A Study in Crimson

by Chris Orcutt

“Wow…it works!” Peyton said.

  “Thank you, Tony Robbins!” Jade shouted.

  The girls laughed.

  “All right.” I grabbed a basket of balls. “Let’s do some drills. One at a time, on the baseline. Hit a forehand approach shot, rush the net, then a backhand volley. Okay? Let’s go, chop-chop!”

  In retrospect, I probably spent too much time individually with Sally. After the second time she asked me to correct her form, the other girls parodied her, saying, “No…correct my form, Dakota.” Even Jade warmed to me, wagging her behind and asking me, “How’s my form, Dakota?”

  After drills, I made them pair off and play a set of doubles. As I walked court to court correcting their serve or volleying technique, I spotted a man sitting at the very top of the grandstand, peering down at us with a pair of binoculars.

  I hadn’t seen him enter the tennis complex. Aside from him, the stands were utterly empty. In fact, the man in the grandstand was the only non-player I’d seen in the entire facility since I came in. When Jade walked to the sidelines for a drink, I approached her.

  “Why aren’t you on the tennis team, Jade? You’re an excellent player.”

  “My parents won’t let me.” Working the spigot, she filled a cup from a giant cooler of Gatorade. “They think it’ll distract me from my studies.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Yeah, it bites all right.” She sipped some Gatorade.

  “Let me ask you something,” I said. “Does Mr. Cohen ever have scouts here watching you girls play?”

  Snorting at my question, she spit up some of her drink.

  “Scouts? Really, Dr. Stevens—do you see them playing over there?”

  We both looked at the courts. Sally served a ball and drilled her doubles partner in the back. The tall blonde tried to return a serve while rolling back on her heels, and the ball sailed over the fence behind her. Peyton played air guitar on her tennis racquet and spanked her partner’s butt with it, then spun around and gyrated her behind for the girls.

  “Oh, Peyton.” Jade shook her head with a faint smile on her lips. “See what I mean, Dr. Stevens?”

  “Jade,” I said, “I need you to do something, but you have to be discreet about it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Look up in the grandstand.”

  She did.

  “Have you ever seen that man before?” I asked.

  “Mm…I don’t think so,” she said. “Binoculars, dude? Really?”

  “Thanks. Take over with the girls for a few minutes, would you?”

  “Me?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Go talk to the guy.”

  “Careful, Dr. Stevens. He looks creepy.”

  “Relax, doll.” I curled my bicep into a muscle while she was drinking, and she spit up Gatorade again.

  “Holy crap!” she said.

  Over thirty, Dakota, and you’ve still got it.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

  I went out the door in the fence, crossed the walkway behind the courts, and started jogging up the aisle into the stands. The man was at the very top, peering down with a small pair of binoculars.

  As I got closer, I saw he had short blonde hair. He was smoking a cigarette and writing in a pocket notebook. Noticing me, he lowered the binoculars and put away the notebook.

  “Dr. Malone?” I said.

  “Oh, hello, Dr. Stevens.” He exhaled a cloud of smoke and ground out his cigarette under his shoe. “Marvelous day for tennis, isn’t it?”

  “Excuse me, Doctor,” I said, “but you can’t be here.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “I come all the time to watch Sally play. No one’s said anything before.”

  “Why the binoculars, Doctor? And why were you taking notes?”

  “This is outrageous, Dr. Stevens. Because I study Sally’s play and give her notes afterward. I don’t know if you’re aware or not, but Sally and I are a couple.”

  “That might be the case,” I said, “but your presence is making the girls nervous.”

  Frowning, he sprang to his feet and stomped down the stairs.

  “What about you, Dr. Stevens?”

  “What about me?”

  “Why are you here?” he said. “Where is Coach Cohen?”

  “I’m filling in for him today.”

  At the bottom of the grandstand, he slowed to a stroll, heading toward the exit.

  “I saw you instructing my Sally earlier.”

