Ed McBain - Three Blind Mice

“Messy one,” Santucci said.

Bloom had seen worse.

“Any idea what did it?” Decker asked the M.E.

“Some kind of blunt instrument,” he answered. He was still kneeling over the body, seemingly more comfortable with his position now. The two officers in the orange slickers kept their torches shining at the back of the stiffs head, where the hair was all matted with blood around the craters in the skull.

“Like what?” Decker asked. “A hammer?”

“Hard to say. Whatever it was, it was wielded with considerable force. Can someone give me a hand here, help me roll him over?”

No one seemed eager to give him a hand.

“Give the Doc a hand there,” Decker snapped to the two officers in the orange slickers.

Both men put down their torches and straddled the ditch. Lying on the roadway, the torches cast a crazy kind of splayed light into the blackness. Legs widespread, the officers tested for purchase and then looked for a place to grab the body; neither of them wanted to get blood on his hands.

“One, two, three, ho !” one of them said, and they rolled the body over.

“Light, please,” the M.E. said.

The officers picked up the torches, shined them on the corpse’s face.

The man from the S.A.’s office let out a short, sharp gasp.

“That’s Frank Bannion,” he said.

His scale this morning had read a hundred and eighty-two pounds; he’d been hoping for a hundred and eighty. He’d swum another hundred laps before breakfast, and now, at twenty minutes to eight, he was in his tennis whites and ready to drive to the club, feeling somewhat more fit than he had last Saturday, when Kit Howell had taught his devastating left-handed lesson.

There was something immensely satisfying about getting up at the crack of dawn, awake with the sun and the birds, and breakfasting before there was any sound of life in the streets. The front lawn was sparkling with dew as he backed the rented car out of the garage. There went Mrs. Hedges across the street, walking in her robe to get the newspaper from the mailbox. A wave. Morning, Mrs. Hedges. Morning, Mr. Hope. Long pink robe, floppy pink slippers, he wondered what Patricia Demming looked like at a quarter to eight in the morning. If she looked terrific sopping wet in the rain or dripping sweat in a running suit, how bad could she look in the morning? Don’t you ever sleep? she’d asked him. But that was before Frank Bannion’s skull got crushed with something blunt.

There was a peaceful calm to the club’s parking lot. Matthew wondered if the early-morning players walking from their automobiles had read the headlines today. He wondered if they even knew who Frank Bannion was. The morning was sunny and bright after yesterday’s rain, not too terribly hot as yet, it was going to be a lovely day. Who wanted to think about dead investigators on a day like today? He wondered if Patricia Demming was thinking about her dead investigator. He wondered if she still thought a copycat murderer was on the loose while Stephen Leeds languished in jail.

He went into the men’s locker room to pee one last time, washed his hands afterward at the sink, looked at himself in the mirror, and thought. You can do it, Hope. You can beat Kit Howell. He nodded at his own image, dried his hands, picked up his racket, and strode confidently to the teaching court.

“The trouble with your game,” Kit was saying, “is that you don’t plan ahead. You have to plan at least two, three moves ahead. Otherwise, you’ll always be surprised by what happens.”

“Six-love was a big surprise, all right,” Matthew said.

They were sitting in the club’s coffee shop, a screened-in area adjacent to the swimming pool. This was Saturday morning, the pool was full of squealing kids. Most of the men hadn’t yet come in from their early-morning doubles games, the shop was full of women waiting to play. On Saturdays and Sundays, men were given preference for morning court time. Unless a woman could prove she was a working woman. Nine to five. Like Patricia Demming. Don’t you ever sleep?

Matthew, and at least a dozen other men he could name, had voted against the proposed rule, but the majority had prevailed. His former wife, Susan, nonetheless decided that Calusa Bath and Racquet was an overtly sexist club and switched her membership to the Sabal Key Club, even though it meant a fifteen-minute-longer drive from the house he once had shared with her. Her protest seemed mild; there were some women in Calusa who would tear out your throat if you so much as opened a door for them.

When Matthew was a little boy, his mother had taught him to open doors for women. Ladies, she’d called them. Another taboo, he guessed, the word ladies . She’d said it was good manners to open a door for a lady. She said gentlemen opened doors for ladies. Nowadays only sexist pigs opened doors for women. When was the second stage going to get here, Betty?

Everywhere around him and Kit, there was female conversation, bright and lively at this hour of the morning, punctuated with laughter. He realized with a start that half the young mothers sitting here, chatting and laughing over their coffee cups, could beat him one-to-one on a tennis court. Or was this a sexist observation, too? The hell with it, he thought; it’s too damn dangerous to live in these trigger-happy times.

“If you plan only for the moment,” Kit was saying, “you’ll…”

“Who says I plan at all ?” Matthew said.

“Well, you’ve got to have some kind of plan,” Kit said, surprised.

“Not very often.”

“At least in that split second before you hit the ball.”

“Well, yes.”

“You’ve got some idea of where you’re trying to place it, haven’t you?”

“Yes. Not that it always goes there.”

“I understand that. But what I’m saying is you’ve got to think of the game as a logical succession of shots. If you hit the ball to a specific place, there should be only one possible shot I can make to return it, and you should know where that place has to be, and you should be waiting there for the ball. And because I’m where I am, then your plan should include where you’ve got to return it so I can’t get to it, do you follow me?”

“Yes. But I have enough trouble just getting the ball back. Without having to worry two shots ahead.”

“That’s exactly my point. You’re having trouble getting it back because I do have a plan. I hit the ball here, you have to return it here,” he said, using the tabletop as a court, moving the tip of his index finger back and forth across it. “You don’t have a choice. You either return the ball the only way it can be returned, or you’ll miss it entirely. So it comes back here,” he said, using his finger again, “and I’m waiting for it, so I hit it here , where you can’t possibly get to it. But let’s say you do manage to get all the way cross-court in time,” he said, moving his finger swiftly to the other side of the table, “and you reach the ball, you actually get your racket on it. The only place you can possibly hit it — because the ball is here on your backhand — is down the line. And I’m waiting for it because I know that’s your only possible shot. So I drill it to the other side of the court, and the point is mine.”

“You make it sound easy,” Matthew said.

“It is easy, if you have a plan,” Kit said. “It’s like chess, in a way. The best player is the one who can think the most moves ahead. Tennis is less predictable, of course, the moves aren’t fixed in tennis… well, maybe that’s the wrong comparison, chess. Tennis is more like a battle. You don’t just return fire haphazardly unless you suddenly find yourself in deep shit, excuse me. But if this is a planned maneuver, if for example you know where the enemy is out there, and you know approximately how many of them there are, then you can situate your platoon so that this specific fire forces this specific response,” again moving his finger across the table, “while you’re all the while moving your people to another position,” the finger moving again, “so they can lob in a mortar from the left, or rush the flank from the right, or whatever. It’s all a matter of calculating what choices, if any, the enemy has for his response, and then being ready for those choices so you can step in and cream him. A plan,” Kit said. “Simple.”