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“Who are you?” she said.

He smiled at her, holding the door open, still casual, like he did this all the time, played the cavalry. “My name’s DiMaggio,” he said, “I’m the good guys.”

DiMaggio sat across the street from the Vertical Club and waited. He knew how to do it. DiMaggio learned young, all the times he waited for his father, Tony DiMaggio, to come back from the road with Ralph Flanagan’s band, bringing him tacky gifts from places like Miami Beach. DiMaggio always wondered what his old man was thinking. Did he think he had a son who wanted to lead the league in plastic pink flamingos? To be able to put his collection up against anybody’s in Commack, Long Island? Tony DiMaggio, with his pompadour hair and gangster suits, would spend a couple of days at home, sleeping all day, saying he couldn’t get out of the habit. Then he would take off again, on his way to Baltimore and Washington and Atlanta. Then DiMaggio would wait some more, watching his mother hit the Four Roses, until there was the big tour through the southwest, after which Tony DiMaggio never came back.

DiMaggio didn’t even have a sample of his father’s handwriting, just the fucking flamingos.

Then there was all the waiting as a ballplayer, too, in the game or on the bench or in the clubhouse. Mostly on the bench, even in all
those bust-out rookie-league towns in the South, the redneck fools yelling out jokes about his last name, asking where his Uncle Joe was. “Uncle Joe
DiMaggio
, get it?” they’d yell. As if he didn’t. They were the kinds of places writers romanticized into the Vatican. It always gave DiMaggio a real thrill, reading about baseball. Every ballpark was a cathedral, and everything associated with the game was a sacrament. Even the waiting.

The Greeks didn’t have as much bullshit mythology as baseball did.

DiMaggio had just the one summer with the Yankees. It wasn’t even a summer, that was bullshit, he sounded like some asshole spin doctor touching up his career. DiMaggio got twelve weeks, four starts when Thurman Munson got hurt, a total of fifty innings, batting average of .202, only getting up there above .200 because of two hits off Rick Wise the last day of the regular season. DiMaggio didn’t remember much about the baseball, remembering much more clearly the phone call telling him he’d been released. He remembered more about living in New York the first time, in this apartment he found, cheap enough, on Ninety-fourth, east of Fifth. A stewardess he’d dated had it. Then she quit it all of a sudden to get married, to some rich guy she met on the red-eye from Los Angeles. DiMaggio grabbed it. The stewardess knew DiMaggio played the piano and told him some old piano player lived next door. DiMaggio did a little investigating and found out it was Vladimir Horowitz. DiMaggio smiled now, his head resting against the window on the right side of the backseat, the other window down, so he could watch the entrance to the Vertical. Some old piano player, he thought. Playing for the Yankees, all those stars, and he’d watch the street in the afternoons until it was time to go to the ballpark, waiting for a look at Horowitz. Mostly he’d just listen in the afternoons, when the old man would open the windows and play, laying the music over all the New York noise, the cabs, the whole shout of the place.

DiMaggio started playing piano again that year, even with every no-good thing catching had done to his hands, catching and the arthritis that had gotten worse every year. After the Yankees released him at the end of October, he traveled around Europe for six months, alone, without any real itinerary, starting in London and finally ending
up in Barcelona, living in a small apartment that looked out on the statue of Christopher Columbus, studying for the law boards and playing the piano nights in the little bar downstairs. He came home and passed and started going to Fordham Law the next September. He also took piano lessons from this crazy Polish woman who lived down at Sheridan Square. DiMaggio remembered how after they’d finish on Thursday afternoons she’d pour them glasses of vodka, and they’d drink it and listen to tapes of Horszowski, the woman crying sometimes as if DiMaggio wasn’t there.

His first job, the dirty low lawyering job of the world, the rookie league of lawyering, was in New York, at Valerio and Cowen. One of the big shots there was a big Yankee fan and a friend of George Steinbrenner, the owner. The big shot, named DeLuca, acted like he was doing DiMaggio a favor by getting him in there with the other drones, all those young Ivy League dickheads who came to work half asleep because that was the time in New York when cocaine started showing up everywhere and the Ivy Leaguers had been out all night. DiMaggio lasted seventeen fun-filled months, then it was down to Washington, ending up on John Dowd’s staff. One of the lawyers at the Players Association knew DiMaggio was looking to make a move. He also knew Dowd was going to be handling the Pete Rose investigation for baseball. He got DiMaggio an interview, and Dowd jumped at the chance of having an ex-player on his staff.

