Jump (22 page)

“Is she gonna want to talk to you? I had to run a guy out of here yesterday. Had his camera crew waiting outside.”

DiMaggio said, “I plan to show her my nurturing side.”

“Hey,” Ryan said, grinning, “not in front of the tea ladies.”

Lisa Melrose came over. She was almost as tall as Hannah Carey; they were probably a sight when they were together. The tray with the bill had some cash on it and a lot of change.

“Jeez,” she said. “When they got close there at the end with the frigging tip, they both started to sweat, I swear to God.”

Ryan took the tray. “Somebody here to see you.” He nodded at DiMaggio. “From the Knicks.”

DiMaggio stood up and Lisa Melrose said, “Lisa told me you’d probably show up.”

“Blew my cover.”

“Knowing her, that’s probably not all—”

Ryan said, “Now, now.”

DiMaggio said, “You got a few minutes?”

“Why not?” Smiling. “Just let me wash up.”

DiMaggio took a cup of coffee with him to a table in the corner near where the tea ladies had been. When Lisa Melrose came back, she had washed her face and put a brush through her spiky hair. DiMaggio smelled some kind of perfume. Her makeup was gone. Now she looked older than the other Lisa, but not too much. The spiky hair made her look severe. She had thick black eyebrows, and even with the high cheekbones there was some tomboy part of her that she’d kept. It didn’t bother DiMaggio. She was pretty and didn’t seem to put too much work into it.

“Lisa, the other one, said you were some kind of investigator. But unofficial?”

“I’m about as unofficial as you can get.”

“So stuff I tell you, it doesn’t end up with the police or in the newspapers?”

DiMaggio smiled at her. “Can I speak frankly?”

“Sure.”

“I wouldn’t piss on reporters if they were on fire.”

Lisa Melrose gave him a husky kind of laugh and said, “She said you were kind of cute.”

“She’s young, she doesn’t know any better.”

“You mind if I have a drink?” Lisa Melrose wanted to know. “Sometimes one or two tables wears you out like a full house.” She went to the bar herself and brought back what looked like a rum drink with a lime in it. She drank some and said, “You’re here about me and Hannah and A.J., right?”

“Hannah mostly. I talked to A.J.”

She was taking another sip of her drink and stopped with the glass near her mouth. Looking at him with big eyes, almost as black as her hair. “Did he say anything about me?”

“He didn’t go into much detail about the whole thing. To tell you the truth, for a jock, he actually seemed a little—”

“—embarrassed?” she said. Nodding. “That’s A.J.’s game. He wants people to think that between basketball and reading all his big books, he barely has time to get laid.”

DiMaggio said, “He’s a sensitive guy, and he doesn’t care who knows it.”

“Well, he’s not exactly too sensitive when he gets his clothes off,” she said. Now she drank.

“Like I said, I’m really here to talk about Hannah.”

Lisa Melrose, loosening up now, said, “Fine. What do you want to know about that bitch?”

DiMaggio told her Fine had referred to her as “Lisa Dee.”

“For Diane, my middle name. I don’t give these guys my real name until I get a sense of how things are going to shake out.”

Lisa Diane Melrose’s story: She had met Hannah at the Vertical Club. Hannah was waiting for the machine Lisa was using. She didn’t really know how to set the weights so Lisa showed her, they ended up working out together that day. Then they had a sauna afterward. They got to chatting about all the bullshit New York girl things: jobs, the city, meeting men, safe sex, clubs.

Lisa: “She said that meeting men in New York had never been her strong suit. I kind of burst out laughing. We were still in the sauna. Hannah said, like, what’s so funny? I told her that if meeting men in New York was an Olympic event, I already had a bunch of medals.”

Lisa Melrose proceeded to tell her about all the athletes she had dated. A couple of Mets. Two hockey players, one from the Islanders, one from the Rangers. A couple of Giants, one of the Celtics when the Celtics were in town. Hannah’s eyes, according to Lisa, got bigger and bigger. Why athletes? she wanted to know.

Lisa: “I told her, God, why
not
athletes, girl? They’re young, they’re cute, most times, anyway, they’ve got great bods, they love to party. And most of them have got a
lot
of money. I’m not looking to settle down yet, neither are they. So what are we talking about? Great sex,
fun places. Laughs. Then they go off to Cleveland or San Antonio or someplace. If it’s a baseball player, and you get to know him well enough, you can go to Florida or Arizona for spring training. Have a nice vacation and help a guy out.”

