Straight Pool

by JJ Partridge

  Why did he ask me? Because, Charlie would wrongly assume my sympathy because he looked for class affinity. I would, he would think, understand the interlocking relationships, institutions, education paths, and financial affluence of Club members; I would appreciate how the Haversham Golf Club’s committee system operated, the chummy atmosphere of Building Committee meetings, and a reliance on an insurance broker who likely was somebody’s friend if not a member himself!

  I deflected Charlie’s plea by playing lawyer. “The insurance company is going to investigate, wait for all the numbers to come in, and decide how much it is going to pay, and when. Arson isn’t a defense under the typical fire insurance policy, unless the fire was set to get the proceeds, which didn’t happen. At the membership meeting, you should be prepared to answer questions that you can answer, about the purchasing process, the Building Committee, and the insurance broker, and don’t try to answer any questions on coverage. Leave that to the lawyers or the broker. Short, simple answers. And, blaming others isn’t going to help!”

  “But….”

  Tramonti’s right hand banged the table, jolting Charlie into silence, pulverizing what was left of Charlie’s poise. “Who’s representing the Club?” I interjected.

  “Gordon Ackley,” Tramonti replied. Of Brinkley & Alley, an archetypical ‘white shoe’ law firm that specialized in real estate development. Ackley, a contemporary of mine, is a stiff, reeking of a preening superiority, the kind of lawyer whom other lawyers instinctively dislike. But smart.

  “Finally,” Flanaghan said, “Least we forget, Oliver Randall.” With that, Bacigalupi, whose aquiline features had thus far shown no interest in Charlie’s plight, raised his eyes to stare at Charlie who was patting a damp forehead with a pocket handkerchief. The professional observer had come to life.

  “Ollie Randall,” Charlie said in a disparaging voice, his eyes avoiding everyone at the table, “lived in a beat-up trailer, next to the family’s crappy house and barn on the property Calibrese bought from his father’s estate. One of a miserable lot of drunks and lay-abouts. I was concerned he’d cause trouble during construction so when the land was being grubbed out for the golf holes, I got the Club to hire him, despite our misgivings, as a handyman working with the maintenance people on the fencing, keeping out the riffraff. But he was incorrigible. Despite being warned several times, the week before the fire, he shows up drunk at work, a surly insulting drunk. I was there with our new club manager who took one look at Randall and fired Randall on the spot. He had to call the Westerly cops to get him off the property. How could we have known that he would take revenge…?”

  “The point is—” Flanaghan began.

  “It’s just not fair!” Charlie lamented, his hands raised to make his point. His face had evasion and self-pity written on it. “Why should I take the blame because the fire destroyed our records, that we don’t have an insurance policy in hand, or have any responsibility for Randall burning down the clubhouse? And this rumor? It’s not fair!”

  Haversham Golf Club had its scapegoat.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Despite Tramonti’s objection that it would take too long, I insisted that we inspect the fire scene. We followed Route 1 toward Charlestown and left the highway at stone pillars incised ‘Haversham Golf Club’ and ‘Private.’ We drove up an incline bounded by cedars to find Benno Bacigalupi getting out a gray Malibu parked in front of a gazebo-like structure marked ‘Valet and Bag Drop.’ Two hundred feet away, on the crest of a knoll circled by bales of hay, a blackened fieldstone chimney was a lonely remnant of what had been the elegant clubhouse of the brochure. The acrid smell of burnt wood and wet ash lay heavily despite a brisk wind off the Sound.

  We left Oboe complaining in the SUV with the windows half open as Benno rolled out a set of plans on the hood of his car. “I got these from the architects.” He picked through the plans until he found one that laid out the site. “From what I can figure, the clubhouse fire started here,” Benno said, pointing to a spot in the main structure, “under this porch. It was used for temporary storage for paper goods, everything from toilet paper to menus, for the opening weekend. The way the drafts would have run, the flames would shoot up this stairwell like a flue into the locker rooms and from there, the kitchen and dining rooms.” He turned to the knoll and we did as well. Against the background of a misted-over sun, the foundation’s fieldstone walls folded into the rise and formed a catch basin for debris; on the side of the knoll, what had been landscaped beds of flowers and decorative grasses, were burnt out or ground into mush.

