Deadly Divots

by Gene Breaznell

  Moving on, through the men’s grill and the main dining room, we entered a lounge filled with art deco sofas and chairs, clustered around chic little cocktail tables. There was also a long, low bar that could easily have concealed the culprit armed with an ice pick, a cocktail shaker, or a long-neck beer bottle. I could use a long-neck right now.

  “He could be anywhere,” Randall said, glancing nervously around.

  “Scared?” I asked.

  “A little,” he admitted.

  “What’s behind that big curtain over there?”

  “The arras?”

  “Yeah. That one.”

  “Perhaps we’ll find Polonius,” Randall said theatrically, trying not to betray his stage fright.

  “Stay back . . .” I said, throwing aside the curtain, arras if you must, finding only bare walls. I got the sinking feeling that Jones had vanished.

  We headed upstairs but stopped as pounding sounds echoed from the main entrance hall.

  “Sounds like a pile driver,” I said.

  “Someone’s at the front door,” said Randall.

  Hope it’s Houdini, I thought, to help me find Jones.

  I cracked the massive front door and called out, to a phalanx of uniformed cops, “It’s Kanopka! We’re the good guys! But our killer’s still loose!”

  I deployed all the cops, half onto the golf course and grounds and the other half into the house.

  “Let’s hit the upper floors,” I told Randall. “I don’t like basements.”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Must be the old Polish joke about trying to commit suicide by jumping out a basement window.”

  Moving rapidly through the maze of upstairs rooms, I posted uniformed cops in strategic corridors and stairwells, so our culprit couldn’t slip behind us, or hide where we’d already searched and escape later.

  Randall and I stopped at a thick Gothic door sealed with burglar bars and heavy padlocks at the end of a dark corridor.

  “Where does this lead?” I asked.

  “To a stairway,” said Randall.

  “A stairway to heaven?”

  “Just another room.”

  “Open it.”

  “Why? You can see by the way it’s locked, no one could have entered. Besides, I don’t have the keys.”

  “Get them.”

  “I don’t know where they are.”

  “No problem. I’ll get a crowbar.”

  “But there’s nothing up there,” Randall insisted, blocking the door with his body. “And the door is very old, all hand-carved. You’ll ruin it.”

  “That’s your problem. Mine is that the killer could be in there.”

  I was about to call for a crowbar when I heard my name being shouted up a back stairwell. I dashed downstairs, leaving Randall and his cherished door alone for the moment, and found two uniforms with Slim the caddy.

  “This guy says he saw Al Jones running across the golf course,” one of the uniforms told me.

  “When?” I asked.

  “’Bout an hour ago,” said Slim, grinning and displaying his rotten teeth. His breath smelled like cheap wine of unknown vintage. Why does Randy Randall allow him on the grounds? Is he that good a caddy?

  “Which way was he headed?” I asked.

  “I already told them.” Slim nodded at the uniforms, weaving slightly.

  “Now tell me . . .” I drew close and stared at him, hoping the visceral challenge would elicit quicker answers and his breath wouldn’t bowl me over.

  “Out past the tenth tee,” he continued, grinning. His B.O. was also brutal.

  “We checked that direction,” someone else said. “There’s a fence around the course’s perimeter, but plenty of places where you can slip through or climb over.”

  “Issue an alert,” I ordered. “Cover the trains, boats, planes, and don’t forget MacArthur Airport. Also check the rental car companies and bus stations. Go beyond the usual. I want this guy.”

  “Do I get a reward?” Slim asked.

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  We have to catch Al Jones first, and the odds are becoming slim to none.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I raced to O’Reilly’s house. Jones could be hiding there, though most felons try to get as far away as possible. Mrs. O opened the front door before I could ring the bell. This time she was dressed.

  “May I help you?” she asked, like I’m a stranger asking for directions.

  “Where’s Al Jones?” I snapped.

  “Do you need golf lessons?”

  “He murdered your husband.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “You were having an affair with him.”

  “I was only taking golf lessons.”

