Frank Crittendon was sitting in the gym, bottom row of the bleachers. He wore a navy blazer and wrinkled khaki pants with cuffs and beat-up old penny loafers and thick socks that fell in bunches on the tops of the loafers. His hair, what was left of it, looked like it had been blown-dry from the back. He had a long skinny black pipe, with a narrow bowl not much bigger than a thimble, stuck in his teeth. DiMaggio thought he was asleep there at first, even with the pipe in his mouth, arms folded across his fat belly. But he straightened up when he saw DiMaggio coming across the court, turned his wrist around, and checked his watch, like some kind of reflex. DiMaggio saw he had one of those multicolored preppy nylon bands. Crittendon had turned off all the overhead lights except the ones on his side of the court. The rest of the Fulton College gym was dark.
“How’d it go?” Crittendon said.
DiMaggio sat down next to him. He said, “You’ve probably spent a lot of time with Donnie Fuchs. How do you think it went?”
Crittendon made a weary, half-assed pass at a smile. “You played ball, right?” he said. “Baseball?”
“Not so’s too many people noticed.”
“What I’m getting at, you saw things from that side. From a ballplayer’s perspective.” He took the pipe out of his mouth, laid it gently between him and DiMaggio. “So you know that in the ballplayer’s mind, it’s always us against them. Them being the manager, the general manager, the owner. Whatever. And what you mostly thought, you being the players, is that all of us were out to screw you. Am I right?”
DiMaggio said, “More or less. Theoretically, we were all on the same side, but it really only seemed to feel that way player to player and not so much there sometimes. From the low minors on, I always thought there were all these other games going on that the fans never got to see. Or’d want to see.”
Crittendon got up on his bowed legs, the pants too short, and walked out to the middle of the court, where the ref would throw the ball up. He picked up a ball that was sitting out there. “It used to be a game,” Crittendon said, his voice echoing some in the empty gym. Here we go, DiMaggio thought. Another guy all set to make sports into church.
“Used to be a game,” Crittendon repeated. “Now it’s a fight to the death with some parasite like Fuchs.” He bounced the ball hard with both hands. “I don’t think of people like Donnie Fuchs as working in this business.” He slammed the ball down again. “I think of them as growing on it. Like things that grow on a leaf.”
Crittendon dribbled the ball in a walk toward the basket to DiMaggio’s right, and now DiMaggio was surprised because he looked like he knew what he was doing. When Crittendon got to the top of the key, he took a quick look at the basket, threw up a right-handed push shot, his right arm coming up as his knee came up, and the ball floated in this big rainbow arc toward the basket and swished through. The basket was in semidarkness. DiMaggio felt like he was watching some grainy film clip out of the fifties. Frank Crittendon had played a long time ago, but he had played.
Now he walked back toward DiMaggio, saying, “They’re not going to help you, are they?”
“I didn’t expect them to,” DiMaggio said. His hands were starting to scream at him, but Crittendon had waited a long time.
DiMaggio said, “I wouldn’t have talked to me. Fuchs was right. There’s only downside, whether they did it or not.”
“I talked to Ted. You think they did it, don’t you?” Crittendon sat down, picked up the pipe. He struck an old wood match to the side of the bleachers, got the pipe going again.
“I see how it could happen, even without knowing any of the particulars, just knowing what’s been in Perez’s column. I saw what it was like when I played. I saw how it started to change at the end of my time.”
“It?” Crittendon said.
“The whole thing. Women. Sex. What you thought they wanted and what they wanted. What they were saying and what you were hearing. What you ended up getting.”
“How could it change that much? I’m forty-five years in basketball, if you count high school. I started in this league with the Rochester Royals. I’ve been a traveling secretary, PR man, scout, assistant coach. I coached in Europe one time, two seasons in Spain, just to stay in, when the ABA closed. I saw the whole thing before the shot clock. I come from when the whole thing was still played on the floor. And there’s only one thing I see that hasn’t changed, other than most points win: The women were always there.”
