by Mike Lupica
“My pretend game was that I wasn’t even there,” Hannah said. “Where’s Hannah? Oh, there she is.”
DiMaggio thought: Ellis Adair wasn’t the only one who wanted to be invisible.
Hannah said her mother fell out of the Top Ten after a year. Then she was out of the Top Twenty, and then she was out of the rankings completely and they were living in Roslyn, Long Island. She remarried, a plastic surgeon. “Dad Number Two,” Hannah said. Jimmy was packed off to Phillips Exeter. At sixteen, Hannah was a good enough tennis prospect to be the best girl at a place called the Port Washington Tennis Academy.
And she hated it.
“It isn’t even probably a surprise, though, that my mother looked at my tennis completely differently than I did,” she said. “But then Mother has always looked at everything completely differently than I did.”
DiMaggio asked, “Stage mom?”
Hannah said, “It was even more than that. All my life, she didn’t know what to do with me. Like she didn’t know who I was supposed to be? Now it was easy for her. I was going to be her.”
Sheila Carey decided she didn’t need some Aussie kid nobody’d ever heard of to teach her kid tennis. Sheila took over, and then when she thought Hannah was ready, she shipped her down to Melbourne, Florida, and now Hannah wasn’t just the best girl at the Port Washington Tennis Academy; she felt like she was in the tennis army.
She was seventeen by then, taking a few high school–equivalency courses in the morning and living in a dorm with girls who had come to Melbourne from all over the world.
Hannah hated them all. “Talking backhands.” She started sneaking out at night and getting drunk.
“I was seventeen but looked older,” Hannah said. “I was as tall as I am now. I didn’t have too much trouble getting guys to buy me drinks.”
There were a couple of warnings from the guy who owned the tennis academy, Billy Ranieri, and then a trip down to Melbourne by her mother. Hannah would go a few weeks being a good girl, and then finally she borrowed a coach’s car and mis-timed the automatic gate in front of Billy Ranieri’s Tennis Academy and totaled the car and was out of there.
“I came back to Long Island and finished high school and tried college for a couple of years and Europe for one year,” Hannah smiled. “I’m running out of gas here. Before long, I was one of a million girls in the big city going from aspiring model to aspiring actress and to waitress and then I had too much to drink again one night and got raped. I’m trying not to drink anymore, or get raped. And that is all the talking I care to do about me tonight.”
DiMaggio said, “No follow-up questions?”
Hannah said, “I’ve already told you more than I should have.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you found out about me.”
“Why don’t you let me ask a few questions.”
“No.” Someone dimmed the lights behind them. Now Hannah’s eyes looked blue again. She was smiling again. DiMaggio couldn’t tell whether she was playing with him or not. He felt it again, the way he did when he watched her from Ted Salter’s secret room at the Garden: The conversation was all over the place, but she was the one moving it around.
“I’d rather talk about you,” she said. “What’s the matter with your hands? I look at you sometimes and it’s like they’re hurting you so much you want to scream.”
“I have arthritis,” he said. “They get a little stiff sometimes, that’s all.”
She stared at his hands until he slid them off the table and put them in his lap.
“Liar,” she said softly.
“Let’s order,” DiMaggio said.
It was after ten when DiMaggio paid the check. He had spent most of dinner telling her about his baseball career. She was a good listener. So he told her about Tony DiMaggio and the pink flamingos and learning to play the piano.
It was more than he usually told.
When they got outside to Forty-ninth, Hannah said, “Well.”
There was some wind up off the East River. It was as if DiMaggio felt the first breath of winter, even as autumn was just beginning.
“You want to take a walk?” he said.
“I’d like that,” Hannah Carey said.
They walked over to First and took a left and started uptown.
“It was different with you and the piano,” Hannah said. “I mean, different than tennis was with me.”
“How so?”
“I couldn’t stand my mother and couldn’t stand tennis. You don’t seem so crazy about your dad, but you love the music.”
“I think it was a way of asking him to take me with him,” DiMaggio said. “Before I really got to know him.”
Hannah said, “You haven’t talked about your mother at all.”
They were on the west side of First, waiting for the light at Fifty-first.
“You did have a mother, didn’t you?” Hannah said, trying to make a joke of it.
“I’ve talked enough,” DiMaggio said.
“Something happened to her, didn’t it?” Hannah said. “You don’t have to tell me—”
Why not? DiMaggio thought. What the hell.
“She got raped,” he said.
His mother always drank, even when Tony DiMaggio was still playing in local bands on Long Island—he actually had his own for a while, “Tony DiMaggio and the Yankee Clippers”—before he hit the road for good.
“I’d come home from school,” DiMaggio told Hannah. “I mean when I was eleven, twelve, in there, and my mom would be asleep in front of the television set, watching some soap opera, The Guiding Light or The Edge of Night, and the ashtray would be full of Viceroy butts, she smoked Viceroys, and there’d be an empty bottle of Four Roses, sometimes tipped over on the rug next to her chair.”
