by Mike Lupica
The players still left in the gym were shooting free throws at the other end in some contest that was causing a lot of loud jive hilarity with both the black players and the white players, everybody motherfucking everybody else. Gary Lenz seemed to be in midfilibuster with the writers.
“How many people know what?” DiMaggio said.
Fine said, “You know what it means. How many people know that I used to date Hannah Carey?”
He had found it out at Joey Bernstein’s public relations office that morning.
Joey was one of DiMaggio’s New York heroes, a Damon Runyon character who had started out as a copyboy at the Daily News fifty years ago and had done everything, known everybody, ever since. He had covered the Dodgers for the old Journal-American, he had been the Dodgers’ last PR man before they left Brooklyn for the West Coast, he had been an advance man for Bobby Kennedy in the sixties. He had even gone to work for Steinbrenner for a while, as much as he had always hated the Yankees. His last year was when DiMaggio backed up Thurman Munson. It turned out Joey had also booked big bands in the fifties, and one of them was Ralph Flanagan’s. He remembered Tony DiMaggio and so he and Tony DiMaggio’s son became friends. They liked the same kind of music. It was Joey who had first taken DiMaggio to hear Ellis Larkins.
Now Joey had his own “store,” as he called it. One of his clients was Madison Square Garden. Salter had told him that Joey was at his disposal for as long as he was in New York, but DiMaggio explained that he and Joey went way back, he didn’t need any help on that one. Joey had been waiting for him at his office on Eighth Avenue when DiMaggio got there at seven in the morning. Joey was dressed in one of his black gangster suits with wide pinstripes and a red-striped shirt with a white collar and a wide red tie with a huge knot, the color of the tie the same as the silk square in his breast pocket.
Joey thought that if he started later than seven, some public relations flack in some other part of town would get the jump on him.
“I brought a bagel for you,” he said. “Garlic.”
DiMaggio made a face.
“It’s good for you, don’t look at me that way,” the little man said. “Garlic in your diet, a gallon of water a day, you’ll live forever.”
“Which is your plan.”
“Which is my plan.”
“To do everything you say you’ve done, you’re a hundred and fifty years old already.”
“And feeling every day of it,” he said. “So what can I do for you?”
“I want you to poke around in that computer thing you told me about.”
“It is called Genius. They go up against another outfit, known as Nexus Lexus. I happen to represent Genius.” He theatrically tightened the knot on his tie. “Which figures.”
“You said you can look up everything ever written about everybody,” DiMaggio said.
“Not quite. But they pitch themselves—actually, I pitch the bastards—as the most extensive library of clippings in the history of the world. You want me to look up on Hannah Carey? It must be her because if it is the two basketball players, my printer will be printing out all morning.”
DiMaggio said, “Can you cross-check?”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, if two names are in a program like this, can you put in both names, then find out if there’s a story someplace with both of them in it?”
Joey said, “I actually followed that.”
“Can you do it?”
“I’m pretty sure,” Joey said. “If I can, which two names are you looking for?”
DiMaggio said, “I want you to put her name with Adair, then her name with Collins. I’m talking about before she accused them of the rape. Then put her name with the rest of the players on the team. Mays. Riordan. I’ve got the roster with me.”
“Why, if I am not being too nosy, though nosy has always been a career for the great Bernstein?”
“I want to see if she has a prior history with the Knicks. Something that hasn’t come out yet, even if it will eventually.”
DiMaggio ate his bagel and read the papers and watched Joey Bernstein, who came out of old New York newspapers and all of the wonderful Runyon lies about Broadway, punching away at a state-of-the-art computer program, playing the keyboard like it was a piano. He thought Joey’s new hairpiece was more silvery than the last one he had.
After about half an hour, Joey Bernstein said, “Bingo, as they say in the lesser faiths.”
“What?”
“A. J. Fine and Hannah Carey. A New York Newsday takeout from a couple of years ago. She is buried at the bottom of the story and described as the sister of a Jimmy Carey, starring at the time in One Life to Live. A soap opera. They call her Fine’s steady. I think I may have placed this story to tell you the truth.”
