I suddenly realized I was hungry—it was long past lunchtime. The Slims catering was heavy on volume and carbohydrates. I rejected fried chicken wings and rice and filled a plastic bowl with some doubtful-looking chili. Mary Ann picked up a handful of cookies to eat with her coffee.
We settled at an empty table in the far corner and ate while Mary Ann pointed out the notables to me. Zina Garrison’s husband was at the buffet next to Katarina Maleeva. The two were laughing together, trying to avoid a fat reporter who was unabashedly eavesdropping on them.
A well-groomed woman near the entrance to the marquee was Clare Rutland, the doyenne of the tour, Mary Ann explained. She had no formal title with the Slims, but seemed to be able to keep its temperamental stars happy, or at least functioning.
As I ate my chili, six or seven people stopped to talk to Rutland. They’d nod at her remarks and race off again. I imagined tennis stars’ wishes, from lotus blossoms to Lotus racers, being satisfied at the wave of her hand.
Mary Ann, talking to acquaintances, began picking up some of the gossip buzzing the room: Lily might have strained her shoulder. Maybe torn her rotator cuff. In this kind of environment the worst scenarios are generated rapidly from the whiff of an idea. And Gary apparently had been thrown out of Lily’s press conference and was now sulking in the women’s lounge.
A collective cry from the group across the room made me jerk my head around. Nicole Rubova was sprinting down the hall, wet, a towel haphazardly draping her midriff.
“Clare,” she gasped.
Clare Rutland was on her feet as soon as she heard the out-cry, almost before Rubova came into view. She took off her cardigan and draped it across the player’s shoulders. Rubova was too far from us for me to be able to hear her, but the reporters in the room crowded around her, tournament etiquette forgotten.
It only took a minute for Mary Ann to get the main point of the story from one of them: Gary Oberst was on the couch in the players’ lounge. Someone had wrapped a string from a tennis racket around his neck a few times.
It was only later that everyone realized Lily herself had disappeared.
III
Clare Rutland curled one foot toward her chin and massaged her stockinged toes. Her face, rubbed free of makeup, showed the strain of the day in its sharply dug lines.
“This could kill the Slims,” she remarked to no one in particular.
It was past midnight. I was in the windowless press room with her, Mary Ann, and a bunch of men, including Jared Brookings, who owned the PR firm handling the Slims in Chicago. Brookings had come in in person around nine, to see what could be done to salvage the tournament. He’d sent his fresh-faced minions packing long ago. They’d phoned him in terror when the police arrested Nicole Rubova, and clearly were not up to functioning in the crisis.
Arnold Krieger was there, too, with a handful of other reporters whose names I never learned. Krieger was the fat man who’d been listening in on Zina Garrison’s husband earlier in the dining area. He covered tennis for one of the wire services and had made himself at home in the press room when the cops commandeered it for their headquarters.
“She’ll be out on bond in the morning, right?” Krieger palmed a handful of nuts into his mouth as he started to talk, so his words came out clogged. “So she can play Martina at one, per the schedule.”
Clare looked at him in dismay but didn’t speak.
Brookings put his fingertips together. “It all depends, doesn’t it? We can’t be too careful. We’ve spent two decades building these girls up, but the whole fabric could collapse at any minute.”
I could see Mary Ann’s teacher instincts debating whether to correct his mixed metaphors and deciding against it. “The problem isn’t just having one of the stars arrested for murder,” she said bluntly. “Lily Oberst is a local heroine and now everyone is going to read that an evil lesbian who had designs on her killed her father because he stood between them. Chicago might rip Nicole apart. They certainly won’t support the tournament.”
“Besides,” Clare Rutland added in a dull voice, “two of the top seeds withdrew when they heard about Rubova’s arrest. They’ve gone off to locate a lawyer to handle the defense. The other Czechs may not play any more Slims this year if a cloud hangs over Rubova. Neither will Freddie Lujan. If they drop out, others may follow suit.”
“If a cloud hangs over Rubova, it’s over the whole tour,” Monte Allison, the Artemis Products representative, spoke for the first time. “We may withdraw our sponsorship for the rest of the year—I can’t speak for Philip Morris, of course. That’s a corporate decision, naturally, not mine, but we’ll be making it tomorrow or—no, tomorrow’s Saturday. We’ll make it Monday. Early.”
I’d never yet known a corporation that could make an important decision early Monday just because one of its vice presidents said so in a forceful voice. But Allison was fretful because none of the tennis people was paying attention to him. Since Artemis also helped Philip Morris promote the tour, Allison was likely to urge that they withdraw their sponsorship just because he didn’t like the way Clare Rutland kept snubbing him.
I muttered as much to Mary Ann.
“If they have to make a decision Monday, it gives you two days to solve the crime, Vic,” she said loudly.
“You don’t believe Rubova killed Oberst?” I asked her, still sotto voce.
“I believe the police wanted to arrest her because they didn’t like her attitude,” Mary Ann snapped.
The investigation had been handled by John McGonnigal, a violent crimes sergeant I know. He’s a good cop, but a soignée, sardonic woman does not bring out the best in him. And by the time he’d arrived Nicole had dressed, in a crimson silk jumpsuit that emphasized the pliable length of her body, and withdrawn from shock into mockery.
