Murder Is My Racquet (7 page)

The pouty lips, the heavy lids, the same crease in the earlobes, even an identical arch in the right eyebrow. When he was satisfied the likeness was unmistakable, he dropped the photo back in the box, left it on the hood of the pickup and went out to his nine-year-old Cadillac and drove straightaway to the Sand Hills Racquet Club where he found Molly and her regular doubles partner engaged in a furious exchange of volleys with two much younger women.

Roger walked onto the court in the midst of the point, the ball whacking him between the shoulder blades.

“Roger! We were about to go up a service break. What in the hell are you doing?”

“We need to talk,” he said quietly, and pried the racquet from her hand and marched over to a bench in the shade of a royal palm.

Molly stormed over and stood looking down at him with her fists balled against her narrow hips.

“This better be good, Roger.”

“It’s not good,” he said. “No, not good at all.”

Molly stared into his eyes and whatever she saw melted the knot in her jaw, neutralized the acid in her eyes. She sat down beside him and together they looked out at the busy courts. The balls passing back and forth across the nets, the cries of exultation and disgust, the peals of laughter. Those neatly lined rectangles of green clay that had always seemed so tranquil to Roger, so calming. The orderliness of it all, a stage so neatly structured, while all around those courts the cosmos whirled haphazardly.

“She’s not mine, is she?” Roger said. “Yours, but not mine.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s a wonder I never saw it before. It’s so obvious, really. So damn plain when you look at it. Even her personality. That same elbow-your-way-to-the-front approach. I guess on some level I’ve always known she couldn’t be mine.”

Roger watched the balls traveling back and forth and back and forth again across the precisely measured nets. He listened to the thwock of cleanly hit serves, the machine gun exchanges with all four players at the net. Such an orderly game. So pure, so simple, so perfectly symmetrical.

• • •

T
wo days later Roger stood in the field of tall grass and looked at the back of his two-story house, aglow with lights on that moonless night. He could see Molly finishing her cleanup in the kitchen. The evening news was over now. She was watching the entertainment shows, learning about the latest tribulations of her Hollywood pals.

Earlier that afternoon Roger had an interview at a Buick dealership down in Miami, over a hundred miles south. Then a half-hour ago he had called Molly to let her know he’d been caught in a snarl of rush-hour traffic, so he’d pulled off 1–95 and stopped at some bar in Ft. Lauderdale to pass an hour till the roadways cleared.

The truth was, after the interview, he’d driven back to Sand Hills and made the call from a bar on the edge of town and then he’d driven to the junior high school a half mile from their house and waited till it grew dark. He’d carried the deer rifle through the stand of pine trees that separated the ball fields of the junior high from the development where he lived. And now he stood in the meadow watching the windows of his own home and thinking about justice and lucky sperm and the difference between an artistic temperament and a plodding, methodical one, which was, he was starting to believe, the difference between arrogance and humility. What utter hubris to have ever believed that a few lucky days of salesmanship was the equivalent of artistic triumph. Roger Shelton was a hopeless plodder just as his daughter was. All she had inherited from him was an unfathomable mediocrity. She wasn’t flashy, wasn’t a slugger, had no killing shot. All she’d ever done was keep the ball in play one hit longer than her opponent. Hanging on, surviving.

When Julie appeared in her window, Roger raised the rifle and brought her closer to him. He lay the center of the X across her ample chest. Julie was on the phone. She was wearing one of her new monogrammed warmups and her hair was damp from the shower. The words came from her lips in a furious rush. Maybe it was her agent or one of her numerous boyfriends. He could see her lips moving, then he watched the clench of her jaw as she forced herself to be silent and listen. It was a gesture he had witnessed in Arthur Janeway a hundred times. Exasperated restraint. As if the two of them believed what they had to say was without question worth more than what any other man might want to say.

Roger did not possess such confidence. He had no idea how it felt to be absolutely certain of anything. Even now, as he stood aiming his rifle, a lonely marksman in a field, he had only the faintest hope that he could undo some small part of the harm he’d caused. Indeed, justice was the smallest part of what brought him to that dewy grass. Roger was acting out the logic of a dream. Like some tennis player driven deep into a corner of the court, left with only one unavoidable shot.

