The Club

by Jane Heller

  “Not likely,” was Detective Cunningham’s response when I told him my theory.

  I had beeped him in the morning, and we’d arranged to meet in the parking lot of Stop ’n’ Shop. We were sitting in his car. It was raining heavily and the windows were fogged. The air was sticky or sultry, depending how you feel about summer humidity.

  “Why couldn’t Ducky have done it?” I said. “He was a spurned lover. Isn’t that a motive for murder?”

  “Not when the spurning happened over twenty years ago,” he said. “From what you tell me, Mr. Laughton hadn’t been in touch with the deceased in all that time. He’d gotten married, gone to work for a respected investment firm, become a member of a prestigious country club. If he had wanted to kill Claire Cox, why wouldn’t he have done it back at Berkeley when she broke his heart?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe he had a delayed reaction,” I said.

  “Good try,” said Tom. He smiled and patted my shoulder. Electrical currents surged through my body. I mean, there we were, just the two of us, sitting in his car with the windows rolled up, breathing each other’s air, looking into each other’s eyes, listening to each other’s theories about a murder case. It was the stuff of High Drama, but it made me laugh, seeing as I wasn’t the High Drama type.

  “What’s so funny?” Tom asked.

  “This,” I said. “The fact that I’m doing this.”

  “What’s ‘this’? Working on a murder investigation or being here with me?”

  “Both.”

  His dark eyes penetrated me. I felt a trickle of sweat form on my upper lip.

  “Do I make you uncomfortable?” he asked.

  “Of course not. It’s just that I’m not used to working this closely with a man I hardly know. The authors I used to work with always submitted a detailed biography with their proposals before we actually got down to business.”

  He smiled. “I don’t have a detailed biography, but if I tell you more about myself, would that make the job easier?”

  “No. I was kidding. Please forget I said anything.”

  “Let’s see,” he said, ignoring me. “I’m allergic to penicillin. My favorite movie is Casablanca. I’m a big Boston Celtics fan. And I love meat loaf. What else would you like to know?”

  “Who cooks you meat loaf? Is there a woman in your life now?”

  “No one special. Ever since Sarah died, I’ve been kind of here and there. My work makes it hard to get attached. I’m always rescuing damsels in distress and falling a little bit in love with them.”

  I swallowed hard as I pictured Tom rescuing me. Falling a little bit in love with me.

  Snap out of it, I commanded myself. Get back to the job you were hired to do.

  “As I was saying about Ducky Laughton,” I continued, “I don’t trust the man at all.”

  “Why not?”

  “I told you. He lied about college. He lied about his relationship with Claire. And he lied about talking to her in the buffet line the night she died.”

  “So the guy’s a liar. That doesn’t make him a murderer.”

  “What about that trouble he got into at Berkeley? Once a troublemaker, always a troublemaker.”

  “Nah. He was a kid then. Now he’s vice president at Fitzgerald & Franklin. A member of The Oaks’s Finance Committee. A real pillar of the community.”

  “Okay. What about this? One minute his wife acts like they have this hot sex life, the next minute she acts like they never have sex at all.”

  “Be more specific.”

  “The other day I heard her having sex in the bushes with the tennis pro at the club.”

  Tom laughed. “You’re taking this informant thing seriously, aren’t you, Judy?”

  “I heard them by accident,” I said. “And I was shocked, let me tell you. Nedra had always seemed so happy with Ducky.”

  “So she likes to get laid. Who doesn’t?”

  My husband, I almost said.

  “Doesn’t any of this sound suspicious?” I asked, growing a bit exasperated by Tom’s refusal to take my theories seriously.

  “Look, Judy, as far as Mr. Laughton is concerned, I doubt whether he killed Ms. Cox over a twenty-year-old failed love affair. Her murder wasn’t a crime of passion. It was planned, premeditated. Our killer knew Ms. Cox was going to be at that party and probably arranged to meet her on the golf course at a specific time. She didn’t strike me as someone who would walk out on her dinner guests and take a little stroll in a sand trap all by herself.”