DiMaggio: “Help him out?”

Lisa: “Give him an alternative to screwing gum-chewing townies with big hair.”

Hannah said she’d love to meet athletes. Lisa told her they’d go to a Knicks game the next week, she had tickets. Told Hannah to wear something understated.

Lisa: “I told her I’d be the hot one. It’s a variation of good cop, bad cop.”

DiMaggio: “A lot has changed.”

Lisa: “What does that mean?”

DiMaggio: “I used to play some ball.”

Lisa: “I knew there was something about you I liked.”

Lisa told Hannah it would be easy, and it was. The first rule of fucking athletes, she told her, was this: Don’t play hard to get. If you were good-looking enough, had a nice-enough bod yourself—and Hannah did—it was just a question of having the right moves.

Lisa: “Remember what I said about the Olympics? They should have
named
some of these moves after me.”

Before they knew it, they were all back at A. J. Fine’s apartment. Lisa said she had always flirted with the idea of a three—DiMaggio thought she made it sound like a three-point goal in basketball—and had come close a couple of times, but had never actually, you know, done it.

This time, she never had a chance to say no.

DiMaggio: “He forced you?”

Lisa shook her head. “She did.”

Quiet Hannah, who spent the whole night acting like a school-teacher in her prim dress, she took over. Lisa couldn’t believe it. DiMaggio told her that A. J. Fine,
he
said it was
his
first time with two women. Lisa said that was obvious to everyone concerned, he didn’t know where to start, what to do, when to watch. But Hannah made it easy on everybody. Afterward, when Lisa thought about the whole night, she realized that it was Hannah who had selected A. J.
Fine, Hannah who had done most of the talking at Play-by-Play, the bar at the Garden.

It was Hannah, the
trainee
, who got everything rolling.

Hannah who had the most fun.

Lisa: “I finally left about six in the morning. Hannah woke up for a minute and smiled and said she was staying. I had the feeling she meant for the rest of the season or something. She said she’d call me later.”

Lisa: “I’m still waiting for that phone call. Let me tell you something about Hannah Carey, okay? She used me as well as any guy ever did.”

Marty Perez was sitting in the shithouse of a dressing room they’d given him at Channel Two, next to the weekend meteorologist—another spic who couldn’t decide how white he actually wanted to be—when it moved on the wire, Fulton, Connecticut, dateline, about the DNA test.

It was Randy Houghton who walked in and handed him the printout. Houghton was dressed in some baggy suit that was almost pink. Jesus, it looked like a
goma.
A rubber. What’d he do, go into the store and say, “I’d like something condom-colored in a double-breasted?” Maybe that was what all the other cutting-edge boys were wearing this week. Condom-colored suits and white T-shirts. Houghton handed him the printout like he was handing him a bad report card.

“I thought you’d want to see this right away.” He nodded at the printout.

Hyland, the Fulton cop, had simply released a statement saying that the semen samples from the dress Hannah Carey had given to them had turned out to be inconclusive. “Contaminated” was the
word Hyland used. She apparently thought she was being careful by keeping the dress zipped up in a garment bag, but the opposite had happened, and the dress turned out to be worthless. Marty knew enough about the test to get by. He knew that the DNA molecule was in most cells, including blood and semen. They tested DNA strips or strands or whatever out of blood and semen and could provide a fairly conclusive match. Some states allowed the test as evidence in cases like this. Connecticut was one of them. There was a tiny possibility of error, but Marty couldn’t remember what the percentage was.

Now it didn’t matter anyway.

“No Ellis, no Richie, huh?” Marty said to Houghton. He had been putting the finishing touches on his commentary for that night’s
Chronicle.
Some nights he did it live, and this was one of them. He was calling for the resignation of the new district attorney in Queens. Another cutting-edge boy, youngest in the history of the borough. There’d been another bias case. Four mopes from Bayside beating some Japanese honor student home from Stanford within an inch of his fucking life. Even Marty got mad. Sometimes it still happened for him.
¡Ay coño!
And he couldn’t tell whether that was good or bad for him anymore, getting a hard-on over something like this, still trying to play crusading reporter.

