Murder Is My Racquet (5 page)

If there’s one thing I know about destiny it is that you can’t count on it forever. I knew things couldn’t go on like this and sure enough they didn’t. Tragically, in the first year of my private practice, Leila Marie died rather suddenly of a fairly arcane illness that is faintly related in the literature to toxic shock syndrome. The malady was impossible to treat, diagnose, or detect and it caused me no little grief to realize the irony that I was a doctor and there was nothing I could do for her. The subsequent autopsy revealed no clue as to the cause of her death.

Lana Lee was there to support me, however, and one thing led to another. When the Lord closes the door He opens a little window, they say. In my case, at least, it certainly seems that way. There was, indeed, a nasty little hint of suspicion surrounding me after Leila Marie’s death but it comes with the territory. Doctors have become as used to this sort of mean-minded gossip as we are to scribbling prescriptions or working with HMOs. I didn’t let it get me down.

Today I’m happily married to Lana Lee and I have a thriving practice. If you’re patient and you see a lot of patients, the medical profession can provide a very lucrative lifestyle. Not only that, but it’s a good way to help serve your fellow man. And speaking of serving, guess what? I’ve taken up tennis again.

SIX LOVE

J
AMES
W. H
ALL

I
n the delicate crosshairs of Roger’s telescopic sight, Gigi Janeway stood at her open window, only the thin mesh of window screen and a hundred yards of humid, bug-dense summer air separating them. With the golden lights of her room blazing behind her, her body seemed to glow.

Gigi still wore her white tennis dress with the blue bows on the sleeves and she was brushing her long auburn hair. For years Roger had observed her close-up each afternoon when he came to retrieve his daughter, Julie, from tennis practice. Since the age of six, Gigi had been Julie’s nemesis, and Roger had made a careful study of this girl who caused his daughter such torment.

By now he was intimately familiar with the scent of sour peppermint that Gigi’s clammy flesh gave off. And he could picture exactly the glint of long blonde hairs coating her forearms and lately he noticed the razor line at midthigh, just above the hem of her pleated tennis skirt, the rigidly precise border where she stopped shaving her legs. He knew her half-dozen habitual facial expressions, from the subtle smirk she made
when one of her inferiors blew an easy shot, to the hawkish squirt that furrowed her forehead when she fell behind and had to summon an extra quotient of concentration.

Gigi looked out at the dark and for a half-second seemed to stare directly at Roger Shelton where he stood, tense and uncertain, the coarse bark of the pine pressed hard against his left cheek, the smooth stock of his deer rifle flat against the other. He was five yards beyond the halo of the neighborhood security lights, in the shadows of the dense stand of pines that bordered Deepwood Estates, the exclusive community where Arthur Janeway, owner of the largest Cadillac dealership in Florida, resided. Arthur was a corpulent man who held a cold disdain for second-raters of every type, which most certainly included Roger Shelton, a common salesman on one of Janeway’s used car lots.

Arthur’s wife, Bettina, was from Dusseldorf. Gaunt and thin-lipped, with the cigarette-roughened voice, the white-blonde hair, and the pale icy detachment of Greta Garbo in her prime. Ages ago, while still a bachelor, Roger had stumbled into Bettina during her first week in Sand Hills. New to America and deeply disoriented, she had briefly mistaken Roger for someone with a promising future and had dallied with him for two nights at a morel on the fringe of town. On the third night when she failed to appear, Roger Shelton went searching and located her at the Hotel Flamingo’s wood-paneled bar. On the stool next to her, Arthur Janeway was touching a flame to her cigarette. She turned and saw Roger in the doorway and the lungful of smoke that bloomed from her lips was directed at him with dismissive finality. When she turned back to Arthur, she gave a long, guttural laugh to some sly remark of his. In reply, Arthur reached up and touched a finger to one of her
chiseled cheekbones. For several moments Roger stared from the doorway as Bettina pressed her baton, firmly and assuredly, into the hand of the swifter runner.

As he was turning to go, Molly Weatherstone appeared beside him in the doorway of the Hotel Flamingo bar. She wore a shimmering black cocktail dress and spiky heels. Roger managed a distracted hello but she didn’t reply. Her furious gaze was fixed on the back of Arthur Janeway’s head.

“You too, huh?” Roger said. “What’d he do, stand you up?”

