Jump (37 page)

He took a left on First, going uptown again.

Ellis stayed to the left of the tunnel that opened up at Forty-ninth Street, going past bookstores and delis and a rib place, another bookstore, passing a church, St. John of Something at Fifty-fifth, then crossing Fifty-seventh again, then checking the traffic, mostly cabs, as he went diagonally across First, then suddenly taking a right at Sixty-second, heading toward F.D.R. Drive and the East River. DiMaggio made the right with him. Ellis crossed York, and now DiMaggio wondered if Ellis was crazy enough to put the bike on the F.D.R.?

But then, maybe they were all crazy.

Ellis made a right now on the east side of the street and sped down to Sixty-first, went up on the sidewalk, got off, and leaned the bike against a chain-link fence there. He stretched for a minute, shaking his legs loose, twisting his back around.

Finally, he pulled the canvas bag out from behind the seat, shook it, and the basketball bounced out.

When Ellis had stopped, DiMaggio made a quick right. Now he eased down the block a little, away from Ellis. Just enough to keep him in sight. DiMaggio had been so busy watching Ellis he didn’t realize he was watching him through a playground for kids, with swing sets and slides and seesaws, with a basketball court next to the playground, cut in underneath F.D.R. Drive. If you weren’t looking for it, you had no chance of seeing the court from the street. DiMaggio smiled, remembering his ride through Jersey City with Richie Collins. Thinking it was like Ellis had found his own little corner of Jersey City now, his own Baby Rucker on the East Side of Manhattan.

Playground to playground.

Ellis got just enough help from the streetlights. And there was plenty of traffic noise from the F.D.R. even at four in the morning, to mute the bounce of the ball, the sound of it hitting the old metal backboard.

And right away, as soon as he started to play, the setting didn’t matter. Even in the hat, the stupid glasses, the fake beard, it was unmistakably Fresh Adair.

He started out shooting from the outside, DiMaggio able to hear the rattling sound it made as it went through the wire-mesh net. Then Ellis would retrieve the ball quickly, sometimes almost on it before it hit the ground, sometimes dunking absently, before he could go back outside and make another jump shot, then be moving toward the basket again, lost now in his own elegant choreography.

Even when a car would stop at the light on Sixty-first, maybe fifty yards from him, there was no reason to see Ellis in there, at the far end of the court.

See the amazing show that was going on.

Left-handed hook. Right-handed hook. Fakes, stutter steps, pull-up jumpers. Stopping every so often to look behind him. Then back to the game, back into the night, like the thousand nights like this he must have had back in Jersey City.

DiMaggio got out of the car, careful not to slam the door, trying to walk quietly toward the court, past where the blue bike rested against the fence. Ellis Adair had his back to him, underneath the basket now, bouncing the ball off the backboard, catching it, dunking in the same motion. Doing it again.

“Ellis.”

He turned around, startled, not picking DiMaggio up at first on the other side of the fence.

“Say what?”

DiMaggio stepped onto the court. “It’s me. DiMaggio.”

“Ain’t no Ellis here. Don’t know no DiMaggio.” He tilted his head to the side. “Get away from my bike.”

“You do know me,” DiMaggio said, taking a couple of steps closer, wondering what he would do if Ellis just made a run for it. He
smiled. “I’m the asshole Ted Salter hired to investigate you and Richie.” Spell it out so he understood.

They stood there on the court, fifty feet apart, Ellis with the ball on his hip. DiMaggio said, “I need to talk to you.”

“You alone?”

“Yes.”

Ellis said, “How’d you—”

DiMaggio said, “Doesn’t matter. Point is, I found you. I found Dale’s place. I found you and Dale.”

Ellis said, “You found. You found. You found
shit
with me and Dale.”

“Listen,” DiMaggio said. “I don’t
give
a shit about you and Dale. I don’t.” He was talking fast, wanting to get it all out there, right now, not wanting to lose him.

Trying to make it sound as if he was on Ellis’s side.

Which maybe he was.

DiMaggio said, “I know stuff I didn’t know before.”

“Know who killed Rich?”

“No.” He took a couple of more steps closer, his arms stretched out wide, feeling silly, feeling like he was showing Ellis he was unarmed. “Listen, you mind if we sit down someplace?”

DiMaggio got a few feet away and stopped.

