“Wassup?” I greeted him.
“Same old,” he said. “I just got a call from our crime guy down at the jail. He looked up that gun you told me about.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “The Norinco something or other.”
“Right,” Graham said. “He told me it is a Chinese make. Inexpensive. Heavily exported. Especially down in South America.”
“Really?” I said. “The druggies like Chinese guns?”
“Apparently,” Graham said. “Wonder if you get hungry again two hours after shooting somebody.”
“Very funny,” I said. “By the way, I just read in your paper this morning about that Kitchen guy quitting the cops. Sounded like it was unexpected.”
“Yeah,” Graham said. “Sounded like that to me, too. But hey, he’s been on the force for a long time. No doubt he had to eat a lot of crap over the years. Maybe he just figured his time had come.”
Yeah,” I said, “Maybe. By the way, I’m supposed to play in some tournament over at the Palmetto Golf Club tomorrow with Conn. Any good?”
“The golf course is good, damn good,” he said. “You must be playing in the Devereaux. I forgot that thing is this week. You’ll enjoy it. Classic old course. While you’re out there, look for an old geezer named Skipper Evans. He’s got some great stories about golf in these parts. Knows a lot about the National, too. Spend half an hour with him, you can get four or five columns, easy.”
“Excellent,” I said. “I’ll look for him.”
Graham rang off as I entered the gates. I went through the same routine of dealing with the Pinkerton guards, drove in, left my car with the valet. Inside the door, the guard told me that Brett was tied up in a meeting, but pointed the way down to the security office and said they were expecting me.
It was in a block of buildings down past the clubhouse tucked between the parking lots and the first fairway. I passed the newfangled press building, which had been built about ten years ago replacing the homey old metal Quonset hut that had long sufficed for the Masters press corps, and came upon a series of low, one-story buildings that appeared to house offices. I knew the last one in the line was where the course superintendent worked, but there were no signs on any of the other doors, so I stood there a minute trying to decide which door led to the security offices.
“Hey!” someone shouted behind me. “What are you doing?” I flinched and turned around. Coming up at me fast, hand on hip holster, was one of the largest men I had ever seen. He would easily tip the scales at 300 pounds and it looked like 400 was a possibility. His head was proportionately small on that huge body, with blondish hair sticking up in a short, bristle-cut, and beady little eyes peering out at me. “This is a secure area,” he said loudly as he came up to stand too closely to me. “You’re not allowed here.”
“Hi, PeeWee,” I said. “Did ya miss me?”
He stared at me, befuddled. I should have been offended that he didn’t remember me, but we went through a similar dance almost every year. Me and everybody else in the press corps.
PeeWee Reynolds was something of a legend, not least because of his highly ironic nickname. His job was guarding the entry to the press room during the Masters. He did it with such ferocity and dedication that he was hired to provide similar security services at most of the other major golf events around the country. I always wondered if he was regulation Pinkerton, or freelance. I suspected the latter, since I was reasonably certain that the Pinkerton company had some regulations about physical conditioning to qualify as a guard. PeeWee had no physical condition beyond immense, but he used it along with his natural orneriness to good effect. PeeWee either couldn’t remember any of our names and faces, secretly enjoyed making us dig for our credentials every year, or he was as stupid as a rock. Every year, some of the guys tried to befriend him, encouraging him to talk about his background or his family or where he lived. But he refused to unbend. He’d sit there at the entrance to the press building, his arms crossed forbodingly across his massive chest, turning his no-neck head to peer at everyone walking in to make sure they had the right credentials, occasionally reaching out with a huge paw to stop someone whose badge he couldn’t see. Someone claimed they had learned he lived in a double-wide in Easley, South Carolina, although that had never been verified.
But he was the gatekeeper at the Masters and almost every other big golf tournament during the year. I happened to be standing near the entrance to the press tent at the Ryder Cup in Brookline in 1999, where PeeWee as usual was guarding the gate when a well-tanned older lady with pouffy white hair started to stroll in.
