Murder is My Racquet

by Otto Penzler

  “Lovely.” The small lies, the little social ones, Kiley had found came easy.

  They talked about Victoria then, Victoria and her sister, whatever jealousies had grown up between them, festered maybe, been smoothed away. Trevor, was he resentful, did he ever treat Alicia as if she weren’t really his? But Trevor was the perfect dad and as far as money was concerned, since his move to Luton, to Vauxhall, some deal they’d done with the German owners, the unions that is, and Trevor had got himself off the shop floor—well, it wasn’t as if they were actually throwing it around but, no, cash was something they weren’t short of, Leslie was sure of that.

  “What about Victoria’s father?” Kiley asked.

  Leslie threw back her head and laughed. “The bastard, as he’s affectionately known.”

  “Is he still around? Is there any chance he might be involved?”

  Leslie shook her head. “The bastard, bless him, would’ve had difficulties getting the right stamp onto the envelope, never mind the rest. Fifteen years, the last time I laid eyes on him; working on the oil rigs he’d been, up around Aberdeen. Took a blow to the head from some piece of equipment in a storm and had to be stretchered off. Knocked the last bit of sense out of him. The drink had seen to the rest long since.” She drew hard on her cigarette. “If he’s still alive, which I doubt, it’s in some hostel somewhere.” And shivered. “I just hope the poor bastard isn’t sleeping rough.”

  • • •

  Paul Broughton was working for a record company in Camden, offices near the canal, more or less opposite the Engineer. Olive V-neck top and chocolate flat-front moleskin chinos, close-shaven head and stubbled chin, two silver rings in one ear, a stud, emerald green, at the center of his bottom lip. A&R, developing new talent, that was his thing. Little bands that gigged at the Dublin Castle or the Boston Dome, the Rocket on the Holloway Road. He was listening to a demo tape on headphones when Kiley walked toward him across a few hundred feet of open plan; Broughton’s desk awash with takeaway mugs from Caffè Nero, unopened padded envelopes and hopeful fliers.

  Kiley waited till Broughton had dispensed with the headphones, introduced himself and held out his hand.

  “Look,” Broughton said, ignoring the hand. “I told you on the phone…”

  “Tell me again.”

  “I ain’t seen Vicky in fuckin’ years.”

  “How many years?”

  “I dunno. Four, five?”

  “Not since she told you she was carrying your child.”

  “Yeah, I s’pose.”

  “But you’ve been in touch.”

  “Who says?”

  “Once you started seeing her picture in the paper, those ads out on the street. Read about all that money she was bringing in. And for what? It wouldn’t have been difficult to get her number, you used your mobile, gave her a call.”

  Broughton glared back at him, defiant. “Bollocks!” And then, “So what if I did?”

  “What did she tell you, Paul? The same as before? Get lost.”

  “Look, I ain’t got time for this.”

  “Was that when you thought you’d put the bite on her, a little blackmail? Get something back for treating you like shit?”

  Broughton clenched his fists. “Fuck off! Fuck off out of here before I have you thrown out. I wouldn’t take money from that stuck-up tart if it was dripping out of her arse. I don’t need it, right?”

  “And you don’t care she had your child against your will, kept her out of your sight?”

  Broughton laughed, a sneer ugly across his face. “You don’t get it, do you? She was just some cunt I fucked. End of fuckin’ story.”

  “She was barely fifteen years old,” Kiley said.

  “I know,” Broughton said, and winked.

  Kiley was almost halfway toward the door before he turned around. Broughton was sitting on the edge of his desk, headphones back in place, watching him go. Kiley hit him twice in the face with his fist, hauled him back up onto his knees and hit him once more. Then left.

  • • •

  They’d bought a nice house on the edge of Dunstable, with views across the Chiltern Hills. They’d done well. Alicia was in the back garden, on a swing. The apple trees were rich in fruit, the roses well into bloom. Catherine stood by the French windows, gazing out. Her expression when Kiley had arrived on the doorstep had told him pretty much all he needed to know.

