Jump

by Mike Lupica

  “They were both in the room with me, too.”

  Marty kept his Panasonic tape recorder, the little one, an RQ-311 minicassette recorder with the built-in microphone, next to his phone. He pushed it forward, showing it to her, checked to see if there was a cassette in there, and jabbed at the Play button. Smiling, but making sure to let her know.

  “You say both.”

  “Both Richie Collins and Ellis Adair.”

  Marty said, “Richie Collins and Ellis Adair were in the room when you were raped.”

  “By Richie Collins,” she said.

  Marty said, “What about Adair?”

  Teresa Delgado said, “He watched.”

  Marty Perez, his heart beating so hard now he thought he really was having a stroke, told her she probably should start at the beginning.

  She lived in a frame house on Newark Avenue, Teresa Delgado said, down the hill from a terrible old bingo place, White Eagle Hall, where Richie Collins and his friends used to play ball in the summer. She was two years younger than he was and had a terrible crush on him anyway, so sometimes she would sneak into White Eagle Hall on the summer nights, sometimes with a girlfriend, sometimes alone, and watch the games.

  “It was like something you thought should be closed down,” she told Marty. “Closed down or condemned. Richie and his friends, though? They treated it like a museum.”

  There were always other girls around, older girls, and it seemed that, according to her observation, Richie Collins always had two or three he was dating at one time. But she was fifteen years old, she said. Teresa Delgado, daughter of a dead Jersey City policeman and a mother who worked two jobs to support Teresa and three sisters, decided that summer that she was in love with Richie Collins.

  “His mother had died the year before,” she said. “He was living by himself over in Lafayette.”

  “How did she die?”

  “It was said that she was stabbed by a mugger,” said Teresa Delgado. “But you heard things …”

  “What things?”

  “That she was a prostitute,” she said. “And that she was killed by the man she worked for.”

  Marty said, “Her pimp.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the kid was allowed to live alone?”

  “It was Lafayette, Mr. Perez,” she said. “It was the projects.” That seemed to explain everything. “He told everyone that he was moving in with Ellis Adair and his Aunt Mary over at Booker T. Washington. But he stayed at Lafayette.”

  “How did he pay?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But he did.”

  Teresa Delgado came to know what nights there would be games at White Eagle Hall better than the players did. She knew when the biggest crowds of adults would be in the folding chairs on the side, so close to the tiny court they were practically in the game. She came to know the players by name, ones from her neighborhood, all the huge black boys from the projects across town, the part of Jersey City that she had only seen a couple of times in her life, from the back of her Uncle Luis’s car. He had been born in the Dominican the way most of her family had, and he had friends over in Montgomery.

  To her, it was like provinces in another country. Montgomery. Lafayette. Booker T. Washington.

  “I followed the game the way real sports fans follow a season,” she said. “I knew which night the college boys would play, which nights they would mix college and high school. But it was all so I could watch him.”

  Sometimes she would wait outside, so he would have to pass her when the game was over. Teresa Delgado, fifteen years old and in love for the first time, did not even care when he would come out with another girl.

  “I knew there would be a night when he would really see me,” she said. “And I was certain, Mr. Perez, that when he saw me he would be able to see all the way inside me.” She smiled at Marty, as if embarrassed at the picture she drew for him of herself.

  At last there was the night when Richie Collins came out alone. And she was there, alone.

  “How old are you?” he said. Before asking her her name.

  “Eighteen.”

  “Liar.”

  “Am not.”

  “What’s your name, little girl?”

  She told him.

  “Would you like to have a date with me?”

  “What kind of date?”

  “I could take you for ice cream. Don’t all little girls like ice cream?”

  She was so brave now. It was happening, not exactly the way she had imagined it, but close enough.

  “So brave,” she repeated to Marty.

  “I drink wine,” she told Richie Collins that night.

  “You’re not old enough to drink.”

  “Am too.”

