Ted Salter, Frank Crittendon, Richie Collins and DiMaggio sat in the Knicks locker room on the fifth floor of the Garden, court level, the other end of the hall from Salter’s private screening room. Salter and Collins looked like they wanted to be anywhere except here, with each other. DiMaggio figured it was just another day at the office for Frank Crittendon, his office being wherever Salter told him it was.
The Knicks had announced in the morning they were breaking camp at Fulton College a day early. Before they did, they issued a release that said Ellis Adair had left the team for personal reasons, even though DiMaggio wondered what the point of that was since Marty Perez had broadcast the whole thing over television the night before. The release said that Adair’s absence from the team was unrelated to what were described as “recent off-court developments.” Crittendon was quoted as saying he fully expected Adair to be with the team for the start of the regular season in two weeks, the first Saturday in November.
It was all bullshit, DiMaggio knew that. When he got to the Garden he found out that even Richie Collins had no idea where Ellis Adair was.
Collins had been the last to show up, wearing a hooded Knicks sweatshirt and jeans. Only his white sneakers looked new. He hadn’t shaved yet, and his eyes were bloodshot. DiMaggio knew the look, from all the clubhouses and locker rooms like this one. A catcher who’d played behind him one time in the low minors, Franklin Roosevelt Jarrett, DiMaggio never forgot him, out of the Robert Taylor projects in Chicago, over near Comiskey Park, used to talk about “misbehavin’ situations.” Richie Collins had come from a misbehavin’ situation, DiMaggio was sure of it.
Maybe he went out and got laid to take the edge off of Ellis making a run for it.
Collins also looked scared. Why not? Ellis was gone. Maybe Donnie Fuchs, agent and lawyer, was on his way, but he sure wasn’t there yet. Ted Salter, the one who signed the checks, was into it now. Richie Collins, for the first time, didn’t look so project tough.
“Does he have to be here?” Collins said when he saw DiMaggio.
“Sit down, Richie,” Salter said. “Next time we throw a party, we’ll let you draw up the guest list.” He sipped some coffee out of a plastic cup. “Maybe you’ll even find a way to show up on time.”
Richie Collins, a little whiny, said, “Mr. Salter—”
“Jesus, sit down, will you?”
Collins sat down in front of his own locker. Maybe it was force of habit. He looked like he wanted to get all the way inside, just hide in there until all this was over. Salter was across from him, in front of Adair’s locker. Maybe it was for effect. Crittendon was next to him, in a folding chair.
DiMaggio said, “Where’s Ellis?”
Collins turned his head toward DiMaggio, as if he wanted to move right in and say something smart. But he stopped himself, making a little calming motion with his hands, like he was telling himself he was in enough trouble already.
“I told Frank first thing. I told Mr. Salter last night, when he called and told me to be here.” Collins shook his head and said, “I have no idea where he is.”
“Has he ever done anything like this before?” DiMaggio said. “In all the years you’ve known him?”
Collins said, “You mean disappear during a rape investigation? Shit, yeah. He can’t stop himself.”
It almost made DiMaggio smile. Collins not being able to stop himself.
“Richie,” Ted Salter said. “Listen to me because I’m going to tell you this one time, and then we’ll all move on here. This situation we have here, this is not a situation where you want to come in with an attitude. I am tired of you. I am tired of your problems. I am tired of your problems being my problems. When Mr. DiMaggio asks you a question, it is the same as me asking you a question or Frank asking you a question. I cannot force you to talk about what did or did not happen with this woman. Your legal rights are your legal rights. I’m not going to piss all over them, as much as I would like to, believe me. Because I know the minute I do, you tell your lawyer and he calls the Players Association and then I’m up to my eyeballs in grievances.” He closed his eyes. “I get a migraine just thinking about it. But Ellis disappearing, that is not a legal problem. It is a goddamn fucking team problem. Which you are going to help solve in any way you can. Are we clear on that?”
Collins looked down and mumbled something that no one could hear, so Salter repeated, “Are we clear?”
“We’re clear,” Collins said.
All along, DiMaggio had wondered if anybody had any real juice with these bastards. Crittendon didn’t. The curly-haired dude coach, Gary Lenz, clearly didn’t. The players seemed to go through all of it, life and ball, like they were bulletproof. But not this afternoon. Not in here. DiMaggio had the feeling that if Salter told Richie Collins to bark like a dog, Collins would bark like a dog.
Salter said, “I believe Mr. DiMaggio asked if Ellis had ever done anything like this before.”
“Ellis isn’t the type for something like this. Ellis was never carefree. You understand? Never impulsive. He didn’t do anything—how would you put it?—spontaneous. Whether he was feeling fucked-up or not. Even when we were kids. The only place Ellis ever takes any chances is up in the air, when he’s got a ball in his hands.”
