Murder Is My Racquet (31 page)

The two women traded service wins up to a first-set tiebreaker that Jessie understood represented the match. Brazinski no doubt knew this as well, but Jessie wasn’t allowing herself to think about Brazinski, nor the crowd, nor the fact that Khol had yet to show himself at the appointed place to signal the arrival of the cash, and therefore, the start of their plan. Instead, she took a series of deep breaths and pushed away the cheering and catcalling, knowing that she had regained a large part of the house with her aggressive play, while Brazinski, as steady as a workhorse, had disappointed the
crowd by her cautious adoption of minimal net play. Jessie considered this a clinic—she was going to show Brazinski how to win both at the net and in the bleachers. She had always played well under pressure, and surely Brazinski knew this about her as well. Tiebreakers played to Jessie’s favor. Warmed up now, she muted the sound on the playback of the crowd and focused entirely on that yellow ball. There was nothing in this world but that yellow ball, and each time it tried to get past her, she smacked it, disciplining it and mandating it return to its corner. If it dared to come back at her, she smacked it again, actually talking to it in her head. “Oh, no you don’t.” “Back you go, little one.” “Not this time.” She clocked the damn thing. Smashed it into submission, turning its spherical shape oblong, raising fuzz dust off her racquet and cheers from the stands. Harder and harder she hit it, to where she knew she’d found the zone. That yellow ball was hers now. It wasn’t going to obey Brazinski. It didn’t dare. Jessie took the tiebreaker and a standing ovation, before an official time-out for a network ad and a court change.

In the third game of the second set, Brazinski broke, following Jessie’s identification of Khol at the mouth of exit 7, just below the huge
TIMEX
sign that posted their scores. Khol made an “E” by extending three fingers, and then flashed his hands to signal “34.” Jessie’s concentration slipped, she double-faulted due to a shitty overruled call on the part of the dykish umpire, and for four and a half minutes she lost focus. In those four and a half minutes she set herself up to lose the second set. Breaking back would not be easy—Brazinski had a feel now for her own reluctance on return of serve, and she exploited it with two aces in a row. The crowd, so very much in her camp at the end of the tiebreaker, began to slip back toward
the more familiar competitor, cheering on those aces and turning up the volume with each convincing point.

Jessie buckled down and prepared for the battle of her career.

She glanced over, ensuring that Khol had reported correctly. There, just below the
COPPERTONE
ad, Michael sat in seat E-34. He, too, was cheering on the aces that suggested a Brazinski second-set victory.

• • •

K
hol received the twenty thousand dollars in an aluminum briefcase. He couldn’t tell his agent what he was doing without risking the man’s career, and the agent didn’t want to know for this very same reason. A look passed between them that conveyed the agent’s concern, disappointment and regret at having participated in any of this. That look warned that he hoped Khol knew what he was doing.

That made two of them.

The tennis circuit, like all of pro sports, is filled with wannabes, groupies, hangers-on and the suckerfish that cling to one’s belly hoping to eat the scraps. The forbidden vice of gambling is rampant—players gamble all the time (seldom on their own games, which is highly illegal and frowned upon even by the most addicted gamblers), using bagmen to place their bets. Khol was not a gambler. He leaned toward the luxury of the groupies—knowing that he could have sex, any kind of sex at all, at nearly any time of day in any city with no responsibility toward maintaining a relationship. Like many of the men on the tour, he knew fine-looking, willing women in dozens of cities around the globe and kept his Palm Pilot brimming with current phone numbers. That he was now involved
with Jessie put much of this into the past for him, but when he needed a bagman to place a bet, it required only a trip up to Todd Seaborn’s suite on the fifth floor and a passing of that briefcase, one hand to the next. Within minutes, a twenty-thousand-dollar bet was placed on the outcome of the finals match taking place on the court below and currently airing on a national television network. A fee of two thousand dollars was to be paid for special delivery, if the bet paid out. It was placed for Jessie to win the match in three sets. The odds were four to one in favor of Brazinski given a three-set final. As Khol walked out of that suite, that briefcase was suddenly either eighty thousand dollars fat, or dead empty. Only Jessie could control the outcome.

