Murder in the Wind (3 page)

When he was drafted he sold most of his possessions and put the money away in a Building and Loan Society. He went through basic, was given a commission in Special Services and assigned to a large camp in the southwest where he gave regular tennis instruction to field grade officers and played exhibition games with other tennis stars who passed through the camp. It was a pleasant life and, but for a certain unfortunate episode with the wife of a full colonel, he could have stayed there for the duration. He found himself assigned to Korea and, as the word had gone ahead of him through the West Point Protective Association, assigned to a test area in Japan. He began to work out seriously and regularly at the Officers’ Club near Tokyo. He got permission to enter the All Pacific Tournament and made such a splendid showing he was sent on tour to Australia and New Zealand playing exhibitions.

At the time of his discharge he almost had his big game back again. But he was twenty-five, and he had lost a lot of time. He did get on the Davis Cup squad as an alternate. After that, during the next two years both his energies and his charm seemed to wear a little thin. It is one thing to be called a tennis bum. It is something else again to be called a tennis bum and be knocked down simultaneously.

The week after that happened he turned pro. That change warranted no press coverage. He went on two tours, one slightly profitable, and one not profitable at all. Through good luck, after several jobs that did not work out, he at last landed the job of tennis pro at the Oswando Club in Westchester. There were six splendid indoor courts, and so it was a year-round job. He had found that he liked working with kids. He was thirty-three that first year at Oswando. All he knew was tennis. All he would ever know was tennis. And the future had begun to look very black.

Betty Oldbern came to him to be “brushed up” on her tennis. She was nineteen. She was not attractive. She was too heavy. She was very shy of him. She knew how to play tennis because she had been given lessons ever since she was a small child. Lessons in tennis, swimming, golf, riding, dancing, fencing, conversational French, painting, sculpting, creative writing. She was the product of private schools in Switzerland, France and Philadelphia. And of innumerable tutors. She did many things competently, and none of them with grace or style. She had few friends, and quite a few relatives, all elderly.

And the name was Oldbern as in Oldbern Shipping Lines and Oldbern Chemicals.

She was nineteen and living on a generous allowance and in two more years she would be twenty-one and on that birthday she would receive something like three million. She had had the most sophisticated education in the world, yet she was almost entirely naive. She still wore her baby fat. She could blush like a sunset. Within a month she was deeply, hopelessly in love with him. It had not been hard to manage. The hard thing was to get her to keep her mouth shut and wait. He explained that she had to be of age first, or all the relatives would cause trouble. He kept his hands off her. That was not a great chore.

Four days after her twenty-first birthday, Bunny made an appointment with Harrison Oldbern, Betty’s father. He did not state his business. Harrison Oldbern was on the Board of Governors of the Oswando Club, a thin alert tanned man, sportsman, deep-water sailor, shrewd businessman.

“Sit down, Bunny. First time you’ve seen the office, isn’t it?”

“Yes sir. Pretty impressive.”

“Drink? I’m afraid I’m only going to be able to give you about ten minutes.”

“I’d like a Scotch and water, thanks.”

As Oldbern mixed the drinks he said, “What’s on your mind, Bunny? Contract for next year? I think I can personally assure you that the membership wants you to stay. You’re doing a marvelous job with the kids. In fact we’re going to raise the ante a little. We don’t want to lose you.”

He brought the drinks over and handed Bunny his. Bunny looked up at him and said, “It isn’t anything like that, Mr. Oldbern. Betty and I want to get married.”

Oldbern’s face stiffened. He stared at Bunny. “Betty? She’s just a kid.”

“She’s over twenty-one, sir.”

“How old are you, Hollis?”

“Thirty-five, sir.”

Oldbern went behind his desk and sat down slowly. “What kind of nonsense are you trying to pull? What the hell is going on?”

“The usual thing, I guess. Love.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Nearly two years. But we thought it would be best to wait until we were both sure.”

“You mean wait until she reached twenty-one.”

“It happened to come out that way.”

“Yes, it happened that way. Hollis, you’re a dirty conniving back-stabbing son of a bitch.”

Bunny looked down at his drink. “I’m sorry to hear you talk that way, sir. Betty and I have been hoping there wouldn’t be too much friction.”

