I realized I was only hearing one side of the story, so I talked to other people at the club. The conversations went something like this:
Eddie Perlmutter: What’s your problem with the One Course members versus the Two Course members?
One Course Member #1: The Two Course members are screwing us.
E.P.: How?
OCM #1: We subsidize their course and can’t play there.
E.P.: Do you have proof of this subsidy?
OCM #1: Proof? What are you, a fuckin’ detective?
Eddie Perlmutter: The One Course members claim they subsidize the Two Course members.
Two Course Member #1: They’re full of shit.
E.P.: That doesn’t really answer the question.
TCM #1: Sure it does.
E.P.: Look, all I want is a simple answer. Is it true that One Course members subsidize the Two Course members, even though they can’t play on the Two Course?
TCM #1: You got proof of that?
E.P.: No.
TCM #1: Then it’s not true.
E.P.: Can you prove it’s not true?
TCM #1: Proof? What are you, a fuckin’ detective?
Eddie Perlmutter: Why don’t you just take out a Two Course membership?
One Course Member #2: Why should I? I’m a homeowner at Boca Heights, and the members own the club. If I’m an owner of the club, and the Two Course is part of the club, then I should be able to play there without having to pay an initiation fee.
E.P.: But what about the current Two Course members? They paid as much as $40,000 extra to join the Two Course.
OCM #2: Something should be done about that.
E.P.: Like what?
OCM #2: I don’t care as long as it doesn’t cost me anything.
Eddie Perlmutter: Do you think the One Course members are getting screwed by not being able to play on the Two Course? They’re property owners like you and feel they should be entitled to play on both courses.
Two Course Member #2: In other words, they want something for nothing. Fuck ‘em.
E.P.: But they claim they’re subsidizing the Two Course members with extra payments.
TCM #2: No one’s ever proven that. But think about this, Eddie: The Two Course brings up the value of the One Course and the overall property at Boca Heights. A new home buyer has the option of playing on two courses at Boca Heights. It’s an advantage. And another thing, most Two Course members play only on the Two Course, even though they pay to play on both courses. If the Two Course members played on the One Course on a regular basis that course would be overcrowded. So, everyone benefits from the setup here.
E.P.: The One Course members don’t think so.
TCM #2: They’re a bunch of assholes.
E.P.: That seems to be the answer to a lot of issues around here.
I was confused by the claims and counterclaims. When I suggested an audit of the Two Course books to determine if the One Course members were actually subsidizing a facility they couldn’t use, I was either told “mind your own business” or was given some explanation I didn’t understand.
I was also drawn into the assessment wars. Arvida left Boca Heights with several inadequate amenities. The facilities had needed to be improved but no one could agree on what needed to be done.
“We don’t need a Taj Mahal for a new clubhouse.”
“Cheap bastard. I want the best things money can buy, and I don’t care what it costs.”
“Who needs a new health club? I don’t use the old one.”
“You should, you fat shit.”
“I want to keep the understated elegance of Boca Heights.”
“By ‘understated elegance’ you mean you don’t want to spend any money.”
“Everyone on the board of directors is stupid.” “The membership voted for the board of directors.”
“The membership is stupid.”
“You’re a member.”
“Are you calling me stupid?”
“We don’t need a six-million-dollar new front entrance.”
“I never leave the place. Why should I pay for a new entrance or exit?”
There were 1,500 homes with 4,000 opinions at Boca Heights.
Robert Goldenblatt had been a man with a lot of opinions, and he expressed them regularly. He was a former president of the club and an aggressive guy. He was in favor of minimum spending, and he wanted a merger of the two types of memberships with no extra cost to the One Course members. Goldenblatt was a big man and an intimidating physical presence. He usually got his way.
Dominick Amici was a vocal supporter of having the best of everything, and he thought a merger of the two memberships with no compensation for the Two Course members was grossly unfair. Dominick was as big physically as Goldenblatt. He usually got his way, too.
Amici and Goldenblatt argued regularly at meetings, and it was no secret that they had developed an unhealthy dislike for one another. They seldom spoke to each other, except to debate the issues, and they avoided each other otherwise.
Then “the e-mail” was sent by Robert Goldenblatt to the entire club membership after a particularly acrimonious meeting. Dominick didn’t have a copy with him when he told me the story at the hospital, so he could only give me the basics of the year-old missive. It went something like this:
At the club meeting tonight, Mr. Dominick Amici was once again loud and obnoxious throughout the proceedings. Mr. Amici’s thinking is so outdated it is prehistoric and of no value in today’s world. He should leave the management of the club to people who are intelligent enough to understand the problems at Boca Heights and do something about them.
The members I talked to about the e-mail agreed that it was in terribly poor taste. (“But it was certainly no reason for Dominick to plant a four iron in Goldenblatt’s forehead.”)