He watched Julie glare out her window into the dark field where he stood. He watched her talk. This girl who was neither his flesh nor his blood, this alien creature who for fifteen years had lived within his household and who was now prospering only because he had wounded the wrong daughter. His own girl, her will broken, her precise, predictable, tireless stroke forever ruined. While this cheap impostor flourished.

He watched Julie Shelton talk on the phone. He watched her shake her head in disdain and spit a few words into the receiver and jerk it away from her ear in a fit of disgust. Then he watched her pop to sudden attention, her face drained of all
but a last flicker of contempt. He watched her drop stiffly out of sight. Then he shifted his gaze to his wife, as Molly lifted her head and stared up at the ceiling where she must have heard a crash against the bedroom floor. He watched her cup her hand to her mouth and call out her daughter’s name. He watched her throw her dish towel down and hurry to the door, then halt abruptly and send one backward glance toward the window that looked out on the darkened field. Her eyes touching his for an icy instant.

Roger Shelton stepped backward into the shadows and lowered his rifle. He listened to the fading echo of his shot. That single blast rippling through the humid air, loud and final, but already dissipating, in just those few seconds the waves of sound spreading outward, breaking up and scattering, until finally the blast was lost in the endless racket of the night.

PROMISE

J
OHN
H
ARVEY

A
t Wimbledon, Kiley found himself sharing overpriced strawberries and champagne with Adrian Costain, a sports agent he’d brushed up against a few times in his soccer days, and when Costain rang him a week later with the offer of some private work, he thought, why not?

So here he was, ten years down the line from his twenty-five minutes of fame, a private investigator with an office, a computer, pager, fax and phone; a small but growing clientele, a backlog of successfully resolved, mostly sports-associated cases.

Jack Kiley, whatever happened to him?

Well, now you know.

• • •

K
iley was alone in his office, August 3. Two rooms above a bookshop in Belsize Park. A bathroom he shared with the financial consultant whose office was on the upper floor.

“So what d’you think?” Kate had asked him the first time they’d looked round. “Perfect, no?” Kate having been tipped off by her friend, Lauren, who managed the shop below.

“Perfect, maybe. But rents in this part of London… there’s no way I could afford it.”

“Jack!”

“It’s all I can do to keep up with the payments on the flat.”

“Then let it go.”

“What?”

“The flat, let it go.”

Kiley had stared around. “And live here?”

“No, fool. Move in with me.”

So now Kiley’s name was there in neat lettering, upper- and lowercase, on the glass of the outer door. The office chair behind the glass-topped desk was angled round, suggesting his secretary had just popped out and would be back. As she might, were she to exist. In her stead, there was Irena, a young Romanian who waited on tables across the street at Cafe Pasta, and two mornings a week did Kiley’s filing for him, a little basic word processing, talked to him of the squares and avenues of Bucharest, excursions to the Black Sea, of storks that nested by the sides of country roads.

In Kiley’s inner sanctum were a smaller desk, oak-faced, an easy chair, a couch on which he sometimes napped, a radio, a TV whose screen he could span with one outstretched hand. There was a plant, jasmine, tiny white flowers amongst a plethora of glossed green leaves; a barely troubled bottle of single malt; a framed print Kate had presented him with when he moved in: two broad bands of cream resting across a field of mottled gray, the lines between hand drawn and slightly wavering.

“It’ll grow on you,” she’d said.

He was still waiting.

The phone chirruped and he lifted it to his ear.

“Busy, Jack?” Costain’s voice was two-thirds marketing, one third market stall.

“That depends.”

“Victoria Clarke.”

“What about her?”

“Get yourself down to Queen’s. Forty-five minutes to an hour from now, she should be toweling down.”

Kiley was enough of a Londoner to know car owning for a mug’s game. Within three minutes, he’d picked up a cab traveling south down Haverstock Hill and they’d set off on the zigzag course that would shuttle them west, Kiley wondering how many billboards of Victoria Clarke they would pass on the way.

