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“I’m aware of that,” Fine said. “But a witness to what? The crime of omission? I didn’t lie to the police. They asked me if I saw Hannah at Mulligan’s. I told them yes, I saw her at the bar. They asked me if I talked to her at the bar. I said no. Technically, it was true. I talked
to her outside, when she followed me out. They asked me when I stopped seeing her. I told them. The only person I lied to was you.”

DiMaggio said, “Where’d you go after you left Mulligan’s?”

“Does it really matter?” Fine said, sounding irritated again.

“Humor me.”

Fine looked away, said, “There’s a little duck pond just down the road. Down by Route 123. We went there.”

“And did what?”

“Talked.”

“What else?”

“We just
talked
, goddamnit!” Fine snapped.

“I don’t think so,” DiMaggio said. “You had sex with her, didn’t you?”

Fine looked at him.

DiMaggio kept going. “She goes for a ride with an old boyfriend and just talked, so what? She can tell the cops that. But she can’t tell them she went off and got laid in an old boyfriend’s car the night she says she got herself raped. She either tells Hyland all of it or none of it. Because if she tells him about going for a ride, he asks you. And you might tell him that a couple of hours before she alleges that she got raped, she’s all sweaty with you down by the goddamn duck pond.”

DiMaggio made a little motion with his coffee cup. Cheers. “Isn’t that what happened?”

“
Yes!
” It came out in a hiss.

They sat there glaring at each other across the fence-post coffee table.

“So why? Here’s this woman you’re doing everything to get away from, who won’t admit it’s over, who keeps chasing. Now you run into her, and the two of you go off for a quick hump? Why?”

Fine stood up. There was a basketball lying in the corner. He reached down and scooped it up and now was twirling it absently in his hands, not even looking at it. Pacifiers for big boys.

Cops liked to touch their guns.

“Does this leave the room?”

“It goes where it goes,” DiMaggio said. “As far as I’m concerned,
you’re still a sideman in all this, even if you couldn’t keep your own dick in your pants. But you get no promises from me. You’ve got no rights anymore. You lied to me, fuck you.”

“People don’t usually talk to me that way.”

DiMaggio said, “Probably not even in junior high school, when they first put your name in the paper. It’s part of the problem here.”

Fine put his hands on the ball like he was going to shoot it, like he was going to toss it out the window and into the night, clean as a whistle, to great cheers that only he would be able to hear because everything he’d ever done with a basketball in his hands had always been cheered.

“Why did I do it?” he said. “You want the truth? Because she was
there
, DiMaggio. Because she was a lot drunk and I was a little drunk and we were both feeling a little loose and horny, and because we’d always humped like champions.”

Not even trying to be the Rhodes scholar anymore, what was the point?

Fine said, “It was training camp and it was New Canaan, Connecticut, and I was in the mood, and I didn’t feel like going through a lot of conversation with some coed, or some lawyer, or some bored Fairfield County housewife babe, out on a toot and willing to go down on me in the back parking lot, if that’s what it would take to be able to say she did it with A. J. Fine. You want to know why, DiMaggio? That’s why. Because Hannah Carey was
there.
And available. And willing. Because there’s always a Hannah around, and it just happened to be her turn again. Jesus Christ, do I have to draw you a picture? You were an athlete once. You were in the big leagues. It’s always
there.
It doesn’t matter who they are, where they come from. I don’t even try to analyze it anymore. I even tried to fight it as a kid. But why? It doesn’t matter how aloof they seem at first, how unavailable they seem. Two years ago, I went home with a minister’s wife just to see what that would be like and she offered to pay me to tie her up. Why Hannah that night? Because I didn’t feel like working for it, that’s why.”

Fine stopped then, took a deep breath, like he was catching his breath. Like coming clean had taken everything out of him all of a
sudden. DiMaggio could still hear the music; he was sure it was that tape of Pavarotti and Domingo and Carrers. Now they were singing a medley from
West Side Story.
Fine took more deep breaths as he walked around the room, the ball still in his hands. He had wanted to be different from the animals. Better. Superior. Now his cover was blown. Here he was in front of DiMaggio, looking like the rest of them.