  I nodded. “Then maybe Ducky had another reason for killing Claire.”

  “Either that or he’s not the killer.”

  I sighed. “Back to the drawing board.”

  “Hey, cheer up,” said Tom as he touched my shoulder again. “There are three hundred members at The Oaks. You’ve already checked out Larkin Vail and Ducky and Nedra Laughton. Only two hundred and ninety-seven more to go.”

  Later on in the summer, my parents flew up from Florida so my father, a Mets fan, could go to some games at Shea Stadium. My mother didn’t care about baseball but she cared very much about food, so she went to the games for the hot dogs, which she enjoyed so much she brought several of them home with her and reheated them in my microwave. Unlike me, my mother was not much of a gourmand. She was more like Hunt in her lack of discrimination regarding food. The greasier and more laden with preservatives, the better. She’d actually go to Chinese restaurants and tell them to put in extra MSG.

  She and I were in the kitchen one morning, debating the age-old question, “Which tastes better: Hellman’s Mayonnaise or Kraft Miracle Whip?,” when she said suddenly, “So who’s the fella?”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “You can’t fool your mother, Judy,” she said. “There’s hanky panky going on around here. Don’t try to deny it.”

  I laughed nervously. “I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “Hunt and I are as happy as we’ve ever been.”

  “You don’t want to tell me? Don’t,” she said.

  “There’s nothing to tell,” I said. “Really.”

  “You and Hunt are having problems,” she said. “I can see it on your faces. Either he’s fooling around or you are.”

  “Hunt? Fooling around? Nah, that would take time away from his golf,” I said.

  “Then you’re the one who’s got someone.”

  “Why do you say that, Mom?”

  “Because you’ve got that look.”

  “What look?”

  “That guilty-secret look. When a woman’s got a guilty secret, it’s either one of two things: either she’s spent money she shouldn’t have or she’s having an affair. You’re out of a job, so you’re not throwing your money around. That can only mean one thing: you’re having an affair.”

  “I like your logic, Ma,” I laughed. “But I’m not having an affair.” Not yet anyway.

  “See that you don’t,” she said. “Hunt’s a nice boy. Not a ball of fire, but a nice boy. Nice appearance. Nice manners. Nice job. You could do worse.”

  “I’ll tell him you said so.”

  “I mean it, Judy. The grass always looks greener, but the grass you’ve got here is green enough.”

  Yeah, green with a few brown spots. Maybe Hunt and I didn’t need a session with a marriage counselor; we needed a house call from the Lawn Doctor.

  The Mets lost five games in a row and my father threatened to become a Yankee fan. He thought his defection might wound his team so profoundly that they’d come to their senses and regain their old form. The strategy didn’t work. The Mets kept losing and my father kept kvetching. I suggested we take his mind off baseball and try to lift his mood by bringing him and my mother to The Oaks for dinner.

  “No valet parking?” my mother asked when we pulled into the parking lot.

  “No, Lucille,” said Hunt. “That would be an unnecessary expense for the club.”

  “Hunt’s on the Finance Committee here,” I explained. “He knows how every penny
is spent.”

  “From the look of the place, I’d say that pennies is all they spend,” said my mother, a firm believer in the old adage, “if you’ve got it, flaunt it.”

  We walked to the clubhouse, where my mother pointed to the creaky, carpetless floors, the frayed fabric on the sofas, and the plaster cracks in the ceiling and said, “Who’s their decorator, the Salvation Army?”

  “Now, Mom,” I said. “Behave.”

  “The Oaks is one of the most prestigious country clubs in America,” Hunt added defensively. “George Bush was once a member.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said my mother. “You saw what he and his wife did to the White House. Shabby this. Shabby that. Thank God the Clintons came in and redecorated the place.”

  Heads turned as we entered the dining room and were shown to our table. At first I thought heads turned because Hunt was so popular at the club. Then I realized heads turned because my mother’s outfit was garish by club standards: gold jewelry, purple dress, purple hair. Yes, purple hair. It used to be a very tasteful silver, but the hairdresser in Boca Raton had suggested a lavender rinse, something special for my mother’s trip north. “They like variety up in New York,” the woman had assured my mother, who forgot that Connecticut was worlds away from Manhattan when it came to things like variety.

