Murder Is My Racquet by Otto Penzler Page B

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 apeach 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—alefty 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