She had just hung up on Brian Hyland when Jimmy came into the living room. Hyland had said he wanted to take a ride over and have another chat with her.
Hyland had been in to see her that afternoon, acting very nice the whole time, but wanting to know if she had an alibi for Monday night, when Richie Collins had been murdered. Hannah told him then and told him again on the phone, she had been at her mother’s house in Litchfield, with her mother’s housekeeper, who house-sat when the house was empty. Sheila Carey was in Palm Beach for a couple of weeks, visiting friends. Hannah just wanted to get away from New York for a day. The tabloid shows were in a bidding war, trying to get her to do an exclusive interview. A Current Affair and Inside Edition had gone to $500,000, according to Harvey Kuhn; Hard Copy had decided to bypass Harvey, they just kept leaving messages on Jimmy’s machine, saying they would top any bid by any other show.
It was like The Price Is Right a little bit, Hannah thought. Or maybe that old show—which one was it? with Door Number One and Door Number Two and Door Number Three?—where you guessed where the big prize was.
It was one of those times when she started thinking about A.J., what he’d done to her. She loved him, of course. She was sure that he still loved her, but if he hadn’t treated her that way, hadn’t left her …
She didn’t tell Brian Hyland about A.J. because she didn’t talk about him anymore, even with Beth. She just told him that she watched the news shows up in Litchfield, watched Entertainment Tonight, said good night to Imparo, the housekeeper, a sweet woman from Colombia, slept fourteen hours, then drove back to New York the next morning and found out about Richie Collins watching television.
“Hey, I believe you, I believe you,” Hyland had said just now on the phone. “I just want to ask you a few more questions on the other.”
He meant the rape.
“Nothing big, nothing to worry about,” Hyland said. “Could I come back in tomorrow morning? Say ten o’clock?”
Hannah knew he wasn’t asking her, he was telling her.
“Whatever you say,” she said.
Thinking: Even the good guys bullshitted you when they wanted something.
“Okay then,” Hyland said. “I’m writing it down. Thursday at ten, Hannah Carey. And if you see your brother, tell him I’d like to ask him a few questions, too. Like I said, no big deal.”
“We’ll be expecting you then,” Hannah said, and hung up as Jimmy came walking into the living room, fresh out of the shower, a red towel in his hand, a white one wrapped around his perfect waist. Hannah noticed he didn’t just have his usual perfect bod, but a perfect tan, too. He had been out in Hollywood with Bob and Ken and the two writers they had put on her movie, standing in for Hannah. “The first half of the movie is back story, Sis,” Jimmy had told her before he left. “They tell your life story, they tell the story of the players. Setting up, you know, that night at the end of the first two hours.”
Hannah knew her life was going to be condensed to four whole hours now, instead of two.
Jimmy had jumped at the chance to go out there for a couple of weeks, round-trip first-class fare, what he said was a junior suite at the Four Seasons Hotel. “On Doheny,” Jimmy’d said one night on the phone, as if that meant something to her.
Now he was back, back on Monday morning after taking the red-eye, on his way out at ten o’clock at night, meeting some friends at some new hot place on Second Avenue. Hannah didn’t get the name when Jimmy told her. She wondered if it ever got confusing for Jimmy, knowing all the hot new places all the time.
Maybe there was some hot button you could press on the phone to get up-to-the-minute information on hot new places.
Hot button. Hot places. That was a good one, Hannah thought. For me. She thought about running it past Jimmy, but he’d probably just give her that look like she was hopelessly square. Or hopeless.
Or just dumb.
“Hey,” Jimmy said. He’d said something, Hannah hadn’t heard him. “We’ll be expecting who?”
“Detective Hyland.”
“You talked to him already.”
Hannah shrugged. “He wants to talk to me again.”
“Maybe he doesn’t buy your alibi.”
“I don’t like that word. Alibi.”
“Why not? You think he came in today ’cause he missed you?”
“He doesn’t think I’m a suspect for God’s sake. He’s just doing his job.”
“Right.”
“What does that mean?” she said, starting to wonder where he was going with this. “Right?”
