by Mike Lupica
Fuck him.
Marty got into his car and drove over to Fulton High School. He sat out in front now and felt like some maricón pervert, watching the kids get out of school at lunch, staring at the girls. Marty had the radio on, listening to the all-news channels, WCBS and WINS, jumping around, edgy, worried that somebody might have something new on Collins. He ended up listening to the same shit over and over again. There was a cut from Ted Salter. Then Frank Crittendon, the Knicks general manager, blubbering like a baby, trying to run that jive on everybody, as though anybody in his right mind would shed a single tear over the passing of Richie Collins.
Then Gary Lenz, the Knicks coach: “Richie was a bit of an outlaw, I’m not going to tell you he wasn’t. But he was my kind of outlaw, like Butch Cassidy to Ellis’s Sundance Kid.”
Basura, Marty thought.
Basura and basura and more garbage on top of that, so much garbage he wanted to roll the window down, the stench inside the BMW was getting so bad. It was all the basura rhetoric of the death. Somebody takes out this goma and immediately everybody starts talking about him, talking about the whole thing, like it was the murder of some hero cop. Before long they’d convince themselves Collins was trying to perform CPR on Hannah Carey that night last year instead of raping her.
And everyone still speculating on what Ellis’s disappearance had to do with any of this. Trying to analyze that without having any idea where Ellis was, why he left.
It made Marty Perez want to laugh. He thought: People who don’t trust the media ought to take a look at everything from the inside sometime.
He listened to the idiots on the sports station for a while. Some of them called up and wanted to pay tribute to Richie Collins, as if the bastard were still listening to WFAN. One guy called while Marty was listening and blamed the whole thing on him.
“Remember something,” the guy said to the host. “Remember how all this started, with that columnist in the News writing up the rape in the first place. You guys in the media, you don’t care who you hurt, do you? No wonder they all hate your guts.”
The host dumped out of the call, chuckling, and then the next caller wanted to know how the host thought Boyzie Mays would do now that he was the starting guard.
Marty jabbed at the button, turned the thing off.
Where was the girl?
Marty didn’t have much of a plan beyond finding the girl he’d seen with Collins that day at the Fulton Sports Shop. Once he found her, if he found her, he’d see if she was still going out with Collins, see if he could scare her into telling him something. Anything. If Collins hadn’t come up here to see the girl, maybe she knew who he had come to see. It was a long shot: Marty knew that when he got into the car for the ride up. Maybe the time Marty saw her with Collins, maybe that was the one and only time she did Collins. Maybe Richie Collins was trying to go through the whole senior class at Fulton High. Or junior class. Maybe that’s what the títere did every September in Fulton.
School was back in and so was Richie.
“A kid from Fulton High,” Collins had said that day. Then said he was loved by kids of all ages. Maybe he was bullshitting about the high school. Maybe she’d come walking out with the rest of the lunch crowd. And maybe he’d have to wait all goddamn day. Which he couldn’t do with a goddamn column to write, and a Chronicle commentary.
Maybe if the kid saw Marty, she’d remember him from the Sports Shop, run like hell. Grab the first teacher she saw and say there was some old fuck outside, bothering her.
“¡Coño!” Marty said out loud.
It was a long shot, but the girl was all that Marty had that the rest of them didn’t have. Only Marty Perez and maybe Ellis Adair, wherever he was, knew that Richie Collins had something going with a six-foot high school girl who kissed him good-bye on Saturday morning, looking pouty, and then rode off in her little car.
What the hell kind of car was it?
What make?
Marty leaned back, closed his eyes, tried to make himself relax. They were all out of school now, he wasn’t going to miss anything if he stopped watching the front door. Jesus, he used to be able to remember everything. That was before he got so tired. In the old days, he could interview somebody at a fire, or at a murder scene, outside some courtroom, and get back to the office with an hour to make the last edition or blow the night and the story entirely, and Marty would never even have to open his notebook. He’d just close his eyes, the way he was doing it in front of Fulton High School, and hear whole conversations verbatim, as if he had a tape going inside his head.
That was before the inside of his head started feeling like a zafacón sometimes.
