Murder Is My Racquet (11 page)

“In here.”

I moved past her in the open doorway, something musky coming off Tucker that I didn’t think originated in a bottle. The room was fifteen by twelve, a king-sized brass bed against one wall, a master bath through another. There were no sheets or pillows in sight, and just an overhead light fixture hung down from a ceiling fan.

“Where exactly was Mr. Schiff’s body?”

Tucker now moved past me to the footboard of the bed, which had a pattern of sturdy, vertical pickets between lateral top and bottom pieces the diameter of bar rails. She grasped the top rail as support and lowered herself to the floor until she was faceup and lying flat, head toward the bed and feet toward the door.

Tucker said, “Sol was like this?” the lilt making her statement sound like a question.

“How about his arms?”

She moved hers to a more exaggerated version of my “Don’t Shoot” in the foyer, her fingernails almost touching the base of the brass footboard.

“What else did you see?”

Tucker did a partial situp, now resting on her elbows, which pushed the doctored bust more aggressively forward. “His bed had been slept in,” now a coy cocking of her head, “but not with me.”

“Meaning with somebody else?”

“I didn’t get any perfumy smell. Ugh, Sol’s was bad enough.”

When people die, their muscles relax and release a lot of unpleasantness. “You didn’t see anybody else?”

“No. And Sol had pajama bottoms on.”

“Bottoms, but no top?”

“Right, right. That’s how he dressed for bed when I wasn’t here.”

“How do you know?”

“Because,” the head now cocking the other way, though to the same effect, “when I was with him, he’d sleep naked.”

Not exactly logical, but the last part struck me as pretty probable. And probably enjoyable.

Tucker said, “You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?”

I decided not to lie. “Yes.”

Her tongue came out, moistened her lips. “Me, too. Minute I saw you in the foyer back there? I was hoping it wouldn’t come to shooting you.”

Reassuring. “Had you and Mr. Schiff been sleeping together much recently?”

A frown, like that wasn’t my next line in her script. “No, truth to tell. Oh, Sol was no great shakes in the sack, but he was—Sol liked to call himself ‘inventive.’”

“Inventive.”

“Yeah. Loved going into the sex shops, buying me things like teddies or bikini thongs.” Tucker stretched the top of her Capri pants to show me some red lace. “These, for instance.”

My throat felt a little tight. “How about sex toys?”

“Oh, he had just a drawerful of those.” Another frown, directed toward the bureau. “But I think his prudy niece must have gone and thrown them all away when she cleaned up the place, account of that’s what I wanted to take back with me, and they aren’t there now.”

I couldn’t see somebody ransacking the house for one of those. “Shirlee, did Mr. Schiff have anything in the house that somebody might have searched for?”

“Searched for? You mean like treasure or something?”

“Jewelry, cash, anything somebody else might want.”

A third cocking of her head. “Just me.”

Actually Tucker’s answer gave me several ideas. “Did Mr. Schiff ever take any photos of you?”

“You mean, like, nudie shots?”

“Yes.”

“No. No, Sol was into gadgets, not cameras.” Yet another nice cocking of her head. “Of course, you don’t look like you need any of those things to please, and this floor’s getting awful hard.”

The floor wasn’t alone in that. “Maybe some other time.”

“Oh, I get it.” Full situp now. “Like when you’re ‘off-duty,’ right?”

Clearing my throat, I agreed with Shirlee Tucker, who recited her phone number, including how easy it was to remember the last four digits because “you just have to keep subtracting by two for each?”

• • •

I
had a resident decal pasted on my windshield, so the security guard at the Club just waved me through the main gate. As I drove around the fishhook road toward my building, Wingfield, I spotted the man I believed to be Lynell Kirby walking toward the clubhouse with a tennis bag slung over his shoulder and that purposeful stride that I’ve always associated with doctors on their way to major operations and players on their way to important matches. Instead of continuing all the way to Wingfield, I parked in a guest slot for Lenglen.

Every one of the Club’s residential buildings is named for a historic tennis player, and there’s a twenty-foot mosaic of each legend—in this case, Suzanne Lenglen of France—on a
peach wall in the respective courtyard. Lends a nice air of tradition, a sense of permanence that I hadn’t found anywhere else in the Lauderdale area.

Jogging, I caught up with Kirby as he reached the pool area, which, along with the tiki bar on the patio, overlooks the front five courts. “Colonel Kirby?”

The man turned. Six-three, great muscle definition in arms and legs, no gut. From fifty feet away, you’d be off thirty years on his age, but up close, his spring-coil hair was spritzed with gray, and his eyes had that faraway look of some older guys I’d known who’d fought in Vietnam.

“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.”

• • •

Y
ou 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.

• • •

K
aren 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.”