Murder is My Racquet

by Otto Penzler

  “You look familiar,” he said. “We serve together somewhere?”

  “No,” though I nearly added a “sir” to it. “I’d like to talk with you about Solomon Schiff.”

  “Police or reporter?”

  “Neither.” I took out my license.

  Kirby barely glanced at it. “I’ve got a match in ten minutes, and that’s all I’m thinking about right now. You’ve got the time to wait, I’ll be happy to talk with you afterward.”

  “Seems reasonable.”

  • • •

  You can tell a lot about people from the way they play tennis. What I could tell from watching Lynell Kirby was that Don Floyd’s implication was dead-on: The man did not like to lose.

  He was playing an athletic younger woman who had the kind of game you associate with Chris Evert: steady, deep, and enough pace to never let you rip at it. Even on Har-tru, which slows the ball down and causes it to sit up, I figured Kirby—a lefty with a powerful serve, but whose strokes were “by-the-numbers” mechanical—to have trouble staying with her.

  I was wrong.

  Kirby never quit on a point, and he had a sharply angled crosscourt forehand. His slice backhand showed good bite, and his topspin “approach” shots down the line were often winners in and of themselves. Plus Kirby was quick if not graceful, volleying the ball solidly.

  After seventy-five minutes by my watch, he’d beaten a good player half his age by a break each set: 6–4, 6–3.

  They shook hands, the woman leaving almost immediately by one of the fence doors. Kirby toweled off his face and neck, then beckoned me to come down under the awning separating his court from the next one, also empty.

  When I reached him, Kirby said, “Sorry to be so curt with you up there,” gesturing toward the elevated pool/patio area, “but I was trying to keep my mind on the game.”

  “No problem. I do the same thing.”

  Kirby yoked his towel around his neck, then sank into one white resin chair under the awning as I took another.

  He said, “Didn’t catch your name before.”

  “Rory Calhoun.”

  “Rory… you were on the tour.”

  “It’s nice to be remembered.”

  “Saw you at the Lipton twice—called it the Ericsson later, and now the Nasdaq, but it’s still held on Key Biscayne.” Kirby grinned. “Of course, you’d know that.”

  “Probably won’t be a difference for me anymore. Bad knee.”

  A judicious nod. “Comes from all that hard court you kids had to play on. Clay keeps the body young.” Then Kirby straightened in his chair. “You said something about Sol, though, right?”

  “His niece has asked me to look into his death.”

  The eyes grew shrewd, and he moved his head some, assessing me, I thought.

  Finally, Kirby said, “Man was killed by a burglar, probably to feed a drug habit. What’s there to look into?”

  “She’d just like to put some concerns to rest.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ve heard you knew Mr. Schiff pretty well. Could he have had anything at his house somebody would be searching for?”

  Kirby settled a little deeper into his chair. “You think somebody intentionally targeted Sol, and not just his place as a good candidate for loot?”

  Loot. “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “Well, I guess I’d challenge your premise, then. Sol and I were more friendly opponents than friends.”

  I knew what he meant. “You didn’t socialize off the courts?”

  “Or really even on them.” A faraway look in the eyes again. “You ever in the service, Rory?”

  “No.”

  “I always was a scrapper, even scrambling to stay alive. And that’s how I play tennis, because I never learned as a kid the way Sol did, with the right racquet and good coaching showing me the proper strokes. Sol was like a ballet dancer between the lines, always moving himself in balance to the ball, always under control. Like there was this overall… choreography for every match but he was the only one who got a peek at it in advance.”

  I knew what Kirby meant about that, too. The sense that you were playing the opponent’s match instead of just the opponent. “And so?”

  “And so it was damned frustrating to go up against him. I had ten years on the man, and he’d play down just so he could be the champion in his seventies and my sixties. The king of the geezers.”

  “You couldn’t beat him.”

  “I never beat him. There’s a difference.”

  “Meaning you were getting closer.”

