Jump (26 page)

“Ahora mismo,”
Marty said, joking at Cantor around the cigar.

“Enough of this shit. What is this, Berlitz? What does—?”

Marty told him, “It means I want to find his black ass. Knock on his door like I’m the law and say, ‘Okay, boy, come with me.’ ”

“Boy?” Cantor said.

It was eight-thirty in the morning. Cantor had told him on the
phone that if they were going to talk, to do it then; he was up to his eyeballs in bankers the rest of the day. Adair had been missing for forty-eight hours. The Knicks didn’t know where he was; Richie Collins still didn’t know. Collins had gotten one phone call, the night before. Adair wouldn’t say where he was, when he was coming back, just that he was fine.

Marty happened to call Collins a little before midnight, to see if anything had changed.

“He wanted me to know he wasn’t dead,” Collins said. “Said it wasn’t a deal like Michael Jordan’s dad, he hadn’t got himself shot and dumped someplace. Then before I could ask him anything else, he said, ‘I need some time, sort some shit out.’ And hung up.”

Marty wrote it in thirty-five minutes, and they put it on the front page of the Sports Final, which was the last edition of the
Daily News.

“I can taste this one,” Marty said. “I find him, I write him up big-time, we hold it for the late edition so nobody else gets to rewrite it and act like it’s theirs. Then I turn around and put him on television the next day.”

Cantor said, “He’s going to do all this for Marty Perez of the
News
out of the goodness of his heart?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I haven’t figured that part out yet.”

“You really do have big balls,” Cantor said.

Marty said, “Richie Collins told me the same thing. Everybody must know.”

Cantor shrugged.

“
Qué cojones
,” Cantor said.

“Now you’re getting the hang of it,” Marty said. “All I’ve got to do is find him.”

“Where does somebody like Ellis Adair go to disappear?”

Marty said, “I keep thinking it might be the place where we’ll least expect to find him.”

“And where is that?”

“Maybe here,” Marty said.

“You’re shitting me,” Cantor said, looking at his Cartier watch. It
was the move that meant get out. “You think he’s in New York?”

Marty said, “Sounds so nice they named it twice. And why not? Where the hell else is he gonna go?”

Marty walked out ahead of Cantor, into the early-morning quiet of the city room.

“Okay, asshole,” Marty said out loud. “Come out, come out wherever you are.”

It was half an hour later. Marty was already working on his second cigar and fourth cup of coffee and feeling jumpy when the kid, Casseas, who worked reception out by the elevators, buzzed him.

He said there was a woman out there to see him, most definitely. Casseas was black and probably Haitian. Marty could never be sure on the Haitian, but Casseas had picked up all the conversational frills the black kids used. Most definitely. No doubt. They seemed to think it made them sound smarter.

“What’s her name?”

“She don’t give me a name, mon.”

“Then tell her I’m busy.”

“I think you want to talk to this one,” Casseas said. “No doubt.”

“Why is that?”

Marty drummed his fingers on the desk. Shit, how many cups of coffee had he had? He felt like he was having a stroke.

Casseas lowered his voice. “She says that Richie Collins raped her one time and she wants to talk to you about that. Most definitely.”

“¿Qué haces?”
Marty said.

Teresa Delgado said, “English, please.” She smiled.

Marty guessed her to be in her mid-twenties. She was tiny, not much over five feet, had a round face and straight, shiny black hair, looking soft enough to touch. Teresa Delgado was not dark, though. She had creamy white-girl skin. There was a sweetness about her, a calm, that came into Marty Perez’s office and seemed to settle his caffeine jitters immediately. There was something about her face, the smallness of her, that gave her a doll quality.

“Can I get you anything?”

“No, thank you.”

“Sorry about the condition of this office.” He grinned. “It’s like Grand Central: We’ve tried to get the homeless out of here, but they still find a way.”

Nothing.

Yeah, you’ve always been a real champ at loosening things up, Perez.
Qué tipo.
Cantor was right. What a guy.

“I probably should have come forward sooner—”

“It’s not an exact science, Miss Delgado—”

“—Teresa—”

“—Teresa. It took Hannah Carey a year.”