Suddenly, lawyering wasn’t just sitting behind a desk. Suddenly, he wasn’t waiting anymore. Waiting for his father. Waiting for the big leagues. Waiting for a chance to get into the game. Waiting for real cases. This
was
a real case, with real action. Some of the other guys on the case were in awe of Rose, felt sorry for him because they’d grown up watching him play his ass off and get all those hits. They wanted to buy into the bullshit mythology, too. Shit, he’s Charlie Hustle, he can’t be betting on baseball! They were like everybody on the outside, amazed that their heroes could fuck up.

DiMaggio came at it all differently, after all the years on the inside. DiMaggio was long past thinking line drives made you smart or noble or good. There’d always been drunks, there’d always been guys taking dope, there’d always been gambling going on. Guys beating
their wives. Now it just happened to be the guy who ended up with more hits than anybody in history.

“You’re not trying to make a case against Pete Rose,” Dowd would tell them. “You’re just trying to make a case against some guy who may have broken the baseball law.” Sometimes DiMaggio thought he was the only one who got it, all the way up until Dowd got Rose.

Dowd offered him a permanent job in D.C., and DiMaggio thought about taking it. He had an apartment he liked in Georgetown, he had drifted into an affair with a producer from National Public Radio, he felt settled for the first time since he’d left Commack to play ball. Then Dowd got the call from Jupiter that changed everything.

The man’s name was Ness Florescu. DiMaggio was vaguely aware of him from watching gymnastics at the Olympics. He had been coaching the Romanian women for years, and the Romanian women had won a pile of medals, and finally Florescu had moved to the United States and opened his own academy in Jupiter, Florida, about a half hour north of Palm Beach. Parents brought girls from all over the country to Florescu because he was supposed to be a kid’s best shot at a gold medal. His best shot at a medal that year, 1992, was a sixteen-year-old named Kim Cassidy. But a few weeks before, Cassidy had been mugged and nearly raped outside one of Florescu’s dormitories. In the process, the attacker had ruined the kid’s knee to the point where she needed surgery.

It turned out Florescu was a baseball fan, so he knew all about the Rose investigation. Florescu called John Dowd and said he didn’t think what happened to Kim Cassidy was an accident. He didn’t want to press charges if he was wrong because he figured that would finish him in gymnastics. But the Olympic trials were coming up and now that Cassidy couldn’t compete, the favorite for the gold medal was another kid from Houston who’d been Cassidy’s rival from the time they started competing against each other when they were eight.

Florescu sat in Dowd’s office with Dowd and DiMaggio and told them he thought the attack on Kim Cassidy might have been arranged.

“I don’t want to be the official sports snoop,” Dowd said after
Florescu left. “Besides, this guy sounds crazy. Nobody’s been whacking out the competition since they used to do it in boxing back in the fifties.”

“What if it’s true, though?” DiMaggio said.

“You want him, he’s yours,” Dowd said.

It took him six weeks in Jupiter and Houston, most of the time spent in Houston. It wasn’t a mugging, and it wasn’t an attempted rape. It was a hit on the Cassidy girl, ordered by the stepfather of the Houston gymnast, an ex-con named Verne Maywood. There was finally a night in one of Maywood’s favorite honky-tonks. DiMaggio had been drinking there a week, watching Maywood get shit-faced, even buying him a couple of rounds of drinks. This night he followed him out and got into the parking lot in time to watch a guy step out from behind Maywood’s pickup and start beating him with a tire iron.

“You owe me sixty-five hundred, boy,” Tire Iron said. “And as you have probably guessed, you’ve officially worn my ass out with your excuses.”

Maywood was rolling on the ground, whimpering, still covering up against blows that had stopped for the time being. He said something DiMaggio couldn’t hear.

“
Yes
, right here,” Tire Iron said. “Right here and right now, goddamnit.”

“I promise you,” Maywood groaned. “A check tomorrow.”