“I’ll never permit it.”

“Betty says we’re going to get married no matter what anybody says. Being twenty-one, I guess she’s her own boss on that. I’m not married and I never have been. She’s certainly in her right mind. I just don’t understand how anybody would go about stopping it.”

Oldbern waited long moments. He leaned back in his chair. “Betty is not a pretty girl, Hollis. She is not even close to being pretty. She happens to have three million dollars.”

“She knows I wouldn’t marry her for her money. She knows me better than that. We’ve gotten well acquainted over the past two years. She knows I have ideals, Mr. Oldbern.”

“You haven’t any more ideals than a mink.”

“I just hoped it could be handled without friction.”

“I’ll put a firm of investigators on you. I’ll have a report on your past that’ll make Betty’s eyes stand out on stalks.”

“You know, Mr. Oldbern, I haven’t looked at another woman for two years. That’s the honest truth. I’ve felt pretty bad about some of the things I’ve done. That’s why I told Betty a pretty complete history. I don’t think you could surprise her. She knows I’ve changed and she knows why. She’s watched me work with the kids there at the club. Love can change a man, Mr. Oldbern.”

“You thought of everything, didn’t you? You’ve had two years to work on it.”

“I’d hoped we could get along.”

“Do you have a price, Hollis?”

“What do you mean?”

“I can write a fairly large check.”

“I’m not thinking about money, Mr. Oldbern. I’m in love with your daughter. And she’s in love with me. We want to be married. That seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it?”

“My God, I wish I knew this had been going on. Have you two been…”

“No sir. I swear that all I’ve ever done is kiss Betty. I guess I’ve done that pretty often. And I talked her out of running away to be married last year. She wanted to do that.”

“But you knew it might mean a cash loss.”

“I don’t want to tell you what to do, but I think you ought to face this, Mr. Oldbern. It’s going to happen.”

The man looked older. “Sit down, Hollis. Let me think.”

Bunny sat down. The man sat with his hand cupped over his eyes. He sighed heavily a few times. When he took his hand away, he looked intently at Hollis. “I understand you, you know. I know what you’re doing. She’s so damn vulnerable. Are you going to try to make her happy? Are you going to even try?”

“Of course I’m going to try.”

“Are you going to ask me to give you some kind of a job with a title? You certainly can’t stay on at the club.”

“Her income figures out to about a hundred and sixty thousand a year before taxes. Taxes will take a lot, but we can live comfortably on the balance. We’re thinking about trying some place along the Mediterranean coast. After the honeymoon, that is. I’m paying for the honeymoon with the money I’ve saved up.”

“White of you, Bunny.”

“I think she’ll feel better about the honeymoon if she isn’t paying for it.”

“There isn’t anything I or anyone else can do, is there?”

Bunny permitted himself his usual likeable grin. “If there is, I wasn’t able to think of it.”

“I certainly hoped she’d do better when she married.” Bunny still grinned. “Like you said, she isn’t what you’d call a pretty girl. Maybe she’s doing about as well as she can do, Mr. Oldbern. Maybe she’s doing better than she would have. We think we’d like a small quiet wedding. Just the family.”

“When do you want it?”

“A month from tomorrow.”

The capitulation was far easier than Bunny had expected. He wondered if Oldbern would have made a more valiant effort to defend his chick had the chick been more decorative, more personable.

Bunny stuck his hand across the desk. Oldbern looked at him, started to take his hand and then changed his mind. “You did this damn neatly, Hollis. But I don’t have to shake your hand. I don’t have to do that.”

“Suit yourself, Mr. Oldbern.”

He remembered how jubilant he was as he went down in the elevator. He wished Cutler hadn’t died. It would be nice for Cutler to read all about it. The sullen skinny kid from the public courts.