  “Your Sally, Dr. Malone?” I said. “You say that like she’s your property.”

  “The two of you seemed quite friendly.”

  I shrugged. “What can I say? I have a natural rapport with girls her age.”

  “I suppose that explains it.” He stared through the fence at Sally, who was having her butt spanked with a tennis racquet by Peyton. “Please tell Sally I’ll be in my car when practice is over. Good day, Dr. Stevens.”

  “Dr. Malone.”

  When I returned to the courts, the girls were packing up. I checked my watch: it was five o’clock. Jade carried two full baskets of balls to the gate. Stowing her racquet in her tennis bag, she leaned into my shoulder.

  “Who was that guy?” she asked.

  “Nobody to worry about,” I said. “A women’s tennis enthusiast, that’s all.”

  “Mm, I bet. More like a women’s tennis perv. Thanks for bouncing him.” She shook my hand. “Nice meeting you, Dr. Stevens.”

  “You too, Jade.”

  “Will you be back?” she asked.

  “Not sure,” I said. “Maybe.”

  I shook hands goodbye with each of the girls except Sally, who waited until the others left before approaching me.

  “Jade said you had to tell a man to leave,” she said. “Who was it?”

  “Sally,” I said, “I need to ask you something.”

  “Yeah, what?”

  “Does Geoff ever come to your practices and give you notes later about your play?”

  “No,” she said. “Well, once he did. Why, was that him?”

  “Yes. He’s waiting in his car for you.”

  Her face blanched. “What did he say? Was he angry?”

  “He saw me correcting your form, and didn’t like it.”

  She gazed across the courts as though in a trance.

  “Crap…I’m in trouble.”

  I put my hands on her shoulders. “Sally, you don’t have to leave with him. And if you don’t feel safe, I don’t want you leaving with him. I can drive you back to your dorm, or you can stay at my hotel.”

  This snapped her out of her trance. “What? Like sleep with you?”

  “Of course not. You’d have your own room.”

  Her eyes darted around, and then they fixed on me.

  “What should I do, Dakota?”

  “I think you—”

  Her cell phone rang. She glanced at the screen.

  “It’s him,” she said.

  “Don’t answer it,” I said. “Or, better yet, let me talk to him.”

  “No, I can handle this.”

  She answered the phone. I couldn’t hear what Malone said, but I saw its effects on her. It was as if he spoke a subliminal code word, because Sally’s face suddenly went blank and all she said was, “Yes. Yes, Geoff. Yes, Master.”

  After a fifteen-second one-sided conversation, she hung up, tucked her racquet under her arm and moved robotically toward the door. I blocked her way.

  “Dakota,” she said, “I have to go!”

  “All right,” I said. “But at least call me later so I know you’re okay. The Charles, room three-one-six. Will you do that for me?”

  “Yes.”

 
“Try to call when you’re alone. And if you don’t feel safe, even if it’s the middle of the night, call me and I’ll come get you.”

  “Okay, fine. Let me go.”

  She squirmed around me, darted through the gate, and marched toward the exit. She didn’t turn around.

  The little steam engine kept marching.

  12

  The Face that Launch’d a Thousand Ships

  Without a punching bag handy on which to take out my frustrations, when Sally stormed out of the tennis center I practiced my serve with a basket of balls, serving each ball as hard as I could. I managed to make ten balls wedge in the chain link fence on the other side of the court. A couple went clear through.

  After cleaning up and changing at the hotel, I walked to the Border Café, an upscale Tex-Mex restaurant and watering hole near Harvard Square. It was mobbed with the after-work crowd. The hostess said the earliest a table would be available was nine o’clock, so I took an empty stool at the bar. I ordered a Macallan double and shrimp and steak fajitas. When my drink arrived, I relished the warmth of the scotch in my throat, and how each sip made me temporarily forget today’s setback with Sally.