A little like Richie Collins, even.

If they thought it could save their ass, sometimes they even told you the truth.

“What was the fight about?” DiMaggio said.

“What the fight was always about,” Fine said. “Why did we have to break up? Why don’t you take me back? I loved you. I
love
you. Please take me back.”

“She was there looking for you that night?”

“Oh sure. I don’t know how she knew, but she did. She
always
did. She found out about the welcome-home dinner. Somebody told her a bunch of us were going over to New Canaan so we could drink. She could always track me down. If I had gone home, she would have been waiting for me here. She wanted to play the injured party a little more. It’s her best part. She happens to be playing the hell out of it right now, you might have noticed.” He shook his head, disgusted. “Anyway, I tried to leave as soon as I saw her. But she followed me out to the garage, which is where your witness must have seen us. I didn’t think there was anyone around. I told her for the millionth time it was over. She got hysterical. As usual. She was like that when she was drunk, giddy one minute, into some huge crying jag the next. And always horny. She wanted to do it right there in the garage at Mulligan’s.”

The three tenors had stopped singing.

Fine said, “I finally gave up. We got into the car. And I drove down to the pond and settled her down the way I always used to settle her down.”

“Then what?”

“I drove her back to Mulligan’s.” Fine tossed the basketball up in the air, grabbed it hard with both hands. “Told her to wait there while I went and parked the car.”

DiMaggio finished it for him. “And you left her there.”

Fine, not looking at him, studying the ball, nodded.

DiMaggio said, “And she waited. And waited a little more. Then a lot. And finally went in and ended up at the table with Richie and Ellis Adair.”

“It could have happened like that. I just couldn’t deal with her anymore.”

DiMaggio said, “Poor baby.”

“Hey, fuck
you
, DiMaggio.”

DiMaggio was over on him before Fine really understood what was happening. He took the ball out of his hands, and then he shoved it as hard as he could into Fine’s stomach, shoving him back into the couch at the same time, feeling the air come out of him.

“Watch your mouth,” DiMaggio said.

Fine started to say something, but now DiMaggio leaned close to him, got in his face like they were always telling you to do in sports, close enough to smell the coffee on his breath.

“I know, I know. Nobody talks to you like that.”

Fine said he drove straight home from Mulligan’s after he left Hannah and went to bed. In the middle of the night, he heard Hannah’s voice talking to his answering machine. He kept changing his number, trying to stay ahead of her. But she always had the new number. He had shut the ringer off, but the volume was too high on the machine.

Hannah’s voice woke him up.

“You could barely understand her, she sounded so hysterical. I just figured she’d gone back inside Mulligan’s and gotten drunker. It was only near the end that I could make out any of what she was saying.”

“Which was?” DiMaggio said.

“She said she’d been raped.”

“She say who did it?”

“Not before she ran out of time on the tape.”

“You didn’t pick up the phone?” DiMaggio said. “With her telling you she’d been raped?”

Fine leaned back now, hands shaking a little as he put them underneath his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“Nothing I’m going to say anymore is going to change your mind about me,” Fine said. “But, no, I didn’t pick up. Because it wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard from Hannah before.”

“She used to cry rape?”

A. J. Fine said, “All the time. Well, not all the time. Sometimes she’d tell me she’d been getting hang-ups. Or that someone tried to get into her apartment. Or that she thought she was being followed. Hannah the victim. You don’t want to believe me, that’s up to you. Maybe she’s played the part convincingly enough for you, and you’re convinced I’m the asshole. But it reached the point, with me anyway, where I didn’t know what was real for her and what wasn’t.” Fine stood up. “I’m not sure if Hannah can make that distinction or not herself anymore.”

DiMaggio stood up, too, tired, not even able to think if there was something else he should be asking. Fine said he’d walk him downstairs. “It’s not more suck-up,” he said. “I want to take a walk, work off some of the caffeine.”

When they got downstairs, the desk guy said to DiMaggio, “Was he surprised?” Nodding at Fine.

“Oh boy,” DiMaggio said. “Was he.”

