Jump (16 page)

Up close it was better.

After a few minutes of Gary Lenz’s practice, DiMaggio realized he couldn’t take his eyes off Adair. It was like the time DiMaggio had been dragged by this dancer he was dating to see the ballet movie
The Turning Point.
DiMaggio sat there through the first part of it, bored, making watch checks about every ten minutes, Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft trying to outshriek each other. Then Baryshnikov danced. DiMaggio didn’t know anything more about ballet than when he’d sat down in the theater, but he sure knew this: What Baryshnikov was doing was so different from everybody else it was a laugh.

Ellis Adair was a laugh. DiMaggio thought: This is the way it’s all supposed to look. Adair always seemed to have this loopy, lopsided grin on his face, a little crooked, always seemed to be a step faster than everybody else going down the court, a step faster and a foot higher when the ball was in the air, doing things in the air then, almost halfheartedly, offhandedly, making these dips and swoops like gulls did outside the upstairs Jupiter window.

Lenz kept making him stop and start. Do this, do that. Go
there
, goddamnit. But every time he would let them play, really let them play, Adair would make another move or play or shot or drive that would blow the top off the gym. DiMaggio watched him and couldn’t help himself, he felt like a kid, the way he had when Tony DiMaggio, on one of his daddy furloughs, had taken him to Shea that first time to see Mays.

DiMaggio sat up there until the end of practice, lost in the sounds of the gym the way he got lost in the music sometimes: the bounce of the ball and the whooshing sound of it going through the net, the slap of one hand on another, Lenz’s whistle, the curses and grunts as the big bodies, as graceful as they were, collided underneath the basket. These were the sounds you never heard in the arena or when you watched on television. This was more intimate for DiMaggio somehow. More personal, in some way he could not explain to himself. This was the inside.

And for the first time, he had trouble putting this Ellis Adair, the
basketball Ellis, the one they called Fresh, with the sulky one he’d met in Frank Crittendon’s office.

For the first time, DiMaggio had a hard time putting Ellis Adair in a pile with Hannah Carey.

It made no sense. There it was, anyway.

When practice was over one of the trainers went down to the other end of the gym from where Adair and Collins had come in, unlocked the double doors, and let the press in. They all went straight for Gary Lenz. The other Knick players, in a show of support for Adair and Collins, still weren’t talking to reporters. DiMaggio watched Lenz, who started talking before anybody got near him, smiling under his Harpo Marx curls, happy to have the audience all to himself.

A. J. Fine was leaning against the basket support, waiting for a ball boy to bring him a towel. When he spotted DiMaggio, Fine nodded in recognition. “I know who you are.”

“Zing,” DiMaggio said, “went the strings of my heart.”

The kid gave him the towel and Fine walked over, putting out a right hand that was surprisingly small, DiMaggio thought, for a basketball player.

“I’m considered somewhat of an oddball with my teammates,” he said. “Not only do I keep up with the news, I actually understand it.”

“Wow.”

Fine said, “You’re impressed, I can tell.”

DiMaggio knew that Fine played the role of jock intellectual the way Bill Bradley had played it once. He was six-five and slightly dumpy-looking, thick in the legs; he had red thinning hair and freckles and looked a little like Archie from the comic books. Watching him at practice, DiMaggio thought he could have played with Bradley on the teams DiMaggio remembered from the old days. Fine had one of those time-warp games, setting picks with his elbows way out there, throwing two-hand chest passes, throwing
bounce
passes sometimes, not jumping worth a damn, looking like a plodder thrown in with Ellis Adair and the rest of them to even up the sides, but in perfect rhythm with the game somehow, the beat, a white crooner out there with all the rappers but getting the job done with a minimum of sweat and effort.

“Frank Crittendon said I wouldn’t have to beg you to talk to me,” DiMaggio said.

“Heck no,” Fine said. He deliberately rubbed down both arms, then the back of his neck, then his face, then tossed the towel casually behind him.

DiMaggio said, “You’re not worried about alienating your teammates?”

“If I really cared what my teammates thought,” Fine said, “I’d have to be on Prozac. How much time are we talking about?”

“Depends on you.”

“I’m loose this afternoon. I’ll meet you at the Fulton Luncheonette. You know where that is, downtown? Almost across from the library?”