Jimmy grinned, playing with her.
“Where’d Imparo sleep?”
“In the guest room where she always sleeps. You know Mom. If she thought she slept in her bed, she’d have to call those people that deliver mattresses right to the house, get a new one.”
“The guest room in the back? You could have lit firecrackers in the front of the house, you wouldn’t wake Imparo up. Remember the party we threw that time a few years ago when Mom was in West Palm? If she slept through that, she could sleep through anything.”
“What’s ‘anything’ supposed to mean?”
“You could have gone out.”
Hannah got up, went into the kitchen for a Snapple. From in there she said, “If you think you’re being funny, you’re not.”
Jimmy waited until she came back. “Sorry,” he said.
“Mean it,” she said, just like when they were kids.
“Mean it,” he said, holding his hand up, like taking a Scout’s oath. “Cross my heart and hope to have looks to die for.” He started for his bedroom and Hannah said to him, “And what about you, Jim?”
He turned around, hair shiny and mussed, looking more like a teenager than ever. Grinning his cocky grin, what he liked to tell Hannah was his babe grin.
“What about me?”
“What about an alibi for you? Brian Hyland said he’d like to ask you a few questions tomorrow, too. After he talks to me. What kind of alibi do you have for Monday night?”
His face held the grin, but he stopped with his eyes. “Why would I need an alibi?” Jimmy said, “Which I have, by the way. It’s one of the benefits of knowing every single bartender in town. What’d they used to say on Cheers? Everybody knows my name, they’re always glad I came.”
“You’re the one who tried to beat him up on national TV practically,” she said. “Defending your sister’s honor. Maybe you’d take it one step farther.”
“Now who’s not funny?” Jimmy Carey said.
“Me,” Hannah said. “But then, I haven’t been funny in a long time.”
Jimmy stared at her. “Let me do the jokes around here,” he said, and went to get dressed for the new hot place.
Hannah slept late, until about nine-thirty, and went to knock on Jimmy’s door. But there was no need, it was still open, the red towel on the bed, the other one on the floor, the way he’d left them. Maybe he’d gotten lucky. Or maybe he’d just crashed at a friend’s apartment. He’d been doing that the last month if he was out too late, not wanting to scare Hannah in the middle of the night; knowing how easy it was to give her the jumps now.
He probably had forgotten already that Brian Hyland wanted to talk to him, too.
The doormen were the same way about not giving her the jumps, even buzzing her to tell her if Jimmy was on his way up. So when the buzzer went off now, she figured it was either Jimmy coming home or Brian Hyland showing up early.
Hannah went over to the speaker near the front door and imagined Ernesto, the tiny guy from Ecuador, not much bigger than a midget, down there with Brian Hyland, if it was Brian. She wondered if Brian had to show him a badge. It would probably give Ernesto a real thrill, make him feel like he was in a movie or something.
Did everybody think of things that way?
How everything that was happening would look up on the screen?
Did everybody step back sometimes and imagine the whole thing was a movie?
Ernesto’s voice, crackling over the cheap intercom system, said, “I got two women to see you here.”
He stopped and she could hear him talking to them.
“One’s name is Kelly.”
He started to say something else, but Hannah pressed her own talk button now, cutting him off.
“I don’t know anybody named Kelly.”
She released her finger just as Ernesto was saying, “—Teresa Delgado.”
Hannah Carey thought: Her I know.
“Send them up,” she said.
“I got this address from Mr. Perez,” Teresa Delgado said, giving Hannah a firm handshake, like she was practicing to be a guy. “I hope you don’t mind.”
Hannah said, “Come in. Please.”
She was starting to feel like some kind of professional hostess. Come in. Please. To my life.
Teresa Delgado wore a white linen dress, and her hands, no rings, held a small white leather purse. The girl Kelly, that’s how Teresa Delgado introduced her, without giving a last name, not that Hannah really cared, sat next to Teresa on the couch. The girl wore a denim skirt that showed off a lot of leg and a black tank top. Hannah didn’t meet a lot of girls her size, but this one sure was.