Wastebasket.
A red car!
You bet it was.
A sporty little red car for the big blond girl. He could see her clearly now, getting that look on her face when Collins brushed her off a little, made it clear that she would have to wait. She had obviously been pinning him down on some date for later. Could this baby girl have done it? Stuck him right through the fucking heart?
If she could find Richie Collins’s heart, Marty thought.
Now he had it in his head, like a photograph: Collins giving her that come-to-daddy look before he saw Marty was watching.
It was nothing more than a hunch. An old-time feeling Marty felt in his stomach. But a million hunches like it had paid off in the past. Maybe Richie Collins had gone out with a million girls. Only Marty had seem him with this one, in Fulton, a few weeks before somebody stabbed him to death in Fulton. It wasn’t much, but Marty knew he had run down the field with a lot less in his life.
“A red car,” he said out loud.
He closed his eyes again, leaning forward now in the front seat, head resting against the steering wheel, not even worried about what the high school boys and girls might think if they came out and saw him, some weird guy asleep at the wheel of the old BMW.
“A red Nissan,” Marty said, sure he was right, and then rode around to the parking lot he knew was in back of Fulton High School until he found what sure looked like the hot joven girl’s hot red car.
DiMaggio had first talked to Boyzie Mays the day he met with A. J. Fine at the Fulton Luncheonette. DiMaggio didn’t do much talking. He found out right away that with Mays you listened. He was eight months out of rehab and wanted to tell DiMaggio all about it: Do the whole recovery rap.
“People think you just want to get back to playing ball, making money,” he told DiMaggio. “Shit, that ain’t half of it. It’s getting so motherfucking tired of talking about yourself, your addiction to rock, the first time you tried rock and when you knew you couldn’t leave it alone. You end up sounding like the most boring-assed nigger in the world. But they keep telling you, You got to talk, Boyd, which is my real name, you got to talk it out, Boyd, or you’ll never get better. You got to get in touch with your feelings, Boyd. And maybe it does get your ass better, but not for the reason they think. You just finally figure out if you don’t do no more dope, then you don’t have to talk about it no more.”
Then, DiMaggio remembered, Mays seemed to tell his whole life story in about ten minutes. Number one draft choice out of Maryland, backup to Richie Collins, All-Rookie Team even averaging fifteen minutes a game, getting on dope after that, getting traded to Dallas, ending up in rehab. He came back this summer, earned a job in the Knicks camp for rookies and free agents.
Now Collins was dead and Mays had the job. DiMaggio didn’t want to talk about that. He had been looking at the notes he’d taken after talking to Mays the first time. There was a throwaway line in there about how Mays used to run with Ellis Adair when he was a rookie, some “wild-assed parties” Adair used to take him to.
“Fresh didn’t always look the part, coming on like some happy sitcom nigger,” Mays said. “But that boy would take a walk on the wild side now and again.”
DiMaggio was waiting by the side of the court at the Garden, the narrow runway leading back to the locker rooms
, when the Knicks finished practice; he was alone. Gary Lenz had called off practice the day before, then closed this one to the media. Lenz was the first one off when practice was over; he slowed down when he saw DiMaggio, looked like he might want to say something smart, then kept going. Mays was one of the last Knicks off the court. DiMaggio could see A. J. Fine still out there, playing one-on-one with Danny Riordan, the rookie who had replaced Ellis Adair in the starting lineup, at least for now.
Mays said he remembered DiMaggio. “From Mr. Salter,” he said, and smiled. “You the man.”
“That’s me,” DiMaggio said. “The man.”
Boyzie Mays said, “This ain’t about Richie, is it? They told me not to talk to nobody about that.”
“It’s about Ellis.”
“He come back?”
DiMaggio shook his head. “I want to talk about those wild-assed parties you told me about.”
“I told you that?” Mays smiled. “Damn, I’m a big-mouthed nigger sometimes.” He snorted. “Not sometimes, all the time. All the rock I did, I can’t remember which shit I’ve talked and which shit I’ve just thought. You do as much dope I did, all you end up with is rocks in your head.”
