Jump (11 page)

“It used to be simple,” DiMaggio said, picking it up for him. “You wanted them, they wanted you. I’m talking about the sixties and seventies. No questions asked. I wasn’t ever a star, not for a single day after they started paying me to play. But the women were there for me, too. Even in the low minors. Fort Lauderdale. Jackson, Mississippi. Columbia, South Carolina. Some wanted a ballplayer just for the sex. Some of the young girls, eighteen years old, nineteen, small-town girls in tight jeans with all these dreams, they looked you over as a potential ticket out of there, a first-class ticket out of Lauderdale
or Jackson or wherever. It wasn’t just that you were young yourself, a jock, on your way somewhere. You know what I always thought part of the lure was? The thing that made it safe sex for these women before that was even in the language? They could see you work. Some guy they met at a singles bar, or at a party, he could talk about being a lawyer or a cop or working construction or pumping gas. If they didn’t know him, they had to take his word. Ballplayers were different. You could come see us. We were safe.”

DiMaggio looked out at the empty court. “At least we used to be.”

Crittendon said, “You said it changed.”

DiMaggio blew some warm air into his hands, as though he were thinking about what he wanted to say next. The air felt good. He tried to picture his hands under a faucet, not just warm water, but hot water, coming out hard.

“Everything got bigger,” DiMaggio said. “Everything got louder in sports, the fame and the money, all of it. And these dumb-jock bastards, they got more and more full of themselves, so they didn’t have time to notice that the world was changing and women were changing along with it. The jocks thought it was still cut-and-dried, meet them and get them back to the room. The volume was up, remember? They’d never heard anybody say no. It was like some foreign language. Sometimes they couldn’t hear it, and sometimes they
did
hear it, but they didn’t know what it fucking meant.”

“I know what you mean,” Crittendon said. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph do I know. From the time Ellis Adair was a better jumper, had a nicer touch, than some kid from the next project over, things started to come for free. Sneakers first. Then clothes maybe. Somewhere along the line a car. Then, if they’re the one in a thousand, whatever the statistics are, and they made the pros, it’s whatever the market can bear. There was a piece in the
Wall Street Journal
the other day. Adair made fifteen million dollars in endorsements last year.”

DiMaggio said, “And he thinks he deserves every dime.”

“Am I answering my own question here?” Crittendon said.

DiMaggio said, “Ellis Adair isn’t any bigger than Magic or Bird or Jordan, or Russell and Chamberlain were in the old days. He’s just more available. He gives off more heat, gets more. And the one
constant in his life, for as far back as he can remember, all the way back to his first hard-on, is this: Women want him. They’re one of the perks that go with everything else. Somebody telling him no? What’s that?”

“Yes,” Frank Crittendon said, making it come out like a sad blues note. “Oh yes,” he said, not talking to DiMaggio now, just talking. “I was going to be a priest. You didn’t know that, did you? Came out of the Jesuits. Now I am sixty years old, and I deal with these players who look at me like I am some worthless piece of shit. Like I am garbage. I have a teenage daughter. She used to come here to watch practice. I finally asked her to stop. Would you like to know why? Because I do not want her around when this team, these players that
I
assembled, look at me like I am
nothing
, Mr. DiMaggio.”

Crittendon got up. “I’ll walk you to the parking lot,” he said. They made their way across the court, DiMaggio trying not to think too much about his hands, talking more than he ever did. He asked Crittendon if he was any good with the Fulton police. Crittendon told him there’d never been any problems before this, it had always been minor shit, parking tickets, speeding tickets, somebody blowing his horn in the middle of the night after too many beers in one of the neighboring towns. Fulton was a dry town, Crittendon explained, so if the players wanted to have a beer and chase a little bit, they went to Westport or Fairfield, some place called Masters there or the Georgetown Saloon, up Route 7 a couple of miles. Or Gates, in New Canaan.

“The chief of police is retiring at the end of this year,” Crittendon said. “The one you want to talk to over there is a detective named Brian Hyland. Good kid. His old man used to be assistant athletic director here at the college. I don’t think he’ll give you a hard time, especially if he knows you’re working for us.”

