by Mike Lupica
“The chief of police is retiring at the end of this year,” Crittendon said. “The one you want to talk to over there is a detective named Brian Hyland. Good kid. His old man used to be assistant athletic director here at the college. I don’t think he’ll give you a hard time, especially if he knows you’re working for us.”
“You’ve obviously talked to him already.”
“He called when she filed her complaint.”
“Did he say if there’s any physical evidence?”
“Evidence?”
“Panties,” DiMaggio said. “A dress maybe. Something with semen on it, or blood, or hair, or skin.”
Crittendon chewed on his pipe. “He just told me about the complaint and that he’d be coming around when he decided how he wanted to proceed with this. Then he told me that he appreciated I’d been friends with his old man, but not to expect any favors.”
It was all right. You could only work your side of it. Sometimes the cops helped, sometimes they didn’t. Big cities or college towns, it depended on the cop. Most of the time they looked at him like some hotshot on a retainer, cutting in on their action, Out to make them look bad somehow. It was one thing TV and the movies always got right, DiMaggio had found that out firsthand. They got just about everything else wrong about cops and investigators, but not that. Cops didn’t want you around because they didn’t know where they stood with you. They were more comfortable with bad guys. They knew where they stood with them, at least.
“Maybe you could give this Hyland a call in the morning before I call him,” DiMaggio said. “I have a feeling he’s not going to want to talk to strangers.”
They were outside now, leaning against the rented car, summer really over, the air cool.
“Do you think you’ll get to talk to the woman?” Crittendon said.
“I met her this afternoon.” What day was it? Thursday? DiMaggio looked at his watch. Thursday, October seventh. He’d gotten the call from Salter the night before. He hadn’t even been on this thing twenty-four hours and already it felt like he’d been here a goddamn week.
Crittendon turned to look at him, surprised. “Where?”
DiMaggio told him about the Vertical Club, and when he finished, Crittendon said, “What’s she like?”
“You mean, does she look like someone who got herself raped, Frank? Yeah, it was written all over her.”
“It’s not what I meant,” Crittendon said.
“I know it’s not. I’m sorry—it’s been a long day. Donnie Fuchs and his boys, your boys, finally wore my ass out.”
“It was a stupid question,” Crittendon said, as if he wanted to out-apologize DiMaggio. “What difference does it make what she’s like?”
DiMaggio said, “It always matters who they are, where they come from. Patty Bowman, the woman in the Kennedy Smith trial in Palm Beach, she had one kind of back story. Unwed mother and so on. So you looked at her one way. Desiree Washington, with Tyson? She was a kid, and her being a kid, National Honor Society, head of her class, you better believe that mattered to the jury. Anita Hill and the jogger in Central Park and the woman with the Mets. Then there was a woman who said she was gang-raped by twenty pro football players. Where’d she come from? How did she get to that night, that place? I don’t care what Marty Perez thinks. Or what some loose-cannon brother thinks. We all want the same thing here, we meaning me and you and your boss. We just want to know.”
Crittendon said, “Do you think she’s got some kind of angle here?”
“She could, Frank. She could. Most people do, I’ve found.”
The GM sighed. DiMaggio couldn’t tell if it was a sigh of agreement, exhaustion, or disgust. “If I need to reach you?”
“The Sherry-Netherland when I’m in the city.”
DiMaggio got into the rented car, left Crittendon in the parking lot. He wondered about an angle, suddenly wanting to explain that there wouldn’t be just one. But why make him feel worse than he already did? DiMaggio would have had to tell him that everyone would have an angle here before they were through, whether they knew it or not, would admit it or not. It could be money, or getting famous, or even getting justice. Getting a story. Getting some play. DiMaggio could see it taking shape already, before he was a day into it. Perez here. Jimmy Carey, the brother, over there. Ted Salter worrying about the boys from Fukiko. Adair and Collins. Donnie Fuchs.