When McGonnigal saw me slide into the interrogation room behind Rubova, he gave an exaggerated groan but didn’t actively try to exclude me from his questioning sessions. Those gave me a sense of where everyone claimed to have been when Gary was killed, but no idea at all if McGonnigal was making a mistake in arresting Nicole Rubova.
Police repugnance at female-female sexuality might have helped him interpret evidence so that it pointed at her. I hadn’t been able to get the forensic data, but the case against Rubova seemed to depend on two facts: she was the only person known to be alone with Gary in the locker room. And one of her rackets had a big section of string missing from it. This last seemed to be a rather slender thread to hang her on. It would have taken a good while to unthread enough string from a racket to have enough for a garrote. I didn’t see where she’d had the time to do it.
McGonnigal insisted she’d spent Lily’s press conference at it, dismissing claims from Frederica Lujan that she’d been talking to Nicole while it was going on. Some helpful person had told him that Frederica and Nicole had had an affair last year, so McGonnigal decided the Spanish player would say anything to help a friend.
None of the Slims people questioned my sitting in on the inquiry—they were far too absorbed in their woes over the tournament. The men didn’t pay any attention to Mary Ann’s comment to me now, but Clare Rutland moved slightly on the couch so that she was facing my old coach directly. “Who is this, Mary Ann?”
“V. I. Warshawski. About the best private investigator in the city.” Mary Ann continued to speak at top volume.
“Is that why you came to the matches today?” The large hazel eyes looked at me with intense interest. I felt the power she exerted over tennis divas directed at me.
“I came because I wanted to watch Lily Oberst. I grew up playing basketball with her mother. Mary Ann here was our coach. After watching Gary train Lily last week I would have thought the kid might have killed him herself—he seemed extraordinarily brutal.”
Clare smiled, for the first time since Nicole Rubova had co
me running down the hall in her towel ten hours ago. “If every tennis kid killed her father because of his brutal coaching, we wouldn’t have any parents left on the circuit. Which might only improve the game. But Oberst was one of the worst. Only—why did she have to do it here? She must have known—only I suppose when you’re jealous you don’t think of such things.”
“So you think Rubova killed the guy?”
Clare spread her hands, appealing for support. “You don’t?”
“You know her and I don’t, so I assume you’re a better judge of her character. But she seems too cool, too poised, to kill a guy for the reason everyone’s imputing to her. Maybe she was interested in Lily. But I find it impossible to believe she’d kill the girl’s father because he tried to short-circuit her. She’s very sophisticated, very smart, and very cool. If she really wanted to have an affair with Lily, she’d have figured out a way. I’m not sure she wanted to—I think it amused her to see Lily blush and get flustered, and to watch Gary go berserk. But if she did want to kill Gary she’d have done so a lot more subtly, not in a fit of rage in the locker room. One other thing: If—if—she killed him like that, on the spot, it must have been for some other reason than Lily.”
“Like what?” Arnold Krieger had lost interest in Monte Allison and was eavesdropping on me, still chewing cashews.
I hunched a shoulder. “You guys tell me. You’re the ones who see these prima donnas week in and week out.”
Clare nodded. “I see what you mean. But then, who did kill Oberst?”
“I don’t know the players and I don’t have access to the forensic evidence. But—well, Lily herself would be my first choice.”
A furious uproar started from Allison and Brookings, with Clare chiming in briefly. Mary Ann silenced them all with a coach’s whistle—she still could put her fingers in her mouth and produce a sound like a steam engine.
“She must have been awfully tired of Gary sitting in her head,” I continued when Mary Ann had shut them up. “She could hardly go to the bathroom without his permission. I learned today that he chose her clothes, her friends, ran her practice sessions, drove away her favorite coaches. You name it.”
The police had found Lily quickly enough—she’d apparently had a rare fight with Gary and stormed away to Northwestern Hospital without telling Monica. Without her entourage it had taken her a while to persuade the emergency room that her sore shoulder should leap ahead of other emergencies. Once they realized who she was, though, they summoned their sports medicine maven at once. He swept her off in a cloud of solicitude for X rays, then summoned a limo to take her home to Glenview. There still would have been plenty of time for her to kill Gary before she left the Pavilion.
“Then there’s Monica,” I went on. “She and Paco Callabrio have been pretty friendly—several people hinted at it during their interviews this afternoon. She and Gary started dating when they were fifteen. That’s twenty-four years with a bully. Maybe she figured she’d had enough.
“I don’t like Paco for the spot very well. He’s like Nicole—he’s got a life, and an international reputation; he didn’t need to ruin it by killing the father of one of his pupils. Although, apparently he came out of retirement because of financial desperation. So maybe he was worried about losing Lily as a client, and his affair with Monica deranged him enough that he killed Oberst.”
“So you think it’s one of those three?” Clare asked.
I shrugged. “Could be. Could be Allison here, worried about his endorsement contract. He watched Gary driving Lily to the breaking point. Artemis could lose seven, eight million dollars if Lily injured herself so badly she couldn’t play anymore.”
