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Salter sat at the dining table and sold him on taking the case.

Salter said, “I’m not looking for you to acquit or convict. I don’t need something from you that will stand up in court or in front of a jury or as some kind of show on Court TV. I want to know what happened that night. If Adair and Collins did it, I want to be able to hand them your report at the end and say, ‘Here it is.’ And I want to
make sure that my Japs are prepared in the event this woman brings some kind of civil action against us down the road. If they didn’t do it and you can prove it to my satisfaction, I want as much ammo as possible.”

Salter moved his coffee cup out of the way, leaning forward, cuff links making clicking noises on the glass tabletop, like he’d had this sudden rush of being earnest, the big guy playing the big guy now in the Sherry. He had blond hair slicked back and tiny round tortoiseshell glasses and what looked to DiMaggio to be a tanning-salon tan.

DiMaggio thought: another one of the yuppie gangsters who had taken over sports.

Salter said, “Adair is as much a representative of Fukiko as the star of any television series. He has a cartoon show of his own on Saturday mornings, for chrissakes. NBC did a prime-time special last season built around his goddamn birthday. So you have my backing on this, and the parent company’s. Richie Collins is just a sideman here, believe me. A nobody. We’re worried about Adair. If you can prove he raped this woman to our satisfaction, he’s out of here. We’ll get somebody else to dunk the fucking ball.”

“There’s something you ought to know,” DiMaggio said. “They probably don’t think of it as rape, even now.”

“Then what the hell do they think it was?”

“One Thursday night with laughs last October. Something to break up the monotony of training camp.”

Salter reached down, snapped open a thin Vuitton briefcase, took out a manila envelope, handed it to DiMaggio. “There’s a picture of her in there.”

DiMaggio said, “Where’d you get this?”

“We got it,” Salter answered. “Hannah Carey, age thirty-one. Didn’t make it as an actress. Waitressed for a while, then went to work as a trainer for the Vertical Club. Her mother was a professional tennis player. Brother’s an actor, too. Jimmy Carey. Did a soap one time. Does commercials. No one seems to know whether Hannah Carey’s working right now, but she still works out at the Vertical almost every afternoon. We talked to the guy who runs the place.”

DiMaggio looked at the old black-and-white publicity picture of
Hannah Carey. Short blond hair, huge eyes, great smile. Classic features all around, nose and cheekbones and jaw. Hannah Carey looked the way beautiful models used to look, before the famine.

Salter clapped his hands. “You’re supposed to be the best,” he said. “So go be the best.” Then he told DiMaggio to use his town car for the rest of the day if he wanted. Salter said he was going to walk back to the Garden, it would give him an hour when nobody could find him.

When DiMaggio got downstairs fifteen minutes later, the car was at the front door, next to the Sherry’s big clock. He told the driver, Rudy, to take him to the Vertical Club. Now they had been sitting in front of the Vertical since two o’clock, watching the media crowd grow on Sixty-first Street: photographers, minicams, kids with press cards clipped to the breast pockets of their blazers, most of the kids in jeans, DiMaggio surprised there seemed to be as many women as men.

He was starting to think about giving up on Hannah Carey, taking a ride up to Fulton instead, when everything started to happen across the street. The media crowd started to move, and then he saw Hannah Carey running toward Second Avenue.

“Go!” DiMaggio snapped at Rudy.

“Where?” Rudy said, pulling his cap down as if by reflex, half turning to DiMaggio as he did.

DiMaggio pointed to Hannah. “Get up alongside her before the dinks catch up.”

DiMaggio opened the door to the backseat when they started to catch up to her. Told her he was the good guys.

Hannah Carey, feeling dizzy and disoriented, hesitated.

“What is that supposed to mean?” she said. “You’re the good guys?” Still not making any move to get into the backseat.

The guy nodded past her, at the crowd. “You sure you don’t want to talk about this in the car?” Then he made some room for her.

Hannah looked over her shoulder, made up her mind, jumped into the backseat next to him, slammed the door behind her. The light was changing up ahead. The driver gunned the car and beat it. Now
they were heading toward Third. Hannah twisted around in her seat, taking one last look. They were back on the other side of Second, pointing the minicams at the car like they wanted to open fire.

The guy smiled. “We should be able to make it over the mountains and into Switzerland from here.”