Making his way across the campus, hearing music in the cold night air, different music from every dorm, even some classical, DiMaggio thought: Somebody got jumped here. Smiling to himself, because he was using Donnie Fuchs’s word. Somebody always got jumped, if you really thought about it. The trick was finding out who.
And, if you were really lucky, why.
11
Ellis stuck his head inside the living room door, careful the way he always was when Richie was in action. Never knowing what to expect, what kind of show might be going on, how many people. But there wasn’t much: Richie and the girl were asleep on the floor in front of the television set on the big soft quilt Richie’d pulled off the bed. The porno tape was still playing.
Ellis looked at them, thinking every girl on campus must have their phone number. No, not just that. Ellis shook his head, all the way in the doorway now, looking down at them. Richie had to have some of that mental telepathy shit going for him. Some way he connected to them that Ellis had never been able to understand. Like Richie sounded some kind of dog whistle only the strange could hear. That morning, Ellis had barely noticed this one. All she’d done was walk in front of their car, give them a little smile. The next thing he knew, she was ringing the doorbell during Love Connection.
Richie had given him that I-can’t-help-it look like he always did, then said, “You remember Jenna?”
Richie had told Ellis he could stay. He was always making fun of Ellis, not in a mean way, because Richie always knew when to stop, just playing with him, because Ellis liked to sleep with something on, a light, the television, the radio. Then it was Richie who acted sometimes like he was afraid to fuck by himself. Ever since they were kids, he was always trying to get Ellis involved in a threesome, or more, thinking Ellis would like it as much as he did, as if anyone could like it the way Richie Collins did.
Ellis would go along sometimes, mostly because it was easier to go along, hating himself every time. Like that time in high school. Shit, it still made him ashamed just thinking about it, Richie doing that poor Spanish girl, or Puerto Rican, whatever she was. Richie doing it right there on the couch and Ellis not wanting to stay, but being afraid to leave because he didn’t want to make Richie mad, didn’t want to lose Richie, even then. So Ellis’d stayed, trying to pretend like he was watching the ball game. Like he couldn’t see. Couldn’t hear …
He’d always needed Richie.
Donnie’d said for both of them to lay low for a while, there were probably reporters staking out every bar in Fairfield County, trying to put them with some strange. Donnie got all worked up, the way he did, and said finally the one thing nobody needed right now was a picture in the Post of Ellis and Richie trying to make some kind of coed sandwich.
But Richie, goddamn, he thought if you stayed at home, it didn’t count. Ellis’d seen guys addicted to shit his whole life, all the way back to the projects, but he’d never seen anybody have a need the way Richie had a need for pussy. Ellis said to him one time, “It’s like something chronic. Like you’ve got some kind of condition.”
Then Ellis said to him, “What’s that medicine diabetics take?”
“Insulin,” Richie told him.
“Jumping somebody, that’s like your insulin then.”
Richie smiled at him and said, “Fresh, some people are just born lucky.”
He wondered sometimes how Richie had enough strength to play ball the way he went through life all-fucked-out.
Ellis needed some air, he decided just like that. He thought about just staying up here, taking out the blue bike—goddamn he loved that bike—maybe
riding it all the way over to the college and back.
No, he needed to get away from Fulton for a while. Ellis knew where he wanted to go. Who he wanted to see. Just thinking it made him feel better. He went in and found the keys to the Jeep, not wanting to take his own car. Richie’d throw a fucking fit if he wanted to go out later. But Ellis came back, saw him there snoring, still with a hard-on, hand right there on Jenna, ready to go to work when he woke up.
He didn’t have to worry about Richie. Ellis could see the two other dirty tapes he’d rented, sitting right there on the VCR.
Ellis needed to get out. Coach Gary’d said they could have tomorrow off, he did that sometimes, even during camp, and then the press would write him up as some master psychologist or whatnot. Say how well he understood the long season. Ellis knew Gary had this girl he flew in sometimes when his wife was out of town with the kids. It was some anchorwoman from the Midwest. They probably just had the one day before the sparrow wife came back.
