Red Shirt

by A. J. Stewart

  “So, what will you do today?” asked Mrs. Dunbar.

  “I plan to track down the source of the problem.”

  “You mean Brett?”

  “I do.”

  “I might be able to help with that.”

  “How so?”

  She stood and moved to the counter and rifled through some loose papers, selected one, and then returned to the table. It was a flyer advertising some kind of charity event, to raise money for a Thanksgiving fund. What they were funding was not specified. What was specified was the day and location.

  “Round Hill Club?” I said, giving both the flyer and Mrs. D my impressed pout.

  “Today.”

  “What makes you think Brett will be here?”

  “The grapevine tells me.”

  “This grapevine seems very connected.”

  “When it knows little, it knows nothing—but when it knows something, it knows everything.”

  “How much to get into this thing?”

  “Two thousand a plate, that’s what I hear.”

  I nodded. “Well at least Brett’s not wasting your money.”

  She didn’t laugh. She didn’t even smile. That was probably because I wasn’t funny. She had lost her life savings, and now her husband seemed to have been cast adrift. There wasn’t anything funny about it. I would have to confront the latter thing eventually, but now I was focussed on the former.

  “Looks like I have a lunch date.”

  ‘You don’t have a ticket,” she said, and then she looked me up and down and frowned. “And even if you did, you wouldn’t get into a club like Round Hill dressed like that.”

  I took a moment to reacquaint myself with my wardrobe. She was right; it really wasn’t country club material.

  “Is that how people dress in Florida?”

  “This is Coach’s sweater,” I said, a touch defensively.

  “I’m talking about the Hawaiian shirt underneath.”

  “This is Florida wear, not Hawaii.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  I shrugged. It was a fair point.

  “It’s hot in Florida.”

  “It’s hot here in the summer. I don’t see people dressed like that.”

  “More’s the pity,” I said.

  “Regardless, it isn’t getting you into Round Hill Club.”

  I knew that. But I also knew how to get in. If there was one thing Florida had, it was golf courses. And more than a decent share of those were trying to recreate that New England old money vibe. Dress codes always helped keep the riff-raff out, as my mother used to say, so plenty of Florida clubs had rules on such things as knee-high socks and Bermuda-length shorts. Given all those clubs, and the amount of monkey-business that went on inside them, you couldn’t be a private investigator worth a dime if you didn’t know how to get past the front door of a fancy golf club.

  Chapter Six

  The Round Hill Golf Club is hidden in amongst the estates and woodlands that dot the landscape north of Greenwich. The journey took me almost all the way back to the airport where I had landed the previous evening. I cut off the Merritt Parkway onto Round Hill Road, sweeping around slow bends under a canopy of bronze- and rust-colored foliage.

  One thing we don’t have in Florida is much of an autumn. In some respects winter is our autumn, but it isn’t noticeable in the palm trees and mangroves which look the same regardless of the time of year. It’s always green and it always feels like you are a week or two away from the flora taking over the entire state. The Northeast, however, is another world—even in Fairfield County, which is more New York than New England. The summers tend to be oppressively humid, and the winters long and cold, so the rebirth of spring and the ebbing of fall are prominent for the extremes.

  I drove my nondescript rental car past the stone walls and ledges and wrought iron gates that gave but an inkling of the stately homes hidden behind, and then cut along the edge of the golf course itself. Although the road was public it dead-ended in the parking lot at the golf club, so there was really no reason to be on it, other than to be heading for the club.

  If a Floridian or Hawaiian shirt would have raised eyebrows, my Chevy Blah would have done the same, so I edged to the side of the road and let what looked like a Bentley pass me by, and then I crept forward until I found a space in the trees where I could pull off the road. I backed in behind some maples—or they could have been elms or oaks; trees really aren’t my area of expertise, except to say the leaves were red—and hid the car from view. Arriving vehicles would miss it, departing vehicles would not, but I wasn’t planning on staying for last call.