“This isn’t funny,” she said. “How do I know …?”

“You’re safe? You don’t. But you are. I’ll drop you at the next corner if you want.”

Hannah, still catching her breath, got herself turned around on the seat so she was facing him. Her dark-haired rescuer. Not bad-looking in his blue suit.

“Who
are
you?” she said.

“I told you,” he said. “My name’s DiMaggio.”

“I mean, what are you
doing
here?”

“Don’t get out of the car at the next corner and I’ll tell you.”

“But if I want to …”

“All you have to do is tell Rudy here to stop.”

Hannah leaned back, away from him, tucking herself into the corner. Maybe she should be as scared of him as she was of the bastards chasing her. But she felt safe all of a sudden in this car, for some reason she couldn’t understand.

“I’m listening,” she said.

She sat there studying him, seeming to relax a little bit. “I’m listening,” she said, and that was it. She had long, elegant fingers, resting on top of the gym bag in her lap. DiMaggio always noticed people’s hands.

They were waiting for the light at Lexington Avenue. DiMaggio said, “Where to?”

“That’s your idea of an explanation?” She made a halfhearted move for the door handle.

“I just wanted to give Rudy some idea …”

“West Side,” she said. “Do you have a first name, Mr. DiMaggio?”

“I don’t like to make a big thing of it.” He smiled at her, then told her his first name. “Do you follow baseball?”

“No.”

“No use explaining then.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Don’t try. Usually when people press me, I tell them to look it up in
The Baseball Encyclopedia
, if it’s that important.”

Giving her a routine, just to keep talking.

Keep her in the car.

“What do you want from me?”

“The Knicks have hired me.”

She leaned forward as soon as he said it. “Hey,” she said to Rudy. “Hey, you.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Rudy said.

“Pull over anywhere, please.” She leaned back, said, “The Knicks, Jesus.”

“Lady, we’re in the park,” Rudy said.

“I don’t care. I’ll walk.”

DiMaggio said to her, “Just listen to me for one second before you get out. I’m working for the Knicks because they want to know what happened.”

“I told the police what happened.”

“I know,” he said. “I come into this believing
you.
Thinking they did it.”

Hannah Carey gave him a sarcastic “Thanks” for his effort.

Rudy hadn’t stopped, but she didn’t seem too worked up. She had her hands back on top of the bag and was looking out the window. So DiMaggio kept going. “The Knicks aren’t necessarily on their side. And I’m not on anybody’s side. I just wanted to meet you, talk to you.”

“Why?”

“I’m going to be around. I don’t want you to think of me as the enemy.”

“Why can’t the police handle this?”

DiMaggio stared at her. You couldn’t help it. Hannah Carey was better-looking in person, blond hair cut even shorter than it had been in the picture Salter had given him. Her blue eyes were so light they seemed to have faded somehow, like old denim. He stared and tried to see her with Adair and Collins, wondering how it came to that.

As if looks ever had anything to do with it. DiMaggio thought: No wonder women think we’re such assholes. Now he said, “Because these things are a bitch for the police. Because a lot of time has passed. Because the police may come out of this convinced that it happened just the way you said it happened and still throw up their hands, say, ‘We can’t make the case.’ I don’t have to worry about that. The people who run the Knicks, they don’t want the case. They want the truth.”

“They have it. It’s in the report. It’s all over the papers now.”

DiMaggio said, “I’m going to be the second opinion.”

They got to Central Park West. Rudy said, “Do you still want me to stop?”

She said, “Yes.”

DiMaggio said, “You don’t live here.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t.”

“I’d like to talk to you again.”

Rudy had come around, giving her the full treatment. He opened the door and Hannah Carey got out, not saying anything. So DiMaggio got out, too.

“What do you say? A cup of coffee sometime. Anything you don’t want to tell me, blow me off, don’t tell me. I’m easy.”

Hannah, studying him now, said, “I don’t think so.”

DiMaggio shrugged.

“Think it over. I’m at the Sherry-Netherland. Like I said, I’m going to be around.”

“I’ll think it over.” She gave him a quizzical look. “Mr. Second Opinion DiMaggio.” She walked north on Central Park West, the park on her right, swinging her bag in her right hand, like a kid. DiMaggio watched her until she was out of sight. He told Rudy to find him a rental car place, he wanted to drive himself up to Connecticut in the morning.

