Murder Is My Racquet (25 page)

Maybe it was because the marriage broke up for good the year of Douglass versus Lockhart at the Open.

“He blew up a tennis match,” she said, “not an office building.”

“You don’t understand,” he told her.

“You’re right,” she said.

He could never decide which was worse, his leaving tennis or his wife leaving him.

He traveled, his schedule not built around the French any longer, or Wimbledon; he really did what divorced men of leisure were supposed to do: tried to see new places, from Jamaica to the Scottish Highlands, even to South Africa, trying to see some of the places his friend Arthur Ashe had seen there.

Ted Carlyle followed the tennis results, all right, tried to learn some of the new names. But he did not watch on television and he missed the Open for the first time since he was ten. He tried baseball for a while, but hated the little boutique ballparks, and the slow games, and the high scores, and the crazy number of home runs being hit. He bought season tickets to the Knicks. He took golf lessons.

He still played tennis himself, his regular games at the Vanderbilt
Club, and out at West Side, as sad and forgotten as that place had become, Ted having more and more trouble each year remembering what it was like in the old days when it would be the capital of tennis for those two glorious weeks at the beginning of September.

Then one day, like a smoker deciding it wouldn’t hurt to smoke one cigarette, he decided it would be all right to start watching
women’s
tennis. But he couldn’t keep the Russians straight. He hadn’t liked watching the Williams sisters even when they were on top. He loved Jennifer Capriati’s heart, not her sledgehammer game. One year he watched two Belgian women play the U.S. Open final, and it was like watching the championship of Middle Earth.

It wasn’t long before Ted was watching the men again, especially this kid Roger Federer from Switzerland, as talented and graceful as anybody he had ever seen.

Ted decided that maybe it was time for him to come all the way back. A friend was willing to sell him a box at the new stadium at the Open, named after Ashe. He was even thinking about returning to Wimbledon, went so far as booking his old room at the Connaught.

Then Ted picked up the
Times
and read about Tony Douglass’s return to tennis, and how he’d changed, how this was like a second chance for him to do things the right way, to honor his talent and his sport.

Somehow, this was like the last test for Ted, some finish line he had to cross, seeing if it was really safe for him to give his heart back to his sport. So three nights later Lawrence Semple, Jr., a former defensive back from the Giants who had later drifted into tennis officiating himself once, was driving Ted up to Westchester Country Club, so they could both see for themselves.

They saw.

In the car now, the Hutch becoming the Merritt, Ted said, “It shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks to get everything together.”

“Then we go pick up the trash,” Lawrence Semple, Jr., said, bigger now than when he’d played corner for the Giants, the size of him seeming to take up the whole front seat.

“You go.”

“My pleasure,” Lawrence Semple, Jr., said.

• • •

T
ed had a friend at CBS who was able to get some of the tapes he needed. And Lawrence knew some production people at both NBC and ESPN from his football days, so it was easy getting the help they needed there, especially with Ted’s amazing memory for dates and places.

“How do you remember some of this shit?” Lawrence Semple, Jr., said.

“Because I do,” Ted said, giving him the tournaments they needed, the years.

The people from Circuit City got the room exactly the way he wanted, two huge screens positioned perfectly, what Lawrence called some of that surround sound shit, even speakers, though the Circuit City people didn’t see why he would need speakers.

Lawrence said, “Sounds like a goddamn recording studio in here when you amp it up all the way.”

“Except that we’re out here in the middle of nowhere in Wilton, Connecticut.”

“No one around for miles.”

Ted said, “Just us.”

When he had all the tapes, he edited them himself, in his own little studio, pleased he still had the moves from the days when he was first starting out, cutting tape at Channel 9, before he started making commercials; before the company took off and he got lucky in the market.

A million years ago, when the money made it easy for him to see all the tennis he wanted.

When he watched it all, it wasn’t as bad as he remembered, that was the amazing part.

It was much, much worse.

Tony Douglass, when he was young, was even crazier than he remembered.

• • •

“W
as easier than I thought it was gonna be,” Lawrence Semple, Jr., said when Ted came back from the Wilton Market with supplies.