  The day with her had been going so well—until Malone showed up. As soon as Sally talked to him, it was as if a switch in her got tripped. I wished I knew the hold Malone had over her. Between following her yesterday, and all of the “meet-cutes” today, I’d put a lot of time and energy into luring her away from Malone. I’d compromised my integrity by telling her what she wanted to hear. I’d kissed her. And enjoyed it. Now, after all that, what if I failed in my assignment? Even worse, what if Mr. Standish had hired another PI to keep tabs on me, and that PI reported my activities to him? Or, what if Director Reeves had Miss Suzuki watching me?

  Relax, Dakota, you’re being paranoid. Relax and enjoy your scotch. Relax and maybe chat up a woman in here.

  A woman with long bronze hair paused in the bar doorway and looked around for somebody. At first blush, she resembled Ashley. The sight of this beautiful stranger made me think about Ashley for the first time in days. No question, I would miss the sexual chemistry between us. But, with a bracing pang of sadness that I curbed with another slug of scotch, I realized there was virtually nothing else I’d miss about our relationship. Like every other woman I’d been involved with, Ashley had been attracted to my looks and my physicality, and occasionally my humor, but never to my intelligence or ambition.

  When I drained my glass, I gestured to the bartender for another scotch, and scanned the bar. Mostly couples, late twenties to early thirties. There were a lot of professionals in suits, and a few who were clearly third-year law students, which I deduced from the dark circles under their eyes and the legal pads jammed in their briefcases.

  Sitting at a cocktail table near the bar entrance were four young women with the overtly vamping behavior of single girls out husband-hunting. They wore little black dresses and took turns glancing in my direction. While they pretended to straighten their hair or adjust themselves in their chairs, they weren’t very subtle about it.

  One of them, a dusky Latina, was more creative than her friends. She checked me out over her shoulder using a compact mirror, and when my chiding eye met hers in the mirror, she blushed and the four of them burst into nervous laughter. I raised my drink to them. They were attractive, but I’d had my fill of young women recently. Their transparency and, frankly, vapidity, bored me.

  I kept scanning the bar. When my fajitas came and I started to eat, I noticed a studious-looking woman at a corner high table on the other side of the bar. She sipped a glass of red wine while reading Homer’s The Odyssey. She was a good deal older than me—in her mid-forties, I surmised—wearing a green tweed skirt suit and sitting with her legs crossed, wagging one foot. They were very nice legs, long and well-proportioned. Her shoes were narrow Oxfords with a high heel, and with the tweed suit they were, antithetically, very sexy.

  The Odyssey was dog-eared, the pages sprouting dozens of colored plastic tabs. She had neither a wedding ring nor an indentation on her ring finger to suggest she used to have one. Every now and then she smiled contentedly, put down her wine, and jotted something in the book margins, or she mused into space across the bar. It looked like she was envisioning a scene in Odysseus’ world.

  The woman had grey-green eyes, huge and pensive, and her hair, a rich chestnut, was rumpled on one side from her absentmindedly running her fingers through it. She had the smooth, pinkish face of a schoolgirl, hinting at the stunner she must have been twenty years earlier.

  Overall she looked like a woman who, for most of her adult life, had subordinated her sexual passions to her academic ones. For all of these reasons—the eyes, the legs, the shoes, the classic text, the smoldering sublimated sexuality, and the contented smile—when I finished my fajitas, I ordered myself another scotch, her another wine, and ventured over to introduce myself.

  The bartender had just finished delivering our drinks to her table when she looked up from her book. At first her eyes were out of focus, as though she were still in Odysseus’ world, and it took her a couple seconds to return to present day. Then she saw the new glass of wine in front of her. With a start, she looked at me incredulously.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  Several pick-up lines occurred to me—lines I’d used successfully on young women over the years—but this woman was a Classics scholar. If I wanted to hit it off with her, I’d have to raise my game considerably.

  “Pardon me, professor.” Picking up my drink, I slid onto the stool across from her and recited a quote about Helen of Troy, considered the most beautiful woman of the ancient world. I gestured at her cheek. “ ‘Is this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’ ”

  She chuckled and raked her fingers through her hair.

