by Otto Penzler
Land of Enchantment. The original owner called the club that because New Mexico uses it on its license plates, and over the years, the club adapted to the name, becoming even more weird and special than Santa Fe likes to think of itself. For starters, there’s the club’s appearance. At the end of a curved potholed gravel street that the post office constantly has trouble finding, it consists of six courts, three on an upper tier, three below it. They’re separated by tall cottonwood trees, and they’ve got rustic wooden benches with sunshades made of interlaced branches stretched overhead between posts. To the left, there’s a swimming pool and changing rooms. In front of the pool is the clubhouse, an adobe-pueblo-style structure that seems constantly in need of maintenance—the porch, for example, the boards of which keep breaking. But somehow the ill repair is part of the charm. Visitors need only one look at the silhouettes of Sun and Moon mountains beyond the club to make them instantly want to join.
The trouble is, zoning restrictions keep the maximum membership to three hundred, so there’s a list of people waiting to get in. The membership has an interesting mix. A former New Mexico attorney general. A retired Hollywood casting director (lots of movie people live in Santa Fe). A founding member of a major computer firm. A surgeon who invented one of the standard techniques of repairing hearts. A factory-systems analyst who saved several corporations from bankruptcy. A director of a local museum.
That sample might suggest that the club’s stuffy and self-important. Not at all. There are plenty of average members, too. If anything, people want to belong because there aren’t any pretensions about the place. Take the way the members dress, for instance. At most clubs, there’s a contest about who has the most expensive, stylish whites. But at the Land of Enchantment, members show up in the baggiest, most washed-out, most poorly color-coordinated shorts and tops. To look at some of the players, you’d think that they didn’t have a dollar to their name.
The owner, Debbie, bought the place ten years ago with an inheritance from her grandmother. She’s a fortyish robust woman who’s fond of burning incense and going on purifying fasts. She claims she bought the club because she loves tennis, but the real reason is, she wanted the club so she could have a place for all the cats she’s adopted. Somebody once counted fifty of them. White ones. Orange ones. Calico ones. Tailless ones. Earless ones. Everywhere you look: cats. The members aim tennis balls at them to keep them off the courts. At night, owls and coyotes deplete the horde, but it doesn’t make much difference because Debbie just goes out and adopts more. When members’ children show up to swim, they try to pet the cats and get bitten, so Debbie’s always having to prove that her cats have had their rabies shots, and then she has to pay for the doctor’s visit to have the bite disinfected. It’s a mark of how strongly members like her and the club that nobody’s ever complained to the Animal Shelter, but an accountant who belongs to the club wondered how Debbie could be earning any money from the place after paying for all the cat food she needs, plus the vet and doctor bills.
As a matter of fact, the police couldn’t tell if it was the cats or a raccoon that ate Rocky’s nose while he was lying on Court One all night (the autopsy determined that he’d been killed around sundown the previous evening). He still had his racquet in his hand. Rigor mortis had set in, so the police had a terrible time getting it away from him. One of the investigators, a tennis buff, couldn’t help noticing that Rocky held the racquet with his favorite grip: the Continental.
For those unfamiliar with tennis: Basically, there are three ways to hold a racquet. The easiest is the forehand grip, in which your hand is to the right of the center part of the handle (or if you’re left-handed, to the left). A little harder is the backhand grip, in which your hand is to the left of the center part of the handle (reverse this if you’re left-handed). And then there’s the cursed Continental, which involves keeping the web between your thumb and first finger directly at the center of the handle. It’s used for close shots at the net, or else for overheads and for serving. It’s effective when done properly, but it feels unnatural at first and requires a lot of hand strength. Beginning players sometimes take a year and more to feel comfortable with it. Then it gets to be so automatic that they can’t make the shift to a forehand or a backhand. Expletives are unavoidable.
The Continental. Rocky was the tennis equivalent of a religious zealot, constantly preaching about that grip. If he mentioned it once during a lesson, he mentioned it a hundred times. Use the Continental. Use the Continental. Of course, he had a whole slew of other mantras. Keep your eye on the ball. Stay in the moment. Move, move, move. Sideways, keep sideways. Bend those knees. Hit low. Get that racquet back early. He even told Debbie to stock his favorite book in what passed for the club’s equipment store: The Inner Game of Tennis. But at the top of his all-time instruction list was, Use the Continental, use the Continental.
So there poor Rocky was, sprawled on the service line, with his racquet in his hand, looking as if he’d been about to make a drop shot before he himself got dropped. The mixed doubles group who found him phoned the police. When the ambulance and the cruisers sped into the gravel parking lot, the sirens made Debbie’s cats scatter (they didn’t come out from bushes and under the porch for the rest of the day). Then two detectives arrived, and with all their questions and the lab crew and the medical examiner, not to mention two policemen using yellow “crime scene, do not pass” tape to cordon off Court One, not much tennis got played that day.