“Can you print it out for me? Everybody else will find out eventually. But maybe I can get a little bit of a jump.”
“No task is too menial,” Joey Bernstein said. “What does this mean, A. J. Fine and Hannah Carey being an item?”
“I’ll let you know.”
“I have to know everything,” Joey Bernstein said. “Information is power.”
DiMaggio smiled. “No shit,” he said. “I never heard that one.”
It was after two when Fine came into the Fulton Luncheonette, which was already DiMaggio’s favorite place in the whole town, with its dark, pretty Greek girls behind the counter and ten tables and fresh homemade pies and some local station playing DiMaggio’s kind of music when he was in there for breakfast. Now in came Hannah Carey’s old squeeze, wearing a white long-sleeved shirt, no logo, frayed at the collar, faded tan corduroy slacks, a pair of scuffed tan bucks, white socks. Like he’d just walked across the green in Hanover after his twelve o’clock class, giving you that worn preppy aristocratic look, his Lands’ End bag slung over his shoulder. He either wore contact lenses on the court or just went without because he had on these thick black-framed glasses like Woody Allen wore. DiMaggio couldn’t decide whether Fine just wanted to dress like the world’s tallest grad student or whether this was just another jock pose and he was as full of shit as the rest of them.
Maybe Fine was just better read.
Fine tossed his bag on the next table and turned his chair around so he could stretch his legs out. One of the Greek girls came over and refilled DiMaggio’s coffee cup. Fine ordered a tea with lemon.
“So what do you want to know,” he said.
“I want to know who she is.”
“That it?”
“With as little bullshit as possible, I want you to tell me about her. You and her. After that maybe you can enlighten me on Ellis Adair and a cockroach named Richie Collins.”
“You’ve spent some quality time with Richie then?”
“I’ve met all three. Accuser and accused. It’s been a real thrill.”
“What do you think about all this?” The waitress came over and brought Fine’s tea. He didn’t even look up, just started squeezing the lemon in there. So she smiled at DiMaggio. A real smile. She knew him from breakfast. Real smiles, real people. Maybe that was why the ballplayer looked so out of place, that and the size of him, scaling down everything in the small room.
“I don’t know what I think yet,” DiMaggio said. “I can’t read her. I think Richie Collins would have sex with a bowl of oatmeal if he could get it to stay warm long enough. Ellis Adair fascinates me, to tell you the truth. I’ve been around ballplayers, one way or another, my whole life. So I’m smart enough to know it’s a mistake to confuse the way they play with who the hell they are. How they conduct themselves in what you call your real life. I’ve seen guys who played you an unbelievably beautiful game of baseball blow it all on crack or on little boys. I worked on a case once, a sensitive wide receiver who’d had books of poetry published; he ended up raping an off-duty cop and then beating her half to death. There isn’t any connection.” DiMaggio sipped some of his coffee. “But I’ll tell you the truth, I have a hard time seeing the guy d
oing what she says he did.”
Fine said, “Me, too.”
“What about Richie?”
Fine had this habit of widening his eyes before he spoke, as if he were just waking up from a nap.
“He’s dangerous, in my opinion. Nothing you could tell me about him would surprise me.”
“Dangerous?”
Fine said, “A bully, just without the size to back himself up, if that makes sense to you. One of those guys who’d threaten to kick your ass, then hire somebody to actually do it. It doesn’t matter if you’re on his team or not. Turning your back on him is a mistake because he will get even with you eventually. No matter how long it takes. And with whatever’s handy, an elbow, a knee, a trip. Just for the sport of it, as far as I’ve been able to gather. And for good measure,” Fine said, “throw in an almost pathological need for sex.”
“Oh yeah.”
