by Mike Lupica
He thought the guy was just copping an attitude.
“How about if I just leave a message?”
The guy said, “Suit yourself.”
DiMaggio left his name, the phone number at the Sherry, his room number. Before the house guy hung up, DiMaggio had a flash. “Hey, since Dale isn’t there, can I speak to Ellis, please?”
As a joke.
The house guy hung up on him.
DiMaggio thought you could look at it two ways. The guy just had an attitude and got tired of talking to him. DiMaggio could have that effect on people. And besides, the guy had no intention of giving Dale Larson the message anyway.
Or he got nervous.
Look on the bright side.
Maybe in the morning he would take a walk over to the address on Fifth, somewhere up in the seventies, Joey had given him.
For fun.
He spread out all his notes, all his research, on the floor, the way he used to do with Dowd. After doing this kind of work all this time, DiMaggio was always surprised at how random an investigation could feel, like he was all over the lot. Even with that, he always kept his research and notes organized: notebooks, newspaper clippings, files, his yellow legal pads, videocassettes, phone records. And on top of every item was a synopsis, with the most interesting stuff highlighted. It was looking through one of his Boyzie Mays notebooks that he had remembered about the wild-assed parties.
DiMaggio even carried a blackboard with him, making diagrams sometimes, like he was making some kind of presentation to the goddamn board of directors.
He usually got efficient like this when he felt the whole thing getting away from him. Which is the way he had felt since they found Richie Collins.
He sat in the middle of all this shit and wondered if there was an answer for him somewhere. Or better questions.
He read and reread Marty Perez’s column about Teresa Delgado, trying to match up details of her story with what he knew about Hannah Carey’s. And reread the notes from his dinner with Hannah.
And went over what he had from Salter and Crittendon and Boyzie Mays and A. J. Fine.
And all the Lisas.
He would stop sometimes to soak his hands, bowls on each side of him, one for each hand, listening to David Benoit play. DiMaggio tried to keep his mind on the case, stay on the rape, not worry so much about Richie Collins all the time. But he saw Benoit and wondered if he ever woke up with any pain. What he would do the first time it happened to him, the way it happened every morning to DiMaggio.
Every morning of his goddamn life, starting with Advil.
He dried his hands, emptied the bowl, poured himself a glass of Scotch. He allowed himself one sometimes, when he was working at night. He told himself it was strictly medicinal, just to take the edge off.
DiMaggio went back to the Hyland notes from the other night, right before he found Richie Collins.
There it was again.
“ ‘Runaround Sue,’ ” DiMaggio said in the suite, like he was making a request to himself. He went over to the piano, knowing the best thing was to give his fingers a rest, but playing around, trying to come up with some kind of rocking start that would have pleased Dion and the boys.
“ ‘Here’s the moral of the story from a guy who knows,’ ” he sang, smiling, knowing how awful he sounded. But trying to picture Hannah Carey, drunk, singing it at Mulligan’s in New Canaan, the way Hyland said she had, before she got herself raped that night.
Would she remember if he asked her? She said she didn’t have blackouts, but she also said she didn’t remember singing, another part of the evening she’d conveniently forgotten. She was either lying about the blackouts or lying about the blanks in her memory. If she was lying there, DiMaggio thought, where else?
“ ‘Sue goooooes out with other guys—’ ”
He knew they could probably hear him in the hall. Fuck it, it was his suite.
Didn’t they understand how a star investigator worked?
It was nine o’clock when he finished cleaning up the room. He called down to the concierge and told him to have the rental car brought up from the garage around the corner.
It was Friday night at Mulligan’s: the restaurant to the right, and bright, as you came in the front door; the saloon part, much darker and louder, to the left, with its golf decor; high tables filled with people and the bar jammed; beyond the bar, another small eating area, and right before that, the small bandstand area, empty, at least for now. It had been a Saturday night for Hannah and Richie and Ellis a year ago.
How many nights had he now spent in this place? And in other places like it?
How many nights looking for somebody who would remember that night better than Hannah did?
He sat at the end of the bar near the kitchen, the only seat he could find, and ordered a beer from a good-looking kid, hair slicked back, wearing a white shirt and flowery tie. No Bermuda shorts. DiMaggio figured he would wait for the place to thin a little, quiet down, and ask for the thousandth time if anybody had been around that night.
Hyland said it had been like pulling teeth, even for him, and he seemed to know everybody in the whole area. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to cooperate, he said, it was that none of these places wanted the publicity. Everybody had gotten a thrill at the start, but now they didn’t want the cops around anymore, the press, the TV cameras, asking questions about a rape that happened a year ago.
“Why they think a rape investigation is bad for business is beyond me,” Hyland had said.
DiMaggio had told him, “People can be so funny.”
Now he sat and drank his beer, feeling out of place as usual, as if they knew he was an outsider, sitting there at the end of the bar in his blue suit. Or maybe the suit wasn’t the problem. Maybe it was just a prop and the real problem was that DiMaggio was permanently out of place.