  “That’s right. Last tournament, I was up 4–2 in the third. Even had a match point at 5–4. I couldn’t quite put him away, but next time out, I believe I would have. And I think he believed it, too.”

  What we all do, psyche out our opponents to psyche up ourselves. “Still, it must have galled you to lose all those—”

  “Let me save you some time, my friend. Sol Schiff could be a prima donna and even a royal pain in the ass. But if I killed him in his bedroom, how would I ever have gotten the chance to beat him on a court?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “What?”

  “That he was killed in his bedroom.”

  A grin, the fingers on his right hand flicking upward one at a time. “First, newspaper article. Second, Shirlee Tucker—his ‘principal squeeze,’ my grandson might call her—can’t shut up about it. Third, the Tennis Club is like a primitive culture, and the drums tell us things.”

  At which point Lynell Kirby began to paddle his palms on his thighs like they were bongos.

  • • •

  Karen Bourke wasn’t hard to find. She lived in a two-bedroom, townhouse apartment in the second building past the Club’s security gate, diagonally across from the tennis center. Greeting me at her front door, Bourke listened to why I’d come to bother her and said it was no bother at all. By the time we sat down in the living room, it was “Karen” and “Rory.”

  Though she had to be in her sixties from what Don Floyd had told me, Bourke was another one whose appearance gave the lie to her age. Blonde and slim, with blue eyes and an eager smile, the only telltales that she was over forty were little crow’s feet of lines around the corners of her eyes.

  From laughing or crying, I thought, with no way to judge which.

  “Rory, I’m really sorry about Sol.”

  I nodded. “Forgive me, but did I see you at the memorial chapel?”

  “No.” Bourke seemed to go inside herself for a moment. “The excuse I gave people is that I had committed to play doubles in a tournament near Palm Beach, but the real reason is…” She looked up to a shelf over my head. “I’ve become a little tired of funerals.”

  I twisted around to see a framed photo of two men, both in their fifties, dressed in business suits with lapels from the seventies. “Your husband and Mr. Schiff?”

  “Yes. That’s Casey on the left. I took that photo of them in their office, just after they’d closed the deal that made all of us functionally rich.”

  “Anything happen to change that, Karen?”

  Bourke looked at me oddly. “To… change it?”

  “I’ve visited Mr. Schiff’s home. No palace, but—”

  “—compared to this place, it looks as though I’ve come down in the world?”

  Bourke’s words came out sandwiched between smiling lips, but I got a sense of strength and resolve buried deep within her. “Basically,” I said.

  The smile softened. “I don’t blame you, Rory. No, I’m sure my condo here isn’t worth a tenth of what Sol’s house would bring as a tear-down, given that waterfront lot it’s on. In fact, Casey and I owned a pretty similar place, but after my husband died, I sold ours to move here.” Bourke looked back at the framed photo. “When you’re alone as a woman, it’s nice to have people around, and living here at the Club gives me a community to be part of. An… identity, if that makes any sense to you.”

  It did.
I remembered back to my knee first failing me, and the pang of wondering whether I’d ever be part of the circuit—or any gregarious, sorority-fraternity experience—again. And, to be honest, I wondered if I hadn’t moved into the Tennis Club for just the same reason Karen Bourke had.

  She said, “But you’re here about Sol, right?”

  “Right.” I tried to refocus. “I guess what I was getting at is whether you were on good terms with Mr. Schiff?”

  “Good terms.” Bourke looked down at her lap for a moment, then smiled, but very sadly. “Sol wasn’t just Casey’s partner: They were best friends as well. One was barely Jewish, the other never missed Mass. But they had tennis as well as business in common, and they played championship-level doubles for years until Casey’s stroke. After that, Sol would visit every day, sitting at my husband’s bedside, making conversation for both of them. And when Casey died, Sol made sure I had the kind of financial advice that let me—and still lets me—never worry about money.” Bourke looked up now, the strength and resolve I’d heard in her words now shining through her eyes as well. “So, yes, I’d say Sol and I were on ‘good terms.’”