So Ellis had the whole night. He could feel all the pressure coming right off him all of a sudden, feeling light. He closed the door softly, went downstairs. He got in the Jeep, rolled down the windows, smiling to himself, knowing he’d be cruising down past Central Park by midnight, easy.
The best part was, nobody’d know, not even Richie. Like he was invisible.
All the years they’d all been watching him, when they said he was as good at being watched as he was everything else, they didn’t know Ellis Adair’s secrets. Even Richie, who thought he knew everything, he didn’t know.
They didn’t know Ellis really wanted to be invisible, for one damn thing.
Be a ghost.
He found a jazz station on the radio, put it up real loud, not minding the cold air hitting him from all sides, feeling fresh now, feeling very fresh, pretending the wind was some crowd cheering for him.
But cheering for the secret Ellis. Ellis the invisible man.
All of a sudden, Ellis was yelling over the wind, yelling like a crazy man, driving too fast, feeling like he was above the wind.
Like he really could fly.
12
Hannah said to Beth, “I’m thinking about putting myself out there.”
Beth gave her that little surprised look, the one that said: Oh? How amusing. Hannah always wanted to tell her how much that look got under her skin, reminded her of her mother, her mother the airhead, acting as if she knew things Hannah didn’t, when her mother really didn’t have a clue.
But Hannah never said anything.
Beth said, “Out there?”
“My name. My face. I’m not comfortable hiding.”
“Maybe we should talk about this.”
Hannah tried to make a joke out of it. “Would you like to go first?” she said to Beth. “We could switch chairs.”
Beth started scribbling on her long yellow legal pad, making her wait.
That was just part of the game.
It was her Monday morning appointment with Beth, who was her official therapist. The amateurs, the newspaper reporters, they were nearly a full week into analyzing her now. By her count, hers and Jimmy’s, they had branched out from him and gotten quotes from eight of her friends, one former boss, two old boyfriends, four neighbors. The newspapers and the Current Affair and Inside Edition shows and the local television stations were hardly getting anything from the Knicks; no one in the organization was talking, so the media was finding new ways, or at least trying to find new ways, to work Hannah’s side.
The media had started showing up at Jimmy’s apartment after he attacked Richie Collins. But then Marty Perez had helped out both Hannah and Jimmy, saying they were staying indefinitely with friends in the Hamptons. It didn’t stop the camera crews from staking out her apartment on West End, for some reason. On Friday, Inside Edition had set up across the street, just showed people walking in and out.
Then they showed the clip of her running away from the Vertical Club. Hannah noticed that television made her butt look fat.
Hannah started to wonder what she was running away from, exactly.
Beth was still scribbling.
Hannah said, “So what do you think?”
Beth looked up. “About switching chairs?”
“About letting people know my name. What I look like. They’re going to find out sooner or later. Somebody faxed Jimmy’s agent a clip from one of the London tabloids; they’re already using my name in the papers over there and some picture of me that looks like they got it from my high school yearbook. Why not have it be, you know, on my terms?” She looked past the cool therapist, lemon-colored overalls over a white T-shirt and Keds so white Hannah wondered how she could keep a straight face when she talked to obsessive people about being obsessive. Hannah looked past her to the tiny garden behind the office, set in there between Tenth Street and Eleventh, near the corner of Sixth Avenue, just a few blocks away from one of Hannah’s favorite things in New York, the arch leading into Washington Square Park. Hannah wanted to look at her watch, but felt the way she always did, that Beth would see it as another little victory, one for her side.
“Well,” Beth said finally, “you’ve obviously done some thinking about this since I saw you last.” Hannah watched her, trying to wait her out for a change. She was almost pretty, in this miniature way, with short brown hair and small features, everything about her small, really, even her voice. Hannah didn’t know how old she was, if she was married, if she was gay. She’d try to picture her sometimes having sex, with either a man or a woman, and couldn’t. Couldn’t see her out of control, her legs up in the air, good and sweaty, into some good screwing.