After absorbing the scene for a moment more, Molly stalked across the room, bent to Arthur’s ear and spoke a few short, sibilant words then swung around and marched out of the bar.

Less than a month later Bettina and Arthur Janeway eloped to Las Vegas. It was only days after that when Roger and Molly consummated their own hasty romance with a civil ceremony at the Sand Hills courthouse. And though over the years their marriage had proved sound enough, Roger always wondered if their bond had not been forged on the flimsy foundation of spite.

Gigi Janeway, the girl in Roger Shelton’s wavering sights, was Arthur and Bettina’s cherished princess. Fourteen years old. A bony girl with pale gray eyes and a world-class two-handed backhand, a good kick serve and a killer instinct around the net. As Roger watched through the telescopic sight, Gigi Janeway drew the brush through her coarse brown hair with the same mindlessly mechanical motion she employed on the court. Every stroke exactly like the last. Not a quiver of difference between the first backhand crosscourt of the afternoon and the five hundredth stroke that came two hours later. Her game was fearsomely robotic. She swung her racquet like
a scythe through the golden wheat of other men’s daughters. Harvesting their vulnerabilities, their mind-wandering lapses, their muscular frailties. Gigi moved forward and forward again in an ever-widening swath, mowing down girl after girl with pitiless perfection.

Roger could see the shelf of trophies on the wall behind her. Not the small runner-up plaques Julie had managed to collect. But the big, gaudy, golden vessels of the triumphant. It was not simply to amass these trophies that drove Roger’s daughter Julie to dash herself over and over and over against the impervious wall of Gigi Janeway’s tennis game. Roger’s daughter was guided by an artistic temperament. Capricious and creative and capable of flights of giddy inspiration, Julie played the game with volatile abandon. She was a poet on those strict and unforgiving courts. Lithe and inventive, mesmerizing in her finest moments, she had a dazzling array of shots and angles and paces and spins that sent the balls skidding away from her opponent’s racquet as if charmed.

On other days, however, when Julie’s juices were not flowing, when the muse deserted her, she simply crumpled under the fractional weight of air. She could be sluggish and erratically self-destructive and painful to watch. Sometimes she fell into a daze of slow -motion awkwardness, eyes unlocked from the moment, stumbling about on the green clay as if she no longer cared about the game of tennis or about anything else on earth.

At her finest moments, Julie exposed Gigi for the mindless automaton that she was, yo-yoing her from side to side and up and back, twisting and turning the girl until she had to be dizzy, using her vast array of spins and speeds to search out the tiny chinks in Gigi’s heavy armor. But those glorious moments
came and went like fragile wisps of starlight. Julie had so far been unable to sustain her quicksilver magic for an entire match against Gigi’s inexhaustible onslaught.

In the small town of Sand Hills, in the tennis crazy county of Palm Cove, Gigi was the unfailing winner and Julie was the eternal runner-up. A girl with more talent and flair than a hundred Gigis, though lacking in Gigi’s single-minded focus, her stubborn, animal appetite for conquest.

If simply winning her matches against Julie had been enough for Gigi Janeway, Roger would not be standing in the woods at that moment, aiming his deer rifle at the girl. But like her rapacious father, Gigi seemed to hunger for more than victory. Nothing less than total domination appeared to satisfy her. Every match against Julie was a blood-letting so vicious and so total that their accumulated effect was to drain the reservoirs of Julie’s very spirit. Between matches, each word Gigi spoke to Julie had a belittling purpose. Every act, each haughty look or whispered remark to a fellow player tormented Julie, mocked her, undermined her faith in her abilities and reminded her of her inferior station in Sand Hills, Florida, where her father was merely an unremarkable salesman.

On too many nights, Julie lay in her sleepless bed and stared into her father’s eyes pleading for Roger to tell her what she might do to alter her fate.

Roger had no answer. But he knew that Gigi Janeway and she alone blocked the way of his daughter. Her talent thwarted, skills obstructed, her very personality was being permanently stunted. No matter how hard she worked, no matter the peaks of athletic grace she reached, her efforts were forever mocked by Gigi Janeway. Just as his own career had been arrested by men like Gigi’s father who were willing to be more
aggressive, more relentlessly ruthless and hardnosed than Roger.

