Straight Pool

by JJ Partridge

  Okay, what had I come to see? Would I recognize it?

  The cart path to the remains of the maintenance building was now free of police tape and I followed it down the slope past trees that had been pruned since my visit. The crane and loader hadn’t gotten here as yet and the remaining masonry walls showed space where the garage entrance and a single window had once been. As I had before, I tried to figure out how Randall got inside. Window? Could he get in a window with a back brace? Were the garage doors open like the pump house? Unlikely, too close to the Clubhouse and would have been picked up by a security patrol. Was the security system already burnt out? Did he set a separate fire inside with gas, or with a fuse from some fireworks, and then couldn’t get out? Wouldn’t he have arranged his exit from inside before setting the fire? Or was it unintended, from a cigarette butt as Flanaghan suggested, or because he had been so drunk as Charlie wanted to believe? Or, was that when Jones came in?

  My ruminations were interrupted by a bark from Shadrach, this time on a long retractable leash. At the other end of the leash was Charlie Fessenden.

  “Algy, what are you doing here?” He approached rapidly, dressed in a maroon pullover sweater, jeans, and a cap with the Club’s emblem. Despite his hearty greeting, his face was set in the same grimness as when I left him yesterday.

  “How about yourself?” I said and remembered that, on purpose, I had not told him that I would visit Ugo Calibrese yesterday.

  “Taking Shadrach for a walk. Dani’s not riding today … feeling a little punky … so I said I’d take him ‘walkies’ and come up here to see how things are progressing. Fausto called me yesterday afternoon. I have to go to Providence tomorrow to meet another lawyer.” He shook his head. “Can’t believe Fausto’s so insistent that I have a Providence lawyer with me just to answer a few questions from the State Police.” He said that with the petulance of a teenager complaining about a visit to a frosty spinster aunt.

  “It’s a good idea.”

  “Sure, sure,” he said dismissively.

  “Tell Laretta everything, about you and Ollie Randall and ….”

  His eyes left me to turn to the vista of fairways at my left. Sheepishly, he said, “Dani told me she called you about the scare Ollie put into her. That bastard! Goddamn it, Algy, that was the last straw, and then he shows up drunk….”

  I could have pursued that point—was being drunk the reason he was fired? Instead, I asked, “How do you get up here?”

  “Past the corral, through a strip of Randall’s …, Calibrese’s …, land, up the back road past the pump house, then through the woods along the eighteenth fairway. It’s about a fifteen minutes walk.” He took off his cap to wipe his forehead with his sweater sleeve and I saw his hair, usually not a strand out of place, was greasy and unkempt. “Archie Soames doesn’t want me up here….” His voice caught. “Asked me to resign as Club Secretary which I have done. I ….,” and he turned back to me. Tears were welling up in his eyes as his hand reached for my forearm. “Algy, you’ve been such a good friend. I can’t tell you how I appreciate it. I know you are doing it for Tony, but …!”

  “Not just for Tony.”

  “Well, for Dani then. I know that’s the reason.”

  I hesitated before I said, “It seems to me you’re getting a raw deal and, well, I don’t like it.”

  I expected a show of appreciation for my support but he wasn’t listening from inside his well of self pity. “Sometimes, I don’t know what to do. I don’t have anybody I can talk to. The Tramontis think I’m a failure, someone that they have to bail out, like I can’t do anything myself. I only stand for it because of Dani. Dani’s wonderful but she’s not practical. And relies too much on her brothers.” He took a long, dispirited breath. “I had something good going here. Really good. I was a success! Now, it’s all over….”

  “It’s not over yet,” I lied because if it was known that Charlie asked for an ‘extra’ to get ‘Charlie’s deal’ closed, it would be, and changed the subject. I gestured toward the fairways and made a comment as to the course’s elaborate irrigation scheme.

