Jump

by Mike Lupica

Ken: “You did see it!”

  Ken tried to come out of his seat but didn’t push forward hard enough and fell back, his feet up in the air.

  Jimmy Carey: “The guy who played the young doctor in Trapper John, M.D.—”

  Ken: “—Gregory Harrison! Great guy. Played the acupuncturist!”

  Bob stood up. DiMaggio liked his moves. It was a way of taking the room back from the rest of them.

  Bob: “You may hear from Thad—the writer—in a couple of days. One way or the other, we want to make this film happen. Make it right. Before you talk to anybody else, we’d at least like you to take a look at our treatment.”

  Harvey Kuhn: “We’d be under no obligations.”

  He just needed to get into it.

  Bob: “None whatsoever.”

  Ken: “Of course not!”

  Ken managed to get out of the chair now and went over and gave Harvey, who was his size, a slap on the back.

  DiMaggio went back to watching Hannah. The conversation had moved away from her again, and she didn’t like that very much.

  Hannah: “I’d—we’d—be very interested in seeing the treatment as soon as you have it.”

  Now she stood up. Bob came over to her. He was smiling. He wasn’t the pushy salesman, but he was the relentless one. Bob was the closer. You could see he knew he had her now. He took both of her hands in his.

  Next to DiMaggio, Ted Salter said, “Yecch.”

  Bob: “As I said, let’s make this happen.”

  Giving both hands a tug on “let’s.”

  Hannah: “I don’t know—”

  Bob: “—and you’re not supposed to. That’s our job.”

  In the fifth-floor room, down the hall from the locker rooms at Madison Square Garden, Ted Salter’s own private screening room, Salter said, “What are you staring at?”

  “Her,” DiMaggio said.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking I might want to try another approach.”

  19

  “You’re getting paranoid,” Richie said.

  They were in the Jeep, coming down the Merritt Parkway from Hartford. They’d played an exhibition game against the Celtics up there, winning by five, six points, something like that, Ellis couldn’t even remember. That or how many points he scored. Everybody else always got excited about his stats, how many times he’d done this and that. Not Ellis. All he had ever cared about was two things: Did we win?

  And when’s the next game?

  Richie was driving the Jeep. They were listening to some girl group. Ellis had seen the tape go into the player but couldn’t remember now whether it was the Funky Divas singing and the name of the tape was En Vogue. Or if it was the other way around and the group was En Vogue.

  Shit like this, if he worried on it too much, always gave him a headache.

  Richie had been big on girl rock and roll singers since he fucked one—Ellis couldn’t remember that group either—in Seattle one time.

  “Am not,” Ellis said finally, after trying to figure out who was singing. His eyes were closed. He had the seat back as far as it would go. He’d only played the first half against the Celtics. Gary hadn’t even wanted to play him that much, but they both knew there’d have been a riot in the Hartford Civic Center if he didn’t. They’d cut the number of preseason games down to six, some deal Richie said the union cut. Richie was the only one who seemed pissed about it. He liked traveling before the season started, get his strange lined up for later on, some dump town like Milwaukee.

  “Am not what?” Richie said. He’d either forgotten what he’d asked already or was playing with Ellis, looking to start something. It woke Ellis up a little.

  That and the fact that Richie was driving real fast all of a sudden, one in the morning on the Merritt with hardly anybody else on the road, just a car passing them every so often. Richie’d told him he’d made a date with this high school girl he’d run into, after some signing he did in Fulton.

  “You want to know who it is?” Richie said.

  “No,” Ellis said. “You know my rule.”

  Richie said, “You don’t want to know what you don’t want to know.”

  Ellis said, “Especially when they’re under.”

  Richie had all sorts of expressions. Over meant they were older than eighteen. Under meant younger. Ellis didn’t keep count, but he’d noticed a lot more unders lately. You’d have thought he’d have enough college girls during training camp, the school right there. But Richie liked to prowl the local high schools.

  Or have the high school girls prowl him.

