V
A single spotlight lit the gate at Nine Nightingale Lane. When I leaned out the window and pressed the buzzer, Monica didn’t bother to check that it was really us: she released the lock at once. The gate swung in on well-oiled hinges.
Inside the gate the house and drive were dark. I switched my headlights on high and drove forward cautiously, trying to make sure I stayed on the tarmac. My lights finally picked out the house. The drive made a loop past the front door. I pulled over to the edge and turned off the engine.
“Any idea why the place is totally dark?” I asked Clare.
“Maybe Lily’s in bed and Monica doesn’t want to wake her up.”
“Lily can’t sleep just knowing there’s a light on somewhere in the house? Try a different theory.”
“I don’t have any theories,” Clare said sharply. “I’m as baffled as you are, and probably twice as worried. Could someone have come out here and jumped her, be lying in ambush for us?”
My mouth felt dry. The thought had occurred to me as well. Anyone could have lifted Lily’s mittens from the locker room while she was playing. Maybe Arnold Krieger had done so. Gotten someone to let him in through the permanently locked end of the women’s locker room, lifted the mittens, garroted Gary, and slipped out the back way again while Rubova was still in the shower. When he realized we were searching the locker room, he came to Glenview ahead of us. He’d fought hard to keep me from going into the locker room, now that I thought about it.
My gun, of course, was locked away in the safe in my bedroom. No normal person carries a Smith & Wesson to a Virginia Slims match.
“Can you drive a stick shift?” I asked Clare. “I’m going inside, but I want to find a back entrance, avoid a trap if I can. If I’m not out in twenty minutes, drive off and get a neighbor to call the cops. And lock the car doors. Whoever’s in the house knows we’re here: they released the gate for us.”
The mittens were zipped into the inside pocket of my parka. I decided to leave them there. Clare might still destroy them in a moment of chivalry if I put them in the trunk for safekeeping.
I took a pencil flash from the glove compartment. Using it sparingly, I picked my way around the side of the house. A dog bayed nearby. Ninja, the Great Dane. But he was in the house. If Arnold Krieger or someone else had come out to get a jump on us, they would have killed the dog, or the dog would have disabled them. I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
A cinder-block cube had been attached to the back of the house. I shone the flash on it cautiously. It had no windows. It dawned on me that they had built a small indoor court for Lily, for those days when she couldn’t get to the club. It had an outside door that led to the garden. When I turned the knob, the door moved inward.
“I’m in here, Vic.” Monica’s voice came to me in the darkness. “I figured you’d avoid the house and come around the back.”
“Are you all right?” I whispered loudly. “Who’s inside with Lily?”
Monica laughed. “Just her dog. You worried about Paco interrupting us? He’s staying downtown in a hotel. Mary Ann called me. She told me you’d found Lily’s mittens. She wanted me to take Lily and run, but I thought I’d better stay to meet you. I’ve got a shotgun, Vic. Gary was obsessive about Lily’s safety, except, of course, on the court. Where he hoped she’d run herself into early retirement.”
“You going to kill me to protect your daughter? That won’t help much. I mean, I’ll be dead, but then the police will come looking, and the whole ugly story will still come out.”
“You always were kind of a smart mouth. I remember that from our high school days. And how much I hated you the day you came to see me with the rest of the team when I was pregnant with little Gary.” Her voice had a conversational quality. “No. I can persuade the cops that I thought my home was being invaded. Someone coming to hurt Lily on top of all she’s already been through today. Mary Ann may figure it out, but she loves Lily too much to do anything to hurt her.”
“Clare Rutland’s out front with the car. She’s going for help before too long. Her story would be pretty hard to discount.”
“She’s going to find the gate locked when she gets there. And even Clare, endlessly clever, will find it hard to scale a ten-foot electrified fence. No, it will be seen as a terrible tragedy. People will give us their sympathy. Lily’s golden up here, after all.”
I felt a jolt under my rib cage. “You killed Gary.”