Naturally, the members were shocked that Rocky had been killed. They felt terrible for his sister and his parents. But then it suddenly hit everybody that a member was probably Rocky’s killer and that whoever had done it might come after other members next. For the rest of the week, the club was so deserted that Debbie felt nervous being there alone with just the handyman and her cats. But tennis players being what they are, they couldn’t resist. They avoided the lonely hours of the evening and early morning, especially the evening because that was when Rocky had been killed. The result was, the courts got so crowded during the middle of the day that, if you wanted to play, you had to pick evening and early morning, so after a while the club got back to normal, even though the murderer hadn’t been caught.
Not that the police didn’t try. Rocky was a wonderful tennis player, but he kept lousy records. His daybook in his office made no mention of the people he’d been teaching that afternoon and evening, which meant that it wasn’t immediately evident who’d been the last person to see him alive. Eventually the retired computer executive learned what had happened and told the police that, to the best of his knowledge, he’d been Rocky’s last lesson the previous day. The sun had been setting when they’d quit. Since there weren’t any lights for playing at night, the other courts had been deserted. Even Debbie and the caretaker had gone home. This raised the obvious question of whether the computer executive was the killer, a promising line of thought that ended when the police learned that, his four-wheel-drive having needed repairs, the executive’s wife and two children had picked him up in the family Volvo while Rocky was by himself, tightening the net on Court One. The wife might have lied convincingly, but the two teenagers would have gotten flustered, the police believed.
Back to deuce. The police interviewed and reinterviewed all the members, with special attention to those who owned Prince racquets. Any of them might have been the murder weapon, but there wouldn’t be any trace evidence on it (blood and hair, for example) because Rocky’s tennis cap had been in the way. The cap might have left fibers on the murder weapon, but unfortunately it was a Land of Enchantment club hat, and many members wore that kind. Fibers from those hats could easily have gotten on the racquets.
The police tried to re-create the crime. Because Rocky had been tall, it made sense to believe that whoever struck the top of his head was tall, which automatically suggested a man. The angle also suggested that the blow came from someone who was right-handed. So for a while the range of suspects was narrowed to a rig
ht-handed tall man who owned a Prince racquet and a club hat. But then the detectives noticed that there were several tall women who belonged to the club. More, Rocky had been relentless in telling his students to bend their knees on certain shots, so it could have been that he’d been demonstrating how knees should be bent when he was struck. For that matter, maybe he’d been stooping to tie his shoes, which meant that the killer wasn’t necessarily tall or male.
Maybe motive was a way of figuring out who’d done it. As the investigators had been taught, there are basically only two reasons for people to commit murder: because they want something from someone else (sex, money, silence, et cetera), or they want to get even. In a way, though, the two are the same inasmuch as revenge is another way of getting something from somebody: the satisfaction of seeing that person die. The same with serial killers, only there it’s random and impersonal, but it’s still getting satisfaction from somebody. So a specific example of the theory had to be worked out.
The first motive the investigators considered was money. Had Rocky been killed while being robbed? Unlikely. No serious player, especially Rocky, ever played tennis with a wallet in his pocket. So what about sex? Exactly. Rocky hadn’t been married. Had he been shtupping some of the female members and a husband of one of them decided to make him stop? Or maybe one of the women had gotten furious when she discovered that she wasn’t the sole object of Rocky’s devotion. Or maybe he’d been gay and… The only trouble with the sex theory was that Rocky had been seeing a woman, not someone at the club, for the past two years and had just gotten engaged to her. As hard as the police tried, they couldn’t get a whiff of scandal about him at the club. He’d been a gentleman.
Deuce two. Well, actually it was more like game, set, and match. What seemed like a spontaneous crime of opportunity, which in the carelessness of the moment would normally have left all kinds of inadvertent clues, turned out to be potentially unsolvable, unless somebody got drunk and said more than he or she intended.
In the meantime, Rocky’s death left a void that had to be filled. An effective club needs a pro to give lessons, organize club tournaments, and generally provide an example to aim toward. So the word went out, and by November, after interviewing dozens of applicants (Santa Fe’s a popular place to move to), Debbie settled on a thirty-seven-year-old pro from Houston. His name was Dan Robertson. Like Rocky, he was tall and lanky. He’d been on the tour, had been ranked at 78, and had plenty of stories to tell (like having seen Jeff Tarango’s wife go ballistic against that French referee). Debbie gave a party to welcome him. Dan made appropriate remarks about not being able to fill Rocky’s shoes and how he was going to do his best to make everybody better tennis players. Applause.
Winter came. Spring. Or if you’re a devoted tennis player, you measure the year according to when the Grand Slams occur: the Australian in January, the French in May, Wimbledon in June, the U.S. Open in September. Right after the Australian, though, in March, the rating clinics occur.
Those clinics are important because, if you want to play in tournaments, you have to be rated each year. The way the system works, four of you go out on the court for fifteen minutes or so. The person doing the rating, in this case the new pro, Dan, gets a pro from another club to help him and make sure that Dan’s opinion isn’t prejudiced because he knows you. They tell the players to hit balls back and forth: forehands, backhands, volleys, lobs, serves, whatever. Then they tell the four of you to play doubles for a while. Throughout, they make notes. Finally, they’ve seen enough, give you a rating, and ask for the next four players.