DiMaggio told him he did.

Fine got to the gym doors and turned around. “How many people know?” he said. “We might as well get that out of the way.”

The players still left in the gym were shooting free throws at the other end in some contest that was causing a lot of loud jive hilarity with both the black players and the white players, everybody motherfucking everybody else. Gary Lenz seemed to be in midfilibuster with the writers.

“How many people know what?” DiMaggio said.

Fine said, “You know what it means. How many people know that I used to date Hannah Carey?”

He had found it out at Joey Bernstein’s public relations office that morning.

Joey was one of DiMaggio’s New York heroes, a Damon Runyon character who had started out as a copyboy at the
Daily News
fifty years ago and had done everything, known everybody, ever since. He had covered the Dodgers for the old
Journal-American
, he had been the Dodgers’ last PR man before they left Brooklyn for the West Coast, he had been an advance man for Bobby Kennedy in the sixties. He had even gone to work for Steinbrenner for a while, as much as he had always hated the Yankees. His last year was when DiMaggio backed up Thurman Munson. It turned out Joey had also booked big bands in the fifties, and one of them was Ralph Flanagan’s. He remembered Tony DiMaggio and so he and Tony DiMaggio’s son became friends. They liked the same kind of music. It was Joey who had first taken DiMaggio to hear Ellis Larkins.

Now Joey had his own “store,” as he called it. One of his clients was Madison Square Garden. Salter had told him that Joey was at his disposal for as long as he was in New York, but DiMaggio explained that he and Joey went way back, he didn’t need any help on that one. Joey had been waiting for him at his office on Eighth Avenue when DiMaggio got there at seven in the morning. Joey was dressed in one of his black gangster suits with wide pinstripes and a red-striped shirt with a white collar and a wide red tie with a huge knot, the color of the tie the same as the silk square in his breast pocket.

Joey thought that if he started later than seven, some public relations flack in some other part of town would get the jump on him.

“I brought a bagel for you,” he said. “Garlic.”

DiMaggio made a face.

“It’s good for you, don’t look at me that way,” the little man said. “Garlic in your diet, a gallon of water a day, you’ll live forever.”

“Which is your plan.”

“Which is my plan.”

“To do everything you say you’ve done, you’re a hundred and fifty years old already.”

“And feeling every day of it,” he said. “So what can I do for you?”

“I want you to poke around in that computer thing you told me about.”

“It is called Genius. They go up against another outfit, known as Nexus Lexus. I happen to represent Genius.” He theatrically tightened the knot on his tie. “Which figures.”

“You said you can look up everything ever written about everybody,” DiMaggio said.

“Not quite. But they pitch themselves—actually, I pitch the bastards—as the most extensive library of clippings in the history of the world. You want me to look up on Hannah Carey? It must be her because if it is the two basketball players, my printer will be printing out all morning.”

DiMaggio said, “Can you cross-check?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, if two names are in a program like this, can you put in both names, then find out if there’s a story someplace with both of them in it?”

Joey said, “I actually followed that.”

“Can you do it?”

“I’m pretty sure,” Joey said. “If I can, which two names are you looking for?”

DiMaggio said, “I want you to put her name with Adair, then her name with Collins. I’m talking about before she accused them of the rape. Then put her name with the rest of the players on the team. Mays. Riordan. I’ve got the roster with me.”

“Why, if I am not being too nosy, though nosy has always been a career for the great Bernstein?”

“I want to see if she has a prior history with the Knicks. Something that hasn’t come out yet, even if it will eventually.”

DiMaggio ate his bagel and read the papers and watched Joey Bernstein, who came out of old New York newspapers and all of the wonderful Runyon lies about Broadway, punching away at a state-of-the-art computer program, playing the keyboard like it was a piano. He thought Joey’s new hairpiece was more silvery than the last one he had.

After about half an hour, Joey Bernstein said, “Bingo, as they say in the lesser faiths.”

“What?”

“A. J. Fine and Hannah Carey. A
New York Newsday
takeout from a couple of years ago. She is buried at the bottom of the story and described as the sister of a Jimmy Carey, starring at the time in
One Life to Live.
A soap opera. They call her Fine’s steady. I think I may have placed this story to tell you the truth.”

“Can you print it out for me? Everybody else will find out eventually. But maybe I can get a little bit of a jump.”