  Trevor was in the garage, tinkering. Tools clipped with precision to the walls, tools that shone with pride of ownership and use. Kiley didn’t rush him, let him take his time. Watched as Trevor tightened this, loosened that.

  “It’s the job, isn’t it?” Kiley eventually said.

  Trevor straightened, surprised.

  “You sold up, left friends, invested in this place. Not just for Catherine and yourself. For her, Alicia. A better place to grow up, country, almost. A big mortgage, but as long as the money’s coming in…”

  “They promised us,” Trevor said, not looking at Kiley now, staring through the open door toward the trees. “The Germans, when we agreed the deal. Jobs for life, that’s what they said. Jobs for sodding life. Now they’re closing down the plant, shifting production to Portugal or Spain. No longer economic, that’s us.” When he did turn, there were tears in his eyes. “They bent us over and fucked us up the arse and all this bastard government did was stand by with the Vaseline.”

  Kiley put a hand on his shoulder and Trevor shrugged it off and they stood there for a while, not speaking, then went inside and sat around the kitchen table drinking tea. Alicia sat in Catherine’s lap, playing with her mother’s hair. Her mother: That’s what she was, what she had become.

  “You could have asked,” Kiley said. “Asked Victoria outright, explained.”

  “We’ve tried before,” Catherine said bitterly. “It’s hateful, like pulling teeth.”

  Trevor reached across and gave her lower arm a squeeze. “Vicky’s not the problem,” he said, “not really. It’s him, the money man.”

  “Costain?”

  Trevor nodded.

  “Leave him to me,” Kiley said. “I’ll make sure he understands.”

  “Mum,” Alicia said. “Let’s read a book.”

  Trevor walked Kiley down the path toward his hired car, stood with one hand resting on the roof. The sun was just beginning to fade in the sky. “I’d go round to their house,” he said. “Evenings, you know, when I was seeing Catherine, and she’d be there. Victoria. I doubt she was much more than fourteen then.” He sighed and kicked the ground with his shoe. “She could’ve put a ring through my nose and had me crawling after her, all fours around the room.” Slowly, he drew air down into his lungs. “You’re right, it’s nice out here. Quiet.”

  The two men shook hands.

  “Thanks,” Trevor said. “I mean it. Thanks a lot.”

  • • •

  Kiley didn’t see Victoria Clarke until the spring, the French Open. He and Kate had traveled Eurostar to Paris for the weekend, stayed in their favorite hotel near the Jardins du Luxembourg. Kate had a French author to interview, a visit to the Musée d’Art Moderne planned; Kiley thought lunch at the brasserie across from Gare du Nord, then a little tennis.

  Costain, buoyant after marshaling Victoria’s advertising contract safely through, had struck a favorable deal with Catherine and Trevor: 5 percent of Victoria’s gross income to be paid into a trust fund for Alicia, an annual payment of six thousand pounds toward her everyday needs, this sum to be reviewed; as long as Trevor remained unemployed, the shortfall on the mortgage would be picked up. In exchange, a secrecy agreement was sworn and signed, valid until Alicia reached eighteen.

  On court at Roland Garros, rain threatened, the sky a leaden gray. After taking the first set 6–2, Victoria was struggling against a hefty left-hander from Belarus. Concentration gone, suddenly she was double-faulting on her serve, overhitting her two-fisted backhand, muttering to herself along the baseline. Five—all and then the set had gone, unraveled,
Victoria slump-shouldered and staring at the ground. The first four games of the final set went with serve and Kiley could feel the muscles across his shoulders knot as he willed Victoria to break clear of whatever was clouding her mind, shake free. It wasn’t until she was 4–3 down that it happened, a skidding return of serve whipped low across the net and some instinct causing her to follow it in, her volley unplayable, an inch inside the line. After that, a baseline smash that tore her opponent’s racquet from her hand, a topspin lob judged to perfection; finally, two aces, the first swinging away unplayably, the second hard down the center line, and she was running to the net, racquet raised to acknowledge the applause, a quick smile and touch of hands. On her way back to her chair, she glanced up to where Kiley was sitting in the stands, but if she saw him she gave no sign.