“Give me about fifteen minutes,” he said to DiMaggio, then walked away shaking his head, looking smaller than the six-one the program said he was, reminding DiMaggio a little of Spike Lee without the glasses. His number 20 gray practice jersey was stuck to his sweat. DiMaggio could hear him still talking to himself, saying, “Big-mouthed nigger” as he took a right in the hall on his way to the Knicks locker room. DiMaggio felt like it was only twenty minutes ago that he’d been in there watching Salter work Richie Collins over, treating him like a dink.
Now DiMaggio just tried to imagine what Boyzie Mays must have been like on cocaine if he talked this much straight.
Mays said he was too tired to go anywhere, they could just go sit high up in the Garden seats. Not even the cleaning people would bother them up there.
So they went way up, up there with the retired uniforms from the old Knick teams, white uniforms hanging up there like ghosts, belonging to Walt Frazier and Willis Reed and Bill Bradley, who went from basketball to being the senator from New Jersey. DiMaggio watched Bradley give the keynote speech at the Garden when Clinton got nominated and remembered thinking Bradley was used to working the room with a much better class of people.
Now DiMaggio looked at Bradley’s number 24 and wondered how he would have handled a punk like Richie Collins, not just playing with him but riding the buses and the airplanes and dressing with him every night, even watching him work the bars like some pimp working a bus station.
Mays had brought coffee with him from the locker room for both of them. DiMaggio was starting to feel as suspicious as a sportswriter. Did this guy really want to talk or was he looking for something? Christ. He had only been back in New York for a month, been around these people for that short a time, and already he was looking at everybody like a cheap hustler, even when they tried to be friendly.
“Nice up here,” Mays said, and DiMaggio had to agree. There were still a couple of lights shining on the basketball court. The rest of the Garden was in semidarkness, so the lights on the court felt like spotlights and seemed to turn the place into a museum, highlighting the fiberglass backboards and one basketball, left behind somehow, sitting there at midcourt. DiMaggio had always liked ballparks and arenas better when they were empty. From high up, where he remembered the cheap seats used to be at the Garden, when you still had cheap seats in sports, the setting had a simple, quiet playground elegance.
DiMaggio’s hands were starting to ache. Maybe there was a connection since sometimes they started to ache when his head did, the way it was now, working Boyzie Mays, wondering if this was just another dead end. But he was noticing them now and had to stop talking for a minute, hope the pain would pass, wanting to kick himself for not soaking in the morning and not having any Advil with him. Not that he’d take it in front of Mays. Everybody had his macho front, including him, he thought, even when the pain made him want to scream. He never knew when a day would turn into a bad day, but there it was all of a sudden, and DiMaggio was flinching, like a fighter anticipating a punch, when someone would reach to shake his hand.
DiMaggio picked up his plastic coffee cup from the seat next to him and sipped his cold coffee just to have something to do with his goddamn hands.
“I’ve been thinking, maybe I shouldn’t be talking about Fresh neither,” Mays started.
DiMaggio said, “You’re not hurting him by helping me.”
“Is Fresh in more trouble, on account Richie’s dead now?”
“There’s a point where perception becomes fact,” DiMaggio said. “Meaning that after a while if you look guilty you start to be guilty. Ellis needs to come back now. The longer he stays away, especially with Richie dead, the more people start to wonder. Did he do the rape? Did he even have something to do with Richie’s death?”
“Shit. If Ellis did Richie, be like a wife doing her husband.”
“It happens all the time,” DiMaggio said.
Mays looked around, as if to make sure they were really alone up there. They were.
DiMaggio said, “The thing I wanted to talk to you about, getting back to that, was those parties you mentioned.”
Mays nodded, smiling, happy with the memory. DiMaggio figured that he was probably happy to have any memories.