  She looked genuinely annoyed. A damn good actress.

  “Then you won’t mind me looking around,” I said.

  “You and who else?” She glanced behind me down the driveway. Like I need help. Like Jones is hiding behind the door with his five iron ready to brain me?

  “I’m all it takes,” I said, reaching for my snub-nose.

  “You and a search warrant,” she said, eyes narrowing.

  I liked her feistiness. It reminded me of Carol. Once she told me I’d need a body cast if I ever forgot our wedding anniversary again.

  “I don’t need a warrant when—”

  “I know,” she interrupted. “There’s probable cause, or some such legalese, that gives you the right to run rampant through my house. Go ahead and look, if it makes you happy.”

  I stepped cautiously inside, liking her dislike of legalese, wary of Jones leaping out at me. He was not behind the door, however, or in the front hall closet. Mrs. O followed as I went through the house.

  “Would you like some coffee?” she asked, in the kitchen.

  “Where does this go?”

  “My bedroom. By the way, Al Jones has never been there.”

  “Then why did you call him the day after your husband was murdered?”

  “How do you know?”

  “Your cell phone told me. Out by the pool, when you loaned it to me. I hit the redial button, and guess who answered?”

  Dame Winifred would love the technological twist. It could inspire a mystery in itself. Maybe Murder and Ma Bell. There is a ring to it, but what’s in a title? My wife was always telling me a book needs sentences, chapters and some other stuff.

  “I should charge you for the call,” Mrs. O said, following me out of the kitchen.

  “Should I charge you with the murder?” I countered.

  “I hate to burst your bubble,” she told me, “but I was only canceling a golf lesson.”

  “Your lover would charge you for a no-show?”

  “Not likely, is it?”

  “I have the receipts.”

  “That would prove we’re not lovers, wouldn’t it?”

  “It’s also good cover.”

  Nothing in her bedroom, but I countered, “If my spouse was just murdered, my last concern would be canceling a golf lesson.”

  “Don’t believe it,” said Mrs. O. “It’s amazing what comes to mind in times of grief.”

  She was right. I must have accomplished at least a few mundane tasks the day Carol died, though I can’t recall anything but abject grief.

  “By your own admission,” I said, “you weren’t grieving.”

  “Come on, Detective. You know what I mean.”

  “You know that you have the right to remain silent?”

  “You arresting me?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’ll go a lot easier if you tell me everything you know.”

  “That I conspired with my golf pro to kill my husband? Come on, Detective. You’ve been watching too many cop shows.”

  “I don’t watch cop shows.”

  “Then reading too many mystery novels.”

  Hmm.

  “Did you put Al Jones up to it?”


  “No,” she answered evenly.

  “And he’s not here?”

  “He has never been here.”

  “That’s not the answer.”

  “Okay, Detective. Al Jones is not here.”

  For some strange reason I believed her.

  “You’ve seen everything,” she said.

  “So I have,” I said, visions of her swimming stark-naked dancing in my head. “Do you know where he is?”

  “Get this straight, Detective. I’m not his lover, his mistress, his murder accomplice, or his keeper.”

  I detected disdain for the tall Texan, which could even have fooled the exceedingly skeptical Peter H. Couloir, though Mrs. O’s great tits and beguiling smile would have had no impact on the limp-wristed little tec.

  “When we get him,” I assured Mrs. O, “and we will get him, he won’t be so protective.”

  She laughed, but I didn’t take offense. I was being melodramatic. And the thought never crossed my mind, though it would with any other suspect who laughed at me, to give her a chip shot in some sensitive area for showing disrespect.

  “Let us know where Jones is hiding,” I simply said, “and we’ll cut you some slack at the sentencing.”

  She laughed again. I liked the sound. It was almost like Carol.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Midnight in the Broken Oak parking lot overlooking the garden of good and evil: glorious golf and murder most foul. In deep shadows in my unmarked car, I was parked across the lot from Al Jones’s car. Staring like an owl stalking a rabbit, ready to pounce if Jones came back. Coming back for the big Crown Vic with Texas plates seemed even a longer shot than his showing up earlier at Mrs. O’Reilly’s, but I was desperate. We had no trace of him.