She’d wake up crying sometimes when she heard him getting a snack or going out to play ball and beg him not to tell his father. But even as a kid, he remembered wondering why his father would care about his mother’s drinking when he didn’t care about anything else that happened in the house.
When his father hit the road for good, his mother stepped up the drinking. When DiMaggio was a junior at Commack High School, she started bringing guys home from the saloons.
“They were just guys,” he said. “Cops sometimes. Gas station guys. Didn’t much matter. She’d try to wait until after she knew I’d gone to bed, but sometimes I’d be out late. The year I got my driver’s license, I’d saved up enough in the summer to buy an old Volkswagen convertible, and I’d run into her. Then I’d go to my room. And everything would start the same way. I’d hear the bastards slamming this shitty ice tray we had on the kitchen counter. Then my mother would put a record on. Old stuff. The stuff I like to play now. After a while, I’d hear them moving some of the living room furniture around. My mother loved to dance.”
There was one night when she didn’t come home. DiMaggio, all this time later couldn’t remember why he woke up early the next morning. He’d been a late sleeper as a kid, even alarm clocks couldn’t do the job with him, and half the time his mother, hungover but getting herself together enough to fix him breakfast, would have to shake him awake to get him off to school on time.
Except for this morning.
DiMaggio woke up a little after six and his mother was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking, drinking a cup of coffee.
DiMaggio said to Hannah, “Yuban.” Thinking to himself as he did: Richie Collins was right, it was funny the shit you remembered.
His mother’s mascara was all under her eyes. Her stockings were bunched around her knees. It took him a minute to notice that it wasn’t just mascara with one of her eyes. She’d been hit. He saw that her best print dress was ripped on one side, down at the bottom, at the hem. He asked her what happened, and that was when she noticed him standing there.
She looked at him for what he remembered as being a long time. She had boiled some water in a soup pan, boiling an egg, and it was s
till bubbling; before she said anything, he walked over and moved the pan to another burner.
Then she said something and DiMaggio said, “What?” and his mother said to him, “I said, he made me.”
“Who made you?” he said, and she named a guy he had met at the house one time, a cop.
DiMaggio said, “She looked up at me, I remember this the best, and I saw how old she’d become. Not thinking about the bruise even. Or her makeup. Just how old and sad she looked. And she just said, ‘He made me.’ ”
She had thought they were coming back to the house to drink and dance. But this time the cop drove to this spot he knew, not too far from one of the Commack exits on the LIE, Long Island Expressway. He was drunk already. He told her he wanted to do it here, like the kids he always had to roust did it.
DiMaggio and Hannah crossed First at Fifty-seventh and walked toward Sutton Place, then crossed the street again. There was a small park there, overlooking the East River. They sat down on a bench.
“You know what my mother told him?” DiMaggio said. “ ‘It isn’t nice.’ Imagine that? ‘It isn’t nice.’ Then he raped her. Then there was somebody else getting into the backseat, and she found out that one of his buddies had followed them. He was next.”
She wouldn’t see a doctor. She wouldn’t file charges. They both told her that if she made trouble, they knew she had a son. They knew he drove his little Volkswagen. They knew he wanted to be a baseball star.
So DiMaggio waited outside the bar for a week, trying to screw up his courage. He was set to go home one night when the cop who did it, the one she knew, came stumbling out. DiMaggio got out of the Volkswagen, walked up and hit him twice, knocked him down, before he knew what was happening.
DiMaggio said, “Then he got up.”
He ended up breaking DiMaggio’s nose, and cracking a rib. He was wearing motorcycle boots. He finished him off by stomping on his hands until he broke them.
“Before he left, he knelt down next to me,” DiMaggio said. “And he said, ‘You got your ass kicked for nothing, kid.’ I said, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ And this guy says to me, ‘It means she wanted it.’ ”
That was what started it with his hands.
They sat in silence when he finished, both of them staring across the river at Queens. Finally, DiMaggio said, “Listen, I’m sorry.”
She said, “For what?”
“If it was too close.”
“It was close enough,” she said. “But I had the feeling it was harder for you to tell than it was for me to hear it.”
“I doubt it.”
“No, really.” She turned to face him. She had pulled the collar of her blazer up against the night. “Is that why you’re here? Why you took this case?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
Hannah Carey stood up. “She wanted it,” she calmly said to DiMaggio. “That’s what they always say, isn’t it?”
24
“Ay bendito,” Marty Perez said.
“I know that one,” Michael Cantor said. “That’s the one you say when you’re feeling sorry for yourself. Which is why I know it, because you’re feeling sorry for yourself all the time.”
Marty bit off the end of his cigar and spit it toward the wastebasket on the side of Cantor’s desk, but he missed. When he made no move to get it, Cantor stood up and picked it up carefully, as if it were some dead bug.
“I came in here so you could tell me how I’m going to find Ellis Adair.”
Cantor said, “That’s the whole game now, at least until they decide to indict or not.”
“Ahora mismo,” Marty said, joking at Cantor around the cigar.
“Enough of this shit. What is this, Berlitz? What does—?”
Marty told him, “It means I want to find his black ass. Knock on his door like I’m the law and say, ‘Okay, boy, come with me.’ ”
“Boy?” Cantor said.
