Jump (40 page)

Not worrying about language anymore.

Language or anything.

Crittendon: “Basketball had been my whole life. It was a sport of precision. It had belonged to gentlemen once, to civilized people who didn’t think the money was an
entitlement.
Not these smug, sneering punks. And now one of them had … 
had
my daughter. And I knew. So I went there. Yes. I went there because I wanted to tell him to his face what scum he was. I wanted to know why he had singled
me
out, my family … my Kelly. This
scum.
I knew he was up there. He’d said something to the coach at practice. About a date in Fulton. Bragging. Saying they all came back to him sooner or later … so I went there. The door was open. I had rung the bell, I was going to leave, then the door blew open a little. I went in. I called out, asking if anybody was there … and then I heard the voices from the bedroom and I went in, and there was this vile movie, this dirty movie … and there he was … blood everywhere … the knife still in him … I touched him … he was dead. He was dead, and I
still
wanted to hurt him. I was crazy in that moment with wanting to hurt him … so I grabbed the knife by the handle … not even thinking … about putting my hands on it … and I
twisted
it into him … like I was screwing
him
 … giving it to
him
 …”

Crittendon was nodding eagerly, looking right into the camera now. Earnest. As if to say, Doesn’t it all make perfect sense?

Pleased with himself.

Crittendon: “I thought to myself, Frank, you really know how to hurt a guy. Isn’t that funny?”

Frank Crittendon started to laugh.

Marty Perez, crying, reached over and hit Stop.

She came out of the Vertical Club when she said she’d come out, about five-thirty in the afternoon. Not wading into the media sharks this time. Just a clear Saturday in New York, the sun emptied out of the afternoon, New York looking like some hazy black-and-white photograph.

Hannah Carey had a purple nylon bag slung over her shoulder. She wore faded jeans with one knee ripped out, a baggy hooded sweatshirt, a black baseball cap with *?!@ sewn over the bill. DiMaggio had seen the caps in the city and up at Fulton College and had no idea if there was some hidden message or a cutting-edge reference.

Or if this was just kids putting
FUCK
on a baseball hat, the word right out there for the world like a headlight.

One way or the other, he was behind the curve again.

“Hey,” he said.

“Mr. Second Opinion,” Hannah Carey said. “I was glad you called.”

DiMaggio said, “I wanted to say good-bye in person.”

“Good-bye?” Hannah smiled. “We just barely said hello.”

DiMaggio jerked a head toward First Avenue.

“You’re not too tired to take a walk?”

“I’m all showered and tingly and ready to go.”

“The last time I was that way was minor-league ball,” he said. “You want me to carry your bag?”

She shook her head. “The tingly one should carry.”

They walked toward First Avenue.

“You’re really leaving, even with the—”

“Richie Collins’s murder?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” he said. At the corner, he turned south on First and she turned with him. “We could go over and sit there on Sutton, where we went after Antolotti’s.”

She said fine. He could see where her hair was still wet under the baseball cap. DiMaggio said, “You’re sure you’re not cold?”

“Like ’em and leave ’em DiMaggio,” she said. “I’m fine, really.”

If they walked a block east, he could show her the basketball court where he caught up with Ellis. He said, “My job is pretty much done here. The murder investigation, yeah, I’d like to know how it comes out, but that’s the cops’ business. The Knicks asked me to find out what happened last October with you and Richie and Ellis Adair. And now I feel like I pretty much have, and so I’m on my way back to Florida. Tomorrow probably.”

They went underneath the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, got to Fifty-eighth, and Hannah Carey said, “You sound pretty sure of yourself.”

“About?”

“About last year.”

“Pretty sure,” DiMaggio said. “I just want to tie up a few loose ends before I go. See what happened, it’s a little different from the way it came out.” DiMaggio took her arm as they crossed First at Fifty-seventh and said, “Here and there.”

Hannah took her arm back without making a big show of it. “The police know what happened. It took me a long time to remember.”

They walked in silence toward Sutton on the long avenue block, DiMaggio aware of the silence between them, of the traffic noises behind them on First, and off in the distance somewhere, way off to the west, the sound of a fire engine.

