Stuart Woods - Choke

“You’re a good judge of character, Victor,” Tommy said.

“Once, in my youth, I got mixed up with somebody like that. It cost me a good job at a great tennis club. If I hadn’t blown that I’d be knocking down a hundred and fifty grand a year.”

“Do you regret that, Victor?”

Victor smiled. “Not really.” He waved a hand at the three courts. “This is more my speed.”

“No ambition?”

Victor shook his head. “Merk is the one with the ambition. He’s always dreaming about opening up a chain of these places-a hundred, hundred and fifty.”

Tommy looked at Victor with interest. “Merk’s ambitious, huh? Does he have any hope of pulling it off?”

“Not without a major investor, and so far, he hasn’t been able to come up with one. Tell you the truth, I keep hoping he’ll sell me this club. It would suit me, I think; keep me going in my old age, which ain’t all that far away.”

“Merk’s a good-looking guy; what sort of social life does he have?”

“Merk seems to read a lot,” Victor said. “We have a beer now and again, but he’s always home early.”

“Married?”

“Divorced. She took him pretty good, or he might have had that chain of tennis clubs by now.”

“Does he have any friends?”

“Just me, I guess. He’s the quiet type.”

“Yeah. How much time do you spend in the clubhouse, Victor?”

“Hardly any,” Victor replied. “I’m out here all day, then I head for home or the bars when the day’s over. Merk’s the office guy; he’s in there all day, keeping the books and selling equipment. Once in a while he’ll do a lesson, if we’re shorthanded, but mostly he’s in there bent over a desk.”

Tommy looked toward the club. “He in there now?”

“He went to the post office, I think. Oops, here comes my next lesson. See you later.”

“Victor,” Tommy said.

Victor stopped and turned. “You were smart to stay away from Clare Carras. Look what’s happened to Chuck.”

Victor grinned. “The secret to happiness, I think, is knowing your limitations.”

Tommy watched Victor trot on court to meet his client, an elderly man in whites, then got up and walked into the clubhouse. The place was deserted. He walked into Merk’s office and looked around. Nothing but a desk, a computer, and a telephone. He opened another door, and it led to the small locker room where he’d searched Chuck’s locker. On one wall of the office was a small key safe. Tommy opened it and browsed. He came up with one labeled “Master, lockers.” He put the key back and left the club. Daryl was waiting for him in the parking lot.

“What do you think?” Daryl asked. “Is Victor in this somehow?”

“I don’t think so,” Tommy said. “Like Chuck Chandler, he doesn’t strike me as the type. What do you know about Merk, the guy who runs the place?”

“Not much.”

“Neither does anybody else.”

Daryl shifted his weight and switched radio stations for something that would keep him awake. He had followed Merk Connor home from the tennis club three hours before, and Merk was still inside. Daryl could see him occasionally as he moved around the little shotgun Conch house. A little legwork had told him that after his divorce, Merk had moved here from a larger house in a better neighborhood.

Daryl glanced at his watch; another forty-five minutes before he was relieved by Tommy. When he looked back at the house, all the lights were off. It was a little early for bedtime, he thought. Then, as he watched, there was the movement of a shadow behind the house, and a figure vaulting over a low fence and disappearing toward the next street. Daryl got the car started and quickly drove around the block. At the next intersection he got out of the car, ran to the corner, and looked around a building. The street was nearly deserted, but he saw a familiar figure turn another corner ahead, toward Duval Street.

Daryl got back into the car, drove straight ahead until he came to Duval, turned the corner, and pulled up at the curb, leaving the engine running. Half a minute later, Merk walked into Duval and started down the street at a rapid pace, headed toward the western end of the island. Daryl followed slowly, just close enough to see that sometime after arriving home from work, Merk had changed into fresh clothes.

Daryl was holding up traffic now, so he pulled over, flipped down the sun visor to expose the car’s ID to the foot patrolmen handing out parking tickets, and continued to follow Merk on foot. Merk never window-shopped or slowed down; he seemed to know exactly where he was going and was in a hurry to get there. He was getting closer and closer to Dey Street and Clare Carras.

From a block back, Daryl saw Merk suddenly turn into a building, and he resisted the temptation to run to catch up. It took him a full minute to make up the distance and find that Merk had turned into a bar. Daryl pushed open the door and walked in.

People turned and looked at him as if they’d been expecting him to arrive. He tried not to appear to be looking for anybody; instead, he ambled up to the bar and ordered a beer. When the bartender had poured it, he allowed himself to lean on the bar and take a good look around for Merk. Suddenly it came to him that he was in a gay bar, and that Merk was not present. At the other end of the bar, he spotted another door to the side street. Cursing under his breath, he left and headed toward the door.

“Don’t rush off,” a man at the bar said as he passed.

Rushing was all Daryl felt like doing. He pushed open the door and emerged into the side street, looking both ways. Merk was nowhere in sight. Had he noticed Daryl following him and deliberately lost him, or had he just taken a shortcut?

Daryl ran back to the corner and back down Duval Street to his car. He got it started and turned right at the next intersection, heading for Dey Street. The bar had been only a block and a half from Clare Carras’s house.

He cruised slowly down Dey Street, waiting for her house to come into view. Just as it did, the living room lights upstairs went off. A moment later there was a glow from behind the fence from approximately where Clare’s bedroom was located. Daryl drove around the corner into Elizabeth Street, parked, and called Tommy on his portable phone.

“Hello?”

“Tommy, it’s Daryl. Merk stayed home for better than three hours, then suddenly left the house by the back door and walked over to Duval Street.”

“Did you follow him?”

“Yeah, to a bar that turned out to be full of extremely graceful young men, but he wasn’t there. There was a back door, and by the time I figured it out, he had disappeared.”

“How far was the place from the Carras house?”

“A little more than a block. I drove around there just in time to see the living room lights go off and what looked like her bedroom light go on.”

“Bingo!” Tommy said. “I think we’ve found our man.”

“I’m around the corner from the house now; are you going to relieve me?”

“I think we’ll let it go for tonight,” Tommy said. “No telling what time he’ll come out of there, and it would take more than the two of us to watch all four sides of the house. I’ll see you at the station tomorrow morning, okay? We’ll do some checking on Merk.”

“See you tomorrow,” Daryl said. He started the car and headed for home.

Tommy arrived at the station the following morning to find Daryl there ahead of him, working at a computer terminal.

“Hi,” the younger man said. “I’m logged on to the state crime computer right now; it’s doing a search on Merk.”

“You’re sure he left the bar before you did last night?”