“Hold on there lady,” he growled at her, moving his bulk with surprising speed to block her way. “You cain’t come waltzing in here. Who do you think you are?”
The lady had eyed him coldly. “I’m with him,” she said, nodding behind PeeWee. He turned and saw former President George H.W. Bush walk up, surrounded by his retinue of Secret Service agents. The President smiled, took the arm of his wife, Barbara, and ushered her into the press room. Check and mate, PeeWee.
“Hacker, Boston Journal,” I said now as PeeWee stood there looking fierce. “Have an appointment in the security office to look at some tapes. Which door is it?”
PeeWee looked like he’d rather shoot me than tell me, but he grudgingly pointed out the door. I smiled, thanked him, and said I’d see him next week. He was silent, but he watched me warily as I turned and walked inside. He was probably trying to remember what he was doing next week. I figured I’d be selected for a cavity search when I showed up for the tournament in a few days.
I went inside. It was quiet and cool, the air conditioner humming softly in the background. After I introduced myself and went through the usual dance of identification and explanation, which only took one call over to Brett to get authorization, I was shown into a back office with a monitor and a player, and they showed me how to plug in the DVD disk and run it. “You want some coffee?” one of the Pinkerton guys asked me as he put the disk in the machine. “It’s pretty damned boring, you ask me. Tain’t nuttin’ on it. We looked. The poh-leece looked. Nuttin’.”
“No thanks on the coffee,” I said. “How does this system work?”
He perched his rear end on the edge of the desk. “Your basic motion-sensor camera, hooked up to a digital camcorder,” he said. “We got ‘er rigged not to trip if it’s just a squirrel or a skunk or a ‘coon wanders in. But anything bulkier than a big dog triggers the camera to run, and sends an alert to the duty desk out front. We got ‘em all around the perimeter of the grounds. If one trips, they all start recordin’ so we can trace anyone comin’ in or out.”
“And the night before they found the body? …”
“Nuttin’,” the guard said. “Now, the funny thing was that one of the cameras tripped that night and started recording. But none of the other ones went off, and there warn’t no alert here at the desk. The tape showed nothing but empty ground. That’s what you got in there,” he said, nodding at the DVD in my hand.
“Where was the camera that went off?” I asked. “Down by the tenth hole?”
“Nope,” the guard said. “It was one way over to the west, near the boneyard.”
“You got your own cemetery here?” I said, wonder in my voice.
He laughed. “Naw. The boneyard is what we call the junkyard.” He looked around furtively. “’Course, they’d prolly fire my ass if they heard me say that. Ain’t no ‘junk’ here at the National. It’s the area where they store the stuff they use during the tournament—metal frames and wood boards for the bleachers, metal rods for the gallery ropes, all that kinda stuff. After the tournament is done, they stack all that crap out there and it looks like a bunch of dinosaur bones all stacked up.”
“The boneyard,” I said, shaking my head.
“But that’s way over yonder,” the guard said, pointing in one direction. “And they found that poor feller way over t’here—” He pointed in the other d
irection. “So even if someone had snuck in at the boneyard and tripped the camera, how’d they get all the way over to the tenth without nobody see’in ‘em? Be awful hard. They’d have to cross the entire golf course draggin’ that poor fella’s body.”
“Shore would,” I said.
“Well,” he said, probably trying to decide if I was making fun of him, “I’ll let you get to it.”
“How long is this tape of nothing?” I asked looking at the disk.
“’Bout an hour. Sure you don’ want some coffee?”
