by Mike Lupica
A little like Richie Collins, even.
If they thought it could save their ass, sometimes they even told you the truth.
“What was the fight about?” DiMaggio said.
“What the fight was always about,” Fine said. “Why did we have to break up? Why don’t you take me back? I loved you. I love you. Please take me back.”
“She was there looking for you that night?”
“Oh sure. I don’t know how she knew, but she did. She always did. She found out about the welcome-home dinner. Somebody told her a bunch of us were going over to New Canaan so we could drink. She could always track me down. If I had gone home, she would have been waiting for me here. She wanted to play the injured party a little more. It’s her best part. She happens to be playing the hell out of it right now, you might have noticed.” He shook his head, disgusted. “Anyway, I tried to leave as soon as I saw her. But she followed me out to the garage, which is where your witness must have seen us. I didn’t think there was anyone around. I told her for the millionth time it was over. She got hysterical. As usual. She was like that when she was drunk, giddy one minute, into some huge crying jag the next. And always horny. She wanted to do it right there in the garage at Mulligan’s.”
The three tenors had stopped singing.
Fine said, “I finally gave up. We got into the car. And I drove down to the pond and settled her down the way I always used to settle her down.”
“Then what?”
“I drove her back to Mulligan’s.” Fine tossed the basketball up in the air, grabbed it hard with both hands. “Told her to wait there while I went and parked the car.”
DiMaggio finished it for him. “And you left her there.”
Fine, not looking at him, studying the ball, nodded.
DiMaggio said, “And she waited. And waited a little more. Then a lot. And finally went in and ended up at the table with Richie and Ellis Adair.”
“It could have happened like that. I just couldn’t deal with her anymore.”
DiMaggio said, “Poor baby.”
“Hey, fuck you, DiMaggio.”
DiMaggio was over on him before Fine really understood what was happening. He took the ball out of his hands, and then he shoved it as hard as he could into Fine’s stomach, shoving him back into the couch at the same time, feeling the air come out of him.
“Watch your mouth,” DiMaggio said.
Fine started to say something, but now DiMaggio leaned close to him, got in his face like they were always telling you to do in sports, close enough to smell the coffee on his breath.
“I know, I know. Nobody talks to you like that.”
Fine said he drove straight home from Mulligan’s after he left Hannah and went to bed. In the middle of the night, he heard Hannah’s voice talking to his answering machine. He kept changing his number, trying to stay ahead of her. But she always had the new number. He had shut the ringer off, but the volume was too high on the machine.
Hannah’s voice woke him up.
“You could barely understand her, she sounded so hysterical. I just figured she’d gone back inside Mulligan’s and gotten drunker. It was only near the end that I could make out any of what she was saying.”
“Which was?” DiMaggio said.
“She said she’d been raped.”
“She say who did it?”
“Not before she ran out of time on the tape.”
“You didn’t pick up the phone?” DiMaggio said. “With her telling you she’d been raped?”
Fine leaned back now, hands shaking a little as he put them underneath his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
“Nothing I’m going to say anymore is going to change your mind about me,” Fine said. “But, no, I didn’t pick up. Because it wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard from Hannah before.”
“She used to cry rape?”
A. J. Fine said, “All the time. Well, not all the time. Sometimes she’d tell me she’d been getting hang-ups. Or that someone tried to get into her apartment. Or that she thought she was being followed. Hannah the victim. You don’t want to believe me, that’s up to you. Maybe she’s played the part convincingly enough for you, and you’re convinced I’m the asshole. But it reached the point, with me anyway, where I didn’t know what was real for her and what wasn’t.” Fine stood up. “I’m not sure if Hannah can make that distinction or not herself anymore.”
DiMaggio stood up, too, tired, not even able to think if there was something else he should be asking. Fine said he’d walk him downstairs. “It’s not more suck-up,” he said. “I want to take a walk, work off some of the caffeine.”
When they got downstairs, the desk guy said to DiMaggio, “Was he surprised?” Nodding at Fine.