  “This is where they found Randall,” he said returning to the plan, indicating a smaller building marked ‘maintenance.’ “He started the fire in the clubhouse, using gasoline as the accelerant. That shows it was planned if it was brought up here, although Charlie tells me they got their own gas tanks at the golf cart garage on the other side of the clubhouse. So maybe not. Then, down to the maintenance building where they kept supplies and greens mowers and other small equipment”—his fingers went left to right on the plan—“and he set off the fireworks stored there for their opening night party. Forty-five minutes worth of starbursts, roman candles, rockets, the most spectacular, newest and loudest New Jersey could supply. Caused multiple explosions including one that blew the roof off!” He shook his head at the thought. “Can’t imagine bein’ so dumb as to store fireworks on site! The Westerly fire marshal told me they couldn’t use their pumpers with the explosions going off. Randall was so crisp, he got identified by a back brace.”

  Benno rolled up the plans and stacked them in the back seat of his car. Tramonti said, “Let’s take a look,” and led us up a cart path carved into the knoll and lined by blue stone walls to a strand of yellow police tape that blocked our way; behind it, a Westerly cop was in a bantering conversation with two men in green overalls taking videos of the debris. After a show of Tramonti’s I.D., the cop loosened the tape and let us pass. To our left, two front-loaders blowing blue exhaust, with treads evidencing clods of chewed up landscaping, were heaving the carbonized remains of a porch into huge mobile dumpsters; to the right, down the cart path a hundred feet or so, was a tee box seemingly untouched by the fire. We gained the crest and peered over a foundation wall into an odious cavern of charred wood, gray ash, and muck. Tramonti lit a cigarette as he and Benno identified lockers, spa equipment, a stove, upended refrigerators flashing a metallic brilliance in the jumble, an elevator slot—where was the car—and a stairway against an inside wall going nowhere. The girders that had supported the building’s post and beam construction had been transformed into blackened pick-up-sticks.

  While they ruminated, I looked up from the overpowering stench from the pit to the prospect of emerald fairways to the north bordered by cedars, oaks, and pines, outcroppings of ledge, and a string of silvery ponds. “That must be the ninth or eighteenth,” I said half aloud, indicating a well-bunkered, undulating green nestled in a hollow of the ridge, and imagined golfers lining up putts as their friends, with long, cool drinks in their hands, watched from the wraparound porch. A lot of very expensive enjoyment had crashed and burned.

  A dog’s bark distracted us from the wreckage. A border collie raced up the knoll and joined us, an ungainly, friendly animal with big paws, white, bristled muzzle and groomed coat, his tail beating against our legs. Benno ignored the dog but both Tramonti and I stroked its head and I found a Westerly tag with a number and the name ‘Shadrach.’ Apparently happy for companionship, Shadrach followed us to what had been the front entrance to the clubhouse, now an intact, pillared entryway to nowhere. From there, we looked south toward Wynomet Pond and rolling, narrow fairways bordered by swaths of swaying grasses, pot bunkers, hummocks, and gorse, obviously, the ‘Scottish Nine’ links from the Club’s brochure. In the distance, a house capped by a silo or large cupola stood at the pond’s edge. ‘Charlie’s,’ I thought, and remembered that I was standing on Charlie’s ‘finger’ of land, the Quonnies’ ‘signal hill.
’

  With the collie trailing us, we continued around the carnage past a burnt-out pro shop identified by a heap of ruined golf equipment and racks of spoiled clothing and took a wider cart path down the knoll through scorched trees toward what remained of the maintenance building. Blackened masonry walls, standing like ruins in an archeological dig, held a pile of rubble; what might have been a garage door and a crumpled metal roof lay nearby. “The fireworks crew got here late from Jersey and had a problem setting up so they decided to leave the stuff in here overnight,” Benno said with scorn. “Stu – pid!”

  With nothing more to see, we retraced our steps up the knoll. “Security?” I asked Benno.

  “They did, and they didn’t. Keyless entry with security codes plus locks, all kinds of burglar detection devices, with audible alarms on all doors and windows in the clubhouse. Not sure about here, but I’d think they would have audible alarms on the doors and windows, and a tie-in to a central control box within the clubhouse. I’ll get that information from the alarm company. A security patrol checked the clubhouse every couple of hours starting at eight, did a quick look around, and went off to their next stop. The Club kept a guard until eight at the main gate, and it planned to have a night watchman on site beginning with the grand opening.” He shook his head warily. “Makes you wonder, right? Whoever set the fire gotta have known that. Came in either from a back trail or from the highway after the guard left, did the job, and got out the same way, … or didn’t, if it was Randall, which it probably was. There’s a maintenance trail that goes out toward where he lived. Almost too easy, because under the porch, where they stored the paper goods, just lattice work behind a cheap lock, easy to bust through, and no alarm. Open a few boxes of paper goods, spread a little gas, and….”

