Authors: Mike Lupica
“She drank that one down in one shot right before she decided she wanted to start dancing at Mulligan’s.”
“Which is another thing I’m glad you brought up.”
Sometimes Ellis surprised himself and knew where everything was going.
Ellis said, “How come it hasn’t come out anywheres that we met her that one time before?”
“I don’t know what that’s about,” Richie said.
Ellis said, happy to let his confusion out, “All that’s come out, she hasn’t told—”
“—half of it,” Richie said, finishing. He turned and smiled at Ellis in the dashboard lights, reminding Ellis of a shark. “The juicy parts.”
“I’m sorry, Rich,” Ellis said. “I really am sorry.”
Where did that come from?
It came from him, that’s where it came from. From inside the real him.
“Nothing to be sorry about, Fresh. All part of the game.”
Richie leaned forward and hit a button. The tape made that eject sound, came up and out of the player. Then he turned on the radio and Ellis heard the jingle for the sports station, WFAN. All the idiots calling to yell about this and that. Richie liked to listen sometimes to see if they were talking about him. Ellis, even when he’d played in the game, had no idea what they were talking about.
“How about we get some scores before I go off to do my duty?” Richie said.
Ellis said go ahead.
All part of the game.
Don’t worry, Fresh. I didn’t think nothing of it, Fresh.
Maybe for once Richie meant it. After all this time, Ellis still couldn’t tell.
Sometimes Ellis wondered what all
Richie
remembered about that night.
Everything was going too fast. Ellis just did what he did, which was hold on and wait for all of it, every fucked-up part of it, to be over.
Salter handed over a tape of the meeting like it was a party favor. DiMaggio watched it again, stretched out on the bed at the Sherry, a big bowl of Epsom salts right next to him. He had come back from the Garden feeling as if somebody had stepped on his right hand. He felt the way he always had after nine innings at the beginning of the season, or the very end, when the weather was too cold for baseball, and he felt like nothing would ever take the stiffness out of that hand, the one without the mitt. The best he could ever do was warm it up and loosen it up enough to go back out the next day.
“Maybe I want to try another approach,” he had said to Salter.
But
what
approach?
For all Salter’s big talk about getting rid of Adair and Collins if they were guilty, that’s not why he had hired DiMaggio. He had hired DiMaggio to find
her
guilty. He wanted DiMaggio to prove that she was the one lying. DiMaggio said he wanted to find out the truth once and for all, and Salter had sat there nodding his head. But the truth Salter wanted was this: Hannah Carey was full of shit.
DiMaggio was a big boy. He knew he had been hired to make a
case against Hannah Carey at the same time Brian Hyland was trying to make his case against Adair and Collins.
There was something about the meeting he hadn’t been able to put a finger on until he watched the tape again. Now he knew. It wasn’t the way Hollywood Bob had worked her over, like some grifter on the hustle. Watching them from Salter’s security room, watching them live, not really analyzing everything, DiMaggio thought it was Hollywood Bob who had run the meeting. Organized the room.
It was her.
She was the one, in her own fragile and understated way, who kept the whole thing coming back to her:
You people are interested in
me
?
DiMaggio thought: Yes. I am. Very interested.
At the first meeting he had told Salter he was sure; now he wasn’t so sure. When the thing with the boxer, Tyson, happened, he was sure Tyson had raped the girl. As time passed, again, DiMaggio wasn’t so sure. He watched the tape of the girl dancing at the beauty pageant the day after it was supposed to have happened. Smiling. Really selling the bathing suit number. Hi, I’m going to be Miss Black USA, or whatever it was. DiMaggio had the tape of the Barbara Walters special she did—how come they all cried, was it stipulated in some contract?—and waited for something in her story that spoke to him of the violence she was describing. He was smart enough to know he was a man trying to read a woman’s mind; he’d read enough in rape books since he’d been in New York to know about denial and all the emotional defense mechanisms; understood that Desiree Washington, Tyson’s alleged victim, had already told the story fifty times before she told it to Barbara Walters.
But how could she be so cool, telling the country?
