Murder Is My Racquet (21 page)

“You want to hear my great news?” he says.

“Why not?”

“I just signed a four-million-dollar deal with Nike.” He put those big hands back around the steering wheel and said, “Four… fucking… million… dollars; I’m golden.”

“Laura must be proud of you,” I say, making a decision now, coming to that decision and telling myself, it’s going to be a long night. I could feel a little anxiousness coming on, but I fought it off.

“Laura,” he says, “yeah, Laura. Wow,” he says, “this car can boogie, I’m going to get me one.”

He pulls off at Emmons Avenue and makes for the shore, Lundy’s restaurant, all aglow and waiting. No place to park, the place was jumping. He tooled down the main drag, past the restaurant, past a construction site, with these huge, blue Dempsey Dumpsters and a bright yellow bulldozer. I could see the ocean and day-trip fishing boats. I could see the lights of Manhattan Beach across the bay. The salty smell of the ocean hit me and I sneezed. I wiped it on my sleeve, saying, “There, over there, behind the Dumpster, park there.”

He took his bag from the backseat. He got out of the car and walked around to the trunk. “Ya know,” he said, “I think this is the best day of my life.” Now, could I refute that, I mean, a four-million-dollar deal from Nike? I looked at him and he smiled, he looked good, I’m thinking a handsome guy, this guy. I’m thinking what guy doesn’t look good on the best day of his life. I opened the trunk.

“Geeze,” he said, “this trunk is huge.” He did not look toward me, he dropped the bag in the trunk and pushed it to the rear, it slid well along the plastic. He was leaning over when, with one hand, I removed my pistol, pushed it up against his skin and popped him behind the right ear. I kept it simple, it wasn’t a big hole, not too bad. He slumped and I grabbed him and shoved him into the trunk. No sound, he did not make a sound. I mean, I’m good. You have to take it slow and know what you’re doing. You have to make that first shot do it all. And in this age of steel-jacketed bullets and quiet guns, it’s very simple.

Anyhow, I closed the trunk and checked the street, not a soul around. I walked two blocks to Lundy’s, put my name on the waiting list and made a call. I telephoned my other fat bastard cousin, Paulie. Paulie owns a junkyard out in Canarsie. Our family comes from there, out near Flatlands Avenue and Avenue L. As a matter of fact, our grandfather used to make his living fishing the oysterbeds out in Jamaica Bay. I went to Canarsie High School.

Oysters, I love oysters, I especially love chicken and oyster stifle. You make it in a casserole, chicken and cream and oysters, it takes a while to make, an hour, more or less. Well, good, I thought, I have time. And it was like I figured, it took two hours for Paulie and this Russian guy to do their thing. Two
hours later, my car was back in its spot, all cleaned up and ready to go. That oyster stifle, it was magnificent.

The following day I get a call and show up at Lester’s place, and there is Lester sitting in a booth, a Dewars and water in his hand, a cigar in his mouth. I barely slide into a seat opposite him when he says, “Are you completely insane?” Lester giving me this sardonic glare.

“What’s the problem?” I said. “You seem a bit uneasy.”

“Uneasy? Why should I be uneasy?”

He put down his cigar, took a drink and I could see that his breathing was quick, irritated, and barely under control. There was the slightest pause before he said, “You whacked the kid. This boy who just signed a four-million-dollar Nike deal.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.”

“You told me to straighten him out. I did just that.”

“I told you to check him out, then see what you gotta do.”

I waited for him to go on.

“You know, my daughter, my Laura, she loved this guy.”

“Getting abused, getting humiliated.”

He took another drink. “She could handle him, she was learning how.” He paused, looking for the right word. “High-strung,” he said finally. “That Rudi Bass was high-strung.”

“Yeah, I’m sure he was.”

“Ey,” he said, putting down his drink alongside his cell phone, “sometimes you’ve got to take a little to get a lot. You have to learn how.”

“It depends on what you call learning,” I said, moving around in my seat.

He ran his hand through his hair. “I wanna know how you, on your own, make a decision to go and do what you do.”

“You don’t know?”

He paused. “Do you?”

“Lester,” I said, “do you know the story of the scorpion and the crow?”

“Whadaya talking about?”