“Oh boy,” DiMaggio said. “Was he.”
Fine walked him over to his car. “Who finds out about this conversation?”
No use bullshitting him. “Salter does,” DiMaggio said. “And Hyland, the Fulton cop. I owe him that.”
Fine said, “Does it get in the papers?”
In the end, it was all that mattered. To all of them. How they looked. It was unbelievable, DiMaggio thought, the power they gave these pissants like Marty Perez, guys who would never have their money. Their fame. They let the papers run their goddamn lives. They picked up the paper in the morning and it was like they were looking in the mirror. How do I look, how do I look, how do I look.…
“Does it?” Fine said.
“Hyland doesn’t talk, I guarantee you that. Maybe you should talk to Salter yourself.” Maybe it was talking about Salter that made him flash on Ellis all of a sudden. He’d meant to ask before. Now he said to Fine, just throwing it out there, “Who’d know where Ellis is?”
Fine put a hand up, rubbed his forehead hard. “No one I can really think of. I mean, Ellis had acquaintances, people he had his picture taken with. But not friends, at least the way he was friends with Richie.” He shrugged. “I mean, Dale Larson started to come to some games last season, and some of the guys made some jokes. But I didn’t think of him as any more than another photo op. You know who he is, right? The model?”
“Who is?”
“Dale Larson. You must have seen him on billboards and shit.”
DiMaggio just sat there. He said to Fine, “Dale Larson is a guy.”
Not even making it into a question.
Not even sounding surprised.
Fine smiled for the first time all night.
“Depends on your definition. But, yeah.”
33
The funny thing, leastwise Ellis thought so, was that part of him was happy Richie was gone. It made him feel guilty, admitting that. Made him feel light, like the boys said now. There it was, anyway. He’d picture Richie there, dead, and no matter how hard Ellis tried, he couldn’t make himself feel as bad about that as he knew he should.
If you added it all up, Ellis decided, good in with the bad, Richie had been more like a warden to him than a friend.
Ellis could feel that way even knowing that the rape charge was still out there, soon as he went back. But he wasn’t going back, at least not right away. Fuck ’em, let them wait, people ought to be used to waiting for Fresh Adair by now. Let them wonder when he was coming back. People wondering now more than ever with Richie dead.
Not understanding.
Not really knowing.
But when did they?
Ellis missed ball, though.
Even now, in the middle of the night, before it got light over the park, that gray-pink light coming up out of there all of a sudden, Ellis would think about ball. How he should be getting back to sleep, there was Gary Lenz’s shoot-around in the morning, the season ready to start tomorrow night. The whole world looking for him, and Ellis here, right under everybody’s nose.
It’d always been a problem, Ellis wanting to be alone, but knowing on the other hand he was no damn good at being alone.
He sat on the terrace, the night air cold, but feeling good, thinking ab
out what the Garden would be like tomorrow night. How the Garden got for openings, whether it was the season or the play-offs. The whole thing feeling like the Broadway opening Richie made him go to that one time. About the Phantom, Ellis at first thinking it was the one used to be in the comics. Ellis loved that guy, a superhero just wearing a mask, no name.
Ellis didn’t care so much for the Phantom music, but he remembered how big the night felt to him, everybody being into it. After that, when there’d be a big game at the Garden, he’d look up sometimes, expecting the scoreboard over the court, up there in the spokes, to come crashing down the way that chandelier did in Phantom, right there at halftime.
Ellis needed somebody to tell him whether he should go back now or not.
Somebody like Richie.
How fucked-up was that?
He couldn’t count on Dale on this one. Dale was so happy to have Ellis all to himself. Even with everything else going on, all the bad, Dale was happy just to know he could call at any time, day or night, and know Ellis would be there. If Ron, the house guy, was gone for the day, Dale would use that code they’d worked out, and it’d be all right for Ellis to pick up.
Dale wanted this to feel like Ellis’s home.