“It’s so terrible about Frank Crittendon,” he said.

Having waited as long as he could.

“Frank?”

“Crittendon. General manager of the Knicks. You haven’t heard?”

“No.”

“He killed himself this morning at the Regency Hotel. Sleeping pills. It turns out he was at Richie Collins’s house in Fulton the night he was murdered. He says he didn’t kill him, but the cops already did a check on his fingerprints, and it turns out they’re his prints on the knife that killed Richie.”

DiMaggio turned and saw that Hannah had stopped. She had a hand over her mouth. If she was acting now, she should never have gotten out of the business. She slowly pulled the hand away from her mouth. He had noticed at Antolotti’s that night, sometimes Hannah Carey looked past you, a little to the right or a little to the left. He had taken this course once, at Palm Beach Junior College, on neurolinguistics, all about interviewing techniques and how people, visualizing things, would actually look in one direction when they were telling the truth, another direction when they were lying.

Maybe he should have paid closer attention.

“I didn’t know,” she said. “No. I never met him.…” She shook her head. “I’m a little confused. Did he kill him or not?”

DiMaggio said, “Kill Richie? Before he died, he told Marty Perez that Collins was already dead and he just gave one more turn to the screw, so to speak. It turns out he had motive to go along with opportunity. Frank had found out that Richie had had sex with his daughter. Sixteen years old.”

DiMaggio said gently to Hannah, “But you know that, don’t you?”

Hannah said, “I’m a little confused—”

“You know that because Kelly Crittendon told you. She came to see you with Teresa Delgado, and she told you that not only did she have sex with Richie, but he raped her, too. And Kelly Crittendon also told you she saw her father coming out of Collins’s house the night he was stabbed to death.”

“Maybe I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” Hannah said.

DiMaggio said, “Just a few more minutes. I’m not looking for a
confession. I’ve been on your side all along, and I still am. Trust me,” he said to her.

They had walked to the corner of Fifty-seventh and Sutton. He took her arm again. Hannah didn’t move.

“Hear me out,” he said. “You can at least do that. I already told you, I’m out of your life tomorrow.”

“You sound relieved.”

“You know what?” DiMaggio said. “I don’t know what I feel anymore.”

They walked across the street, past a beat-up blue van, and sat down on the same bench they’d used after Antolotti’s. They were the only ones there. The day was getting colder. Out on the river, going pretty good, was a single powerboat, its wake looking clean and white in the dirty gray water.

“I didn’t even know Frank Crittendon,” she said, turning to face DiMaggio. “I certainly didn’t know that if I told Marty what I did, Frank Crittendon would kill himself.”

“He was a very good guy.”

DiMaggio took his hands out of his pockets, cupped them in front of his mouth, and blew warm air into them, then deliberately folded them in his lap.

“Your hands,” she said.

“Not too bad today. Blowing on them is a habit. Like people with good hands cracking their knuckles.”

“I mean it,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to hurt anybody. I was trying to repay a favor, that’s all. He’s been very generous with my side—”

“That’s what Marty thought, too. But then the more he got to think about it, the more he felt bad for sandbagging Crittendon the way he did. See, I watched the interview and saw Crittendon going to pieces and when it was over, I said, ‘How’d you know that last part, Marty?’ And he said, ‘Hannah Carey told me.’ ”

“I told you—”

“I just want you to tell me one more thing before I go.”

He reached over and took her cap off and set it between them on the bench. She looked down, confused, but let it sit there.

DiMaggio said, “I know you were with A.J. that night.”

She started to say something. DiMaggio just held up a hand and stopped her.

“Let me finish. Ellis Adair says he didn’t do anything, and I believe him because I don’t think he was particularly interested. What I want to know is if Richie really did rape you that night and
that’s
why you killed him or if there was another reason why you killed him I don’t know about.”

Hannah reached down for her baseball cap and DiMaggio got to it first and put it out of her reach at his end of the bench.