Somebody had taken the rock and roll off the sound system and snuck Garland in there, in a duet with Streisand, Garland singing “Get Happy” while Streisand belted out “Happy Days Are Here Again.” DiMaggio was old enough to remember them doing it on Garland’s old Sunday-night television show on CBS, the one show he watched with his mother.
She loved Judy Garland.
DiMaggio’s mother would say, “She’s had a very hard life, you know.”
He didn’t know whether it was the song taking him back there or just the memory of the Sunday nights in the living room in Commack, watching with his mother before she would pass out on the couch and he could take the lit cigarette out of her hand and shut the set off and cover her and go to bed himself.
She used to sing in bars.
One of the cops from the neighborhood told him. Not somebody who hit on her, but somebody DiMaggio liked, a guy named Tommy Duggan, who’d coached him one season in Little League.
DiMaggio was waiting for the train one day. He’d ride it into the city when he was a teenager, she wouldn’t even notice he was gone, going into Manhattan like Boyzie Mays coming up from Maryland, hitting some of the jazz clubs, already looking older than he really was, acting older. He was sitting there at the Commack station waiting, always good at waiting, trying to make his voice sound like Louis Armstrong singing “All of Me” on one of his father’s albums, not knowing anyone was there.
DiMaggio was always so good at being alone, it was like he practiced.
And from behind him, he heard a voice, Duggan’s as it turned out, say, “You sure didn’t get it from your mother, kid.”
He saw himself as a kid, startled, turning around and then relaxing when he saw it was Duggan.
“Didn’t get what?”
“Your voice.”
“What’s that got to do with Mom?”
Duggan was surprised.
“You never heard your mother sing? Around the house or anything?”
“Mom doesn’t sing around the house.”
Which was true. She drank around the house and looked sad around the house. She smoked all the time,
from the time she woke up until he took the cigarette out of her hand. He heard her crying.
She never sang for him.
Duggan said, “Hey, kid, I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just talkin’. But nothin’ for nothin’, she gets up sometimes over to the Elms, sings ‘Over the Rainbow’ and makes half the joint start cryin’.”
Duggan gave him another look. “She really never sang for you?”
The kid shook his head, and then the train came and in Mulligan’s now, a million years later, he tried to remember if it was before or after he found her that morning, after the rape. If she ever sang after that …
He wondered if his mother sang that night. Hannah Carey sang “Runaround Sue.” What song would his mother have chosen …
At the bar, a woman’s voice said, “That’s some conversation you’re having there, fella.”
DiMaggio turned. She had auburn hair, cut short. Maybe it was lighter than auburn, it was hard to tell at Mulligan’s. She also had a lot of freckles and a great smile.
DiMaggio smiled back and felt like he was off the case all of a sudden.
“I didn’t know I was having a conversation,” he said.
“Oh yeah, you were.” She put a hand out. “I’m Ellen.”
He hesitated out of habit, because of his hands. It was long enough to stop her smile. DiMaggio shook her hand.
Not too bad.
“DiMaggio.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Sometimes,” he said, “I wish.”
“You have a first name maybe?”
He told her.
“Ellen Harper,” she said. The smile was back. “You better watch it, before long I’ll be spilling my guts and telling you what I do for a living.”
“So what do you do for a living?”
“I’m a teacher. High school.”
“Around here?”
“Fulton High. What about you?”
“You got a few minutes?”
Ellen Harper said, “Until the tour bus leaves.”
He noticed a couple of empty tables behind her in the back of Mulligan’s. “Would you like to go sit down?”
She stood up. She was wearing a white T-shirt with some kind of short-sleeved denim vest over it and tight jeans. He watched her hands as she reached for her beer and the change in front of her on the bar. No rings.
“Single,” she said casually.
“Single teacher Ellen Harper,” DiMaggio said. “Pretty.”
“Pretty worn out,” she said. “I have just spent an entire evening of my life grading blue books. It was a spot quiz. I asked them to give me a report on the last book or magazine they read that had nothing to do with schoolwork. You want to know how many Spin magazine reviews I got?”
DiMaggio said, “How old am I if I don’t know what Spin is?”
“Old enough to officially buy me a drink. A beer would be nice. Nice quiet beer. The Knicks have once again departed from Fairfield County. Rapists and nonrapists alike. Now I’m going to sit down with you, but you have to promise to talk.”
“I’ll talk,” he said. “I’ll talk.”
They sat in the corner, DiMaggio in a big leather chair that looked like it belonged in somebody’s living room. He took off his jacket, ordered another beer, and told Ellen Harper what he did for a living, what he was working on, what he was doing in Mulligan’s.
“Nothing like this has ever happened around here,” she said.
“It’s only supposed to happen on Court TV.”
She said, “I mean, we expect the usual training-camp craziness and the high school girls getting hysterical over some of the players. I mean, you try to warn them every year, and it’s still like they’ve just been let out of the convent or something. But this year, what’s the woman’s name?”
“Hannah Carey.”
“But with her yelling rape, even after the fact, and now the murder, I officially feel like we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.” She sipped some beer. Her hands were small, he saw, and didn’t seem to go with the rest of her, the long elegant length of her, built like a high school girl herself in her T-shirt and tight jeans. There was a white line where her wedding ring could have gone once, ring finger, left hand.