“Home for the homeless homey,” Ellis had said the other night, and Dale had laughed and said he loved him. Then Ellis had said, “Me too,” because it made him feel funny still, saying the actual words himself.
Richie always said it a different way. Not meaning it the way Dale did. But meaning it, in his own pushy way.
“Love you, Fresh,” Richie’d say. “You know I love you, man.”
Or Richie’d say, “When the rest of them are all gone, Fresh, who’s gonna be there for you?”
Only now Richie wasn’t there for him. Now Richie was gone.
Ellis sat here in the middle of the night, four o’clock, wanting Richie to be around just for a little while longer, figure one last thing out for him. Four o’clock, invisible the way he said he always wanted to be, but trying to figure out how to make himself uninvisible.
Ellis needed to move.
He went inside and got his cheap-looking Yankee hat, the kind they gave away to kids. Put on the funny sunglasses Dale had given him, ones that took up half his face but really weren’t sunglasses at all, they actually made things brighter. And the fake beard Dale had gotten him. And the baggy windbreaker and the bicycle shorts.
Ellis’s disguise, when he worked up the nerve to take the blue bike out in the night.
Ellis went and got the bike, Dale’s birthday present to him, out of the maid’s room and then went down the back stairs, the secret way out you could have when you had a place like this, Dale’s kind of money, coming out the little alleyway on Seventy-ninth Street.
Thinking on things himself, shit, it was harder than he thought it would be.
It always came back to waiting.
When he didn’t know what else to do, DiMaggio waited.
So he sat in the backseat, listening to the overnight show on WQEW, which he was pretty sure used to be WNEW, but had moved up the dial, changed call letters, for some reason DiMaggio didn’t know about. But then he was often behind the curve on things. Like who the hell Dale Larson was. Now he listened to Rosie Clooney on a station that didn’t even exist when he was in New York last, in the town car across Seventy-ninth Street from Dale Larson’s building, watching the front door.
He had driven straight here from Westchester, not even bothering to stop at the Sherry-Netherland. He had gotten here a little after two, and now it was after four o’clock.
It was only a hunch that Ellis Adair was in there, that Dale Larson the guy had taken in his … what? Lover? Special friend? DiMaggio had a hunch. A feeling. Nothing more. He knew he could be wasting his time.
But then, what was new about that?
What did he have to go on? Boyzie Mays running his jive mouth about Ellis? A. J. Fine? He had nothing is what he had, except a feeling that this was where Ellis had been hiding out all along. Maybe he’d had it ever since the house guy hung up on him, just something about the way the guy did it, like DiMaggio had spooked him even asking to talk to Ellis.
What if Ellis had managed to get himself lost right in the middle of New York?
There were a million ways to get in there. Or at least take a shot. He could wait until eight o’clock or something, fake his way in, use the same moves on the doorman he’d used up at Fine’s place in Westchester. Or give Ted Salter the number, have him talk to the house guy, tell him he was Ellis’s boss and put him on the phone or else.
Or call Hyland, get him in on it, have him bluff his way in with a badge.
Except Hyland had his own problems, trying to find out who stuck Richie.
Rosie Clooney sang “Mack the Knife,” putting some scats in there the way Ella did. The disc jockey then introduced a record by a singer DiMaggio didn’t know, Nancy LaMott. She sang “Moon River.” DiMaggio had never heard it sung better in his life, by anyone. Here he was, behind the curve again. Where did Nancy LaMott come from?
A cab pulled up to Larson’s building. A young stud in a tuxedo got out with his date, looking drunk in her bare feet, holding her high heels in her right hand, laughing like a fool, DiMaggio could hear it from across the street. The doorman came out, held the door for them, they went right in.
DiMaggio knew he could get in sooner or later.
But then what?
Ask Ellis what?
Hey, Fresh, don’t answer if you think I’m prying, but are you gay?
What’d it mean if he was? That he couldn’t have raped her?
The books said a lot of gay guys raped.