Out on the glaring pavement of the used car lot Roger had known his own moments of artistic grace. Closing deals in half an hour with penny-pinching old fools from the beachfront condos. There were days when he’d summoned his silver tongue and not even the devil himself could have withstood his sales pitch. He held the single-day sales record of five used cars. However, he also held the record for the longest stretches without a sale. It was, Roger believed, all a function of the ebb and flow of the artistic temperament. But men like Arthur Janeway didn’t appreciate transcendent qualities. Janeway, like his daughter, was unapologetically cold-blooded, relying on his superior focus and his boundless stamina to wear down and eventually crush his competition. He got what he wanted by wanting it more than anyone else.

Roger was certain all Julie needed was the smallest of boosts. What father could turn away from such need? Truly, all he wished to do was wing the girl in the golden window, a nonfatal wound that would keep her sidelined for a month or two, long enough for Julie to replenish her confidence and gather the momentum she needed.

Framed by honeyed light, Gigi stood in her window and dared Roger to shoot. Dared him to still the shudder in his arms and summon the courage that had eluded him for months.

He watched as Gigi took hold of a clump of her hair and brought it close to her face and inspected it. He watched her pluck a split end and flick it toward the screen. A casual gesture that was a perfect echo for the way she mercilessly brushed aside her flawed opponents. Then he watched with
fascination as she released her hair and lifted the hairbrush to her mouth—turning it into a microphone, tipping her head to the side as if searching for a more flattering angle in the sunlight of Centre Court Wimbledon. Having completed the entire fortnight without the loss of a set, Gigi had dispatched her final opponent and now curtseyed before the duke and duchess, and explained to the enraptured crowd how she had managed this stunning victory at such a young age. Lucky sperm, Roger imagined her to say. Lucky sperm swam up my mother’s thingy and infected her with me and gave me the endless stamina and the narrow focus and the ability to be unbored by hours of unvarying repetition. I am not worthy of this trophy, she would say. The deserving one is Julie Shelton back in Sand Hills, Florida, a girl who went farther than anyone would have expected given the fact she had such unlucky sperm. Julie Shelton, a beautiful loser. This is for you, unlucky Julie. This is for you, you pathetic girl, who never found the guts and gristle and monotonous meanness to succeed.

Through his sight Roger Shelton watched as Gigi dropped the hairbrush and came to sudden attention. Her smile went rigid as if someone had plucked the harp string that joined her cerebellum with the million unbearable nerves of her body. And then Gigi’s mouth went slack and with one final puff of energy those ruthless blue eyes fixed on Roger’s and all around his hiding place the woods glowed with Gigi Janeway’s outrage. In her last moment of consciousness, a pout took control of her lips as if she were suffering an unaccustomed disappointment, some treasure withheld, some bauble snatched from her grasp.

Roger lowered the rifle and listened to the echo of the blast
swallowed by the thick, damp air, the surf roar of traffic, the high keening of crickets and mosquitoes, and the muffled television laughter leaking from behind insulated walls and all that machine-driven air.

He was to learn later that no one had heard the shot. No witnesses came forward with descriptions of a man dressed in camouflage. Apparently Roger had moved back to his car with perfect anonymity. In the following days, police investigators searched the nearby woods but failed to locate his nest in the trees or any other sign of him. The Sand Hills police were utterly baffled. Their theory was that Gigi had been struck by a stray slug from someone taking target practice in the woods. Arthur and Bettina pleaded for help from state authorities or the FBI but they were denied. A month after the incident the furor had subsided.

What Roger learned of Gigi’s condition came from the newspaper stories and the scuttlebutt around the used car lot. For seven weeks Gigi Janeway lay in a coma. When she woke, she remembered little of her previous life. The most mundane physical movements were now monumental challenges. For a while, every breath was a test, every eye blink an accomplishment. Her muscle memory had been totally erased. It would be a year before she could walk without crutches. Two before she might even grip a tennis racquet again.

Indeed, it was almost two years to the day of her shooting when Roger witnessed Gigi’s return to the courts at the Sand Hills Racquet Club. Her spastic swing, her heavy trudge, her immediate weariness were a cruel parody of her former game. Roger took no pleasure in her misery. But the acid drip of guilt he felt was neutralized by the welling pleasure and satisfaction as he watched his own daughter thrive. With a single tightening
of his finger, Roger had liberated Julie and had given a totally justifiable rebuke to the imperious Janeway family.