Jump (20 page)

Bob was leaning forward. What color were his eyes? Hannah wanted to call them beige. She could feel Kenny leaning forward, so could Bob, so without looking, he just held out a hand.

“Understand,” he said. “We’re not telling their story. The hell with Ellis Adair and Richie Collins. We’re telling your story.”

He put the hand on her arm. “Our only problem is finding a writer who can tell it as eloquently as you did at the Plaza.”

Ted Salter said, “What do you think his next move is? Unbuttoning her blouse?”

DiMaggio didn’t pay any attention to him, just watched it play out, more interested in Hannah’s reaction than in the Hollywood bullshitter. He felt as if he were on the viewing side of some two-way mirror and Hannah and the bullshitter were in a motel room.

Way back at the beginning, Salter had said he thought he was hiring a private eye. Now he felt like one.

DiMaggio, the peeper.

“This kid has sent more TV movies into the toilet than you could count,” Salter said. “But you’ve got to give him high marks on the pitch.”

“She likes it,” DiMaggio said.

“You sound surprised.”

“Listen,” DiMaggio said, staring at the screen. In the conference room, Bob said something that got lost because Harvey Kuhn talked over him.

Hannah: “I think so.”

Jimmy Carey: “It’s called a treatment. Like an outline.”

Bob: “We’ve already got a writer in mind. You might even know of his work.
People
did a big story on him not long ago. He did the story of the breast-cancer doctor last year. Meredith Baxter? Did a huge number during the November sweeps.”

Hannah: “When she finally decided to go holistic?”

Ken: “You
did
see it!”

Ken tried to come out of his seat but didn’t push forward hard enough and fell back, his feet up in the air.

Jimmy Carey: “The guy who played the young doctor in
Trapper John, M.D.
—”

Ken: “—Gregory Harrison! Great guy. Played the acupuncturist!”

Bob stood up. DiMaggio liked his moves. It was a way of taking the room back from the rest of them.

Bob: “You may hear from Thad—the writer—in a couple of days. One way or the other, we want to make this film happen. Make it
right.
Before you talk to anybody else, we’d at least like you to take a look at our treatment.”

Harvey Kuhn: “We’d be under no obligations.”

He just needed to get into it.

Bob: “None whatsoever.”

Ken: “Of
course
not!”

Ken managed to get out of the chair now and went over and gave Harvey, who was his size, a slap on the back.

DiMaggio went back to watching Hannah. The conversation had moved away from her again, and she didn’t like that very much.

Hannah: “I’d—
we’d
—be very interested in seeing the treatment as soon as you have it.”

Now she stood up. Bob came over to her. He was smiling. He wasn’t the pushy salesman, but he was the relentless one. Bob was the closer. You could see he knew he had her now. He took both of her hands in his.

Next to DiMaggio, Ted Salter said, “Yecch.”

Bob: “As I said, let’s make this happen.”

Giving both hands a tug on “let’s.”

Hannah: “I don’t know—”

Bob: “—and you’re not supposed to. That’s our job.”

In the fifth-floor room, down the hall from the locker rooms at Madison Square Garden, Ted Salter’s own private screening room, Salter said, “What are you staring at?”

“Her,” DiMaggio said.

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking I might want to try another approach.”

“You’re getting paranoid,” Richie said.

They were in the Jeep, coming down the Merritt Parkway from Hartford. They’d played an exhibition game against the Celtics up there, winning by five, six points, something like that, Ellis couldn’t even remember. That or how many points he scored. Everybody else always got excited about his stats, how many times he’d done this and that. Not Ellis. All he had ever cared about was two things: Did we win?

And when’s the next game?

Richie was driving the Jeep. They were listening to some girl group. Ellis had seen the tape go into the player but couldn’t remember now whether it was the Funky Divas singing and the name of the tape was
En Vogue.
Or if it was the other way around and the group was En Vogue.

Shit like this, if he worried on it too much, always gave him a headache.

Richie had been big on girl rock and roll singers since he fucked one—Ellis couldn’t remember that group either—in Seattle one time.

