Windy City Blues

I

PEOPLE BORN NEAR the corner of 90th and Commercial used to have fairly predictable futures. The boys grew up to work in the mills; the girls took jobs in the bakeries or coffee shops. They married each other and scrimped to make a down payment on a neighborhood bungalow and somehow fit their large families into its small rooms.

Now that the mills are history, the script has changed. Kids are still marrying, still having families, but without the certainty of the steel industry to buoy their futures. The one thing that seems to stay the same, though, is the number who stubbornly cling to the neighborhood even now that the jobs are gone. It’s a clannish place, South Chicago, and people don’t leave it easily.

When Monica Larush got pregnant our senior year in high school and married football hero Gary Oberst, we all just assumed they were on their way to becoming another large family in a small bungalow. She wasn’t a friend of mine, so I didn’t worry about the possible ruin of her life. Anyway, having recently lost my own mother to cancer, I wasn’t too concerned about other girls’ problems.

Monica’s and my lives only intersected on the basketball court. Like me, she was an aggressive athlete, but she clearly had a high level of talent as well. In those days, though, a pregnant girl couldn’t stay in school, so she missed our championship winter. The team brought her a game ball. We found her, fat and pasty, eating Fritos in angry frustration in front of the TV in her mother’s kitchen. When we left, we made grotesque jokes about her swollen face and belly, our only way of expressing our embarrassment and worry.

Gary and Monica rewrote their script, though. Gary got a job on the night shift at Inland Steel and went to school during the day. After the baby-Gary Junior-was born, Monica picked up her GED. The two of them scrimped, not for a down payment, but to make it through the University of Illinois ’s Chicago campus. Gary took a job as an accountant with a big Loop firm, Monica taught high school French, and they left the neighborhood. Moved north was what I heard.

And that was pretty much all I knew-or cared-about them before Lily Oberst’s name and face started popping up in the papers. She was apparently mopping up junior tennis competition. Tennis boosters and athletic-apparel makers were counting the minutes until she turned pro.

I actually first heard about her from my old basketball coach, Mary Ann McFarlane. Mary Ann’s first love had always been tennis. When she retired from teaching at sixty, she continued to act as a tennis umpire at local high school and college tournaments. I saw her once a year when the Virginia Slims came to Chicago. She worked as a linesperson there for the pittance the tour paid-not for the bucks, but for the excitement. I always came during the last few days and had dinner with her in Greek Town at the end of the finals.

“I’ve been watching Lily Oberst play up at the Skokie Valley club,” Mary Ann announced one year. “Kid’s got terrific stuff. If they don’t ruin her too young she could be-well, I won’t say another Martina. Martinas come once a century. But a great one.”

“Lily Oberst?” I shook my head, fishing for why the name sounded familiar.

“You don’t remember Monica? Didn’t you girls keep in touch after your big year? Lily is her and Gary ’s daughter. I used to coach Monica in tennis besides basketball, but I guess that wasn’t one of your sports.”

After that I read the stories in detail and got caught up on twenty years of missing history. Lily grew up in suburban Glenview, the second of two children. The Herald-Star explained that both her parents were athletic and encouraged her and her brother to go out for sports. When a camp coach brought back the word that Lily might have some tennis aptitude, her daddy began working with her every day. She had just turned six then.

Gary put up a net for her in the basement and would give her an ice cream bar every time she could hit the ball back twenty-five times without missing.

“He got mad when it got too easy for me,” Lily said, giggling, to the reporter. “Then he’d raise the net whenever I got to twenty-four.”

When it became clear that they had a major tennis talent on their hands, Monica and Gary put all their energy into developing it. Monica quit her job as a teacher so that she could travel to camps and tournaments with Lily. Gary, by then regional director for a pharmaceutical firm, persuaded his company to put in the seed money for Lily’s career. He himself took a leave of absence to work as her personal trainer. Even now that she was a pro Monica and Gary went with her everywhere. Of course Lily had a professional coach, but her day always started with a workout with Daddy.

Gary Junior didn’t get much print attention. He apparently didn’t share the family’s sports mania. Five years older than Lily, he was in college studying for a degree in chemical engineering, and hoping to go off to Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati.

Lily turned pro the same year Jennifer Capriati did. Since Capriati was making history, joining the pros at thirteen, Lily, two years older, didn’t get the national hoopla. But Chicago went wild. Her arrival in the Wimbledon quarterfinals that year was front-page news all over town. Her 6-2, 6-0 loss there to Monica Seles was shown live in every bar in the city. Fresh-faced and smiling under a spiky blond hairdo, she grinned through her braces and said it was just a thrill to be on the same court with players like Seles and Graf. The city fell in love.