He had talked to Sex Crimes people, one from the Queens D.A., one from Brooklyn. They had both told him the same thing: What a rape victim said the day after it happened or a year after it happened didn’t matter. Not one bit.
Every woman dealt with it differently.
The woman from the Brooklyn D.A.’s office, Gail Moore, had looked at him icily across her desk and said, “They didn’t look ashamed enough for you?”
“Ashamed has nothing to do with it.”
Moore said, “I’m not hitting you with it. I’m just telling you how it is. You’re a guy. You’re conditioned, up until the last few years anyway, when it’s been beat into you finally, to expect women to fall apart at the mention of the thing. Everybody has their own way of dealing with trauma of this kind. By the time a lot of them do come forward, they’re cried out.”
DiMaggio said, “You think these guys did it?”
“Yes.”
“Tyson?”
“Yes.”
“The Kennedy kid?”
“Yes.”
DiMaggio said, “It’s not logical to assume that every time a woman steps forward, she’s the one telling the truth. That the guy did it every time. It can’t be that way one hundred percent of the time, any more than somebody charged with murder is guilty one hundred percent of the time.”
“I didn’t say that. You asked me about some of the famous ones. The ones you brought up, I think the guy did it. I think
these
guys did it.”
“When that woman stepped forward with the Mets players a few years ago, there was no indictment, no grand jury. No case.”
Gail Moore, somewhere in her thirties he guessed, a lovely, light-skinned black woman, said, “You didn’t ask me if I thought there should have been an indictment. Or about the merits of the investigation. Or the case. You’re asking me if I thought what happened to the women you’re talking about fit a classical definition of rape and I’m telling you it did.” She said, “You look into this yourself, Mr. DiMaggio. You draw your own conclusions. You, most men really, have no idea what is going on out there. None. I’m not mad. I’m not lecturing you. I’m just telling you. I’ve been at this for five years, and I frankly don’t know how much longer I want to do this job. But here’s what I know: When a woman takes it this far, my experience is that she’s telling the truth.”
“I’ve got to ask this: You never think, not for a minute, it could be some kind of setup?”
She looked at her watch then. Got up. Done with him.
“I watched Hannah Carey on television. At that press conference. I tried not to look at her as a lawyer, or prosecutor, any of that. Just woman to woman.”
“And?”
“And,” she said, “I frankly don’t think she is smart enough to have made all this up.”
He rewound the tape of the press conference again, looked at it one more time, wondering what Gail Moore saw in there that he didn’t. Then he watched some of the movie meeting and finally he shut off the television and closed the drapes in the middle of the afternoon and put Ellis Larkins on. He wanted it to feel like night, because Ellis was always a night guy. Now he was again, Ella singing Gershwin the way you were supposed to and Ellis staying right with her because, of all of them, Ellis was the one.
DiMaggio loved Oscar Peterson; George Shearing still was one of the great players. But Ellis Larkins—what was he now? seventy-five?—was his hero. An aristocrat of a performer. The first time DiMaggio had seen him, as a kid, he was playing at the Carnegie Tavern, Fifty-sixth and Seventh. That was his room, the way the Carlyle was Bobby Short’s room, and the Algonquin used to belong to Michael Feinstein. And DiMaggio knew right away, before he knew anything, that this was the way his kind of music was supposed to sound, this was the way you commanded a piano, a piece of music, a room. The music came, but you never saw the hands move. There was a book review DiMaggio had read once, he couldn’t remember the book, but the guy reviewing it had said there were two kinds of geniuses, the ordinary and the magicians. An ordinary genius, he was a guy you and I would be as good as, if we were just a lot better. Then there were the magicians. DiMaggio remembered the next line exactly: “Even after we understand what they’ve done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark.” That was Ellis Larkins, the bright music coming out of that dark, magical place.
DiMaggio thought: If I could have hit a baseball the way Ellis
Larkins played, they would have had to build me my own wing in Cooperstown. Ellis Larkins played piano, he thought, the way Ellis Adair played basketball …
The phone rang.
“It’s Lisa. Remember me?”
