by Mike Lupica
DiMaggio said, “It’s not logical to assume that every time a woman steps forward, she’s the one telling the truth. That the guy did it every time. It can’t be that way one hundred percent of the time, any more than somebody charged with murder is guilty one hundred percent of the time.”
“I didn’t say that. You asked me about some of the famous ones. The ones you brought up, I think the guy did it. I think these guys did it.”
“When that woman stepped forward with the Mets players a few years ago, there was no indictment, no grand jury. No case.”
Gail Moore, somewhere in her thirties he guessed, a lovely, light-skinned black woman, said, “You didn’t ask me if I thought there should have been an indictment. Or about the merits of the investigation. Or the case. You’re asking me if I thought what happened to the women you’re talking about fit a classical definition of rape and I’m telling you it did.” She said, “You look into this yourself, Mr. DiMaggio. You draw your own conclusions. You, most men really, have no idea what is going on out there. None. I’m not mad. I’m not lecturing you. I’m just telling you. I’ve been at this for five years, and I frankly don’t know how much longer I want to do this job. But here’s what I know: When a woman takes it this far, my experience is that she’s telling the truth.”
“I’ve got to ask this: You never think, not for a minute, it could be some kind of setup?”
She looked at her watch then. Got up. Done with him.
“I watched Hannah Carey on television. At that press conference. I tried not to look at her as a lawyer, or prosecutor, any of that. Just woman to woman.”
“And?”
“And,” she said, “I frankly don’t think she is smart enough to have made all this up.”
He rewound the tape of the press conference again, looked at it one more time, wondering what Gail Moore saw in there that he didn’t. Then he watched some of the movie meeting and finally he shut off the television and closed the drapes in the middle of the afternoon and put Ellis Larkins on. He wanted it to feel like night, because Ellis was always a night guy. Now he was again, Ella singing Gershwin the way you were supposed to and Ellis staying right with her because, of all of them, Ellis was the one.
DiMaggio loved Oscar Peterson; George Shearing still was one of the great players. But Ellis Larkins—what was he now? seventy-five?—was his hero. An aristocrat of a performer. The first time DiMaggio had seen him, as a kid, he was playing at the Carnegie Tavern, Fifty-sixth and Seventh. That was his room, the way the Carlyle was Bobby Short’s room, and the Algonquin used to belong to Michael Feinstein. And DiMaggio knew right away, before he knew anything, that this was the way his kind of music was supposed to sound, this was the way you commanded a piano, a piece of music, a room. The music came, but you never saw the hands move. There was a book review DiMaggio had read once, he couldn’t remember the book, but the guy reviewing it had said there were two kinds of geniuses, the ordinary and the magicians. An ordinary genius, he was a guy you and I would be as good as, if we were just a lot better. Then there were the magicians. DiMaggio remembered the next line exactly: “Even after we understand what they’ve done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark.” That was Ellis Larkins, the bright music coming out of that dark, magical place.
DiMaggio thought: If I could have hit a baseball the way Ellis Larkins played, they would have had to build me my own wing in Cooperstown. Ellis Larkins played piano, he thought, the way Ellis Adair played basketball …
The phone rang.
“It’s Lisa. Remember me?”
He remembered, actually. He had been leaving cards with his name and number at the Sherry-Netherland at Hannah Carey’s gym, her bars, the place where she got her hair cut; he could go into one place on the West Side and they would tell him another place she liked to go. In the last week, he had talked to trainers, waiters, managers, a couple of old boyfriends, women she’d waitressed with, her former modeling agent, finding out random things, none of them big. Sometimes they didn’t want to talk at work, so he would hand them a few cards and tell them to get back to him. Sometimes they would. The shit work of any investigation.
Some of his folders were around him on the bed. He opened one he had labeled FRIENDS.
“Lisa Wells,” he said. “Twenty-two years old.”
“But—”
“—you can do older.”