She reminded Hannah a little bit of herself at that age, which had to be seventeen or eighteen, tops.
“I apologize again for just showing up,” Teresa Delgado said, “but I felt it was time we all met. So I just came. I have a habit of doing this lately. First with Mr. Marty Perez, now with you.”
“You could have called,” Hannah said, not in a mean way, just telling her it would have been all right. “After reading the papers the other day, I almost called you.”
The girl didn’t say anything.
Hannah said, “I wouldn’t have turned you away is what I’m saying.”
“I am not a very confident person, even if some people think I am,” Teresa said. “I am better than I used to be. But still not so much, really, in the confidence department. I come from a culture where men are treated as gods by the women. These are tough habits to break. So I try to reduce my chances of rejection wherever possible.”
“Even with another woman who was—”
“Yes,” Teresa said, smiling at her, the smile making her pretty. “Even with such a woman as that.”
Hannah looked at the Seth Thomas wall clock behind the couch. If Brian Hyland was on time, and Hannah figured he’d be the type, whenever he said he was going to call at a certain time, he called on the dot, she had about half an hour for somebody to get to the point.
Hannah said, “You said we should talk.”
Teresa turned to the girl on the couch, the girl’s blond hair parted in the middle in that sixties style they all were starting to wear again. “Kelly is sixteen years old,” she said. “Just sixteen. She is a junior at Fulton High School.” She put a hand on the girl’s arm and said, “Why don’t you tell Hannah the rest.”
Sometimes you had to draw Hannah Carey a picture, but not now. Even Hannah, who was always a little slow on the uptake, knew what was coming next. She said to the girl, Kelly, “He raped you, too, didn’t he?”
Without making a sound, without moving or changing expression, the girl started to cry, the tears just coming. Like it was a movie. What did they call them? Some kind of fake tears? Like somebody just applied them to Kelly’s cheeks.
“Yes,” the girl said.
Teresa said, “She read about me in the newspaper. It did not make as big an impression as when I was with Oprah the other day. She went back to the newspaper.” Teresa Delgado smiled. “They had not been recycled yet. She read the story again to find out that I am from Jersey City and got my number from information. I almost changed it, all the other television shows calling me up and offering me money.”
Teresa Delgado brought her small right hand up, made a fake slapping motion against her cheek. “Why am I telling you about television people? And these vulgar people from the movies?”
Vulgar? Hannah thought.
Kelly said, “I watch Oprah every day. You can find out some very cool things. I heard her start talking, and it was so awesome, and a little weird. She was talking about exactly what I wanted someone to be talking about. It’s like when you turn on QVC, you know? The shopping network? And you’ve been thinking about buying this one necklace or whatever, and there it is!”
“Anyway,” Teresa said, continuing, “I decided we should come here this morning. I thought it would be appropriate to form our own support group.”
“Support group,” Hannah echoed.
“It will be explained when you hear,” Teresa said.
“Why not the police?” Hannah said, and felt stupid as soon as she did.
“She is a girl,” Teresa Delgado said, taking a Kleenex from out of her purse and handing it to Kelly. “You are a woman. I am a woman. It took you a year to come forward, and it took me all these years.”
“I’m sorry,” Hannah said, comfortable with that one, as always.
“Don’t be,” Teresa said. “Don’t be sorry. They always want us to be sorry. For something. For everything.” Softly she said, “Don’t they?”
Teresa said, “When they don’t want us to be afraid anymore and they don’t want us to be guilty, they want us to be sorry. Are you a Catholic, Hannah?”
“No.”
“But you know of the Holy Trinity?”
“Father, Son, Holy Ghost,” Hannah said quickly. Was it still the Holy Ghost? Or was it the Holy Spirit? Hannah seemed to remember there had been some kind of change, she noticed it at a wedding one time.
“Well, there is a different Trinity for women like us, maybe all women,” Teresa said. “When we bless ourselves, genuflecting before men, it should be in the name of fear and then in the name of the guilt and finally in the name of being sorry. I was raped and you were raped and she was raped.”