  When he arrived back at the hotel, Kate was already there, damp from the shower, leaning back against the pillows with a book. The shutters out onto the balcony were partway open.

  “So?” Kate said as Kiley shrugged off his coat, “how was it?”

  “A struggle.”

  “Poor lamb.”

  “No call to be bitchy.”

  Kate poked out her tongue.

  Stretched out on the bed beside her, Kiley bent his head. “Are you reading that in French?”

  “Why else d’you think I’m moving my lips?”

  The skin inside her arm was taut and sweet.

  A DEBT TO THE DEVIL

  JEREMIAH HEALY

  Don Floyd led me into the memorial chapel as though he’d been there before, despite his mentioning on the drive over from the Lauderdale Tennis Club that he wasn’t Jewish himself. Given the short time I’d lived in South Florida, much less at the Club, the building we entered looked more to me like a Spanish villa than a funeral parlor, what with exterior walls of yellow stucco and orange bumpy tiles on the roof. But around us a lot of grave markers dotted the flat, green meadow.

  In a small vestibule, we signed a VISITORS log, Floyd—in the deliberate cadence of his native Georgia—introducing me to people as “Rory Calhoun.” Back in the early sixties, my mom had developed a permanent crush on that B-movie star, so after she married his surname-sake and I came along, my given name was a forgone, if embarrassing, conclusion.

  Floyd and I began to follow the flow into the chapel proper. It was a big, square room, with rows of oak benches like Catholic pews but upholstered on the seats, a Star of David carved into each end post. A seven-spiked candelabra stood centered at the front of the room, a large-lettered prayer entitled the “Mourner’s Kaddish” to one side, a similar mural of the Twenty-third Psalm to the other, which kind of surprised me.

  And, underneath the candelabra, a blonde-wood casket. Closed, which didn’t surprise me.

  Most of the benches were full already. I followed Floyd—eighty-plus and white of hair, but still as sharp as he was spry—into one of the back rows. As we sat, a woman moved with purpose toward a podium near the Kaddish mural. Identifying herself over the microphone as a rabbi, she announced she’d be reading the Twenty-third Psalm first in Hebrew, then in English. Tuning out the initial version, I began to wonder exactly why I was there.

  You see, I’d gotten a college degree before going on the professional tennis circuit. After a few years of touring, however, a chronic knee problem and a mediocre first serve relegated me to satellite tournaments, especially those on clay, where stamina and strategy could carry a player past the first round. During the stretches I couldn’t play, I’d apprenticed myself to private investigators for the day-labor money they paid. In fact, I’d just gotten my full Florida investigator’s license, though I didn’t understand—

  Floyd nudged me in the ribs. “Rory?”

  That’s when I realized the rabbi was now reciting the psalm in English, most of the people in the chapel joining in. I mouthed the words, feeling strangely reassured by the chorus rising up in honor of Solomon Schiff, a man I’d seen on the courts at the club but only barely met.

  After we all finished, the rabbi gave a short, thoughtful eulogy for “Sol,” noting that he wasn’t exactly a regular at “Shabbat” services, but still supported his faith in tangible ways. Then she invited any who wished to share a “remembrance” to succeed her at the podium.

  A man who turned out to be the publisher of Florida Tennis magazine made his way there. He spoke with humor and grace about Sol Schiff’s career as a college champion and solid amateur before the era of open tennis began with Rod Laver at the Longwood Cricket Club. Then he toted up Schiff’s long history with the USTA—the United States Tennis Association—and Seniors’ Sectional and National tournaments.

  A few members of our club followed, including Don Floyd—its unofficial “mayor.” All recounted different anecdotes about playing with Schiff or instances of kindness the decedent had shown to people over the years. The phrases most repeated were “fair opponent,” “man of his word,” and “tough negotiator.”

  I was kind of surprised no family spoke, then realized that a man in his seventies like Solomon Schiff might not have had any direct survivors. But as a woman in her forties moved to the podium, a hush fell over the room.

  Floyd leaned into me a little. “She’s the one who wanted you here today.”

