Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 6. Whole No. 790, June 2007

A Vision in White by Lawrence Block

© 2007 by Lawrence Block

A Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, and one of the nation’s most popular crime novelists, Lawrence Block hasn’t always devoted as much time to short fiction as fans of his taut short stories might wish. This year we’re lucky; EQMM has three of his stories in its line-up, and there’s a new book of Keller stories, Hit Parade (William Morrow), not long off the presses and also out in audio.

The game changed over time. Technology made change inevitable: Racquets were larger and lighter and stronger, and even shoes got a little better every few years. And human technology had much the same effect; each generation of tennis players was taller and rangier than the one before it, and players improved on genetics by getting stronger through weight training and more durable through nutrition. So of course the game changed. It had to change.

But the players still — with rare exception — wore the traditional white clothing, and that was one thing he hoped would never change. Oh, some of them sported logos, and maybe that was inevitable, too, with all the money the corporations were throwing around. And you saw colored stripes on some of the white shirts and shorts, and periodically the self-appointed Brat of the Year would turn up in plaid shorts and a scarlet top, but by and large white prevailed.

And he liked it that way. For the women, especially. He didn’t really care what the men wore, and, truth to tell, found it difficult to work up much enthusiasm for the men’s game. Service played too great a role, and the top players scored too many aces. It was the long drawn-out points that most engaged him, with both players drawing on unsuspected reserves of strength and tenacity to reach impossible balls and make impossible returns. That was tennis, not a handful of 120-mile-an-hour serves and a round of applause.

And there was something about a girl dressed entirely in white, shifting her weight nervously as she waited for her opponent to serve, bouncing the ball before her own serve. Something pure and innocent and remarkably courageous, something that touched your heart as you watched, and wasn’t that what spectator sports were about? Yes, you admired the technique, you applauded the skill, but it was an emotional response of the viewer to some quality in the participant that made the game genuinely engaging, and even important.

Interesting how some of them engaged you and others did not.

The one who grunted, for example. Grunted like a little pig every time she hit the ball. Maybe she couldn’t help it, maybe it was some Eastern breathing technique that added energy to her stroke. He didn’t care. All he knew was that it put him right off Miss Piglet. Whenever he watched her play, he rooted for her opponent.

With others it was something subtler. The stance, the walk, the attitude. One responded or one didn’t.

And, of course, the game the woman played was paramount. Not just the raw ability but the heart, the soul, the inner strength that enabled one player to reach and return shots that drew no more than a futile wave from another.

He sat in his chair, drew on his cigarette, watched the television set.

This one, this Miranda DiStefano. Sixteen years old, her blond hair hanging in a ponytail, her face a perfect oval, her nose the slightest bit retroussé. She had a slight overbite, and one closeup revealed braces on her teeth.

How charming...

He’d seen her before, and now he watched her play a match she was not likely to win, a quarterfinal that pitted her against one of the sisters who seemed to win everything these days. He liked both sisters well enough, respected them as the dominant players of their generation, but they didn’t engage him the way Miranda did. She didn’t have to win, he just wanted to watch her play, and do the best she could.

A vision in white. Perfectly delightful and charming. He wished only the best for her.

There were sports you could see better on television. Boxing, certainly. Even if you sat at ringside, you didn’t get nearly as good a view of the action as the TV camera provided. Football was a tossup; at home you had the benefit of good closeup camera work and instant replay, while from a good stadium seat you could watch a play develop and see the whole of a pass pattern. Basketball was better in person, and hockey (if you could endure it at all) was only worth watching in person; on TV, you could never find the bloody puck.

TV covered tennis reasonably well, but it was much better in person. The court was small enough so that, from a halfway decent seat, you were assured a good view of the whole of it. And, of course, watching in person had other benefits that it shared with other sports. There were no commercials, no team of announcers droning on and on, and, most important, it was exciting in a way that televised sport could never be. You were there, you were watching, it was happening right before your eyes, and your excitement was magnified by the presence of hundreds or thousands of other similarly excited fans.

He’d been here for the entire tournament, and was glad he’d come. He’d managed to see some superb tennis (as well as some that was a good deal less than superb) and he’d made a point of watching all of Miranda DiStefano’s matches. The blond girl won her first two matches in straight sets, and he’d sat there beaming as she dispatched both opponents quite handily. In the third round, his heart sank when she double-faulted to lose the first set tiebreaker, then had her serve broken midway through the second set. But she rallied, she summoned up strength from within, and broke back, and went on to win that set. The final set was no contest; Miranda, buoyed by her second-set comeback, played brilliantly, and you could see the will to win drain out of her opponent, a black-haired Croatian girl who was five inches taller than Miranda, with muscles in her arms and shoulders that hinted at either steroids or a natural abundance of testosterone.