Teresa Delgado was small, but she was a tough little bird.
“We are the ones violated,” Teresa said, picking up a little steam, “but as soon as that is over, we begin to violate ourselves. Violate our confidence. Our dignity. Our self-worth.”
Hannah couldn’t help thinking she should have had Teresa Delgado around when it was time to write her little speech at the Plaza. It was crazy, getting a thought like that. But there it was, once again like it was up on the screen. Hannah could see herself really bowling them over with words like Teresa’s.
Maybe when this was all over, she could have Teresa sit down with the screenwriter. Or meet Bob and Ken. Especially Bob. Just to show her they weren’t all vulgar …
She heard Teresa saying, “Hannah? I feel like I lost you there. Maybe it sounded like I was making a speech?”
“No,” Hannah said, “no, that’s not it at all. I was just thinking that you were saying things that are inside me, I just can’t ever find the right words for.”
“So you understand why Kelly did not go to her mother or her father or the police?”
Hannah said, “I don’t want to rush you, but there’s a Fulton policeman coming here in a few minutes to talk about Richie Collins.”
Kelly turned to Teresa, eyes wide.
“No!” she said, a gasp, really. “My father knows every policeman in that town. They’ll tell!”
Teresa Delgado said, “We will be gone before he comes, do not worry. But since I think we are going to be friends here, maybe you should tell Hannah who your father is.”
The girl said, “Frank Crittendon. You know who he is, right?”
Hannah, trying not to act floored, said, “The general manager of the Knicks.”
“As you can see, it is a problem,” Teresa Delgado said. “But not as big as the other.”
Now Hannah felt like someone had to draw her a picture.
Kelly Crittendon sighed. “Teresa says I can tell. So here goes.” She looked at Teresa, who smiled and nodded, like, go ahead. “Richie raped me Monday afternoon.”
Hannah said, “This Monday—?”
“This Monday,” Teresa Delgado said.
“Jesus Christ,” Hannah Carey said.
“Pray for us,” Teresa Delgado said.
Teresa told Kelly to tell it the same way she had at breakfast.
Kelly Crittendon said she felt like she had known Richie Collins her whole life. “Even if it was only half.”
She had always looked older than her real age. Been bigger than the other girls. The first to get a chest. She was a tomboy, ball-girling for the Knicks in training camp from the time she was twelve.
Richie noticed her even then.
The guys at school, they never noticed her.
Kelly said, “We all knew my dad wanted a boy. I mean, Mom she’s, like, even taller than me, when you put her next to Dad, they look sillier together than Billy Joel and Christie looked before, you know, they split up. She jokes all the time that Dad only married her so they could breed a shooting guard. So it’s like I was always expected to not just do boy things, but like them. You know? But my secret was, I only did the stuff to be around boys. Like: I was noticing them way before they were noticing me. Wanting them to notice me in the worst way. But nobody did. Till Richie.”
By the time she was in her teens, he flirted with her constantly. The October before this one—my October with the Knicks, Hannah thought—he had her start calling him “Uncle Rich.” That was for her father’s benefit.
It had reached the point, though, where both Richie and Kelly knew he wanted to be more than her uncle. And she wanted the same thing.
She started thinking about him all the time, all during that season. She couldn’t go to all the games; they finished up too late and her father usually had something to do afterward, some meeting with the coach or a late dinner in the city that wouldn’t even start until around midnight. Sometimes he’d even stay over at the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue, where the team rested up in the afternoons before home games.
So she didn’t come too much, but when she did, it wasn’t about seeing the games. Just Richie Collins. After the game, she’d wait an hour in the hall, like she was waiting for Frank Crittendon to collect her. But she was waiting to say hello to “Uncle Rich,” have him give her a little kiss on the cheek, nobody noticing the squeeze he’d sometimes give her, too.
On game nights, she said, then laughed and said most of the time her father was in a world of his own, so he didn’t notice the clothes she’d wear to the games, clothes that didn’t just get looks from Richie Collins, but all the players after a while.
Only Richie, though, looked at her the way you look at something you can have, Kelly Crittendon said.