  We ordered our entrées (Broiled Swordfish for Hunt and me, Steak Diane for my mother and father). When they arrived, nobody was happy with his meal, not even Hunt.

  “It’s overcooked,” he complained of his swordfish.

  “It must be really overcooked,” I said. “You never complain about food.”

  I took a bite of my fish and winced. “This baby wasn’t broiled, it was cremated.”

  Then it was my parents’ turn.

  “Where’s the rest of it?” my mother asked as she looked down at her pathetically small piece of steak and almost cried. As I indicated earlier, it was quantity, not quality, that mattered to her, when it came to food. As long as the portions were plentiful, she was happy.

  My father, already in poor humor as a result of the Mets’ losing streak, chewed a piece of his steak and then spit it into his napkin.

  “Dad!” I said, horrified by his bad manners.

  “I know, I know,” he said, shaking his head. “But this meat isn’t fit for dogs.”

  Here we go again, I thought, remembering Valerio’s reaction to the meat at the club. Hunt and I had chalked that outburst up to the fact that Valerio was a star and a prima donna and a know-it-all about food. But now my father was reacting the same way.

  “Who’s in charge here?” he said.

  “The chef’s name is Brendan Hardy,” said Hunt. “He buys all the meat for the club.”

  “Yeah, well he’s buying cutter,” said my father, the butcher.

  “What’s cutter?” asked Hunt.

  “Dog meat,” said my father. “The lowest grade you can get.”

  “But that’s impossible, Arthur,” said Hunt. “I see the bills, and I can tell you The Oaks buys prime meats.”

  “You may be paying for prime, but you’re not getting it,” said my father, echoing Valerio’s remarks.

  “Didn’t Ducky tell us that Duncan Tewksbury brought Brendan into the club a few years ago?” I asked Hunt.

  “Yes,” said Hunt. “He used to be the chef at the Belford Athletic Club.”

  “Their loss, our gain,” I said.

  “My steak was delicious—what there was of it,” said my mother, who had cleaned her plate while the rest of us were talking. “I think I’ll have seconds.”

  When Hunt and I were in bed that night, I asked him if he had ever met Brendan Hardy.

  “Once or twice,” he said. “He takes a break from the kitchen sometimes and watches us tee off. Perry says he’s a pretty good golfer.”

  “Interesting. Does he do all the buying for the dining rooms?”

  “You mean the food and beverage buying?”

  I nodded.

  “Sure. Then he gives the bills to Jimmy, the general manager, who approves them and sends them on.”

  “To whom?”

  “To Evan Sutcliffe, the club treasurer and our committee chairman. Evan signs the checks and pays the suppliers. Why all the questions, Jude?”

  “Just curious.”

  “About The Oaks? Since when?”

  “Since…well, since you became a member of the Finance Committee, sweetheart.”

  I never called Hunt sweetheart, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “Gee, if you’re really interested in what we do in the Finance Committee, I’d be glad to tell you all about the way we oversee the budget and—”

  “No, that’s okay,” I said, eager to ward off what I knew would be a hopelessly boring recitation of the club’s bookkeeping practices. “It must be very involved.”

  “It is, but we leave the tough stuff to the accounting firm. They come in once a year to clean things up,” said Hunt, who punctuated his remarks with a loud yawn.

  I nodded again. “Getting back to Brendan,” I said, “does he seem like a nice fellow? What I mean is, does he have a friendly way with the members? Is he receptive to criticism? Does he mind if people make suggestions about the menu? Some chefs can be awfully touchy about their creations. I was just wondering if Brendan struck you as the sort who balks at interference.”

  I went on and on about the chefs I’d known and worked with, hoping Hunt would jump in and offer some insightful commentary on The Oaks’s chef. But when I looked over at him, I realized that there was no point in continuing the discussion. Discussions take a minimum of two people, and I was the only person doing any discussing.