Really getting into it.
Sometimes Hannah just wanted to shock the shit out of her.
“I’m not supposed to think about this?” Hannah said, surprised at how sharp the words came out. “There should be something else on my plate I should be worrying about? Doing something different with my hair? Getting rid of those hard-to-lose ten pounds? Give me a break.” Hannah looked away now, back out there in the garden, one of those New York country scenes that would just show up somehow, behind a brownstone in the Village, making you think it was a fairytale cottage in the woods.
“Where’s this coming from all of a sudden?” Beth said.
Hannah shifted slightly in her chair, looked back at her.
“I thought this was supposed to be about my destiny? Getting hold of the reins of my life again. Isn’t that what you said? I think they were your exact words, as a matter of fact.”
Beth bought time, took another note in what Hannah had seen was perfect penmanship. When she finished she looked up and said, “Getting hold of the reins, yes.”
“That’s not the way this thing is going.”
“How did you expect it to go, Hannah?” Crowding her a little by using her name. “We talked about how the lights were going to be turned up, something appropriate to the level of the ballplayers’ celebrity. It’s been obvious in the past, from the other big cases, the thirst the public has for this sort of … episode.”
“Episode,” Hannah said dryly. “Like from a television series?”
Beth gave her a fake smile.
“We’re going to argue about terminology? Frankly, Hannah, I’d like to have more time with you on this. I don’t know how you could have come in here initially and kept something like this …”
Hannah, the keeper of secrets. She had worked her way into it with Beth the way she had with the police. Maybe she thought of Beth as another form of the police.
Detective Brian Hyland was friendlier, of course.
“I’m sorry I took so long,” Hannah said.
Beth started to say something, but Hannah put a hand up.
“It isn’t the publicity that’s surprised me,” she said. “It’s the … force of it. I expected a storm, but not like this. I guess what I’m saying is, I didn’t know I was going to end up with a hurricane.”
Beth said, “Now your terminology is
rather interesting.”
“How so?”
“In all these last couple of weeks, before you pressed charges, you talked repeatedly about being lost in a storm. It’s always been your most vivid metaphor.”
Hannah said, “I was after more control and got less. I just feel like I don’t want to be seen in the way I’m being seen. Or not seen. If that makes any sense.” She poured some Evian out of the liter bottle Beth always kept on the desk, with two glasses.
“Do you want to be seen?” Beth said.
Hannah got up from her chair and went and sat on the windowsill to her right, leaning against the window frame, able to see a little of the garden, the country scene, from there. Wanting the next part to come out just right.
“I just don’t want to be some artist’s version of me,” she said. “Marty Perez? The newspaper columnist?” Beth’s face was a blank. She probably only read the Times. “Anyway,” Hannah said, “he’s been very kind so far. Very supportive. Most people have, other than the sportswriters. Those bastards. My mother has been right about very little in her life, but she was right about sportswriters and how low they are on the planet’s food chain. They’re writing about me, what happened to me, and half the time I don’t even know what they’re talking about.” She crossed a leg, sneaker to knee. Compared to Beth’s Keds, Hannah’s Reeboks looked like they should be on some homeless woman. “But even when people are being nice, it’s as if they’re working around me, never actually getting to me. Does that make any kind of sense?”
She hated herself because it sounded like she was pleading to be understood. Looking for Beth to give her a pat on the head.
“It makes a lot of sense,” Beth said. “Go on.”
Hannah said, “I’m not looking to make some kind of speech or statement, say something that might jeopardize my case if we ever get to a trial. I don’t need to go on Oprah. I just want the chance to stand up and say, ‘Hey, everybody, this is who I am. This is what I look like.’ I’m not afraid of them anymore. If somebody asks me what I want to say to Adair and Collins, I’ll just say something like, ‘I was afraid of them for a long time but I’m not afraid of them anymore. So don’t anyone be afraid for me.’ ”