“Am not,” Ellis said finally, after trying to figure out who was singing. His eyes were closed. He had the seat back as far as it would go. He’d only played the first half against the Celtics. Gary hadn’t even wanted to play him that much, but they both knew there’d have been a riot in the Hartford Civic Center if he didn’t. They’d cut the number of preseason games down to six, some deal Richie said the union cut. Richie was the only one who seemed pissed about it. He liked traveling before the season started, get his strange lined up for later on, some dump town like Milwaukee.

“Am not what?” Richie said. He’d either forgotten what he’d asked already or was playing with Ellis, looking to start something. It woke Ellis up a little.

That and the fact that Richie was driving real fast all of a sudden, one in the morning on the Merritt with hardly anybody else on the road, just a car passing them every so often. Richie’d told him he’d made a date with this high school girl he’d run into, after some signing he did in Fulton.

“You want to know who it is?” Richie said.

“No,” Ellis said. “You know my rule.”

Richie said, “You don’t want to know what you don’t want to know.”

Ellis said, “Especially when they’re under.”

Richie had all sorts of expressions. Over meant they were older than eighteen. Under meant younger. Ellis didn’t keep count, but he’d noticed a lot more unders lately. You’d have thought he’d have enough college girls during training camp, the school right there. But Richie liked to prowl the local high schools.

Or have the high school girls prowl him.

He said this one was an under who could pass for an over, no problem.

“Am not paranoid,” Ellis said, getting back to what he wanted to talk about, which was the phone. “It’s just that every time I’m on the phone I hear this click-click-click shit. I mean, what’s up with that?”

“Fresh,” Richie said, “you can’t even get the CD
in
the machine, now you’re some kind of electronic surveillance man?”

Ellis said, “I think it’s tapped is all.” He reached down and flicked the lever underneath the seat and it popped up into place, like on an
airplane. Now he turned the volume down on the music, En Vogue or the Funky Divas or whoever the fuck they were. “And I’ll tell you something else: I think someone’s been watching the house. Not all the time, but sometimes.”

“You’re starting to sound like one of those guys, all they want to talk about is the Kennedy assassination,” Richie said, then gave him a quick sideways glance and added, “You know, always thinking someone besides Lee Harvey Oswald”—giving him all three names—“was the shooter.”

“I know who shot Kennedy,” Ellis said. “I’m just telling you, you’re never there as much as I am, that two straight days there was the same van across the street.”

Richie said, “You mind if I turn this back up?”

“En Vogue …” Ellis said it vaguely, so he could go either way with it.

“Are they hot or what?” Richie said.

It was important to Ellis, being right at least once in a while.

Ellis said, “I think somebody might be watching us come in and out, see who we’re with, so maybe we should both be a little more careful.”

Richie sighed. “Meaning me.”

“Goddamn Rich, meaning both of us. Till this shit dies down or whatever.”

“Didn’t I take the heat off for a couple of days with that dickhead Perez?”

“You mean, giving him A.J. that way? Getting A.J. into it.”

Richie said, “Let the Ivy Leaguer talk about all the places
his
dick has been for a while.”

“Doesn’t get our ass out of traction.”

“You got something to say, Fresh, why don’t you come right out with it before you drop me.” Ellis was supposed to leave him off at Gates in New Canaan. Where the high school girl was waiting for him.

Ellis thought: White girls from the suburbs run around at night like they’re from the projects and their mothers are over working a motel near the Lincoln Tunnel.

Ellis said to Richie, “I just don’t want one of those
National
Enquirer
TV shows getting more into my business than they already
are
in my business. Is all.”

Richie turned the radio off with one of his edgy, jittery moves. Ellis saw it on the court all the time, Richie getting a shove he didn’t like or fucking up himself but wanting to blame it on somebody else, then he’d be all wired for the next couple of minutes, doing crazy shit, until Gary Lenz finally had to get him out of the game, cool his ass off.

Here we go, Ellis thought.

Ellis tried to go over the whole conversation in his head real fast, trying to remember what part had set him off. It couldn’t have been the part about the TV shows, Ellis’d heard Richie say the same thing plenty of times since all this had started.