  “Ah, the great Christopher Marlowe…Doctor Faustus,” she said. “Wonderful. Would you believe, kind sir, that my name actually is Helen?”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  Smiling, she narrowed her eyes at me. “Did you ask the bartender my name?”

  “I didn’t, I swear.”

  “I believe you,” she said. “Helen Hale. And you are…?”

  “Dakota Stevens.”

  We shook hands. Her hand felt fragile, so I was exceptionally gentle.

  “Oh my, what a marvelous name,” she said. “A hero’s name.”

  “I’m happy with it,” I said.

  “Dakota, how did you know I’m a professor?” she asked.

  “Elementary, Doctor Hale. Your copy of The Odyssey is marked with color-coded plastic tabs, and over the past half-hour I’ve seen you make a dozen notations in the margins. I believe you’re a professor of Classics and that you can both read and write ancient Greek and Latin.”

  She put down her book and clapped. “Spot on, Dakota Stevens. Spot on.”

  “But with a first name of ‘Helen,’ I guess you were somewhat predestined for your work.”

  “I suppose so.” She finished the glass of wine in her hand, put it down and picked up the one I’d bought for her. “Now what about you, Dakota? Are you a professor as well?”

  At first I was going to give her my Harvard Fellow cover story, but she smiled so sweetly at me. Besides, I didn’t feel like lying anymore today. I wanted to share the truth about my situation with someone, so I wouldn’t feel so damn lonely.

  “I’ll tell you, Helen,” I said. “But you have to swear not to tell a soul. Okay?”

  “Certainly, Dakota. I swear.”

  Moving my drink and stool to her side of the table, I sat close to her and told her my story. I explained how, until a year ago, I’d worked for the FBI; how I’d been a very good agent; and how, if I’d stayed, I likely would have become the SAC (Special Agent-in-Charge) of a field office. But now I was on my own, struggling to s
tart a private investigations firm, taking non-cases to pay the bills, and being forced by the Director of the FBI to woo a Harvard student out of an inappropriate relationship. Helen listened intently the entire time, cradling her head in her hand with her elbow on the table, gazing at me with those fathomless grey-green eyes of hers.

  “Mmm,” she said when I finished, “although I know nothing about investigations—I’ve only ever been an academic—your plight is actually reminiscent of the ideas of Joseph Campbell, particularly his text The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Have you heard of it?”

  “Peripherally,” I said. “Isn’t he the guy who deconstructed the journeys of great heroes in literature and film and showed the commonalities? And didn’t George Lucas consult with him when he was creating the Star Wars movies?”

  She chuckled. “Yes, I believe he did. But the reason I bring him up—the idea that I thought apropos to your life’s journey—is his contention that every hero, once he accepts what Campbell terms ‘The Call to Adventure,’ faces a dark period in the wilderness, when he is cut off from everyone and everything. He undergoes a series of tests which Campbell refers to as ‘The Road of Trials,’ and the hero must get himself through them.” She sipped some wine and, canting her head, stared thoughtfully at me.

  “In forming your own agency, Dakota, you accepted the Call to Adventure,” she said. “Now I think you’re on the Road of Trials. This will be a dark time for you, a time of struggling in the wilderness, alone without the support of a big government agency. But…I believe if you fight your way through this period and overcome the challenges you’re faced with, on the other side will be success and satisfaction beyond anything you’ve ever known.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I thought all I did was quit my job with the FBI. But when you say it like that”—I tapped her book with a forefinger—“you make me sound like Odysseus.”

  “You are like Odysseus,” she said with a smile. “A modern-day one.”

  With that, I decided I really liked this woman. I wanted to take her to bed if she was agreeable to the idea. I downed the rest of my drink and gestured to the bartender to bring us two more. Locking my eyes on her, I asked her to tell me about herself.