
Hyland said, “It was in all the papers.”
DiMaggio said, “You say you thought you had physical evidence.”
Hyland said, “Miss Carey thought she was doing right by keeping the dress in a garment bag.”
DiMaggio said, “And contaminated whatever samples might have been on it. So you’ve got no physical evidence and no crime scene.”
“You’ve done a little research,” Hyland said. “Oh, I’ve got a crime scene all right. Their rented house over at Fulton Crest. The same one they’ve rented the last few years. It’s just a crime scene—”
“—alleged crime scene—”
“—one year removed,” Hyland said.
“So now you’re doing what I’m doing,” DiMaggio said. “Talking to people and finding out if someone will back up whatever Hannah Carey told you.”
“Consistency of testimony.”
“Found any?”
Hyland snorted disdainfully. He stopped and casually scooped up a handful of rocks, began scaling them easily into the river, sidearm. “With all due respect, fuck you, DiMaggio.”
They were almost to the train station, in a little wooded area with a couple of benches. Hyland motioned to one of the benches and they both sat down, Hyland making a big throw downriver with his last rock. DiMaggio said to him, “Do you believe her?”
Hyland put the big hands behind his head and stared out at the river. He took a deep breath and kept looking out there as he talked. Way in the distance, DiMaggio could hear a train.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m not going to go into it. You’re not here to help me, I’m not going to help you. I wish she could remember things better than she does. But do I believe she was raped by these guys? Yeah, I do.”
Behind his head, Hyland cracked his knuckles. The sound made DiMaggio wince.
“I keep thinking about the first call from her,” Hyland said. “Wouldn’t give me her name. Wouldn’t even say who the players were. So the cat-and-mouse game was on. A few days go by, I don’t hear from her. Then about three weeks ago, she called again. This time she gave me Collins’s name, which didn’t exactly sh
ock me, from what I’ve heard about him. I say to her, ‘Why can’t you come in and at least talk to me?’ ‘I’m not ready,’ she says. Okay. What else am I gonna say? A few days later, she called me and told me she’s got proof. ‘You’ll see,’ she says. This time she sounded like she could break down and cry any minute. Finally, one day she called and said, ‘I’m coming in.’ She’s said that before, by the way. But this time she showed. And here we are.”
DiMaggio got up, walked over to the riverbank, and put his own hands in the icy water. The water felt fine. He never knew what was going to work, heat or something cold. There just came a point where he had to break up the achy feeling. He looked back at Hyland, said, “There’s no way it’s a setup. In your opinion?”
Hyland shook his head.
DiMaggio said, “You’re convinced she didn’t make this up?”
Hyland said, “I am convinced something very lousy happened that night.” Now he stood up, came over to DiMaggio. “Your hands okay?”
“Fine.” He took them out, wiped them off on the slacks of his blue suit.
“But I’ll tell you something, just so you can feel like a big-time hotshot investigator before you get out of my hair,” Hyland said.
The train was coming up on them now, the whistle and the engine noise shattering the small-town river quiet. Hyland had to shout to be heard.
“This may not be the politically correct thing to say. But even I wonder what really took her so goddamn long.”
15
Ellis and Richie were in the cramped locker room at Fulton, all nice and new and painted this year for the Knicks, but still smaller than someplace like the visitors’ locker room at Boston Garden. That rat hole wasn’t just small, it was so old and tenement dirty you thought you were back at Booker, going on real rat hunts. When he was little, Ellis used to think of himself as a comic book hero: Ellis the rat hunter.
