He wasn’t going to bother to explain why unless pushed, so I was going to have to push. I wasn’t expecting that. He wasn’t a developer or a realtor, but I had no doubt those guys offered bounties to lawyers like Martin for referring sales. And no one involved in property in Florida gave up a sale. It wasn’t done. Maybe elsewhere, but not in Florida. In Florida people lived to shift real estate.
“You holding out on me, Martin?”
“Not at all.”
“It sounds like you’re onto something good and you don’t want to share.”
“I’m not a real estate salesman, Miami. I just handle transactions. Usually for developers or high-end purchases.”
“And Capricorn Lakes is not that?”
“Mr. Jones, have you visited the community in question?”
It felt like a trick question, like a hand grenade Danielle would throw at me, a question with no correct answer. I wondered if he knew I had been there. I wondered if the gardeners had told him I was there. I wondered how the gardeners would even know who I was. I didn’t give anyone there my name. And I hadn’t been wearing my usual palm tree print shirt and khaki shorts, so I didn’t think I was particularly memorable.
I said, “I haven’t had the opportunity. It’s been a busy week.”
“It has. My counsel would be for you to finish your business here, and once that is done, go visit the development.”
“Why?”
“To see what you’re getting into. If you still think it a wise investment, come back and talk to me. If not, I do know a couple of very good investment managers who would be more than happy to assist you.”
I sat back and sipped my water. He was a clever guy. Smarter than me for sure. What worried me was how streetwise he was. I had thought I had his measure on that score, but now I wasn’t so sure.
I noticed Miss Tiffany stepping back into the tent, her heels on the grass making it look as if she were walking barefoot on broken glass. I stood and thanked Martin for his time.
“Of course. Good luck for tomorrow.”
I nodded and offered a smile to Miss Tiffany as I wandered out and got a blank stare in return. I found Nixon standing by a food truck, eating a Cuban sandwich. He was a lean guy, fit without being overdone. He didn’t get that way eating piles of fatty meats and cheese. He saw me coming and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin.
“What’s news?” he asked.
I made my perplexed face. “I don’t know. I brought up the investment idea, like you said. And I brought up Capricorn Lakes.”
“And?”
“He begged me off. Told me it wasn’t for me.”
“Wasn’t for you? What’s his angle?”
“I don’t know.” I was suddenly hungry, so I ordered a Cuban sandwich as well. I collected my dripping sandwich from the guy in the truck and Nixon and I walked away toward the clubhouse.
“I can’t figure the guy,” I said. “It felt like maybe he knew I was trying to set him up, and he wanted me well away from the deal.”
“That tells us something.”
“Only if it’s accurate. Because it might be something else.”
Nixon waited until he swallowed a mouthful. “What else could it be?”
“He might have been warning me off a deal he thought was a bad deal.”
“Honesty?” Nixon frowned. “How often do you run into that?”
“Not often enough,” I said.
As we stood in the afternoon sun I caught a glimpse of a familiar gait, and we watched Danielle wander over from the corporate hospitality village. She was chatting with a fellow deputy. When they got close she noticed us and broke our way.
“You guys look worried,” she said with a smile that would dissolve most of my worries. Most of them.
“Thoughtful,” I said.
“Intriguing.”
“That’s what I’m going for.”
I realized that neither Danielle nor Nixon knew I had already visited Capricorn Lakes. It was the sort of thing I would ordinarily share with Danielle, but for reasons I couldn’t pin down I decided to keep to myself. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the guys tending the gardens, or because of Martin Costas, or because there was something important I’d put into my mental filing cabinet that I thought I’d lose to the ether if I spoke about it.
Danielle said she had thirty minutes to grab something to eat before she went back to work. Nixon and I wore the shiny grins of freshly devoured Cuban sandwiches, so she begged off and went to eat with her colleague. I told her I was going to find Heath McAllen and see if he needed anything. We both left Nixon standing there like a flagpole in the wind.
Chapter Thirty-Four
I didn’t find Heath McAllen. A PGA Tour official at the driving range told me he had been and gone, and that he had a sponsor’s dinner that evening. I took that as my cue to exit stage left. I was tired and confused. I resolved to go home, grab a beer and think things through. I got to the parking lot before I realized my problem. I didn’t have a car. I had no way to get home. I cursed the big English caddy. A taxi was going to be as difficult to find as a Florida accent, and I was giving serious consideration to walking the fifteen miles when Heath McAllen wandered out of the clubhouse. He was freshly showered but otherwise looked the same. He wore trousers and a polo. His ball cap was the only thing he had left behind, and his full head of wavy brown hair rustled in the breeze.
“There’s my caddy.”
“Sorry I missed practice, boss.”
“Don’t do it again.” He smiled and I found it to be infectious. A large black SUV pulled up to the entrance.
“Sponsor’s dinner?” I asked.
He nodded, sheepishly. “Not my idea of a good time, but I cannae complain about the pay. What about you?”
“Thinking about how to get home.” I looked across the parking lot like it was a meadow in the Wild West and I had a week-long ride ahead. Heath watched me briefly before the penny clicked home.
“Oh, right. No car.” He looked embarrassed, as if it were he who had driven my car into a lake. “Can I give you a lift?”
“Not necessary. But thanks.”
“No hassle. They’ll drop me off and then wait for me. They might as well take you home while they’re waiting.”
I looked at the car. The driver had the rear door open. “It would be my pleasure, sir,” the driver said to me.
Heath got in and I followed and the driver took us to Palm Beach.
“Where’s your dinner?” I asked.
“Some place called The Breakers. You know it?”