She said, “ ‘One of these days, little girl,’ he’d say. And I’d go, ‘One of these days what?’ And he’d go, ‘One of these days, you’re going to have to fight me off.’ ”
Out of nowhere, she started to cry again. Hannah just sat there, not knowing what to do for her. Teresa Delgado took out another Kleenex, wiped Kelly Crittendon’s tears herself this time, saying, “He never changed.”
Then she added, “Until he died.”
Six months before, in the spring, before the Knicks’ last regular season game, Kelly had told her father she would meet him at the game, just leave her ticket for her; she’d take the train in from Fulton, where Frank Crittendon had bought his dream house. It was a Saturday. Kelly took the train, got a cab at Grand Central, and took it to the Regency, arriving there right after the Knicks’ morning practice. Getting his room number had been easy. Her father was a meticulous man, “a real fuddy-duddy about detail stuff.” There was always an itinerary in his briefcase.
She wore what she would wear to the game: this cool hot-yellow shirt over black tights. Heels.
She had waited as long as she could.
She had convinced herself that Richie Collins—ten years older? more? so what, ten years was nothing—wanted her as much as she wanted him. She was sure that he sensed this thing that had been growing between them. So Kelly did what she had been dreaming about doing for more than a year, a year that seemed like fifteen lifetimes to a fifteen-year-old: She knocked on Richie Collins’s door.
Kelly: “I was on the pill. I wasn’t a virgin anymore. I’d, well, like I’d practiced doing it with this guy Kenny, the best player on the Fulton basketball team. All my life, I’d heard Daddy and everybody else make practicing something sound like a sacrament. I figured I’d better practice sex, too, if I didn’t want to look like a jerk.”
Looking at Hannah and Teresa for approval.
Teresa Delgado said, “We are willing to do anything for them.”
Hannah jumped in for the first time, surprising herself. She said, “Anything and everything,” not thinking about Teresa or this girl, knowing she was talking about herself.
Teresa said, “We want to make them happy and so proud.”
Richie wasn’t even surprised to see her, Kelly said. Or if he was surprised, he was too cool, too grown-up, to show it.
He had a suite.
Kelly: “We didn’t even make it to the living room. I could see this big fruit basket in there, the biggest I’d ever seen. But we did it right there. Standing up.”
Her eyes got very big, and Hannah thought she might cry again.
Kelly: “It wasn’t … I had thought about how it would be all different from this. But I didn’t even get a chance to take my blouse off. Richie just kept saying we’d waited long enough. He said he needed me. Need you, baby. Need you, baby. I think back, and that’s all I can remember him saying.”
After that first time, they decided it was too risky to meet at the hotel, especially with the play-offs coming up and the whole city turning up the lights on the Knicks. So they began meeting at his apartment.
Then, way too soon for Kelly, so soon she couldn’t believe it, the season was over. The whole rest of her life, she said, the season seemed to go on forever.
Now she would have done anything to get another month.
Frank Crittendon, after taking care of the NBA draft, took his family to their summer home on Cape Cod. Richie Collins, because of his sneaker contract, went off to conduct basketball clinics in Europe and Asia. Promising to see Kelly in September.
Kelly: “He asked me if I’d ever heard of that song ‘See You in September.’ He said it was like him. I asked him what he meant and he said, ‘An oldie but a goodie.’ He said the song was from way back there in the fifties.”
Teresa gave out this little gasp. “He told me the same thing that summer,” she said. “About that same song.” Hannah noticed it was the first time she had heard an accent from her, told sounding like toll, like she was talking about paying a toll.
When training camp started, Richie and Kelly started up again. It still seemed so reckless to her, so wicked, sneaking around right under her father’s nose. She knew he would kill her if he found out. “Kill me and then kill Richie,” she said.
But she couldn’t help herself.
Kelly: “It’s like something Miss … like Teresa said in the papers, about how the heart knows what the heart knows. I read that and it was like, wow. I mean, I had only read the story the first time, going, like, Oh, here’s somebody Richie fucked over the way he fucked me over.”
