Murder Is My Racquet (30 page)

No reply from the driver.

“Excuse me…”

The driver turned up the radio. Some hip-hop crap that neither of them liked.

“Turn that down!” said Khol.

“Driver,” said Jessie.

“Hey!” said Khol.

A left turn that clearly aimed them away from their Clayton destination.

Jessie reached to unclip her seat belt only to find the mechanism didn’t release. Khol, who hadn’t bothered with his seat belt, leaned over to try to help her.

“Driver,” Khol hollered again.

Jessie abandoned her seat belt efforts and fumbled with the door lock. It too had been sabotaged—a piece unscrewed, leaving her nothing to grab onto.

“Oh, shit,” she said. “Khol… It’s me… my fault. I fucked up. The Open. Oh, my God!”

The car stopped sharply, throwing Khol forward. The driver climbed out and came around back, so close to the vehicle that Jessie couldn’t see his face. Khol was up and pounding on his door.

“No… no!” Jessie said, clumsily slipping out of the fastened seat belt, all knees and snags. “No, Khol!”

But as his door came open, an irate Khol lunged for freedom, to make his objections heard. It happened fast: a knee to his face, his arm pinned half-in, half-out of the car, and then the door slamming hard. The sharp sound of a bone snapping like a small tree limb. His cry, loud and savage. The door slamming again. Khol, on his knees, slipping to the car’s leather interior, unconscious, his face pale and ghastly. Drool and vomit. That hip-hop so loud that it rattled the car’s trim. The car door sagged open.

Jessie thought she heard a car behind them.

Khol’s right arm had a red lump midforearm the size of a softball.

“Somebody help,” Jessie said, her voice buried by the radio. “Somebody help,” she repeated, more earnestly.
“Help me!”
Then she muttered, “My fault, my fault, my fault,” and reached over to attempt to resuscitate Khol.

• • •

S
he slept alone that night, lock and chain and a chair braced against the hotel room door. The phone unplugged. The police had ruled it a stalking, the Town Car having been rented on a counterfeit credit card that came up valid, but belonged to no one. Ironically, because of the stalker designation, the press was not informed. The two reporters who scanned the radios and had caught on to Jessie’s and Khol’s celebrity were tricked by officers at the emergency room, allowing Jessie to get out of the hospital unseen.

She understood perfectly well that all that did was delay things. The press had its way. It would make ink at some point.
If she were lucky, the cover story, invented by the cops, would hold: Limo slams on its brakes, Khol snaps his forearm because he wasn’t wearing his seat belt. The
Enquirer
headline would read something like: Crash Test Dummy: Tennis Star Double-faults!

She passed on taking a pill in order to sleep. Didn’t want to mix it with the wine. Naked, in fresh sheets. Air turned way up to chill the room. She cried, sobered, and cried again. Khol’s eyes, unforgiving and wounded right before they drugged him for surgery. A plate and two titanium screws. Six to twelve months. They claimed he’d play again, though she wondered how much was for his spirits, how much the truth. Would he serve 110? Would he ache every time a storm approached? Would he ever talk to her again?

She should have kept her mouth shut. Shouldn’t have blurted out that bit about the Open. Maybe he’d been in shock. Maybe he hadn’t heard. Those eyes said something different, but she allowed a moment of self-deception while hoping for sleep.

Instead, she heard that sound.
Thwack… thwack
. She willed it away. Then she pulled a pillow over her head and she swore it lessened. Five minutes. Ten. It continued inside her head. She climbed out of bed, found a T-shirt in a drawer and pulled it on before heading to the blinds. The T-shirt barely reached her crotch, but the balcony would block her from the waist down, unless some adventuresome photographer had bribed his way onto the hotel roof and was looking down on her from across the hotel’s lazy curve of glass and plaster. This thought stopped her. She pulled on a pair of underwear. She made a point of not pulling the blinds, not sending any signals. She slipped inside the blackout curtain, between this and the sheer. Then she parted the sheer, unlocked the sliding door and
cracked it open a few inches. The sound was louder. The courts were empty.