A rating of two means you don’t know one end of the racquet from the other. A two-point-five means that you pretty much suck but have promise. A three means that you don’t stink up the court. A three-point-five means that you’re not too bad. A four is fairly respectable. A four-point-five: Now you’re really getting somewhere. And so on, all the way up to the super-expert-top-player-never-been-anything-like-it category of seven-point-five.
After the March rating clinic, the tournament schedule lasted until the end of June. After that, there was the usual summer confusion until the second week in September, right after the U.S. Open, when the club had its own tournament. There were a couple of surprises. A player who’d gotten used to winning in the three-point-five singles category lost in his new category of four. The same thing happened to a player whose rating had been raised from four to four-point-five. Annoyed by the unaccustomed humiliation, the losers wanted more lessons.
They weren’t the only ones, and that was how Dan nearly got killed just around the anniversary of when Rocky had been killed. It happened at the end of the day, the same time as with Rocky. Dan was teaching the factory-systems analyst. Might as well call him what he really was: an efficiency expert.
“Watch your grip,” Dan kept saying. “Stay in the moment. Move your feet. Stay sideways. Get that racquet back early. Bend those knees. Watch the ball. Use the Continental.”
“The Continental, the Continental, the Continental,” the efficiency expert said.
“What?”
“Watch the ball. Bend those knees. Tote that barge. Lift that bale.”
“What?”
“The Continental, the Continental, the Continental.” The efficiency expert leaped over the net. “Watch your grip. Well, here’s what I think of the fucking Continental. I want you to notice that at this very moment as I speak I’m using the Continental.” He swung his racquet so hard at Dan’s head that Dan barely had a chance to raise his own racquet, deflecting the blow.
It was late, the courts were empty, but Debbie still hadn’t gone home, so when she heard the yelling, she ran onto the porch (a board broke under her feet) and saw the efficiency expert chasing Dan around the court, trying to hit him with his racquet, screaming, “The Continental, the effing Continental!”
He was still chasing Dan (they were about two blocks away by then) when the police arrived. It turned out that the efficiency expert had been a four-point-five player when he retired to Santa Fe and joined the club four years earlier. He’d been fanatic about playing, did it every day, took two and sometimes three lessons a week, and for whatever reason (maybe because, without his work to remind him, he’d forgotten how to be efficient), his rating had slipped to a four, a three-point-five, a three, and in the recent rating clinic in March, a two-point-five.
He’d become so terrible that no one would play with him. He’d been forced to watch the club championships from the sidelines. In fact, the only person he could get to play with him was for money—Dan, and earlier Rocky. But no matter how much time and money he put in on lessons, he kept getting worse.
The previous September, he’d shown up at the club after the computer executive had left and demanded that Rocky give him another lesson (he revealed this eventually in a moment of lucidity amidst his babbling). He told Rocky that they were going to play by the light of the sonofabitch silvery moon until the cows came home if they had to, but there was no way Rocky was going to leave the court until he made up for the tens of thousands of dollars the efficiency expert had spent on lessons, until Rocky did his damned job and made him a decent motherloving tennis player again. “A two-point-five, for Christ sake! Why, that’s for little kids!”
The two policemen who arrived in response to Debbie’s 911 call weren’t enough to subdue him. The best they could do was chase him to the club where they cornered him at the concrete backboard. Players use it to practice their shots when they don’t have anybody to play with. The efficiency expert had been at the backboard a lot lately, it turned out, hitting and hitting, getting worse and worse. The backboard has two concrete arms on each side, so once he was in there, he couldn’t get out, not with the policemen blocking the way. It didn’t matter. What he was doing before four other policemen and a psych-ward ambulance arrived was holding his racquet as if it were a banjo. He was strumming it and doing a little dance (“Move those feet!”) and singing something about the Continental, tha
t there was nothing like it, that it was different and sexy and that everybody was doing it, doing it, doing it, do the Continental, feet, feet, feet, so in the end the motive for Rocky’s murder turned out to be that a tennis player had lost his grip.
CLOSE SHAVE
RIDLEY PEARSON
It all started late one night, when the chorus of summer cicadas would not allow her a decent night’s sleep. They sang mightily and strong that night to the backdrop of earthy celestials—fireflies sparking their way from rhododendron to lilac and back. They worked up a frenzy, in a way Jessie could not remember having heard before, and the fireflies too, their stately illumination beyond anything in recent memory. She lay awake, naked in the heat, unfettered by the slight breeze that lifted the tiny hairs on her skin, her thoughts unusually sensual as she watched him sleep beside her. It would take so little to arouse him, to bring at least part of him awake, to waste ten or twenty minutes of her insomnia on self-indulgence, as she rode him in the sultry bedroom, trying her best to put those cicadas to rest.
She drew the sheet off him and studied his form in the faint light. The workouts served him well, sharpening his chest and flattening his stomach. His chest and arms reflected a body capable of 110-mile-an-hour serves, even in the fifth set. A wild line of dark hair ran down from his navel to the nest where she gently touched him—not lightly like a tickle, nor firmly to where she might awaken him. She wanted to move his dreams, to control him in his sleep, and awaken him with her own warmth and readiness, but only as she joined him.