  They really did go for ice cream the first night, a little place on Newark Avenue, down the hill from White Eagle Hall. The next time, they went for pizza. The third time, he told her he was ready to see if she really did drink wine. He said there was nobody home at his friend Ellis’s. Did she know Ellis? Everybody knew Ellis by then in Jersey City. They took the Greenville local bus that Richie always took home after the basketball games. Teresa felt wicked and grown-up, going into the world she had only seen from Uncle Luis’s car.

  Richie Collins took her up to Ellis Adair’s apartment. She was surprised to see Ellis there. Richie had told her they would be alone.

  And later on, after they had drunk a lot of the wine—“cheap Gallo red”—Richie Collins raped Teresa Delgado, not the eighteen she said she was, fifteen years old and a virgin, on Ellis Adair’s living room couch, with a Mets baseball game on the television in the bedroom and the window open and all the summer-night noises including basketball coming up through the window from the playground down below.

  He raped her with Ellis Adair wandering in and out of the room, waiting for Richie Collins to be finished.

  “So they could go do something,” she said. “Ellis seemed impatient that Richie was taking so long.”

  Marty said, “Did you scream?”

  Teresa Delgado said, “I was too ashamed.”

  Then she said to him, “Besides, there was this part of me, even when the pain started to come, that thought, all this time, girl, this is what you wanted.”

  She told him more about it, as much as she could remember, and finally Marty Perez, remembering the sexy young blond girl who’d been hitting on Richie Collins outside the Fulton Sports Shop, said to Teresa, “What happened? When it was over?”

  She shrugged and said, “He took me down to the bus and gave me a quarter.”

  25

  Ellis didn’t want Dale to go. Didn’t understand how somebody could leave now.

  But Dale said, “I am going to keep working.” Working this time meant Europe. First London, then Paris, then Rome. A week in each one. Ellis didn’t know why a modeling job in Europe had to take nearly a month, but there it was, and so Ellis had Dale’s triplex to himself until he sorted things out.

  “I wish there was a way to smuggle you through customs, big boy,” Dale said, and kissed him.

  Tall beautiful Dale, dark skin, some kind of Hawaiian mix going: Dale, who made being beautiful look as easy as Ellis made basketball. Looking young enough still to do those billboards everybody talked about, wearing that skimpy black underwear.

  Dale, looking as sad as Ellis could ever remember, gave Ellis another kiss good-bye. “I wish there was something I could say to make you feel better.”

  “You want me to feel better?” Ellis said.

  “Yes, you.”

  “Nothing to say.”

  “We’ll get through this.”

  Ellis said, “It isn’t fair.”

  “It’s like they say. Life sucks, then you die. Isn’t that what they say?”

  “Don’t,” Ellis said.

  Really wanting to say, “Don’t go.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dale said.

  “Ellis said, I was sitting there this morning, looking out at the par
k. Like I used to sit out on Aunt Mary’s terrace and watch guys score rock. And I’m thinking, I did everything they told me to do. You know what I’m saying? I played by the goddamn rules. I worked my ass off and didn’t do no drugs and I kept making myself better playing ball. And now all this happens. All this shit.”

  He stopped because he didn’t want to cry in front of Dale. Because he shouldn’t have been the one crying, anyway. “Sometimes I think I should’ve been one of those Idas I told you about,” he said. “Be a playground legend. You understand? But never left Jersey City.”

  Dale, with those sad eyes still going, said, “How in the world did someone like you get from there to here?”

  Dale meant the triplex here, on Fifth Avenue, Seventy-ninth and Fifth, with the houseboy who lived downstairs someplace and never talked except to say, “Is there anything else?” The houseboy who seemed to exist only to go get Ellis something when Ellis didn’t want to go outside. Nobody knowing he was here in New York, right underneath everybody’s nose, in his very own secret and invisible home.

  Not even Richie, who Ellis had called just to say he hadn’t died.

  “You know the way I showed you to get in and out?” Dale said. “If you want to take one of your night walks, all disguised?”