Richie Collins said, “It’s why he was made for basketball, and not just ’cause he has such a talent for it. Ellis likes the regularless of it, or whatnot. Practice at this time, playing that time. Bus will be at five-fifteen. Bus leaves forty-five minutes after the game. He’s very deep into that shit.”
DiMaggio just watched him go, impressed. Whatever else he was, he wasn’t stupid.
“Let me tell you something about Fresh Adair,” Collins said. “Him alone and the two of us together. If it wasn’t me, it would have been somebody else. He likes to be told. He wants to be told.”
“You’re saying you’re worried,” DiMaggio said.
Collins looked straight at him. “Fuck yes.”
Salter said to Collins, “Why’d he go? Frank talked to Boyzie this morning. Why’d the DNA test set him off?”
“He’s been acting even more squirrelly than usual the last few days,” Collins said. “If it hadn’t been for my ankle, I would’ve been with him.” He looked around at all of them, as if trying to make them understand how important that was, had always been, Collins being with Ellis Adair. “But I wasn’t with him, and he snapped out on us.”
DiMaggio watched him, fascinated, not recognizing this Richie Collins, wondering whether these were real feelings or whether this was another pose to get him over with Salter.
Collins put it to Salter now: “We’ve got to find him. Maybe nobody outside of me understands this, or could ever, but Ellis Adair hasn’t got any talent for fending for himself.”
“Where does he have places besides the city?” DiMaggio said. “Weekend homes or whatnot?” Jesus, he was starting to sound like them.
“We got condos, right next door to one another, at the Polo Club in Boca. But he isn’t there, I checked already, with the guy takes care of them for us. Ellis couldn’t show up there without the guy, Eddie, knowing.”
DiMaggio said, “I thought I read that he’s got some place out in California, too.”
“No, he just stays at La Costa. Out in the desert? I checked there, too. They haven’t seen him.”
“Ellis likes warm places,” DiMaggio said.
“Ellis likes anyplace he can golf,” Collins said. “You believe that shit? Ellis Adair, out of the projects?” Collins smiled. “All he wants to do when he goes out there is put on a pair of green slacks and go play goddamn golf. Play golf or go ride that blue bike of his.”
DiMaggio said, “A bike?” He tried to see the Ellis Adair he’d watched in practice, the one who could fly, riding around on some bicycle.
Collins nodded. “Remember that movie with the kids on the bicycles? Breaking Away? Came out a long time ago. Me and Ellis saw it once when we were kids. And one of the kids in it, I forget which one, had this blue bike. Or Ellis decided it was blue, afterward, I can’t even remember anymore. He said to me when he came out, ‘One of these days, I’m gonna get me a blue bike, and I’m gonna ride until I come to some place like in that movie, with trees and green grass and everybody smiling at everybody else.’ I told him, ‘You want to end up in Indiana?’ But he didn’t care where it was, as long as it wasn’t the projects. Finally, when we were in high school, some guy came over from the city, wanted Ellis ‘n’ me to play on his summer team. And he says to Ellis, ‘What’s it gonna take?’ Meaning money. But Ellis says, ‘A blue bike.’ I pulled him aside and said, ‘Fresh, we got a chance to score here.’ But he didn’t want to hear anything like that. He wanted his blue bike. Which he got.” Collins smiled in this sad way. “Which got fucking stolen about a week later. Ellis wouldn’t talk about it. I said, ‘You can get another bike.’ He said, ‘Won’t be that bike.’ Then a few months ago, all this time later, he shows up with one just like it. I went looking for it last night. I don’t know where Ellis went, like I told you, but wherever he did, he took that goddamn bike with him.”
DiMaggio said, “Let me ask you something: Does he have any relatives left in Jersey City?”
“His Aunt Mary was the last one, but she died a couple of years ago.”
“He ever go back?”
Collins shook his head no. “The last time I can remember us being over there was Ellis’s rookie year. Aunt Mary’s birthday. She was the one who ended up raising him after his mother died. Ellis’d end up moving her down to Hilton Head, a nice house he built for her with some of his signing money. But the house wasn’t ready yet, so Ellis rented her this house over on Garfield Avenue. That’s where the party was.”
Richie Collins smiled again. “Funny what you remember? Aunt Mary said she wanted us to stay the night, which we did. We went to bed. About three o’clock in the morning, you know what wakes me up? Bounce of a ball. I look out the window. There’s a court down the hill from the back of Aunt Mary’s rented house. And there’s Ellis, in his gym shorts and the sneakers he wore over, shooting around, looking happy as happy could be. I go down there and say, ‘What the hell you doing out here in the middle of the night?’ Three o’clock in the morning it was. You know what he says? He smiles at me and goes, ‘Rich, maybe things wasn’t so bad here.’ ”
DiMaggio said, “I think I want to take a ride over there.”