“No task is too menial,” Joey Bernstein said. “What does this mean, A. J. Fine and Hannah Carey being an item?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“I have to know everything,” Joey Bernstein said. “Information is power.”

DiMaggio smiled. “No shit,” he said. “I never heard that one.”

It was after two when Fine came into the Fulton Luncheonette, which was already DiMaggio’s favorite place in the whole town, with its dark, pretty Greek girls behind the counter and ten tables and fresh homemade pies and some local station playing DiMaggio’s kind of music when he was in there for breakfast. Now in came Hannah Carey’s old squeeze, wearing a white long-sleeved shirt, no logo, frayed at the collar, faded tan corduroy slacks, a pair of scuffed tan bucks, white socks. Like he’d just walked across the green in Hanover after his twelve o’clock class, giving you that worn preppy aristocratic look, his Lands’ End bag slung over his shoulder. He either wore contact lenses on the court or just went without because he had on these thick black-framed glasses like Woody Allen wore. DiMaggio couldn’t decide whether Fine just wanted to dress like the world’s tallest grad student or whether this was just another jock pose and he was as full of shit as the rest of them.

Maybe Fine was just better read.

Fine tossed his bag on the next table and turned his chair around so he could stretch his legs out. One of the Greek girls came over and refilled DiMaggio’s coffee cup. Fine ordered a tea with lemon.

“So what do you want to know,” he said.

“I want to know who she is.”

“That it?”

“With as little bullshit as possible, I want you to tell me about her. You and her. After that maybe you can enlighten me on Ellis Adair and a cockroach named Richie Collins.”

“You’ve spent some quality time with Richie then?”

“I’ve met all three. Accuser and accused. It’s been a real thrill.”

“What do
you
think about all this?” The waitress came over and brought Fine’s tea. He didn’t even look up, just started squeezing the lemon in there. So she smiled at DiMaggio. A real smile. She knew him from breakfast. Real smiles, real people. Maybe that was why the ballplayer looked so out of place, that and the size of him, scaling down everything in the small room.

“I don’t know what I think yet,” DiMaggio said. “I can’t read her. I think Richie Collins would have sex with a bowl of oatmeal if he could get it to stay warm long enough. Ellis Adair fascinates me, to tell you the truth. I’ve been around ballplayers, one way or another, my whole life. So I’m smart enough to know it’s a mistake to confuse the way they play with who the hell they are. How they conduct themselves in what you call your real life. I’ve seen guys who played you an unbelievably beautiful game of baseball blow it all on crack or on little boys. I worked on a case once, a sensitive wide receiver who’d had books of poetry published; he ended up raping an off-duty cop and then beating her half to death. There isn’t any connection.” DiMaggio sipped some of his coffee. “But I’ll tell you the truth, I have a hard time seeing the guy doing what she says he did.”

Fine said, “Me, too.”

“What about Richie?”

Fine had this habit of widening his eyes before he spoke, as if he were just waking up from a nap.

“He’s dangerous, in my opinion. Nothing you could tell me about him would surprise me.”

“Dangerous?”

Fine said, “A bully, just without the size to back himself up, if that makes sense to you. One of those guys who’d threaten to kick your ass, then hire somebody to actually do it. It doesn’t matter if you’re on his team or not. Turning your back on him is a mistake because he
will
get even with you eventually. No matter how long it takes.
And with whatever’s handy, an elbow, a knee, a trip. Just for the sport of it, as far as I’ve been able to gather. And for good measure,” Fine said, “throw in an almost pathological need for sex.”

“Oh yeah.”

“You say you’ve been around sports your whole life,” Fine said. “So have I. I don’t know how much of a player you were, frankly, whether you were good or just some kind of shit player—”

“—I was a shit player—”

“—but I’ve always been a star. Not here the way I was in high school, or at Dartmouth, or even in the Olympics. But there has been a constant level of success. Okay? Celebrity. I am familiar after all this time with the standard-issue adulation that comes with being a sports star in this country. Which is to say: Girls and women have always been there with me, from cheerleaders to college professors to, well, Hannah. They have been there, in varying degrees, for me and my teammates. And in all that time, I have never seen anyone to whom sex is more important, in an almost primal way, than Richie Collins.”