Richie didn’t say anything right away, just gunned the engine a little, like he was passing somebody, except there was nobody else on the road. Ellis tried to see the speedometer and couldn’t.

They both knew that Ellis didn’t like it when he drove too fast. But then Richie always told him that if you wanted to make a list of all the things that scared Ellis Adair, you’d end up with the Sears catalogue.

Ellis didn’t say anything, hoping Richie was just in a hurry to get to his high school girl.

“You know your problem lately, Fresh? I’ll tell you what. Your problem is that first you tell
me
how to handle this shit. Then you start talking all over the place and acting like you want to handle it your
own
self.”

“That’s not—”

“—true? It’s not? If the phone was tapped, you don’t think I’d know it? You think I wouldn’t check it out myself?”

They were going seventy. Ellis felt like he did in a plane sometimes when they’d hit some chop in the night and he couldn’t look out the window the way he liked to and see something. See
any
goddamn thing. Just hold on and ride it out in the dark.

Richie said, “The guy in the van is from some tree place. ‘Save a Tree’ is the name of the outfit. They usually ride around in some station wagon. But it broke down. So one of the Save a Tree guys had
to use his own car. Which happens to be a beat-up blue van. Not the
Hard
Fucking
Copy
television show.”

Seventy-five now. Richie was back in the right lane. Ellis always worried about getting pulled over, having to go through some song and dance, not knowing if the cop was going to let him off because he was so happy to meet Fresh Adair—“Fresh in the flesh,” Richie called situations like that—or fuck with him because he
was
Fresh Adair. Richie never worried about cops, never got pulled over. It was like he had his own radar going, a different kind than he had with women, but just as good.

The Jeep hurtled through these pockets of fog on the Merritt.

Ellis said, “I’m not trying—”

“—to handle things?”

It was never good when he started finishing Ellis’s sentences.

“ ’Course you are,” Richie said. “That’s exactly what you’re doing, Fresh. You’ve got all these new things added to the things you’re always afraid of. ’Fraid of the dark. ’Fraid of flying—”

Eighty miles an hour now.

“Slow down!” Ellis yelled.

Embarrassed right away at the way it sounded, like some girlie thing. But not able to hold it back.

“Slow the fuck
down
!”

Richie did. Ellis was breathing hard. Thinking: Harder than I ever breathe in a damn game.

“Sometimes I get the feeling that inside your head,” Richie said slowly, “you blame me for us being in this … situation. And myself, I don’t see it that way at all.”

Ellis said, “It’s me and you, Rich. You know that. Always
has
been me and you. Always will be. I don’t want that to ever change. But I just wish you hadn’t gone to see her.”

Richie was back to the speed limit. Ellis leaned forward in his seat, put his hands on his knees, which were jiggling up and down.

Richie said, “You may be right, Fresh. Maybe I shouldn’t’ve. But it was bothering me, trying to figure out what she told the cops, what she might’ve told the newspapers, what she might’ve told this asshole DiMaggio. See, what I’m starting to wonder is just how much of that
night the bitch actually
does
remember. Shit, sometimes
I
don’t remember it that much. One night out of a million nights.” Richie shook his head. “You know I got a great head for details, Fresh. Especially when it comes to strange. But a goddamn year ago? I’m supposed to print out a play-by-play sheet every time I get my dick wet?”

Amazing, Ellis was thinking, this was as close as they’d come to talking about it. Getting it all out in the open. You’d think they’d have talked all about it by now, but this was the way they’d handled things their whole lives. Talked
around
things, never right at them.

“Who knows what she saw,
thinks
she saw, as shit-faced as she was,” Richie said. “Point is,” he said, “I think if she had any more than has been in the papers, it would’ve come out by now.”

“You think?” Ellis made sure it didn’t come out in a pushy way. Just asking a question, letting Richie be the expert.

“Yeah, I do.”

Ellis said, “You think she might not? Remember, I mean?”

“Shit,
you
remember how drunk she was when we met her that one time the week before, she was looking for A.J.?”

“Vodka,” Ellis said.

“With a slice of orange. I never saw that one before.”