Jump

by Mike Lupica

  “This Monday,” Teresa Delgado said.

  “Jesus Christ,” Hannah Carey said.

  “Pray for us,” Teresa Delgado said.

  Teresa told Kelly to tell it the same way she had at breakfast.

  Kelly Crittendon said she felt like she had known Richie Collins her whole life. “Even if it was only half.”

  She had always looked older than her real age. Been bigger than the other girls. The first to get a chest. She was a tomboy, ball-girling for the Knicks in training camp from the time she was twelve.

  Richie noticed her even then.

  The guys at school, they never noticed her.

  Kelly said, “We all knew my dad wanted a boy. I mean, Mom she’s, like, even taller than me, when you put her next to Dad, they look sillier together than Billy Joel and Christie looked before, you know, they split up. She jokes all the time that Dad only married her so they could breed a shooting guard. So it’s like I was always expected to not just do boy things, but like them. You know? But my secret was, I only did the stuff to be around boys. Like: I was noticing them way before they were noticing me. Wanting them to notice me in the worst way. But nobody did. Till Richie.”

  By the time she was in her teens, he flirted with her constantly. The October before this one—my October with the Knicks, Hannah thought—he had her start calling him “Uncle Rich.” That was for her father’s benefit.

  It had reached the point, though, where both Richie and Kelly knew he wanted to be more than her uncle. And she wanted the same thing.

  She started thinking about him all the time, all during that season. She couldn’t go to all the games; they finished up too late and her father usually had something to do afterward, some meeting with the coach or a late dinner in the city that wouldn’t even start until around midnight. Sometimes he’d even stay over at the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue, where the team rested up in the afternoons before home games.

  So she didn’t come too much, but when she did, it wasn’t about seeing the games. Just Richie Collins. After the game, she’d wait an hour in the hall, like she was waiting for Frank Crittendon to collect her. But she was waiting to say hello to “Uncle Rich,” have him give her a little kiss on the cheek, nobody noticing the squeeze he’d sometimes give her, too.

  On game nights, she said, then laughed and said most of the time her father was in a world of his own, so he didn’t notice the clothes she’d wear to the games, clothes that didn’t just get looks from Richie Collins, but all the players after a while.

  Only Richie, though, looked at her the way you look at something you can have, Kelly Crittendon said.

  She said, “ ‘One of these days, little girl,’ he’d say. And I’d go, ‘One of these days what?’ And he’d go, ‘One of these days, you’re going to have to fight me off.’ ”

  Out of nowhere, she started to cry again. Hannah just sat there, not knowing what to do for her. Teresa Delgado took out another Kleenex, wiped Kelly Crittendon’s tears herself this time, saying, “He never changed.”

  Then she added, “Until he died.”

  Six months before, in the spring, before the Knicks’ last regular season game, Kelly had told her father she would meet him at the game, just leave her ticket for her; she’d take the train in from Fulton, where Frank Crittendon had bought his dream house. It was a Saturday. Kelly took the train, got a cab at Grand Central, and took it to the Regency, arriving there right after the Knicks’ morning practice. Getting his room number had been easy. Her father was a meticulous man, “a real fuddy-duddy about detail stuff.” There was always an itinerary in his briefcase.

  She wore what she would wear to the game: this cool hot-yellow shirt over black tights. Heels.

  She had waited as long as she could.

  She had convinced herself that Richie Collins—ten years older? more? so what, ten years was nothing—wanted her as much as she wanted him. She was sure that he sensed this thing that had been growing between them. So Kelly did what she had been dreaming about doing for more than a year, a year that seemed like fifteen lifetimes to a fifteen-year-old: She knocked on Richie Collins’s door.

  Kelly: “I was on the pill. I wasn’t a virgin anymore. I’d, well, like I’d practiced doing it with this guy Kenny, the best player on the Fulton basketball team. All my life, I’d heard Daddy and everybody else make practicing something sound like a sacrament. I figured I’d better practice sex, too, if I didn’t want to look like a jerk.”