Hannah couldn’t help but notice how easily the word came out of the girl’s mouth, the girl just sixteen, this girl who had given up her virginity, practiced, just to make herself ready for Richie Collins.
It was right after training camp started that he started asking about her girlfriends.
Kelly would bring friends to watch practice with her. He’d stop sometimes and make faces at them, make them giggle. Then later, when they were together, he’d say to Kelly, “Who was that?” When Kelly would pout, he’d laugh it off, saying, “What’s this, my baby girl is jealous?” And then drop it for a couple of days.
It became obvious to her that Richie Collins wanted to have sex with Kelly and another girl.
Kelly: “He said we could get all dressed up first, like a prom. He’d get some champagne. He said it would be the most fun I’d ever have. If we could just find the right girl to fill out the ménage à trois. When he said it the first time, I acted like I knew exactly what he was talking about. Then I had to go look it up.”
She said no. He kept at her, making fun of her, saying maybe he was wrong about her. Maybe she was too young. Making it sound like being too young was being too fat or something. But the thought of getting naked, doing it, with another girl, a friend, was dirty. Gross.
Even after some of the things Richie had already made her do in bed. And in his car. One time in the locker room after everybody was gone.
On the court.
She couldn’t make herself do it with another girl.
He told her he didn’t want to see her anymore if she didn’t want to be a good sport.
One Saturday morning, though, she knew he was doing an autograph session at a sports shop in Fulton. She went over there and waited and made up with him. That was the day the reporter showed up, Kelly said. Richie told her about it after.
Hannah perked up on that one.
“Do you happen to remember the reporter’s name?”
“Sure. The same one Teresa talked to. Mr. Perez.”
Hannah said, “He was waiting for Richie outside that sports shop?” She looked at Teresa Delgado. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t know he and Richie were so close.”
“You don’t trust him?” Teresa said.
“I sort of did,” Hannah said. “But now I’m not so sure.” She’d have to talk about this one with Jimmy, if he could ever find his way home. “He certainly does seem to get around, though.”
Teresa said, “I’m not sure I follow,” and Hannah said, “I just thought he was on my side more than their side is all.”
“I’m sorry,” Hannah said now to Kelly. “Please go ahead. I’ve gotten used to everything being about me all the time.”
Richie and Kelly were together that Saturday in Fulton, once Richie had his meeting with Marty Perez. It was their last time, she said. Right after the Knicks broke training camp and went back to New York to get ready for the start of the season “Right after you,” she said to Hannah, she found out that Richie Collins had been calling one of her friends behind her back.
Kelly: “She’s a sophomore. Richie kept telling her I was too old for him. After he’d kept telling me I was too young to do it with him and another girl. Nice, huh?”
Kelly’s girlfriend, Emma, finally told Richie that if he called her again, she was going to tell her parents; Emma said she would have done it the first time he called, except that she was afraid it would get Kelly in trouble.
When Kelly found out, she called Richie in New York. He said he didn’t have time to talk to her, but maybe they could get together when he came up to clean out his condominium in Fulton.
They agreed to meet after school. Her last class was Computers, she got out at two-thirty. It left her enough time to go home and change out of her school clothes. Even after the way he had hurt her, she said, and the way he had tried to use her and tried to two-time her, Kelly Crittendon still wanted to look nice for him.
She put on a summer dress she’d bought for him but never got a chance to wear.
She parked where he always had her park, in this guest lot down the hill from his house, the area secluded by trees and some tennis courts. She remembered checking herself in the mirror one last time. She had even borrowed this neat headband from Emma, she said, not telling Emma why she needed it.
Kelly: “He was smiling when he answered the door. Like, saying, I’m the old Richie. He looked at me the way he did the first time, at the hotel. And then he grabbed me the same way he did that day. I thought he was just kidding around at first, giving me a fooling-around hug, just to let me know he wasn’t really mad. Like, not even thinking that I was the one who was supposed to be pissed at him. Then he wouldn’t let go. So I start to go, ‘No, no, no, we have to talk.’ And Richie goes, ‘If it’s about that bitch Emma, you’ve got it all wrong, she was the one chasing after me.’ So I go, ’emma isn’t like that.’ Trying to get him off me for a second. But then Richie goes, ‘You’re all like that.’ Still running his hands all over me. I asked him what that was supposed to mean and he goes, ‘You all want it.’ Now he had his hands, like, under my dress, trying to see if I had panties on.”
