by Mike Lupica
“Just suppose,” Hyland continued, “for the sake of conversation, that when a very good cop might ask her about an inconsistency that might crop up—when I am very definitely looking for the opposite—the woman might have a habit of saying something like, ‘Brian, I’m sorry, I just don’t remember.’ ”
DiMaggio said, “I’ve talked to bartenders, the owner, waitresses, customers, enough people who were there. Whenever the Knicks go out of town to play some exhibition game, I’m here. Everyone agrees that they’ve never seen Mulligan’s more crowded. Everyone agrees that there were always women around Richie Collins. And nobody I’ve talked to yet can remember seeing them leave together. Either her with Collins or her with both of them.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Brian Hyland said. “Why don’t you give up and go home?” He blew on the head of his beer, leaned over, and sipped some without taking it off the bar. It was five-thirty, and people were starting to come in for a drink after work. Jack hit a switch on the wall and DiMaggio heard Sinatra and Anita Baker singing “Witchcraft” from his Duets album. He looked around at the framed Sports Illustrated covers lining the walls, all of them with golfers on the front, the covers going all the way back to Ben Hogan and Sam Snead. DiMaggio had been at Mulligan’s enough lately, he was starting to have dreams about golfers and Hannah Carey, not basketball players.
“Tell you what,” Hyland said. He clapped DiMaggio on the back. “You find Ellis and deliver him to me, I’ll be your friend.”
“A reason to live,” DiMaggio said.
Hyland finished his beer and left. Mulligan’s got louder, busier. Jack turned up the sound system. DiMaggio liked Hyland. He had turned out to be a hard case, but he was a pro. DiMaggio knew that if they switched roles, he’d play it the same way Hyland was playing it. He’d tease DiMaggio once in a while, with the dress, with the gaps in Hannah Carey’s story, but wouldn’t give away anything. Because he wasn’t interested in impressing DiMaggio. Because he was a good cop, and he was doing the best he could with Hannah Carey.
Where the hell was Ellis Adair? What had made him snap? Adair wasn’t the smartest guy in the world, you didn’t have to be around him five minutes to figure that out. But what had made him do something this dumb?
If he didn’t leave when Hannah Carey first came forward, why leave now?
Find Ellis, DiMaggio thought. Maybe he’ll tell you.
He slid some money across the bar and walked outside. He wasn’t ready to go back to New York yet. He was up here again, do something with the time. He decided to drive over to Fulton. He had never been inside the house Adair and Collins rented, the one where Hannah Carey said they’d raped her. They’d been living there during training camp, so there was no way for DiMaggio to get a look at the crime scene, or alleged crime scene, even from the outside.
Maybe he’d be inspired.
Maybe he’d drive up, see a light in the window. Go knock on the door and have Ellis answer it. DiMaggio could give him a big smile and say, “Hi, honey, I’m home.”
He took Route 106 into Fulton, took a left before he got to Route 7, then a right into the main driveway of the development called Fulton Crest: chalet-type condominiums set up above the Norwalk River, the main road going over a little bridge and then winding up into the woods, branching off into smaller roads as you went along. The bigger structures, real houses with more privacy, were all the way in the back of the Fulton Crest property. Without having been there, just reading about the layout, DiMaggio knew Adair and Collins had taken the last house, all the way in the back. They had their own garage, he remembered that, too. When DiMaggio got there, he saw the garage next to the house and a sidewalk that took you from the front door, across a narrow driveway, then down some stairs to what looked to be a guest parking lot.
It was far enough from everything else that no one would have heard any screams.
He drove past the house and came back around, then parked in the guest lot. He walked up the stairs. He had only been back in New York for a few weeks, but already the noise was getting to him again; the old shout. Fulton in the night was Jupiter in the night, without the muted crash of the ocean out the window. He stood there in the street, in front of the place where it all had started. It was a red brick house, made to look older than it probably was. There was a small terrace outside one of the bedrooms on the second floor.