It was eight-thirty in the morning. Cantor had told him on the phone that if they were going to talk, to do it then; he was up to his eyeballs in bankers the rest of the day. Adair had been missing for forty-eight hours. The Knicks didn’t know where he was; Richie Collins still didn’t know. Collins had gotten one phone call, the night before. Adair wouldn’t say where he was, when he was coming back, just that he was fine.
Marty happened to call Collins a little before midnight, to see if anything had changed.
“He wanted me to know he wasn’t dead,” Collins said. “Said it wasn’t a deal like Michael Jordan’s dad, he hadn’t got himself shot and dumped someplace. Then before I could ask him anything else, he said, ‘I need some time, sort some shit out.’ And hung up.”
Marty wrote it in thirty-five minutes, and they put it on the front page of the Sports Final, which was the last edition of the Daily News.
“I can taste this one,” Marty said. “I find him, I write him up big-time, we hold it for the late edition so nobody else gets to rewrite it and act like it’s theirs. Then I turn around and put him on television the next day.”
Cantor said, “He’s going to do all this for Marty Perez of the News out of the goodness of his heart?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I haven’t figured that part out yet.”
“You really do have big balls,” Cantor said.
Marty said, “Richie Collins told me the same thing. Everybody must know.”
Cantor shrugged.
“Qué cojones,” Cantor said.
“Now you’re getting the hang of it,” Marty said. “All I’ve got to do is find him.”
“Where does somebody like Ellis Adair go to disappear?”
Marty said, “I keep thinking it might be the place where we’ll least expect to find him.”
“And where is that?”
“Maybe here,” Marty said.
“You’re shitting me,” Cantor said, looking at his Cartier watch. It was the move that meant get out. “You think he’s in New York?”
Marty said, “Sounds so nice they named it twice. And why not? Where the hell else is he gonna go?”
Marty walked out ahead of Cantor, into the early-morning quiet of the city room.
“Okay, asshole,” Marty said out loud. “Come out, come out wherever you are.”
It was half an hour later. Marty was already working on his second cigar and fourth cup of coffee and feeling jumpy when the kid, Casseas, who worked reception out by the elevators, buzzed him.
He said there was a woman out there to see him, most definitely. Casseas was black and probably Haitian. Marty could never be sure on the Haitian, but Casseas had picked up all the conversational frills the black kids used. Most definitely. No doubt. They seemed to think it made them sound smarter.
“What’s her name?”
“She don’t give me a name, mon.”
“Then tell her I’m busy.”
“I think you want to talk to this one,” Casseas said. “No doubt.”
“Why is that?”
Marty drummed his fingers on the desk. Shit, how many cups of coffee had he had? He felt like he was having a stroke.
Casseas lowered his voice. “She says that Richie Collins raped her one time and she wants to talk to you about that. Most definitely.”
“¿Qué haces?” Marty said.
Teresa Delgado said, “English, please.” She smiled.
Marty guessed her to be in her mid-twenties. She was tiny, not much over five feet, had a round face and straight, shiny black hair, looking soft enough to touch. Teresa Delgado was not dark, though. She had creamy white-girl skin. There was a sweetness about her, a calm, that came into Marty Perez’s office and seemed to settle his caffeine jitters immediately. There was something about her face, the smallness of her, that gave her a doll quality.
“Can I get you anything?”
“No, thank you.”
“Sorry about the condition of this office.” He grinned. “It’s like Grand Central: We’ve tried to get the
homeless out of here, but they still find a way.”
Nothing.
Yeah, you’ve always been a real champ at loosening things up, Perez. Qué tipo. Cantor was right. What a guy.
“I probably should have come forward sooner—”
“It’s not an exact science, Miss Delgado—”
“—Teresa—”
“—Teresa. It took Hannah Carey a year.”
She had taken her shoulder purse, some kind of expensive-looking leather or a great imitation, and put it in her lap. She was working it over pretty good. Her hands looked even whiter than her face; she sure had some strong white blood in her somewhere from daddy or mommy.
“Ten years for me,” she said.
Marty said, “Why now and why me?”
Teresa Delgado looked up at him with her big eyes.
“I read those first things you wrote about Hannah Carey when no one in the newspapers was giving her a chance. I was very impressed by that.”
Marty thought: Still the king of the bullshitters. “Thank you,” he said, trying to sound humble. Bullshitting her some more.
“I’ve been following the case ever since,” she continued in a voice without accent or inflection, a sad voice that Marty didn’t think belonged to a face this pretty, this sweet.
Teresa Delgado said, “They’re going to get away with this, aren’t they?”
“You can’t know that—”
“They are, aren’t they?” Pressing him.
“They probably are,” Marty admitted. “If she’d only done things differently. Back then, I mean.”
“It’s like you told me,” she said. “This isn’t an exact science.”
“No.”
“Sometimes, though.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Maybe it is, once in a while. I haven’t told you my story yet.”
Marty watched her. A little girl named Delgado, talking about bad things. Getting ready to, anyway.