“Could I have my hat, please?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because if you don’t tell me the truth, I might have to give this hat to Brian Hyland. And when I do that—
if
I do that—Hyland is going to check the hair that’s in here against the hair he found on Richie Collins’s body. And I have a feeling—because I get these feelings sometimes—that it’s going to be the kind of DNA match he
didn’t
get off your dress.”

Hannah Carey’s eyes seemed to follow the powerboat, disappearing now, toward the Triborough Bridge. She said, “I thought only guys—”

“The test goes both ways,” DiMaggio said. “It’s kind of ironic, if you think about it.”

Hannah said, “I don’t understand.” Just that, looking right at him now. Like she wanted him to explain where he was going with all this.

DiMaggio thought, She looks like Ellis. Having to think things out for himself now with Richie gone.

“Maybe I should go?” It came out of her a question.

“Don’t leave now,” he said, smiling, trying to relax her. Keep her sitting there. “Not when I’m going good. Besides, what’re the cops really going to do with the goddamn hat? All the hair does is prove you were there. Which means you probably lied to them. But even with that, they’ve still got Frank’s prints, they’ve got Frank admitting to Perez he was there, even if he said he didn’t do it. You’re in the clear.” He smiled at her. “And that is fine with me. Richie Collins
deserved
to die. You did the world a favor.”

“I didn’t kill him,” she said.

“Sure you did.”

“What do you
want
from me!”

“The truth.”

“About
what
?”

“This really was about A. J. Fine, wasn’t it? He dumped you and then he didn’t want you back and then when you thought you had him back that night, he left you there on the sidewalk. Isn’t that right?”

Hannah Carey made this little rocking motion on the bench.

“Isn’t that right, Hannah?”

“No.”

“Yes.”

She kept rocking, staring out at the river now, rocking and finally saying to DiMaggio,
“Yes!”
Rocking. “He treated me like the
rest
of them. After everything …” Rocking harder. “I was like the rest of them, and so was he.”

DiMaggio said, “So you were going to show him, weren’t you? You were going to make him jealous, walk out with a couple of his teammates right in front of him. Which you did. Except it went wrong then, didn’t it? You got in over your head with Richie and Ellis. And now here you are a year later. I don’t know why it took a year. Maybe you don’t, either. But it did. So here you are, with a story that they both raped you. And all I’m asking is this, Hannah: Did at least
one
of them rape you?”

“I told what happened. I told Brian.”

“Ellis heard you scream. Ellis left. Then it was you and Richie.”

“I don’t want to do this anymore.” Hannah shook her head.

“Nobody’s forcing you.”

“Men always say that, don’t they?”

Hannah was still now. She said, “I didn’t kill him.”

DiMaggio gently turned her, so she was facing him. “Richie raped you. He had it coming. I don’t give a shit whether you killed him or not. But Ellis didn’t rape you. Before I go I just want to hear
you
tell
me
that Richie Collins did.”

He had been afraid she was going to cry before, cry or get hysterical or run away and blow the whole thing. But when she turned from
him now, turned all the way around so she was facing him on the bench, she was calm.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, he raped me. That
animal.
I woke up, and he had tied me to the
sofa.
And he raped me. And then he cleaned himself off and left me there and came back. And then he raped me again.”

“Why Ellis—”

“Because he
let
him, that’s why. You know what the last thing was? That I remembered? You want to know, Mr. Second Opinion, just doing your job? I remember that fucking door slamming while I screamed for him to come help me.”

She drank in air in big gulps, blew it out, DiMaggio feeling her breath on his face, they were that close now.

“Ellis didn’t do what the other one did?” Hannah said. “Fuck him, okay? He did enough. He
let
him.” She stared past him now. “You wanted the truth? There it is. Nobody was going to ignore me if Ellis Adair was in it. And he was. He was an accomplice. He was there, and he
let
him.”

DiMaggio stared out at the East River. What did Ellis and the rest of them say? Whoomp, there it is.

All of it, finally.

Nearly all of it.

“Why did you kill him?” he said softly. “Was it that he was going to get off? Did he tell you he was going to do it again? Frank Crittendon said it to Perez. Richie’d told his coach, they all came back around sooner or later.”