  “Sprinklers?” I asked.

  “Inside the clubhouse to meet building codes. But not under the porches. The place went up too quickly for sprinklers to be of much use anyway. When the sprinklers started spraying, the security system—that was in a room in the basement—sent out the alarm, and then was burnt out. Dunn’s Corner Fire District sent the first truck, a small pumper, at”—he checked a flip-up moleskin notebook—“nine fifty-six, got here ten minutes after the alarm went off. Took one look and called in Westerly and Charlestown, which took another twenty to roll in. Something as big as this gets started our here in the boonies and there’s no chance for the locals. Makes them ‘chimney savers.’ ”

  At the parking lot, the collie, attracting Oboe’s barks, ambled off to a paved trail that disappeared into the woods. Tramonti soon had a fretful Oboe pulling on a leash, leaving marks on nearby bushes and rocks. I heard Tramonti say to Benno, “You gotta stay up on this. It’s important we know….”

  “Everybody thinks it’s straight forward, so maybe it is,” Benno replied. “Except, how does Randall get stuck inside after he sets off the fireworks?” Benno opened the door to his car and slid inside. “With a cracked skull? And why set the fire only a week after he made his threats against the Club? Was he that drunk or crazy? And they tell me he was a little guy, scrawny, with a limp. How does he get up here? Walk? With a gasoline can maybe? I don’t know.”

  * * *

  A short time later, we were heading north on the South County Trail, a three hundred year old road that links the shoreline to metropolitan Providence, in a parade of slow moving traffic led by a Charlestown police cruiser enforcing the twenty-five mile per hour speed limit near Town Hall and the Narragansett Tribe’s health center, smoke lodge, and headquarters. Tramonti, who drives as though speed limits are suggestions, was frustrated by our pace but didn’t dare to plug in the dashboard flasher and defy a local cop. It was time to ask why he hadn’t told me about Ugo Calibrese’s involvement in the development of Haversham Golf Club.

  “I was going to,” he demurred. Then louder, “Look at that guy!” as he braked as the Ford Focus in front of us yanked into a dirt trail without the benefit of a turn signal. ‘What, give you a clue…?’

  “You should have.”

  “Okay, I know. I was afraid you wouldn’t do it if you thought this was about politics. But, it isn’t. This is about Dani.” His voice left me no doubt as to his sincerity. “Charlie embarrasses her again, and she’s back to the shrinks. If Charlie had a conflict while representing the Club, Fausto thinks Sonny will turn it into a public spectacle, maybe at the Real Estate Commission, on his broker license. What’s that gonna do to Dani?” I was about to point out that such a gambit would implicate Calibrese in something unsavory when he complained, “Just to embarrass me!”

  A reforming Police Commissioner could have a dunce or a business failure for a brother-in-law, but not one caught in blatant illegality or a conflict-of-interest scandal. It would be manna from heaven for Sonny Russo, a payback for his embarrassment when Tramonti, appointed by Sonny through Fausto’s influence, shut down Sonny’s patronage operation run by Chief Daniel Patrick McCarthy, and began to push for change in the famously inefficient, ill-trained, and politically gutted Department. Over the past two years, Tony Tramonti, through his choice of enemies and with the Journal backing his reforms, had gained traction as someone willing to take on the seemingly unbeatable mayor. Meanwhile, Sonny bleated to his intimates that Tramonti was a ‘traitor pissing in my soup,’ and that he, Sonny, was going to ‘kick his ass across Kennedy Plaza’ when Tramonti announced his candidacy for mayor.

  We drove a few miles in silence, picking up speed after we left Charlestown. He touched a button on the console and a Junior Brown song began, ‘I got a star on my car and one on his chest.’ My face was to my window as the rolling meadows of farms blurred; rows of vegetables were already leafy and where the dark earth had been harrowed, corn had been planted. “Let me tell you about Benno,” he said, lowering the volume on the trooper’s hymn. “Ran into promotion problems with the State Police a few years ago. Did a lot of organized crime, Mafia stuff. After twenty-five years, eighty percent pension, there wasn’t much use in his hanging on. Now he mostly freelances for insurance companies, and on the side, the Staties let him do cold case files. The rap on him is that he couldn’t get use to unit policing. Too much a loner, the kind who keeps his own files. A bachelor. Whole life is catching bad guys. His house in Mount Pleasant is supposedly chock-full of clippings and boxes of stuff he’s collected on people he’d like to get, crimes that didn’t get resolved to his satisfaction. He’s also the kind of guy I wouldn’t want to have on my case. Never gives up.”