Ellis said, “I don’t know that we got anything to talk about.”

“Just hear me out. I found out A.J. had Hannah before she went off with you guys that night. I believe she’s lied to me. Now I need to find out how much lying she’s done.” DiMaggio took a deep breath, let it out. “It’s just you and me. I don’t have a tape recorder.” He opened his jacket. “You can pat me down if you want. I’m not wearing a wire. I just want you to tell me the rest of it.”

“I don’t have to tell you nothing, Richie said.”

“Richie’s fucking
dead.
”

Ellis didn’t say anything, just stood there with the basketball on his hip.

DiMaggio said, “You’ve got to come back, Ellis. You look guiltier every day you don’t.”

“Guilty of what? Takin’ out Rich? You’re standing here telling me I’m a suspect?”

DiMaggio said, “You think you’re not? Let me explain something to you, Ellis. When somebody’s wife gets killed, you know who the number one suspect is, before the cops know anything? It’s the husband. It’s the one closest to her. You saw what happened with O.J., right from the start. So who was closer to Richie Collins than anybody in the whole world?
You
were.”

Ellis shook his head. He said, “Doesn’t prove one goddamn thing.”

“You’re absolutely right. It doesn’t. But it’s a place for them to start. And they don’t have to prove anything at the start. There’s a reason they’re called
suspects
, Ellis. Maybe they think you’re pissed at Richie because he got you into this mess with Hannah Carey in the first place. Hey, the cops say, maybe Ellis is innocent, after all. Maybe it was Richie who raped her and Ellis got fed up with being called some dirty rapist, too. Maybe Ellis got tired of taking the fall.”

Ellis Adair stared at him, ball still on the hip, frowning at DiMaggio, as if trying to keep up. Like he was listening to him as hard as he could.

DiMaggio said, “And who’s missing? You are. The season’s starting, your best friend is dead, and nobody can find you. You know what the cops say to that one? What’s Ellis Adair got to hide? They’re starting to think it was you Richie went to meet that night at the house. There’s enough people who will tell them how Richie’s been bossing you around all these years. Maybe the cops are starting to think you got fed up with his bullshit and you’re the one who killed him.”

Ellis said, “That what you think?”

DiMaggio said, “It doesn’t matter what I think. It’s what the cops think, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. It’s how things
look.
”

Not even thinking about what he was doing, DiMaggio took a step closer to him and took off Ellis’s sunglasses, pulled off the fake beard. Then took the Yankee cap off his head. Ellis stood there and let him do it, like a kid allowing himself to be undressed.

“I didn’t kill him,” Ellis said softly.

“Then go tell the police that yourself. Or call Ted Salter and have him arrange for you to tell the police.”

“I didn’t kill Richie, and I didn’t rape her,” Ellis said evenly.

Just like that.

DiMaggio didn’t give him any time, any room. “What about Richie? Did Richie rape her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come
on
, Ellis.”

“I think he did. I just didn’t see him do it.”

DiMaggio said, “Give me ten more minutes. Let me finish this job and get back to Florida.” He took a deep breath. “It’s time to turn yourself in, Ellis. You’re going to walk on this rape thing, I’m sure Donnie Fuchs has been telling you that from the start. You don’t want to go from there to being a suspect in Richie’s murder.” Ellis turned away, toward F.D.R. Drive. DiMaggio grabbed his arms, surprised at how skinny they felt, and repositioned him so they were facing each other. “You got an alibi for Richie?”

“Yes.”

“Dale?”

“Somebody at Dale’s. I was there all night.”

DiMaggio tried to read his face in light that kept changing because of the traffic on the F.D.R. but couldn’t decide if he was telling the truth or not, even with his kid’s face no longer hidden by a disguise. “Tell the cops that. Tomorrow. But tell me about you and Richie and Hannah Carey right now.”

“Maybe I’ll just go off again, somewhere you can’t find my ass this time.”

DiMaggio said, “I found you once. It’s always easier the second time, once you know the other guy’s moves.”

“Not my moves.”

DiMaggio said, “Why’d you take off, anyway? The DNA test on the dress, it made you look innocent, not guilty.”

Ellis nodded his head slowly, like he wanted to explain, but all he said was, “I’ll tell you about it someday.”

“Just tell me about that night.”

