Jump

by Mike Lupica

  It was right on his way home. Why not? DiMaggio thought. Just go ring the doorbell and wake the bastard up.

  31

  Marty looked at the fax, not believing it.

  It was the registration of the red Nissan, the one his friend at the Seventeenth Precinct had gotten him from the Department of Motor Vehicles in Norwalk, the closest one to Fulton. The cop owed Marty a favor. He was married, but he had this Hunter College girl on the side. The guy had called him about six months ago, desperate, thinking he was losing his chula girl, telling Marty he needed Streisand tickets at the Garden.

  Marty had covered it for him; it was how you did business, or stayed in business, especially in New York, everybody being on the take, one way or another.

  “No tengo chavos,” Marty said now in his apartment.

  Who needed money when people all over town still owed him favors? Who needed money when you still had the juice? Now he had the girl’s registration on the coffee table and the clippings on her family.

  Still not believing it. He had waited until four o’clock that day at Fulton High, waiting for her to come collect the car. When he couldn’t wait anymore, because of all the goddamn typing waiting for him in the city, he’d copied down the license plate and left. Maybe she was at cheerleading practice. Or getting into the kind of field-hockey outfit that would have made Richie Collins faint. Then the cop ran the plate for him, and Marty finally remembered that he had the girl on tape.

  He walked over to the television set and hit Play. He’d almost forgotten he had the cassette, because he forgot even important shit now. But it was in a stack on his desk. He must have taken it out of the camcorder when he got back from Fulton that Saturday afternoon. The angle was a little off, and the focus, which always happened when he had to shoot through a window, especially a car window. There they were anyway, Richie Collins and the girl, at the Fulton Sports Shop.

  The young girl, the joven, making that pouty face.

  Richie doing come-to-daddy.

  Then the girl driving off, happy, knowing Richie would have something for her later.

  Kelly Crittendon.

  Frank Crittendon’s daughter.

  ¿Qué haces?

  Now what?

  He had that nervous feeling, good nervous, like he did in the old days when he knew he had something first. Solid didn’t matter the way it used to, just being first. In the old days, Marty knew, he would have called Cantor, would have called around until he found him, used the beeper number if he had to. And when the phone rang, Cantor calling back right away, he was so fucking neurotic, Marty would have played it cute with him, even though both of them knew that even Marty Perez, the king of the bullshitters, never beeped the editor of the paper unless it was important. Unless he had something. Then they would have arranged to meet at the office no matter what time it was—what was it now? a few minutes past midnight?—and decided whether it was worth it to take a run at the last edition. Or hold the last edition. And decided it was worth it, you bet your ass it was worth it, Cantor calmly orchestrating everything like the day was just starting, redoing the front page. Cantor would have gotten the Knicks guy out of bed, or out of the bar, had him track down Crittendon and the girl, and he would have gotten the production guys in to see how the video would reproduce for the front page.

  The two of them would have turned Cantor’s office into the war room, everything happening in there, Marty banging away at Cantor’s computer, his back to the room, Cantor interrupting him only occasionally, only if it was important, the rest of the time just saying, “Type, Type” every time Marty would ask him how it was going.

  Or saying, “How close?”

  Marty started to get hot, just thinking about it.

  So how come he hadn’t called Cantor yet?

  Marty Perez knew the answer.

  It was a television piece. It was one of his lucky-shot television pieces, the kind of shot the spic kids called a chivo on the playgrounds. “¡Quiero chivo!” they would yell when you would pull some shot out of your ass and make it. Ellis Adair and Richie Collins, they probably called it a prayer. Now Marty had the chivo prayer shot right in front of him, on tape, not just some high school girl coming on to Richie Collins, but the general manager’s daughter. Jesus, he could see the promos already, the little teases all day on Channel 2, with Kelly Crittendon, sixteen years old, brushing up against Collins, nearly humping him against the side of the Jeep.

  Marty thought: I’ve got my own little Amy Fisher for Chronicle.

  Not solid, but definitely first.