She had taken her shoulder purse, some kind of expensive-looking leather or a great imitation, and put it in her lap. She was working it over pretty good. Her hands looked even whiter than her face; she sure had some strong white blood in her somewhere from daddy or mommy.

“Ten years for me,” she said.

Marty said, “Why now and why me?”

Teresa Delgado looked up at him with her big eyes.

“I read those first things you wrote about Hannah Carey when no one in the newspapers was giving her a chance. I was very impressed by that.”

Marty thought: Still the king of the bullshitters. “Thank you,” he said, trying to sound humble. Bullshitting her some more.

“I’ve been following the case ever since,” she continued in a voice without accent or inflection, a sad voice that Marty didn’t think belonged to a face this pretty, this sweet.

Teresa Delgado said, “They’re going to get away with this, aren’t they?”

“You can’t know that—”

“They are, aren’t they?” Pressing him.

“They probably are,” Marty admitted. “If she’d only done things differently. Back then, I mean.”

“It’s like you told me,” she said. “This isn’t an exact science.”

“No.”

“Sometimes, though.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Maybe it is, once in a while. I haven’t told you my story yet.”

Marty watched her. A little girl named Delgado, talking about bad things. Getting ready to, anyway.

“They were both in the room with me, too.”

Marty kept his Panasonic tape recorder, the little one, an RQ-311 minicassette recorder with the built-in microphone, next to his phone. He pushed it forward, showing it to her, checked to see if there was a cassette in there, and jabbed at the Play button. Smiling, but making sure to let her know.

“You say both.”

“Both Richie Collins and Ellis Adair.”

Marty said, “Richie Collins and Ellis Adair were in the room when you were raped.”

“By Richie Collins,” she said.

Marty said, “What about Adair?”

Teresa Delgado said, “He watched.”

Marty Perez, his heart beating so hard now he thought he really was having a stroke, told her she probably should start at the beginning.

She lived in a frame house on Newark Avenue, Teresa Delgado said, down the hill from a terrible old bingo place, White Eagle Hall, where Richie Collins and his friends used to play ball in the summer. She was two years younger than he was and had a terrible crush on him anyway, so sometimes she would sneak into White Eagle Hall on the summer nights, sometimes with a girlfriend, sometimes alone, and watch the games.

“It was like something you thought should be closed down,” she told Marty. “Closed down or condemned. Richie and his friends, though? They treated it like a museum.”

There were always other girls around, older girls, and it seemed that, according to her observation, Richie Collins always had two or three he was dating at one time. But she was fifteen years old, she said. Teresa Delgado, daughter of a dead Jersey City policeman and a mother who worked two jobs to support Teresa and three sisters, decided that summer that she was in love with Richie Collins.

“His mother had died the year before,” she said. “He was living by himself over in Lafayette.”

“How did she die?”

“It was said that she was stabbed by a mugger,” said Teresa Delgado. “But you heard things …”

“What things?”

“That she was a prostitute,” she said. “And that she was killed by the man she worked for.”

Marty said, “Her pimp.”

“Yes.”

“And the kid was allowed to live alone?”

“It was Lafayette, Mr. Perez,” she said. “It was the projects.” That seemed to explain everything. “He told everyone that he was moving in with Ellis Adair and his Aunt Mary over at Booker T. Washington. But he stayed at Lafayette.”

“How did he pay?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But he did.”

Teresa Delgado came to know what nights there would be games at White Eagle Hall better than the players did. She knew when the biggest crowds of adults would be in the folding chairs on the side, so close to the tiny court they were practically in the game. She came to know the players by name, ones from her neighborhood, all the huge black boys from the projects across town, the part of Jersey City that she had only seen a couple of times in her life, from the back of her Uncle Luis’s car. He had been born in the Dominican the way most of her family had, and he had friends over in Montgomery.

To her, it was like provinces in another country. Montgomery. Lafayette. Booker T. Washington.

“I followed the game the way real sports fans follow a season,” she said. “I knew which night the college boys would play, which nights they would mix college and high school. But it was all so I could watch him.”

Sometimes she would wait outside, so he would have to pass her when the game was over. Teresa Delgado, fifteen years old and in love for the first time, did not even care when he would come out with another girl.