• • •

J
essie faced an Australian in the semis, a performance-enhanced woman with big hands, wide shoulders and a kick-ass serve. Her groundstrokes came over the net extremely low, difficult for the eye to pick up, and consistently powerful. One in ten caught the net’s tape and lumbered across unpredictably, inevitably a point for her. The players called such net shots Funky Chickens, and this Australian could have opened her own restaurant. Her vulnerability came in a backhand that while extremely powerful, always came down the line. Always. Never a crosscourt. Never even a passing shot. Jessie believed she could rush net and exploit this trait to victory, as long as she could push the woman into the corner and make her take those backhands. But the woman knew her own weaknesses and tended to avoid her backhand as much as possible. When she did take one, she hit cleanly and she hit hard right for the far corner. She could move you out of position with that shot, force you to expose too much of the court, and the power behind it required immediate commitment. Jessie made her move to the baseline corner as the woman wound up for those backhands, thankful just to return them. It was a dominant net game that made that predictable a shot a liability, and it was the net game that Jessie exploited.

“If you’re going to lose the semis, you’d better make it three sets.”

But she wasn’t going to lose the semis. She took the first set in a tiebreaker and sensed victory. She pounded shots into that backhand corner, feeling that her racquet connected with Michael’s head each time she clobbered the ball.

At the start of the second set she spotted him in the stands. She lost a break because of that—her nerves getting the better of her. He had the audacity to offer a small wave—catching her looking. But then she broke right back love–40, a humiliating service for her opponent, and what proved to be the final straw. It was the first of three more breaks. A trouncing. She hurried off the court, denying the television commentator an interview, a breach of contract that would cost her ten thousand dollars. She refused an interview in the studio as well, another ten thousand. Michael would be pleased by the victory, of course, and it angered her that she couldn’t score any points against him. Not yet, anyway.

• • •

J
essie watched the night game of the other women’s semi from her hotel room. She wore bags of hotel ice taped to both ankles and both knees—a trick she’d practiced for some time now. The ice kept any possible swelling down. After two decades on every kind of tennis court surface, she had the joints of a fifty-year-old. She swallowed two Advils, adjusted her pillows and turned the sound up so she could cover that
other
sound. It had begun about ten minutes earlier: the familiar swoosh and slap of a tennis volley. The problem was that no one was out there playing on the hotel courts at this hour.

She didn’t really care whom she faced in the finals, though she slightly favored the number-two-ranked player, the Czech, Sylvia Brazinski, with the big backhand, little legs and average serve. She could tire out Brazinski if she played a good, solid net game, and maybe win a break off that serve, although as a leftie Brazinski proved difficult to return. They had rarely met on the court, and Jessie felt confident of her chances.

The knock on the door to her suite caught her by surprise, and a trill of adrenaline spiked her system as if she’d been slapped from behind. “Busy!” she called out, not wanting to deal with the carefully rigged bags of ice on her joints.

She couldn’t make out any of the words of the voice on the other side of the door, through the suite’s living room, but its rich Scandinavian timbre gave away Khol, and she felt moved to greet him. She hobbled toward the door, checked the peep hole and threw the locks, admitting him. In a camisole, bikini underwear and taped up with lopsided bags of ice, she imagined herself quite the sight.

His arm was slinged and in a cast. He looked much paler than she’d ever seen him. She wondered how a court tan could fade so quickly. She locked the door behind him, and began crying before she turned around. She hated herself for this show of weakness.

“It’s all right, it’s all right,” he comforted her. “I’m glad it wasn’t you. They could have raped you. Killed us. They must have planned to kidnap us, don’t you think?” She loved the lilt to his voice, but it made him sound all the more naive as he assessed their assault incorrectly.

“We have to talk.”

“I came to watch Brazinski with you,” he said, drying her eyes of the tears. “Thought you could use the company.”

“We’ll watch in a minute.” She led him into the suite’s living room, and Khol must have known something was up: Jessie was far too great a competitor not to watch every last second of this semifinal match.

“Jess?”

“I have something to tell you. I hope you won’t hate me. But even if you do, I’ve got to tell you.”

“Who is he?” Khol said suspiciously, unwilling to be seated.

She burst out laughing, in a nervous volley of release. “I wish!” she said. “Sit,” she instructed again, and this time Khol sat down. Jessie turned one of the overstuffed chairs to face him.

“What the hell’s going on?”

She said, “I threw the Open. Four years ago. That loss to Crispin?”

“You what?”

“I owed some people a lot of money. Khol, I’m in big trouble.”

• • •

T
he most difficult part of their plan was acquiring twenty thousand dollars in cash in less than three hours. Khol turned to his sports agent in Chicago, a man named Stan Feingold, who was instructed come hell or high water he was to deliver the amount in cash to Khol before the end of the second set, as no one could predict if Jessie’s match against Brazinski would go the distance and reach a third set.

