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DiMaggio said to her, “Even you. That’s what he meant, didn’t he? Even somebody he’d raped. Isn’t that right?”

“Frank Crittendon killed him.”

“I don’t think so,” DiMaggio said.

She reached down into her bag and came out with a cigarette and a Bic lighter. She took a drag of the cigarette. “I allow myself one a day.”

“Why did you go up there?”

She smoked and stared out at the East River again. “It was such a dumb idea,” she said casually, like she was telling him what a dope she’d been to leave the car lights on or the water running. “I realized
it when I got up there. I had called him and told him I’d had a change of heart, that I wanted to see him. To talk things over. I was going to see if I could get him into bed and then pull out a gun and scare him. Not a knife.” Hannah turned to DiMaggio. “Don’t you see? I wanted him to see how it felt for once. Being helpless. I thought I deserved that much satisfaction.”

“You have a gun?”

“Had. I bought it after the rape, permit and everything. You can check it out if you want. But when I got back that night, I threw it in the river. I’m not really the gun type.”

“You were going to scare him, that was all?”

Hannah nodded. “Exactly. I was going to get him into bed and then stick the gun in his mouth and tell him to scream a little bit.”

“But you didn’t do that.”

“I got scared all over again.” She blew some smoke out the side of her mouth. “This time I ran out of there before things got out of hand.” Hannah said, “He thought he was
so
irresistible.”

“You got him into bed, though?”

She looked at him. “Obviously,” she said. “If they found my hair when they found him.”

“Where?”

“In his bed.”

“How’d you know they found him in bed?” DiMaggio said.

“What?”

“I was wondering how you knew Richie Collins was in bed. Hyland never said they found him in bed. He just said they found him at the house. The newspapers never said they found him in bed. How’d you know he was in bed?”

DiMaggio handed her back the cap. “They didn’t find any hair,” he said.

“You lied,” Hannah said.

Beautiful hands, beautiful fingers.

“I lied, you lied,” he said. “And you killed him.”

She didn’t answer, just pulled up her knees in front of her, pulled them close to her.

“You killed him and poor old Frank Crittendon will take the rap. Richie got away with rape, you get away with murder.”

Hannah Carey got up, dropped the cigarette, and stubbed it out with the toe of her sneaker. “Good-bye, Mr. Second Opinion.”

“Say good-bye to everybody,” DiMaggio said.

He opened the jacket to the blue suit to show her the microphone Hyland had hooked up.

“I’m sorry,” he said into the microphone to the Fulton cop. “We’re getting nowhere here.”

He reached up with his own right hand, touched her cheek, surprised at how cold she felt, turned her face toward the street so she could see Brian Hyland when he opened the side door to the blue van. Hyland sat there with the receiving equipment, cramped in the back with another cop who was working the camera.

“You don’t even have to wait,” DiMaggio said to Hannah Carey. “You’re in the movies already.”

What did that mean?

Now you’re in the movies?

Why did he have that disappointed look on his face? Why had men
always
looked at her like that? Like she’d let them down?

Like she didn’t measure up?

Her mother started looking at her that way when she didn’t measure up in tennis, and then it was like the rest of the world took over.

Stop looking at me that way.

Like I don’t get it.

Why wouldn’t Brian Hyland come over and talk to her?

He just stood there next to the blue van. Giving her the same look. Not the friendly Brian she’d talked to on the telephone. Not the one she finally met. Now he had that disappointed look. Like Hannah had let
him
down.

DiMaggio got up and walked toward the van.

Now you’re in the movies?

They
were the ones who didn’t get it, Hannah thought. It was all a movie, at least once she got it straight in her head. She couldn’t make anybody understand, of course. God, she couldn’t even make Beth understand.

A.J. never understood.

Sometimes she thought about killing A.J.

Boy, how many times had she pictured
that
!

He had been too rough with her that night down by that stupid duck pond, almost as rough as Richie was later. She hadn’t wanted to, she wanted to talk to him, make him understand once and for all that they belonged together. That she was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

But he didn’t want to talk. Oh no. He didn’t care that she didn’t want to. He didn’t care what
she
wanted …

But she loved him. When they were together, he was the only one who didn’t treat her like she was some dumb blonde.