Kelly stopped, not looking at either one of them, just fixed on her hands, clenched there in her lap.
Kelly: “He liked me not to, you know, wear any. So when he found out I was, he gave me this creepy look. Scaring me. He went, ‘Oh, we’re going to play Miss Hard to Get all of a sudden?’ I was crying by then, saying, ‘I want to talk, please, can’t we talk?’ And he just goes, ‘Later.’ And then … then … he was just on me, crazylike, crazier than he ever was when we’d done it, on the living room floor. There was some game show on the TV. I don’t even know why I know that. A game show.”
Teresa Delgado said to Hannah, “Was a ball game for me. What about you?” Hannah said she didn’t remember the TV being on when they got there, just later, when they were both through with her and Richie was jerking off watching the porno movie.
Hannah was proud of herself, using the guy language to tell Teresa Delgado about it. “The jerk-off jerking off,” she said. Maybe she could get off good ones when it was just women around.
Richie Collins raped her there in the living room. Kelly said she never screamed. “I was still more afraid of somebody finding me with him than I was of him doing what he did to me.” When it was over, he left her there on the floor and went to take a shower, saying, “Let’s face it, kid, breaking up is hard to do.”
He stood over her, naked, grinning, saying, “Think of it as one more oldie but goodie.”
Kelly Crittendon, when she got there in her story, stood up, went to use Jimmy’s bathroom. When she came back, her eyes were red and she’d applied fresh lipstick. Hannah thought the lipstick made her look like a little girl playing grown-up. But she was grown-up enough to finish telling what she had come there to tell.
Kelly: “As soon as he left the room, I ran. I remembered that Mom was in the city. I figured my dad wouldn’t be home. I took a shower and stuffed my dress in a garbage bag and took it down to the garage. I don’t know, I thought if the dress was gone, if I didn’t have it anymore, then maybe it didn’t happen. Or wasn’t as bad as I thought. Then I took another shower and went to my room and went to sleep. When I woke up, nobody was home yet. That was when I decided I wanted to hurt him back.”
She decided she would wait until dark and bust up his car. Windows. Windshield. Anything, she said, that would break.
She waited until ten o’clock. When they had agreed to meet, Richie said it had to be in the afternoon, he had to meet with somebody later on.
Hannah asked, “Did he say who?” Kelly shook her head. “He just told me he was going to stay overnight and drive back into the city in the morning for practice.”
When she went back to the house—“It’s in this development or whatever called Fulton Crest,” she said—she parked in the same place and started up the steps to where his garage was, about fifty yards from the front door. You had to go past the front door to get there.
She never got to the garage. The front door opened suddenly. Kelly was sure it was him, sure if he saw her he would chase her and catch her and bring her back and rape her again.
She hid in the bushes.
Kelly said, “But it wasn’t Richie who came out.”
Hannah said, “Another woman?”
Kelly Crittendon gave her a funny look.
“It was my father.”
“Your father was there the night Richie was …?” Hannah stopped.
Teresa Delgado nodded slowly and said, “Yes.”
Kelly waited in the bushes until she heard her father’s car pull away. Then, confused, she forgot about Richie’s car and drove around for a couple of hours before going home. Her parents were asleep when she got there. She didn’t hear about Richie’s death until later in the day, in the car on her way home from school. Her father had not mentioned anything about the night before. She had not asked him about it.
Hannah said, “So you don’t know if your father is the one.”
Kelly looked at her, then shook her head.
“We don’t any of us know,” Teresa Delgado said.
Somehow, the thought comforted Hannah. She wasn’t the only one who needed an alibi all of a sudden. She couldn’t wait to see Jimmy’s face.
He thought he knew everything, but he was barely watching the same movie.