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But she couldn’t help herself.

Kelly: “It’s like something Miss … like
Teresa
said in the papers, about how the heart knows what the heart knows. I read that and it was like, wow. I mean, I had only read the story the first time, going, like, Oh, here’s somebody Richie fucked over the way he fucked me over.”

Hannah couldn’t help but notice how easily the word came out of the girl’s mouth, the girl just sixteen, this girl who had given up her virginity, practiced, just to make herself ready for Richie Collins.

It was right after training camp started that he started asking about her girlfriends.

Kelly would bring friends to watch practice with her. He’d stop sometimes and make faces at them, make them giggle. Then later, when they were together, he’d say to Kelly, “Who was
that
?” When Kelly would pout, he’d laugh it off, saying, “What’s this, my baby girl is jealous?” And then drop it for a couple of days.

It became obvious to her that Richie Collins wanted to have sex with Kelly and another girl.

Kelly: “He said we could get all dressed up first, like a prom. He’d get some champagne. He said it would be the most fun I’d ever have. If we could just find the right girl to fill out the ménage à trois. When he said it the first time, I acted like I knew exactly what he was talking about. Then I had to go look it up.”

She said no. He kept at her, making fun of her, saying maybe he was wrong about her. Maybe she was too young. Making it sound like being too young was being too fat or something. But the thought of getting naked,
doing it
, with another girl, a friend, was dirty. Gross.

Even after some of the things Richie had already made her do in bed. And in his car. One time in the locker room after everybody was gone.

On the
court.

She couldn’t make herself do it with another girl.

He told her he didn’t want to see her anymore if she didn’t want to be a good sport.

One Saturday morning, though, she knew he was doing an autograph session at a sports shop in Fulton. She went over there and waited and made up with him. That was the day the reporter showed up, Kelly said. Richie told her about it after.

Hannah perked up on that one.

“Do you happen to remember the reporter’s name?”

“Sure. The same one Teresa talked to. Mr. Perez.”

Hannah said, “He was waiting for Richie outside that sports shop?” She looked at Teresa Delgado. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t know he and Richie were so close.”

“You don’t trust him?” Teresa said.

“I sort of did,” Hannah said. “But now I’m not so sure.” She’d have to talk about this one with Jimmy, if he could ever find his way home. “He certainly does seem to get around, though.”

Teresa said, “I’m not sure I follow,” and Hannah said, “I just thought he was on my side more than their side is all.”

“I’m sorry,” Hannah said now to Kelly. “Please go ahead. I’ve gotten used to everything being about
me
all the time.”

Richie and Kelly were together that Saturday in Fulton, once Richie had his meeting with Marty Perez. It was their last time, she said. Right after the Knicks broke training camp and went back to New York to get ready for the start of the season “Right after you,” she said to Hannah, she found out that Richie Collins had been calling one of her friends behind her back.

Kelly: “She’s a sophomore. Richie kept telling her I was too
old
for him. After he’d kept telling me I was too young to do it with him and another girl. Nice, huh?”

Kelly’s girlfriend, Emma, finally told Richie that if he called her again, she was going to tell her parents; Emma said she would have done it the first time he called, except that she was afraid it would get Kelly in trouble.

When Kelly found out, she called Richie in New York. He said he didn’t have time to talk to her, but maybe they could get together when he came up to clean out his condominium in Fulton.

They agreed to meet after school. Her last class was Computers, she got out at two-thirty. It left her enough time to go home and change out of her school clothes. Even after the way he had hurt her, she said, and the way he had tried to use her and tried to two-time her, Kelly Crittendon still wanted to look nice for him.

She put on a summer dress she’d bought for him but never got a chance to wear.

She parked where he always had her park, in this guest lot down the hill from his house, the area secluded by trees and some tennis courts. She remembered checking herself in the mirror one last time. She had even borrowed this neat headband from Emma, she said, not telling Emma why she needed it.

