Murder Is My Racquet Read Online Free PDF Page A

well cost him the championship.
    Not so. Trailing 30–40, he won the next point with a service ace, then won the game by playing brilliantly for the next two points. The final game was almost anticlimactic; Macquereau, serving, seemed to know how it was going to end, and scored only a single point while Tommy broke his service to take the game, the set, the match, and the United States Open championship.
    All of which made the aftermath just that much more tragic.
    • • •
    T he whole world knows the rest. How Tommy Terhune, flushed with triumph, accompanied by his curiously unemotional wife, returned to his hotel, racquet in hand. How Roger MacReady was waiting for them in the lobby, and accompanied them upstairs to their suite. How Jennifer explained haltingly that she and MacReady had fallen in love, that they had been, like, having an affair, and that she wanted Tommy to give her a divorce so that she and MacReady could be married.
    She said all this calmly, expecting Tommy to take it every bit as calmly. Perhaps she thought it was a good time to tell him—riding high after his victory, he could presumably take a lostlove in stride. In any event, Tommy had never shown much emotion off the court, and now was equally cool on it, so she knew she could count on him to be a gentleman about this. If he could be gallant enough to hand two points to Claude Macquereau through purposeful double faults, wouldn’t he be equally gallant and self-sacrificing now?
    As it happened, he would not.
    He was clutching his tennis racquet when she told him all this. It was the racquet he had been using ever since his return from Togo, and it had lasted longer than any racquet he had previously owned, because he had not once swung it at anything harder than a tennis ball.
    By the time he let go of it now, it was in pieces, and his wife and his rival were both dead. He smashed the edge of the racquet into Roger MacReady’s head, striking him five times in all, fracturing his skull even as he smashed the racquet, and he went on swinging until all he had left in his hand was the jagged handle.
    Which he continued to hold as he backed the terrified Jennifer into a corner, where he pinned her against the wall and drove the racquet handle into the hollow of her throat.
    Then he picked up the phone and told the desk clerk to summon the police.
    • • •
    E veryone had a theory, of course, and one that got a lot of play held that Tommy’s temper, no longer released periodically on the tennis court, didn’t just disappear. Instead it got tamped down, compressed, so that the eventual inevitable explosion was that much greater and more disastrous.
    One enterprising newsman found his way to Togo, wherethe enigmatic Atuele told him essentially the same thing. “I gave the man a spirit,” he said, between puffs on a cheroot. “To help him when he played tennis. And it helped him, is it not so?”
    “But off the court—”
    “Off the court,” Atuele said, “the man had no problem. So, when he was not playing tennis, the spirit’s work was done. And the anger had to go somewhere, didn’t it?”

TENNIS, ANYONE?
    K INKY F RIEDMAN
    H aven’t played tennis since high school. Haven’t touched a racquet since Christ got aced but I was pretty hot way back when. Got to the state finals in my senior year. My coach, Woodrow Sledge, always emphasized basic skills and groundstrokes, a dominant serve, strong forehand and backhand, and a confident, yet conservative approach to the net. Therefore, he was never completely happy with what I will call the peculiar morality of my game. As long as I was winning, however, he’d just pat me on the back and shake his head.
    They say sports does not build character, it just reveals it. Maybe this is true but I think I learned important life lessons from the way I was able to win at tennis. To put the best face on it you could say I played like a high-stakes poker player or a riverboat gambler. There was