“You say you’ve been around sports your whole life,” Fine said. “So have I. I don’t know how much of a player you were, frankly, whether you were good or just some kind of shit player—”
“—I was a shit player—”
“—but I’ve always been a star. Not here the way I was in high school, or at Dartmouth, or even in the Olympics. But there has been a constant level of success. Okay? Celebrity. I am familiar after all this time with the standard-issue adulation that comes with being a sports star in this country. Which is to say: Girls and women have always been there with me, from cheerleaders to college professors to, well, Hannah. They have been there, in varying degrees, for me and my teammates. And in all that time, I have never seen anyone to whom sex is more important, in an almost primal way, than Richie Collins.”
“Could you see Hannah attracted to someone like that?”
“Maybe.”
DiMaggio said, “Richie Collins is her type?”
Fine sipped some of his tea. “I didn’t say that. You asked me if I could see Hannah being attracted. You say Ellis is fascinating? Shit, so is Richie because of his ability to draw all kinds of women to him. I tell you what, I’ve always been amazed at the range of his conquests. He feels this need to always bring them back to the hotel bar before they head upstairs. I’ve been introduced to topless dancers in Chicago and a psychiatrist in Denver. I swear to God, there was an ex-nun in Portland. Somehow he just sucks them in.” Fine tried to look embarrassed. “Do I sound like something less than a feminist here?”
“I don’t give a shit one way or another.”
Fine said, “No, I don’t suppose you do.”
DiMaggio said, “Why don’t you tell me about you and Hannah.”
Fine had met her at a Knicks game. One of the trainers at her exercise club trained some vice president of the Garden. “The suit directly below Ted Salter.” The trainer would get tickets sometimes and one night he couldn’t go so he gave the tickets to Hannah, who went with a girlfriend, Lisa something.
“Lisa Dee, she called herself. I just met her the one time, after this game. I never knew if it was her last name or an initial. But I had seen her around before with a couple of the other guys, I just figured she was on the circuit.”
“Circuit?”
“Girls for all seasons. Baseball, football, basketball. Some of them have been out there as long as I’ve been in New York.”
“We used to call them Baseball Annies.”
“They’re more versatile now. Maybe it’s a Deion Sanders thing. They’re two- and three-sport girls. They come up to training camp, they even go down to Florida for spring training.”
“Any of them hookers?”
“They may be. Nobody ever asked me for money. A lot of them are bored rich girls, with enough money to support their habit.”
“Same habit as always.”
“Thrill-fucking athletes.”
Lisa knew the drill. During warm-ups, women looking to set something up for later on would present themselves under the basket. The security guys and cops would let them stay until just before the horn sounded, announcing the game was about to start. These were the ones on the circuit, the ones looking to get on.
DiMaggio: “Then what?”
“It’s pretty interesting. It’s all done with eye contact, smiles, nods. It’s like this game goes on before the game. If you see somebody you want, all of a sudden there’d be a problem with your sneakers or the tape job on your ankle. You might discover, shit, I need to do a little more stretching. The trainer comes out. You tell him where she is, what she’s wearing. He goes under the basket, retrieves balls while we’re shooting, makes sure he makes contact with her.”
“It sounds like high school.”
“It is. Anyway, he’ll tell her ‘Play-by-Play, forty-five minutes after the game.’ It’s a bar here they put in when they redid the Garden, built the Paramount theater and all the rest of it. You take a shower, talk to the press, go in there. There she is. There Hannah was. Wearing the blue dress I’d seen her wearing under the basket. Some of them wear hot clothes to make you notice them. Lisa did. Hannah didn’t. It was just this elegant-looking blue dress.”
“So that’s how you met her.”
“That’s how I met Hannah and Lisa Dee.”
“They were both there.”
“They sure were.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it became obvious after a while, as we all got a little high on wine, that they were an entry.”
“You’re saying—”
“—we all left together.”
“—you and Hannah and this other woman.”
“It’s usually not my style. But yes. Just the one time. First time. We never did it again.”
“She ever explain it?”
“She said she thought she was supposed to be wild if she wanted to meet athletes.”