  I took my bundle from the passenger seat and stepped through the trees and out onto the rough edge of the golf course. The course was still technically open for play, but the cold breeze and pewter sky kept all but the hardiest souls away. I saw a cart in the distance, but that could have been a greenskeeper for all I knew. I followed the tree line back along the fairway until I reached a spot where it opened up in front of the clubhouse.

  The building was built to last. It was made of stone and low in profile, long and sturdy, and it made me think of Yorkshire, and the sort of stone cottage one might stay in if one wanted to spend time drinking warm beer in cold rain. It was like a bunker and easy to heat, the antithesis of Florida clubs and their sweeping verandahs and indoor-outdoor construction.

  To my left the road ended in a lazy loop where there was a small parking lot that looked insufficient for the job. A line of vehicles like a prestige car show waited on the valets, who were running back from the lot beyond my view so the members and guests didn’t have to walk fifty yards themselves.

  Well-dressed folks were getting out of their cars and stepping under a gray canopy that led to the entrance of the clubhouse. None of them looked dressed for golf. I wouldn’t have dressed so well to visit the opera. Gentlemen were pulling tickets from suit jacket pockets, but I got the impression that the guy opening the door for them knew pretty much everyone by sight.

  He didn’t know me, but I wasn’t too concerned about that. I strode across the green lawn between a tee box and the side of the stone clubhouse, and then moved around behind onto an open patio that ran the length of the building and overlooked the golf course. I imagined it to be a very popular spot during the warmer months, but as the sky half-heartedly began sending drizzle down onto the stones underfoot, I noted that no one was braving the elements today.

  I kept walking toward the main part of the building where the structure grew to two stories and an awning covered the patio, under which gas heaters kept the cold at bay. A few hardy souls had ventured out to watch the fall colors around the eighteenth green change imperceptibly before them. I figured this to be the smoking crowd, but smelled no evidence of it.

  My late mentor, Lenny Cox, had taught me a valuable rule regarding Palm Beach society,—and given Palm Beach society was largely the people in this golf club escaping the northern winter, the rule was equally valid here. His rule was: A tuxedo could get you into any room in Palm Beach. I had found it to be uncommonly true. Lenny had taken me to be fitted for my first tux, and I had worn one in a professional capacity more often than I thought possible. But there were two problems. The first was, I didn’t have my tux with me. The second was, society folks generally didn’t wear tuxedos to functions in daylight hours. But I had noted something in the years I had worn my tux, and that was what it actually did for me—it made me look like I was supposed to be wherever I happened to be, even if I really had no business being there, and it did so by essentially making me invisible. Pretty much every man looks good in a penguin suit, but if every man is wearing one, then every man looks the same. I recalled something about not seeing forests for the trees.

  So I took the principles of the rule and reapplied them. I needed to look like I belonged, while remaining invisible, like a piece of furniture. And no one looked more like furniture in places like this than the staff.

  I wa
sn’t sure if it was a necessary trait to be able to see service staff as furniture in order to become rich, or if being rich made you that way because you saw these people so often that they were reduced to nothing more than the service they rendered, the way most of us see a refrigerator. Either way, I had never been at ease with it. I never felt the need for a guy in a big hat to open a hotel door for me, and it always made me uneasy when it happened. Not that it happened that often. I’m a pretty big guy, so most people wait for me to open those heavy hotel-type doors. But even at Longboard Kelly’s, I never saw Muriel as a piece of furniture. She was more like a friend who happened to work in a bar. Those are the best kinds of friends.

  As I moved under the awning, I passed a service trolley that was being used to deposit glasses and small plates to be taken to the kitchen for washing. I snapped up a silver tray from the top of the trolley, and placed it over my bundle, and kept walking.