  The woman identified herself as Naomi Schiff, Sol’s niece. Her curly hair was black, only a few strands gray. When she began speaking, you could hear sniffling and outright sobbing for the first time during the service. Schiff herself kept swiping a hankie at her eyes, but the voice was strong and clear.

  And more than a little angry.

  “My uncle was known to all of you, but he was loved by me. After my father died, Sol took me in as his own. He fed me, he educated me, he helped me finance a business of my own up in New Jersey, where we lived until Sol moved down here permanently twenty-two years ago. At every stage of my life, there was a step where I would have faltered if he hadn’t taken my hand in his and led me the right way. Though he never married and had no children of his own, Sol was everything anyone could ever have asked for in a parent. Only now he’s been taken from me. From all of us.”

  Schiff gripped the edges of the podium with both hands, bringing her lips very close to the microphone, although she spoke her next words most softly of all. “As some of you know, my father… committed suicide. I made my uncle promise then that he’d never do that to me,. Well, I’m the one making a promise now.” She turned to the casket. “Uncle Sol, I will not rest until the person who killed you is strapped into Florida’s electric chair.”

  Don Floyd leaned into me again. “That’s why she wants to hire you.”

  • • •

  Naomi Schiff said, “You look more like Tom Selleck than William Conrad.”

  Stars of the television shows Magnum, P.I. and Cannon. “Is that a compliment?”

  “Not really.” She shrugged. “Selleck was good-looking, but Conrad gave the impression he was just good.”

  Schiff and I were walking back from the graveside toward the memorial chapel. The services over the coffin were mercifully brief, workers in tan jumpsuits and wrap-around shades lowering it into the ground via green straps attached to a perimeter frame of chrome. Some mourners, Don Floyd included, used a small shovel to take handfuls of pale-colored earth from a wheelbarrow and sprinkle it into the hole before the workers began disassembling the frame and straps for the next person needing them. Then Floyd went back to his car so Schiff and I could talk by ourselves.

  We reached a little glade in the cemetery with half a dozen markers and a polished marble bench that read “Clarstein” on the edge of its seat. Schiff said, “Why don’t we sit? I somehow don’t think the Clarsteins would mind.”

  “All right.”

  Settling onto the stone, she smoothed the black dress down over her thighs almost to the knees. “I’ve never done this before.”

  “Talked with a private investigator?”

  “Yes.”

  I didn’t want to bl
ow Don Floyd’s cover. “I’m assuming it has something to do with your uncle’s death?”

  Schiff looked at me more closely. “Mr. Calhoun, how long have you been at the Lauderdale Tennis Club?”

  “I’ve lived there about a month.”

  “So, you knew my uncle Sol.”

  “He was a nonresident member, so I more knew of him. Who he’d been, how people viewed him.”

  “Meaning, as an icon.”

  Give it to her. “My impression.”

  Schiff sighed, scuffing the soles of her shoes on the slate flagstones beneath her feet. “Tennis was everything to Sol, and he was everything to me—though once he moved down here, we lost track a little of each other’s lives. You follow what I said in the chapel?”

  I didn’t want to tell her that Florida had switched from the electric chair to lethal injection, so I just said, “Yes.”

  “Well, my father—Sol’s brother—suffered a series of… ‘reversals,’ he called them. ‘Just business reversals, honey,’ I remember him saying to my mother. Until one day when I was seven years old, and he blew his head off. Which sent my mother into a mental institution for the rest of her life.”

  “Ms. Schiff, I’m sorry.”

  A frustrated wave of the hand. “But my uncle got me through it, Mr. Calhoun, and through everything else, from dating boys to negotiating contracts. And now somebody’s killed him.”

  “Word around the Club was he surprised a burglar.”

  Schiff ratcheted down a notch. “That’s the theory the police fed me. But his place had been ransacked, and as I tried to clean up the mess, something else occurred to me.”

  “What?”

  “That maybe the killer was searching for something. So many things got broken, it’s hard to say if much is missing.”

  “I don’t know exactly where your uncle lived.”