Tire Iron got into a beat-up Grand Prix and drove off. DiMaggio was able to get the license plate. The car belonged to another ex-con, this one named Bobby Ray Bonner. It was easy enough to find out he and Maywood had been in prison together. DiMaggio called the Jupiter police in the morning, Jupiter called Houston. By the next day, Bobby Ray had given up Verne Maywood, and that night there was some wonderful television footage of the two dumb asses screaming at each other in front of a Houston courthouse.

The next Sunday night,
60 Minutes
devoted a whole show to the attack on Kim Cassidy, built around DiMaggio’s investigation. Now he was the sports snoop. He was the one you called when you had the kind of problem the Knicks had now with Ellis Adair and Richie Collins.

So Ted Salter, the president of Madison Square Garden, had called. And now DiMaggio was in New York trying to catch a glimpse of a rape victim, feeling like some shitheel reporter himself, all because he’d let Salter talk him into it.

Salter was the Yankees’ vice president in charge of broadcasting the one year DiMaggio played there. When the Madison Square Garden cable network bought Yankee games, Salter moved over there, finally ending up president of the network. DiMaggio was vaguely aware that the Garden once belonged to Paramount Communications, along with Paramount’s movie and television companies and publishing houses. Then there were takeovers and sales and finally the last company to buy everything kept the movie and television companies but sold the Garden, the Knicks, and the New York Rangers hockey team to the Fukiko Corporation of Tokyo. DiMaggio seemed to recall that Fukiko was the product of some big Japanese merger. Salter went with Fukiko and became president of the Garden.

He called DiMaggio in Jupiter the night he found out about the charges against Adair and Collins. He was moving fast, he told DiMaggio. “Remember?” he said. “I always liked to move fast.”

“Find somebody else,” DiMaggio said. “Fukiko must have people who do this sort of thing.”

“I don’t really know the Japs yet,” Salter said. “I’m not saying I don’t trust them. Hell, what they’re paying me, I’d do the geisha thing, walk on their backs if they asked. But I don’t
know
them. And I certainly don’t know their lawyers. I’ve got to have somebody I can trust here, so I make sure I look like I’m on top of this fucking thing. I’m not asking for a lot of your time here. Remember that time in Florida, that woman saying those three Mets jumped her booty? I don’t remember the exact dates, but it seems to me it started in spring training and the whole thing was wrapped up before Opening Day.”

“Cops did that.”

“I’m not putting the Garden and my basketball team in the hands of the Fulton Fucking Connecticut Police Department.”

“Then hire yourself a private investigator.”

“Going with a private investigator I don’t know is the same as going with lawyers I don’t know,” Salter said. “I know you. And I know I can trust you. You were a schmuck when you were a player.
You were with the Yankees ten minutes and you were running all that union shit in the clubhouse like you were Jimmy Hoffa. But everybody said you were an honest schmuck.”

“Honest has nothing to do with it,” DiMaggio said. “It’s all juice.
Jurisdiction.
You’re not listening here. When I was with Dowd on the Pete Rose thing, we
were
the cops. Baseball commissioners used to run baseball like the commies ran Russia. People had to talk to me. You talk about the Mets thing? The ballplayers that girl accused, they
still
haven’t talked to the cops. Your guys aren’t going to help the cops, and they’re sure as shit not going to help me.”

“They work for me,” Salter said. “I’m old-fashioned enough to think that still counts for something.”

DiMaggio said, “That’s not the way these assholes look at it. They think you’re just another rich guy put on this earth to take care of them.”

They went around and around, Salter saying he wasn’t going to hire a private investigator, he didn’t trust goddamn lawyers, he wanted a pro. Salter saying he’d want DiMaggio to work alone, he didn’t want the whole thing turning into the leak-a-thon—Salter’s expression—the O. J. Simpson case had been from the start. And Salter finally saying he’d overpay if he had to, at least fly up from Florida and talk to him in person. Which DiMaggio finally said he’d do. Salter had been out in California when he called; he flew back on the Fukiko jet. DiMaggio caught the early Delta out of West Palm. They met in DiMaggio’s suite at the Sherry-Netherland. DiMaggio always stayed there. There were flashier New York hotels, but he liked the suite they always gave him at the Sherry, one of the two they had with a piano. Sometimes DiMaggio had to travel with his little pack-up baby Yamaha keyboard if he wanted to play, but he didn’t like to use it if he didn’t have to, it always made him feel like some dufus accordion player with Lawrence Welk.