  He said this one was an under who could pass for an over, no problem.

  “Am not paranoid,” Ellis said, getting back to what he wanted to talk about, which was the phone. “It’s just that every time I’m on the phone I hear this click-click-click shit. I mean, what’s up with that?”

  “Fresh,” Richie said, “you can’t even get the CD in the machine, now you’re some kind of electronic surveillance man?”

  Ellis said, “I think it’s tapped is all.” He reached down and flicked the lever underneath the seat and it popped up into place, like on an airplane. Now he turned the volume down on the music, En Vogue or the Funky Divas or whoever the fuck they were. “And I’ll tell you something else: I think someone’s been watching the house. Not all the time, but sometimes.”

  “You’re starting to sound like one of those guys, all they want to talk about is the Kennedy assassination,” Richie said, then gave him a quick sideways glance and added, “You know, always thinking someone besides Lee Harvey Oswald”—giving him all three names—“was the shooter.”

  “I know who shot Kennedy,” Ellis said. “I’m just telling you, you’re never there as much as I am, that two straight days there was the same van across the street.”

  Richie said, “You mind if I turn this back up?”

  “En Vogue …” Ellis said it vaguely, so he could go either way with it.

  “Are they hot or what?” Richie said.

  It was important to Ellis, being right at least once in a while.

  Ellis said, “I think somebody might be watching us come in and out, see who we’re with, so maybe we should both be a little more careful.”

  Richie sighed. “Meaning me.”

  “Goddamn Rich, meaning both of us. Till this shit dies down or whatever.”

  “Didn’t I take the heat off for a couple of days with that dickhead Perez?”

  “You mean, giving him A.J. that way? Getting A.J. into it.”

  Richie said, “Let the Ivy Leaguer talk about all the places his dick has been for a while.”

  “Doesn’t get our ass out of traction.”

  “You got something to say, Fresh, why don’t you come right out with it before you drop me.” Ellis was supposed to leave him off at Gates in New Canaan. Where the high school girl was waiting for him.

  Ellis thought: White girls from the suburbs run around at night like they’re from the projects and their mothers are over working a motel near the Lincoln Tunnel.

  Ellis said to Richie, “I just don’t want one of those National Enquirer TV shows getting more into my business than they already are in my business. Is all.”

  Richie turned the radio off with one of his edgy, jittery moves. Ellis saw it on the court all the time, Richie getting a shove he didn’t like or fucking up himself but wanting to blame it on somebody else, then he’d be all wired for the next couple of minutes, doing crazy shit, until Gary Lenz finally had to get him out of the game, cool his ass off.

  Here we go, Ellis thought.

  Ellis tried to go over the whole conversation in his head real fast, trying to remember what part had set him off. It couldn’t have been the part about the TV shows, Ellis’d heard Richie say the same thing plenty of times since all this had started.

  Richie didn’t say anything right away, just gunned the engine a little, like he was passing somebody, except there was nobody else on the road. El
lis tried to see the speedometer and couldn’t.

  They both knew that Ellis didn’t like it when he drove too fast. But then Richie always told him that if you wanted to make a list of all the things that scared Ellis Adair, you’d end up with the Sears catalogue.

  Ellis didn’t say anything, hoping Richie was just in a hurry to get to his high school girl.

  “You know your problem lately, Fresh? I’ll tell you what. Your problem is that first you tell me how to handle this shit. Then you start talking all over the place and acting like you want to handle it your own self.”

  “That’s not—”

  “—true? It’s not? If the phone was tapped, you don’t think I’d know it? You think I wouldn’t check it out myself?”

  They were going seventy. Ellis felt like he did in a plane sometimes when they’d hit some chop in the night and he couldn’t look out the window the way he liked to and see something. See any goddamn thing. Just hold on and ride it out in the dark.

  Richie said, “The guy in the van is from some tree place. ‘Save a Tree’ is the name of the outfit. They usually ride around in some station wagon. But it broke down. So one of the Save a Tree guys had to use his own car. Which happens to be a beat-up blue van. Not the Hard Fucking Copy television show.”