This part of the plan was never mentioned to the FBI handlers who jumped in on the case following Jessie’s call late the night before. They might have thrown her and Khol in jail for even thinking about it, but as it was, the federal agents’ full focus remained on obtaining warrants for cellular phone surveillance and establishing perimeter security in the face of four thousand adoring fans, any one of whom could be a mob-hired hit man. Hit
woman
, for that matter.

Jessie had been up until four in the morning; had gotten only four hours’ sleep as a result of the interviewing (interrogating was more like it) and the lawyering (her attorney in New
York, Susan Steiger, had obtained representation for her here with a firm specializing in criminal defense). She realized she faced an uphill battle in the match against Brazinski—not that it actually mattered. Even when in top physical shape, Jessie found the southpaw no pushover. They’d met seven times. Jessie had won four. Three of the last five. She held a psychological edge, but the wear and tear of the previous late-night negotiations, while supporting the FBI plan, threatened her own.

The FBI plan called for her to lose a close match, preferably in three sets. Michael would believe she had capitulated to his demands following the violence done to Khol and would pay her off for services rendered. This payoff would be monitored and intercepted and recorded by authorities. At the very least, Michael, and perhaps his associates along with him, would do some serious time.

For agreeing to throw the match, to cooperate, the FBI had offered that her criminal wrongdoing at the Open four years before would be expunged from her interrogation transcripts in return for a fine equal to her tournament winnings and her payoff for throwing the Open, plus interest, plus a one-year hiatus from the sport. For this, she would serve no jail time and the ATA would be led to believe this tournament was the only attempt at extortion and that Jessie had come forward of her own free will following the harm done to Khol.

With each of the concerned parties scheduled to win something from the deal, all Jessie had to do was lose, and walk away from the sport for a year, possibly the best tennis she’d ever played—to throw away everything she had worked toward for her entire life. With a victory here, in a major, she would gain enough points to hold the number-one ranking in the
world for at least two weeks—the date of the next scheduled major.

She walked out onto that court amid a roar of applause, captured by live television cameras, a mass of confusion, awaiting a sign from Khol that Stan Feingold and his twenty thousand in cash had reached the stadium. Waiting for a sign they could satisfy the FBI’s needs, while satisfying their own as well.

A person couldn’t always do the right thing.

• • •

H
aving only twenty-five minutes to warm up, and under the considerable pressure of not only a finals appearance in a major, but a match of such magnitude in terms of national ranking, Jessie approached the first game cautiously. Her return of serve revealed itself as her most obvious weakness and Brazinski capitalized, pummeling ninety-mile-an-hour SCUDS so close to the service tape that twice Jessie waited for Cyclops to chirp his out-of-bounds alert, only to realize the serve had been good. She hadn’t even seen the thing. Forty-love. Brazinski won not only the first game, but a piece of the crowd. As number two in the world, Brazinski had legions of adoring fans. Jessie, at a current ranking of number five wasn’t quite as well-loved. (It was only through the mathematics of computer-rated standings, enhanced by the number-one player having lost in the first round in her last two majors, that either Brazinski or Jessie had a shot at the bullet. The number-three player had been ambushed by a random drug testing and had showed positive for a performance enhancer that everyone in the locker room knew she was taking—in point of fact, she’d probably been sandbagged by a player or a player’s agent in an
effort to get her off the rankings, which seemed inevitable.) But Brazinski claimed the crowd early. She wore a very tight top, which would be soaked through in perspiration in a matter of minutes to the pleasure of all the men attending (she was famous for this wet T-shirt look, and had twice been censured by the ATA, but the networks weren’t complaining, given the ratings whenever she played), a white and blue pleated skirt so short that it rose off her cheeks every time she lifted to serve. It was the way of women’s tennis—part athletics, part soft porn. The real money came from endorsements, millions a year to the number-one-ranked player who had a body worthy of national television and billboard ads. The butt-faces didn’t get nearly the offers that the glamour queens did. In this day and age it wasn’t enough to be coached on your backhand, your media coach meant the difference between winning and stardom, and stardom paid for the fractional ownership of a private jet, stretch limos, presidential suites, private masseuses, personal chefs and the rest of the entourage. Jessie didn’t appreciate losing the crowd so early in the match. Now, instead of having Brazinski to beat, she could add seven thousand others to the list.