She burst out laughing. “Oh, my goodness, yes, Vic. Did you just figure that out, smart-ass that you are? I was sure you were coming up here to gun for me. Did you really think little Lily, who could hardly pee without her daddy, had some sudden awakening and strangled him?”
“Why, Monica? Because she may have hurt her shoulder? You couldn’t just get him to lay off? I noticed you didn’t even try at her practice session last week.”
“I always hated that about you,” she said, her tone still flat. “Your goddamned high-and-mightiness. You don’t-didn’t-ever stop Gary from doing some damned thing he was doing. How do you think I got pregnant with little Gary? Because his daddy said lie down and spread your legs for me, pretty please? Get out of your dream world. I got pregnant the old-fashioned way: he raped me. We married. We fought-each other and everything around us. But we made it out of that hellhole down there just like you did. Only not as easily.”
“It wasn’t easy for me,” I started to say, but I sensed a sudden movement from her and flung myself onto the floor. A tennis ball bounced off the wall behind me and ricocheted from my leg.
Monica laughed again. “I have the shotgun. But I kind of like working with a racket. I was pretty good once. Never as good as Lily, though. And when Lily was born-when we realized what her potential was-I saw I could move myself so far from South Chicago it would never be able to grab me again.”
Another thwock came in the dark and another ball crashed past me.
“Then Gary started pushing her so hard, I was afraid she’d be like Andrea Jaeger. Injured and burned out before she ever reached her potential. I begged him, pleaded with him. We’d lose that Artemis contract and everything else. But Gary ’s the kind of guy who’s always right.”
This time I was ready for the swish of her racket in the dark. Under cover of the ball’s noise, I rolled across the floor in her direction. I didn’t speak, hoping the momentum of her anger would keep her going without prompting.
“When Lily came off the court today favoring her shoulder, I told him I’d had it, that I wanted him out of her career. That Paco knew a thousand times more how to coach a girl with Lily’s talent than he did. But Mr. Ever-right just laughed and ranted. He finally said Lily could choose. Just like she’d chosen him over Nicole, she’d choose him over Paco.”
I kept inching my way forward until I felt the net. One of the balls had stopped there; I picked it up.
Monica hadn’t noticed my approach. “Lily came up just then and heard what he said. On top of the scene he’d made at her little press doohickey it was too much for her. She had a fit and left the room. I went down the hall to an alcove where Johnny Lombardy-the stringer-kept his spool. I just cut a length of racket string from his roll, went back to the lounge, and-God, it was easy.”
“And Nicole’s racket?” I asked hoarsely, hoping my voice would sound as though it was farther away.
“Just snipped a few pieces out while she was in the shower. She’s another one like you-snotty know-it-all. It won’t hurt her to spend some time in jail.”
She fired another ball at the wall and then, unexpectedly, flooded the room with light. Neither of us could see, but she at least was prepared for the shock. It gave her time to locate me as I scrambled to my feet. I found myself tangled in the net and struggled furiously while she steadied the gun on her shoulder.
I wasn’t going to get my leg free in time. Just before she fired, I hurled the ball I’d picked up at her. It hit her in the face. The bullet tore a hole in the floor in
ches from my left foot. I finally yanked my leg from the net and launched myself at her.
VI
“I’m sorry, Vic. That you almost got killed, I mean. Not that I called Monica-she needed me. Not just then, but in general. She never had your, oh, centeredness. She needed a mother.”
Mary Ann and I were eating in Greek Town. The Slims had limped out of Chicago a month ago, but I hadn’t felt like talking to my old coach since my night with Monica. But Clare Rutland had come to town to meet with one of the tour sponsors, and to hand me a check in person. And she insisted that the three of us get together. After explaining how she’d talked the sponsors and players into continuing, Clare wanted to know why Mary Ann had called Monica that night.
“Everyone needs a mother, Mary Ann. That’s the weakest damned excuse I ever heard for trying to help someone get away with murdering her husband.”