“You’ve obviously talked to him already.”

“He called when she filed her complaint.”

“Did he say if there’s any physical evidence?”

“Evidence?”

“Panties,” DiMaggio said. “A dress maybe. Something with semen on it, or blood, or hair, or skin.”

Crittendon chewed on his pipe. “He just told me about the complaint
and that he’d be coming around when he decided how he wanted to proceed with this. Then he told me that he appreciated I’d been friends with his old man, but not to expect any favors.”

It was all right. You could only work your side of it. Sometimes the cops helped, sometimes they didn’t. Big cities or college towns, it depended on the cop. Most of the time they looked at him like some hotshot on a retainer, cutting in on their action, Out to make them look bad somehow. It was one thing TV and the movies always got right, DiMaggio had found that out firsthand. They got just about everything else wrong about cops and investigators, but not that. Cops didn’t want you around because they didn’t know where they stood with you. They were more comfortable with bad guys. They knew where they stood with them, at least.

“Maybe you could give this Hyland a call in the morning before I call him,” DiMaggio said. “I have a feeling he’s not going to want to talk to strangers.”

They were outside now, leaning against the rented car, summer really over, the air cool.

“Do you think you’ll get to talk to the woman?” Crittendon said.

“I met her this afternoon.” What day was it? Thursday? DiMaggio looked at his watch. Thursday, October seventh. He’d gotten the call from Salter the night before. He hadn’t even been on this thing twenty-four hours and already it felt like he’d been here a goddamn week.

Crittendon turned to look at him, surprised. “Where?”

DiMaggio told him about the Vertical Club, and when he finished, Crittendon said, “What’s she like?”

“You mean, does she look like someone who got herself raped, Frank? Yeah, it was written all over her.”

“It’s not what I meant,” Crittendon said.

“I know it’s not. I’m sorry—it’s been a long day. Donnie Fuchs and his boys,
your
boys, finally wore my ass out.”

“It was a stupid question,” Crittendon said, as if he wanted to out-apologize DiMaggio. “What difference does it make what she’s like?”

DiMaggio said, “It always matters who they are, where they come from. Patty Bowman, the woman in the Kennedy Smith trial in Palm
Beach, she had one kind of back story. Unwed mother and so on. So you looked at her one way. Desiree Washington, with Tyson? She was a kid, and her being a kid, National Honor Society, head of her class, you better believe that mattered to the jury. Anita Hill and the jogger in Central Park and the woman with the Mets. Then there was a woman who said she was gang-raped by twenty pro football players. Where’d she come from? How did she get to that night, that place? I don’t care what Marty Perez thinks. Or what some loose-cannon brother thinks. We all want the same thing here, we meaning me and you and your boss. We just want to
know.
”

Crittendon said, “Do you think she’s got some kind of angle here?”

“She could, Frank. She could. Most people do, I’ve found.”

The GM sighed. DiMaggio couldn’t tell if it was a sigh of agreement, exhaustion, or disgust. “If I need to reach you?”

“The Sherry-Netherland when I’m in the city.”

DiMaggio got into the rented car, left Crittendon in the parking lot. He wondered about an angle, suddenly wanting to explain that there wouldn’t be just one. But why make him feel worse than he already did? DiMaggio would have had to tell him that everyone would have an angle here before they were through, whether they knew it or not, would admit it or not. It could be money, or getting famous, or even getting justice. Getting a story. Getting some
play.
DiMaggio could see it taking shape already, before he was a day into it. Perez here. Jimmy Carey, the brother, over there. Ted Salter worrying about the boys from Fukiko. Adair and Collins. Donnie Fuchs.

Making his way across the campus, hearing music in the cold night air, different music from every dorm, even some classical, DiMaggio thought: Somebody got jumped here. Smiling to himself, because he was using Donnie Fuchs’s word. Somebody
always
got jumped, if you really thought about it. The trick was finding out who.

And, if you were really lucky, why.

Ellis stuck his head inside the living room door, careful the way he always was when Richie was in action. Never knowing what to expect, what kind of show might be going on, how many people. But there wasn’t much: Richie and the girl were asleep on the floor in front of the television set on the big soft quilt Richie’d pulled off the bed. The porno tape was still playing.