Three zero zero zero zero zero zero.
The wedding had been quiet. The tabloids were noisy. None of the news accounts bothered him. One columnist got a half millimeter under his hide:

“Bunny Hollis, ex-almost tennis great, and bronzed glamor boy emeritus, proved yesterday to fellow refugees from sports headlines that with patience, a file of scrap books and the ability to balance a tea cup, a spotted past can be parlayed into a glowing future. Our Bunny bided his time at the swank Oswando Club where, for the past few years he has been teaching the game he once played well to the children and the wives of the almost rich, the middle rich and the big rich. And yesterday, just a little over a month after a coarse wad of cash was handed over to twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth Oldbern, Bunny cut his notch in that bankroll in a double ring ceremony attended only by the family and exceptionally close friends. The groom, a well-preserved thirty-five, wore a dark suit and a satisfied smile. Though the former Miss Oldbern does not come up to the standards of pulchritude this correspondent has noted among Bunny’s previous playmates, we believe that Bunny has at last firmly established the standard of living which for so many years he has tried to become accustomed to. No prior marriages blot our Bunny’s escutcheon. And that, fellows, is what we mean by patience. He began giving Miss Oldbern tennis lessons two years ago. They left cozily in a Mercedes-Benz, a wedding present from the bride’s aunt, Janice Stawson Fielding Chancellor—who is soon, it is rumored, to become the Baroness Von Reicker.”

Bunny remembered the column again and glowered at his own image in the motel mirror. He went back into the bedroom. Betty still slept, in the same position as before. He looked at her fondly and thought,
Good kid.
They had driven down to Miami, with stops at Nags Head and Myrtle Beach. They had taken a boat to Curacao, had flown to Nassau, and flown back to Miami for the car.

He had expected to be bored by the honeymoon, bored by the aura of adoration, but to his surprise he had had fun. It had at first shocked and alarmed him and then pleased him to find that he had married a virgin bride. He was quite aware that the incidence of twenty-one-year-old virgins in her particular social and financial strata was very very small. It had given him a very strange feeling to be able to lead her with gentleness through the fears and pain of the first nights, then through the passive acceptance of nights that followed and then at last into more than acceptance—into a gratifyingly lusty participation. It gave him a strange feeling of responsibility to be the only man she had ever known. And he felt a certain amount of pride in realizing that through gentleness and understanding he had been able to arouse her completely. He knew how easily it could have gone the other way—how through brutality she could have been made frigid for life.

Knowing her for two years, knowing her shyness, her physical awkwardness, he had expected her to be a woman of meager desires. He thought her flames would be turned low and would flicker. But she soon became a woman of considerable ardor, sensitive, imaginative, demanding in her lovemaking. He knew she was not pretty. Her figure was fair, at best. Yet during the last week at odd moments he would happen to notice her with half his mind when she moved, when she turned away from him, when she walked toward him, when she pulled herself onto a swimming float or dived into a breaking wave—and at those moments he would feel a quick surprising surge of desire for her. Her skin was marvelously clear and unblemished. She was tidy as a cat and her body was fragrant. In a dark room her brown hair would crackle and there would be faint sparks when he ran his fingers quickly through it.

He knew he did not love her. But he was fond of her. She had her own quiet sense of fun. And secure in her own conviction that she was loved, she had begun to blossom for him.

He sat on the edge of her bed and put his hand on her waist, shook her gently. “Come on, fat lamb.”

She spoke clearly, and without opening her eyes. “Not so daggone fat. I’m being deprived of my starches.”

“How long have you been awake, you sneak?”

“Maybe five minutes.” She opened her eyes. They were pale gray eyes. He had talked her into using dark pencil on her pale brows, into touching up her eyelashes that were like fine gold wire. It gave her eyes more expression and he realized that while he had been in the bathroom she had gotten up and fixed her eyes, run a brush through her hair, used a breath of perfume.

“And this week,” she said, “I shall lose another two pounds. In a few months I will weigh one hundred and fifteen. And then I shall wonder why I wasted all this unearthly beauty on a tired old man.”

“Mmmmhmmm,” he said. “Tired.” He grinned and caressed her.

“Are you being bawdy, Mr. Hollis?” she asked primly.

“A touch. Just a wee bit.”

“That’s what I hoped,” she whispered, smiling, reaching her arms out toward him.

The hard rain came down. The room was gray with the light of the dull morning. Somehow it became a very special time for them. They had a cigarette and then, after showers, got dressed and packed quickly and got in the car and headed north in the dusky gloom of the constant rain.