by Mike Lupica
Maybe he should have paid closer attention.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “No. I never met him.…” She shook her head. “I’m a little confused. Did he kill him or not?”
DiMaggio said, “Kill Richie? Before he died, he told Marty Perez that Collins was already dead and he just gave one more turn to the screw, so to speak. It turns out he had motive to go along with opportunity. Frank had found out that Richie had had sex with his daughter. Sixteen years old.”
DiMaggio said gently to Hannah, “But you know that, don’t you?”
Hannah said, “I’m a little confused—”
“You know that because Kelly Crittendon told you. She came to see you with Teresa Delgado, and she told you that not only did she have sex with Richie, but he raped her, too. And Kelly Crittendon also told you she saw her father coming out of Collins’s house the night he was stabbed to death.”
“Maybe I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” Hannah said.
DiMaggio said, “Just a few more minutes. I’m not looking for a confession. I’ve been on your side all along, and I still am. Trust me,” he said to her.
They had walked to the corner of Fifty-seventh and Sutton. He took her arm again. Hannah didn’t move.
“Hear me out,” he said. “You can at least do that. I already told you, I’m out of your life tomorrow.”
“You sound relieved.”
“You know what?” DiMaggio said. “I don’t know what I feel anymore.”
They walked across the street, past a beat-up blue van, and sat down on the same bench they’d used after Antolotti’s. They were the only ones there. The day was getting colder. Out on the river, going pretty good, was a single powerboat, its wake looking clean and white in the dirty gray water.
“I didn’t even know Frank Crittendon,” she said, turning to face DiMaggio. “I certainly didn’t know that if I told Marty what I did, Frank Crittendon would kill himself.”
“He was a very good guy.”
DiMaggio took his hands out of his pockets, cupped them in front of his mouth, and blew warm air into them, then deliberately folded them in his lap.
“Your hands,” she said.
“Not too bad today. Blowing on them is a habit. Like people with good hands cracking their knuckles.”
“I mean it,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to hurt anybody. I was trying to repay a favor, that’s all. He’s been very generous with my side—”
“That’s what Marty thought, too. But then the more he got to think about it, the more he felt bad for sandbagging Crittendon the way he did. See, I watched the interview and saw Crittendon going to pieces and when it was over, I said, ‘How’d you know that last part, Marty?’ And he said, ‘Hannah Carey told me.’ ”
“I told you—”
“I just want you to tell me one more thing before I go.”
He reached over and took her cap off and set it between them on the bench. She looked down, confused, but let it sit there.
DiMaggio said, “I know you were with A.J. that night.”
She started to say something. DiMaggio just held up a hand and stopped her.
“Let me finish. Ellis Adair says he didn’t do anything, and I believe him because I don’t think he was particularly interested. What I want to know is if Richie really did rape you that night and that’s why you killed him or if there was another reason why you killed him I don’t know about.”
Hannah reached down for her baseball cap and DiMaggio got to it first and put it out of her reach at his end of the bench.
“Could I have my hat, please?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because if you don’t tell me the truth, I might have to give this hat to Brian Hyland. And when I do that—if I do that—Hyland is going to check the hair that’s in here against the hair he found on Richie Collins’s body. And I have a feeling—because I get these feelings sometimes—that it’s going to be the kind of DNA match he didn’t get off your dress.”
Hannah Carey’s eyes seemed to follow the powerboat, disappearing now, toward the Triborough Bridge. She said, “I thought only guys—”
“The test goes both ways,” DiMaggio said. “It’s kind of ironic, if you think about it.”
Hannah said, “I don’t understand.” Just that, looking right at him now. Like she wanted him to explain where he was going with all this.
DiMaggio thought, She looks like Ellis. Having to think things out for himself now with Richie gone.
“Maybe I should go?” It came out of her a question.
“Don’t leave now,” he said, smiling, trying to relax her. Keep her sitting there. “Not when I’m going good. Besides, what’re the cops really going to do with the goddamn hat? All the hair does is prove you were there. Which means you probably lied to them. But even with that, they’ve still got Frank’s prints, they’ve got Frank admitting to Perez he was there, even if he said he didn’t do it. You’re in the clear.” He smiled at her. “And that is fine with me. Richie Collins deserved to die. You did the world a favor.”
“I didn’t kill him,” she said.
“Sure you did.”
“What do you want from me!”
“The truth.”
“About what?”
“This really was about A. J. Fine, wasn’t it? He dumped you and then he didn’t want you back and then when you thought you had him back that night, he left you there on the sidewalk. Isn’t that right?”
Hannah Carey made this little rocking motion on the bench.
“Isn’t that right, Hannah?”
“No.”
“Yes.”
She kept rocking, staring out at the river now, rocking and finally saying to DiMaggio, “Yes!” Rocking. “He treated me like the rest of them. After everything …” Rocking harder. “I was like the rest of them, and so was he.”