Allison broke off his conversation with Brookings when he heard his name. “What the hell are you saying? That’s outrageous. We’re behind Lily all the way. I could sue you—”
“Control yourself, Monte,” Clare said coldly. “No one’s accusing you of anything except high-level capitalism. The detective is just suggesting why someone besides Nicole might have killed Gary Oberst. Anything else?”
“The hottest outsider is Arnold Krieger here.”
Two of the anonymous reporters snickered. Krieger muttered darkly but didn’t say anything. The tale of Lily’s interview with him had come out very early in McGonnigal’s questioning.
Tennis etiquette dictates that the loser meet journalists first. The winner can then shower and dress at her leisure. After her match Lily had bounced out, surrounded by Paco, Gary, and Monica. She’d giggled with the press about her game, said she didn’t mind losing to Nicole because Nicole was a great player, but she, Lily, had given the game her best, and anyway, she was glad to have a few extra days at home with Ninja, her Great Dane, before flying off to Palm Springs for an exhibition match. People asked about her shoulder. She’d said it was sore but nothing serious. She was going over to Northwestern for X rays just to be on the safe side.
Arnold Krieger then asked whether she felt she ever played her best against Rubova. “After all, most people know she’s just waiting for the chance to get you alone. Doesn’t that unnerve you?”
Lily started to giggle again, but Gary lost his temper and jumped Krieger on the spot. Security guards pried his hands from the journalist’s throat; Gary was warned out of the press room. In fact, he was told that one more episode would get him barred from the tour altogether.
The cops loved that, but they couldn’t find anyone who’d seen Krieger go into the locker room afterwards. In fact, most of us could remember his staying near the food, playing tag team with Garrison’s husband.
“Don’t forget, it was Rubova’s racket the string was missing from,” Krieger reminded me belligerently.
Clare eyed Krieger as though measuring him for an electric chair, then turned back to me. “What do you charge?”
“Fifty dollars an hour. Plus any unusual expenses—things above the cost of gas or local phone bills.”
“I’m hiring you,” Clare said briskly.
“To do what? Clear Nicole’s name, or guarantee the tour can go on? I can only do the first—if she’s not guilty. If it turns out to be Lily, or any of the other players, the Slims are going to be under just as much of a cloud as they are now.”
Clare Rutland scowled, but she was used to being decisive. “Clear Nicole for me. I’ll worry about the Slims after that. What do you need me to do to make it official?”
“I’ll bring a contract by for you tomorrow, but right now what I really want is to take a look at the women’s locker room.”
“You can’t do that,” one of the anonymous reporters objected. “The police have sealed it.”
“The police are through with it,” I said. “They’ve made their arrest. I just need someone with a key to let me in.”
Clare pinched the bridge of her nose while she thought about it. Maybe it was the objections the men kept hurling at her that made her decide. She stood up briskly, slipped her feet into their expensive suede pumps, and told me to follow her. Mary Ann and I left the press room in her wake. Behind us I could hear Allison shouting, “You can’t do this.”
IV
I tore the police seal without compunction. If they’d been in the middle of an investigation I would have honored it, but they’d had their chance, made their arrest.
The locker room was a utilitarian set of cement cubes. The attempt to turn the outermost cube into a lounge merely made it look forlorn. It held a few pieces of secondhand furniture, a large bottle of spring water, and a telephone.
Gary had been sitting on a couch plunked into the middle of the floor. Whoever killed him had stood right behind him, wrapping the racket string around his throat before he had time to react—the police found no evidence that he had been able even to lift a hand to try to pull it loose. A smear of dried blood on the back cushion came from where the string had cut
through the skin of his neck.
Whoever had pulled the garrote must have cut her—or his—hands as well. I bummed a pad of paper from Clare and made a note to ask McGonnigal whether Nicole had any cuts. And whether he’d noticed them on anyone else. It was quite possible he hadn’t bothered to look.
The lounge led to the shower room. As Mary Ann had warned, the place was strictly functional—no curtains, no gleaming fittings. Just standard brown tile that made my toes curl inside my shoes as I felt mold growing beneath them, and a row of small, white-crusted shower heads.
Beyond the showers was a bare room with hooks for coats or equipment bags and a table for the masseuse. A door led to the outer hall.
“It’s locked at all times, though,” Clare said.
“All the time? I expect someone has a key.”
She took the notepad from me and scribbled on it. “I’ll track that down for you in the morning.”
A barrel of used towels stood between the showers and the massage room. For want of anything better to do I poked through them, but nothing unusual came to light.
“Normally all the laundry is cleared out at the end of the day, along with the garbage, but the maintenance crews couldn’t come in tonight, of course,” Clare explained.
The garbage bins were built into the walls. It was easy to lift the swinging doors off and pull the big plastic liners out. I took them over to the masseuse’s corner and started emptying them onto the table piece by piece. I did them in order of room, starting with the lounge. Police detritus—coffee cups, ashes, crumpled forms—made up the top layer. In the middle of the styrofoam and ash, I found two leather mittens with bunnies embroidered on them. The palms were cut to ribbons.
The Big Book of Female Detectives Page 160