A Hole In One

by Paul Weininger

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  A HOLE

  IN

  ONE

  Paul Weininger

  A Hole in One

  © Paul & Helen Weininger, 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  For permission requests, contact the author at:

  Bandy Publishing

  P.O. Box 433

  Oaks, PA 19456

  First Edition

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, incidents,

  organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally.

  ISBN: 9798734239834

  Editor: Hugh Gardner

  Printed in the United States of America.

  For my wife, Helen,

  the love of my life.

  One

  It was 10:00 a.m. in front of the synagogue when the first bullet struck the Rabbi’s left shoulder. The second bullet broke two ribs and caused one of his lungs to collapse resulting in immediate respiratory failure: causing him to fall hard to the ground. In the ambulance, he heard someone say, “He has a pneumothorax as a result of the gun shot and we’ll have to aspirate him,” and then he passed out. As his lungs received some air, he snapped up for a moment and heard the EMT say, “The aspiration did the trick in getting his breathing and his color back to normal. We’ll operate inside.” Rabbi Neil Bloom realized that he was alive, then fell into dreaming of a sermon he had given at the synagogue.

  When he awoke in the recovery room three hours later, Carol was sitting in the chair next to his bed just as his surgeon, Dr. Shapiro, arrived. All he could recollect from the operation was his being told by the doctor, “Rabbi, the big guy upstairs must’ve been on your side today, because you’re going to be just fine in about one to two months.”

  Shapiro had saved his life. “We extracted the bullets from your shoulder. We also repaired and re-inflated your lung and you will heal normally within a few weeks. Your ribs will heal by themselves but will take more time and will hurt whenever you cough or sneeze. So, don’t cough or sneeze,” he said with a smile. “We should be able to release you to go home by the end of the week. But,” he emphasized, “none of your Rabbinical services for at least six weeks. Just bed rest for now until I see you again for your follow-up visit. Be sure to make an appointment with my nurse before you leave the hospital once I release you.”

  Nurse Lucy Warner told the Rabbi that Detectives Pratt and Sommerville were waiting patiently outside the recovery room to talk to him. He asked the nurse to tell the detectives that he was still in a deep sleep and probably would be for another two hours.

  Carol was in his room and he wanted to hug and kiss her so badly because she was not only his friend and frequent companion, but his mistress as well; he was thrilled to see her again, having survived the surgery.

  Her husband, Jules Jacobson, was a weekly congregant of the synagogue and twenty-three-years older than Carol. He had spent twenty-five years as a broker, having started with another brokerage office and when he thought he could steal some of their potential buyers, he opened his own business called Heaven’s Resorts Real Estate in Sedona. He had built it up over nineteen years, but as more youthful agents began moving in, his office became just one of thirteen such offices in and around town. With new competition having taken over most of the real estate openings, his business went into Chapter Seven. With the demise of his business, he attempted to take some of the other real estate broker’s customers. Jules wasn’t the most scrupulous businessman in the city, and when the other agents found out what he was doing, the Real Estate Commission of Arizona blackballed him. As a result, he couldn’t even get a job brokering for another agency. Money soon became an issue for the couple, but Carol told him not to worry because she would figure out how to deal with it.

  Bloom couldn’t believe that Jules had no idea of their sexual relationship and their love for each other. However, the bullets in his body made him wonder if Jules did know about their relationship. What other motive could there be for somebody shooting him at his own front door?

  Carol Jacobson was twenty-four and had the face and body of an auburn-haired Christie Brinkley when she was Carol’s age. Rabbi Neil Bloom was forty-four. He figured that Carol liked older men. He realized that he didn’t do so badly for a Rabbi, getting this girl into his bed. Bloom was almost as old as Jules, not overly handsome, but no Quasimodo either. He bore a slight resemblance to actor John Cusack.

  Rabbi Bloom was five-foot, ten-inches tall, always clean shaven, and bald on top, leaving him with hair only on the sides of his head by the time he was twenty-nine. He did not resemble the stereotype of what a Rabbi should look like. As the leader of a Reformed Synagogue, he was not required to wear a large black hat with curly sideburns, a long beard, or a skullcap called a yarmulke. He looked and dressed like any other upper-class professional.

  Bloom had never taken a wife, but not because he wasn’t good looking enough. What women were attracted to in Bloom was his position in the community. However, when Carol indicated her attraction to him two years before by her very flirtatious manner at a community event, his interests boldly led toward getting her into his bed. After all, having attracted a lover as gorgeous as this young nymphet was like winning the Power Ball Lottery.

  The nurse left them alone with the wraparound rod curtains closed around his bed, and Carol gave him a gentle hug and a deep, long-lasting kiss.