Did Houghton and all the rest of them think they’d heard it all before?

Randy Houghton said, “You’ve still got an hour. You want to do something on this? I know it’s not much, but my feeling is, people eat up any kind of news on this like they’re eating peanuts.”

Marty had thought about it the minute he read the bulletin lead from AP. Only the thought of cranking something out on deadline exhausted him. Marty thought: In the old days, sure. Shit, in the old days if he couldn’t find a place to write he’d call somebody on the desk and dictate if it meant making the edition.

Now … what? What was the word they would have used for him back home?
Pasao.
Said of something old. Worn out.

“Let me make one call,” he said to Randy Houghton.

“If you can do it we want it,” he said. “We’ll go with this at the top of the show and push the Flashdance—”

“Flashdance?”

“—topless dancers to segment three. But we gotta know. Barry will open with the straight news, then throw it to you.” He vaguely held up the format he was holding in his hand. “If you don’t think you have time …”

“Ten minutes,” Marty said. Houghton left. Marty got out his wallet and found the number in Fulton Richie Collins had given to him. Were the Knicks still up there? Jesus, he couldn’t keep track of anything anymore. He knew they were breaking camp soon, the regular season started either next week or the week after. Marty just couldn’t remember.

“
Estoy pasao
,” he said out loud. He could feel himself start to sweat through his blue oxford television shirt. It always happened in here, the closer and closer he got to airtime.

Collins picked up on the first ring. “Fresh?” he said.

“Perez.”

“Well, now. My day is fucking complete.”

“And I thought we were buddies now. You’re not glad to hear from me?”

“Today,” Richie Collins said, “is not the day to dick around with me.”

“Why? I just got the release on the dress. I thought you’d be throwing yourself a party.”

Richie said, “I got the call from the cops about a half hour ago myself. Acting like they were doing me a favor. They ever showed up in Jersey City, the cops over there would look at them like they were wearing tights.”

Marty said, “You ought to be looking at the big picture here, if you ask me.”

“Who asked you?” Richie said.

“Listen, it could’ve been your love juice there on the dress.”

“Still wouldn’t have proved anything.”

“It’s like fingerprints.”

Richie Collins said, “Just stickier.”

“Now they can’t even prove the two of you had sex with her.”

Collins wouldn’t bite. “You trying to get me to say something here, Perez? I told you I’m not in the mood.”

Marty said, “What’s your friend Ellis have to say about all this? I go on the air in a little while, I could use a quote.”

“Ellis says nothing.”

“You haven’t talked about this? You expect me to believe
that
? He doesn’t take a leak without clearing it with you first, that’s what you told me.”

There was a pause, and Marty flashed on the dial tone coming next, thinking Collins had hung up on him. Marty looked at his watch. Six-twenty. If he was going to do something with this he was going to have to do it off the top of his head. Which meant without TelePrompTer.

Marty said, “Hey?” And Richie said, “I’m gonna tell you something.”

“If you are, do it now. I’m under a little pressure here.”

“Jesus,” Richie said. “I love it when you bastards talk about pressure. Or rip us a new asshole for not handling pressure the way you think we should. And you know what? You have no
idea.
You ever had to stand out there in front of everybody and make one free throw? Those big balls of yours you like to talk about? They’d shrivel up the size of cherry pits.”

Marty said, “Listen, I didn’t mean it that way—”

Richie Collins cut him off. “Fresh is gone, Perez.”

“When you say gone—”

“When I say it, I mean it’s going to be announced by the team at practice tomorrow. The Knicks’re going to say he’s left the team for personal reasons. But the truth is, they have no goddamn idea where he is.”

“And you don’t?”

“I don’t,” Richie Collins said and then added, “have shit.”

There was a makeup mirror in front of Marty, a makeup mirror with white lightbulbs up and down the sides and running across the top, the glare of it so harsh he didn’t like looking at himself in it, made him look so old. Marty looked now and saw Randy Houghton behind him in the doorway, trying to get his attention. Pointing to his watch.

Marty smiled. He held up one finger with his free hand and said into the phone, “So what you’re basically telling me is that Ellis Adair has disappeared?”