  The kid with Collins didn’t prove anything, Marty knew that. It didn’t solve anything. But solving shit, maybe that was for the old days, too. The tabloids fighting for the smallest piece of dirt, rooting around like little mongrel dogs, sato dogs, through garbage cans, had changed everything. Loosened everything up. Be first, and be loudest. Everybody just assumed that the headline, the come-on, was supposed to be bigger than the story. Let the little clerks over at the Times worry about doing it the way they were taught in journalism school. The guys who lasted, the big-balls guys, knew how to sell the story.

  Knew how to make it be about them.

  Geraldo, when he was running around for Channel 7, even breaking stories, he couldn’t carry Marty’s notebook. But it didn’t matter, because of television. Now he had one of those Oprah shows, syndication money out the ass.

  Marty sat there and couldn’t get Amy Fisher out of his mind.

  He kept adding it all up, adding the high school girl into everything that started with the rape and now included a murder. So what if his little tape didn’t prove anything except Richie Collins was probably doing the boss’s daughter? Marty was the one putting the Lolita angle into it.

  People would eat it up.

  He picked up the phone, but not to call Michael Cantor. Marty punched out the number he had for Frank Crittendon in Fulton, got his machine, saying he’d be in the city until the Knicks opener on Saturday night.

  That meant the Regency.

  It was twelve-fifteen Saturday morning.

  Marty went over to the liquor cabinet, got out the Don Q, fixed himself a good dark one, just a splash of tonic, no fruit, a little ice. He looked at the plaques and certificates over the bar, thinking that was a good place for them. Over a bar. Associated Press awards. The National Headliners Association. The certificate he got when he won the Meyer Berger Award. Even from the Associated Press sports editors, for the story on that girl jockey overdosing that time.

  The old days.

  He drank some rum and called Randy Houghton. You could call the little bastard at any time of the day or night, he was always up watching something, afraid he might miss something, even in the middle of the night.

  One of the television boys and girls who ran the fucking world now.

  “Houghton.”

  “Perez.”

  “Hey, babe, you’re not going to believe this, but I was just thinking about you.”

  Houghton always said that.

  “Listen,” Marty said, not wanting to play, and just laid it all out for him, laying it out down and dirty so that even Randy Houghton, who liked to finish everybody’s sentences, couldn’t find a place to interrupt.

  “Okay, I’m hard,” Houghton said. “Now what do we do?”

  “I want a crew to meet me at the Regency.”

  “In the morning?”

  Marty said, “Now.”

  “You’re going to ambush Crittendon?” Houghton’s voice was high-pitched, almost squeaky, the way it got when he was excited.

  “I want to surprise him is all. Just go over and call him from the lobby, tell him I’m on my way up.”

  “What if he says he won’t talk?”

  Marty drank the last of the rum and thought about having another, just to settle himself down.

  “I tell him I understand his position, but if he doesn’t, I’ve got to run a tape I’ve got of his daughter hanging all over Richie
Collins.”

  “What if he still won’t talk?”

  “We run the tape tomorrow night.”

  Houghton told him he’d call Channel 2, it’d probably take half an hour to get a crew over to the Regency. If they weren’t there by one, to call him back. If not, assume everything was a go. Marty hung up and went back over to the bar. He reached for the rum. He’d figure out what to tell Cantor later.

  He was the king of the bullshitters, he’d think of something. Are you kidding?

  32

  DiMaggio said, “Are you alone?” to Fine, not really caring if he was or not.

  “I’m alone,” A. J. Fine said. He had on a faded green Dartmouth T-shirt and Knick sweatpants, black, and he had a book in his hands, marking his place with a finger, the fat paperback of the Truman biography that came out a few years ago. DiMaggio remembered that it won a bunch of big awards, which meant somebody must have read the sonofabitch.

  Now he wondered if the book was a prop for the Ivy Leaguer, even at this hour, not knowing who was going to be at the door.