So when it was announced that she was coming to Chicago to play in the Slims in February the tournament generated more publicity than it had ever known. After a year and a half on the pro circuit Lily was ranked eighth in the world, but the pictures of her arrival at the family home still showed an ingenuous grin. Her Great Dane, standing on his hind legs with his paws on her shoulders, was licking her face.

Mary Ann McFarlane called me a few days after the Obersts arrived back in town. “Want to come up to Glenview and watch the kid work out? You could catch up with Monica at the same time.”

That sounded like a treat that would appeal to Monica about as much as it did to me. But I had never seen a tennis prodigy in the making. I agreed to drive out to Glenview on Friday morning. Mary Ann and I would have lunch with Monica after Lily’s workout.

The Skokie Valley Tennis Club was just off the Edens Expressway at Dempster. Lily’s workout started at eight but I hadn’t felt the need to watch a sixteen-year-old, however prodigious, run laps. I arrived at the courts a little after ten.

When I asked a woman at the reception desk to direct me to Lily, she told me the star’s workout was off-limits to the press today. I explained who I was. She consulted higher authority over the phone. Mary Ann had apparently greased the necessary skids: I was allowed past a bored guard lounging against a hall door. After showing him my driver’s license, I was directed down the hall to the private court where Lily was practicing. A second guard there looked at my license again and then opened the door for me.

Lily had the use of three nets if she needed them. A small grandstand held only three people: Mary Ann and Monica and a young man in a workout suit with “Artemis” blazoned across the back. I recognized Monica from the newspaper photos, but they didn’t do justice to her perfectly styled gold hair, the makeup enhancing her oval face, or the casual elegance of her clothes. I had a fleeting memory of her fat, pasty face as she sat eating Fritos twenty years ago. I would never have put those two images together. As the old bromide has it, living well is the best revenge.

Mary Ann squeezed my hand as I sat on her other side. “Good to see you, Vic,” she whispered. “Monica-here’s Vic.”

We exchanged confused greetings across our old coach, me congratulating her on her daughter’s success, she exclaiming at how I hadn’t changed a bit. I didn’t know if that was a compliment or not.

The man was introduced as Monte Allison, from Artemis Products’ marketing department. Artemis supplied all of Lily’s tennis clothes and shoes, as well as a seven-figure endorsement contract. Allison was just along to protect the investment, Mary Ann explained. The equipment maker heard her and ostentatiously turned his left shoulder to us.

On the court in front of us Lily was hitting tennis balls. A kid in white shorts was serving to her backhand. A dark man in shabby gray sweats stood behind her encouraging her and critiquing her stroke. And a third man in bright white clothes offered more forceful criticisms from the sidelines.

“Get into the shot, Lily. Come’n, honey, you’re not concentrating.”

“ Gary,” Mary Ann muttered at me. “That’s Paco Callabrio behind her.”

I don’t know much about tennis, but even I’d heard of Callabrio. After dominating men’s tennis in the sixties he had retired to his family home in Majorca. But five years ago he’d come out of seclusion to coach a few selected players. Lily had piqued his interest when he saw her at the French Open last year; Monica had leaped at the opportunity to have her daughter work with him. Apparently Gary was less impressed. As the morning wore on Gary ’s advice began clashing with Paco’s more and more often.

In the midst of a heated exchange over Lily’s upswing I sensed someone moving onto the bench behind me. I turned to see a young woman leaning at her ease against the bleacher behind her. She was dressed in loose-fitting trousers that accentuated the long, lean lines of her body.

Lily saw the newcomer at the same time I did. She turned very red, then very white. While Paco and Gary continued arguing, she signaled to the young man to start hitting balls to her again. She’d been too tired to move well a minute ago, but the woman’s arrival infused her with new energy.

Mary Ann had also turned to stare. “Nicole Rubova,” she muttered to me.

I raised my eyebrows. Another of the dazzling Czech players who’d come to the States in Martina’s wake. She was part of the generation between Martina and Capriati, a year or so older than Graf but with time ahead of her still to fight for the top spots. Her dark, vivid beauty made her a mediagenic foil to Graf’s and Lily’s blondness, but her sardonic humor kept her from being really popular with the press.

“ Gary ’s afraid she’s going to rape his baby. He won’t let Lily go out alone with any of the women on the circuit.” Mary Ann continued to mutter at me.

I raised my brows again, this time amazed at Mary Ann’s pithy remarks. She’d never talked so bluntly to me when she was my basketball coach.