“Even the Ivy Leaguers?”
“Even them.”
She knew a little bit about basketball, a lot more about him. “Like I was some kind of exam she’d been studying for.” She said she wanted to meet him because he was different. And so they began their affair.
“The only way to describe Hannah is as a passionate joiner. Everything I liked, she liked.”
So they went to art galleries. When the Knicks would get a day off from practice, they would go up to his weekend place in Rhinebeck. She talked a lot about her brother the actor, never about her mother, just that she had been a tennis player and lived in some ritzy part of Connecticut. In nice ways, he would ask her why she wasn’t doing more with her life than exercise clubs and waitressing. She said that until she’d met him, it was like she’d hit some Pause button on her life. She was in therapy, she told him that. She said she was just waiting to see what the “next thing” was going to be.
Fine: “After a while, it became obvious that in her mind, the next thing was getting married to me.”
“That wasn’t in your program.”
“It was always a bigger deal to her than to me. I never stopped dating other women.”
“That bother her?”
“I didn’t think it was any of her business, frankly.”
It became her business, as it turned out, when she decided to surprise him one time at a hotel in Landover, Maryland, when the Knicks were playing the Bullets in one of the last games of the regular seasons. She told the desk clerk she was Mrs. Fine, got a key, went up to his room the afternoon before the game, and found him in bed with one of the flight attendants from the team plane.
He thought it was over right there. She didn’t. She called, she sent telegrams. She asked him for another chance. She would show up outside practice when the Knicks were getting ready for the play-offs. After a couple of months, Fine assumed she had given up. The season ended with the Knicks losing in the finals of their conference. Fine went to Europe. Hannah Carey was out of his life, out of his mind.
“She wasn’t the type for the circuit, so I didn’t expect her to keep showing up for games or anything.”
“You never saw her agai
n.”
“One time. It must have been the week before she said Ellis and Richie raped her. Up here. I went into this place Gates, over in New Canaan, to have a beer and watch Monday Night Football. I came down these steps from the street, and there’s a door that leads into the bar area. And there she was, sitting at the bar talking to Richie.”
“The stories keep saying that she didn’t meet Collins and Adair until the night they raped her.”
“Hannah always had a rich fantasy life, Mr. DiMaggio. You ought to keep that in mind.”
17
Eleven o’clock, Saturday morning. Third Saturday in October. Marty Perez sat in the parking lot in front of the Fulton Sports Shop, at the intersection of Route 7 and Old Ridgefield Road and waited for the guy to come out. Marty hoped he’d be alone when he did.
Marty was in the front seat of his old blue BMW, the tape playing softly. Rubén Blades was almost talking his way through the ballad. Now he found himself going right along with Blades in Spanish, on every word. Marty surprised himself sometimes. Usually it was when he was alone, like this, when he was relaxed, waiting for something to happen. Then there’d be no urge to de-spic himself, to turn himself back into Marty Peters.
Go back to being Marty the WASP.
Sometimes it was food that did it, the taste of something in a restaurant suddenly making it all vivid, and he would be at his grandmother’s table, eating arroz con gandules, rice and that kind of pea they could pick off the trees themselves and shuck. Arroz con gandules or asopao, the stew she would cook up sometimes on Sunday nights, with a side dish of sorullos, his favorite of all, cornmeal fritters deep-fried into little sausages.
Sometimes it was music that did it. Like now. This old album from Blades, one of the three he made with the great Willie Colon. Blades was Panamanian, but old Willie was Puerto Rican all the way. Marty knew what part of the island, but had forgotten. Fuck it. He let them both take him home now. Closed his eyes and thought of the spring nights when he would be back sometimes on school vacations, going over, playing some blackjack in the tiny casino at Palmas, like he was gambling in somebody’s living room. Then walking out to the beach after that, late, with a bottle of Don Q, and waiting for the little barmaid in there—Elena—to get off. Then she would come through the trees not wanting to have a drink or wait, undressing both of them, whispering, “Ahora mismo.”