  “I might be a little grumpy,” Fine said, “even when a good friend like DiMaggio shows up unannounced in the middle of the night. But I am very much alone.” He gave DiMaggio that quizzical eyebrow. “Not that it would have mattered, right?”

  “There you go.” DiMaggio waited for Fine to get out of his way, let him in, though he didn’t mind the surroundings. Even the hallways were elegant at the Westchester Country Club. DiMaggio didn’t even know people could live here, he just vaguely had heard the name, knew they played some big golf tournament here every year. But it turned out the main building was like some fancy old apartment hotel and Fine had the penthouse suite. The guy at the desk, when DiMaggio gave him his name, said, “You know, Ralph Branca, his wife, used to live here. You remember Branca, right?”

  DiMaggio said, “Hey, who doesn’t remember Ralph?” Then he told him it was all right to ring A.J., they were old friends, it was going to be one hell of a surprise.

  “A.J.’s going to love this,” DiMaggio said to the guy at the desk.

  Now Fine was leaning against the door frame, ducking his head a little, casual, still not making any kind of move to let DiMaggio in. “This must be important,” he said.

  “You bet.”

  “How’d you get up here, by the way?”

  “I lied,” DiMaggio said. “But you know about lying, right?”

  Fine said, “Maybe this could wait.”

  DiMaggio said, “And maybe I could call Ted Salter right now. Or the papers. Or Marty Perez. Tell everybody how I’ve at least cracked some of the Hannah Carey case.”

  “What part would that be exactly?”

  Jesus, they were all starting to wear him out. DiMaggio pushed past A. J. Fine, startling him, knocking Harry Truman out of his hands.

  Give ’em hell.

  Over his shoulder, he said to Fine, “The part about the person who drove off in a car with Hannah Carey before Richie and Ellis even got their hands on her.”

  Fine wanted to cute it out all the way. “Who might that be?”

  DiMaggio could hear classical music coming from somewhere. “You,” he said. “Now are we going to keep fucking around with this or are you going to tell me about it?”

  “Any break in Richie’s murder, by the way?” Fine said.

  Without asking, he had stopped in the kitchen, come out with two cups of hot coffee. Now they were in the living room, on matching sofas with Navajo designs on the upholstery, facing each other against some coffee table that looked like it had been made out of old fence posts. The rest of the room was all Santa Fe, or whatever they were calling it, as well. DiMaggio didn’t even question it anymore, he just walked into these rooms when the people had money and expected the southwestern shit to be all over the place.

  “It’s one in the goddamn morning,” DiMaggio said, “so let’s get right to it. Why’d you lie to me?”

  Fine had both hands on his mug, blowing on the coffee, his hands making it look as if he was drinking out of a thimble.

  “Why did I lie?” he said. “Because I don’t belong in this. Because I never belonged in it in the first place.” His voice was rising, sounding girlish almost, the Ivy Leaguer not so cool now. Trapped a little bit and knowing that and acting petulant. “I lied because fucking Hannah Carey in the first place was an incredibly stupid mistake. Sonofabitch. At least the clap goes away. She never does.”

  DiMaggio sat there, watching him try to calm himself down, DiMaggio’s aching hands on his own mug, feeling the heat, not wanting to drink.

  Just hold on to the mug.

  Fine looked at him, his glasses crooked on his face, hair spiky and a little wild-looking.

  Fine said, “I figured I was safe with Hannah. Once it didn’t come out in the original newspaper stories, it was just a question of whether she’d told the cops. But when that Fulton detective—”

  “—Hyland—”

  “—right, Hyland, questioned me, he never brought it up. Which means that Hannah didn’t talk.”

  DiMaggio said, “Protecting you?”

  Fine said, “Protecting herself. If it comes out that she was up there chasing after one player, it makes her a little less of a victim with the others. I figured I was in the clear anyway.”

  DiMaggio said, “I got a witness.”