  Two hours later, the nurse returned to check his vitals and woke them both up. “Mrs. Bloom, I must ask you to leave now. It’s past visiting hours and I need to take your husband’s vitals and try to get him ready to be released tomorrow.” Obviously neither one of them had any intention of correcting the nurse about their non-marital status. It really wasn’t any of her business, but Bloom realized she had a job to do, and he wasn’t going to interfere if it might hasten his release from the pre-morgue, as he called it. That’s how he always viewed hospitals in the past; you come in walking but ride out on a gurney to be taken to the morgue. The nurse told him that all his vitals were within normal ranges.

  Carol went home to Jules. Four hours later, Jules went out to buy a pack of cigarettes and that’s when she called Neil at his hospital bed and told him of the conversation she and Jules had when she got home. She said that he beg
an his questioning with, “Where the hell have you been, I’ve been calling your cell all afternoon and you didn’t answer it. Why the hell not?”

  Neil asked her, “And how did you handle that?”

  She replied how she felt bewildered by Jules’ grilling and that she had to stare at him awhile to come up with a viable reply. “First off, I went to visit Rabbi Bloom in the hospital. You do know he was shot, don’t you? And there are signs all over the hospital letting visitors know that all cell phones must be turned off. After my visit, I went window-shopping at the stores in downtown Sedona and forgot that my cell phone was still off because of the hospital rules. I just neglected to turn it on again. I’m sorry if that pissed you off, but if you take a close look, you’ll notice that I am home before 6:00 p.m., so what’s all the fuss about?”

  “How did he take your answer?” asked the Rabbi.

  She told him that Jules said, “I just don’t like not being able to get hold of you. Why the hell did you go visit the Rabbi? You’re not even a congregant. I go to synagogue every week and instead of you coming with me, you usually decide to go shopping or out with the girls.”

  “Was he satisfied with your answer, Carol?”

  She replied, “Not really, he just kept his questions coming at me like a machine gun so I explained to him why I had come to see you by telling him crossly, ‘Look, Jules, I went and visited the Rabbi because I was representing you and me as a couple, since I knew that you alone wouldn’t go visit him.’”

  “Did that end the conversation with Jules?” Neil asked.

  “Not really,” she replied. “He then asked me, ‘What did you and Bloom talk about?’”

  “I told him, ‘Oh, just the usual stuff.’ That I had asked you how you were feeling; how much pain you were in. I also asked him if he knew why anyone would shoot you and if he did, who was it? I said that I couldn’t understand why any person might want to do something so despicable, especially to a Rabbi. ‘Do you have any idea why a person might want to kill him, Jules?’”

  Jules seemed to take a step back. “What makes you think that I would have any idea why somebody would try and kill the Rabbi? No one at the synagogue came up with any names and I certainly never thought about it.”

  “Neil,” Carol continued, “I wasn’t convinced by Jules’ denial and suspect that he might be the person who shot you, if he knows about our affair. There was something in the way he’s been behaving lately that gave me the impression that he knows or at least suspects us. Anyway, darling, Jules just kept up his interrogation. He asked me very suspiciously, ‘What else did the two of you talk about? After all, you were with him quite a long time even before you went shopping.’ I simply answered, ‘What makes you think I was with him a long time before I went shopping?’ Jules response was, ‘Because I called your girlfriends to find out if they knew where you were. Remember you didn’t answer your cell and none of your friends except Rachell had any idea. Rachell knew that you went to the hospital to visit the Rabbi and said that she hadn’t seen you all afternoon. So, I’m guessing, you must have been at the hospital a few hours. Is that your idea of a couple’s representation of a visit?’”

  “That really pissed me off, Neil. I suspected that Jules was skillfully trying to get at whether I was having an affair with you. I decided that I was just not going to give him the ammunition he was seeking, so I reacted angrily and said, ‘Don’t be a wise-ass, Jules. Yes, I did stay awhile but I was certainly not there for hours, nor did I tell you that I went shopping with Rachell after I left the hospital. What I said was that I went shopping and by that I meant I was alone, Jules. I was not with my girlfriends, so it’s not unusual for Rachell not to have seen me all afternoon. Neil asked me about you, and if you were still going to the Sabbath services even though he was not able to be there to conduct them.’ Then he asked me what I was doing with myself while you were at services. So, I told him that I kept busy by just shopping around town.”

  “I made a mistake, though,” she went on, “by using your first name, and Jules caught on. He asked me, ‘When did you and the Rabbi get to calling each other by your first names? I don’t even call him Rabbi Neil at the synagogue. I never heard you refer to him just by his first name.’ Jules really pounced on me with that one. I told him, ‘It was in the hospital actually. After a few minutes of my calling him Rabbi, he finally said, ‘Please, call me Neil,’ and from then on, I did. Why the third-degree, Jules?”

  “Well let’s just say I heard a few things. Some of your explanation sounded suspicious at first, that’s all, darling,” he said as he tried to pull his foot out of his mouth.

  “What do you mean, you heard a few things?” I asked him.

