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Mays stopped to take a breath.

It was like he was reloading. DiMaggio was starting to wonder if he ever ran out of saliva.

“When you’d go to these parties, you ever go to the same place more than once? Was there a regular circuit?” DiMaggio asked.

Boyzie Mays leaned back, put his feet up on the back of the seat in front of him. He was wearing a purple silk shirt, matching purple slacks, and no socks to go with purple shoes that looked more like bedroom slippers. And even in the bad light, DiMaggio could see
some little design Mays had razored into his hairdo, above the ear.

DiMaggio thought: Who was the first black guy to do it? Go into the barber’s, sit down, and say to the guy, “A little off the top, and could you also write in my nickname over my ear?”

Out loud, Mays went through his list of famous names: a tennis player; a rock star DiMaggio was vaguely aware of; then another tennis player, French, who’d opened the best restaurant in Tribeca, at least according to Boyzie Mays, who finally said, “But I tell you who threw the best parties. Not only threw the best parties, but even started to show up at games after a while, sit in those rich-boy seats ’cross from our bench. You know the big model named Dale? Dale the bitch from the billboards a couple of years ago? In that black underwear?”

DiMaggio just waited, not wanting to throw him off while he sorted through the rocks in his head.

Mays clapped his hands. “Dale Larson!” he said, all excited. “Dale Larson threw the best parties, oh fuck yeah.”

DiMaggio took out a small spiral notebook and wrote down Dale Larson, which was another cutting-edge name he was supposed to know and didn’t. The last model he’d paid any attention to was Twiggy.

He’d call Joey Bernstein for an address or a phone number. Joey knew everybody.

He and Boyzie Mays took the elevator down to the street, the Thirty-third Street side, came out the employees’ entrance, right next to a saloon called Charley O’s. Boyzie Mays took off the wire-rimmed glasses he’d been wearing and put on some big shades, like he was getting back into character. Boyzie in his cool shades and cool pose, in his purple outfit, his initials diagrammed into his hair, DiMaggio able to see the writing now. Boyzie looking bigger outside, in real life, than he had inside.

They all did.

DiMaggio said, “You think Ellis Adair raped that girl, Boyzie?”

“No.”

“How come?”

“Because everybody has a line they won’t cross. Real simple for some, too: Live or die. Me, I went to rehab. And when I look back,
it really don’t matter what got me there.
Staying
, now, that was a different matter. Once I
stayed
, that was Boyzie Mays saying, Fuck, I ain’t
ready
to die yet. I look at Ellis, and look at what I know about him, and, my opinion? I don’t think he crosses over the rape line. Maybe I’m full of shit. I can’t really explain it. But if you’re asking me, put it on the line, did he rape that girl, no, I don’t think he did.”

DiMaggio said, “Then how come he ran?”

Boyzie Mays looked at him over the top of his shades and said, “Maybe the boy decided the rest of the world finally crossed over the line with him.”

Mays walked over to the corner of Thirty-third and Eighth, hailed a cab. DiMaggio watched the cab disappear into the uptown traffic. He was deciding whether or not to walk back to the Sherry when Donnie Fuchs, Adair and Collins’s agent, came out of the employees’ entrance.

The clothes were as sharp as the first time DiMaggio had met him, up in Fulton, but it was as if Donnie Fuchs, who had been such a tough guy that day in Frank Crittendon’s office, had shrunk in the weeks since. His color was bad. Now the clothes, a shapeless blazer, gray T-shirt, white slacks, looked even baggier on him than they were probably supposed to.

“DiMaggio,” he said, making no move to shake hands.

“Sorry about Richie, Donnie.”

Fuchs said, “I was just upstairs with some of the Knicks PR people making funeral arrangements. We’d do it faster, but with a homicide and all …” He shrugged. It seemed to take so much out of him. DiMaggio was waiting for Fuchs to sit down on the sidewalk until he got his strength back.

DiMaggio said, “Where’s the funeral going to be? Over in Jersey City someplace?”

“Saint Patrick’s,” Donnie Fuchs said, and managed a grin. “No disrespect intended, but do you believe that shit? Richie Collins in Saint Patrick’s? There goes the neighborhood.”

“Where’s Ellis, Donnie?”

“I told Salter, I told the cops, I’ll tell you.” He sounded whiny now. “I swear, I haven’t heard from the guy.”