• • •

S
he never recovered the break. Brazinski won the second set 6–4 to thunderous applause, and the match headed into the third set. To see the look on Michael’s face, one might have mistaken him for a cheerleader. He left his seat early in the third set. Jessie wondered if he was gone for good, or to the men’s room, or to check in with his bosses over the cell phone. If the last, the FBI was likely listening in at this very moment, and Michael was on his way to exposing his employers. Files would be created. Transcripts of the conversations would be generated. The U.S. attorney’s office would be on the way to building a case worth prosecuting.

Jessie returned to her earlier success, punishing the ball in regular strokes with a focus and concentration unmatched in any of the contests leading up to this final. Seeing Khol’s signal and knowing their plan was under way allowed her a freedom of thought, a peace of mind, overcoming her anxieties,
and permitting her to dedicate herself to the task at hand—defeating Brazinski and upsetting the FBI’s sting. She met the ball with the full force of her body; nothing felt quite as good to her as a perfectly executed groundstroke, not even sex, if truth be known. Everything paled by comparison. That one perfect stroke, the ball launched a quarter-inch above the net, the fuzz practically peeled off, trained into the exact spot on the court that the mind intended as if she talked it down through a perfect landing. She sprang back into position, a light bounce to her step, not an ounce of fatigue in her joints or muscles, the racquet already preparing itself—a mind of its own—setting up for another devastating power shot that sprang from her strings like a bullet.

God, but she loved this game.

No one, nothing, was going to take it from her life. Especially Sylvia Brazinski.

• • •

T
he first “Ditti” (Digital Telephone Intercept) recorded by the FBI techs at the corporate headquarters of the Global Wireless Corporation intercepted a call from one Michael Raphael to an AT&T wireless owned by Sebastian Califoni, aka “Sid” Califoni, a known racketeer, bookie and gambler who was believed to be tied to the Umbrizi family, a Vegas-based coalition of mobbed-up accounting firms that connected six of the biggest casinos. This call set into motion the possibility of raiding Sid Califoni’s residence, which in turn presented the hope that some connection to the Umbrizis might be found. If so, the house of cards would come tumbling down.

Anthony Meta, the St. Louis Field Office’s SAC, monitored events from the fairways of the Ladue Country Club by cell
phone, wanting to be kept apprised of events but not daring to pass up an invitation to one of the area’s premiere courses. His next in command, Donna Fabiano, a woman he’d wanted to bone since she’d been assigned to him, but a woman he would never touch for fear of losing his coveted job, kept tabs on operation Close Shave and reported to her SAC at regular intervals. By the time Tony Meta was informed the chain of command might lead to the Umbrizis his golf game had gone to shit as his concentration waned, and he learned a painful lesson: It’s far better to opt out on a golf game at this level than duff through the back nine looking like a kid learning the game.

Donna Fabiano felt giddy with excitement. Sid Califoni. It made sense he’d be corrupting players to shave points and throw games in support of his gambling connections. No doubt a Brazinski win would put tens, maybe even hundreds, of thousands into his pockets. She quickly notified the federal prosecutors to go after the necessary warrants for her to monitor all incoming and outgoing calls to Sid Califoni’s home, car and cell phone. The nice thing about the federal court system was that it could move quickly. She sat back, notifying her technicians to begin the necessary work to wiretap Califoni, absolutely convinced those warrants would be in place in a matter of minutes. Now, with a Brazinski win, all was set for the upset of the decade—and that upset had nothing to do with tennis. Thank God, she thought, that Jessie had come to them and was now going to throw the game. When Califoni’s winnings came in, they would have an airtight case against him.

Watching the television monitor installed into the Global Wireless Corporation’s tech center, one of Fabiano’s aides said,
“She’s sure trying awfully hard for a person who’s supposed to lose.”

It was the first bit of queasiness Fabiano experienced. She turned her attention to the television.

It wouldn’t be her last.