All along, even before Teresa Delgado showed up to say all Ellis did was watch when Richie Collins raped her in high school, DiMaggio had felt Ellis Adair wasn’t the one here. That maybe he was as much a victim as Hannah, in some way he couldn’t even explain to himself or figure out.
DiMaggio had heard about other big athletes being gay before, the way you heard the stories about movie stars, even before Rock Hudson got AIDS. DiMaggio would hear a name and think, Okay, that guy has made it, he’s a real A-list celebrity now, they were saying he was homosexual. Or she was homosexual.
DiMaggio never cared one way or the other.
He wasn’t looking to out Adair. He just wanted him to talk, once and for all. Maybe if Ellis and Dale Larson were lovers, if Ellis could see DiMaggio had him there, he could get him to tell the truth about Hannah …
It almost made him laugh. Jesus, he was no better than the rest of them. I give you this, you give me that. I’ve got something on you. You take care of me. Or else.
He was tired of being here, tired of this case. Tired of these people. Especially tired of waiting. He just wanted to find out what happened that night. Maybe it was tied into Richie Collins’s murder, maybe not. DiMaggio wanted to be back in Jupiter, sitting on the beach, when Hyland cracked that one. If he ever did.
Find Ellis, Salter had said.
So DiMaggio waited.
The overnight disc jockey, a woman, said it was four-fifteen in New York City.
The big guy came out of the alley then across the street, a big black guy, DiMaggio saw, Yankee cap turned around on his head so the mesh was in front. Dressed like one of those psycho bicycle messengers.
Except he was too tall.
And who made deliveries at four-fifteen, even in New York?
The guy checked the traffic on Seventy-ninth and put out his arm, signaling for a left turn even though there wasn’t a car in sight, then made the left onto Fifth, on the park side, pedaling slowly as he went past the town car.
A guy on his blue bike.
DiMaggio saw the weird-looking sunglasses, the beard. Saw how long the guy’s legs were, almost too long for the sleek bike.
DiMaggio put the car into gear, looking at himself in the rearview mirror. Grinning at himself.
Follow that bike.
34
Marty’s cameraman, José Pedroza, was also out of San Juan, a pretty little suburb called Rio Piedras. The sound guy was named Andy Forst. Pedroza and Forst waited around the corner with the equipment so as not to draw the attention of the doorman. Marty waited near the hotel entrance for Frank Crittendon to come back from dinner, or wherever he’d been. Pedroza and Forst spotted Crittendon first, walking uptown on Park, west side of the street. They whistled to get Marty’s attention, and Marty stepped out in front of Crittendon before he could walk into the Regency.
Crittendon didn’t even act surprised to see him.
“I’ve been waiting for you to show up,” he said, taking the little pipe he’d been smoking out of his mouth.
Marty said, “Me specifically?”
“Somebody like you.”
“There’s some things I need to talk to you about.”
“I know,” Frank Crittendon said. “I know.” He stuck the pipe in his mouth and said, “I’m in 804.”
When they were finished with Crittendon, Marty told Pedroza and Forst he’d take the cassette. He’d worked with both of them before and trusted them not to screw with him.
“Randy said I should drop it by his apartment,” Pedroza said. He looked like a wiry lightweight boxer, maybe about five-five, with curly hair and a thick mustache. He always wore one of those khaki bush jackets, no matter what the weather. Lots of pockets. And one of those Indiana Jones fedoras. Marty told him all the time he looked like the spic who’d rolled the great white hunter.
Pedroza said, “He said I should drop it by his apartment, he’d be up.”
“I’ll do it,” Marty lied. “I just want to go over to the News, transcribe it first. I figure we have to run this tonight on one of the regular newscasts. I just want to follow it up with a column for the Sunday paper.”
Pedroza said, “Houghton even said something about maybe a special Saturday Chronicle.”
They were standing at the corner of Sixty-first and Park. Marty said, “I’ll work it out with Houghton. You guys go to bed. And don’t tell anybody what you heard in there.”