  “No doubt,” Ellis said.

  “Take care of yourself,” Dale said.

  Ellis said, “How can you say that? Take care of yourself.”

  Dale said, “We’ll take care of each other,” giving a little toss to the long black hair because they both knew how much Ellis liked that one and then pushing the elevator button. The doors closed, then it was just Ellis, as invisible as he could be, way up above the park.

  It was the third week of October now. Less than two weeks to go to the opening of the regular season. And Ellis Adair, who was supposed to have more moves than any motherfucker alive, was trying to figure out what his next move should be. For once sorting things out without Richie. At least for the time being.

  But not even being able to pray on everything without wanting to cry his eyes out.

  From the start, Ellis had worried about that dress, on account of what had happened in the car, on the way back to the house. He had even been thinking about renting the movie Presumed Innocent. Ellis couldn’t remember exactly, but him and Richie had gone to see it on the road someplace. With Indiana Jones playing the good guy they thought killed his girlfriend. Richie had read the book first, which was always a treat for Ellis because Richie would talk through the whole movie. “Watch this, Fresh.” Or: “Pay attention to this part, Fresh.” Like he was running Ellis through some set plays, practically telling him which parts of the movie he was supposed to like.

  The movies were like everything else in their life then.

  Anyway, Ellis remembered that the wife was behind it all in the movie, that was the big surprise ending. It was some sort of thing with the guy’s come. She saved it or some such thing. At first trying to set him up because she caught him jumping this other girl. Then feeling bad at the end, even after he got off.

  Ellis couldn’t remember all of it. He just knew there was a way for them to screw around with those samples and then you could end up guilty, even if you weren’t.

  He wondered if Hannah Carey even remembered the ride over, drunk as she was. Ellis looked out at Central Park thinking on that. Or maybe she was just acting drunk, though Ellis seemed to recall she was putting those vodkas with the orange slices away as fast as the waitress brought them.

  Ron, the house guy, said, “I know you said you don’t like to read the papers, but I thought you might want to change your mind.” Ron only lived in when Dale was out of town and the apartment was empty. But they all decided he should stay around while Ellis was there, in case Ellis needed something.

  The first couple of days after Ellis left Fulton, he didn’t read the papers. What was the point? He knew where he was and they were just making it up, which is what they did most of the time, anyway. It was like after he played the games. He didn’t need some sportswriter telling him why the Knicks’d won or lost; shit, he knew while it was happening. And sometimes you just lost the game, it was as simple as that. Except sportswriters didn’t want it to be simple, so they analyzed the shit out of it. Which is why Ellis stopped reading after a while.

  But now Ron handed him the Daily News with the headline RICHIE RAPED ME and a smaller one underneath that went like this: “While Ellis Watched.”

  Of course Ellis remembered her, the little Spanish girl, or whatever she was, no bigger than a doll, from the other side of town. He wasn’t sure anymore if he’d stayed there the whole time. It seemed to him she might be making that part up. But what did that matter anymore? People making things up and dragging Ellis into it? That wasn’t news anymore, not to him.

  Now Teresa Delgado was going to be on with Oprah. Ellis read it all slowly, like Richie always told him to, so he didn’t miss something important. And a little bit into the story there was something else, about how A Current Affair was offering Hannah Carey $250,000 to do a week’s worth of interviews, just tell her life story, but that Hard Copy, another show, was up to $400,000.

  Ellis laughed. Scared as he was, scared that he was losing it all now—scared to death, that was the truth—he couldn’t help laughing.

  Teresa Delgado on Oprah, which the story said she’d picked over Donahue and Geraldo.

  Hannah Carey with two shows fighting over her, maybe more.

  He thought: They’re being recruited like I was for college.

  Ellis thought: Before this is over, they’re going to have to hold a draft for Richie’s girls.

  26

  “You know what I feel like?” DiMaggio said to Hyland. “I feel like I’m swimming in the dark.”