He thought: What really happened that night after Mulligan’s, when they were all inside and the door was closed?
DiMaggio walked around to the left side, saw that there was no backyard to speak of, just a small area out the back door and then the woods. From somewhere in the woods, he heard the rustling of some small animal. Or maybe it was just the wind. Now DiMaggio walked around to the other side. Still waiting for inspiration. He thought about looking in, but the shades were drawn over here, the same as they were on the other side.
Except that they hadn’t been pulled all the way, and so some light escaped from inside.
DiMaggio went over, crouched down, tried to look inside. There wasn’t enough room under the shade. He could make out the bottom of a bed, the bottom of the nightstand next to it, a thick rug of some ornate design. But there was a light on.
DiMaggio walked around to the front door. What did he have to lose? There was an old-fashioned knocker on the door. DiMaggio used it. Nothing. He rapped it harder against the elaborate design carved into the heavy front door of 75 Fulton Crest. He tried the handle now, just to see.
The door was unlocked.
DiMaggio walked in. There was a wide foyer in front of him, a living room area to his left. He found the light switch to his left, turned the lights on in the foyer.
“Hello,” he said, his own voice startling him.
“Hey,” he said. “Anybody here?”
He walked slowly down the hall, past the kitchen, also on his left, toward the first-floor bedroom where he figured the light must have been coming from.
“Honey,” DiMaggio said. “I’m home.”
He heard music coming from the end of the hall. A song ending, then the disc jockey giving call letters, saying, “Cool oldies.”
The music was coming from the bedroom. The door was slightly ajar. DiMaggio could feel his heart and did not know why. He was probably crazy to come here in the first place. Maybe it was all crazy from the start. From Salter’s first phone call.
DiMaggio pushed the door open and there was Richie Collins on the bed, naked and dead and on his back, the handle of the knife or icepick or whatever it was sticking straight out of his chest.
27
Hannah had put on the new cable channel, NY 1, when they came on with the news about Richie Collins.
“… the center of a shocking sex charge scandal” was the first thing she heard from the kitchen. She had gone in there for a Snapple iced tea. She grabbed the bottle out of the refrigerator. When she got back into the living room, there was a reporter on the screen, standing in front of a sign that said NORWALK HOSPITAL.
The reporter was finishing up, saying, “Again, New York Knicks guard Richie Collins, dead at the age of twenty-eight. This is …”
Then they were back at the studio in New York, the studio looking pretty chintzy, Hannah thought, and they were showing some footage of Collins making a high pass to Ellis Adair and Adair, looking like some dark bird flying out of nowhere, above all the rest of the players, catching the ball and dropping it through the basket with such a fast motion Hannah thought the whole thing had been some kind of optical illusion.
Then they were cutting away down to Madison Square Garden, and some other cable news guy was putting a microphone in the face of some blond guy, yelling, “Mr. Salter!”
Hannah shut the television off and drank the Snapple out of the bottle.
So how do I feel?
Was that the question?
No, that wasn’t the question at all, Hannah decided.
The question was about whether it was over now.
The question was: Is this enough?
And maybe, Hannah thought, trying to be so smart about herself, so analytical, one more question:
If it really was over, how did she feel about that?
Ellis had told the house guy to go ahead and shut the phones off, take the rest of the night off. That was about five in the afternoon, when Ellis liked to take his nap.
He thought he might watch some of the World Series later, it was still going because of some rainouts. Ellis always needed a nap when he wanted to go the distance on a baseball game. He could never understand those boys wanting to play baseball, frankly, even the top boys like Barry Bonds and the Griffey kid, out there until the end of October, if they were good enough to last that long, freezing their asses off, standing around most of the time, getting to be on offense four times a night, maybe five times if they were lucky.
Most of the time, the whole sport was one guy staring at another guy. The pitcher holding the ball, like he never wanted to throw it. The batter always stepping away from the plate, like he didn’t want to hit it, even if the fucking pitcher gave him a chance.