  Hunt was sound asleep, and his snoring would have drowned me out anyway.

  I rolled over on my side and thought about Brendan Hardy. Had he known that Claire was intent on getting the club to replace him with another chef? Had he feared that if he lost his job at The Oaks, he’d never get another one, given his spotty reputation? Had he gotten a look at the reservation list for the Wild West July Fourth party, seen Claire’s name on the list, and lured her onto the golf course? Could it be that it was an employee of The Oaks, not a member, who killed her? Could it be that a country club chef bludgeoned a famous feminist to death?

  I tried to make myself think, tried to put myself in Brendan’s shoes, tried to imagine how panicked I’d be if some bitch set out to fire me.

  Then I lit on the irony of the whole thing. I was in Brendan’s shoes. I had been fired by a bitch. But as much as I despised Leeza Grummond, I’d never once been tempted to hit her over the head with a pitching wedge. Not even after she hired my husband as her commodities broker.

  “Jude?”

  It was Hunt, but he was still asleep. I could tell he was asleep because his mouth was slack and his eyeballs were rolled back in his head. During the seven years we’d been married, he often called out my name in his sleep, and I’d learned not to make more of it than it was: a reflex. Sure, I wished his “Jude?” was a prelude to seduction, a sign that he was about to sit up in bed, pull me toward him, and make mad, passionate love to me, over and over until the sun came up. But I knew Hunt’s sleep patterns. That’s what marriage is all about: knowing your partner’s sleep patterns. Knowing that he snores. Knowing that he drools. Knowing that he likes two pillows instead of one, one blanket instead of two, and sheets that are cotton, not polyester. As mundane as it must sound, there is something to be said for all this knowing, something reassuring, comforting.

  “Jude?” he mumbled again.

  “Yes, Hunt. I’m here,” I said as I watched his chest rise and fall with each breath. “I’m right here.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Brendan lived at the club, in a small white cottage behind the kitchen. According to one of the waitresses, he was single, did not have pets, and liked to play golf on Mondays, when employees were permitted to use the facilities. When I caught up with him, he was sitting at a table in the main dini
ng room, smoking a cigarette and reading People magazine. It was ten-thirty on a Tuesday morning, and I supposed he was taking a break from his pre-lunch preparations.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m Judy Mills. My husband is Hunt Price. From the Finance Committee?”

  “Sure, sure,” said Brendan distractedly. He was chubby—maybe two hundred pounds—and had shaggy brown hair and a ruddy complexion.

  “Would you mind if I sit down?” I asked.

  He seemed surprised by the question. Perhaps The Oaks had a rule about members fraternizing with The Help. But he pulled out a chair and motioned for me to sit next to him.

  I guessed he was about fifty, and despite his somewhat doughy body, he wasn’t unattractive. Just bleary-eyed, as if he’d been chopping onions all night.

  “I’d like to talk to you,” I said.

  “About what?” he said.

  “Well, my husband and I enjoy the meals at the club tremendously,” I said with a straight face. “In fact, I was saying to Hunt just the other day, ‘I’ve got to introduce myself to the chef and get his recipe for that delicious rice pudding.’”

  Brendan laughed. I suspected that no one had ever complimented him on his food before, except Duncan Tewksbury, who was probably born without taste buds.

  “You like that rice pudding, huh?” He grinned, then drew on his cigarette.

  “Oh yes. Very much,” I lied. I had tried Brendan’s rice pudding once—and that was enough. It was a gooey, sickeningly sweet pudding, with very little rice. And the rice that was in it wasn’t even cooked. In fact, if you weren’t careful, you could break a tooth on it. I’d joked to Hunt that I thought Brendan’s rice pudding, like many of his dishes, should come with a warning label from the Surgeon General.

  “I appreciate the compliment,” said Brendan, “but I never give out my recipes.”

  “Oh, that’s a shame,” I said, trying to look grief-stricken. “Let me ask you something else then. I’ve been in the cookbook business for several years, and my latest project is a theme cookbook.”

  “A what?”