She had asked him out on a date when he’d met her a couple of nights before at a restaurant on the West Side run by Lee Mazzilli, the former ballplayer. DiMaggio said he was a little old for her, and she said, no way, not only could she do older, she had dated a guy in his fifties once. With excitement in her voice.
Making it sound like a field trip.
“I told you I’d give you a call if I came up with anything,” she said.
“And you have.”
“You bet! I’ve been following the case a lot closer since I talked to you.”
He didn’t say anything. He was seeing the girl better now. She didn’t need much help to get revved up.
“Boy, was I surprised to find out that Hannah got into a three with her old boyfriend.”
“A. J. Fine.”
“I mean, I’d seen her in here a couple of times with her friend—”
“—Fine?—”
“No, the girlfriend, plenty of times. And they never looked like the type that would ever, you know, get sweaty together. I mean, what’s up with that?”
DiMaggio said, “You know this friend of hers? A. J. Fine said he couldn’t even remember her name.”
Lisa said, “She works in Dakota.”
“She moved, you mean?”
She laughed. “No, silly. The new place, Dakota, up on Third.”
The only Dakota DiMaggio knew about in New York was the apartment building where John Lennon got shot.
“I don’t know it.”
“It just opened. That’s how I happened to run into Lisa. Lisa the other girl whose name A. J. Fine couldn’t remember. We were applying there the same day. I said, ‘Hey, I know you.’ ”
She was starting to make DiMaggio feel dizzy. Trying to stay with her, he said, “Her name is Lisa, too?”
“I mean, is that wild?”
DiMaggio said, “You read my mind. Do you know her last name?”
“Lisa Melrose. Like the show.”
“The show?”
“Melrose Place. On Fox. Very hot. What’s up with that, you don’t even know that show?”
He tried again. “So she’s working at Dakota?”
“Got the last waitressing job. Bummed me out big-time.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll check her out.”
Lisa said DiMaggio should call her sometime. “When I’m a little less jammed up,” he told her, then he hung up and called Dakota. It was between Eighty-eighth and Eighty-ninth, on Third. Lisa Melrose worked the eleven-to-five shift. It was two o’clock. DiMaggio asked the guy on the phone, probably the bartender, when lunch quieted down. The guy said after three, all there was left to do was set up for dinner.
“Lisa Melrose,” he said in the Sherry. Smiled. “What’s up with that?”
Jesus, he was getting old.
DiMaggio couldn’t decide whether Dakota looked more like a Los Angeles place or a New York place. It was getting harder and harder to tell the difference. He went to Los Angeles and there was a new place called Tribeca, in New York there was a new place called Mulholland Drive. And here was Dakota on Third, which seemed to be all of them. There was one long room with a high ceiling, which probably made Dakota sound louder than a ballpark when it was crowded. There were a half-dozen tables near the front window and then the majority of tables in the back. In between was a bar that seemed long enough to serve as the runway for Miss America.
There was an old guy, looking very natty in a tweed blazer a little warm for the weather and a red ascot, sitting at the end of the bar, sipping a martini and watching a soccer game on the television set above him. The
bartender, a big, good-looking kid, who said his name was Ryan. He told DiMaggio that Lisa Melrose was the tall black-haired one serving tea to two women in the back, the only customers back there that DiMaggio could see.
Ryan said, “They’re paying up, then she’s off. It just depends now how they break the tip down into pennies and nickels.”
DiMaggio nodded knowingly. “You know who could fix the deficit? Women who eat out.”
“Lisa know you’re coming?”
“Not exactly.”
“What did you say you did again?”
“I’m doing some work for the Knicks right now.”
“Is she gonna want to talk to you? I had to run a guy out of here yesterday. Had his camera crew waiting outside.”
DiMaggio said, “I plan to show her my nurturing side.”
“Hey,” Ryan said, grinning, “not in front of the tea ladies.”
Lisa Melrose came over. She was almost as tall as Hannah Carey; they were probably a sight when they were together. The tray with the bill had some cash on it and a lot of change.
“Jeez,” she said. “When they got close there at the end with the frigging tip, they both started to sweat, I swear to God.”