Mary Ann looked at me strangely. “Maybe Monica is right about you, Victoria: too high-and-mighty. But it was Lily I was trying to help. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known Monica was going to try to kill you. But you can take care of yourself. You survived the encounter. She didn’t.”
“What do you mean?” I demanded. “All I did was bruise her face getting her not to shoot me. And no one’s going to give her the death penalty. I’d be surprised if she served more than four years.”
“You don’t understand, Vic. She didn’t have anything besides the… the scrappiness that got her and Gary out of South Chicago. Oh, she learned how to dress, and put on makeup, and what kinds of things North Shore people eat for dinner. Now that the fight’s gone out of her she doesn’t have anything inside her to get her through the bad times. You do.”
Clare Rutland interrupted hastily. “The good news is that Lily will recover. We have her working with a splendid woman, psychotherapist, I mean. She’s playing tennis as much as she wants, which turns out to be a lot. And the other women on the circuit are rallying around in a wonderful way. Nicole is taking her to Maine to spend the summer at her place near Bar Harbor with her.”
“Artemis dropped their endorsement contract,” I said. “It was in the papers here.”
“Yes, but she’s already made herself enough to get through the next few years without winning another tournament. Let’s be honest. She could live the rest of her life on what she’s made in endorsements so far. Anyway, I hear Nike and Reebok are both sniffing around. No one’s going to do anything until after Monica’s trial-it wouldn’t look right. But Lily will be fine.”
We dropped it there. Except for the testimony I had to give at Monica’s trial I didn’t think about her or Lily too much as time went by. Sobered by my old coach’s comments, I kept my time on the stand brief. Mary Ann, who came to the trial every day, seemed to be fighting tears when I left the courtroom, but I didn’t stop to talk to her.
The following February, though, Mary Ann surprised me by phoning me.
“I’m not working on the lines this year,” she said abruptly. “I’ve seen too much tennis close up. But Lily’s making her first public appearance at the Slims, and she sent me tickets for all the matches. Would you like to go?”
I thought briefly of telling her to go to hell, of saying I’d had enough tennis-enough of the Obersts-to last me forever. But I found myself agreeing to meet her outside the box office on Harrison the next morning.
AT THE OLD SWIMMING HOLE
I
THE GYM WAS DANK-chlorine and sweat combined in a hot, sticky mass. Shouts from the trainers, from the swimmers, from the spectators, bounced from the high metal ceilings and back and forth from the benches lining the pool on two sides. The cacophony set up an unpleasant buzzing in my head.
I was not enjoying myself. My shirt was soaked through with sweat. Anyway, I was too old to sit cheering on a bleacher for two hours. But Alicia had been insistent-I had to be there in person for her to get points on her sponsor card.
Alicia Alonso Dauphine and I went to high school together. Her parents had bestowed a prima ballerina’s name on her, but Alicia showed no aptitude for fine arts. From her earliest years, all she wanted was to muck around with engines. At eighteen, off she went to the University of Illinois to study aeronautics.
Despite her lack of interest in dance, Alicia was very athletic. Next to airplanes, the only thing she really cared about was competitive swimming. I used to cheer her when she was NCAA swimming champ, always with a bit of irritation about being locked in a dank, noisy gym for hours at a time-swimming is not a great spectator sport. But after all, what are friends for?
When Alicia joined Berman Aircraft as an associate engineer, we drifted our separate ways. We met occasionally at weddings, confirmations, bar mitzvahs (my, how our friends were aging! Childlessness seemed to suspend us in time, but each new ceremony in their lives marked a new milestone toward old age for the women we had played with in school).
Then last week I’d gotten a call from Alicia. Berman was mounting a team for a citywide corporate competition-money would be raised through sponsors for the American Cancer Society. Both Alicia’s mother and mine had died of cancer-would I sponsor her for so many meters? Doubling my contribution if she won? It was only after I’d made the pledge that I realized she expected me there in person. One of her sponsors had to show up to testify that she’d done it, and all the others were busy with their homes and children, and come on, V. I., what do you do all day long? I need you.