“Not even since—”

“Not even since his buddy got himself stabbed to death up in Fulton, though for the life of me I don’t know what he was doing up in Fulton.” There was no one around them. Fuchs lowered his voice anyway. “It true you found him?”

“No comment.”

“I’m not the press.”

“You’re also not my friend, Donnie. No disrespect intended.”

Fuchs started to go. DiMaggio put both hands on his shoulders. “Where’s Ellis, Donnie?”

“Let me ask you something, DiMaggio. Whether we’re friends or not. You think I want this? You think I want him away so that they can start to turn him into a fucking
suspect
here? I may not be one of nature’s noblemen, but I did not get to where I am by being stupid. If I knew where he was, I would go get him with the
army.
”

“You’re his agent.”

Donnie Fuchs casually reached up, took DiMaggio’s hands off him.

“No,” he said. “I’m not. I’m like everybody except Richie, and I wasn’t always so sure about Richie.” Fuchs shook his head. “I’m just another butt boy,” he said.

She had just hung up on Brian Hyland when Jimmy came into the living room. Hyland had said he wanted to take a ride over and have another chat with her.

Hyland had been in to see her that afternoon, acting very nice the whole time, but wanting to know if she had an alibi for Monday night, when Richie Collins had been murdered. Hannah told him then and told him again on the phone, she had been at her mother’s house in Litchfield, with her mother’s housekeeper, who house-sat when the house was empty. Sheila Carey was in Palm Beach for a couple of weeks, visiting friends. Hannah just wanted to get away from New York for a day. The tabloid shows were in a bidding war, trying to get her to do an exclusive interview.
A Current Affair
and
Inside Edition
had gone to $500,000, according to Harvey Kuhn;
Hard Copy
had decided to bypass Harvey, they just kept leaving messages on Jimmy’s machine, saying they would top any bid by any other show.

It was like
The Price Is Right
a little bit, Hannah thought. Or maybe that old show—which one was it? with Door Number One
and Door Number Two and Door Number Three?—where you guessed where the big prize was.

It was one of those times when she started thinking about A.J., what he’d done to her. She loved him, of course. She was sure that he still loved her, but if he hadn’t treated her that way, hadn’t left her …

She didn’t tell Brian Hyland about A.J. because she didn’t talk about him anymore, even with Beth. She just told him that she watched the news shows up in Litchfield, watched
Entertainment Tonight
, said good night to Imparo, the housekeeper, a sweet woman from Colombia, slept fourteen hours, then drove back to New York the next morning and found out about Richie Collins watching television.

“Hey, I believe you, I believe you,” Hyland had said just now on the phone. “I just want to ask you a few more questions on the other.”

He meant the rape.

“Nothing big, nothing to worry about,” Hyland said. “Could I come back in tomorrow morning? Say ten o’clock?”

Hannah knew he wasn’t asking her, he was telling her.

“Whatever you say,” she said.

Thinking: Even the good guys bullshitted you when they wanted something.

“Okay then,” Hyland said. “I’m writing it down. Thursday at ten, Hannah Carey. And if you see your brother, tell him I’d like to ask him a few questions, too. Like I said, no big deal.”

“We’ll be expecting you then,” Hannah said, and hung up as Jimmy came walking into the living room, fresh out of the shower, a red towel in his hand, a white one wrapped around his perfect waist. Hannah noticed he didn’t just have his usual perfect bod, but a perfect tan, too. He had been out in Hollywood with Bob and Ken and the two writers they had put on her movie, standing in for Hannah. “The first half of the movie is back story, Sis,” Jimmy had told her before he left. “They tell your life story, they tell the story of the players. Setting up, you know,
that
night at the end of the first two hours.”

Hannah knew her life was going to be condensed to four whole hours now, instead of two.

Jimmy had jumped at the chance to go out there for a couple of weeks, round-trip first-class fare, what he said was a junior suite at the Four Seasons Hotel. “On Doheny,” Jimmy’d said one night on the phone, as if that meant something to her.

Now he was back, back on Monday morning after taking the red-eye, on his way out at ten o’clock at night, meeting some friends at some new hot place on Second Avenue. Hannah didn’t get the name when Jimmy told her. She wondered if it ever got confusing for Jimmy, knowing all the hot new places all the time.

Maybe there was some hot button you could press on the phone to get up-to-the-minute information on hot new places.