I thanked him, but declined. He left me alone. I popped in the disk and hit the play button. At first, there was just visual static. Then the screen went black. In a few seconds, a fuzzy, gray picture appeared, with white numbers along the bottom that said “02:30:15.” The seconds began ticking off. It was hard to tell what it was I was looking at, since the camera was shooting at night. Even with an infared night vision gizmo, there wasn’t much available light to provide contrast or definition. I picked out what looked like a fence running top to bottom on the screen, and figured that the camera was up on a post, looking down the fence line. There were some barely distinguishable trees or bushes off to the left of the screen, which I figured was the outside of the property line. Inside the fence to the right on the screen, there was a fuzzy pile of something in the foreground. Maybe one of the piles of “bones.”
I watched the screen for a few minutes. Nothing was moving. No shadowy figures dragging a body around. The only thing moving was the seconds and minutes ticking away on the counter. I hit fast-forward and let it run for a while, then stopped it, started over, hit play again. Same thing. Fuzzy, gray, silent and still. I hit stop and sent it back to the beginning. I hit play again and watched carefully. The video static was followed by the black. Then the picture came up again, showing nothing. Or did it? I rewound and did it again. And again.
I went out into the main office and asked my Pinkerton friend if he knew how to view the disk one frame at a time. He did, and showed me. He watched while I fiddled with the machine, until I had found the first ten or so frames that the camera had captured after it had tripped that night. I went through them one at a time.
“There,” I said finally, stopping on the fourth frame. “Do you see that?”
“Son of a dad-blamed gun,” the guard said. “I sure as hell do.”
There was a shadow, almost indiscernible, in the top left corner of the screen. It lasted for less than five more frames, but there was definitely a movement of some kind. Someone—or something—had been there that night.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “Ever one of us plus the Augusta cops looked at that thing six times to Sunday. Didn’t notice a thing.”
“You were looking for an intruder,” I said. “But this was someone who knew where the system was and how to defeat it. I’m not sure how, but whoever it was managed to freeze the camera. Look at the trees and stuff…” I ran the fast-forward and got the usual gray picture of the fence. “You see? Nothing is moving. I mean, literally nothing. The leaves are frozen in place. I don’t know what the weather was that night, but I’ll bet there’s usually some kind of breeze, especially at night.”
“Son of a …” The Pinkerton guy was beside himself.
“I don’t know if they did something to the camera, or maybe hacked the software,” I said. “You’d better get your tech guys to look at that. But at least now we’re pretty sure that someone was on the grounds that night. Now all we need to do is find out who.”
“Yeah,” the guy said. “No problem.”
I stopped off at Brett’s office on my way out. I told him what I’d just learned.
“Really?” he said, amazed. “I thought everyone looked at that tape. Even the cops. Pretty amazing that no one else spotted that shadow.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Amazing.”
He looked at me funny. “Do I detect a note of cynicism in your voice?” he said, smiling.
“Well, it is pretty strange that nobody paid enough attention,” I said. “But then, a lot of things are getting pretty strange.”
“Such as?” he asked. He wasn’t smiling anymore.
“Such as the guy down at the cop shop, who’s apparently been running homicide investigations for years around here, suddenly decides its time to quit. Right after he gives me a lecture about how nobody is going to push him around.”
“You think someone pressured him?”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” I said.
“Who?” he asked.
“I was going to ask you that,” I said.
“How …?” He stopped and looked at me. Not smiling this time. “You don’t think anyone here …?”
“I don’t know, Brett,” I said. “From what I’ve been told, the only real power group in Augusta is right here. What I see is a murder case, happened at Augusta National, cop in charge suddenly retires. That’s a pretty direct connection if someone is putting pressure on someone to shitcan the case.”
He sat there thinking. His phone began ringing. He looked at me, and for a second I thought I saw something in his eyes. Worry. Concern. Wariness. He looked at the ringing phone and sighed.
“Keep digging,” he said. “Keep me posted.”
Chapter Thirteen
Conn Thackery picked me up early the next morning. I transferred my golf clubs to the trunk of his Mercedes and we worked our way over to Washington Road and down to the Interstate, stopping for coffee at the Krispy Kreme. Then he headed east, over the Savannah River bridge and into South Carolina. The day promised to be clear and sunny, the few clouds in the sky painted a pretty pink in the early morning sun.
