“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.