  “Engineering marvel,” Charlie said quickly, momentarily perked up and selling the Club as he had done with prospective members. “Ingenious system. Depends upon the pumps for sucking out the water from wells and ponds and sending it back into the creeks and swamps. If the pumps fail, the irrigation system stops, the waters aren’t charged, the recycling ponds don’t fill….”

  “I had no idea.” I feigned interest since I was trying to keep him from slipping back into his self-centered doldrums.

  “Come on,” he said, “if the pump house is open, I’ll give you the tour. Leave your car here. Have lunch with Dani and me and I’ll drive you back.”

  I didn’t resist his invitation; after all, why the hell was I here?

  * * *

  We followed a well-behaved Shadrach past throbbing diesel dump trucks to a wide asphalt trail that probably accommodated maintenance trucks and tractors. It wound around the height of a modest ridge that sloped east to west, a natural point for the gravity flow that must help with the irrigation. Through groves of pines pungent with resin and with last year’s needles making a brown carpet, past cairns of boulders and broken ledge likely grubbed out during the construction of the fairways, Charlie mounted his hobbyhorse about the obstacles the Club overcame to obtain environmental permits. The original course design, he explained, contemplated that the swamps and ponds were to be used as water hazards or were to be redirected to line fairways, with wells tapping into abundant ground water providing irrigation. Seemed elegantly simple to all concerned until the world famous course designer and his engineering team met reality at the Department of Environmental Management.

  The answer from DEM, after months of prodding during an ominous silence, was ‘no.’ The ponds, creeks and swamps, it pointed out, eventually became the southern end of the Indian Swamp, an ‘ecologically sensitive’ area. Any change in the volume of water from the golf course property would disrupt the swamp forever. If there was going to be a golf course, there would be no change in ground water levels, meaning the Club would need a closed or ‘looped’ irrigation system. That brought howls from the Board and the course designer, but eventually they threw up their hands and the course was reengineered with elaborate use of dikes, culverts, aerators, and tunnels that controlled the flows of surface and ground water, with the pumps the key to its functionality.

  “The engineering cost was a quarter million alone,” he blustered, “but it didn’t pass muster. The DEM now objected that fertilizer and herbicides would affect the ecosystem of the swamp no matter what happened in the ‘loop,’ and that errant golf balls would attract golfers into the marshy ‘fly-overs’ from some tees to fairways, making ‘habitat management’ unmanageable. Bad enough, but then the Rare Species Society found a fern that was indigenous only to the Indian Swamp and someone from URI discovered a rare salamander that had to be protected.”

  Although they eventually got through the fern issue with a designated ‘forever wild’ patch of land and the salamander crisis with culverts to its breeding areas, the Board decided to go the political route to speed things up. “That’s what everyone thinks you do in Rhode Island, and this one time, they were flat out wrong. The staff at DEM was fighting with the Governor about something else so when his office intervened on our permits, we got into deeper shit …, pardon the expression.”

  We had been walking for almost five minutes. Where was this pump house?

  Finally, the Board got smart and hired a local engineer with environmental credentials and political clout and a deal was reached. The Club would have a closed, pressurized system which would irrigate from designated ponds and wells, aeration would be provided to the ponds, a continuous filtration system would be installed, and a state of the art monitoring system would check on the pumps and fertilizers, solvents, or any other gunk that might get into the eco-system. “Cost a ton! And DEM still has it in for
us. The relationship is poisonous. Their multiple permits require activation of the system at all times between March and November. If not, the permits are yanked, golf is suspended or terminated.” And then, he pointed to our left. “There it is.”

  Through a line of cedars, I saw a building designed like a country barn painted red with white trim. A radio antenna or maybe a lightning rod, exhaust pipes, and air conditioning units dotted its roof. Our trail led up to its garage doors and then down a steep incline into trees. A section of metal tank was visible on one side of the building. As we got closer, I heard the rhythmic hum of large machinery. Charlie pulled on Shadrach and stooped to release him from the leash.

