Black Money

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The people and events in this novel are all imaginary, and do not refer to any actual people or events.

R. M.

I’d been hearing about the Tennis Club for years, but I’d never been inside of it. Its courts and bungalows, its swimming pool and cabanas and pavilions, were disposed around a cove of the Pacific a few miles south of the Los Angeles County border. Just parking my Ford in the asphalt lot beside the tennis courts made me feel like less of a dropout from the affluent society.

The carefully groomed woman at the front desk of the main building told me that Peter Jamieson was probably in the snack bar. I walked around the end of the fifty-meter pool, which was enclosed on three sides by cabanas. On the fourth side the sea gleamed through a ten-foot wire fence like a blue fish alive in a net. A few dry bathers were lying around as if the yellow eye of the sun had hypnotized them.

When I saw my prospective client, in the sunny courtyard outside the snack bar, I recognized him instinctively. He looked like money about three generations removed from its source. Though he couldn’t have been out of his early twenties, his face was puffy and apologetic, the face of a middle-aged boy. Under his carefully tailored Ivy League suit he wore a layer of fat like easily penetrable armor. He had the kind of soft brown eyes, which are very often short-sighted.

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