I went through the rest of the garbage quickly, so quickly I almost missed the length of nylon wrapped in paper towels. One end poked out as I perfunctorily shook the papers; I saw it just as I was about to sweep everything off the massage table back into the bag.
“It’s racket string,” Mary Ann said tersely.
“Yes,” I agreed quietly.
It was a piece about five inches long. I unrolled all the paper toweling and newsprint a sheet at a time. By the time I finished I had three more little pieces. Since the garrote that killed Gary had been deeply embedded in his throat, these might have been cut from Nicole’s racket to point suspicion at her.
“But the mittens…” My old coach couldn’t bring herself to say more.
Clare Rutland was watching me, her face frozen. “The mittens are Lily’s, aren’t they? Her brother got them for her for Christmas. She showed them off to everyone on the tour when we had our first post-Christmas matches. Why don’t you give them to me, Vic? The string should be enough to save Nicole.”
I shook my head unhappily. “Could be. We’d have to have the lab make sure these pieces came from her racket. Anyway, I can’t do that, Clare. I’m not Gary Oberst’s judge and jury. I can’t ignore evidence that I’ve found myself.”
“But, Vic,” Mary Ann said hoarsely, “how can you do that to Lily? Turn on her? I always thought you tried to help other women. And you saw yourself what her life was like with Gary. How can you blame her?”
I felt the muscles of my face distort into a grimace. “I don’t blame her. But how can you let her go through her life without confronting herself? It’s a good road to madness, seeing yourself as above and beyond the law. The special treatment she gets as a star is bound to make her think that way to some degree already. If we let her kill her father and get away with it, we’re doing her the worst possible damage.”
Mary Ann’s mouth twisted in misery. She stared at me a long minute. “Oh, damn you, Vic!” she cried, and pushed her way past me out of the locker room.
The last vestiges of Clare Rutland’s energy had fallen from her face, making her cheeks look as though they had collapsed into it. “I agree with Mary Ann, Vic. We ought to be able to work something out. Something that would be good for Lily as well as Nicole.”
“No,” I cried.
She lunged toward me and grabbed the mittens. But I was not only younger and stronger, my Nikes gave me an advantage over her high heels. I caught up with her before she’d made it to the shower-room door and gently took the mittens from her.
“Will you let me do one thing? Will you let me see Lily before you talk to the police?”
“What about Nicole?” I demanded. “Doesn’t she deserve to be released as soon as possible?”
“If the lawyer the other women have dug up for her doesn’t get her out, you can call Sergeant McGonnigal first thing in the morning. Anyway, go ahead and give him the string now. Won’t that get her released?”
“I can’t do that. I can’t come with two separate pieces of evidence found in the identical place but delivered to the law eight hours apart. And no, I damned well will not lie about it for you. I’ll do this much for you: I’ll let you talk to Lily. But I’ll be with you.”
Anyway, once the cops have made an arrest they don’t like to go back on it. They were just as likely to say that Nicole had cut the string out herself as part of an elaborate bluff.
Clare smiled affably. “Okay. We’ll go first thing in the morning.”
“No, Ms. Rutland. You’re a hell of a woman, but you’re not going to run me around the way you do the rest of the tour. If I wait until morning, you’ll have been on the phone with Lily and Monica and they’ll be in Majorca. We go tonight. Or I stick to you like your underwear until morning.”
Her mouth set in a stubborn line, but she didn’t waste her time fighting lost battles. “We’ll have to phone first. They’re bound to be in bed, and they have an elaborate security system. I’ll have to let them know we’re coming.”
I breathed down her neck while she made the call, but she simply told Monica it was important that they discuss matters tonight, before the story made national headlines.
“I’m sorry, honey, I know it’s a hell of an hour. And you’re under a hell of a lot of strain. But this is the first moment I’ve had since Nicole found Gary. And we just can’t afford to let it go till morning.”
Monica apparently found nothing strange in the idea of a two A.M. discussion of Lily’s tennis future. Clare told her I was with her and would be driving, so she turned the phone over to me for instructions. Monica also didn’t question what I was doing with Clare, for which I was grateful. My powers of invention weren’t very great by this point.
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 inches 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.
DETECTIVE: GWEN CLEAR
BENEATH THE LILACS
Nevada Barr
IT IS NOT UNCOMMON for fictional detectives to share the same career path as their creators; mystery novels and short stories abound with mystery-writing sleuths, lawyers, and journalists. It is a little more uncommon to share a calling as a park ranger, as Nevada Barr (1952– ) does with her series protagonist, Anna Pigeon.
Soon after receiving a master’s degree in drama, Barr worked as an actress in New York and Minneapolis, appearing in off-Broadway plays, movies, television, commercials, and radio voice-overs. When her first husband, a director, became interested in environmental issues, she began working as a park ranger during the summer, and then full-time, until she became a bestselling author and devoted all her time to writing books.
The tough-talking Pigeon is a hard-working law enforcement park ranger with the United States National Park Service in nineteen novels, beginning with Track of the Cat (1993), which won both the Agatha and Anthony Awards as the best first novel of the year. Barr got the idea for the plot while walking through the woods and thinking of the many ways a person could die—and the people she believed would be better off dead. Since then, she (and Pigeon) have been regulars on the bestseller list. Curiously, Pigeon’s adventures have been set in a different national park in every book as she solves mysteries in the wilderness and historic locales, generally involving natural resources.
The Big Book of Female Detectives Page 161
