Murder Is My Racquet (26 page)

“He was sayin’ the other day he might recognize your voice.”

“You know what, Lawrence? I don’t care anymore.”

“You’re tellin’ me you don’t give a rat’s ass he figures out it was you in the chair that day? You who brung him here?”

“Maybe I want him to know,” Ted said. “But not before I yell back.”

Ted did that the next afternoon, after they’d played the explosion in that Lockhart match over and over again, Tony Douglass pleading with them after two hours to turn it off before he lost his bloody mind. If Douglass knew it was Ted Carlyle who’d been in the chair that day, Ted Carlyle whom he’d humiliated that way, he didn’t say.

Maybe, in the end, they all sounded alike to him.

Ted got right in front of him, right in front of the chair, and said, “So how do you like it?”

“It sucks.”

“Doesn’t it, though?”

Douglass, somehow managing to shrug, said, “What can I say? The shit got out of hand. Whoever the guy you have with you, he’s right. Somebody should’ve stopped me when I was young. But no one ever did.” He shrugged again. “Shit happens.”

“So it wasn’t your fault, is that it?”

“It’s not what I’m saying exactly, but—”

“Shut up!”

Ted Carlyle said it with such force it snapped Douglass’s head back.

“I was just trying to explain—”

“Shut the fuck up!”
Ted shouted, louder than before, a foot up on the side of the chair, his mouth practically next to Douglass’s ear, the one with the diamond stud in it. “I suppose it was somebody else’s fault that you only won those four majors with your talent, is that it?” Ted said.

“I told you, shit happens…”

“
Bullshit
shit happens,” Ted said, spitting out the words. “You know who the ignorant moron was, Tony?
You
were. Did McEnroe have more talent than you? Did Connors or Borg or Sampras or any of them? You know they didn’t. But you finally pissed it all away, didn’t you? You were more interested in being some asshole bad-boy character than you were in being the champion you should have been. Isn’t that right, Tony? At least McEnroe used to play doubles to keep himself in shape. You were too big even for that, weren’t you? There was always another party, wasn’t there? Maybe that’s why you
were so pissed off all the time, it was because you were so fucking hung over.”

“I worked,” Douglass said in a small voice. “Maybe not as hard as the others…”

“
Liar!
” Ted’s voice was as loud as gunfire in the ballroom. “Who’s the one who can’t see now, Tony? Who’s the one who’s so stinking
blind?
”

Ted Carlyle was out of breath, his chest heaving, sweating as if they were playing a match, both feet back on the ballroom floor, a high heat rising in the back of his neck.

Jesus, he thought, it’s finally happened, I’m as crazy as he is.

“I’m the one who’s right, aren’t I, Tony?” he said.

“No, it was more complicated than that…”

“Yes!”

“No!”

“The people in the chair, the people calling the lines, you just abused them for sport, didn’t you?”

“It wasn’t like that. Sometimes, maybe, because it had become part of my act by then, people expected it…”

“
Liar!
They weren’t even worthy of being on the same court with the great Tony Douglass, were they?”

“I just expected them to do their jobs properly.”

“Bullshit!” Ted velled. “They tried to do their jobs properly, but you wouldn’t let them, would you? At least not after the first call that went against you.”

“I saw things…”

“You saw what you wanted to see!”
There was only the harsh sound of Ted’s breathing in the ballroom. “And then you did exactly what you wanted to do, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” The word seemed to die a foot in front of Tony Douglass’s mouth. “Yes,” he said, in a whisper now.

Ted said, “You didn’t give a shit about anything or anybody, did you? It was all about you, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, goddamnit!” Tony Douglass said. “Yes! Is that what you want to hear? I fucked up myself and I fucked up tennis. Is that what you want to hear? Bloody
Christ!
What else do you want me to say?”

“I’m sorry,” Ted said.

“What?”

“Tell me you’re sorry.”

“I’m sorry!” Douglass screamed from the chair. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Jesus, I’m
sorry
. Now please let me go.”

At last, Ted thought, at last, it was Tony Douglass who sat in that chair wanting to cry.

“Not yet,” Ted said, and left him there. Lawrence Semple, Jr., was waiting on the clay court out back for their afternoon hit.