Ellis had said to Richie one time, “This isn’t a sport. It’s a stakeout with bats and balls.”
Ellis couldn’t remember what he was dreaming about when he woke up. He wasn’t good at remembering his dreams. Richie was. Richie would want to give you a play-by-play if he had a good one. But mostly they were about girls. They all sounded the same to Ellis after a while. Ellis woke up, he couldn’t remember shit. Somebody had asked him one time, wanting to do a book on Ellis, did he ever dream about basketball. And Ellis’d said, “I never dream.” Everybody had made a big to-do about that one quote, though for the life of him he couldn’t understand why.
Everything was dark when he woke up. The television was still on. He looked at the clock. Two-thirty in the morning. Sonofabitch, I already had my eight hours, Ellis thought, and reached around on the couch for the remote. There was just some rerun of the news. A blond guy and a serious-looking sister sitting next to him, wearing these big glasses.
Maybe they’d tell who won the ball game.
“Again,” the blond guy was saying in a deep voice, “in case you missed it earlier, Richie Collins, the Knicks guard involved in recent rape allegations along with his friend and teammate Ellis Adair—”
Goddamn, it never goes away, Ellis thought.
“—was found murdered earlier this evening at the rented home he shared in Fulton, Connecticut, during the preseason with Ellis Adair.”
Ellis shook his head.
“No,” he said.
The blond guy was saying something else to the woman. Ellis couldn’t hear.
“No,” Ellis said.
The remote in his hand, he felt himself start to rock on the couch, staring at the screen as they started to roll the credits.
“Noooo,” Ellis Adair moaned.
Ellis started to cry now, rocking hard, his finger on the button switching the channel, the other channels flying by, Ellis not even noticing.
“Nooooooooo!” he screamed in Dale’s apartment and got up and started putting the lights on. Ellis ran through the first floor, turning them all on, then ran up the spiral staircase and turned more lights on.
Then up the last staircase, to the bedroom, turning on the overheads and the floor lamps, even the ones in the bathroom. Ellis in his secret place. Dale’s place. Ellis in the place even Richie didn’t know about.
Ellis all alone.
28
DiMaggio did everything by the numbers, knowing that if he didn’t, Brian Hyland would want to do him the way somebody did Richie Collins. Dial 911, tell them what he found at Fulton Crest, tell them to call Hyland right away. Wait for everybody to show up. He knew enough not to tamper with the crime scene. He waited out front. Collins wasn’t going anywhere.
The first black Taurus, FULTON POLICE written in white on both sides, pulled up in eight minutes. DiMaggio timed them. Hyland was there seven minutes later. He walked right past DiMaggio, just pausing long enough to say, “You won’t get out of the way, will you?”
DiMaggio let him go. Hyland got to the front door, turned around. “And not one fucking interview,” he said, all business. “To anyone.” He went inside 75 Fulton Crest.
When Hyland and his Crime Scene guys were finished, they drove back to the station, DiMaggio gave them a statement, read it, signed it, drove home. He heard the first bulletin about ten o’clock, on WCBS, the all-news channel. He switched over to WFAN, the sports station, and it sounded like the end of the world. He listened to jazz the rest of the way back to the city. There were four messages from Ted Salter. DiMaggio stuffed the message slips inside his pocket, told the guy at the front desk no calls, and went upstairs and went to bed.
And dreamed, finally, about Richie Collins, not dead in his own bed in Fulton but on some court over in Jersey City, hanging dead from a rim without a net, the kind that could ruin things for a whole neighborhood.
“What was he doing in Fulton?” Salter said in the morning.
“No one knows.”
“Is Ellis a suspect?”
“Hyland—the cop up there—says if he runs into me one more time, I’m a goddamn suspect.”
“So where do we go from here?”
“I’m going back up to Fulton this morning, then I plan to be at practice this afternoon. The team’s still going to practice, right?”
Salter said, “As far as I know.”