  Two men in dark suits and starched shirts were in hushed conversation, and one of them glanced at me. For a moment I thought I was made, but then he held out an empty glass and I took it from him and placed it on my tray without stopping. He offered me a nod, as if it was a job well done, which proved he wasn’t completely inhuman, but I knew all he had seen was the tray and the white shirt and the clip-on bow tie that I had borrowed from Coach Dunbar’s wardrobe. My khaki trousers probably should have been black, but that was a calculated risk I was prepared to take.

  I slipped in through a door and found myself in the exact room I expected to find, even though I had never been anywhere near the club before. If I were given a paper and a box of crayons and asked to design a clubhouse for a New England golf club, this was pretty much what I would have drawn. The brown crayon would have been used down to a nub. There was dark wood everywhere. The walls were dark wood, the chairs were dark wood, even the bar was dark wood. The ceiling had been lightened up to give the room a sense of space, so the whole thing felt inviting rather than oppressive, and it oozed class. The word that came to mind—and I grimaced as I thought it—was clubby.

  There was a service station at one end of the bar where a bartender was placing drinks on a tray while a waiter waited, so I headed for the other end. I weaved around men dressed like bankers and women dressed like fine china. I left the tray and the ruse with it on the end of the bar, and then looked around for a bathroom. They don’t tend to be signposted in these kinds of places so they can be tricky to find, but there is a proven method. At most prestigious clubs the membership tended to skew older, sometimes much older. And the defining feature of older people wasn’t ethnicity or baldness or weight. It was that they went to the bathroom more often than everyone else.

  It was a disconcerting phenomenon that had started to creep its way into my life, especially in the middle of the night, especially after a few brews at Longboard’s. Lately I had even noticed a need to not stretch during the seventh inning of a baseball game, but rather run off for a quick whizz.

  So I watched for the flow of penguin suits headed for an otherwise unlikely location. It didn’t take long to spot a corridor off the restaurant area, where men seemed to moving to and fro like crackheads to a tenement. I slipped in behind a couple of gentlemen who looked to be headed in the general direction and tucked my bundle under my arm, and I swept past a maître d′-looking guy with an eagle nose who gave every indication that he was on patrol to find interlopers just like me.

  The bathroom was one of the finest rooms I had ever been in. There was more dark wood, but the lighting and the mirrors and the stone vanities opened it up. It looked too good to use, like using one of those architectural magazine covers to start a log fire. There was an old guy sitting on a stool, doing nothing more than hand guys small towels to dry their hands, in return for which they were depositing hard currency in a small jar.

  Fortunately the old guy was paying more attention to those leaving than those arriving, so I slipped into a cubicle and did my superman act. I dropped my bundle onto the seat of the toilet and ripped off my clip-on bow tie. From the bundle I took a long neck tie which I had pre-knotted, and I slipped it over my head. It was red and gold stripes and made me think I was going off to school with Harry Potter, but it was the clubbiest tie Coach Dunbar owned, and the pickings had been pretty slim. After I pulled it tight I unfolded Coach’s blazer, a blue thing with gold buttons on the cuffs. It felt like the sort of thing a person might wear if they were going to Halloween dressed as a billionaire, but I had seen one or two in the clubhouse so I wasn’t going to be completely out of place, even though it was the wrong side of Labor Day.

  I slipped out of the cubicle and took a look in the mirror as I washed my hands. With my blue blazer, white shirt, and khaki trousers I looked like one of those Silicon Valley guys, and with my unruly blond hair I wasn’t a banker. I buttoned the jacket, pulled out a dollar for my towel toll, and went back out to find an old friend.

  There were a lot of suits and a lot of balding heads and a lot of bellies pushing at belts, and even though the women wore different colored dresses, they all seemed to have gone to the same hairdresser. The most notable thing about the crowd was how white it was. It was like looking for a grain of sand on a beach. I was used to living in South Florida where I saw every variation of human imaginable, every single day. There were whites and blacks and browns, and even one guy who wandered along the foreshore in West Palm who bore a jaundiced yellow color despite having been in Florida longer than me. There were people who could trace their heritage back to the Mayflower and folks who had arrived yesterday, Cubans and Haitians and Mexicans and Nebraskans, all looking for their slice of sun-drenched heaven, and generally seeming pretty happy about being there. But in this room, I struggled to find even a decent tan. Which made finding my guy all the more challenging.