That damp June and July she had been a minor sensation at the Wimbledon Championships, the first British woman to reach the semifinals since Boadicea, or so it seemed, and ranked currently twenty-three in the world. And she had sprung from nowhere, or somewhere near the Essex end of the Central line at best; a council flat she had shared growing up with her sister, step-dad and mum. And like the Williams sisters, Serena and Venus, in the States, she had learned to play on public courts, enjoying none of the privilege that usually attended the luckless Amandas and Betinas of the English tennis world. Nor did it end there. Her face, which freckled slightly in the sun, was beautiful in a Kate Moss kind of a way, her legs slender and long; the quality of the sports photographer’s long lens and of television video ensured that not one salted bead of sweat that languished on her back then slowly disappeared into the decolletage of the T-shirt tops she liked to wear was spared from public view.

Before the tournament was over, Costain had the contracts signed, the company’s ad campaign agreed. Less than a fortnight later, the first of the advertisements appeared: Clarke crouching on the baseline, racquet in hand, lips slightly parted, waiting to receive. In another she was watching the high toss of the ball, back arched, about to serve, white cotton top stretched tight across her breasts. For these and others, the strap line was the same:
A Little Honest Sweat!
Just that and a discreet Union Jack, the deodorant pictured lower right, close by the product’s name.

Unreconstructed feminists protested and sprayed slogans late at night; students tore them down as trophies for their rooms; Kate devoted her column in
The Independent
to the insistent eroticizing of the everyday. One giant billboard near an intersection on the AI North was removed after advice from the Department of Transport.

In
The Observer Sport Monthly
’s annual list of Britain’s Top Twenty Sportswomen, Victoria Clarke was number seven with a bullet, the only tennis player to appear at all.

“Looks like you forgot your racquet,” the cabbie joked, glancing at Kiley, empty-handed, waiting outside Queen’s Club for his change and his receipt.

Kiley half-grinned and shook his head. “Different game.”

• • •

C
ostain was in the bar: tousled hair, rimless glasses, Paul Smith suit and large gin. He bought Kiley a small scotch and water and they moved to a pair of low leather chairs by the far wall. Good living, Kiley noticed, had brought Costain a considerable gut, which the loose cut of his suit just failed to disguise.

“So how is it really?” Costain asked with a smile.

“You know.”

“Still with Kate?”

Kiley nodded.

“How long’s that now?” And then, quickly, “I know, I know, who’s counting?”

In a week’s time it would be two years since they’d started seeing one another; nine months, almost to the day, since he’d moved into Kate’s house in Highbury Fields. Kate, Kiley knew, had gone out with Costain a few times some few years back; kissing him, she said, was like being force-fed marinated eel.

“Victoria Clarke,” Kiley said, “what’s the problem? There is a problem, I suppose.”

Costain drank a little more gin. “She’s being blackmailed.”

“Don’t tell me she was a Page Three Girl for
The Sun.”

For an answer, Costain took an envelope from the inside pocket of his suit coat and passed it across. Inside, a black-and-white copy of a photograph had been pasted to a single sheet of paper: a young woman in a park, holding a small girl, a toddler, high above her head; in the background, another woman, beside an empty buggy, looked on. The first woman, and the girl, were smiling, more than smiling, laughing; the second woman was not. The quality of the copy was such that it took a keen eye to identify the former as Victoria Clarke. Even then, there was room for doubt.

“Is this all there is?” Kiley asked.

“It arrived this morning, first post. A phone call some forty minutes later, man’s voice, disguised.” He nodded toward the paper in Kiley’s hand. “I imagine the original’s a lot clearer, wouldn’t you?”

“And the child?”

“Hers. Victoria’s.”

Kiley looked at the picture again: The relationship between the two women was there, but it wasn’t yet defined. “Whoever sent this, what do they want?”

“A quarter of a million.”

“For what?”

“The negative, all originals, copies. We’ve got two days before they sell it to the highest bidder. The tabloids’d go apeshit.”