  Impressive speech. “Karen, anything in his home that somebody might have torn it apart to find?”

  “To find? Like what?”

  “That’s why I’m asking.”

  “Sorry, Rory, but I can’t help you there.”

  I decided to risk our first-name basis. “How did you feel about Shirlee Tucker?”

  My question seemed to genuinely throw Bourke. “Feel about her?”

  “Did you… approve of their relationship?”

  A laugh, one that I thought would go on before I sensed Bourke realizing it already had lasted a little too long. “Sol never married, Rory. What he did romantically was hardly any of my business.”

  “I don’t think you’ve answered my question.”

  “Well, then,” said Karen Bourke, standing, “I guess that’s the only one I haven’t.”

  • • •

  After losing a professional tennis match, I practiced a little ritual whenever I had cash to spare. I’d rent a car and drive around to clear my head. I don’t know why, but having to concentrate on steering, accelerating, and braking would help me analyze what had gone wrong as well as push myself toward improving next time out.

  Now I just cruised some of the major streets around the Club, letting the Sebring kind of have its head as though it were a stable horse taking me for a slow, aimless ride. Maybe the last question I asked Karen Bourke is what let me notice something about the strip malls lining Oakland Park Boulevard as I headed east toward the beach.

  Several of them sported sex shops.

  I pulled into the parking lot of the second one. Shirlee Tucker had told me that Solomon Schiff was into kinky sex, but not recently. And Karen Bourke had dodged that issue entirely.

  I thought about it, then drove back to my apartment to check the Yellow Pages and pick up my camera.

  • • •

  It was a single-lens reflex Canon, which is about all I understood of what the guy at a photography store in Chicago had explained to me years before. But I’d just reached the semis of a satellite near there, and I wanted my girlfriend of the weekend to have a decent camera to capture me winning the title. I lost both the finals and the girlfriend, but not the camera, and once I began doing daywork for private investigators, I’d invested in a telephoto lens as well.

  Spending Naomi Schiff’s retainer in what I hoped was a responsible way, I sat outside her uncle’s house on the Intracoastal until I caught Shirlee Tucker arriving in her teal Toyota. I got three good head-and-shoulders portraits of her, one with the sunglasses off. A few hours later, I snapped two close-ups of Lynell Kirby as he picked up a pizza at the Big Louie’s on Andrews Avenue. Finally, I caught Karen Bourke the next cloudy morning from the balcony of my unit as she walked onto Court Ten for a singles match wearing neither shades nor a baseball cap.

  I drove to the Walgreen’s and patiently waited for their one-hour photo service to prove itself, then I took the prints and began making the rounds of the sex shops I’d found in the phonebook.

  • • •

  “You’re not a cop?”

  I looked at the guy in the fifth place. He wore a palomino toupee, kept a dead cigar clamped between his teeth, and had breath foul enough to blister paint.

  I said, “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  “My loyal customers expect some privacy when they shop here, you know?”

  I took in just the “impulse” items near his cash register. “I can see that.”

  “But you say this is about a killing?”

  “That’s right. And I’d rather not have the police drag you down for questioning, only to leave your loyal customers in the lurch.”

  His eyes told me I’d pressed the right button.

  “Okay, let me see your photos.”

  As I’d done four times previously that day, I laid them face up in front of him on the counter as though I were dealing blackjack. He waited to see all three people before pointing with his cigar. “Her. Yeah, last week sometime.”

  “What did she buy?”

  The dead end of the cigar went toward the “bondage” wall. “One of those sets there, on the left.”

  • • •

  “Why,” said Shirlee Tucker, the one-trick pony again cocking her head coyly from the bar stool, “you want to play with them?”

  I’d called her, asking if she’d meet me at Lord Nelson’s Pub on Southwest Second. Given the time of day, the bar was ours.