“Big-ass parties,” Mays said. “Was like I told you before. They was wild-assed parties. Uptown and downtown. When Ellis first asked me to go it was, like, okay, but why me? Then I just figured he got tired of Richie bossing his ass all the time, maybe he just wanted to get away from the sound of the boy. Or maybe he wanted to talk brother to brother once in a while, even if Fresh was never too big on conversation. So we’d go to some of these parties, and it was like we’d like to have left the motherfucking planet. Like we was on the starship Enterprise. There’d be rock and high-class for-hire babes and men dressed up like women. Women dressed up like men, too. Queers all over the place, but cool queers, you know? They’d make their pass on you and you could give them an I-don’t-fuckin’-think-so look, and they’d move on, no hassle. I said to Fresh one time, ‘Boy, you a long way from Jersey City.’ And Fresh said, ‘You know what, Boyz? I can be invisible here. There’s too much shit going on for everybody to care about every move I make.’ ”
Mays stopped to take a breath.
It was like he was reloading. DiMaggio was starting to wonder if he ever ran out of saliva.
“When you’d go to these parties, you ever go to the same place more than once? Was there a regular circuit?” DiMaggio asked.
Boyzie Mays leaned back, put his feet up on the back of the seat in front of him. He was wearing a purple silk shirt, matching purple slacks, and no socks to go with purple shoes that looked more like bedroom slippers. And even in the bad light, DiMaggio could see some little design Mays had razored into his hairdo, above the ear.
DiMaggio thought: Who was the first black guy to do it? Go into the barber’s, sit down, and say to the guy, “A little off the top, and could you also write in my nickname over my ear?”
Out loud, Mays went through his list of famous names: a tennis player; a rock star DiMaggio was vaguely aware of; then another tennis player, French, who’d opened the best restaurant in Tribeca, at least according to Boyzie Mays, who finally said, “But I tell you who threw the best parties. Not only threw the best parties, but even started to show up at games after a while, sit in those rich-boy seats ’cross from our bench. You know the big model named Dale? Dale the bitch from the billboards a couple of years ago? In that black underwear?”
DiMaggio just waited, not wanting to throw him off while he sorted through the rocks in his head.
Mays clapped his hands. “Dale Larson!” he said, all excited. “Dale Larson threw the best parties, oh fuck yeah.”
DiMaggio took out a small spiral notebook and wrote down
Dale Larson, which was another cutting-edge name he was supposed to know and didn’t. The last model he’d paid any attention to was Twiggy.
He’d call Joey Bernstein for an address or a phone number. Joey knew everybody.
He and Boyzie Mays took the elevator down to the street, the Thirty-third Street side, came out the employees’ entrance, right next to a saloon called Charley O’s. Boyzie Mays took off the wire-rimmed glasses he’d been wearing and put on some big shades, like he was getting back into character. Boyzie in his cool shades and cool pose, in his purple outfit, his initials diagrammed into his hair, DiMaggio able to see the writing now. Boyzie looking bigger outside, in real life, than he had inside.
They all did.
DiMaggio said, “You think Ellis Adair raped that girl, Boyzie?”
“No.”
“How come?”
“Because everybody has a line they won’t cross. Real simple for some, too: Live or die. Me, I went to rehab. And when I look back, it really don’t matter what got me there. Staying, now, that was a different matter. Once I stayed, that was Boyzie Mays saying, Fuck, I ain’t ready to die yet. I look at Ellis, and look at what I know about him, and, my opinion? I don’t think he crosses over the rape line. Maybe I’m full of shit. I can’t really explain it. But if you’re asking me, put it on the line, did he rape that girl, no, I don’t think he did.”
DiMaggio said, “Then how come he ran?”
Boyzie Mays looked at him over the top of his shades and said, “Maybe the boy decided the rest of the world finally crossed over the line with him.”
Mays walked over to the corner of Thirty-third and Eighth, hailed a cab. DiMaggio watched the cab disappear into the uptown traffic. He was deciding whether or not to walk back to the Sherry when Donnie Fuchs, Adair and Collins’s agent, came out of the employees’ entrance.
The clothes were as sharp as the first time DiMaggio had met him, up in Fulton, but it was as if Donnie Fuchs, who had been such a tough guy that day in Frank Crittendon’s office, had shrunk in the weeks since. His color was bad. Now the clothes, a shapeless blazer, gray T-shirt, white slacks, looked even baggier on him than they were probably supposed to.