  Seventy-five now. Richie was back in the right lane. Ellis always worried about getting pulled over, having to go through some song and dance, not knowing if the cop was going to let him off because he was so happy to meet Fresh Adair—“Fresh in the flesh,” Richie called situations like that—or fuck with him because he was Fresh Adair. Richie never worried about cops, never got pulled over. It was like he had his own radar going, a different kind than he had with women, but just as good.

  The Jeep hurtled through these pockets of fog on the Merritt.

  Ellis said, “I’m not trying—”

  “—to handle things?”

  It was never good when he started finishing Ellis’s sentences.

  “ ’Course you are,” Richie said. “That’s exactly what you’re doing, Fresh. You’ve got all these new things added to the things you’re always afraid of. ’Fraid of the dark. ’Fraid of flying—”

  Eighty miles an hour now.

  “Slow down!” Ellis yelled.

  Embarrassed right away at the way it sounded, like some girlie thing. But not able to hold it back.

  “Slow the fuck down!”

  Richie did. Ellis was breathing hard. Thinking: Harder than I ever breathe in a damn game.

  “Sometimes I get the feeling that inside your head,” Richie said slowly, “you blame me for us being in this … situation. And myself, I don’t see it that way at all.”

  Ellis said, “It’s me and you, Rich. You know that. Always has been me and you. Always will be. I don’t want that to ever change. But I just wish you hadn’t gone to see her.”

  Richie was back to the speed limit. Ellis leaned forward in his seat, put his hands on his knees, which were jiggling up and down.

  Richie said, “You may be right, Fresh. Maybe I shouldn’t’ve. But it was bothering me, trying to figure out what she told the cops, what she might’ve told the newspapers, what she might’ve told this asshole DiMaggio. See, what I’m starting to wonder is just how much of that night the bitch actually does remember. Shit, sometimes I don’t remember it that much. One night out of a million nights.” Richie shook his head. “You know I got a great head for details, Fresh. Especially when it comes to strange. But a goddamn year ago? I’m supposed to print out a play-by-play sheet every time I get my dick wet?”

  Amazing, Ellis was thinking, this was as close as they’d come to talking about it. Getting it all out in the open. You’d think they’d have talked all about it by now, but this was the way they’d handled things their whole lives. Talked around things, never right at them.

  “Who knows what she saw, thinks she saw, as shit-faced as she was,” Richie said. “Point is,” he said, “I think if she had any more than has been in the papers, it would’ve come out by now.”

  “You think?” Ellis made sure it didn’t come out in a pushy way. Just asking a question, letting Richie be the expert.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Ellis said, “You think she might not? Remember, I mean?”

  “Shit, you remember how drunk she was when we met her that one time the week before, she was looking for A.J.?”

  “Vodka,” Ellis said.

  “With a slice of orange. I never saw that one before.”

  “She drank that one down in one shot right before she decided she wanted to start dancing at Mulligan’s.”

  “Which is another thing I’m glad you brought up.”

  Sometimes Ellis surprised himself and knew where everything was going.

  Ellis said, “How come it hasn’t come out anywheres that we met her that one time before?”

  “I don’t know what that’s about,” Richie said.

  Ellis said, happy to let his confusion out, “All that’s come out, she hasn’t told—”

  “—half of it,” Richie said, finishing. He turned and smiled at Ellis in the dashboard lights, reminding Ellis of a shark. “The juicy parts.”

  “I’m sorry, Rich,” Ellis said. “I really am sorry.”

  Where did that come from?

  It came from him, that’s where it came from. From inside the real him.

  “Nothing to be sorry about, Fresh. All part of the game.”

  Richie leaned forward and hit a button. The tape made that eject sound, came up and out of the player. Then he turned on the radio and Ellis heard the jingle for the sports station, WFAN. All the idiots calling to yell about this and that. Richie liked to listen sometimes to see if they were talking about him. Ellis, even when he’d played in the game, had no idea what they were talking about.

