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“Could you see Hannah attracted to someone like that?”

“Maybe.”

DiMaggio said, “Richie Collins is her type?”

Fine sipped some of his tea. “I didn’t say that. You asked me if I could see Hannah being
attracted.
You say Ellis is fascinating? Shit, so is Richie because of his ability to draw all kinds of women to him. I tell you what, I’ve always been amazed at the range of his conquests. He feels this need to always bring them back to the hotel bar before they head upstairs. I’ve been introduced to topless dancers in Chicago and a psychiatrist in Denver. I swear to God, there was an ex-nun in Portland. Somehow he just sucks them in.” Fine tried to look embarrassed. “Do I sound like something less than a feminist here?”

“I don’t give a shit one way or another.”

Fine said, “No, I don’t suppose you do.”

DiMaggio said, “Why don’t you tell me about you and Hannah.”

Fine had met her at a Knicks game. One of the trainers at her exercise club trained some vice president of the Garden. “The suit directly
below Ted Salter.” The trainer would get tickets sometimes and one night he couldn’t go so he gave the tickets to Hannah, who went with a girlfriend, Lisa something.

“Lisa Dee, she called herself. I just met her the one time, after this game. I never knew if it was her last name or an initial. But I had seen her around before with a couple of the other guys, I just figured she was on the circuit.”

“Circuit?”

“Girls for all seasons. Baseball, football, basketball. Some of them have been out there as long as I’ve been in New York.”

“We used to call them Baseball Annies.”

“They’re more versatile now. Maybe it’s a Deion Sanders thing. They’re two- and three-sport girls. They come up to training camp, they even go down to Florida for spring training.”

“Any of them hookers?”

“They may be. Nobody ever asked me for money. A lot of them are bored rich girls, with enough money to support their habit.”

“Same habit as always.”

“Thrill-fucking athletes.”

Lisa knew the drill. During warm-ups, women looking to set something up for later on would present themselves under the basket. The security guys and cops would let them stay until just before the horn sounded, announcing the game was about to start. These were the ones on the circuit, the ones looking to get on.

DiMaggio: “Then what?”

“It’s pretty interesting. It’s all done with eye contact, smiles, nods. It’s like this game goes on before the game. If you see somebody you want, all of a sudden there’d be a problem with your sneakers or the tape job on your ankle. You might discover, shit, I need to do a little more stretching. The trainer comes out. You tell him where she is, what she’s wearing. He goes under the basket, retrieves balls while we’re shooting, makes sure he makes contact with her.”

“It sounds like high school.”

“It is. Anyway, he’ll tell her ‘Play-by-Play, forty-five minutes after the game.’ It’s a bar here they put in when they redid the Garden, built the Paramount theater and all the rest of it. You take a shower, talk to the press, go in there. There she is. There Hannah was.
Wearing the blue dress I’d seen her wearing under the basket. Some of them wear hot clothes to make you notice them. Lisa did. Hannah didn’t. It was just this elegant-looking blue dress.”

“So that’s how you met her.”

“That’s how I met Hannah and Lisa Dee.”

“They were both there.”

“They sure were.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it became obvious after a while, as we all got a little high on wine, that they were an entry.”

“You’re saying—”

“—we all left together.”

“—you and Hannah
and
this other woman.”

“It’s usually not my style. But yes. Just the one time. First time. We never did it again.”

“She ever explain it?”

“She said she thought she was supposed to be wild if she wanted to meet athletes.”

“Even the Ivy Leaguers?”

“Even them.”

She knew a little bit about basketball, a lot more about him. “Like I was some kind of exam she’d been studying for.” She said she wanted to meet him because he was different. And so they began their affair.

“The only way to describe Hannah is as a passionate joiner. Everything I liked, she liked.”

So they went to art galleries. When the Knicks would get a day off from practice, they would go up to his weekend place in Rhinebeck. She talked a lot about her brother the actor, never about her mother, just that she had been a tennis player and lived in some ritzy part of Connecticut. In nice ways, he would ask her why she wasn’t doing more with her life than exercise clubs and waitressing. She said that until she’d met him, it was like she’d hit some Pause button on her life. She was in therapy, she told him that. She said she was just waiting to see what the “next thing” was going to be.