And Miranda crushed her. How his spirit soared to see it!

Now she was playing in the quarterfinals, and it looked as though she was going to beat the bigger, taller girl on the opposite side of the net. A strong player, he thought, but lacking finesse. All power and speed, but no subtlety.

A lesbian, from the look of her. He hadn’t heard or read anything to that effect, but you could tell. Not that he had anything against them. They were as ubiquitous in women’s sports as were their male counterparts in ballet and the design trades. If they played good tennis, he could certainly admire their game.

But he wouldn’t leave his house to watch a lesbian, let alone travel a few hundred miles.

He watched, his heart singing in his chest, as Miranda worked the ball back and forth, chasing her opponent from one side of the court to the other, running the legs off the bigger girl. Running her ragged, crushing her, beating her.

He was there two days later, cheering her on in the semifinals. Her opponent was one of the sisters, and Miranda gave her a good fight, but the outcome was never in doubt. He applauded enthusiastically every time she won a point, cheered a couple of difficult returns she managed, and took her eventual loss in good grace — as did Miranda, skipping up to the net to congratulate the girl who beat her.

A good sport, too. The girl was one in a million.

He knew better than to write to her.

Oh, the impulse was there, no question about it. Sometimes he found himself composing letters in his head, but that was all right. You could write anything to anybody in the privacy of your own mind. It was when you put your thoughts on paper and entrusted them to the mails that things could go wrong.

Because there were a lot of lunatics out there. An attractive young woman could find herself an unwitting magnet for the aberrant and the delusional, and a letter from a devoted fan could seem as fraught with potential danger as one threatening the life of the President. There was a difference, you wouldn’t get in trouble writing a fan letter, but the effect on its recipient might be even greater. The President of the United States would never see your letter, a secretary would open it and hand it over to the FBI, but a young tennis player, especially a relative novice who probably didn’t get all that much fan mail, might well open it and read it herself.

And might take it the wrong way. Whatever you said, however you phrased it, she might read something unintended into it. Might begin to wonder if perhaps this enthusiastic fan might be a little too enthusiastic, and if this admiration for her athletic ability might cloak a disturbing obsession.

And what, really, was the point in a fan letter? To reward the recipient for the pleasure her performance had brought him? Hardly, if such a letter were more likely to provoke anxiety than to hearten. What kind of a reward was that?

No, it was the writer’s own ego that a fan letter supported. It was an attempt to create a relationship with a stranger, and the only fit relationship for two such people was distant and anonymous. She played tennis, and sparkled on the court. He watched, rapt with enjoyment, and she didn’t even know he existed. Which was as it should be.

In the letters he wrote in the privacy of his own mind, sometimes he was a wee bit suggestive, a trifle risqué. Sometimes he thought of things that would bring a blush to that pretty face.

But he never wrote them down, not a sentence, not a word. So where was the harm in that?

Her game was off.

Last month she’d played in the French Open, and the television coverage had been frustrating; he’d only been able to see one of her matches, and highlights of others. She didn’t make the quarter-finals this time, went out in the third round, beaten in a third-set tiebreaker by an unseeded player she should have swept in straight sets.

Something was missing. Some spark, some inner fire.

And now she was back in the States, playing in the women-only Virago tournament in Indianapolis, and he’d driven almost a thousand miles to watch her play, and she wasn’t playing well. At game point in the opening set, the girl double-faulted. You just didn’t do that. When the serve had to be in or you lost the set, you made sure you got that serve in. You just did it.

He watched, heartsick, as his Miranda lost point after point to a girl who wasn’t fit to carry her racquet. Watched her run after balls she should have gotten to, watched her make unforced errors, watched her beat herself. Well, she had to, didn’t she? Her opponent couldn’t beat her. She could only beat herself.

And she did.

Toward the end, he tried to inspire her through sheer force of will. He narrowed his gaze, stared hard at her, willed her to look at him, to meet his eyes. And she just wouldn’t do it. She looked everywhere but at him, and a fat lot of good it did her.

Then she did look over at him, and her eyes met his and drew away. She was ashamed, he realized, ashamed of her performance, ashamed of herself. She couldn’t meet his eyes.

Nor could she turn the tide. The other girl beat her, and she was out of the tournament. He’d driven a thousand miles, and for what?

He wrote her a letter.