Collins said, “Take the Holland Tunnel.”
Maybe it was a reflex, DiMaggio thought, Richie Collins snapping back into being a punk this quickly.
“I want to take a ride over there with you.”
“Right.”
Salter leaned forward, but DiMaggio held up a hand. “Let me explain something to you, Richie,” he said. “You’re going to help me out on this sooner or later. Because sooner or later you’re going to figure out there’s no percentage for you in not helping me. You’re going to figure out, all by yourself, like a big boy, just how shitty this is all starting to look, especially for Ellis. You don’t know where he is? Well, okay, then nobody does. But if he’s not in Florida and he’s not in California, maybe the best place to start is at the beginning.”
Collins said, “It’s going to be a waste of time is all I’m trying to tell you. Just ’cause Ellis shot some baskets over at Garfield one night doesn’t mean he’d go over there to disappear himself.”
“Humor me,” DiMaggio said. “Wasting time is pretty much all I’ve been doing since I got to town.” He turned to Frank Crittendon. “You said Gary Lenz decided to move practice into the Garden?”
“We didn’t tell the press, but they’ll go at six.”
DiMaggio looked at his watch. “That gives Richie and me about four hours.”
“Do what you have to do,” Salter said. “Even if he has to miss practice, I’ll square it with Gary.”
“Now wait a fucking—” Collins tried to stop himself, but it was out there already.
“No,” Salter said in his calm voice. “You wait, Richie. You don’t know where Ellis is, fine, you don’t know. But if Mr. DiMaggio thinks there’s even a chance that taking a ride over to Jersey might help find him, then you take the ride.” Salter smiled and said, “Would that be all right with you?”
“Yes, sir.”
Salter said to DiMaggio, “My car’s right outside. Where you came in. Call me if you need anything else.” He went for the door, saying “Frank?” over his shoulder. The two of them walked out of the locker room.
It was just DiMaggio and Collins now.
DiMaggio said, “You have to wake up here, Richie. You have to understand that you’ve got no power base left without Ellis. No juice.”
He felt like Salter all of a sudden, tired of Richie Collins, tired of his problems. “So let’s go get in the car and take a ride. But I have to be honest with you. If you mouth off to me one more time today, I’m going to break your fucking nose.”
Collins got up, walked past him as if all DiMaggio had said was “Let’s go.”
“Follow me,” Collins said. “I’ll show you the quickest way out of here. We can cut across the court.”
DiMaggio followed him, thinking about Ellis Adair.
Trying to see him somewhere on that blue bike.
Salter’s driver, Rudy, said to DiMaggio, “We doing any chase scenes this time?” DiMaggio said, “Not unless we end up in the wrong neighborhood in Jersey City.”
Richie Collins, next to DiMaggio in the backseat said, “Isn’t anything but wrong neighborhoods in Jersey City.”
They went through the Holland Tunnel. Richie Collins didn’t say anything. DiMaggio let him go. Rudy found a jazz station on the radio after they got through the tunnel; DiMaggio recognized Coltrane, then Paul Desmond, finally David Benoit doing his light, breezy version of “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.” When they got to the Jersey City exit off the Jersey Turnpike, Collins, looking out the window, said, “Get off here,” and then took over.
“Anything in particular you want to see?”
DiMaggio said, “You decide.”
They took a left on Grand Street off the exit and came to an intersection, crossed that, went another block, and made a right on Pacific. “Up on the right here is the Lafayette project, where I grew up,” Collins said. DiMaggio looked past him. It could have been any project in any neighborhood like this. This one just happened to be named Lafayette, in Jersey City, New Jersey. It would have another name in Overtown, in Miami, in the South Bronx and Detroit. This was just Richie Collins’s geography.
DiMaggio said, “You still have any family here?”
Collins looked straight ahead. “I barely had any to begin with. Ellis had his Aunt Mary. I didn’t have that. My mother was pregnant with me when my old man got killed. He was in the navy. Not fighting or anything. Just standing in the engine room one day when it fucking blew up. She was living in Newark when I was born anyway, and then we ended up over here. I was sixteen when she died.”
DiMaggio said, “How—?” And Richie Collins cut him off, looking straight ahead on Pacific, Lafayette behind them now, said, “Her pimp cut her throat.” There was just a small beat, and Richie Collins said to Rudy in a dead voice, “Take Johnston Avenue here.”