“You got no leverage to make me tell.”

“I got Dale.”

“Like I said, you got what you
think
you got.”

“You say.”

“God
damn
!” Ellis shouted all of a sudden. “God
damn
! Always somethin’, isn’t it? Always somebody wanting something. You come
on like you want to be my friend. Like Ellis and DiMaggio, we’re on the same
team.
Talk to me, Ellis.
Work
with me, babe. But you got your own angle. You
gots
to know. You gots to know and I
gots
to help you.”

DiMaggio said, “You’re right. I’ve got to know.”

“Why is it so fucking important to you?”

“Because I’m starting to think maybe the wrong people ended up victims here.”

“You mean Rich?”

“I mean you.”

Ellis nodded to the playground. There was a bench next to the seesaw. They went over and sat down and Ellis told him what he did know.

Ellis’s story:

Richie knew Hannah from when she was A.J.’s girl. He’d even run into her the week before, at Gates over in New Canaan, Ellis said. Got her drunk. Thought about maybe getting her into a scene with this high school girl he was meeting there later. But Hannah only wanted to talk about A.J., wanting to know if A.J. might be coming in. Richie told her come back next week after the welcome-home dinner, everybody would probably be around, the team had decided to party after the boring welcome-home party.

Finally, the high school girl showed up and Hannah blew Richie off.

Ellis: “It only made Richie want her more. Richie didn’t take too much to turndowns, even if he was trying all the time. So right away that night at Mulligan’s, when he realized Hannah and A.J. was in the same place, Richie said, ‘The Dartmouth boy’s going to get some shit big-time from his ex.’ Then he told me he might hang around, give the bitch a second chance.”

The place got more and more crowded and before long most of the Knicks were there. Richie and Ellis got separated. The next time Ellis noticed Hannah Carey was later. A. J. Fine was gone, and all of a sudden Richie had his arm around Hannah and was bringing her over to where Ellis was sitting. Ellis couldn’t tell at first whether she was
drunk or high, but she wasn’t at the table five minutes when she jumped up and wanted to sing with the band.

Ellis: “Some old song Richie knew the name of. Said it was a golden oldie.”

About eleven o’clock, Richie said they should all go someplace more quiet. Hannah said something like, Why leave a great party, right, Ellis?

Ellis: “Rich acted mad because she didn’t want to leave, but I knew better. She was making it pretty
damn
clear she wanted to be with me. That’s why he was mad.”

He said that no matter how hard he didn’t try sometimes, even as Richie Collins was trying his ass off, it didn’t matter, they wanted to be with Ellis. Always.

Ellis: “I never knew what way to go. If I got up and left, and the girl left, too, Rich’d get all mad at
me.
Or he’d get all mad if I stayed and he couldn’t get nowhere with the girl. The best thing was, when there’d be two of them, even if they didn’t want to get in one of Rich’s piles.”

DiMaggio asked him why.

Ellis: “ ’Cause if I took one of them home, did my deal right in front of him, it would get him offa me for a while, not be asking me where I was last night, where’d I go? Asking me if I had some strange I hadn’t told him about. It was like I had this clock inside my head. The kind they always said I had on the court? Okay, Fresh, been a while since you made Richie happy by jumping some strange, better get out there tonight. Be the Ellis he wanted me to be. The Ellis he never wondered if I
wasn’t
, he was so wrapped up in his own head about the way
he
wanted things to be. How they was supposed to
look.
He knew I wasn’t pussy-crazy like him. But, hell, no one was. He wanted me to be Ellis the stud. So I was, at least enough to get him off my back.”

Ellis finally suggested he and Hannah go back to the house so they didn’t have to sit in Mulligan’s all night. Maybe Hannah would change her mind back there. Or do them both. Ellis drove her car, Richie drove the Jeep, following them.

Hannah never asked where Richie was, and Ellis didn’t say.

Ellis: “She was real drunk by then. She started to fool around with
me, trying to get me all turned on. Then she started crying, telling me all about A.J., how she knew he loved her, he’d always loved her, how could he fuck her over this way. How maybe he’d get all jealous when he found out she’d gone off with me. I just wanted to get her back to the house and turn her over to Richie and get her out of my face.”

Richie was standing in the living room when they walked in. Hannah said something like, “What’re you doing here?”