“How’s your case going?” Conn asked as we motored along.
“Troubling,” I said. “Things aren’t adding up.”
“Somehow,” he said, “That doesn’t surprise me. Those fellows at the National are a piece of work. Usually takes three or four passes before you can come within shouting distance of the truth with those guys.”
I filled him in with what I had learned in the last day or two. He whistled at the news of Enrico de la Paz, the Colombian killer who may or may not be on the loose. And he laughed when he heard about the security tape.
“Those Pinkerton guys dress well, but they’re not exactly your top of the line Dick Tracy crimebusters,” he chuckled. “Whoever is involved in this thing is obviously way over their head.”
“Maybe over the head of the Augusta constables, too,” I said.
“Doesn’t take much,” he said. “Listen, we’ve got a great day here. Let’s just go out and play some golf, have some laughs. Let’s forget about all the bad stuff going on back there—” he motioned over his shoulder in the general direction of Augusta—“and have some fun.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
In a few minutes he pulled off the Interstate and followed a winding road through gently rolling hills and piney woods into the town of Aiken, South Carolina. We rolled slowly through the mostly empty grid of streets in the center of town. There were a handful of traffic lights, three or four impressive church steeples reaching into the blue morning sky, a couple of brick bank buildings and a street or two of shops. It all looked quaint, slightly upscale and well preserved.
“This old town used to be quite the place,” Conn told me. “During the late 1800s it was what Florida is today—the place where the rich went to get away from the ice and snow up North. Railroad went right through downtown here, and from January to April, the trains were full every day. Rich people, their servants, steamer trunks full of clothes…it must have been quite a scene.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Well, Henry Flagler started pushing his railroad further and further south down into Florida, draining swamps and selling building lots along the ocean as he went,” Conn said. “That kinda killed the tourist market around here. The Depression finished it off. But a lot of the horsey set stayed. In fact,
Devereaux Milburn, the guy whose tournament we’re playing in today, was a champion polo player and World War I hero. He was pals with guys like Tommy Hitchcock, Averill Harriman and the hoi polloi like that.”
We headed south out of downtown, and I could tell that Aiken had once been a wealthy enclave. Huge brick mansions began to appear on both sides of the road, shaded by towering magnolias and waves of azalea hedges in full and colorful bloom. Some still had large barns and riding paddocks, with whitewashed rails and jumps; others fronted on grassy pastures where graceful horses grazed in the morning sun, snorts of warm breath flowing from their nostrils in the morning air.
Conn turned down what looked like a residential street and in a few hundred yards turned again into a long driveway that led up a hill and into some woods. I didn’t see a sign. Apparently they liked to keep their golf clubs a secret here in Aiken.
He pulled into one of the spaces tucked between the thick stand of pine trees that made for a haphazard parking lot. There was a low, whitewashed bungalow to the left, a tee in front of it across the main drive and another one-story shack off to the right. After driving through the tonier parts of Aiken, it felt like we had arrived in some kind of backwoods clearing. Not only was there absolutely nothing remotely ostentatious about this place, it wouldn’t have surprised me to find someone cooking up a fresh batch of hootch around the corner, eyes and ears cocked for the revenuers.
“This is it!” Conn said happily. “Welcome to the Palmetto. This place is the anti-National.”
Conn popped open his trunk and an elderly black man materialized.
“Mornin’ Mr. Conn,” the man said as he began to unload our golf clubs.
“Hello, William,” Conn said, shaking his hand. “How’s the Missus and that boy of yours?”
William’s lined face lit up as he smiled. “Fine, fine,” he said. “Gerald has one more year to go at the university. He’s doin’ well, doin’ well. Lookin’ to go into the law school.”
“Good Lord,” Conn said, “I gotta talk him out of that! He’ll take all my business away!”
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