  “It’s that important! That’s why I came up here the night of the fire. Just to check ….”

  “What…?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I wrenched Charlie to his feet. His face was inches from mine, his eyes amazingly wide.

  “You told us you were home all night! Then, you heard the sirens….”

  Charlie shook off my grasp. Limply, he said, “That wasn’t completely true.”

  “Don’t tell me!” I marched toward the pump house, furious at another deception, barely able to keep my temper in control. He caught up to me and it came spilling out.

  “I … left out some details. Nothing important.” He touched my arm but I didn’t break stride. I couldn’t bear to look into those lying eyes. “Dani and the girls were away. I’d gone to a cocktail party earlier, went home about nine and watched a movie, had a couple of drinks. Dani telephoned me and I must have slurred a word or two. She asked me if I had been drinking and I said ‘no’ and that started an argument because she had been all over me about the booze. After I hung up, Shadrach had to go outside. I put him on a lead and went up by the corral. That’s where I thought I saw a flicker of light, a flashlight maybe, maybe a tail light, up by the pump house. With the leaves not all out yet, you could see right up there on the ridge. Nobody should have been up there. And, I knew the security patrol didn’t extend that far. All I could think of was that son of a bitch Randall doing something up there….”

  “Why didn’t you call somebody?”

  “I … didn’t have my cell phone with me and ….”

  What? It was always attached to his belt. “You could have gone back to the house and called.”

  “I know,” he said with his head down, “I wasn’t thinking clearly. Must have been the booze. Anyway, I took the trail, just like this morning. Before I got here, I thought I heard voices, then a door slam. As I got closer, I realized that Shadrach might start barking and …, so I decided to go back to the corral, tie him, and come back.”

  We had reached the front of the pump house. Machine noises from inside were loud, intense, and regular, reminding me of the engine rooms of ships I experienced during my stint in the Marine Corps. Two concrete steps led to the only door; ‘no admittance’ was painted on an upper panel. When the knob didn’t give in to his hand, Charlie said “I didn’t think anybody would be here because there’d be a maintenance cart or a truck out front. Come over here so you can see the pumps,” he said and peered into the only window in the building’s front.

  Despite a reluctance to follow a direction from him, I joined him at a triple glazed window with a manufacturer’s label on one corner pane; my fingers found gouges on its frame that had been painted over. A dim light inside illuminated three huge, parallel machines painted a pea green, maybe twenty feet long and six or seven feet high, set within concrete piers, each with rows of pipes, valves and cylinders. Digital lights showed on a control board and computer system near the door.

  I muttered, “Impressive,” because it was.

  “All automatic and controlled from here. Those pumps are hybrids. Use diesel during the day and electric when full power isn’t needed, like at night. Or, you can change it around if it’s cheaper. Program and check the pumps once in a while. They keep the pressure in the lines all over the course and power aerators in the ponds for the wells without drawing too much water. Almost completely self-contained, except for an agreed amount of filtered water that you could probably drink that flows through a drainage tunnel into Indian Swamp.”

  I backed away from the window and faced him. Might as well hear it all. “So, when you came back ….”

  His chin went down to his chest like a little boy expecting a spanking and croaked out his story. “I left Shadrach and started back up here. It was quiet, no noise at all, no lights except for that one over the door”—he pointed to a spotlight fixture—“that’s on a timer. As I approached, I saw the door was open a crack. Shouldn’t have been.” He gulped and hesitated long enough for me to wonder if he had recollected something he wasn’t going to tell me. “I was about to go inside when I heard the sirens coming from Dunn’s Corner and thought of the clubhouse immediately. I ran up the trail, think I even forgot to close the door.”

  “What about an alarm?”

  He walked away from me, maybe to avoid my question. “I thought of that, too. Maybe nobody heard it and it went off after a time. Or somebody forgot to turn it on. I knew the Club was having problems with that system, in fact all the security systems for the outlying buildings. Come over here,” and disappeared around the corner of the building.