“She seem like an actress to you?” DiMaggio said, and Rudy said, “Don’t they all?”

DiMaggio took the Fulton College exit off the Merritt Parkway. It put him on Route 7, which didn’t look like Connecticut at all to DiMaggio, just some kind of anywhere fast-food drag, Burger King and McDonald’s and Taco Bell and Roy Rogers, until everything finally settled down and he got into the town of Fulton, with its small-town movie-set library and all its beige designer brick. DiMaggio thought they just should have called it Town Beautiful.

It didn’t take long to go all the way through downtown Fulton. The directions said take a left when he could see the train station. DiMaggio did that and then went up a hill, past a pretty white-frame Congregational church, following signs to a town called Ridgefield, exactly the way Salter’s secretary said. He wasn’t even a mile out of town and already he felt like he was in the country, with elegant old houses set back from the road and huge fenced-in areas with horses. He took a right off the road to Ridgefield, went down a hill this time, and saw Fulton College spread out below him.

Salter’s secretary told him he couldn’t miss the huge stone arch that served as the front gate. You went through the arch, and then
about a hundred yards down was a security booth. She said his name would be left with the guard there. She promised that the guard could direct him to the gym, all the way in the back of the campus.

It took him almost half an hour to get from the stone arch to the booth with the security guard. DiMaggio counted fifteen cars and vans ahead of him. Most of the vans had spaceship satellite dishes coming out of their tops. The guard was stopping everyone, DiMaggio could see him, busting balls, checking his list, then waving them through.

When DiMaggio got to the front of the line, the guy took him through the same drill, looking at the first page on his clipboard, flipping to the next page, running his finger down the long list, making a small check mark. DiMaggio figured him for about seventy in his blue-and-orange Knicks windbreaker. He was more of a greeter than a private cop. Maybe it was working at the college. He wore a denim shirt and some kind of flashy tie with what looked to be basketball players jumping all over it. His white hair was brushed back and curled down over the collar of the denim shirt.

“DiMaggio?” he said, turning it into a question, leaning forward to take a better look inside the car. DiMaggio just waited with the window down, looking past him at the campus, which looked beautiful, cut out of woods, hills, and sky. Some of the roofs had red tile on them, like Stanford. If you were going to steal, steal from the best.

The white-haired greeter said, “It’s a little crowded over there at the gym today, which is straight down to the end of this road and then to the right. My advice is to take the first space you see and then just walk from there or the Knicks’ll be all done and—”

The white-haired greeter stopped. A Cherokee, black, was pulling around DiMaggio’s rented Taurus, going up on the grass, spitting dirt and rocks, coming so close to DiMaggio on the passenger side he could feel his car move a little bit. The guard looked up and said, “Hey,” then seemed to recognize the black Jeep. He gave a sheepish wave, and the Jeep gunned its way past them.

DiMaggio said, “Who was that?”

“Right there? Right there was Mr. Adair and Mr. Collins. Themselves.” He smiled. “ ’Course this time of year, that’s not what they’re known as around here.”

DiMaggio could see a couple of the cars ahead of him start chasing after the Jeep. He said to the guard, “What are they known as around here?”

“The Dick Brothers.”

Ellis said to Richie, practically screaming, “Take the service road behind the library. Cut back up that little dirt road next to the soccer field.” He was turned around in the front seat, looking back at the reporters, somehow feeling like they were chasing them with ropes and torches. “Get me the fuck inside that gym.”

Richie slowed down, let two girls pass. The first one, with real short black hair and a nice body on her, waved at Richie like she knew him.

Ellis said, “Not now, man. Shit.” He turned around again. There was a TV reporter and his cameraman, on the dead run, maybe a hundred yards behind them. “Fuck it,” Ellis said. “I ain’t practicing today, I can’t deal with this shit. Tell Gary I’m having some of that tendinitis behind my knees again.”

Richie didn’t say anything back. Sometimes he could position Ellis, they both knew it, get Ellis to do something he didn’t want to do. But Richie also knew there were times when you shouldn’t push. Richie knew better than anyone: Push too hard and you couldn’t move Ellis Adair in a million fucking years.