I don’t know what you think you’re doing, he wrote, but the net result — no pun intended — is to sabotage not merely a career but a life.

He went on to the end, read the thing over, and decided he didn’t like the parenthetical no pun intended bit. He copied the letter over, dropping it and changing net to overall. Then he signed it: A Man Who Cares.

He left it on his desk, and the next day he rewrote it, and added some personal advice. Stay away from the lesbians, he counseled her. They’re only after one thing. The same goes for boys. You could never be happy with someone your own age. He read it over, copied it with a word changed here and there, and signed it: The Man Who Loves You.

The following night he read the letter, went to bed, and got up, unable to sleep. He went to his desk and redrafted the letter one more time, adding some material that he supposed some might regard as overly frank, even pornographic. The Man For Whom You Were Destined. The phrase struck him as stilted, but he let it stand, and below it, with a flourish, he signed his name. He destroyed all the other drafts and went to bed.

In the morning he read the letter, sighed, shook his head, and burned it in the fireplace. The words, he thought, would go up the chimney and up into the sky, and, in the form of pure energy, would find their way to the intended recipient.

Her next tournament was in a city less than a hundred miles from his residence.

He thought about going, decided against it because he didn’t want the disappointment. He’d developed a feeling for her, he’d invested emotionally in the girl, and she wasn’t worth it. Better to stay home and cut his losses.

Better to avoid her on television as well. He wouldn’t tune in to the coverage until she was eliminated. Which, given the massive deterioration of her game, would probably come in the first or second round. Then, once she was out of it, he could sit back and watch the sport he loved.

But, perversely, she sailed through the opening rounds. He read the sports pages every morning, and noted the results of her matches. One reporter commented on the renewed determination she was showing, and the inner reserves upon which she seemed able to draw.

There’s a sparkle in her eye, too, he added, that hints at an off-court relationship.

He was not surprised.

She won in the quarterfinals, won again in the semis. He didn’t watch, although the pull toward the television set was almost irresistible.

If she reached the finals, he promised himself, then he would watch.

She got there, and didn’t have to contend with either of the formidable sisters; one had skipped the tournament with a sore heel tendon, while the other lost in the semis to Ana Dravic, the Croatian lesbian he’d watched Miranda lose to in a quarterfinal match when she was still his Miranda, pure and innocent, glowing with promise. Now Miranda would play Dravic again, for the tournament, and could she win? Would she win?

She lost the first set 4–6, won the second in a fierce tiebreaker. She was on serve in the first game of the third and final set, won that, and then broke Dravic’s serve to lead two games to none.

And then her game fell apart.

She double-faulted, made unforced errors. She never won another game, and, when she trotted up to the net to congratulate the hulking Croatian, the TV commentators were at a loss to explain what had happened to her game.

But he knew. He looked at her hand as she clasped Dravic’s larger hand, caught the expression on her face. And then, when she turned and looked into the camera, looked straight at him, he knew that she knew, too.

Her next tournament was in California. It took him four days to drive there.

He went to one early-round match, watched her win handily. Her tennis was purposeful, efficient, but now it left him cold. There was no heart and soul in it. It had changed, even as she had changed.

At one point, she turned and looked him right in the eye. Her thoughts were as clear as if she’d spoken them aloud, as if she’d shouted them into his ear. There! What are you going to do about it?

He didn’t go to any more of the matches, hers or anyone else’s. He stayed in his cheap motel, smoked cigarettes, watched the television set.

When he smoked, he removed the white cotton glove from the hand that held the cigarette. Otherwise, he kept the gloves on while he was alone in his room.

And periodically he emptied his ashtray into the toilet and flushed the cigarette butts.

He was ready. He knew where she was staying, had driven there twice and scouted the place. He had a gun, if he needed it. It was untraceable, he’d bought it for cash at a gun show from a man with a beard and a beer belly and a lot to say on the subject of government regulation. He had a knife, equally impossible to trace. He had his hands, and flexed them now, imagining them encircling her throat.

And there was nothing to connect him to her. He’d never sent a letter, never met her face to face, never given another human being the slightest hint of the way he and she were bonded. He’d always driven to the tournaments he’d attended, always paid cash at the motels where he stayed, always registered under a different false name. Never made a phone call from his room, never left a fingerprint, not even so much as a DNA-bearing cigarette butt.

He would stalk her, and he would get to her when she was alone, and he would do what he’d come to do, what he had to do. And the world would never know why she’d died, or who had killed her.

He was confident of that. And why shouldn’t he be? After all, they’d never found out about any of the others.