Ellis looked at them, thinking every girl on campus must have their phone number. No, not just that. Ellis shook his head, all the way in the doorway now, looking down at them. Richie had to have some of that mental telepathy shit going for him. Some way he connected to them that Ellis had never been able to understand. Like Richie sounded some kind of dog whistle only the strange could hear. That morning, Ellis had barely noticed this one. All she’d done was walk in front of their car, give them a little smile. The next thing he knew, she was ringing the doorbell during
Love Connection.

Richie had given him that I-can’t-help-it look like he always did, then said, “You remember Jenna?”

Richie had told Ellis he could stay. He was always making fun of
Ellis, not in a mean way, because Richie always knew when to stop, just playing with him, because Ellis liked to sleep with something on, a light, the television, the radio. Then it was Richie who acted sometimes like he was afraid to fuck by himself. Ever since they were kids, he was always trying to get Ellis involved in a threesome, or more, thinking Ellis would like it as much as he did, as if anyone could like it the way Richie Collins did.

Ellis would go along sometimes, mostly because it was easier to go along, hating himself every time. Like that time in high school. Shit, it still made him ashamed just thinking about it, Richie doing that poor Spanish girl, or Puerto Rican, whatever she was. Richie doing it right there on the couch and Ellis not wanting to stay, but being afraid to leave because he didn’t want to make Richie mad, didn’t want to lose Richie, even then. So Ellis’d stayed, trying to pretend like he was watching the ball game. Like he couldn’t see. Couldn’t hear …

He’d always needed Richie.

Donnie’d said for both of them to lay low for a while, there were probably reporters staking out every bar in Fairfield County, trying to put them with some strange. Donnie got all worked up, the way he did, and said finally the one thing nobody needed right now was a picture in the
Post
of Ellis and Richie trying to make some kind of coed sandwich.

But Richie, god
damn
, he thought if you stayed at home, it didn’t count. Ellis’d seen guys addicted to shit his whole life, all the way back to the projects, but he’d never seen anybody have a need the way Richie had a need for pussy. Ellis said to him one time, “It’s like something chronic. Like you’ve got some kind of con
dition.
”

Then Ellis said to him, “What’s that medicine diabetics take?”

“Insulin,” Richie told him.

“Jumping somebody, that’s like your insulin then.”

Richie smiled at him and said, “Fresh, some people are just born lucky.”

He wondered sometimes how Richie had enough strength to play ball the way he went through life all-fucked-out.

Ellis needed some air, he decided just like that. He thought about just staying up here, taking out the blue bike—god
damn
he loved
that bike—maybe riding it all the way over to the college and back.

No, he needed to get away from Fulton for a while. Ellis knew where he wanted to go. Who he wanted to see. Just thinking it made him feel better. He went in and found the keys to the Jeep, not wanting to take his own car. Richie’d throw a fucking fit if he wanted to go out later. But Ellis came back, saw him there snoring, still with a hard-on, hand right there on Jenna, ready to go to work when he woke up.

He didn’t have to worry about Richie. Ellis could see the two other dirty tapes he’d rented, sitting right there on the VCR.

Ellis needed to get out. Coach Gary’d said they could have tomorrow off, he did that sometimes, even during camp, and then the press would write him up as some master psychologist or whatnot. Say how well he understood the long season. Ellis knew Gary had this girl he flew in sometimes when his wife was out of town with the kids. It was some anchorwoman from the Midwest. They probably just had the one day before the sparrow wife came back.

So Ellis had the whole night. He could feel all the pressure coming right off him all of a sudden, feeling light. He closed the door softly, went downstairs. He got in the Jeep, rolled down the windows, smiling to himself, knowing he’d be cruising down past Central Park by midnight, easy.

The best part was, nobody’d know, not even Richie. Like he was invisible.

All the years they’d all been watching him, when they said he was as good at being watched as he was everything else, they didn’t know Ellis Adair’s secrets. Even Richie, who thought he knew everything, he didn’t know.

They didn’t know Ellis really wanted to be invisible, for one damn thing.