By now Gary had also seen Rubova in the stands. Like Lily he changed color, then grew even more maniacal in his demands on his daughter. When Paco advised a rest around eleven-thirty, Gary shook his head emphatically.

“You can’t spoil her, Paco. Believe me, I know this little girl. She’s got great talent and a heart of gold, but she’s lazy. You’ve got to drive her.”

Lily was gray with exhaustion. While they argued over her she leaned over, her hands on her knees, and gasped for air.

“Mr. Oberst,” Paco said, his chilly formality emphasizing his dislike, “you want Lily to be a great star. But a girl who plays when she is this fatigued will only injure herself, if she doesn’t burn out completely first. I say the workout is over for the day.”

“And I say she got to Wimbledon last year thanks to my methods,” Gary yelled.

“And she almost had to forfeit her round of sixteen match because you were coaching her so blatantly from the seats,” Paco shouted back. “Your methods stink, Oberst.”

Gary stepped toward the Catalan, then abruptly turned his back on him and yelled at his daughter, “Lily, pick up your racket. Come on, girl. You know the rules.”

“Really, Oberst,” Monte Allison called tentatively down to the floor from the stands. “We can’t injure Lily-that won’t help any of us.”

Monica nodded in emphatic agreement, but Gary paid no attention to either of them. Lily looked imploringly from Paco to Gary. When the coach said nothing else, she bent to pick up her racket and continued returning balls. She was missing more than she was hitting now and was moving leadenly around the court. Paco watched for about a minute, then turned on his heel and marched toward a door in the far wall. As he disappeared through it, Monica got up from Mary Ann’s left and hurried after him.

I noticed a bright pink anorak with rabbit fur around the hood next to where she’d been sitting, and two furry leather mittens with rabbits embroidered on them.

“That’s Lily’s,” Mary Ann said. “Monica must have forgotten she was holding them for her. I’ll give them to the kid if she makes it through this session.”

My old coach’s face was set in angry lines. I felt angry, too, and kept half rising from my seat, wondering if I ought to intervene. Paco’s departure had whipped Gary into a triumphant frenzy. He shooed the kid serving balls away and started hitting ground strokes to his daughter at a furious pace. She took it for about five minutes before collapsing on the floor in tears.

“I just can’t do it anymore, Daddy. I just can’t.”

Gary put his own racket down and smiled in triumph.

A sharp clap came from behind me, making me jump. “Bravo, Gary!” Nicole cried. “What a man you are! Yes, indeed, you’ve proved you can frighten your little girl. Now the question is: Which matters more to you? That Lily become the great player her talent destines her to be? Or that you prove that you own her?”

She jumped up lightly from the bench and ran down to the court. She put an arm around Lily and said something inaudible to the girl. Lily looked from her to her father and shook her head, flushing with misery. Nicole shrugged. Before leaving the court she and Gary exchanged a long look. Only an optimist would have found the seeds of friendship in it.

II

The Slims started the next Monday. The events at the Skokie Valley Tennis Club made me follow the newspaper reports eagerly, but the tournament seemed to be progressing without any open fireworks. One or two of the higher seeds were knocked out early, but Martina, Rubova, Lily, and one of the Maleeva sisters were all winning on schedule, along with Zina Garrison. Indeed, Martina, coming off knee surgery, seemed to be playing with the energy of a woman half her age.

I called Mary Ann McFarlane Thursday night to make sure she had my pass to the quarterfinal matches on Friday. Lily was proving such a hit that tickets were hard to get.

“Oh, yes,” she assured me. “We linespersons don’t have much leverage, but I got Monica to leave a pass for you at the will-call window. Dinner Sunday night?”

I agreed readily. Driving down to the Pavilion on Friday, I was in good time for the noon match, which pitted Martina against Frederica Lujan.

Lujan was seeded twelfth to Martina’s third in world rankings, but the gap between their games seemed much wider than those numbers. In fact, halfway through the first set Martina suddenly turned her game up a notch and turned an even match into a rout. She was all over the court, going down for shots that should have been unhittable.

An hour later we got the quarterfinal meeting the crowd had come to see: Lily against Nicole Rubova. When Lily danced onto the court, a vision in pink and white with a sweatband pulling her blond spikes back from her face, the stands roared with pleasure. Nicole got a polite round of applause, but she was only there to give their darling a chance to play.

A couple of minutes after they’d started their warm-up, Monica came in. She sat close to the court, about ten rows in front of me. The man she joined was Paco Callabrio. He had stood next to Lily on the court as she came out for her warm-ups, patted her encouragingly on the ass, and climbed into the stands. Monica must have persuaded him not to quit in fury last week.