DiMaggio said, “So you were going to show him, weren’t you? You were going to make him jealous, walk out with a couple of his teammates right in front of him. Which you did. Except it went wrong then, didn’t it? You got in over your head with Richie and Ellis. And now here you are a year later. I don’t know why it took a year. Maybe you don’t, either. But it did. So here you are, with a story that they both raped you. And all I’m asking is this, Hannah: Did at least one of them rape you?”
“I told what happened. I told Brian.”
“Ellis heard you scream. Ellis left. Then it was you and Richie.”
“I don’t want to do this anymore.” Hannah shook her head.
“Nobody’s forcing you.”
“Men always say that, don’t they?”
Hannah was still now. She said, “I didn’t kill him.”
DiMaggio gently turned her, so she was facing him. “Richie raped you. He had it coming. I don’t give a shit whether you killed him or not. But Ellis didn’t rape you. Before I go I just want to hear you tell me that Richie Collins did.”
He had been afraid she was going to cry before, cry or get hysterical or run away and blow the whole thing. But when she turned from him now, turned all the way around so she was facing him on the bench, she was calm.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, he raped me. That animal. I woke up, and he had tied me to the sofa. And he raped me. And then he cleaned himself off and left me there and came back. And then he raped me again.”
“Why Ellis—”
“Because he let him, that’s why. You know what the last thing was? That I remembered? You want to know, Mr. Second Opinion, just doing your job? I remember that fucking door slamming while I screamed for him to come help me.”
She drank in air in big gulps, blew it out, DiMaggio feeling her breath on his face, they were that close now.
“Ellis didn’t do what the other one did?” Hannah said. “Fuck him, okay? He did enough. He let him.” She stared past him now. “You wanted the truth? There it is. Nobody was going to ignore me if Ellis Adair was in it. And he was. He was an accomplice. He
was there, and he let him.”
DiMaggio stared out at the East River. What did Ellis and the rest of them say? Whoomp, there it is.
All of it, finally.
Nearly all of it.
“Why did you kill him?” he said softly. “Was it that he was going to get off? Did he tell you he was going to do it again? Frank Crittendon said it to Perez. Richie’d told his coach, they all came back around sooner or later.”
DiMaggio said to her, “Even you. That’s what he meant, didn’t he? Even somebody he’d raped. Isn’t that right?”
“Frank Crittendon killed him.”
“I don’t think so,” DiMaggio said.
She reached down into her bag and came out with a cigarette and a Bic lighter. She took a drag of the cigarette. “I allow myself one a day.”
“Why did you go up there?”
She smoked and stared out at the East River again. “It was such a dumb idea,” she said casually, like she was telling him what a dope she’d been to leave the car lights on or the water running. “I realized it when I got up there. I had called him and told him I’d had a change of heart, that I wanted to see him. To talk things over. I was going to see if I could get him into bed and then pull out a gun and scare him. Not a knife.” Hannah turned to DiMaggio. “Don’t you see? I wanted him to see how it felt for once. Being helpless. I thought I deserved that much satisfaction.”
“You have a gun?”
“Had. I bought it after the rape, permit and everything. You can check it out if you want. But when I got back that night, I threw it in the river. I’m not really the gun type.”
“You were going to scare him, that was all?”
Hannah nodded. “Exactly. I was going to get him into bed and then stick the gun in his mouth and tell him to scream a little bit.”
“But you didn’t do that.”
“I got scared all over again.” She blew some smoke out the side of her mouth. “This time I ran out of there before things got out of hand.” Hannah said, “He thought he was so irresistible.”
“You got him into bed, though?”
She looked at him. “Obviously,” she said. “If they found my hair when they found him.”
“Where?”
“In his bed.”
“How’d you know they found him in bed?” DiMaggio said.
“What?”
“I was wondering how you knew Richie Collins was in bed. Hyland never said they found him in bed. He just said they found him at the house. The newspapers never said they found him in bed. How’d you know he was in bed?”
DiMaggio handed her back the cap. “They didn’t find any hair,” he said.
“You lied,” Hannah said.
Beautiful hands, beautiful fingers.
“I lied, you lied,” he said. “And you killed him.”
She didn’t answer, just pulled up her knees in front of her, pulled them close to her.
“You killed him and poor old Frank Crittendon will take the rap. Richie got away with rape, you get away with murder.”
Hannah Carey got up, dropped the cigarette, and stubbed it out with the toe of her sneaker. “Good-bye, Mr. Second Opinion.”
“Say good-bye to everybody,” DiMaggio said.
He opened the jacket to the blue suit to show her the microphone Hyland had hooked up.
“I’m sorry,” he said into the microphone to the Fulton cop. “We’re getting nowhere here.”
He reached up with his own right hand, touched her cheek, surprised at how cold she felt, turned her face toward the street so she could see Brian Hyland when he opened the side door to the blue van. Hyland sat there with the receiving equipment, cramped in the back with another cop who was working the camera.
“You don’t even have to wait,” DiMaggio said to Hannah Carey. “You’re in the movies already.”
What did that mean?
Now you’re in the movies?