• • •

T
ed and Lawrence Semple, Jr., sat on the back terrace having coffee the next morning.

“Was it enough?” Lawrence said.

“It?”

“Bringing his sorry ass here, makin’ him watch the shit, talkin’ to him the way you did? Was it enough for what he did to you that time? Hell, what he did to everybody
all
the times?”

“No,” Ted said, staring down the long expanse of lawn, stretching all the way to the lake, the tennis court right before it looking beautiful in the morning sun, Lawrence having already rolled it. “But it will have to do. I mean, we can’t kill the sonofabitch, can we?”

Lawrence smiled.

They finished their coffee. Lawrence had already taken Douglass to the shower, stripped off his clothes as he did every day, thrown him in there with his hands tied behind him, let the water wash over him, roughly dried him before he helped him on with one of the T-shirts they’d bought for him, underwear, jeans, Nike tennis sneakers.

Then it was back to the chair.

They both walked into the ballroom.

“We’re done with you now,” Ted said.

Douglass sighed.

“At last,” he said. “When do we leave?”

“Not just yet,” Ted said.

“What do you
mean
not just yet? I’ve been here a bloody week? You’ve
tortured
me for a bloody week. I’ve learned my lesson, I swear to you! What more can you say to me than you already have? What more can
I
say to convince you? I believe your friend when he says that if I ever act up again, he’ll come for me.”

“I’ve said all I wanted to say, Tony,” Ted said. “But that doesn’t mean even body has.”

“We nearly needed a damn waitin’ list,” Lawrence Semple, Jr., said.

Lawrence opened the double doors to the ballroom then and Helen Kaiser, the chair umpire from Westchester Country Club, dressed smartly in a beige summer suit, came walking across the shiny hardwood floor, the one painted to look like a tennis court, to where Tony Douglass sat in the chair.

“There’s so many who want to talk to you, Tony,” Ted Carlyle said.

“My turn,” Helen Kaiser said.

They had left the windows open when they left her there with him. Halfway through their first set, Ted and Lawrence could still hear the shrill sound of Helen Kaiser’s screaming from up the hill.

CONTINENTAL GRIP

D
AVID
M
ORRELL

A
s much as anyone could tell, the murder weapon was a Prince long-body racquet, the edge of which had been driven into the top of the victim’s skull. There was some uncertainty because the victim wore a tennis cap, so the indentation that the edge of the racquet made wasn’t as defined as the police would have liked. But by trial and error, it turned out that Wilsons and other racquets didn’t fit the groove as much as Princes did, so Prince owners became the initial suspects. That narrowed the list to about 50 percent of the club’s membership.

The victim was the club’s pro, Rocky Radigan. A tennis player doesn’t usually have a boxer’s nickname, but it fit. The way a first-rate boxer keeps dancing all the time he’s in the ring, that’s how Rocky moved on the tennis court, always shifting rhythmically. A beautiful thing to see. He was thirty-seven, tall and lanky, good-looking in a boyish way, with hazel eyes and dark hair, although those last two details were hard to notice because almost nobody ever saw him without his sunglasses and his tennis cap. For several years, he’d been on the pro tour,
was ranked as high as 85, made it to the third round at the U.S. Open, and had lots of good stories: the shock of seeing Pete Sampras vomit in the quarterfinals at the U.S. Open, for example, or the reaction of the Wimbledon spectators when a female player went onto the court in a white spandex cat suit. Eventually Rocky had gotten tired of the tour’s exhausting schedule and moved to Santa Fe, where he became the pro for the Land of Enchantment tennis club and where, after a successful five years, he was found dead on Court One when the first players showed up at eight on a sunny September morning.

Land of Enchantment. The original owner called the club that because New Mexico uses it on its license plates, and over the years, the club adapted to the name, becoming even more weird and special than Santa Fe likes to think of itself. For starters, there’s the club’s appearance. At the end of a curved potholed gravel street that the post office constantly has trouble finding, it consists of six courts, three on an upper tier, three below it. They’re separated by tall cottonwood trees, and they’ve got rustic wooden benches with sunshades made of interlaced branches stretched overhead between posts. To the left, there’s a swimming pool and changing rooms. In front of the pool is the clubhouse, an adobe-pueblo-style structure that seems constantly in need of maintenance—the porch, for example, the boards of which keep breaking. But somehow the ill repair is part of the charm. Visitors need only one look at the silhouettes of Sun and Moon mountains beyond the club to make them instantly want to join.