  “I’m aware of that,” Fine said. “But a witness to what? The crime of omission? I didn’t lie to the police. They asked me if I saw Hannah at Mulligan’s. I told them yes, I saw her at the bar. They asked me if I talked to her at the bar. I said no. Technically, it was true. I talked to her outside, when she followed me out. They asked me when I stopped seeing her. I told them. The only person I lied to was you.”

  DiMaggio said, “Where’d you go after you left Mulligan’s?”

  “Does it really matter?” Fine said, sounding irritated again.

  “Humor me.”

  Fine looked away, said, “There’s a little duck pond just down the road. Down by Route 123. We went there.”

  “And did what?”

  “Talked.”

  “What else?”

  “We just talked, goddamnit!” Fine snapped.

  “I don’t think so,” DiMaggio said. “You had sex with her, didn’t you?”

  Fine looked at him.

  DiMaggio kept going. “She goes for a ride with an old boyfriend and just talked, so what? She can tell the cops that. But she can’t tell them she went off and got laid in an old boyfriend’s car the night she says she got herself raped. She either tells Hyland all of it or none of it. Because if she tells him about going for a ride, he asks you. And you might tell him that a couple of hours before she alleges that she got raped, she’s all sweaty with you down by the goddamn duck pond.”

  DiMaggio made a little motion with his coffee cup. Cheers. “Isn’t that what happened?”

  “Yes!” It came out in a hiss.

  They sat there glaring at each other across the fence-post coffee table.

  “So why? Here’s this woman you’re doing everything to get away from, who won’t admit it’s over, who keeps chasing. Now you run into her, and the two of you go off for a quick hump? Why?”

  Fine stood up. There was a basketball lying in the corner. He reached down and scooped it up and now was twirling it absently in his hands, not even looking at it. Pacifiers for big boys.

  Cops liked to touch their guns.

  “Does this leave the room?”

  “It goes where it goes,” DiMaggio said. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re still a sideman in all this, even if you couldn’t keep your own dick in your pants. But you get no promises from me. You’ve got no rights anymore. You lied to me, fuck you.”

  “People don’t usually talk to me that way.”

  DiMaggio said, “Probably not even in junior high school, when they first put your name in the paper. It’s part of the problem here.”

  Fine put his hands on the ball like he was
going to shoot it, like he was going to toss it out the window and into the night, clean as a whistle, to great cheers that only he would be able to hear because everything he’d ever done with a basketball in his hands had always been cheered.

  “Why did I do it?” he said. “You want the truth? Because she was there, DiMaggio. Because she was a lot drunk and I was a little drunk and we were both feeling a little loose and horny, and because we’d always humped like champions.”

  Not even trying to be the Rhodes scholar anymore, what was the point?

  Fine said, “It was training camp and it was New Canaan, Connecticut, and I was in the mood, and I didn’t feel like going through a lot of conversation with some coed, or some lawyer, or some bored Fairfield County housewife babe, out on a toot and willing to go down on me in the back parking lot, if that’s what it would take to be able to say she did it with A. J. Fine. You want to know why, DiMaggio? That’s why. Because Hannah Carey was there. And available. And willing. Because there’s always a Hannah around, and it just happened to be her turn again. Jesus Christ, do I have to draw you a picture? You were an athlete once. You were in the big leagues. It’s always there. It doesn’t matter who they are, where they come from. I don’t even try to analyze it anymore. I even tried to fight it as a kid. But why? It doesn’t matter how aloof they seem at first, how unavailable they seem. Two years ago, I went home with a minister’s wife just to see what that would be like and she offered to pay me to tie her up. Why Hannah that night? Because I didn’t feel like working for it, that’s why.”

  Fine stopped then, took a deep breath, like he was catching his breath. Like coming clean had taken everything out of him all of a sudden. DiMaggio could still hear the music; he was sure it was that tape of Pavarotti and Domingo and Carrers. Now they were singing a medley from West Side Story. Fine took more deep breaths as he walked around the room, the ball still in his hands. He had wanted to be different from the animals. Better. Superior. Now his cover was blown. Here he was in front of DiMaggio, looking like the rest of them.