  Looking at Hannah and Teresa for approval.

  Teresa Delgado said, “We are willing to do anything for them.”

  Hannah jumped in for the first time, surprising herself. She said, “Anything and everything,” not thinking about Teresa or this girl, knowing she was talking about herself.

  Teresa said, “We want to make them happy and so proud.”

  Richie wasn’t even surprised to see her, Kelly said. Or if he was surprised, he was too cool, too grown-up, to show it.

  He had a suite.

  Kelly: “We didn’t even make it to the living room. I could see this big fruit basket in there, the biggest I’d ever seen. But we did it right there. Standing up.”

  Her eyes got very big, and Hannah thought she might cry again.

  Kelly: “It wasn’t … I had thought about how it would be all different from this. But I didn’t even get a chance to take my blouse off. Richie just kept saying we’d waited long enough. He said he needed me. Need you, baby. Need you, baby. I think back, and that’s all I can remember him saying.”

  After that first time, they decided it was too risky to meet at the hotel, especially with the play-offs coming up and the whole city turning up the lights on the Knicks. So they began meeting at his apartment.

  Then, way too soon for Kelly, so soon she couldn’t believe it, the season was over. The whole rest of her life, she said, the season seemed to go on forever.

  Now she would have done anything to get another month.

  Frank Crittendon, after taking care of the NBA draft, took his family to their summer home on Cape Cod. Richie Collins, because of his sneaker contract, went off to conduct basketball clinics in Europe and Asia. Promising to see Kelly in September.

  Kelly: “He asked me if I’d ever heard of that song ‘See You in September.’ He said it was like him. I asked him what he meant and he said, ‘An oldie but a goodie.’ He said the song was from way back there in the fifties.”

  Teresa gave out this little gasp. “He told me the same thing that summer,” she said. “About that same song.” Hannah noticed it was the first time she had heard an accent from her, told sounding like toll, like she was talking about paying a toll.

  When training camp started, Richie and Kelly started up again. It still seemed so reckless to her, so wicked, sneaking around right under her father’s nose. She knew he would kill her if he found out. “Kill me and then kill Richie,” she said.

  But she couldn’t help herself.

  Kelly: “It’s like something Miss … like Teresa said in the papers, about how the heart knows what the heart knows. I read that and it was like, wow. I mean, I had only read the story the first time, going, like, Oh, here’s somebody Richie fucked over the way he fucked me over.”

  Hannah couldn’t help but notice how easily the word came out of the girl’s mouth, the girl just sixteen, this girl who had given up her virginity, practiced, just to make herself ready for Richie Collins.

  It was right after training camp started that he started asking about her girlfriends.

  Kelly would bring friends to watch practice with her. He’d stop sometimes and make faces at them, make them giggle. Then later, when they were together, he’d say to Kelly, “Who was that?” When Kelly would pout, he’d laugh it off, saying, “What’s this, my baby girl is jealous?” And then drop it for a couple of days.

  It became obvious to her that Richie Collins wanted to have sex with Kelly and another girl.

  Kelly: “He said we could get all dressed up
first, like a prom. He’d get some champagne. He said it would be the most fun I’d ever have. If we could just find the right girl to fill out the ménage à trois. When he said it the first time, I acted like I knew exactly what he was talking about. Then I had to go look it up.”

  She said no. He kept at her, making fun of her, saying maybe he was wrong about her. Maybe she was too young. Making it sound like being too young was being too fat or something. But the thought of getting naked, doing it, with another girl, a friend, was dirty. Gross.

  Even after some of the things Richie had already made her do in bed. And in his car. One time in the locker room after everybody was gone.

  On the court.

  She couldn’t make herself do it with another girl.

  He told her he didn’t want to see her anymore if she didn’t want to be a good sport.

  One Saturday morning, though, she knew he was doing an autograph session at a sports shop in Fulton. She went over there and waited and made up with him. That was the day the reporter showed up, Kelly said. Richie told her about it after.