  “How about we get some scores before I go off to do my duty?” Richie said.

  Ellis said go ahead.

  All part of the game. Don’t worry, Fresh. I didn’t think nothing of it, Fresh. Maybe for once Richie meant it. After all this time, Ellis still couldn’t tell.

  Sometimes Ellis wondered what all Richie remembered about that night.

  Everything was going too fast. Ellis just did what he did, which was hold on and wait for all of it, every fucked-up part of it, to be over.

  20

  Salter handed over a tape of the meeting like it was a party favor. DiMaggio watched it again, stretched out on the bed at the Sherry, a big bowl of Epsom salts right next to him. He had come back from the Garden feeling as if somebody had stepped on his right hand. He felt the way he always had after nine innings at the beginning of the season, or the very end, when the weather was too cold for baseball, and he felt like nothing would ever take the stiffness out of that hand, the one without the mitt. The best he could ever do was warm it up and loosen it up enough to go back out the next day.

  “Maybe I want to try another approach,” he had said to Salter.

  But what approach?

  For all Salter’s big talk about getting rid of Adair and Collins if they were guilty, that’s not why he had hired DiMaggio. He had hired DiMaggio to find her guilty. He wanted DiMaggio to prove that she was the one lying. DiMaggio said he wanted to find out the truth once and for all, and Salter had sat there nodding his head. But the truth Salter wanted was this: Hannah Carey was full of shit.

  DiMaggio was a big boy. He knew he had been hired to make a case against Hannah Carey at the same time Brian Hyland was trying to make his case against Adair and Collins.

  There was something about the meeting he hadn’t been able to put a finger on until he watched the tape again. Now he knew. It wasn’t the way Hollywood Bob had worked her over, like some grifter on the hustle. Watching them from Salter’s security room, watching them live, not really analyzing everything, DiMaggio thought it was Hollywood Bob who had run the meeting. Organized the room.

  It was her.

  She was the one, in her own fragile and un
derstated way, who kept the whole thing coming back to her:

  You people are interested in me?

  DiMaggio thought: Yes. I am. Very interested.

  At the first meeting he had told Salter he was sure; now he wasn’t so sure. When the thing with the boxer, Tyson, happened, he was sure Tyson had raped the girl. As time passed, again, DiMaggio wasn’t so sure. He watched the tape of the girl dancing at the beauty pageant the day after it was supposed to have happened. Smiling. Really selling the bathing suit number. Hi, I’m going to be Miss Black USA, or whatever it was. DiMaggio had the tape of the Barbara Walters special she did—how come they all cried, was it stipulated in some contract?—and waited for something in her story that spoke to him of the violence she was describing. He was smart enough to know he was a man trying to read a woman’s mind; he’d read enough in rape books since he’d been in New York to know about denial and all the emotional defense mechanisms; understood that Desiree Washington, Tyson’s alleged victim, had already told the story fifty times before she told it to Barbara Walters.

  But how could she be so cool, telling the country?

  He had talked to Sex Crimes people, one from the Queens D.A., one from Brooklyn. They had both told him the same thing: What a rape victim said the day after it happened or a year after it happened didn’t matter. Not one bit.

  Every woman dealt with it differently.

  The woman from the Brooklyn D.A.’s office, Gail Moore, had looked at him icily across her desk and said, “They didn’t look ashamed enough for you?”

  “Ashamed has nothing to do with it.”

  Moore said, “I’m not hitting you with it. I’m just telling you how it is. You’re a guy. You’re conditioned, up until the last few years anyway, when it’s been beat into you finally, to expect women to fall apart at the mention of the thing. Everybody has their own way of dealing with trauma of this kind. By the time a lot of them do come forward, they’re cried out.”

  DiMaggio said, “You think these guys did it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tyson?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Kennedy kid?”

  “Yes.”