“I knew there would be a night when he would really see me,” she
said. “And I was certain, Mr. Perez, that when he saw me he would be able to see all the way inside me.” She smiled at Marty, as if embarrassed at the picture she drew for him of herself.

At last there was the night when Richie Collins came out alone. And she was there, alone.

“How old are you?” he said. Before asking her her name.

“Eighteen.”

“Liar.”

“Am not.”

“What’s your name, little girl?”

She told him.

“Would you like to have a date with me?”

“What kind of date?”

“I could take you for ice cream. Don’t all little girls like ice cream?”

She was so brave now. It was happening, not exactly the way she had imagined it, but close enough.

“So brave,” she repeated to Marty.

“I drink wine,” she told Richie Collins that night.

“You’re not old enough to drink.”

“Am too.”

They really did go for ice cream the first night, a little place on Newark Avenue, down the hill from White Eagle Hall. The next time, they went for pizza. The third time, he told her he was ready to see if she really did drink wine. He said there was nobody home at his friend Ellis’s. Did she know Ellis? Everybody knew Ellis by then in Jersey City. They took the Greenville local bus that Richie always took home after the basketball games. Teresa felt wicked and grown-up, going into the world she had only seen from Uncle Luis’s car.

Richie Collins took her up to Ellis Adair’s apartment. She was surprised to see Ellis there. Richie had told her they would be alone.

And later on, after they had drunk a lot of the wine—“cheap Gallo red”—Richie Collins raped Teresa Delgado, not the eighteen she said she was, fifteen years old and a virgin, on Ellis Adair’s living room couch, with a Mets baseball game on the television in the bedroom and the window open and all the summer-night noises including basketball coming up through the window from the playground down below.

He raped her with Ellis Adair wandering in and out of the room, waiting for Richie Collins to be finished.

“So they could go do something,” she said. “Ellis seemed impatient that Richie was taking so long.”

Marty said, “Did you scream?”

Teresa Delgado said, “I was too ashamed.”

Then she said to him, “Besides, there was this part of me, even when the pain started to come, that thought, all this time, girl, this is what you wanted.”

She told him more about it, as much as she could remember, and finally Marty Perez, remembering the sexy young blond girl who’d been hitting on Richie Collins outside the Fulton Sports Shop, said to Teresa, “What happened? When it was over?”

She shrugged and said, “He took me down to the bus and gave me a quarter.”

Ellis didn’t want Dale to go. Didn’t understand how somebody could leave now.

But Dale said, “I am
going
to keep working.” Working this time meant Europe. First London, then Paris, then Rome. A week in each one. Ellis didn’t know why a modeling job in Europe had to take nearly a month, but there it was, and so Ellis had Dale’s triplex to himself until he sorted things out.

“I wish there was a way to smuggle you through customs, big boy,” Dale said, and kissed him.

Tall beautiful Dale, dark skin, some kind of Hawaiian mix going: Dale, who made being beautiful look as easy as Ellis made basketball. Looking young enough still to do those billboards everybody talked about, wearing that skimpy black underwear.

Dale, looking as sad as Ellis could ever remember, gave Ellis another kiss good-bye. “I wish there was something I could say to make you feel better.”

“You want
me
to feel better?” Ellis said.

“Yes, you.”

“Nothing to say.”

“We’ll get through this.”

Ellis said, “It isn’t fair.”

“It’s like they say. Life sucks, then you die. Isn’t that what they say?”

“Don’t,” Ellis said.

Really wanting to say, “Don’t go.”

“I’m sorry,” Dale said.

“Ellis said, I was sitting there this morning, looking out at the park. Like I used to sit out on Aunt Mary’s terrace and watch guys score rock. And I’m thinking, I did everything they told me to do. You know what I’m saying? I played by the goddamn
rules.
I worked my ass off and didn’t do no drugs and I kept making myself better playing ball. And now all
this
happens. All this
shit.
”

He stopped because he didn’t want to cry in front of Dale. Because he shouldn’t have been the one crying, anyway. “Sometimes I think I should’ve been one of those Idas I told you about,” he said. “Be a playground legend. You understand? But never left Jersey City.”