Kelly: “He was smiling when he answered the door. Like, saying, I’m the old Richie. He looked at me the way he did the first time, at
the hotel. And then he grabbed me the same way he did that day. I thought he was just kidding around at first, giving me a fooling-around hug, just to let me know he wasn’t really mad. Like, not even thinking that
I
was the one who was supposed to be pissed at
him.
Then he wouldn’t let go. So I start to go, ‘No, no, no, we have to talk.’ And Richie goes, ‘If it’s about that bitch Emma, you’ve got it all wrong, she was the one chasing after me.’ So I go, ’emma isn’t like that.’ Trying to get him
off
me for a second. But then Richie goes, ‘You’re
all
like that.’ Still running his hands all over me. I asked him what
that
was supposed to mean and he goes, ‘You all want it.’ Now he had his hands, like, under my dress, trying to see if I had panties on.”

Kelly stopped, not looking at either one of them, just fixed on her hands, clenched there in her lap.

Kelly: “He liked me not to, you know, wear any. So when he found out I was, he gave me this creepy look. Scaring me. He went, ‘Oh, we’re going to play Miss Hard to Get all of a sudden?’ I was crying by then, saying, ‘I want to
talk
, please, can’t we talk?’ And he just goes, ‘Later.’ And then … then … he was just
on
me, crazylike, crazier than he ever was when we’d done it, on the living room floor. There was some game show on the TV. I don’t even know why I know that. A game show.”

Teresa Delgado said to Hannah, “Was a ball game for me. What about you?” Hannah said she didn’t remember the TV being on when they got there, just later, when they were both through with her and Richie was jerking off watching the porno movie.

Hannah was proud of herself, using the guy language to tell Teresa Delgado about it. “The jerk-off jerking off,” she said. Maybe she could get off good ones when it was just women around.

Richie Collins raped her there in the living room. Kelly said she never screamed. “I was still more afraid of somebody finding me with him than I was of him doing what he did to me.” When it was over, he left her there on the floor and went to take a shower, saying, “Let’s face it, kid, breaking up is hard to do.”

He stood over her, naked, grinning, saying, “Think of it as one more oldie but goodie.”

Kelly Crittendon, when she got there in her story, stood up, went
to use Jimmy’s bathroom. When she came back, her eyes were red and she’d applied fresh lipstick. Hannah thought the lipstick made her look like a little girl playing grown-up. But she was grown-up enough to finish telling what she had come there to tell.

Kelly: “As soon as he left the room, I ran. I remembered that Mom was in the city. I figured my dad wouldn’t be home. I took a shower and stuffed my dress in a garbage bag and took it down to the garage. I don’t know, I thought if the dress was gone, if I didn’t have it anymore, then maybe it didn’t happen. Or wasn’t as bad as I thought. Then I took another shower and went to my room and went to sleep. When I woke up, nobody was home yet. That was when I decided I wanted to hurt him back.”

She decided she would wait until dark and bust up his car. Windows. Windshield. Anything, she said, that would break.

She waited until ten o’clock. When they had agreed to meet, Richie said it had to be in the afternoon, he had to meet with somebody later on.

Hannah asked, “Did he say who?” Kelly shook her head. “He just told me he was going to stay overnight and drive back into the city in the morning for practice.”

When she went back to the house—“It’s in this development or whatever called Fulton Crest,” she said—she parked in the same place and started up the steps to where his garage was, about fifty yards from the front door. You had to go past the front door to get there.

She never got to the garage. The front door opened suddenly. Kelly was sure it was him, sure if he saw her he would chase her and catch her and bring her back and rape her again.

She hid in the bushes.

Kelly said, “But it wasn’t Richie who came out.”

Hannah said, “Another woman?”

Kelly Crittendon gave her a funny look.

“It was my father.”

“Your father was there the night Richie was …?” Hannah stopped.

Teresa Delgado nodded slowly and said, “Yes.”

Kelly waited in the bushes until she heard her father’s car pull
away. Then, confused, she forgot about Richie’s car and drove around for a couple of hours before going home. Her parents were asleep when she got there. She didn’t hear about Richie’s death until later in the day, in the car on her way home from school. Her father had not mentioned anything about the night before. She had not asked him about it.