Fine: “After a while, it became obvious that in her mind, the next thing was getting married to me.”

“That wasn’t in your program.”

“It was always a bigger deal to her than to me. I never stopped dating other women.”

“That bother her?”

“I didn’t think it was any of her business, frankly.”

It became her business, as it turned out, when she decided to surprise him one time at a hotel in Landover, Maryland, when the Knicks were playing the Bullets in one of the last games of the regular seasons. She told the desk clerk she was Mrs. Fine, got a key, went up to his room the afternoon before the game, and found him in bed with one of the flight attendants from the team plane.

He thought it was over right there. She didn’t. She called, she sent telegrams. She asked
him
for another chance. She would show up outside practice when the Knicks were getting ready for the play-offs. After a couple of months, Fine assumed she had given up. The season ended with the Knicks losing in the finals of their conference. Fine went to Europe. Hannah Carey was out of his life, out of his mind.

“She wasn’t the type for the circuit, so I didn’t expect her to keep showing up for games or anything.”

“You never saw her again.”

“One time. It must have been the week before she said Ellis and Richie raped her. Up here. I went into this place Gates, over in New Canaan, to have a beer and watch
Monday Night Football.
I came down these steps from the street, and there’s a door that leads into the bar area. And there she was, sitting at the bar talking to Richie.”

“The stories keep saying that she didn’t meet Collins and Adair until the night they raped her.”

“Hannah always had a rich fantasy life, Mr. DiMaggio. You ought to keep that in mind.”

Eleven o’clock, Saturday morning. Third Saturday in October. Marty Perez sat in the parking lot in front of the Fulton Sports Shop, at the intersection of Route 7 and Old Ridgefield Road and waited for the guy to come out. Marty hoped he’d be alone when he did.

Marty was in the front seat of his old blue BMW, the tape playing softly. Rubén Blades was almost talking his way through the ballad. Now he found himself going right along with Blades in Spanish, on every word. Marty surprised himself sometimes. Usually it was when he was alone, like this, when he was relaxed, waiting for something to happen. Then there’d be no urge to de-spic himself, to turn himself back into Marty Peters.

Go back to being Marty the WASP.

Sometimes it was food that did it, the taste of something in a restaurant suddenly making it all vivid, and he would be at his grandmother’s table, eating
arroz con gandules
, rice and that kind of pea they could pick off the trees themselves and shuck.
Arroz con gandules
or
asopao
, the stew she would cook up sometimes on Sunday
nights, with a side dish of
sorullos
, his favorite of all, cornmeal fritters deep-fried into little sausages.

Sometimes it was music that did it. Like now. This old album from Blades, one of the three he made with the great Willie Colon. Blades was Panamanian, but old Willie was Puerto Rican all the way. Marty knew what part of the island, but had forgotten. Fuck it. He let them both take him home now. Closed his eyes and thought of the spring nights when he would be back sometimes on school vacations, going over, playing some blackjack in the tiny casino at Palmas, like he was gambling in somebody’s living room. Then walking out to the beach after that, late, with a bottle of Don Q, and waiting for the little barmaid in there—Elena—to get off. Then she would come through the trees not wanting to have a drink or wait, undressing both of them, whispering,
“Ahora mismo.”

Reaching for his belt buckle and telling him, “Right now …”

Blades finished the song and there was a click from the tape player as the thing began to rewind. Marty gave his head a little shake and looked at the front door of the Sports Shop. There was still a line, fathers and sons mostly, waiting to go in and get autographs, the little bastards in their Knicks sweatshirts and cheap blue-and-orange Knicks caps, the fathers looking bored, checking their watches. It probably seemed like a great outing, a way to kill off time with the kid, now they had to stand in this goddamn line. Good, Marty thought. Let them wait, too. He could sit here and listen to the music, try to figure out how he was going to approach this, get into it with him.