  Hannah perked up on that one.

  “Do you happen to remember the reporter’s name?”

  “Sure. The same one Teresa talked to. Mr. Perez.”

  Hannah said, “He was waiting for Richie outside that sports shop?” She looked at Teresa Delgado. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t know he and Richie were so close.”

  “You don’t trust him?” Teresa said.

  “I sort of did,” Hannah said. “But now I’m not so sure.” She’d have to talk about this one with Jimmy, if he could ever find his way home. “He certainly does seem to get around, though.”

  Teresa said, “I’m not sure I follow,” and Hannah said, “I just thought he was on my side more than their side is all.”

  “I’m sorry,” Hannah said now to Kelly. “Please go ahead. I’ve gotten used to everything being about me all the time.”

  Richie and Kelly were together that Saturday in Fulton, once Richie had his meeting with Marty Perez. It was their last time, she said. Right after the Knicks broke training camp and went back to New York to get ready for the start of the season “Right after you,” she said to Hannah, she found out that Richie Collins had been calling one of her friends behind her back.

  Kelly: “She’s a sophomore. Richie kept telling her I was too old for him. After he’d kept telling me I was too young to do it with him and another girl. Nice, huh?”

  Kelly’s girlfriend, Emma, finally told Richie that if he called her again, she was going to tell her parents; Emma said she would have done it the first time he called, except that she was afraid it would get Kelly in trouble.

  When Kelly found out, she called Richie in New York. He said he didn’t have time to talk to her, but maybe they could get together when he came up to clean out his condominium in Fulton.

  They agreed to meet after school. Her last class was Computers, she got out at two-thirty. It left her enough time to go home and change out of her school clothes. Even after the way he had hurt her, she said, and the way he had tried to use her and tried to two-time her, Kelly Crittendon still wanted to look nice for him.

  She put on a summer dress she’d bought for him but never got a chance to wear.

  She parked where he always had her park, in this guest lot down the hill from his house, the area secluded by trees and some tennis courts. She remembered checking herself in the mirror one last time. She had even borrowed this neat headband from Emma, she said, not telling Emma why she needed it.

  Kelly: “He was smiling when he answered the door. Like, saying, I’m the old Richie. He looked at me the way he did the first time, at the hotel. And then he grabbed me the same way he did that day. I thought he was just kidding around at first, giving me a fooling-around hug, just to let me know he wasn’t really mad. Like, not even thinking that I was the one who was supposed to be pissed at him. Then he wouldn’t let go. So I start to go, ‘No, no, no, we have to talk.’ And Richie goes, ‘If it’s about that bitch Emma, you’ve got it all wrong, she was the one chasing after me.’ So I go, ’emma isn’t like that.’ Trying to get him off me for a second. But then Richie goes, ‘You’re all like that.’ Still running his hands all over me. I asked him what that was supposed to mean and he goes, ‘You all want it.’ Now he had his hands, like, under my dress, trying to see if I had panties on.”

  Kelly stopped, not looking at either one of them, just fixed on her hands, clenched there in her lap.

  Kelly: “He liked me not to, you know, wear any. So when he found out I was, he gave me this creepy look. Scaring me. He went, ‘Oh, we’re going to play Miss Hard to Get all of a sudden?’ I was crying by then, saying, ‘I want to talk, please, can’t we talk?’ And he just goes, ‘Later.’ And then … then … he was just on me, crazylike, crazier than he ever was when we’d done it, on the living room floor. There was some game show on the TV. I don’t even know why I know that. A game show.”

  Teresa Delgado said to Hannah, “Was a ball game for me. What about you?” Hannah said she didn’t remember the TV being on when they got there, just later, when they were both through with her and Richie was jerking off watching the porno movie.

  Hannah was proud of herself, using the guy language to tell Teresa Delgado about it. “The jerk-off jerking off,” she said. Maybe she could get off good ones when it was just women around.

