Ed McBain - Goldilocks

“What was all the excitement last night?” Joanna asked.

At first I thought she meant the fight between Susan and me. She’d undoubtedly heard us railing at each other. Then I realized she was talking about the phone ringing at a quarter to one, and my leaving the house shortly afterward. I didn’t know quite what to say. How do you tell a twelve-year-old that three people she knew and possibly loved had been stabbed to death the night before?

“Dad?” she said. “What was it? Why’d you leave the house that way?”

“Dr. Purchase called me,” I said.

“What about?”

I took a deep breath. “Somebody killed Maureen and the little girls.”

She put down her spoon. She looked at me.

“Who?” she said.

“They don’t know yet.”

“Wow,” she said.

“You’d better get dressed, huh?”

“I’ve got time,” she said, and glanced at the wall clock, and said immediately, “No, I haven’t,” and got up and ran for her bedroom. I put up a kettle of water to boil, and then I sat down at the table and sipped my juice and studied the newspaper. It made no mention of the murders. There were going to be renewed SALT talks. A governor in a nearby state had been accused of larceny. A Hollywood celebrity had played tennis at the Field Club on Sunday morning. Chris Evert had won the Virginia Slims singles tournament and Governor Askew had declared yesterday Chris Evert Day in honor of — should I keep my tennis date?

The water was boiling.

I fixed myself a cup of instant coffee, and then carried it outside to where a dozen small docks jutted out into the canal shared by the houses on both sides of it. The sun was just coming up. The wind of the night before had blown away whatever had been hanging over the city and smothering it; the day was going to be bright and clear. I crossed the lawn, greener here than out front, wet with early morning dew. The Windbag was tied fore and aft to the dock, one of her halyards banging against the aluminum mast and setting up a terrible racket. I climbed aboard and tightened the line, and the clanging stopped abruptly. I had named the boat over Susan’s protests; she had cost seven thousand dollars used, which was not bad for a twenty-five-footer that slept four comfortably. The water in the canal was still. Down the street, I heard an automobile start. I looked at my watch. It was fifteen minutes to seven. The city of Calusa was coming awake.

I went inside the house, and then on through to the bedroom. Susan was still asleep, her hair fanned out over the pillow, her right arm bent at the elbow, the palm facing the ceiling. The sheet was tangled between her legs. I pushed in the alarm button on the back of the clock. Across the hall, Joanna was showering. I could hear the steady drumming of the water. The radio was on in her bedroom, her usual rock-and-roll station. She turned it on very softly each morning, the moment she got out of bed. It was as if she could not bear being without music at any time during her waking hours. I sometimes wished she would turn it on loud instead. This way, I could only hear the monotonous sound of the bass guitar, without even a hint of the melody.

I felt well rested, but I didn’t know what demands might be made on me later in the day, and I had the feeling I should be getting to the office instead of the Calusa Tennis Club. At the same time, I didn’t imagine Jamie would be up and around much before noon, and I could see no reason to be sitting at my desk at nine sharp, waiting for a call. I would, in any event, be at the office no later than nine-thirty, ten o’clock. I decided to keep the date, went into the bathroom I shared with Susan, took off my robe, and turned on the shower. As I lathered myself with soap Susan had bought on our trip to England the summer before, the soap she warned me constantly not to leave in the dish since it melted so fast and was so awfully expensive, as I watched rivulets of foam run over my chest, my belly, and my groin, I thought only of Aggie.

The Calusa Tennis Club had been undergoing alterations for the past six or seven months and was finally nearing completion. It promised to be even larger and grander than before, but meanwhile there was lumber stacked everywhere, and kegs of nails, and rolls of tar paper, and sawhorses marking off areas that were not to be trespassed while construction was under way. Mark Goldman was sitting on one such sawhorse, or rather leaning against it, his right ankle crossed over his left, his racket resting on his partial lap. He looked at his watch the moment he saw me.

“Thought you’d never get here,” he said.

Every time he said that, I automatically looked at my own watch. He said it every Monday morning. I had looked at the dashboard clock before getting out of the car, and it had read three minutes to eight. I had checked my own watch as I crossed the parking lot and the time then was two minutes to eight. But now, as Mark said what he said every Monday morning since we’d begun our game together, I looked at my watch like a damn fool.

Mark had curly black hair and dark brown eyes and a mustache he’d begun cultivating only two months back. When he started growing it, he told me mustaches were the thing. He said mustaches drove young girls wild. This was important to Mark because he was forty-eight years old and a bachelor. If he could not drive young girls wild, then whom was he supposed to drive wild — old ladies of thirty-nine or forty? No, no. He had been a successful bachelor all these years only because he watched the trends. “Trends, Matt,” he said. “You want to succeed in anything, you’ve got to watch the trends. Mustaches are a trend right now. There isn’t a girl under thirty who will even spit on a man without a mustache.”

“Will they spit on a man with a mustache?” I asked.

“Nobody likes a smartass, Matt,” he said, and cocked his finger at me.

He destroyed me.

Instead of taking pity on a man who was sporting a highly visible Ace bandage on his right wrist, he instead played better than I’d ever seen him play. His serves were devastating. The ball came in low over the net and then hit the court and bounced up high and away to the left, curving into my backhand. Because of my tennis elbow, I couldn’t follow through without wincing in pain. Most of my returns were weak little shots that popped the ball high up into the air to be met on the other side of the net by Mark’s overhead smash. When I did manage to return a serve with something more respectable, Mark dazzled me with a repertoire of cross-court slashes, dinky dropshots, infuriating lobs, and vicious volleys designed to take off my head if I had the audacity to step into their path. He won the first set 6–2, and the second 6–0. When he asked if I wanted to play a third, I told him he was a cruel and heartless bastard who took advantage of cripples.

“You’re wearing the bandage in the wrong place,” he said. “If your elbow hurts, you should wear it on your elbow, not your wrist.”

“No,” I said, “it’s the action of the wrist that causes the pain in the elbow.”

“Who told you that?”

“My doctor.”

“What doctor?”

“Dr. Cooper, he’s an orthopedist.”

“He doesn’t know tennis elbows,” Mark said. “ I had my first tennis elbow when I was sixteen.”

“What’d you do for it?”

“I wrapped it in a bandage and went up on the roof with a girl named Giselle. Giselle knew how to fix a tennis elbow, all right. If Giselle was here in Calusa, she’d fix that tennis elbow of yours in a minute.”

“It’s not the elbow, it’s really the wrist.”

“She’d fix your wrist, too, old Giselle.”

It was twenty minutes past nine. Mark’s exercise in demolition had taken little more than an hour. Where the courts had earlier been filled almost exclusively with men, there were now women beginning to play, or walking along the shrub-lined paths toward unoccupied courts. Some of the courts were being watered, and there was the whispering sound of the sprinklers and above that the steady rhythmic sound of balls being hit and returned, hit and returned. The morning was cool, a faint breeze rustled in the trees surrounding the courts. It occurred to me that something was different. Or rather... nothing was different, that was the trouble. Everything was the same.