“You mind if I do a little work?” DiMaggio said.
“A little.”
“Last year, were you around when the Knicks were around?”
“Oh sure. I’m a townie lifer. Grew up in New Canaan, went to the Congregational Church as a kid. Country Club of New Canaan. New Canaan High. The whole deal. I was married here. I was divorced here, and don’t even bother asking.”
“What I shouldn’t bother asking, what was that going to be exactly?”
“I got the dog, he got the intern from Duke. There, you’ve got all the important details.” Ellen Harper reached inside the vest and came out with a pack of Marlboro Lights. “You mind if I smoke? I still give myself a couple a day so I don’t turn into a serial killer.”
He smiled at her again. He was surprised how easy that was. “In that case, be my guest.”
She blew some smoke toward the ceiling and said, “I’ve tried to leave a few times. But somehow I always come back. I just spent most of the summer in California, as a matter of fact. Trying to finish a novel.” She leaned on novel and made it sound like the most solemn work imaginable, as a way of mocking herself.
DiMaggio liked her already, even if she did move the conversation around so much he wanted to put her up against Boyzie Mays for the title.
“Anyway,” she said, “I guess this is sort of the long way around—”
DiMaggio said, “Really?”
“Very funny. The bottom line is, I’m used to seeing this whole area make an ass of its collective self, but never ever the way it does over these basketball players.”
“You used to see them in here?”
“All the time. In fact, I was here the night of all the allegedness. I mean, I was here early. It felt like the whole team was here that night, as a matter of fact. I watched some of the mating rituals, I saw the fight with A. J. Fine—”
DiMaggio said, “The fight?”
“In the parking lot. Between Hannah and A. J. Fine. I just happened to be walking in.”
DiMaggio, trying not to be too eager, said, “Why don’t you tell me about the fight.”
She said that when the main lot at Mulligan’s was full, there was this parking garage right next door, maybe he’d noticed it? And when that was full, when the place was really jumping, there was a parking garage across the street, down from the Baptist Church. She had to use that one that night. She usually didn’t even lock the car—“Do you care about this?”—but she locked it when she parked across the street. She had gone back to do that, and when she came across the street the second time, she saw A. J. Fine and Hannah Carey at the bottom of the hill, at the entrance to the other parking garage.
“You knew who Fine was?”
“Remember where you are,” she said. “I’m surprised that when these guys came in, they didn’t introduce them over some PA system, like they do for the real games.”
“You hear what they were arguing about?”
“No,” she said. “But it all looked pretty dramatic. She seemed real upset. And she was crying, I could tell that from the front door. I felt kind of lousy even stopping to watch, you know? Like I was one of the local swivelheads. But it was hard not to notice them. They’re a couple of pretty impressive specimens.”
DiMaggio signaled for a couple more beers.
Ellen Harper said, “Fine eventually got her settled down, and the next thing I know they drove off.”
“But she was back later, right?”
“Singing. It was one of those nights when everybody got into a big golden oldies thing. I’m trying to remember what she sang exactly because it brought the house down—”
DiMaggio said, “ ‘Runaround Sue.’ ”
She said, “How’d you know?”
�
�I’m a trained investigator.”
“Cheers,” she said, and picked up her fresh bottle of beer, not even bothering with a glass.
“You never told any of this to the police.”
“I told you, I just got back from California. I didn’t really follow the case out there, but isn’t the big deal now the Collins murder?”
“It’s a big deal,” he said. “But I’m still working on the other.”
“You said the Knicks hired you. But it’s more than that with you, isn’t it?”
“I want to know,” he said.
Ellen Harper said, “Let me get this straight: I’m the only person who saw them leave together?”
“Correct.”
“You talked to Fine?”
“He failed to mention it.”
“He lied.”
“That’s another way of putting it.”
“Hannah Carey?”
“She’s said from the start there are gaps in her memory.”
“Oh,” Ellen Harper said.
He thought about Fine, sitting there at the Fulton Luncheonette like the Ivy League absentminded professor, acting like he was above the crowd.
Bullshitting him.
Ellen said, “You’re having another one of those conversations with yourself.” She was leaning forward, her pretty face cupped by the tiny little-girl hands, looking at him with big solemn gray eyes.
She said, “What I told you, it’s important, isn’t it?”
“It might be.”
“You’re out of here?”
“After we finish our beers.”
“How would you like to buy a girl dinner sometime?”
Where was she a month ago?
He said, “How about two dinners?”
“Two?”
“I believe in long-term contracts.”
“See how much better this works when you’re not just talking to yourself all the time?” He took his notebook out and she gave him her phone numbers, home and at work. They went outside. Her car was right by the front door. “Call me tomorrow?” she said.
“Twice.”
She backed out. Single pretty teacher Ellen Harper. The car was out front, on the street. His old Orvis duffel bag with his address book was in the backseat. He looked up A. J. Fine. He had an apartment at the Westchester Country Club. DiMaggio remembered him saying he liked it there because it was halfway between Fulton and the city.