  “Well, at the synagogue, people are talking about the Rabbi having an affair with one of the congregant’s wives. No one mentioned names. Naturally, I get crazy jealous with someone as young and beautiful as you. You know how much I love you and I get really nervous when it comes to you.”

  “So, what you are saying is that you really do believe the bullshit you’re hearing about our wonderful Rabbi and now you don’t even trust me,” I said indignantly.

  “Oh, don’t be like that honey,” Jules replied. “Of course, I trust you implicitly.”

  Two

  When he was ten-years old, John Herbert Pratt loved watching the Johnny Carson show, especially Johnny’s humor, more so than his guests. Because he liked Carson so much, in addition to also hating his own middle name Herbert, he legally changed his name to Johnny H. Pratt, which now became his proper name.

  Johnny grew up in a bedroom community a little north of Dallas. From the age of eight until sixteen he played baseball, lacrosse, soccer, and skate boarding, then at ten he had taken up karate and earned a black belt in Tae Kwan Do by seventeen. He intended to join the Dallas Police Academy. His goal was to become a Texas State Ranger.

  After having earned his third-degree black belt by the age of eighteen, he became a karate instructor at a friend’s dojo. In just one additional year he achieved two higher degrees of black belts and became a Master Black Belt, the highest form of this martial art. This enabled him to open his own dojo.

  He spent three years teaching students from ages eight to sixty-five. He felt that anyone younger or older than those age limits would be too fragile for the sport. At age twenty-two he joined the Police Academy and became a police officer, one of approximately sixty-five hundred already on duty in Dallas.

  Three years later he married Denise. Then two years into their marriage, she gave birth to their son, Thomas. Denise worked at an assembly line warehouse, packaging items purchased by television viewers of the “H.O.M.E. TV” shopping channel, which stood for Home Ordering Made Easy. She worked until her water broke while in the ladies’ room. She then took a maternity leave for three months after Tom’s birth.

  A few years later, Johnny Pratt was promoted to detective in Dallas but no increase in money came with it. He began looking for employment elsewhere and found that Sedona, Arizona was recruiting for an experienced detective. He flew to Sedona for an interview, met with a Marshal Brian Whitaker who, if Johnny were hired, would eventually become his boss. After the Whitaker interview, both the District Attorney and the Mayor of Sedona saw Pratt for the final stages of the interviewing process.

  All three agreed that Johnny was an ace. They made him an offer so much greater than what he was earning in Dallas that he would now be able to move his wife and son, buy a house, and his wife would no longer need to work. He accepted the offer and moved with his wife and three-year-old son to Sedona.

  Pratt was now forty-eight. His twenty-year-old son Tom applied to the Dallas Police Academy, like he himself did before he became a police officer in the same city, with the intention of moving back to Sedona once he graduated and becoming a local police officer, but decided to remain in Dallas instead.

  After all his years with the Sedona Police, the detective began to resemble Columbo from the old 1980s TV seri
es. Pratt had dark naturally wavy-curly hair and must have loved that show’s re-runs because his appearance was so similar. He even wore a light gray colored windbreaker (rather than a raincoat) even in ninety-degree weather. His wrinkled off-white shirt, thin dark tie, and half-smoked unlit cigar in his right hand completed the Columbo look, though at six-foot-four he was much taller than Peter Falk looked on TV.

  Once Tom moved out of their home, Denise had taken a job working for a pharmacy in town handling resident and tourist questions about where they could find certain over-the-counter medications and other products such as hair needs and make-up. When the customers were ready to leave the store, Denise was the one who cashed them out.

  Detective Pratt made arrangements for his colleague Detective Jason Somerville of Flagstaff to meet at the hospital where the Rabbi had been taken. The detectives waited for Rabbi Bloom to wake up in his hospital bed after the surgery, so they could come in and speak to him. In the waiting area, Pratt and Somerville dozed off for a few hours while Neil and Carol did the same, dozing on his hospital bed. The detectives never noticed Carol leaving Bloom’s room. Inside the room they found Bloom sitting up and ready to be questioned. They introduced themselves and Pratt began his questions. “Rabbi, when did your wife leave the hospital? I didn’t notice her walk by.”

  Bloom was quick to respond. “Oh, that was not my wife, just a visitor who is actually married to one of my congregants. Very pleasant lady and nice of her to come and visit.”

  “And a real looker too, as some of the doctors tell me,” commented Detective Sommerville.

  “Yes, she is, but my devotion is to God and not to the fine women of our community. That’s not to say that I am not grateful for their kindnesses.”

  “Rabbi, do you have any idea who wanted to kill you?” asked Pratt.

  “Kill me? What makes you think someone wants to kill me?” he replied.

  Pratt was taken aback by his question: “Well. Rabbi, why else do you think you were shot twice? Do you think someone mistook you for a deer? I’m sorry, Rabbi, I don’t mean to be sarcastic, but your question seems a little foolish after you got shot two times. After all, why would anyone want to shoot you, especially so close to your heart, if killing you was not their intent?”