“I want to talk to Boyzie Mays. Of all the players I’ve talked to, he seemed to know Ellis as well as anybody besides Richie.”
“I don’t want to tell you how to do your job,” Salter said.
DiMaggio said, “There’s a relief.”
“But your job right now is to find Ellis.”
“Don’t worry,” DiMaggio said. “I don’t do murder.”
He had no real plan in Fulton. But going up there felt like real action, at least until the Knicks players showed up at the Garden later. Maybe DiMaggio was turning into one of the media flies and just wanted to see what the homicide carnival was like when it came to a place like Fulton.
He got to the intersection of Route 7 and Old Ridgefield Road at ten o’clock; it was as close as he could get to town, that’s how much the traffic was backed up. He finally parked at the Fulton Sports Shop and walked up Old Ridgefield Road and left onto Main Street, where there were so many people, so much action, DiMaggio imagined this was what Fulton got like on Memorial Day or the Fourth of July, one of those parade holidays that made small towns like this go wild with patriotic fervor. Most of the news vans, from the city and from the Connecticut stations, had set up in the park near the police station, across from the Fulton Library. He counted eight television boys and girls doing their earnest stand-ups, looking right into the minicams, as some carpenters did some work on the bandstand at the end of the park closest to the police station.
Already the crowd of locals was forming, ringing the park, three deep on the sidewalk across the street from the Fulton Luncheonette. Behind DiMaggio, the car horns kept blaring. He slowly made his way to the front of the crowd and saw Marty Perez, with a television crew, doing a stand-up, oblivious to the pounding of the hammers. He held a microphone in one hand and an unlit cigar in the other. He wore a wrinkled gray suit and a blue shirt with the tie yanked down from the collar. The sunlight, DiMaggio noted, was unkind to Perez, less forgiving than the ballroom lights of the Plaza had been the day Hannah Carey held her press conference there.
There was a notebook sticking out of one of the side pockets of the gray sports jacket. DiMaggio had heard Marty Perez did some television now, but had never seen him. Perez seemed to be having some difficulty with whatever he was trying to say, DiMaggio couldn’t hear over the racket the workers were still making as they tried to finish the bandstand. Whenever Perez would stop, he seemed self-conscious about his thinning gray hair, patting it to keep it in place.
When he seemed satisfied,
he handed the mike to his cameraman. Now Perez pulled the notebook out and tried to work the crowd. But every few minutes, one of the other television reporters would come over and Perez would nod, and then there would be the scene of one reporter interviewing the other.
DiMaggio watched, amazed: Maybe he had missed some important changing of the guard all these years living in Florida. Maybe people like Perez really did run the whole fucking world now.
DiMaggio looked behind him, toward the street, and saw more television crews now, maybe twenty in all, and saw a van from one of the local radio stations had set up with a loudspeaker and was covering the whole scene in the park live.
He felt a tap on his shoulder and turned around and there was Marty Perez.
“DiMaggio,” he said.
“What a memory,” DiMaggio said.
Neither one of them made any move to shake hands.
Perez tossed the cigar away, pulled his notebook out. “Mind if I ask you a few questions?”
“No comment,” DiMaggio said evenly.
“I heard you’re the one who found Collins’s body.”
“No comment.”
Perez made a big show of stuffing the notebook back in his pocket. “How about we go off the record?”
DiMaggio smiled. “Because I trust you so much.”
Perez said, “Maybe we could help each other out here.”
“I doubt that.”
“You think there’s a connection between Adair’s disappearance and Richie Collins getting stuck?”
DiMaggio put his hands out, plaintively. “I’m stuck.”
Marty Perez shrugged. “I’ll tell you something, DiMaggio,” he said. “You haven’t changed at all. You’ve still got a lousy fucking attitude.”
“You want a quote, Marty, here’s a quote: I agree with you. Now you better get back to talking to people who think you’re somebody.”
Go talk to people who think you’re somebody.
Like he was somebody.
Like DiMaggio, the big-time investigator, came up here and broke the case wide open.