Fine walked him over to his car. “Who finds out about this conversation?”

No use bullshitting him. “Salter does,” DiMaggio said. “And Hyland, the Fulton cop. I owe him that.”

Fine said, “Does it get in the papers?”

In the end, it was all that mattered. To all of them. How they looked. It was unbelievable, DiMaggio thought, the power they gave these pissants like Marty Perez, guys who would never have their money. Their fame. They let the papers run their goddamn lives. They picked up the paper in the morning and it was like they were looking in the mirror. How do I look, how do I look, how do I look.…

“Does it?” Fine said.

“Hyland doesn’t talk, I guarantee you that. Maybe you should talk
to Salter yourself.” Maybe it was talking about Salter that made him flash on Ellis all of a sudden. He’d meant to ask before. Now he said to Fine, just throwing it out there, “Who’d know where Ellis is?”

Fine put a hand up, rubbed his forehead hard. “No one I can really think of. I mean, Ellis had acquaintances, people he had his picture taken with. But not friends, at least the way he was friends with Richie.” He shrugged. “I mean, Dale Larson started to come to some games last season, and some of the guys made some jokes. But I didn’t think of him as any more than another photo op. You know who he is, right? The model?”

“Who is?”

“Dale Larson. You must have seen him on billboards and shit.”

DiMaggio just sat there. He said to Fine, “Dale Larson is a guy.”

Not even making it into a question.

Not even sounding surprised.

Fine smiled for the first time all night.

“Depends on your definition. But, yeah.”

The funny thing, leastwise Ellis thought so, was that part of him was happy Richie was gone. It made him feel guilty, admitting that. Made him feel light, like the boys said now. There it was, anyway. He’d picture Richie there, dead, and no matter how hard Ellis tried, he couldn’t make himself feel as bad about that as he knew he should.

If you added it all up, Ellis decided, good in with the bad, Richie had been more like a warden to him than a friend.

Ellis could feel that way even knowing that the rape charge was still out there, soon as he went back. But he wasn’t going back, at least not right away. Fuck ’em, let them wait, people ought to be used to waiting for Fresh Adair by now. Let them wonder when he was coming back. People wondering now more than ever with Richie dead.

Not understanding.

Not really knowing.

But when did they?

Ellis missed ball, though.

Even now, in the middle of the night, before it got light over the
park, that gray-pink light coming up out of there all of a sudden, Ellis would think about ball. How he should be getting back to sleep, there was Gary Lenz’s shoot-around in the morning, the season ready to start tomorrow night. The whole world looking for him, and Ellis here, right under everybody’s nose.

It’d always been a problem, Ellis wanting to be alone, but knowing on the other hand he was no damn good at being alone.

He sat on the terrace, the night air cold, but feeling good, thinking about what the Garden would be like tomorrow night. How the Garden got for openings, whether it was the season or the play-offs. The whole thing feeling like the Broadway opening Richie made him go to that one time. About the Phantom, Ellis at first thinking it was the one used to be in the comics. Ellis loved that guy, a superhero just wearing a mask, no name.

Ellis didn’t care so much for the
Phantom
music, but he remembered how big the night felt to him, everybody being into it. After that, when there’d be a big game at the Garden, he’d look up sometimes, expecting the scoreboard over the court, up there in the spokes, to come crashing down the way that chandelier did in
Phantom
, right there at halftime.

Ellis needed somebody to tell him whether he should go back now or not.

Somebody like Richie.

How fucked-up was that?

He couldn’t count on Dale on this one. Dale was so happy to have Ellis all to himself. Even with everything else going on, all the bad, Dale was happy just to know he could call at any time, day or night, and know Ellis would be there. If Ron, the house guy, was gone for the day, Dale would use that code they’d worked out, and it’d be all right for Ellis to pick up.

Dale wanted this to feel like Ellis’s
home.

“Home for the homeless homey,” Ellis had said the other night, and Dale had laughed and said he loved him. Then Ellis had said, “Me too,” because it made him feel funny still, saying the actual words himself.

Richie always said it a different way. Not meaning it the way Dale did. But meaning it, in his own pushy way.