A.J.
listened.

A.J. was
interested.

She couldn’t kill A.J. She hadn’t kept the dress for evidence. She kept it because it was A.J.’s favorite. It was only later, when she could remember everything, she thought there might be some of that DNA stuff on it. After she had seen some of the other cases, realized you could do something.

You didn’t just have to lie there, even afterward, and take it.

What were the two of them
talking
about over there?

Wasn’t that the way it always went, though? Guy stuff? Like they got what they wanted from Hannah and now she wasn’t even here?

Didn’t they understand that Richie
had
to die?

That it didn’t matter who did it?

God, she was supposed to be the dumb one and it was so
obvious.
At least once it became clear that he was going to get off.

Get off, Hannah thought.

That’s a good one. I’ll have to remember that one to tell Jimmy.

Not just that he was going to get off. It was more than that. She knew when he came to see her in front of Jimmy’s apartment. Scaring her that way.

She started thinking about it that day.

He was
so
happy when she called. So sure she still wanted him. She had been so careful, wearing the body stocking, not sure how you could leave prints. That sexy white body stocking.

Richie thinking it was some kind of sex game. Telling her it was like she was wearing a body condom.

The
safest
sex, she had purred at him once she was down to the stocking.

Like you won’t believe, Richie.

He looked so happy. Not disappointed at all.

What were Brian and DiMaggio
waiting
for?

For her to tell them the good parts?

Close your eyes, Richie.

I want to watch.

In a minute.

He was so happy.

I’ve got a little toy I want to show you, she said.

I love toys, he said.

The knife was in her purse …

Who knew Frank Crittendon would make it so easy for her?

Hannah laughed.

Men.

She wondered why more of them didn’t end up like Richie Collins.

That was the amazing thing, if you really thought about it.

“How many times have you said you’re leaving tomorrow?” Ellen Harper said.

“I’ll figure it out and tell you tomorrow,” DiMaggio said.

They were lying in the big bed at the Sherry, in the back of the suite, in the back of the dignified old New York hotel, after doing undignified things. They had eaten dinner at a place she picked out on Twenty-ninth Street called Tempo. It was when they were having brandy after dinner that she said, “I’m not going back to Connecticut tonight, am I?” DiMaggio smiled at her. He did it all the time, going slow with her, too old not to. He signaled for the check, and they rode uptown in the cab, holding hands, and he played the piano for her.

Then they did something else, finally.

Now they were in bed listening to another Nancy LaMott tape he’d found. Maybe New York hadn’t been a total loss, everything going bad. He met Ellen Harper because he came to New York. And he found out about Nancy LaMott, who sang his kind of music the way it was supposed to be sung.

He’d been threatening to go back to Jupiter for two weeks, the two weeks since he found Ellis Adair.

“Sometimes I get the feeling it’s not over for you,” Ellen Harper said.

“It’s as over as it’s going to be.”

He rested a hand lightly on her hip.

“You’re still convinced she did it?”

“Oh, sure.”

“And she’s going to get away with it, even with what she said on the tape?”

“We just thought that if I could get her to panic and confess on the tape, she might give it all up for Hyland. Other than that, the tape doesn’t do him any good. She doesn’t even have to talk to him about it, as a matter of fact. Hyland walked over to her from the van when I finished with her and said, ‘What about this?’ And I’ve got to hand it to her, she was smart enough to say, ‘I’m confused, talk to my lawyer.’ Then she got into a cab and went home. Hyland called Harvey Kuhn—her lawyer—and Kuhn said what I would’ve said: ‘You want to try and arrest my client off what she said to a third party on some inadmissible videotape, be my guest. Other than that, we have nothing to say.’ ”

“You’re kidding,” Ellen said. “She doesn’t have to talk to the cops if she doesn’t feel like it?”

“Nope. Hyland’s just left with an open investigation on Richie’s murder. But he knows it’s an investigation going nowhere.”