Ryan took the tray. “Somebody here to see you.” He nodded at DiMaggio. “From the Knicks.”
DiMaggio stood up and Lisa Melrose said, “Lisa told me you’d probably show up.”
“Blew my cover.”
“Knowing her, that’s probably not all—”
Ryan said, “Now, now.”
DiMaggio said, “You got a few minutes?”
“Why not?” Smiling. “Just let me wash up.”
DiMaggio took a cup of coffee with him to a table in the corner near where the tea ladies had been. When Lisa Melrose came back, she had washed her face and put a brush through her spiky hair. DiMaggio smelled some kind of perfume. Her makeup was gone. Now she looked older than the other Lisa, but not too much. The spiky hair made her look severe. She had thick black eyebrows, and even with the high cheekbones there was some tomboy part of her that she’d kept. It didn’t bother DiMaggio. She was pretty and didn’t seem to put too much work into it.
“Lisa, the other one, said you were some kind of investigator. But unofficial?”
“I’m about as unofficial as you can get.”
“So stuff I tell you, it doesn’t end up with the police or in the newspapers?”
DiMaggio smiled at her. “Can I speak frankly?”
“Sure.”
“I wouldn’t piss on reporters if they were on fire.”
Lisa Melrose gave him a husky kind of laugh and said, “She said you were kind of cute.”
“She’s young, she doesn’t know any better.”
“You mind if I have a drink?” Lisa Melrose wanted to know. “Sometimes one or two tables wears you out like a full house.” She went to the bar herself and brought back what looked like a rum drink with a lime in it. She drank some and said, “You’re here about me and Hannah and A.J., right?”
“Hannah mostly. I talked to A.J.”
She was taking another sip of her drink and stopped with the glass near her mouth. Looking at him with big eyes, almost as black as her hair. “Did he say anything about me?”
“He didn’t go into much detail about the whole thing. To tell you the truth, for a jock, he actually seemed a little—”
“—embarrassed?” she said. Nodding. “That’s A.J.’s game. He wants people to think that between basketball and reading all his big books, he barely has time to get laid.”
DiMaggio said, “He’s a sensitive guy, and he doesn’t care who knows it.”
“Well, he’s not exactly too sensitive when he gets his clothes off,” she said. Now she drank.
“Like I said, I’m really here to talk about Hannah.”
Lisa Melrose, loosening up now, said, “Fine. What do you want to know about that bitch?”
DiMaggio told her Fine had referred to her as “Lisa Dee.”
“For Diane, my middle name. I don’t give these guys my real name until I get a sense of how things are going to shake out.”
Lisa Diane Melrose’s story: She had met Hannah at the Vertical Club. Hannah was waiting for the machine Lisa was using. She didn’t really know how to set the weights so Lisa showed her, they ended up working out together that day. Then they had a sauna afterward. They got to chatting about all the bullshit New York girl things: jobs, the city, meeting men, safe sex, clubs.
Lisa: “She said that meeting men in New York had never been her strong suit. I kind of burst out laughing. We were still in the sauna. Hannah said, like, what’s so funny? I told her that if meeting men in New York was an Olympic event, I already had a bunch of medals.”
Lisa Melrose proceeded to tell her about all the athletes she had dated. A couple of Mets. Two hockey players, one from the Islanders, one from the Rangers. A couple of Giants, one of the Celtics when the Celtics were in town. Hannah’s eyes, according to Lisa, got bigger and bigger. Why athletes? she wanted to know.
Lisa: “I told her, God, why not athletes, girl? They’re young, they’re cute, most times, anyway, they’ve got great bods, they love to party. And most of them have got a lot of money. I’m not looking to settle down yet, neither are they. So what are we talking about? Great sex, fun places. Laughs. Then they go off to Cleveland or San Antonio or someplace. If it’s a baseball player, and you get to know him well enough, you can go to Florida or Arizona for spring training. Have a nice vacation and help a guy out.”
DiMaggio: “Help him out?”