“There’s this scorpion, he wants to get across this pond. He needs to get to the other side. So, he asks this crow to give him a lift. Please, he says to the crow, fly me across, my family is on the other side. The crow tells him, you’re a scorpion, you’ll sting me, I’ll die. The scorpion says, why would I do that? I need to get over the water. So the crow tells him, okay, get on my back, I’ll fly you across. Halfway across the pond the scorpion stings the crow in the neck. You killed me, the crow says, what is wrong with you, you gave me your word. Ey, the scorpion says, what can I say, I can’t help myself. I’m a scorpion.”

He thought for a moment. “Yeah, I’ve heard that story before.” He shrugged. “What are you telling me, you can’t help yourself?”

“I take my time, Lester, check things out. When I make a decision, I stay with it. I thought you liked how I work,” I said.

“I used to.”

“So it’s the money?”

“Four million is a lot of wood.” He paused for a moment, looking around. “Laura was learning to handle him,” he said again. “What does that tell you?”

I figured it was best not to tell him what I thought, so I said nothing.

“I’ll tell you what it tells you, it tells you these two were going to work it out.”

Right about then his cell phone rang. He sighed, then picked up the phone. He held the phone close to his ear and
leaned forward on the table as if he were having trouble hearing. “Marion,” he said, “what the fuck are you talking about? Do you know what you’re talking about? I mean, how stupid are you? Do… you…
ever
… listen… to… me?”

My stomach was growling, you know, growling. My stomach talks to me, my stomach tells me a lot of things. All I need to know sometimes.

He put down the cellular.

“Ya know,” he said, “I got nothing around me but lames and zips and zeros. This woman, this Marion, my wife, this stupid bitch that I married. This woman makes me crazy.”

Sometimes I know things, I don’t know I know yet. Lester was looking at me curiously.

“Pally,” he said, “I have got to tell you, you’re no scorpion, you’re just stupid.”

“I’m sorry that you feel that way.”

I have always been interested in how these things come to me, these decisions I make.

“I’m thinking, I trusted you. I did, you know, I trusted you and you let me down. Now I got this feeling that I don’t want to see you anymore.” His voice had something new in it. A threat.

“Listen,” I said, “this Rudi Bass was a bad actor. Real bad.”

“I want you to go, I don’t want to see you again.” He sounded worried and that confused me.

I saw him looking at my hands, at the fountain pen I was holding in my hand. “What are you going to do,” he said, “write me a note?”

“No,” I said, “this was a gift to me, it’s a valuable pen, I treasure it.”

“Let me have it.”

I nodded. Exactly what I thought he’d say. I scare myself sometimes. I swear to God, I scare myself.

I handed him the Mont Blanc, he put it in his pocket and took a drink, wiping his lips with the tips of his fingers. He had pretty hands, clean nails.

NEEDLE MATCH

P
ETER
L
OVESEY

M
urder was done on Court Eleven on the third day of Wimbledon, 1981. Fortunately for the All England Club, it wasn’t anything obvious like a strangling or a shooting, but the result was the same for the victim, except that he suffered longer. It took three days for him to die. I can tell you exactly how it happened, because I was one of the ball boys for the match.

When I was thirteen I was taught to be invisible. But before you decide this isn’t your kind of story let me promise you it isn’t about magic. There’s nothing spooky about me. And there was nothing spooky about my instructor, Brigadier Romilly. He was flesh and blood all right, and so were the terrified kids who sat at his feet.

“You’ll be invisible, every one of you, before I’ve finished with you,” he said in his parade-ground voice, and we believed him, we third-years from Merton Comprehensive.

A purple scar like a saber cut stretched downward from the edge of the Brigadier’s left eye, over his mouth to the point of his chin. He’d grown a bristly ginger mustache over part of it,
but we could easily see where the two ends joined. Rumor had it that his face had been slashed by a Mau Mau warrior’s machete in the Kenyan terrorist war of the fifties. We didn’t know anything about the Mau Mau, except that the terrorist must have been crazy to tangle with the Brigadier—who grabbed him by the throat and strangled him.