  If he made it to Manhattan, where a tall Texan swinging a bloody five iron along Ninth Avenue could be considered normal, the crush of inhumanity could hide him forever. If he stole a car, he could be in Texas by now. No one pays stolen cars any attention. My only hope is America’s Most Wanted.

  Stranger things have happened than Jones coming back for his ride, however. Criminals can get pretty stupid. And someone else might show. Like Mrs. O, trying somehow to help her lover. I’d normally tow the car immediately to the lab and let forensics go through it, but I decided to leave it untouched until the next day. I had to try something different. I was desperate. I was also in trouble at headquarters for not using more backup when I first came to make the arrest. The brass informed me, after the fact of course, that I should have flooded the joint with blue uniforms. Hindsight at headquarters is always 20-20.

  I sat alone in the parking lot for hours, hoping for a call on my short wave that would help the investigation, surfing between talk shows and music stations on my AM/FM, wondering why rappers, punk rockers, and talk show callers are so full of hate, wishing I had brought one of my Chuck Berry CDs and that my unmarked car had a player. WFAN was broadcasting a baseball game, but it was a blowout. And the New York Inevitables, aka the Yankees, would make the playoffs anyway.

  I had read two newspapers from cover to cover and finished both crosswords. The New York Times was easy. I do them every day except Sunday. I used to do the Sunday puzzle with Carol, when I wasn’t playing golf. She knew words like Erse and esne, I knew words like Spahn and Sain. What to do now, at midnight in the garden of golf and grisly murder? Another good title for a Dame Winifred mystery? Which reminded me, I had brought Murder on the Moor with me. But I was afraid to start reading it in case it put me asleep. If Al Jones sneaked back and managed to escape in his own car, headquarters would justifiably have my hide.

  I removed the yellowed and broken little paperback from my glove compartment, along with a penlight, and opened it carefully so as not to lose any more pages. I had stopped at a good part. The arrogant, gun-loving Algernon Spotswood, aka Algie or murdering pond scum, like Al Jones, is about to get his comeuppance. Algie is escaping on the Orient Express, which is just pulling out of the Gare du Nord in Paris, as Dame Winifred’s Peter H. Couloir hops on board. I was not sure how Couloir and Algie had gotten to this point, as several pages prior were missing, but I got the main drift.

  Couloir bustled down the narrow corridor of the sleeping car, squeezing past confused passengers, whispering, “Pardon . . . pardon . . .” until he stopped at Algernon Spotswood’s closed compartment door . . .

  Hope he breaks it down and coldcocks the son of a bitch. Couloir tapped lightly. . .

  Limp-wristed wimp.

  . . . calling out, “Porter, si vous plait” . . .

  I like that. Once I posed as a pizza delivery man to catch a killer.

  . . . but there was no answer . . .

  Crap.

  . . . tried the door, and found it unlocked. . .

  Watch out!

  . . . compartment was completely empty. . .

  What now? The next two pages were missing. I jumped ahead.

  . . . in the baggage car, Couloir spied Algernon Spotswood’s steamer trunk. . .

  Hmm.

  . . . and deftly picked the latch . . . threw open the lid . . . stood back . . . and gasped . . . Spotswood’s body was curled inside . . . in the fetal position . . . stone dead. . .

  The prime suspect dead in his own steamer trunk on the Orient Express? What claptrap. That would be like Al Jones shipping himself out on the auto/train to Disney World.

  I stuffed the little book back into my glove compartment, stretched, yawned, longed for some hot coffee, hoped to stay awake for the duration. Somewhere in the wee hours I would have to call for relief.