Hot button. Hot places. That was a good one, Hannah thought. For me. She thought about running it past Jimmy, but he’d probably just give her that look like she was hopelessly square. Or hopeless.

Or just dumb.

“Hey,” Jimmy said. He’d said something, Hannah hadn’t heard him. “We’ll be expecting who?”

“Detective Hyland.”

“You talked to him already.”

Hannah shrugged. “He wants to talk to me again.”

“Maybe he doesn’t buy your alibi.”

“I don’t like that word. Alibi.”

“Why not? You think he came in today ’cause he missed you?”

“He doesn’t think I’m a suspect for God’s sake. He’s just doing his job.”

“Right.”

“What does that mean?” she said, starting to wonder where he was going with this. “Right?”

Jimmy grinned, playing with her.

“Where’d Imparo sleep?”

“In the guest room where she always sleeps. You know Mom. If she thought she slept in her bed, she’d have to call those people that deliver mattresses right to the house, get a new one.”

“The guest room in the back? You could have lit firecrackers in the front of the house, you wouldn’t wake Imparo up. Remember the party we threw that time a few years ago when Mom was in West Palm? If she slept through that, she could sleep through anything.”

“What’s ‘anything’ supposed to mean?”

“You could have gone out.”

Hannah got up, went into the kitchen for a Snapple. From in there she said, “If you think you’re being funny, you’re not.”

Jimmy waited until she came back. “Sorry,” he said.

“Mean it,” she said, just like when they were kids.

“Mean it,” he said, holding his hand up, like taking a Scout’s oath. “Cross my heart and hope to have looks to die for.” He started for his bedroom and Hannah said to him, “And what about you, Jim?”

He turned around, hair shiny and mussed, looking more like a teenager than ever. Grinning his cocky grin, what he liked to tell Hannah was his babe grin.

“What about me?”

“What about an alibi for you? Brian Hyland said he’d like to ask you a few questions tomorrow, too. After he talks to me. What kind of alibi do you have for Monday night?”

His face held the grin, but he stopped with his eyes. “Why would I need an alibi?” Jimmy said, “Which I have, by the way. It’s one of the benefits of knowing every single bartender in town. What’d they used to say on
Cheers
? Everybody knows my name, they’re always glad I came.”

“You’re the one who tried to beat him up on national TV practically,” she said. “Defending your sister’s honor. Maybe you’d take it one step farther.”

“Now who’s not funny?” Jimmy Carey said.

“Me,” Hannah said. “But then, I haven’t been funny in a long time.”

Jimmy stared at her. “Let me do the jokes around here,” he said, and went to get dressed for the new hot place.

Hannah slept late, until about nine-thirty, and went to knock on Jimmy’s door. But there was no need, it was still open, the red towel on the bed, the other one on the floor, the way he’d left them. Maybe he’d gotten lucky. Or maybe he’d just crashed at a friend’s apartment. He’d been doing that the last month if he was out too late, not
wanting to scare Hannah in the middle of the night; knowing how easy it was to give her the jumps now.

He probably had forgotten already that Brian Hyland wanted to talk to him, too.

The doormen were the same way about not giving her the jumps, even buzzing her to tell her if Jimmy was on his way up. So when the buzzer went off now, she figured it was either Jimmy coming home or Brian Hyland showing up early.

Hannah went over to the speaker near the front door and imagined Ernesto, the tiny guy from Ecuador, not much bigger than a midget, down there with Brian Hyland, if it was Brian. She wondered if Brian had to show him a badge. It would probably give Ernesto a real thrill, make him feel like he was in a movie or something.

Did everybody think of things that way?

How everything that was happening would look up on the screen?

Did everybody step back sometimes and imagine the whole thing was a movie?

Ernesto’s voice, crackling over the cheap intercom system, said, “I got two women to see you here.”

He stopped and she could hear him talking to them.

“One’s name is Kelly.”

He started to say something else, but Hannah pressed her own talk button now, cutting him off.

“I don’t know anybody named Kelly.”

She released her finger just as Ernesto was saying, “—Teresa Delgado.”

Hannah Carey thought: Her I know.

“Send them up,” she said.

“I got this address from Mr. Perez,” Teresa Delgado said, giving Hannah a firm handshake, like she was practicing to be a guy. “I hope you don’t mind.”