  Hyland sipped a beer. “This is why I had to stop on the way home from work, so I could listen to your problems?”

  They were sitting in Mulligan’s, the bar from which Hannah Carey had left with Ellis Adair and Richie Collins. At least that is what Marty Perez had written and the other newspapers were printing as fact now. The bare bones of the story, at least the story the public knew, hadn’t changed: Hannah Carey was on her way up to her mother’s home in Litchfield that night; her mother was out of town and she was going to spend the weekend up there. They closed off the Merritt Parkway because of an accident right before Exit 38. Hannah used to know a bartender at Gates, a restaurant in New Canaan. She stopped in there, met Adair and Collins, went with them to Mulligan’s, where the Knicks players had congregated after a welcome-back dinner.

  Collins asked her for a ride home. She went into the house he had rented with Ellis Adair to use the bathroom before driving to Litchfield. Adair was inside waiting for them.

  They raped her.

  “I know we’ve gone over this before,” DiMaggio said. “But why do you feel like I’m the enemy here?”

  Hyland said, “You’re not the enemy. You’re just in the way. I go to the city, I try to talk to somebody, some waitress Hannah Carey worked with, and they go, ‘I told this to some guy named DiMaggio the other day.’ And you know what? They all seem to think you’re official.”

  DiMaggio said, “I never tell them I’m a cop. I tell them I work for the Knicks.”

  “I have a feeling you don’t spend a hell of a lot of time making the distinction.”

  “So I’m wasting my time here. Or your time.”

  Hyland said, “Maybe the Knicks’ll give you a bonus for trying so hard.”

  DiMaggio said, “I’m not going to lie to you, Connecticut is starting to wear my ass out.”

  Hyland smiled. “Your ass probably wore out long before you got here.”

  “I have no authority,” DiMaggio complained. “I’ve gotten to talk to the accused and the accuser. But they don’t have to answer any of my questions. So I end up talking to people who know her or know them. Then I end up talking to you again. Only you don’t answer my questions, either.”

  Hyl
and said, “Put yourself in my shoes for a minute, if you can stop whining long enough. She came in on her own, said these two guys raped her. But these two guys, they don’t have to talk to me. They didn’t even have to give me blood and hair samples. But their lawyer convinced them it was bad for their image, not cooperating at all. So they throw me a bone and give me the samples, which are worthless because she kept the goddamn dress in a zipped-up bag for a year, and so I’ve got nothing to match them up with.”

  Hyland waved over the bartender. DiMaggio saw that the bartender, whom Hyland had introduced as Jack, was wearing a white shirt, striped tie, and Bermuda shorts. Hyland said, “You want another Scotch?” DiMaggio said he was fine. Hyland said to Jack, “One more and I’m out of here.”

  Hyland put an elbow on the bar, turned to face DiMaggio.

  “How many nights in a row for you here?”

  “Three.”

  “You find out anything interesting?”

  “You don’t give me shit, but I’m supposed to help you? Is that how it works?”

  “Think of it as being a good citizen.”

  “I know what you probably know,” DiMaggio said, “because you’ve talked to everybody I’ve talked to. Some people remember Hannah Carey being here. One of the bartenders working that night, who I tracked down in Australia, said she was drunk, and even got up at one point and sang with the band they had here that night.”

  “ ‘Runaround Sue,’ ” Hyland said. “You see her as the type to get up in a bar and sing oldies?”

  “I don’t see her as the type to get up and sing at all. She must have been drunk.” He sipped some Scotch. “But if she was that drunk, let me ask you this: Why would Richie Collins ask her for a ride home?”

  Hyland smiled. “Is that a hypothetical question?”

  “Will you give me a fucking break?” DiMaggio said.

  “You want me to speak hypothetically. Let’s just say that hypothetically, her recollections of that evening, the before part and the after part, might not be so sparkling.” Jack brought him his beer and Hyland waited until he placed it on top of the napkin.