Marty smiled. They could call him a bullshitter all they wanted. Call him the
king
of the spic bullshitters. They were
pendejos.
All of them. Worthless shits.
“¡Pendejos!”
he said out loud, spitting it out. The reason he would be back on top, in television this time, bigger than ever, was because he was
here
on a Saturday morning, while the
pendejo
shits were still asleep.

It was Michael Cantor who gave him the idea. Marty knew he took Cantor for granted sometimes, forgot what a great newspaper editor he really was, a great
idea
man. But then Marty would be in the middle of something, not knowing where to go with it, and Cantor would do everything except take his cards and play his hand for him.

They were having lunch the day before, their usual Friday lunch, Chinese, Tommy’s Gold Coin, a couple of blocks up Second from the
News
building. They were walking back to the office when Cantor said, “Incidentally, I think we’ve gone as far as we can with Hannah’s side of it. At least for now.”

Incidentally.
Cantor always used “incidentally” or “by the way” to shift gears. They had been talking about the Giants. Cantor’s family had tickets that went all the way back to the Polo Grounds. Sometimes he would get going on them, who the quarterback ought to be, what was wrong with the offense, and Marty would think about maybe putting something in his drink to get him to shut the fuck up.

Then out of the blue, Cantor hit him with this Hannah thing, catching Marty off guard. The editor was good at that. He had a lot of conversational moves, always acting like it was an accident when he made the point he wanted to make all along. Sometimes Cantor didn’t act like Marty’s editor at all but his therapist.

Or maybe his conscience.

Marty got defensive right away. He couldn’t help himself. He was a thin-skinned spic and always had been. He’d write the worst sort of shit about people and expect them to take it, then feel himself going to pieces himself at the hint of criticism.

“You want me off it,” he said to Cantor, “just say so.”

“No, no, no,” Cantor said. “Let me finish here. She’s given us a great run, we’ve been ahead of everybody else in town from the first day. The circulation guys were on the phone again this morning, begging for more.
Squealing.
”

They were waiting for the light at Forty-second.

Cantor said, “Take a look at this.” He reached into the pocket of the Brooks Brothers suit and pulled out a crumpled piece of graph paper. He held the paper out in front of him so they both could see it.

Cantor said, “We haven’t had a run like this since that judge went nuts and started sending rubbers to his old girlfriend instead of Hallmark cards. Remember that one? Anyway, Hannah gave us a two percent bump when we had her out front last Monday. Four percent on Friday. You don’t think
that
gave all the car advertisers hard-ons?
And this past Sunday? They figure an extra thirty thousand copies.”

They went across Forty-second, Marty just taking it all in, chewing on his cigar.

“All I’m asking you,” Cantor said, “is that we see if there’s anything for us on the
other
side. Even if it’s for one day.”

“You want me to do it?” Marty asked.

“It’s not like you haven’t done it before. Keep coming at them the same way. Hammering away. Like a quarterback throwing short all day, the same pattern. Finally, the cornerback comes up and—badda bing!—the quarterback throws the bomb. It’s my opinion that you could give Collins and Adair a day and not lose her. You could finesse them. Cut a deal—”

“A deal?” Marty said incredulously. “We’d be offering them tipping money.”

“Not money. Offer them the wood.”

After all these years, Cantor was still in love with the lingo.
Wood
meant the front page, from when they used to use wood to set the type out there.

“Tell them it will be the wood in a good way this time,” Cantor said. “We’ll do it like
Vanity Fair
does. Shit, you see some celebrity out there, you know before you read the article it’s going to be a blow job. So bullshit these guys a little. Tell them you’ll turn the column over to them and they can write their own defense in the first person.”

“Bullshit being a specialty of mine, of course.”

Cantor smiled. “You can make a big show out of it. I’m Marty Perez, and I’m big enough to give everybody a chance. Look at me, I’m hammering the shit out of them and they’re
still
talking to me.”

They were in the lobby now, over by the gigantic globe. Cantor never walked in the entrance on Forty-second and Second, he always liked to walk past the globe.

Marty shook his head slowly. “These guys aren’t talking.”