  A thick night mist wafted into the parking lot, shrouding Jones’s car. I could barely see it. What if the big Crown Vic disappears into the mist, like a David Copperfield illusion? Stop thinking like that, Kanopka. Letting your life become illusory since your wife lost hers. Evanescence, she would have termed it, and worried about my melancholy. If Jones’s car disappeared in the mist, however, I’d get an instant reality check in the form of an ass-reaming at headquarters. I shivered at the thought and at the sudden realization that, in all the hustle and bustle, I had taken only a cursory look at the car. Peter H. Couloir would surely have popped the trunk, as he had on the Orient Express. What was I thinking?

  I hopped out of my car, removed the tire iron from its trunk, and stalked toward the Crown Vic, like Jones stalking O’Reilly with the five iron.

  Cutting through the mist, across the fifty yards of tarmac toward the big sedan from the Lone Star State, seemed surreal. My heart was beating like a trip-hammer and my footsteps echoed like thunder, blowing my state of mind and my stakeout. Betraying my presence and botching this case to every cop and the entire criminal world. What if the murder weapon’s in the trunk? Why hadn’t I thought of that before? Headquarters will kick me from here to kingdom come. What if it’s even worse? Like another murder victim. Like Algernon Spotswood’s body in that steamer trunk on the Orient Express? Or body parts, and good ole boy Al Jones is a serial killer?

  Inserting the tire iron into a crevice, I popped the Crown Vic’s cavernous trunk. Though the trunk light was dim and wisps of night mist further diffused it, I could easily tell the body inside belonged to Al Jones.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Forensics pecked at the Crown Vic like corbies on road-kill, while two pontificating captains pecked at me.

  “Wicked head wound,” said Captain Gleason, staring at Jones, still in the trunk.

  “Another golf club,” Captain Kowalski declared.

  “You think?” I smirked. Kowalski’s a ball buster like Gleason, but beneath contempt.

  “I’d bet a month’s salary,” Kowalski continued, “the same guy nailed that mick out here by the water hole. And don’t cry just because this guy in the trunk was your prime suspect.”

  “He still is,” I said.

  “You must be kidding,” Kowalski scoffed. “You sure you’re only half Polack?”

  “I’ve got the best of both worlds,” I told my superiors.
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  “You got nothin’ in this murder case,” Kowalski reminded me, as if I needed it.

  “We’ve been following your progress,” Gleason added.

  “What progress?” Kowalski said, with a shit-eating grin. “He’s back to square one.”

  “You’re right,” said Gleason. “He needs another suspect, preferably living.”

  “What makes you so sure that Jones didn’t kill O’Reilly?” I asked. “He had motive and opportunity.”

  “Tell us the motive.”

  “I’m pretty sure he was sleeping with O’Reilly’s wife.” Pretty sure? Jesus.

  “Can you prove they were getting it on?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you wasting our time?”

  “I mean I can’t prove it yet.”

  “I got it,” Kowalski grinned. “Jones felt guilty about killing the mick and committed suicide by whacking himself in the head and locking himself in the trunk.”

  I always wondered how he made captain. He had to be the inspiration for every Polish joke.

  “You’re a damn good detective,” Gleason said, “but remind me why this stiff was your prime suspect.”

  “He wanted O’Reilly’s wife.”

  “Wasn’t she getting a divorce?” Gleason.

  “Yeah. Couldn’t he wait?” Kowalski.

  “They wanted the life insurance.” Gleason.

  “They were in it together?” Kowalski.

  “That’s too obvious.” A faint reply from yours truly.

  “Plus his property. He’s got a hell of a house over on Dosoris.” Kowalski again.

  “You checked his finances?” Gleason asked.

  “We’re in the process,” I told him.

  “What’s taking so long?” Kowalski said.

  “You know how it goes,” I shrugged, though it’s up to me to push for quick answers.

  “We know all about the bastard.” Kowalski grinned like a Cheshire cat. “He was flat broke and borrowed to the max.”

  “You prick!” I snapped.

  “Hey!” Kowalski shot back. “Don’t forget, I’m your captain.”

  “Sorry, Karl,” said Gleason. “We should have told you sooner.”