• • •

A
t the height of the third set, Jessie no longer felt her body. Somewhere along the way she had merged with the tennis racquet, had
become
the tennis racquet, and now every twitch of muscle, every drip of sweat was aimed at the ball. The ball was everything. She even lost score for a while—something that seldom happened to her—as she focused only on winning each point, not how those points added up. She took the third, fourth and fifth games in nine minutes, a period of time that reporters would later refer to as “perfect tennis.” Clips from those three games would run for years on television, as Jessie made her mark not merely as a player, but as
the
player. It was nine minutes of women’s tennis no one had ever seen before. Jessie had attained Knighthood, win or lose.

Losing seemed out of the question. The racquet wouldn’t let her, Khol wouldn’t let her, and finally the crowd wouldn’t let her. Brazinski was the last to understand the preordained nature of their competition. It simply wasn’t in the cards. Jessie briefly attained the stature of a tennis god, and poor Brazinski found herself on the other side of the same net, giving it her absolute best, and finding it largely insufficient. No matter what she threw at Jessie, the ball came back lower, faster and more perfectly placed. When Brazinski broke her racquet in frustration in the ninth game of the third set, when Jessie delivered a heat-seeking overhead slam to lead 5–4, the television
color commentator called the game. “It’s over,” she said. “Mark my word, Jessie is going to break for match. This one’s already over.”

• • •

K
hol worked the needles out of the fingers of his broken arm as he looked on from a hidden vantage point as Michael Raphael began checking around himself in the stands for any faces he might recognize. With his job to “bring in” Jessie now in question, Michael Raphael had to wonder if his boss had already dispatched the knee-cappers to teach him a lesson about crossing the mob. Khol reveled in the moment and prepared to act out his own risky role in their plot. Raphael, no doubt, still clung to the belief that Jessie would throw what could be the final game, tying the match and inching it toward a 6–6 tiebreaker. But if he was watching the same match as the other seven thousand spectators he knew differently, and hence his increasing concern. Jessie did not have the look of a woman about to lose the final. She was on fire. The crowd could barely contain itself. This match was already over.

Khol placed a call to Todd Seaborn and said but one word, “Go.” He hung up. Over the course of the next ten minutes every bookie in this town—and more important, a few in Las Vegas—would hear that Michael Raphael had placed a twenty-thousand-dollar bet on Jessie
to win
. The bookie who had handled the bet would be mentioned by name. Khol couldn’t allow all the information to be passed along, not without the setup being spotted for what it was, so he left the rest of it up to greed and malice. The people for whom Raphael worked would already be disconcerted by Jessie’s sensational performance. When word came that their
own bagman had placed twenty large on a
victory
by the woman who was supposed to shave points, the shit would hit the racquet. Khol’s only concern now was that he manage to pull off placing himself squarely in the middle of the chaos that seemed certain to ensue. Anything short of that, and their efforts would fail.

• • •

J
essie no longer saw herself as a backboard. All these years, and she realized that she’d been imagining herself as a backboard to the other player’s serves.
Get in the way of the ball
, and at least it got back over. Suddenly, right there on “center court” of the finals, she found herself attacking Brazinski’s serves, winding up and pounding them back down the pipe so that they seemed to return faster than they’d arrived. She caught Brazinski flat-footed and looking on in complete disbelief. The old Jessie was gone. One serve, a single stroke, and everything was different. Jessie was no longer a weak returner. A matter of attitude was all. Jessie took the game 40–love, the set, 6–4, the match 2 sets to 1. Invincible. The crowd erupted in adoration. Jessie searched the stands for any sign of Khol, and prepared herself for the acting role of a lifetime.

The color commentator hurried across the court with a camera crew. Every eye in the place was trained on her, as she shook both Brazinski’s and the referee’s hands and then collapsed into the chairs alongside her racquet bag.

“What’s it feel like to be number one in the world?” the commentator shouted loudly over the roar of the fans.

Jessie bent over, threw a towel over her head, and cried.

• • •

K
hol had been in the stands of tennis matches his whole life and could judge their movement like a fly fisherman can judge a river’s current. Michael Raphael, a relative newcomer, hadn’t a clue. With his attention on the people surrounding him, now more than ever afraid the Baseball Bat Brigade would fall into lockstep somewhere behind him, Raphael misjudged which exit tunnel to push toward and got caught in the mother lode of all logjams.