He remembered, actually. He had been leaving cards with his name and number at the Sherry-Netherland at Hannah Carey’s gym, her bars, the place where she got her hair cut; he could go into one place on the West Side and they would tell him another place she liked to go. In the last week, he had talked to trainers, waiters, managers, a couple of old boyfriends, women she’d waitressed with, her former modeling agent, finding out random things, none of them big. Sometimes they didn’t want to talk at work, so he would hand them a few cards and tell them to get back to him. Sometimes they would. The shit work of any investigation.
Some of his folders were around him on the bed. He opened one he had labeled
FRIENDS
.
“Lisa Wells,” he said. “Twenty-two years old.”
“But—”
“—you can do older.”
She had asked him out on a date when he’d met her a couple of nights before at a restaurant on the West Side run by Lee Mazzilli, the former ballplayer. DiMaggio said he was a little old for her, and she said, no way, not only could she do older, she had dated a guy in his fifties once. With excitement in her voice.
Making it sound like a field trip.
“I told you I’d give you a call if I came up with anything,” she said.
“And you have.”
“You bet! I’ve been following the case a lot closer since I talked to you.”
He didn’t say anything. He was seeing the girl better now. She didn’t need much help to get revved up.
“Boy, was I surprised to find out that Hannah got into a three with her old boyfriend.”
“A. J. Fine.”
“I mean, I’d seen her in here a couple of times with her friend—”
“—Fine?—”
“No, the girlfriend, plenty of times. And they never looked like the type that would ever, you know, get sweaty together. I mean, what’s up with
that
?”
DiMaggio said, “You know this friend of hers? A. J. Fine said he couldn’t even remember her name.”
Lisa said, “She works in Dakota.”
“She moved, you mean?”
She laughed. “No, silly. The new place, Dakota, up on Third.”
The only Dakota DiMaggio knew about in New York was the apartment building where John Lennon got shot.
“I don’t know it.”
“It just opened. That’s how I happened to run into Lisa. Lisa the other girl whose name A. J. Fine couldn’t remember. We were applying there the same day. I said, ‘Hey, I know you.’ ”
She was starting to make DiMaggio feel dizzy. Trying to stay with her, he said, “Her name is Lisa, too?”
“I mean, is that
wild
?”
DiMaggio said, “You read my mind. Do you know her last name?”
“Lisa Melrose. Like the show.”
“The show?”
“
Melrose Place.
On Fox. Very hot. What’s up with that, you don’t even know that show?”
He tried again. “So she’s working at Dakota?”
“Got the last waitressing job. Bummed me out big-time.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll check her out.”
Lisa said DiMaggio should call her sometime. “When I’m a little less jammed up,” he told her, then he hung up and called Dakota. It was between Eighty-eighth and Eighty-ninth, on Third. Lisa Melrose worked the eleven-to-five shift. It was two o’clock. DiMaggio asked the guy on the phone, probably the bartender, when lunch quieted down. The guy said after three, all there was left to do was set up for dinner.
“Lisa Melrose,” he said in the Sherry. Smiled. “What’s up with
that
?”
Jesus, he was getting old.
DiMaggio couldn’t decide whether Dakota looked more like a Los Angeles place or a New York place. It was getting harder and harder to tell the difference. He went to Los Angeles and there was a new place called Tribeca, in New York there was a new place called Mulholland Drive. And here was Dakota on Third, which seemed to be all of them. There was one long room with a high ceiling, which probably made Dakota sound louder than a ballpark when it was crowded. There were a half-dozen tables near the front window and then the majority of tables in the back. In between was a bar that seemed long enough to serve as the runway for Miss America.
There was an old guy, looking very natty in a tweed blazer a little warm for the weather and a red ascot, sitting at the end of the bar, sipping a martini and watching a soccer game on the television set above him. The bartender, a big, good-looking kid, who said his name was Ryan. He told DiMaggio that Lisa Melrose was the tall black-haired one serving tea to two women in the back, the only customers back there that DiMaggio could see.
Ryan said, “They’re paying up, then she’s off. It just depends now how they break the tip down into pennies and nickels.”
DiMaggio nodded knowingly. “You know who could fix the deficit? Women who eat out.”
“Lisa know you’re coming?”
“Not exactly.”
“What did you say you did again?”
“I’m doing some work for the Knicks right now.”