Murder Is My Racquet (12 page)

“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.”

• • •

A
fter 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.

• • •

I
t 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.

• • •

“Y
ou’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.”

• • •

“W
hy,” 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?”

• • •

E
xercising 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.

• • •

“K
aren?”

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.”

“Yes.” Bourke got quieter. “Casey couldn’t walk, much less play tennis. Lying on his back every waking hour, the sores that…” She shook her head.

“Did you talk about… ending things?”

“Casey was very religious. Even if my husband could have
taken his own life, he wouldn’t have. And I certainly couldn’t do it for him.”

“But Solomon Schiff could.”

Karen Bourke looked at me, that strength back in her eyes. “Casey begged him, and Sol deflected it, tried everything to cheer my husband up. But the doctors told me there was no hope of improvement, and with that Kevorkian man being prosecuted up in Michigan, they were scared of acting themselves.” She seemed to steady herself. “So Sol and I both did some… God, ‘research,’ I’d guess you’d call it, about how to ‘simulate’ heart failure, which is a pretty typical complication from a stroke. And one night, when we’d all come to peace about the decision,” Bourke’s pace of speaking accelerating, “Sol took a pillow and pressed it over Casey’s face and smothered him.”

After a few more strides, I said, “But Mr. Schiff first… negotiated a return promise, right?”

“Right.” Bourke looked down at her tennis shoes now. “Sol told me about the promise to his niece. He made me agree that if he was ever like… in a situation like Casey’s, that I’d do the same for him.”

“Only Mr. Schiff wasn’t—”

“—paralyzed?” She grunted, but not like a laugh. “Just by that promise. And by his pride, I suppose.” Bourke looked at a court we were passing, two older men playing scrappy singles. “Sol was sick with cancer. He kept it from most people, and he still played well. But Sol himself told me that opponents he used to beat soundly were now creeping up on him, and he was afraid he couldn’t maintain his game much longer.”

I thought back to Lynell Kirby sensing the same thing. “And Mr. Schiff couldn’t tolerate that.”

“No. And I also think that, after seeing Casey the way… confined to his bed for so long.” Another shake of the head. “I think Sol didn’t want to wither away in a hospital somewhere with tubes sticking out of him.”

“So to keep his promise to his niece, and to cover the mercy killing, you made it look like a burglary.”

“He made it look that way. Slashed his furniture, smashed his things.” A sad smile. “Except for the tennis trophies, of course. He couldn’t bear to hurt those.”

I’d registered that at his house. “But why stage it like a homicide at all? Why not have it look like just plain heart failure?”

“We talked about that, too. Sol had his pride, Rory, as I said before. And the man who could play three matches a day felt his overall level of conditioning would make it hard for people to believe that his heart would simply ‘give out’ in his sleep. Sol thought some kind of trauma—like ‘struggling with a violent burglar’—was necessary.”

“And the velvet handcuffs?”

“We actually tried it first the week before without anything. A ‘practice session,’ Sol called it. But each time I… pressed the pillow onto his face, even with me sitting on his chest, he’d flail away with his arms.” A sadder smile. “The instinct to survive, I guess. He hadn’t had that… problem with Casey, on account of the stroke.”

“And so Mr. Schiff came up with the idea of the handcuffs, so he’d be restrained—”

“—we ran the cuffs through the brass rods at the foot of his bed—”

“—and it would look as though the ‘burglar’ had held his wrists while wearing gloves.”

Just a nod now. “And he had me carry away all his… marital aids, so the police wouldn’t think of anything ‘velvet’
but
‘gloves.’”

Bourke’s story was consistent with the facts.

Almost a laugh from her now. “You know what Sol called it?”

“Called what?”

“His agreement with me, that I’d do for him what he’d done for Casey.”

I said, “A debt to the Devil?”

Bourke stopped cold in her tracks. “Who told you about—?”

“It’s more what I’m going to tell everyone else.”

She stared at me now. “Everyone.”

“That Solomon Schiff died while trying to protect himself from a violent burglar.”

I’d have walked Karen Bourke back to her condo, but after giving me a desperate hug, the woman excused herself, saying she really had to be alone for a while.

STEPHEN LONGACRE’S
GREATEST MATCH

S
TEPHEN
H
UNTER

S
tephen Longacre picked things up quickly; that was his talent. He gave them up quickly as well; that was his curse. He just couldn’t stay interested. He flunked out of Choate so resoundingly that neither Groton nor Essex would consider him, and finally ended up in a third-rate prep school in his mother’s hometown in Baltimore, spending the cold Maryland winter well fortified with scotch, his drink as it was his father’s.

When he came home to the largest cattle ranch in west Arkansas for the summer of 1948 as a semialcoholic with a three-pack-a-day habit, seventeen going on thirty-nine, his mission ostensibly was to prepare for the fall term at a somewhat better place, if his father could buy his way in, and, more generally, to think about some hideous destination called—how boring!—the future. Of course it was only a matter of a few days before the scandals started.

The state trooper Earl Swagger arrested him for speeding, driving under the influence, and providing alcohol to a minor, a Sally Mae Ford, fourteen, of Mount Ida, whom Stephen had
spied riding a bicycle, stopped, and chatted up. He could be a charmer, when he wanted. Then he’d gotten the girl drunk. He was driving her home at four in the morning when Earl arrested him and he spent the night in the Blue Eye lockup until his mother called her great friend Sam Vincent, who was the Polk County prosecutor, and got Stephen let out.