“Who raised you after that?” DiMaggio said.
“I raised me after that,” Richie Collins said. “I raised me. And me and Ellis’s Aunt Mary raised Ellis.”
“How did you get by?”
Collins turned around now in his seat. “I did jobs,” he said. “And when that wasn’t enough, I took.”
“Took what?”
“Whatever I could take. After Ellis came along, and everyone knew Ellis ‘n’ me were a team when it came to playing ball, then I didn’t have to take anymore because people started to give.”
He showed DiMaggio the court at a playground called Baby Rucker, with its sad, ruined concrete and fenced-in basketball hoops and a tavern across the street. Collins told Rudy to pull up at Baby Rucker and stop. Collins got out and motioned for DiMaggio to do the same. He went through the playground and hooked his fingers through the fence around the court. “Lot of action here in the summer,” Richie Collins said. “Drunks coming across the street to make bets, drug deals going on all night long. But ball like you couldn’t believe. Ellis doing shit …” Collins closed his eyes. “Bad guys and scumbags all around, and Ellis doing things with a basketball that knocked your fucking eyes out.”
They got back in Salter’s town car, went back to Pacific and made a left, then took a right on Communipaw and finally a left on Garfield. They went past a big car wash, and then out of nowhere was another basketball court. “Look at that,” Richie Collins said. “Stop here,” he said to Rudy.
“What’s the problem?” DiMaggio said.
“They got a net down,” Richie Collins said. “Man, nobody wants to play without a net. You have to be from here to understand. One net down at a place like this can fuck up twenty or thirty lives. Twenty or thirty kids who got nowhere else to go except here.”
The two of them got out again, went and stood in the middle of the Garfield Avenue court.
“Aunt Mary’s was right up there,” Collins said, pointing to a white-frame house up the hill. “This is the court where I found Ellis shooting that night, after her party. Damn, he always liked this court, even when we were kids. I shouldn’t’ve been surprised to find him in the middle of the night. There was nights Ellis’d shoot all night long. He was funny that way. Ellis was afraid of everything growing up. Especially of the dark. I told him once, it wasn’t the dark he was afraid of, it was the dark at Booker T. But he’d get out here, just shooting by the streetlights at that basket right down there, the one that still has the net, and he wouldn’t be afraid of nobody.”
They got back into the car. Richie said to Rudy, “I’m gonna use that phone. All right?” Rudy said, “Go ahead, Mr. Collins.” Collins got information for the Jersey City Police Department. “Emergency?” he said to the operator. “Only sort of.” He got the number, punched it out, and said, “I just want to leave a message. This is Richie Collins of the Knicks. Tell somebody there’s a net down at the Garfield Avenue court.” He handed the phone back to Rudy in the front seat and said, “That shit shouldn’t go on over here.”
They ended up finally at Booker T. Washington. Collins explained that there were three big projects over on this side of town. Lafayette, Montgomery, and then Booker T. “The other ones have ten-story buildings,” Collins said. “Booker T.’s only got two stories. Less floors, higher crime rate.”
Collins said to Rudy, “We won’t be long. But go ahead and lock the door anyway.” He took DiMaggio down a long sidewalk between the low buildings and into the courtyard in back where the basketball court was. “Ellis lived on the second floor, this building to your right,” Collins said. “And this court right here, this was where I first met him, where we started playing ball. There’s a lot of games, especially in the summer. There’s this great game, over at this place White Eagle, a bingo hall over on Newark Avenue. But that’s once you’re in high school, and college. You ever hear of Bobby Hurley? Slick little guard, even slicker than me? He came out of Jersey City, ’fore he went to Duke and then the pros. His father’s the big coach in town, over at St. Anthony High. Coach Hurley always organized the games at White Eagle. But when you were coming up, trying to make a name for yourself, the best game was at Booker T., right here on this court. This was where you found the best runs in town.”
“Runs?” DiMaggio said. Collins would lose him sometimes.
“Best games,” he said. “Best ball. If you keep winning you can have yourself a run that would last all day and night. More bad guys over here than over at Baby Rucker. But nobody ever messed with Ellis. There’s only one kind of royalty in a place like this, and that’s basketball royalty. Ellis ’n’ me, we were as safe playing games in here as we are playing ball right now at Madison Square Garden. I used to see drug dealers pull their guns out on each other if they thought anybody was messing with Ellis. See, they knew Ellis was going to get out. He was going to do what none of them would ever do. Alive, anyway.”
In the middle of Booker T. Washington, Collins pointed in the direction of New York City.
“Ellis was going somewhere,” he said.
He looked all around him, at the ruins of Booker T. “So, Ellis,” Richie Collins said softly. “Where are you?”