Lawrence weighed about two-thirty now, maybe thirty pounds over his playing weight, but looked as if he spent more time in the weight room now than he did when he was still in the NFL. Ted knew the bodybuilding started when he did that stretch, out in California somewhere, for income tax evasion, another ex-athlete who took a fall for not reporting the money he was making at autograph and memorabilia shows. Lawrence had just drifted for a few years after that, more ashamed than anything else at what had happened, the football money gone, finally taking a job as a driver for Bermuda Limousine in the city. It turned out he had always loved tennis, all the way back to when he had played on the tennis team in high school in West Palm Beach. He became a dues-paying member of the United States Tennis Association,
started playing in a regular game at the National Tennis Center, which the public could basically use when the Open wasn’t in town, and decided it would be fun to start working lines at some small local tournaments, eventually working his way up to the Open.

That was where Ted met him.

Ted joked one day, after a Connors match, that all tennis officials should be Lawrence’s size, look as menacing as he still could when he’d stare at a player with his arm out.

Lawrence said, “I always wanted to stand up, grab one of ’em by they stringy hair and say, ‘Who you callin’ a moron, white boy?’”

Ted hired him when the Open was over, as much for the company as for the driving.

Now here they were, in the front hall of the elegant old mansion Ted had bought ten years before—Rachel the fixer-upper’s last expensive project—and it was as if Lawrence had a team again, with Ted calling the plays.

Even if they really felt more like partners in crime.

Ted said, “I never doubt you, Lawrence.”

They walked back to what the original owners, a couple of New York aristocrats who’d built the place in the twenties, had used as a ballroom for their big, formal Fairfield County parties. The two new screens were positioned to the left and right of the chair, the screen he’d already owned in front, far enough away so you could clearly see the picture. Lawrence, Ted decided, had done a beautiful job of painting what looked like the lines of a real tennis court, even putting the net up.

Tony Douglass would be able to see it later, when they took off his blindfold.

For now, Douglass sat tied to the umpire’s chair, duct tape over his mouth, one of Ted’s Brioni silk neckties tightly covering his eyes. He was squirming like a fish on a hook, but wasn’t going anywhere, Lawrence Semple, Jr., had made sure of that.

The growling noises he was making, Lawrence noted, didn’t sound so different from the ones he used to make when a call would go against him. Douglass had an apartment in the city, a beach house out in Amagansett, in the Hamptons. Lawrence Semple, Jr., had grabbed him there, on the solitary stretch of beach, behind some dunes, where Douglass liked to take his morning run.

“His mouth,” Ted said.

Lawrence walked over to the chair, just a little shorter than a normal umpire’s chair in tennis, reached up, ripped the tape away from Douglass’s mouth, causing him to howl with pain.

“What the
fuck?
” Douglass said. “What the bloody fuck is going on here?”

Neither Ted nor Lawrence said anything.

“Who’s there?” Douglass said. “How many of you are there, for Chrissakes?”

More silence from Ted and Lawrence Semple, Jr., just the sound of Tony Douglass’s voice bouncing around the old ballroom, giving off a faint echo, as if this were an empty stadium.

“You want money, is that it? Well, let me explain something to you cocksuckers: I’ve got more money than God.”

Douglass waited for an answer to that and when he decided one wasn’t coming he said, “At least let me see you.”

He finally stopped trying to get his hands loose, which was
smart, since Lawrence Semple, Jr., had fastened them all the way up to his elbows.

“Assholes!”
Douglass hissed.

Lawrence Semple, Jr., walked over to the chair, put one foot on the bottom step, and slapped him hard across the face.

Tony Douglass screamed again.

“What… is… this… about?” he said. “Can you at least tell me that?”

In a quiet voice, a friendly voice, Ted Carlyle said, “Sure. It’s your turn in the chair, Tony.”

They walked out of the ballroom then, Ted and Lawrence both listening to Tony Douglass yell from an umpire’s chair this time, instead of at it.