Lisa: “Give him an alternative to screwing gum-chewing townies with big hair.”
Hannah said she’d love to meet athletes. Lisa told her they’d go to a Knicks game the next week, she had tickets. Told Hannah to wear something understated.
Lisa: “I told her I’d be the hot one. It’s a variation of good cop, bad cop.”
DiMaggio: “A lot has changed.”
Lisa: “What does that mean?”
DiMaggio: “I used to play some ball.”
Lisa: “I knew there was something about you I liked.”
Lisa told Hannah it would be easy, and it was. The first rule of fucking athletes, she told her, was this: Don’t play hard to get. If you were good-looking enough, had a nice-enough bod yourself—and Hannah did—it was just a question of having the right moves.
Lisa: “Remember what I said about the Olympics? They should have named some of these moves after me.”
Before they knew it, they were all back at A. J. Fine’s apartment. Lisa said she had always flirted with the idea of a three—DiMaggio thought she made it sound like a three-point goal in basketball—and had come close a couple of times, but had never actually, you know, done it.
This time, she never had a chance to say no.
DiMaggio: “He forced you?”
Lisa shook her head. “She did.”
Quiet Hannah, who spent the whole night acting like a school-teacher in her prim dress, she took over. Lisa couldn’t believe it. DiMaggio told her that A. J. Fine, he said it was his first time with two women. Lisa said that was obvious to everyone concerned, he didn’t know where to start, what to do, when to watch. But Hannah made it easy on everybody. Afterward, when Lisa thought about the whole night, she realized that it was Hannah who had selected A. J. Fine, Hannah who had done most of the talking at Play-by-Play, the bar at the Garden.
It was Hannah, the trainee, who got everything rolling.
Hannah who had the most fun.
Lisa: “I finally left about six in the morning. Hannah woke up for a minute and smiled and said she was staying. I had the feeling she meant for the rest of the season or something. She said she’d call me later.”
Lisa: “I’m still waiting for that phone call. Let me tell you something about Hannah Carey, okay? She used me as well as any guy ever did.”
21
Marty Perez was sitting in the shithouse of a dressing room they’d given h
im at Channel Two, next to the weekend meteorologist—another spic who couldn’t decide how white he actually wanted to be—when it moved on the wire, Fulton, Connecticut, dateline, about the DNA test.
It was Randy Houghton who walked in and handed him the printout. Houghton was dressed in some baggy suit that was almost pink. Jesus, it looked like a goma. A rubber. What’d he do, go into the store and say, “I’d like something condom-colored in a double-breasted?” Maybe that was what all the other cutting-edge boys were wearing this week. Condom-colored suits and white T-shirts. Houghton handed him the printout like he was handing him a bad report card.
“I thought you’d want to see this right away.” He nodded at the printout.
Hyland, the Fulton cop, had simply released a statement saying that the semen samples from the dress Hannah Carey had given to them had turned out to be inconclusive. “Contaminated” was the word Hyland used. She apparently thought she was being careful by keeping the dress zipped up in a garment bag, but the opposite had happened, and the dress turned out to be worthless. Marty knew enough about the test to get by. He knew that the DNA molecule was in most cells, including blood and semen. They tested DNA strips or strands or whatever out of blood and semen and could provide a fairly conclusive match. Some states allowed the test as evidence in cases like this. Connecticut was one of them. There was a tiny possibility of error, but Marty couldn’t remember what the percentage was.
Now it didn’t matter anyway.
“No Ellis, no Richie, huh?” Marty said to Houghton. He had been putting the finishing touches on his commentary for that night’s Chronicle. Some nights he did it live, and this was one of them. He was calling for the resignation of the new district attorney in Queens. Another cutting-edge boy, youngest in the history of the borough. There’d been another bias case. Four mopes from Bayside beating some Japanese honor student home from Stanford within an inch of his fucking life. Even Marty got mad. Sometimes it still happened for him. ¡Ay coño! And he couldn’t tell whether that was good or bad for him anymore, getting a hard-on over something like this, still trying to play crusading reporter.