  I recognized the character as described. In fact, I’d been to Benno’s modest raised ranch near Rhode Island College. Even its living room floor had cardboard boxes and plastic crates full of files, photographs, faded manila folders, and notebooks with tiny writing on musty, clammy pages. “What do you expect him to do?” I asked, thinking of his parting remarks to Benno.

  Tramonti waited a beat before responding, as though forming an answer that didn’t come readily. “It’s Fausto’s idea,” he said, almost plaintively because it was Fausto who would be looking at every angle in what might become a political crisis. “Keep in touch with the insurance adjusters so we know if the Club is going to have a problem with Charlie in the middle. Put Charlie through a grind with Flanaghan to find out about the kickback.” I noticed he didn’t say ‘alleged kickback.’ “Come up with his own angles on Randall and the fire and see where that takes us.”

  His response seemed to me, hesitant, maybe shallow or incomplete. But I had to agree the whole episode could use tidying up.

  We were now in South Kingstown passing through its famous turf farms, hundreds of acres of carefully tended grass on either side of the highway, the color and flatness reminding me of pool table cloth. Rain streaks began to line my window even as toward the west, shafts of light pierced dark clouds, creating luminous yellow-green patches on the turf, in what my family referred to as ‘Jacob’s ladders.’

  “I appreciate this,” he said, sounding more like the Tony Tramonti of pre-political
days. “I can take the heat from Sonny but I don’t want Dani sick again. How’s she gonna hold up her head unless somehow Charlie comes out of this with some reputation left? Her life’s down there now. All I ask is that you be tight with him until he gets through the membership meeting.” He coughed and then continued. “I can’t deal with him without wanting to puke!” He banged his fists in anger on the steering wheel. “He’s pathetic!”

  “I can’t do much to improve his brain power, let alone his reputation.”

  He replied sourly, “You can’t shine sneakers.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Nadie, in jeans and a striped short sleeve shirt, was in the loft, a functional work area and bedroom that takes up most of the second floor of my Greek Revival house on Congdon Street. The cool-blue slats of the window blinds were closed against the bright late afternoon sun, leaving barely enough light for her to be at our shared worktable. Hunched over her laptop, her ears covered by Bose earphones, she didn’t hear me enter. I knew I shouldn’t do it, but I did: I touched her left shoulder.

  If I had poked her with a cattle prod, I couldn’t have gotten a more severe reaction. She ripped off the headphones, jumped up, wide-eyed and indignant. “Why do you do things like that?” Her fists pounded my chest, not especially playfully. How does someone so waif-like pack such a punch!

  “You were too tempting a target.” I smiled. Winningly? Apparently, not enough.

  “Don’t do it! Just don’t do it! I hate it!”

  “Okay, okay,” and with palms raised in mock surrender, I left her for the bathroom, stripped for a quick shower and for a moment had a mirrored glance of a body that was holding up despite fifty plus years. I decided against shaving, smiled largely at myself, and ran my fingers through white flecked, wiry hair which didn’t change course one whit. As the hot water scoured my body, my thoughts focused on Nadie, her recent mood swings, attempts to be compatible and happy, followed by periods of fussiness and irritability. It seemed to begin in January, after she had requested to teach a course in ‘positive psychology.’ What I took from her enthusiastic description was that it was a newish slant on the human psyche focusing on individual strengths and virtues as the point of departure of analysis, in stark contrast to clinical, more traditional, behaviorist psychology. The Department chair gave quick approval for second semester next year, and Nadie, with great excitement and purpose began to prepare. In March, at a departmental curriculum meeting, came belated reactions from a few colleagues that Nadie, the Department’s wunderkind, found insulting and dismissive—‘it’s all happy faces and happy talk,’ ‘where’s the clinical evidence,’ ‘it’s philosophy, not psychology,’ ‘it smacks of religion’—being some I could remember. Although bothered, she managed to suffer those comments, only to be angered when in April, she received a list of ‘suggestions’ to her course syllabus authored by two senior professors. She responded aggressively, informing the Department chair that she would not be ‘intimidated,’ making pointed comments about finding a more ‘open’ venue, using as leverage what amounted to invitations to her from Wellesley and Penn. What about us, I had asked, when she told me of her threat. She retreated into an ‘off limits’ mode that made discussion short, me anxious, and her—maybe ‘troubled’ best describes it. Our first crisis? Did our relationship depend ultimately upon a college course?