She gently took his hand and kissed it.

Ellen said, “But Hannah lied about having an alibi.”

“Hannah turned out to be a rather unreliable narrator, let’s face it. And lying about her alibi doesn’t prove anything. It doesn’t give them probable cause, it doesn’t give them sufficient reason to arrest her, or even issue a warrant. They had no physical evidence with her, any more than they had physical evidence with the rape. She got crazy and killed Richie, I’m convinced of that. Then she got lucky with Frank Crittendon. He got crazy and killed himself.”

Ellen said, “I can’t believe she doesn’t have to talk to the cops.”

“Hyland was talking about the O. J. Simpson thing one day, and
how that first day after they found the bodies, O.J. went in and voluntarily talked to the cops without a lawyer present. Hyland said, ‘You know how many times in the history of the world that has helped a suspect? Never.’ Only idiots talk to the cops when they don’t have to.”

DiMaggio sighed. “This thing began with the basketball players not talking to the cops about rape and ends with the rape victim not talking to the cops about killing one of the players.”

“How do you feel about all this?” she said.

“Which?”

“That she gets away with it.”

“I don’t know.” He got out of bed. “You want one more brandy? I think I might have one. At my age, you need help getting to sleep.”

She winked at him, said, “After the brandy helps you, I’ll help the brandy.”

He came back with one glass for both of them.

“Why did you have to know?” she said.

“Because I did. Marty Perez was right about something. I have to know.”

He sipped the brandy, handed it to her. “I don’t think I ever asked you,” Ellen said, “but why do you think Marty Perez helped you?”

“He really felt like he killed Frank Crittendon. And he wanted to work off some of the guilt. If somebody deserved to be a victim here, it was Richie Collins, not Frank.”

“All you ended up with are victims.”

“I know,” DiMaggio said.

“Hannah was just the first one.”

“Now she gets away with murder.”

Ellen said, “And you want to feel worse about that than you do.”

DiMaggio said, “Remember what I told you about my mother?”

The sheets had fallen off her. Ellen was one of those people who were perfectly relaxed naked. She had her head propped up on one elbow. She said, “Yes.”

“I told you how I went after the guy?”

She nodded.

“I could’ve killed that guy.”

Ellen Harper took the glass out of his hand then and helped the brandy, and they slept until two o’clock in the morning, when there was one last phone call, this one from Ellis Adair.

The cab dropped him off at the corner of Sixty-first and First. DiMaggio walked over from there to wake up a little more. When he got to the playground, the blue bike was where it had been the first time, leaning against the fence.

Ellis Adair was on the court, wearing most of his disguise, just not the beard this time, shooting layups, one after another, in a light rain. DiMaggio, dressed in sweats himself because Ellis had told him to, walked over to him and said, “Hey.”

Adair flipped him the ball, not too hard. DiMaggio caught it. Maybe it was Ellen. Or the brandy. Or still being half asleep. The ball didn’t hurt. He flipped a little set shot at the basket and missed everything. Ellis laughed and then sang “Air balllllllll” in a deep voice, the way they did in an arena when somebody shot one.

DiMaggio said, “I’m out of practice.” Ellis gave him the ball again, and DiMaggio shot another one up there, this one bouncing off the back rim. He said, “Didn’t you guys have a game tonight?”

Ellis Adair said, “Boston. We won. Then we flew right out after the game, our private plane. Landed at La Guardia about one. I needed to get out. I played in worse conditions than this.”

DiMaggio said, “Dale back?”

“Tomorrow. I wasn’t even sure you’d still be in town.”

“I keep saying I’m going to leave, but I don’t leave. I met someone.”

Ellis nodded at the bench, and they went over and sat down. He still had the ball. He spun it on the tip of his fingers the way the Globetrotters did, smiling as he did, making it look ridiculously easy.

Looking ridiculously young and happy doing it.

“She did it, didn’t she? That’s what Mr. Salter said anyhow.”

“She did it.”

“And she’s gonna walk.”

“Yes.”

DiMaggio said, “Let me ask you something somebody just asked me: Does that bother you?”