When I asked why everyone seemed so sure Dominick had committed murder, the various answers I received boiled down to the following:
Robert Goldenblatt was killed the same night the e-mail was distributed to the membership. It was easy to understand why Dominick Amici would be so offended. Also, at a little after nine on the night of the e-mail, Dominick’s car was seen by Goldenblatt’s next-door neighbor, screeching to a halt in front of Goldenblatt’s house. It was a cloudy, windy night. Dominick ran toward the open garage shouting, “Goldenblatt, you asshole, I wanna talk to you.” Goldenblatt pushed a button on the garage wall to close the overhead door, but Amici managed to get into the garage an instant before the door closed. Two more neighbors could hear the banging and screaming coming from inside the garage. The next-door neighbor who had been there from the beginning of the confrontation quickly told the arriving dog walkers what had transpired. They suddenly heard a loud bang, and then Dominick Amici appeared, running through the front gate. He had obviously exited through the back door of the garage that led to the courtyard behind the front gate. He looked panicked, and there was blood on his hands.
“That man is crazy,” Dominick said to the bystanders as he got into his car and drove away. The garage door was still closed, so the onlookers entered cautiously through the front gate and opened the back door to the garage. Robert Goldenblatt was found lying dead in a pool of blood with the blade of his four iron embedded in his forehead. The police confirmed that the four iron had Dominick’s fingerprints on it, but the blood on his hands was proven to be his own, not Goldenblatt’s.
The circumstantial evidence was impressive. I had a lot of work to do.
I met Ely Samuels in front of Robert Goldenblatt’s house in an area called Harbor Point. No harbor and no point. Expansive, expensive homes backed up to a large, man-made lake on the east side of the street. There were no homes on the west side. Goldenblatt’s house was an interesting structure. As you faced the house, the garage was to the left below a balcony of a two-floor, two-bedroom guesthouse that was separate from the main house. The main house was behind a ten-foot-high wooden gate. We entered the courtyard, where I saw a
small swimming pool and the man-made lake behind the house.
Samuels led me into the garage through the courtyard garage door. Across the three-car garage was a large overhead door to accommodate two full-sized cars. There was a separate small overhead door to accommodate a compact car. He pressed two buttons on the wall next to the door, and both overhead doors went up. We walked across the garage to the front of the house and looked back again. “So Amici pulls up there.” Samuels pointed. “Goldenblatt is in the garage practicing golf with plastic golf balls.”
“Why was he practicing in the garage? Why not in the driveway where there’s more room?”
“Good question,” Samuels said. “It was very windy that night and the plastic golf balls probably would have blown to Pompano.”
“So why practice at all on a night like that?”
“Goldenblatt had developed the shanks.”
“Is that like the shingles?” I asked.
“No. It’s like death. It’s when a golfer hits the ball sideways instead of straight.”
“On purpose?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then why does he do it?”
“He can’t help it. There’s something wrong with his swing,” Samuels explained.
“So, Goldenblatt was trying to correct his swing by hitting plastic golf balls in his garage on a windy night?”
Samuels nodded.
I shrugged.
I surveyed the garage, trying to re-create what had happened that night. I pictured the struggle between the two men, which should have been even enough, considering that they were both enormous. Yet, Amici said he ran away from Goldenblatt. Was he running from the scene of the crime, or was he running from a maniac with a golf club?
Samuels exited through the open front of the garage while I waited by the heavy wood and metal back door. When Samuels was safely outside I pressed the buttons to close the overhead doors. I opened the back door and stepped into the courtyard, still holding the door handle. I turned to look back at the garage, then let go of the heavy door. A gusty breeze off the lake blew the door shut with surprising force. The door slammed loudly. It was a relatively mild day, but the breeze still had enough velocity to slam the door shut forcefully.
I walked past the pool to the back fence and looked out at the lake. The breeze was warm and steady off the water. I went to the back garage door and opened it again. When I released the handle the breeze off the lake slammed the door shut again.
I inspected the courtyard area. The Goldenblatt main house was one level, but high ceilings inside made it a tall structure. I guessed the peak of the roof at approximately twenty feet. Thanks to Boca’s zero lot-line zoning, the house next door on the south side was only a few feet away from Goldenblatt’s pool area. The house had two levels and was taller than Goldenblatt’s house by several feet. The houses were separated by high palms and thick vegetation.
The breeze off the lake was squeezed between the two houses to the front of the Goldenblatt lot and the two-story, unattached guesthouse. The two buildings created a wind tunnel that funneled enough wind velocity from a mild breeze to generate a gust strong enough to slam a heavy door shut with authority.
I left the courtyard and joined Samuels in front of the Goldenblatt house.
“What took you so long?” he asked.
“I took a dip.” The air was calm in front of the Goldenblatt house and it was several degrees warmer than the courtyard. “Actually, I was trying to remember the basic laws of physics that I didn’t learn in high school.”
“And what did you remember?”
“Nothing,” I admitted.
“Got any theories?” he asked.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“You’re joking.” He raised his eyebrows.
“My theory might be a joke,” I conceded, “but I’m not joking.”
“I’m listening,” he told me.
“Don’t strain yourself,” I said, “because I’m not talking. I need to gather my thoughts into a cohesive bunch of bullshit.”
We shook hands and got into our cars. I let Samuels leave first, and then I drove to the nearby neighborhood of Vintage Estates and the Buford house.