He needed to relight the pipe again. DiMaggio noticed Crittendon’s hands shaking this time. He thought it might be some kind of palsy. Drinkers’ hands most likely. He always wondered what it was like watching them get the first cup of coffee to their lips in the morning.
DiMaggio waited for him, the way you waited for somebody who stuttered, Crittendon finally needing three matches to do the job.
“It used to be simple,” DiMaggio said, picking it up for him. “You wanted them, they wanted you. I’m talking about the sixties and seventies. No questions asked. I wasn’t ever a star, not for a single day after they started paying me to play. But the women were there for me, too. Even in the low minors. Fort Lauderdale. Jackson, Mississippi. Columbia, South Carolina. Some wanted a ballplayer just for the sex. Some of the young girls, eighteen years old, nineteen, small-town girls in tight jeans with all these dreams, they looked you over as a potential ticket out of there, a first-class ticket out of Lauderdale or Jackson or wherever. It wasn’t just that you were young yourself, a jock, on your way somewhere. You know what I always thought part of the lure was? The thing that made it safe sex for these women before that was even in the language? They could see you work. Some guy they met at a singles bar, or at a party, he could talk about being a lawyer or a cop or working construction or pumping gas. If they didn’t know him, they had to take his word. Ballplayers were different. You could come see us. We were safe.”
DiMaggio looked out at the empty court. “At least we used to be.”
Crittendon said, “You said it changed.”
DiMaggio blew some warm air into his hands, as though he were thinking about what he wanted to say next. The air felt good. He tried to picture his hands under a faucet, not just warm water, but hot water, coming out hard.
“Everything got bigger,” DiMaggio said. “Everything got louder in sports, the fame and the money, all of it. And these dumb-jock bastards, they got more and more full of themselves, so they didn’t have time to notice that the world was changing and women were changing along with it. The jocks thought it was still cut-and-dried, meet them and get them back to the room. The volume was up, remember? They’d never heard anybody say no. It was like some foreign language. Sometimes they couldn’t hear it, and sometimes they did hear it, but they didn’t know what it fucking meant.”
“I know what you mean,” Crittendon said. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph do I know. From the time Ellis Adair was a better jumper, had a nicer touch, than some kid from the next project over, things started to come for free. Sneakers first. Then clothes maybe. Somewhere along the line a car. Then, if they’re the one in a thousand, whatever the statistics are, and they made the pros, it’s whatever the market can bear. There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal the other day. Adair made fifteen million dollars in endorsements last year.”
DiMaggio said, “And he thinks he deserves every dime.”
“Am I answering my own question here?” Crittendon said.
DiMaggio said, “Ellis Adair isn’t any bigger than Magic or Bird or Jordan, or Russell and Chamberlain were in the old days. He’s just more available. He gives off more heat, gets more. And the one constant in his life, for as far back as he can remember, all the way back to his first hard-on, is this: Women want him. They’re one of the perks that go with everything else. Somebody telling him no? What’s that?”
“Yes,” Frank Crittendon said, making it come out like a sad blues note. “Oh yes,” he said, not talking to DiMaggio now, just talking. “I was going to be a priest. You didn’t know that, did you? Came out of the Jesuits. Now I am sixty years old, and I deal with these players who look at me like I am some worthless piece of shit. Like I am garbage. I have a teenage daughter. She used to come here to watch practice. I finally asked her to stop. Would you like to know why? Because I do not want her around when this team, these players that I assembled, look at me like I am nothing, Mr. DiMaggio.”
Crittendon got up. “I’ll walk you to the parking lot,” he said. They made their way across the court, DiMaggio trying not to think too much about his hands, talking more than he ever did. He asked Crittendon if he was any good with the Fulton police. Crittendon told him there’d never been any problems before this, it had always been minor shit, parking tickets, speeding tickets, somebody blowing his horn in the middle of the night after too many beers in one of the neighboring towns. Fulton was a dry town, Crittendon explained, so if the players wanted to have a beer and chase a little bit, they went to Westport or Fairfield, some place called Masters there or the Georgetown Saloon, up Route 7 a couple of miles. Or Gates, in New Canaan.