The trouble is, zoning restrictions keep the maximum membership to three hundred, so there’s a list of people waiting to get in. The membership has an interesting mix. A former
New Mexico attorney general. A retired Hollywood casting director (lots of movie people live in Santa Fe). A founding member of a major computer firm. A surgeon who invented one of the standard techniques of repairing hearts. A factory-systems analyst who saved several corporations from bankruptcy. A director of a local museum.

That sample might suggest that the club’s stuffy and self-important. Not at all. There are plenty of average members, too. If anything, people want to belong because there aren’t any pretensions about the place. Take the way the members dress, for instance. At most clubs, there’s a contest about who has the most expensive, stylish whites. But at the Land of Enchantment, members show up in the baggiest, most washed-out, most poorly color-coordinated shorts and tops. To look at some of the players, you’d think that they didn’t have a dollar to their name.

The owner, Debbie, bought the place ten years ago with an inheritance from her grandmother. She’s a fortyish robust woman who’s fond of burning incense and going on purifying fasts. She claims she bought the club because she loves tennis, but the real reason is, she wanted the club so she could have a place for all the cats she’s adopted. Somebody once counted fifty of them. White ones. Orange ones. Calico ones. Tailless ones. Earless ones. Everywhere you look: cats. The members aim tennis balls at them to keep them off the courts. At night, owls and coyotes deplete the horde, but it doesn’t make much difference because Debbie just goes out and adopts more. When members’ children show up to swim, they try to pet the cats and get bitten, so Debbie’s always having to prove that her cats have had their rabies shots, and then she has to pay for the doctor’s visit to have the bite disinfected. It’s a mark of how
strongly members like her and the club that nobody’s ever complained to the Animal Shelter, but an accountant who belongs to the club wondered how Debbie could be earning any money from the place after paying for all the cat food she needs, plus the vet and doctor bills.

As a matter of fact, the police couldn’t tell if it was the cats or a raccoon that ate Rocky’s nose while he was lying on Court One all night (the autopsy determined that he’d been killed around sundown the previous evening). He still had his racquet in his hand. Rigor mortis had set in, so the police had a terrible time getting it away from him. One of the investigators, a tennis buff, couldn’t help noticing that Rocky held the racquet with his favorite grip: the Continental.

For those unfamiliar with tennis: Basically, there are three ways to hold a racquet. The easiest is the forehand grip, in which your hand is to the right of the center part of the handle (or if you’re left-handed, to the left). A little harder is the backhand grip, in which your hand is to the left of the center part of the handle (reverse this if you’re left-handed). And then there’s the cursed Continental, which involves keeping the web between your thumb and first finger directly at the center of the handle. It’s used for close shots at the net, or else for overheads and for serving. It’s effective when done properly, but it feels unnatural at first and requires a lot of hand strength. Beginning players sometimes take a year and more to feel comfortable with it. Then it gets to be so automatic that they can’t make the shift to a forehand or a backhand. Expletives are unavoidable.

The Continental. Rocky was the tennis equivalent of a religious zealot, constantly preaching about that grip. If he mentioned it once during a lesson, he mentioned it a hundred
times. Use the Continental. Use the Continental. Of course, he had a whole slew of other mantras. Keep your eye on the ball. Stay in the moment. Move, move, move. Sideways, keep sideways. Bend those knees. Hit low. Get that racquet back early. He even told Debbie to stock his favorite book in what passed for the club’s equipment store:
The Inner Game of Tennis
. But at the top of his all-time instruction list was, Use the Continental, use the Continental.

So there poor Rocky was, sprawled on the service line, with his racquet in his hand, looking as if he’d been about to make a drop shot before he himself got dropped. The mixed doubles group who found him phoned the police. When the ambulance and the cruisers sped into the gravel parking lot, the sirens made Debbie’s cats scatter (they didn’t come out from bushes and under the porch for the rest of the day). Then two detectives arrived, and with all their questions and the lab crew and the medical examiner, not to mention two policemen using yellow “crime scene, do not pass” tape to cordon off Court One, not much tennis got played that day.