  What made it harder still was not having seen him for close on two decades. People age, it’s an incontrovertible fact. They can fight it or they can face it with grace, but they can’t deny it. Some people, like Danielle, look better with a few years on the clock than they did in school. Others, like me, just get furrowed brows like the Grand Canyon and crow’s feet like road maps of Paris. I had no idea which direction Brett Pickering had gone.

  I wandered around the room with a glass of Perrier in my hand. I really could have done with a beer but I noted that not that many people were drinking alcohol. I had found day drinking to be a mistake more often than not, and this was a smart crowd. Perhaps they had work to get back to, or perhaps they just wanted to minimize visits to the bathroom.

  I found Brett Pickering in a clutch of suits standing by a fireplace. The fire was dormant so they weren’t there for the heat, but they seemed to have gravitated to it anyway. I didn’t recognize Brett right away. I was looking for something completely different.

  I had started two years as quarterback for our high school team, but I was admired rather than adored. I never really combed my hair back then, and I don’t really do it very often now, and I have to admit that it makes me look a touch scruffy. That look played well to some of the girls at school, but almost none of the parents. Brett Pickering, on the other hand, followed behind me. He was the JV quarterback during my senior year, and went on to start for the varsity side when I went on to college. He had a good arm and was more mobile than me, but was generally considered to be a bit more suspect in the pocket. It didn’t matter. He had an offensive line in front of him that was the envy of many colleges, and he took our little school to the only state championship game it ever played—before or since. But none of that really mattered, either.

  Brett was the golden boy. The girls loved him, the parents loved him. Coach Dunbar loved him. He had blond hair like me, but unlike me, his was layered like a hand-crafted croissant, coiffed to perfection with the comb he carried on him everywhere except the football field. I went to a barber once or twice a year. Brett went to a hairdresser, and the general assumption was that he visited them every Thursday, to look his best for th
e Friday games. He wore a winning smile and dressed like a refugee from Miami Vice, and it was that sort of look I had in my mind’s eye as I searched for him.

  He looked different, but not completely. He still had his hair, which was something. But it was short and darker and flicked up at the front like a duck’s tail with what I assumed must have been some kind of hair gel. He wore black-framed glasses that might have made another person look smarter but made Brett look like he was playing a part. He had discarded the Miami Vice thing for a charcoal pinstripe suit that fit him to perfection. There was no doubt he was still in shape.

  I stepped into their little circle. Some people have trouble doing that. Some folks can’t join a conversation or approach a person they don’t know—even at a networking event where people are expecting just that to happen—because they fear they can’t think of anything clever to say. I always figured they were looking at it wrong. I don’t try to say something clever or ingratiating. I say nothing. I stood in the circle with my expensive water in my hand and an impish grin on my lips as they all looked at me. But I said nothing.

  I just looked at Brett Pickering.

  I wondered how long it might take him to place me. Then, as time dragged, I wondered if he ever would. We had been teammates, we had trained together and watched film together and read playbooks together, but no one would have called us close. But we weren’t enemies, either. Coach Dunbar had a way of making everything about the team, and making sure you knew your place in it. The long-time New England Patriots head coach, Bill Belichick, had a saying, central to everything he ever did: Do your job. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he had picked that tidbit up from Coach Dunbar. We did our jobs, we helped each other play better, but I was never threatened by him taking my starting position, and he never gave the slightest sign that he thought that was an option. We parted on good terms when I left for Miami, but neither of us ever felt the compulsion to keep in touch. So as I stood there looking at him, I had to consider the possibility that I had not swept across his mind in decades.