“The chief of police is retiring at the end of this year,” Crittendon said. “The one you want to talk to over there is a detective named Brian Hyland. Good kid. His old man used to be assistant athletic director here at the college. I don’t think he’ll give you a hard time, especially if he knows you’re working for us.”
“You’ve obviously talked to him already.”
“He called when she filed her complaint.”
“Did he say if there’s any physical evidence?”
“Evidence?”
“Panties,” DiMaggio said. “A dress maybe. Something with semen on it, or blood, or hair, or skin.”
Crittendon chewed on his pipe. “He just told me about the complaint and that he’d be coming around when he decided how he wanted to proceed with this. Then he told me that he appreciated I’d been friends with his old man, but not to expect any favors.”
It was all right. You could only work your side of it. Sometimes the cops helped, sometimes they didn’t. Big cities or college towns, it depended on the cop. Most of the time they looked at him like some hotshot on a retainer, cutting in on their action, Out to make them look bad somehow. It was one thing TV and the movies always got right, DiMaggio had found that out firsthand. They got just about everything else wrong about cops and investigators, but not that. Cops didn’t want you around because they didn’t know where they stood with you. They were more comfortable with bad guys. They knew where they stood with them, at least.
“Maybe you could give this Hyland a call in the morning before I call him,” DiMaggio said. “I have a feeling he’s not going to want to talk to strangers.”
They were outside now, leaning against the rented car, summer really over, the air cool.
“Do you think you’ll get to talk to the woman?” Crittendon said.
“I met her this afternoon.” What day was it? Thursday? DiMaggio looked at his watch. Thursday, October seventh. He’d gotten the call from Salter the night before. He hadn’t even been on this thing twenty-four hours and already it felt like he’d been here a goddamn week.
Crittendon turned to look at him, surprised. “Where?”
DiMaggio told him about the Vertical Club, and when he finished, Crittendon said, “What’s she like?”
“You mean, does she look like someone who got herself raped, Frank? Yeah, it was written all over her.”
“It’s not what I meant,” Crittendon said.
“I know it’s not. I’m sorry—it’s been a long day. Donnie Fuchs and his boys, your boys, finally wore my ass out.”
“It was a stupid question,” Crittendon said, as if he wanted to out-apologize DiMaggio. “What difference does it make what she’s like?”
DiMaggio said, “It always matters who they are, where they come from. Patty Bowman, the woman in the Kennedy Smith trial in Palm Beach, she had one kind of back story. Unwed mother and so on. So you looked at her one way. Desiree Washington, with Tyson? She was a kid, and her being a kid, National Honor Society, head of her class, you better believe that mattered to the jury. Anita Hill and the jogger in Central Park and the woman with the Mets. Then there was a woman who said she was gang-raped by twenty pro football players. Where’d she come from? How did she get to that night, that place? I don’t care what Marty Perez thinks. Or what some loose-cannon brother thinks. We all want the same thing here, we meaning me and you and your boss. We just want to know.”
Crittendon said, “Do you think she’s got some kind of angle here?”
“She could, Frank. She could. Most people do, I’ve found.”
The GM sighed. DiMaggio couldn’t tell if it was a sigh of agreement, exhaustion, or disgust. “If I need to reach you?”
“The Sherry-Netherland when I’m in the city.”
DiMaggio got into the rented car, left Crittendon in the parking lot. He wondered about an angle, suddenly wanting to explain that there wouldn’t be just one. But why make him feel worse than he already did? DiMaggio would have had to tell him that everyone would have an angle here before they were through, whether they knew it or not, would admit it or not. It could be money, or getting famous, or even getting justice. Getting a story. Getting some play. DiMaggio could see it taking shape already, before he was a day into it. Perez here. Jimmy Carey, the brother, over there. Ted Salter worrying about the boys from Fukiko. Adair and Collins. Donnie Fuchs.
Making his way across the campus, hearing music in the cold night air, different music from every dorm, even some classical, DiMaggio thought: Somebody got jumped here. Smiling to himself, because he was using Donnie Fuchs’s word. Somebody always got jumped, if you really thought about it. The trick was finding out who.
And, if you were really lucky, why.