  This forced disengagement was getting old but I followed. The ground behind the building fell away quickly to a pond that was connected to the pump house by large steel pipes two feet or so in diameter, each held by a metal frame set close to the ground; two led toward the pond and two out toward the course. Behind the pipes were three huge steel tanks, with yellow ‘hazard’ signs. Charlie put his hand on the nearest tank marked ‘Mega Green Only.’ “Fertilizer. It’s liquid catfish gurry from Mississippi. Nothing, absolutely nothing, chemical, one hundred percent natural! Unbelievable stuff. We’re not allowed to use anything else!” He shrugged and pointed at the larger pipes. “High-pressure aeration and recirculation. That smaller one contains the power cables. Those two boxes contain the back-up generators in case the electricity goes off.” He pointed to two immense orange boxes stenciled ‘Kumasu’ behind a chain-link fence and a tank marked ‘Diesel’; each generator box had an exhaust pipe that extended upward over ten feet. “We’ve got our own electric substation up by Route One, that’s how much juice it takes to run the system, with underground cables up to here. The pumps got to be on twenty-four seven.”

  Interesting but a typical Charlie diversion. I didn’t give up. “So…?”

  “Didn’t even get to the knoll when I saw the flames,” he responded. “Turned right around for home!”

  “Why?”

  He took a step toward me, his face reflecting shame. “Because I was in a goddamn panic! That’s what you wanted to hear, right?”

  “I don’t get that.”

  “Algy, everything I had built up here rested on the success of the club. My future was literally going up in smoke. I didn’t want to be the first on the scene. I couldn’t take the … responsibility.” He was holding back tears unsuccessfully. “I went back, got Shadrach into the house, and had some … coffee. Then, because I knew people would expect it, I drove over like everyone else.”

  “Didn’t you tell anyone about the lights, the voices, the door left open?”

  “In the excitement that night, it didn’t seem like a big deal.” He hesitated. “I could have been wrong about the lights or the voices, I mean. Maybe the light was from over the door. Maybe the voices were my imagination. Sound carries out here in ways you wouldn’t expect and the wind was really blowing. And, goddamn it, Algy, I had been drinking! How could I be sure?” He shook his head plaintively. “A day or so later, though, I mentioned the door to Joe Pontarelli, a groundskeeper, the guy who takes care of the pump system. He kind of dismissed it. He said maybe one of his people could have left it open by mistake and came back later to close it because nobody reported it. Or, I was wrong.” Charlie’s voice was whiney. “And maybe I was.”
>
  “You didn’t tell anyone else?”

  His eyes flashed back. “Who? Who wants to talk to me besides the accountants? And, I didn’t press it with Pontarelli. He’s a tough wop, sarcastic, disrespectful, always seemed to have a comment on everything, the kind who mutters to himself. I guess he must be good at what he does if he got hired. All he seemed to care about was the course and the pumps. Didn’t want anyone near his precious pump house.”

  I followed Charlie back to the front of the building, trying to stay on message, remembering I got into this mess to protect Dani. “Make sure you tell the whole story to Laretta. Everything, including the noise, the lights, the voices, the unlocked door….”

  He stopped me short. Fear surrounded him like a fog. “I ... I have to tell him I .. panicked?”

  “For crying out loud,” I answered sternly, “give him the goddamn facts! You went back to investigate and by that time, there were sirens everywhere, flames leaping out of the clubhouse. I think that’s what really happened, right?”

  “Yes,” he said with uncertainty. “I’d like to think that.”

  Shadrach had returned to his master and Charlie led the way down the ridge line. Near Charlie’s boundary line, the asphalt path ended in a dirt track that seemed rarely used by anything with four wheels. Despite my disgust, I needed one more answer, if for no one else, me. “Calibrese says you asked to be the exclusive broker on some of his properties near the golf course if the Club deal went through.”