  I centered my pint of Boddington’s on its coaster. “Actually, what I’m wondering is why you were buying a pair of velvet handcuffs last week when you told me that lately Solomon Schiff hadn’t been much into lovemaking, much less anything kinky?”

  Tucker drew on the straw sticking in her Sex on the Beach, which made me shift a little uncomfortably on my own stool.

  She said, “Do you like watching me… drink this?”

  “More than we can go into now, but I’d still like to know—”

  “Seemed funny to me, too,” said Tucker, looking almost thoughtful. “But Sol asked it as a favor, and when I wanted to know why—if he wasn’t going to use them with me?—all he said was, ‘It’s to repay a debt to the Devil.’”

  “A what?”

  “A debt to the Devil.” Tucker waved with her drink. “Look, I didn’t get it, either. Only, like I said, Sol asked me as a favor, so I went out and got the cuffs for him.”

  “What did he do with them?”

  “Beats me. I know this: He’d never asked me to tie him up before, and he never asked me to cuff him last week after I gave the things to him.” Then Shirlee Tucker drew on her straw again. “If you like the idea enough, though, we could always just… buy another pair?”

  • • •

  Exercising some willpower, I left Tucker at the bar and drove around some more, trying to sort through what I’d learned. Solomon Schiff dies of heart failure, apparently trying to defend himself against a burglar. Only his devoted niece Naomi doesn’t completely buy that, and she hires me to find his killer. Shirlee Tucker seems almost detached from her lover’s recent death, Lynell Kirby seems to regret only losing the opportunity to best an unbeaten opponent, and Karen Bourke seems to think her dead husband’s partner was the salt of the earth. Besides, Sergeant Lourdes Pintana tells me the autopsy confirms a struggle but also found that cancer would have killed Schiff if his heart hadn’t given out first. And the only thing I’ve discovered that somebody could have been ransacking his house to find—even assuming Naomi Schiff was right about that part—is a pair of velvet handcuffs that Shirlee Tucker says—

  I stopped in the middle lane of Route i, and the poor guy driving his family around on vacation behind me smacked into my rear bumper.

  The damage to both cars was minimal, though it seemed to take forever to exchange licenses and registrations. I assured the tourist that I�
�d tell my insurance company I’d caused the accident.

  Even if only indirectly.

  • • •

  “Karen?”

  She turned toward me on the Club’s patio, apparently on her way from a match back to her condo. I’d debated just following her there, but I figured to let her choose the ground.

  “Rory. More questions?”

  “Actually, more answers.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m pretty sure what happened, Karen, but I’d like to talk with you about it first.”

  Bourke stared at me, then rolled her head on her shoulders, as though her neck was stiff and she wanted to relax before serving. Or, in this case, probably before returning serve.

  Finally she said, “Can we walk?”

  “Sure.”

  • • •

  I’d guess the perimeter of the fishhook road around the Club’s buildings is about half a mile. We hadn’t gone more than a hundred feet, that sweet pong of female sweat wafting off her, before Karen Bourke said, “Why don’t you start?”

  Okay. “Your husband and Solomon Schiff were partners—both businesswise and tennis, but friends as well. They hit it big twenty-some years ago, big enough for both sides to be completely comfortable financially. But, as they say, if you don’t have your health…”

  Bourke nodded beside me, biting her lower lip. I waited a moment as a couple on their way to play greeted us cheerily.

  When the couple had moved out of earshot, I continued. “The rabbi at Mr. Schiff’s funeral said he wasn’t terribly religious, and you confirmed that. On the other hand, a lot of people there felt Mr. Schiff had been a tough negotiator but a man of his word. And one of the promises he’d made—to his niece, after her own father had committed suicide—was that he’d never take his own life.”

  “Sol told us about that.”

  “Before you all reached… consensus?”

  “Rory, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “After your husband’s stroke, he was bedridden.”