Hannah said, “So you don’t know if your father is the one.”

Kelly looked at her, then shook her head.

“We don’t any of us know,” Teresa Delgado said.

Somehow, the thought comforted Hannah. She wasn’t the only one who needed an alibi all of a sudden. She couldn’t wait to see Jimmy’s face.

He thought he knew everything, but he was barely watching the same movie.

His father said it to him one day when they were waiting at the Commack station, so Tony DiMaggio could take the train to another bus, start another tour with Ralph Flanagan. His father always waited until a few minutes before he left so he didn’t have to really wear himself out with a father-son chat.

“Rule number one of life,” Tony DiMaggio said. “You can’t make this shit up.”

DiMaggio started to ask him, Make
what
up, but his father wasn’t through.

“Just remember what I’m telling you,” his father said, acting as if he were passing on the secret of life. “Don’t go out in the world looking for logic, kid. For things to
follow.
You follow? This isn’t the movies or a good book. Life doesn’t
follow.
”

DiMaggio thought about that when it was all over, how they had all gone along, gone along, then everything happened at the end. Like basketball. People saying everything happened in the last two minutes.

He thought about that and how he never thought to ask anybody the right question.

Not even knowing there was one.

DiMaggio: star investigator.

He just picked up the phone and took a shot, dialed the number that Joey gave him, just saying, “I’d like to speak to Dale please,” when the guy answered.

“Out of the country.”

“When do you expect her back?”

“Out of the country indefinitely. You’re some kind of smart guy, right?”

He thought the guy was just copping an attitude.

“How about if I just leave a message?”

The guy said, “Suit yourself.”

DiMaggio left his name, the phone number at the Sherry, his room number. Before the house guy hung up, DiMaggio had a flash. “Hey, since Dale isn’t there, can I speak to Ellis, please?”

As a joke.

The house guy hung up on him.

DiMaggio thought you could look at it two ways. The guy just had an attitude and got tired of talking to him. DiMaggio could have that effect on people. And besides, the guy had no intention of giving Dale Larson the message anyway.

Or he got nervous.

Look on the bright side.

Maybe in the morning he would take a walk over to the address on Fifth, somewhere up in the seventies, Joey had given him.

For fun.

He spread out all his notes, all his research, on the floor, the way he used to do with Dowd. After doing this kind of work all this time, DiMaggio was always surprised at how random an investigation could feel, like he was all over the lot. Even with that, he always kept his research and notes organized: notebooks, newspaper clippings, files, his yellow legal pads, videocassettes, phone records.
And on top of every item was a synopsis, with the most interesting stuff highlighted. It was looking through one of his Boyzie Mays notebooks that he had remembered about the wild-assed parties.

DiMaggio even carried a blackboard with him, making diagrams sometimes, like he was making some kind of presentation to the goddamn board of directors.

He usually got efficient like this when he felt the whole thing getting away from him. Which is the way he had felt since they found Richie Collins.

He sat in the middle of all this shit and wondered if there was an answer for him somewhere. Or better questions.

He read and reread Marty Perez’s column about Teresa Delgado, trying to match up details of her story with what he knew about Hannah Carey’s. And reread the notes from his dinner with Hannah.

And went over what he had from Salter and Crittendon and Boyzie Mays and A. J. Fine.

And all the Lisas.

He would stop sometimes to soak his hands, bowls on each side of him, one for each hand, listening to David Benoit play. DiMaggio tried to keep his mind on the case, stay on the rape, not worry so much about Richie Collins all the time. But he saw Benoit and wondered if he ever woke up with any pain. What he would do the first time it happened to him, the way it happened every morning to DiMaggio.

Every morning of his goddamn life, starting with Advil.

He dried his hands, emptied the bowl, poured himself a glass of Scotch. He allowed himself one sometimes, when he was working at night. He told himself it was strictly medicinal, just to take the edge off.

DiMaggio went back to the Hyland notes from the other night, right before he found Richie Collins.