• • •

L
awrence Semple, Jr., took care of feeding him the first couple of days, untying Douglass from the chair when he needed to use the bathroom, Lawrence walking him in there, standing right there next to the toilet. The first time they made the trip, Lawrence let Douglass feel the sap he was carrying, telling him he would use it if Douglass made any kind of move to take the blindfold off.

The second day, Douglass tried to pull away as Lawrence was helping him back into the chair. Lawrence Semple, Jr., grabbed a fistful of blonde hair, still longish, as if this were the old days and Douglass were still young and said, “I told you, boy. I will bitch-slap you.”

“Who
are
you?” Tony Douglass said in a raspy whisper, his voice already hoarse from all the yelling he did when he was alone in the ballroom.

Lawrence got close to his ear and said, “Bill Tilden. Give us a kiss.”

The third day, they started playing the tapes for him on the big screen.

Ted would throw a switch and the room would go to total darkness and Lawrence would remove the blindfold. Lawrence would walk out a side door and then Ted would begin playing Tony Douglass’s worst tantrums, from the U.S. Open and the French and Wimbledon and Davis Cup, all three screens at the same time, the volume turned up to ear-splitting levels.

Douglass got to watch himself throwing his racquet around, busting floral arrangements near the court, grabbing his crotch, standing over linesmen and lineswomen while he berated them, even throwing sawdust in the face of a fan who’d said something smart to him one time at the old indoor tournament in Philadelphia.

But the best moments were always at the umpire’s chair, Douglass howling at the top of his lungs in the good-boy accent, face contorted with rage.

Always looking, Ted thought, mad as a fucking hatter.

“I can’t listen to this shit anymore,” Douglass said late the afternoon of the third day, after the show was over and blindfold was back in place.

“Is anybody still here?” Douglass said.

“I’m begging you to shut this shit off,” he said.

Ted Carlyle’s voice came over the speakers. “I’m sorry, Tony. What were you saying?”

“I said I can’t take listening to this shit anymore.”

Ted said, “Imagine how the rest of us used to feel.”

“You’ve had your little fun,” Douglass said. “I get it, okay? I was an asshole, okay? I was an official asshole. You’ve made your
point. Just dump me back in the car, drop me by the side of the road someplace, I don’t even care who you are anymore.”

Silence.

“Do I know you?” Douglass said. “I swear I recognize your voice from somewhere.”

“Do you now?” Ted Carlyle said.

“Bloody hell!” Douglass shouted. “Who
are
you?”

“All of them,” Ted said.

“Fuck you,” Douglass said.

“No,” Ted’s voice said over the speakers. “That’s where you have it wrong, Tony. It was ‘fuck you’ all those years when you were number one, when you were on top, when you came along and actually made Connors and McEnroe look like choir boys. It was ‘fuck you’ when you were running the sport, when you were the attraction, when you were the one who could get any appearance money he wanted, because promoters would sell their souls to have you play their tournaments. But that was a long time ago.”

There was a pause and then Ted said, “Fuck
me
, Tony? Oh, no. Now it’s fuck
you
.”

• • •

T
he fifth day Tony Douglass said, “How long is this going to last? I assume you’re not going to keep me here prisoner forever.”

Lawrence Semple, Jr., had just come in behind him, the lights off and the afternoon show over, and put the blindfold back on him.

“Not too much longer,” Lawrence said. “We comin’ to the end soon, on account of my boss wanted to do this chronological.”

“I’ll figure out who you are eventually,” Douglass said. “You know that, right? And when I do, I’m going to come after you, you bastard.”

It came out bah-stid in his Brit accent.

Lawrence Semple, Jr., said, “’Course if you still haven’t learned manners by the time we fixin’ to turn you loose, we may have to extend your engagement here at the Bad Boy Ramada.”

“Kiss my English arse,” Tony Douglass said, and Lawrence slapped him hard across the face, saying, “Somebody shoulda done that the very first time you smart-mouthed somebody in a junior tournament.”

Lawrence left him there, went and found Ted Carlyle sitting and smoking a cigarette in his study.

“You sure you want to show him the big one?”

“Against Lockhart at the Open? Lawrence, it’s the grand finale.”