  Richie Collins raped her there in the living room. Kelly said she never screamed. “I was still more afraid of somebody finding me with him than I was of him doing what he did to me.” When it was over, he left her there on the floor and went to take a shower, saying, “Let’s face it, kid, breaking up is hard to do.”

  He stood over her, naked, grinning, saying, “Think of it as one more oldie but goodie.”

  Kelly Crittendon, when she got there in her story, stood up, went to use Jimmy’s bathroom. When she came back, her eyes were red and she’d applied fresh lipstick. Hannah thought the lipstick made her look like a little girl playing grown-up. But she was grown-up enough to finish telling what she had come there to tell.

  Kelly: “As soon as he left the room, I ran. I remembered that Mom was in the city. I figured my dad wouldn’t be home. I took a shower and stuffed my dress in a garbage bag and took it down to the garage. I don’t know, I thought if the dress was gone, if I didn’t have it anymore, then maybe it didn’t happen. Or wasn’t as bad as I thought. Then I took another shower and went to my room and went to sleep. When I woke up, nobody was home yet. That was when I decided I wanted to hurt him back.”

  She decided she would wait until dark and bust up his car. Windows. Windshield. Anything, she said, that would break.

  She waited until ten o’clock. When they had agreed to meet, Richie said it had to be in the afternoon, he had to meet with somebody later on.

  Hannah asked, “Did he say who?” Kelly shook her head. “He just told me he was going to stay overnight and drive back into the city in the morning for practice.”

  When she went back to the house—“It’s in this development or whatever called Fulton Crest,” she said—she parked in the same place and started up the steps to where his garage was, about fifty yards from the front door. You had to go past the front door to get there.

  She never got to the garage. The front door opened suddenly. Kelly was sure it was him, sure if he saw her he would chase her and catch her and bring her back and rape her again.

  She hid in the bushes.

  Kelly said, “But it wasn’t Richie who came out.”

  Hannah said, “Another woman?”

  Kelly Crittendon gave her a funny look.

  “It was my father.”

  “Your father was there the night Richie was …?” Hannah stopped.

  Teresa Delgado nodded slowly and said, “Yes.”

  Kelly waited in the bushes until she heard her father’s car pull away. Then, confused, she forgot about Richie’s car and drove around for a couple of hours before going home. Her
parents were asleep when she got there. She didn’t hear about Richie’s death until later in the day, in the car on her way home from school. Her father had not mentioned anything about the night before. She had not asked him about it.

  Hannah said, “So you don’t know if your father is the one.”

  Kelly looked at her, then shook her head.

  “We don’t any of us know,” Teresa Delgado said.

  Somehow, the thought comforted Hannah. She wasn’t the only one who needed an alibi all of a sudden. She couldn’t wait to see Jimmy’s face.

  He thought he knew everything, but he was barely watching the same movie.

  30

  His father said it to him one day when they were waiting at the Commack station, so Tony DiMaggio could take the train to another bus, start another tour with Ralph Flanagan. His father always waited until a few minutes before he left so he didn’t have to really wear himself out with a father-son chat.

  “Rule number one of life,” Tony DiMaggio said. “You can’t make this shit up.”

  DiMaggio started to ask him, Make what up, but his father wasn’t through.

  “Just remember what I’m telling you,” his father said, acting as if he were passing on the secret of life. “Don’t go out in the world looking for logic, kid. For things to follow. You follow? This isn’t the movies or a good book. Life doesn’t follow.”

  DiMaggio thought about that when it was all over, how they had all gone along, gone along, then everything happened at the end. Like basketball. People saying everything happened in the last two minutes.

  He thought about that and how he never thought to ask anybody the right question.

  Not even knowing there was one.

  DiMaggio: star investigator.

  He just picked up the phone and took a shot, dialed the number that Joey gave him, just saying, “I’d like to speak to Dale please,” when the guy answered.

  “Out of the country.”

  “When do you expect her back?”

  “Out of the country indefinitely. You’re some kind of smart guy, right?”