Why did he have that disappointed look on his face? Why had men always looked at her like that? Like she’d let them down?
Like she didn’t measure up?
Her mother started looking at her that way when she didn’t measure up in tennis, and then it was like the rest of the world took over.
Stop looking at me that way.
Like I don’t get it.
Why wouldn’t Brian Hyland come over and talk to her?
He just stood there next to the blue van. Giving her the same look. Not the friendly Brian she’d talked to on the telephone. Not the one she finally met. Now he had that disappointed look. Like Hannah had let him down.
DiMaggio got up and walked toward the van.
Now you’re in the movies?
They were the ones who didn’t get it, Hannah thought. It was all a movie, at least once she got it straight in her head. She couldn’t make anybody understand, of course. God, she couldn’t even make Beth understand.
A.J. never understood.
Sometimes she thought about killing A.J.
Boy, how many times had she pictured that!
He had been too rough with her that night down by that stupid duck pond, almost as rough as Richie was later. She hadn’t wanted to, she wanted to talk to him, make him understand once and for all that they belonged together. That she was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
But he didn’t want to talk. Oh no. He didn’t care that she didn’t want to. He didn’t care what she wanted …
But she loved him. When they were together, he was the only one who didn’t treat her like she was some dumb blonde.
A.J. listened.
A.J. was interested.
She couldn’t kill A.J. She hadn’t kept the dress for evidence. She kept it because it was A.J.’s favorite. It was only later, when she could remember everything, she thought there might be some of that DNA stuff on it. After she had seen some of the other cases, realized you could do something.
You didn’t just have to lie there, even afterward, and take it.
What were the two of them talking about over there?
Wasn’t that the way it always went, though? Guy stuff? Like they got what they wanted from Hannah and now she wasn’t even here?
Didn’t they understand that Richie had to die?
That it didn’t matter who did it?
God, she was supposed to be the dumb one and it was so obvious. At least once it became clear that he was going to get off.
Get off, Hannah thought.
That’s a good one. I’ll have to remember that one to tell Jimmy.
Not just that he was going to get off. It was more than that. She knew when he came to see her in front of Jimmy’s apartment. Scaring her that way.
She started thinking about it that day.
He was so happy when she called. So sure she still wanted him. She had been so careful, wearing the body stocking, not sure how you could leave prints. That sexy white body stocking.
Richie thinking it was some kind of sex game. Telling her it was like she was wearing a body condom.
The safest sex, she had purred at him once she was down to the stocking.
Like you won’t believe, Richie.
He looked so happy. Not disappointed at all.
What were Brian and DiMaggio waiting for?
For her to tell them the good parts?
Close your eyes, Richie.
I want to watch.
In a minute.
He was so happy.
I’ve got a little toy I want to show you, she said.
I love toys, he said.
The knife was in her purse …
Who knew Frank Crittendon would make it so easy for her?
Hannah laughed.
Men.
She wondered why more of them didn’t end up like Richie Collins.
That was the amazing thing, if you really thought about it.
37
“How many times have you said you’re leaving tomorrow?” Ellen Harper said.
“I’ll figu
re it out and tell you tomorrow,” DiMaggio said.
They were lying in the big bed at the Sherry, in the back of the suite, in the back of the dignified old New York hotel, after doing undignified things. They had eaten dinner at a place she picked out on Twenty-ninth Street called Tempo. It was when they were having brandy after dinner that she said, “I’m not going back to Connecticut tonight, am I?” DiMaggio smiled at her. He did it all the time, going slow with her, too old not to. He signaled for the check, and they rode uptown in the cab, holding hands, and he played the piano for her.
Then they did something else, finally.
Now they were in bed listening to another Nancy LaMott tape he’d found. Maybe New York hadn’t been a total loss, everything going bad. He met Ellen Harper because he came to New York. And he found out about Nancy LaMott, who sang his kind of music the way it was supposed to be sung.
He’d been threatening to go back to Jupiter for two weeks, the two weeks since he found Ellis Adair.
“Sometimes I get the feeling it’s not over for you,” Ellen Harper said.
“It’s as over as it’s going to be.”
He rested a hand lightly on her hip.
“You’re still convinced she did it?”
“Oh, sure.”
“And she’s going to get away with it, even with what she said on the tape?”
“We just thought that if I could get her to panic and confess on the tape, she might give it all up for Hyland. Other than that, the tape doesn’t do him any good. She doesn’t even have to talk to him about it, as a matter of fact. Hyland walked over to her from the van when I finished with her and said, ‘What about this?’ And I’ve got to hand it to her, she was smart enough to say, ‘I’m confused, talk to my lawyer.’ Then she got into a cab and went home. Hyland called Harvey Kuhn—her lawyer—and Kuhn said what I would’ve said: ‘You want to try and arrest my client off what she said to a third party on some inadmissible videotape, be my guest. Other than that, we have nothing to say.’ ”
“You’re kidding,” Ellen said. “She doesn’t have to talk to the cops if she doesn’t feel like it?”