Young Buford was in front of the white stucco house scrubbing off the large, blue Star of David I had painted near the front door. Hope Blue Alien Spray Paint was a bitch to get off any surface unless you had an industrial solvent like ITW Daymon Graffiti Remover and a wire brush. I didn’t know what he was using but the Israeli blue paint drizzled down the side of the house discoloring the walls.
I stopped my car in front of the house and watched the little Nazi scrub. He was dressed entirely in black and had a buzz cut on the sides of his head and a thin, short dyed Mohawk running down the middle. He was a Goth. I had dealt with Goths in Boston years ago and recently at the Publix supermarket in the Regency Mall. I couldn’t stand the morbid little motherfuckers. Randolph was squat, with a flat face and unremarkable features, except for a pair of vacant blue eyes that stared at me when he sensed my presence. I stared back, trying to tell him with a smirk that I was the artist who had decorated his walls. Just then Forrest Buford came out of the house carrying a bucket and a brush. He was a tall man with broad shoulders. His sandy-colored hair was close-cropped, and his thick neck supported a wide, flat, humorless face. Father and son both stared at me now.
I put the Mini in gear and drove slowly past the house. Their suspicious eyes followed me. I extended my left arm out the open driver’s window and gave them a Nazi salute, and then, with a subtle twist of my wrist, I gave them the finger.
I crashed on my rented living-room sofa and clicked on the television set with the remote control. I checked my watch. It was five-thirty in the afternoon of another sunny day in Boca. Today, however, was different from any prior sunny afternoon. Today was the last day of Dominick Amici’s life. By now he was receiving a morphine drip at Hospice by the Sea to ease his departure. They say you can’t die in your own dreams, but what if you die while you’re dreaming?
The African Queen, starring Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart, was on television. I’d seen it before. Katharine Hepburn looked great. It would be a long time before she would start shaking from Parkinson’s. I guess the best people can hope for is to get old before they get sick.
Dominick Amici was sixty-six years old when he was diagnosed with leukemia. He would be sixty-seven when he died. He would be thirty-seven years younger than his amazing mother was when she died.
Dominick had agreed to go to hospice that afternoon, only ten days after telling me the Robert Goldenblatt story. Dominick didn’t want to go. He wanted to stay with his wife and family. He wanted to play golf and poker with his friends. He wanted to watch his grandchildren grow up. But when his priest, Father Tom, told Dominick it was okay for him to say goodbye to his family on earth and join his family in heaven, Dominick agreed. With his church’s blessing, Dominick Amici was prepared to go to the afterlife he had been promised since the beginning of his life.
I was at the hospital when Dom made his decision to leave us, and I wanted to scream, “Stay here with us. There is no afterlife!”
But I didn’t want to disrupt his peace of mind and the unquestioning faith of his family. And what did I know anyway? Maybe there was an afterlife, and Dominick could be a par golfer when he got there. Every time Dom talked about being a par golfer, his buddies would say, “Yeah, sure, Dom, in your next life.” Maybe now Dom was only a heartbeat away from being a par golfer.
Whether there was an afterlife or not, though, I had unresolved concerns about this life.
My relationship with Alicia Fine was stalled. We had talked only once since the night I left her apartment, and our last discussion was awkward.
Alicia Fine’s nature was to avoid confrontation. My nature was to confront.
“The Bufords never did anything to you,” she reasoned.
“They won’t get a chance.”
“Violence
doesn’t solve anything.”
“Aryan Army thinks that violence solves everything.”
“So your answer is to be violent like them?”
“No, my answer is to be more violent than them.”
Alicia and I didn’t talk again after that phone call. There was nothing to talk about. We were from different worlds. In my world, you had to fight back against creeps like the Bufords.
I dozed off watching Bogie and Hepburn bobbing in the water. Somewhere between asleep and awake I accepted that Dominick was going and Alicia was gone.
“You pay. You die” I heard from the bottom of a well.
I tried to open my eyes, but I felt as if there were weights on my lids.
“You pay. You die,” I heard again.
I managed to get one eye open, and I saw the round faces of the men who had tried to kill me in the hospital. This time I wasn’t drugged. I bolted upright on the sofa, and threw myself in the direction of the two men. There were no catheters or intravenous tubes to drag me down. There was, however, a coffee table. I caught both my shins on the sharp edge of the heavy table and toppled forward. I rolled onto my back and looked up. The two faces were still there, inside the television set. I was confused. I sat upright on the floor and looked at the television screen. The older man was smiling cheerfully at me, and I heard him say clearly, “You buy. You pay. You die. We pay. Right, Howard?”
“That’s right, Dad!”
Printed words came on the screen:
LIVE RICH! DIE RICH! BARRY KAYE & ASSOCIATES
It was an advertisement for a local insurance company.
“And now back to our movie.”
“Schmuck!” I called myself when I realized that I had been attacked twice by a father-and-son life-insurance team.
“You buy (our insurance), you pay (the premium), you die (pass away), we pay (the death benefit).”
I decided not to tell anyone.
I pulled myself up from the floor and glanced at my watch. It was only 8 p.m. and there was still plenty of time to play another round of Follow the Goth, the same game I had been playing all week.
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