“Don’t ever get the idea that you’re doing this to be seen. You’ll be there, on court with Mr. McEnroe and Mr. Borg—if I think you’re good enough—and no one will notice you, no one. When the game is in play you’ll be as still as the net post, and as uninteresting. For Rule Two of the Laws of tennis states that the court has certain permanent fixtures like the net and the net posts and the umpire’s chair. And the list of permanent fixtures includes you, the ball boys, in your respective places. So you can tell your mothers and fathers and your favorite aunties not to bother to watch. If you’re doing your job they won’t even notice you.”

To think we’d volunteered for this. By a happy accident of geography ours was one of the schools chosen to provide the ball boys and ball girls for the Championships. “It’s a huge honor,” our headmaster had told us. “You do it for the prestige of the school. You’re on television. You meet the stars, hand them their towels, supply them with the balls, pour their drinks. You can be proud.”

The Brigadier disabused us of all that. “If any of you are looking for glory, leave at once. Go back to your stuffy classrooms. I don’t want your sort in my squad. The people I want are functionaries, not glory seekers. Do you understand? You will do your job, brilliantly, the way I show you. It’s all about timing, self-control and, above all, being invisible.”

• • •

T
he victim was poisoned. Once the poison was in his system there was no antidote. Death was inevitable, and lingering.

• • •

S
o in the next three months we learned to be invisible. And it was damned hard work, I can tell you. I had no idea what it would lead to. You’re thinking we murdered the Brigadier? No, he’s a survivor. So far as I know, he’s still alive and terrifying the staff in a retirement home.

I’m going to tell it as it happened, and we start on the November afternoon in 1980 when my best friend Eddie Pringle and I were on an hour’s detention for writing something obscene on Blind Pugh’s blackboard. Mr. Pugh, poor soul, was our chemistry master. He wasn’t really blind, but his sight wasn’t the best. He wore thick glasses with prism lenses, and we little monsters took full advantage. Sometimes Nemesis arrived, in the shape of our headmaster, Mr. Neames, breezing into the lab, supposedly for a word with Blind Pugh, but in reality to catch us red-handed playing poker behind bits of apparatus or rolling mercury along the bench tops. Those who escaped with a detention were the lucky ones.

“I’ve had enough of this crap,” Eddie told me in the detention room. “I’m up for a job as ball boy.”

“What do you mean—Wimbledon?” I said. “That’s not till next June.”

“They train you. It’s every afternoon off school for six months—and legal. No more detentions. All you do is trot around the court picking up balls and chucking them to the players and you get to meet McEnroe and Connors and all those guys. Want to join me?”

It seemed the ideal escape plan, but of course we had to get permission from Nemesis to do it. Eddie and I turned ourselves into model pupils for the rest of term. No messing about. No detentions. Every homework task completed.

“In view of this improvement,” Nemesis informed us, “I have decided to let you go on the training course.”

But when we met the Brigadier we found we’d tunneled out of one prison into another. He terrified us. The regime was pitiless, the orders unrelenting.

“First you must learn how to be a permanent fixture. Stand straight, chest out, shoulders back, thumbs linked behind your back. Now hold it for five minutes. If anyone moves, I put the stopwatch back to zero again.”

Suddenly he threw a ball hard at Eddie and of course he ducked.

“Right,” the Brigadier announced, “Pringle moved. The hand goes back to zero. You have to learn to be still, Pringle. Last year one of my boys was hit on the ear by a serve from Roscoe Tanner, over a hundred miles per hour, and he didn’t flinch.”

We had a full week learning to be permanent fixtures, first standing at the rear of the court and then crouching like petrified sprinters at the sideline, easy targets for the Brigadier to shy at. A couple of the kids dropped out. We all had bruises.

“This is worse than school,” I told Eddie. “We’ve got no freedom at all.”

“Right, he’s a tyrant. Don’t let him grind you down,” Eddie said.

In the second and third weeks we practiced retrieving the balls, scampering back to the sidelines and rolling them along the ground to our colleagues or throwing them with one bounce to the Brigadier.

• • •

T
his was to be one of the great years of Wimbledon, with Borg, Connors and McEnroe at the peaks of their careers, challenging for the title. The rivalry would produce one match, a semifinal, that will be remembered for as long as tennis is played. And on an outside court, another, fiercer rivalry would be played out, with a fatal result. The players were not well known, but their backgrounds ensured a clash of ideologies. Jozsef Stanski, from Poland, was to meet Igor Voronin, a Soviet Russian, on Court Eleven, on the third day of the Championships.