How can you know you’re being manipulated and still let it happen? I hunched an impatient shoulder and turned back to the starting blocks.
From where I sat, Alicia was just another bathing-suited body with a cap. Her distinctive cheekbones were softened and flattened by the dim fluorescence. Not a wisp of her thick black hair trailed around her face. She was wearing a bright red tank suit-no extra straps or flounces to slow her down in the water.
The swimmers had been wandering around the side of the pool, swinging their arms to stretch out the muscles, not talking much while the timers argued some inaudible point with the referee. Now a police whistle shrilled faintly in the din and the competitors snapped to attention, moving toward the starting blocks at the far end of the pool.
We were about to watch the fifty-meter freestyle. I looked at the hand-scribbled card Alicia had given me before the meet. After the fifty-meter, she was in a 4 × 50 relay. Then I could leave.
The swimmers were mounting the blocks when someone began complaining again. The woman from the Ajax insurance team seemed to be having a problem with the lane marker on the inside of her lane. The referee reshuffled the swimmers, leaving the offending lane empty. The swimmers finally mounted the blocks again. Timers got into position.
Standing to see the start of the race, I was no longer certain which of the women was Alicia. Two of the other six contenders also wore red tank suits; with their features smoothed by caps and dimmed lighting, they all became anonymous. One red suit was in lane two, one in lane three, one in lane six.
The referee raised the starting gun. Swimmers got set. Arms swung back for the dive. Then the gun, and seven bodies flung themselves into the water. Perfect dive in lane six-had to be Alicia, surfacing, pulling away from all but one other swimmer, a fast little woman from the brokerage house of Feldstein, Holtz and Woods.
Problems for the red-suited woman in lane two. I hadn’t seen her dive, but she was having trouble righting herself, couldn’t seem to make headway in the lane. Now everyone was noticing her. Whistles were blowing; the man on the loudspeaker tried ineffectually to call for silence.
I pushed my way through the crowds on the benches and vaulted over the barrier dividing the spectators from the water. Useless over the din to order someone into the pool for her. Useless to point out the growing circle of red. I kicked off running shoes and dove from the side. Swimming underwater to the second lane. Not Alicia. Surely not. Seeing the water turn red around me. Find the woman. Surface. Drag her to the edge where, finally, a few galvanized hands pulled her o
ut.
I scrambled from the pool and picked out someone in a striped referee’s shirt. “Get a fire department ambulance as fast as you can.” He stared at me with a stupid gape to his jaw. “Dial 911, damn it. Do it now!” I pushed him toward the door, hard, and he suddenly broke into a trot.
I knelt beside the woman. She was breathing, but shallowly. I felt her gently. Hard to find the source of bleeding with the wet suit, but I thought it came from the upper back. Demanding help from one of the bystanders, I carefully turned her to her side. Blood was oozing now, not pouring, from a wound below her left shoulder. Pack it with towels, elevate her feet, keep the crowd back. Wait. Wait. Watch the shallow breathing turn to choking. Mouth-to-mouth does no good. Who knows cardiopulmonary resuscitation? A muscular young man in skimpy bikini shorts comes forward and works at her chest. By the time the paramedics hustle in with stretcher and equipment, the shallow, choking breath has stopped. They take her to the hospital, but we all know it’s no good.
As the stretcher-bearers trotted away, the rest of the room came back into focus. Alicia was standing at my side, black hair hanging damply to her shoulders, watching me with fierce concentration. Everyone else seemed to be shrieking in unison; the sound reechoing from the rafters was more unbearable than ever.
I stood up, put my mouth close to Alicia’s ear, and asked her to take me to whoever was in charge. She pointed to a man in an Izod T-shirt standing on the other side of the hole left by the dead swimmer’s body.
I went to him immediately. “I’m V. I. Warshawski. I’m a private detective. That woman was murdered-shot through the back. Whoever shot her probably left during the confusion. But you’d better get the cops here now. And tell everyone over your megaphone that no one leaves until the police have seen them.”
Windy City Blues Page 12