At first I assumed Gary was boycotting the match, either out of dislike of Paco or for fear his overt coaching would cause Lily to forfeit. As play progressed, though, I noticed him on the far side of the court, behind the chair umpire, making wild gestures if Lily missed a close shot, or if he thought the lines-persons were making bad calls.

When play began Rubova’s catlike languor vanished. She obviously took her conditioning seriously, moving well around the court and playing the net with a brilliant ferocity. Mary Ann might be right-she might have designs on Lily’s body-but it didn’t make her play the youngster with any gentleness.

Lily, too, had a range of motion that was exciting to watch. She was big, already five ten, with long arms and a phenomenal reach. Whether due to Gary ’s drills or not, her backhand proved formidable; unlike most women on the circuit she could use it one handed.

Lily pushed her hard but Rubova won in three sets, earning the privilege of meeting Navratilova the next afternoon. It seemed to me that Lily suddenly began hitting the ball rather tentatively in the last few games of the final set. I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to know if she had suddenly reached her physical limit, or if she was buckling under Rubova’s attack.

The crowd, disappointed in their favorite’s loss, gave the Czech only a lukewarm hand as she collected her rackets and exited. Paco, Monica, and Gary all disappeared from the stands as Lily left the court to a standing ovation.

Mary Ann had been a linesperson on the far sideline during the Rubova match. Neither of the players had given the umpire a hard time. Rubova at one point drew a line on the floor with her racket, a sarcastic indicator of where she thought Mary Ann was spotting Lily. Another time Lily cried out in frustration to the chair umpire; I saw Monica’s shoulders tense and wondered if the prodigy was prone to tantrums. More likely she was worried by what Gary -turning puce on the far side-might do to embarrass her. Other than that the match had gone smoothly.

Doubles quarterfinals were on the agenda for late afternoon. I wasn’t planning on watching those, so I wandered down to the court to have a word with Mary Ann before I left.

She tried to talk me into staying. “Garrison has teamed up with Rubova. They should be fun to watch-both are real active girls.”

“Enough for me for one day. What’d you think of the kid in tournament play?”

Mary Ann spread her hands. “She’s going to go a long way. Nicole outplayed her today, but she won’t forever. Although-I don’t know-it looked to me in the last couple of games as though she might have been favoring her right shoulder. I couldn’t be sure. I just hope Gary hasn’t got her to injure herself with his hit-till-you-drop coaching methods. I’m surprised Paco’s hanging on through it.”

I grinned suggestively at her. “Maybe Monica has wonderful powers of persuasion.”

Mary Ann looked at me calmly. “You’re trying to shock me, Vic, but believe me, I was never a maiden aunt. And anyway, nothing on this circuit would shock me… They have free refreshments downstairs for players and crew. And press and hangers-on. Want to come have some coffee before you go? Some of the girls might even be there.”

“And be a hanger-on? Sure, why not?” Who knows, maybe Martina would meet me and remember an urgent need for some detective work.

A freight elevator protected by guards carried the insiders to the lower depths. Mary Ann, in her linesperson’s outfit, didn’t need to show any identification. I came in for more scrutiny, but my player’s-guest badge got me through.

The elevator decanted us onto a grubby corridor. Young people of both sexes hurried up and down its length, carrying clipboards at which they frowned importantly.

“PR staff,” Mary Ann explained. “They feed all the statistics from the match to different wire services and try to drum up local interest in the tournament. Tie-ins with the auto show, that kind of thing.”

Older, fatter people stood outside makeshift marquees with coffee and globular brownies. At the end of the hall I could see Paco and Monica huddled together. Gary wasn’t in sight.

“Lily may have gone back in for a massage; I think she already did her press interview. Gary must be inside with her. He won’t let her get a workover alone.”

“Inside the locker room?” I echoed. “I know she’s Daddy’s darling, but don’t the other women object to him being there while they’re changing? And can she really stand having him watch her get massaged?”

“There’s a lounge.” Mary Ann shepherded me into the refreshment tent-really a niche roped off from the cement corridor with a rather pathetic plastic canopy overhead. “Friends and lovers of the stars can sit there while the girls dress inside. I don’t expect he actually hangs around the massage table. Don’t go picturing some fabulous hideaway, though. This is a gym at a relatively poor university. It’s purely functional. But they do have a cement cubbyhole for the masseuse-that sets it apart from the normal school gym.”

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 tide 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 outcry, 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 come 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.

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 Une, 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.