I nodded. I knew it well. It was one of Ron and Cassandra’s haunts. It was, in fact, where they had met. Ron and I were there on a case, and Cassandra was at a fund-raiser for the governor. We were in tuxedos so we looked the part, and Cassandra had taken a shine to a dapper-looking Ron, which had not worn off.
We cruised out past Bonita Mar and up the palm-lined driveway to the grand old building that was as much a part of the island as the ubiquitous trees. I told Heath I’d see him on the morrow, and he shot me the wink and got out into a throng of fans. I noticed that a lot of them were young women.
When I had been a kid my dad had taken me one time to a minor league game. The New Haven Ravens played at Yale Field, not far from our home. I was in junior high and doing well with baseball, and I liked to think that my dad took me because of that. He wasn’t a big baseball fan, and we’d never gone to a game before. But we had recently lost my mother to cancer, and I think it was my dad’s attempt at trying to save us. To bond, as fathers and sons do over a hotdog and America’s pastime. The field was nothing special. The Yale college team played there too, and I guess that was how my dad got tickets. He worked at the university as a janitor, and they took care of their people. I remembered the smell of the field, grass and popcorn, as we approached the gate. We arrived early for batting practice, and afterward the home team players signed autographs. I’ll never forget how big those guys seemed. Arms li
ke lumber and chests like bank vaults. One of the players signed a ball, dirty with infield clay, and handed it to me. I thought I’d gone to heaven.
But now kids don’t ask for autographs, they take selfies. If you don’t get a photo with the famous person then it never happened. Stories aren’t enough anymore. Now we all need evidential proof.
The driver closed the door and pulled away, leaving Heath to his fans, that trademark grin to be plastered across social media websites alongside complete strangers.
* * *
The driver took me home to Singer Island. The sun was low and thinking about clocking out. I thanked the guy for the ride, and he said it was his pleasure and he seemed to mean it. I pulled out my wallet to offer him a tip but he waved it off.
The house was quiet. My house usually is. I don’t have kids and I don’t have a television, so that keeps the noise level down. But the silence was unnerving, as if it were underscoring the point that I was alone. I didn’t like the feeling at all. I’m normally quite fine in my own company. I enjoy solitude. Perhaps like a lot of people I enjoy it on my own terms, not when it is thrust upon me. I slid my phone into the dock connected to a speaker on the kitchen counter, and I turned on some Tim McGraw. I took a beer from the fridge and found Tim singing about living as if I were dying just didn’t suit my mood, so left him to it and wandered out onto the back patio.
I lay back on my lounger and chose not to look at the empty one beside me. The sun was falling over Riviera Beach, and water on the Intracoastal was pastel. I took a sip and took a deep breath. I was having trouble getting a handle on things. There were too many moving pieces. The wedding party and the fathers of the bride and groom—who didn’t seem overly fond of each other. Nathaniel Donaldson, whom no one seemed particularly fond of. Keith Hamilton, who appeared to be prepared to open a vein for the club, but who had purchased adjacent land prime for development. And he had done that in cahoots with Martin Costas and Barry Yarmouth. Or at least with their full knowledge that the cash came from Donaldson’s pocket. And there was Dig Maddox, who seemed happy to sell the same grass over and over again.
I decided to go back to the beginning. Right to the beginning. To the primordial part of the whole thing. The virus. It was fast and it was nasty. Connie Persil had said it was a new strain, never seen before in the United States. But it was here. There was no doubt about that. Connie would be trying to track it back to its source, but the trail went dry one step back from the wedding party. Connie would check all the sick family members, but I had a hunch she would come up with nothing. The answer was in the bottle of bleach. The virus was there, lurking and waiting. Or more specifically someone was holding it and waiting to use it. The virus wasn’t malicious. It didn’t plan on hurting anyone. There was no malice aforethought. It was like a gun. It got fired, or it didn’t. But like a gun, someone had brought it to the party when they shouldn’t have. And that someone was the link to the source point.
I resolved to call Lizzy in the morning and get her hunting for the source. I resolved to confirm what Connie Persil knew. I resolved to get some good sleep and be at the course early so I could give a young golfer the support and protection he deserved.
I sucked back the rest of my beer and looked at the lights begin their nightly twinkling across the water. I considered another beer. I thought about how I had done something Nixon couldn’t do, and how he could now do something I couldn’t do. I looked at the empty lounger beside me.
And I resolved to not let it stay that way.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The morning bloomed the way spring mornings should. The sky azure, the breeze light. Danielle had come home late and tired and was still sleeping fast when I got up and found Ron waiting outside my house in his Camry. The car rattled like a stagecoach but never broke down. I couldn’t say the same for my cars.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said, getting in to find him offering a travel mug of coffee.
“Anytime. If I didn’t say so before, sorry about the Porsche.”
“I’m not. It wasn’t me.”
“I didn’t want to say anything.”
“Yes, you did. You said plenty.” I looked at him. “And as usual you were right.”
He punched the old car into gear and pulled away.
“Danielle was there late last night,” he said.
“I know. She’s working hard.”
“She always works hard. This is above and beyond.”
I sensed there was something more he had to say on the subject, but he didn’t say it. Ron liked to travel with the window down, like a Labrador, and it didn’t make for great conversation when he picked up speed.
The course was coming to life when we arrived. There were catering trucks delivering food and waste management trucks taking it away. The corporate hospitality tents were silent like a boardwalk in winter. Ron parked and we walked up to the clubhouse. He went right and I went left and found my way to the locker rooms.
Some clubs had separate rooms for the players and caddies, and other clubs didn’t even let the caddies into the clubhouse. South Lakes was a little more relaxed. Players had one side of the rooms, caddies the other. The players’ side was nicer to be sure, but the caddies’ side wasn’t the worst. I unlocked the locker and removed the coveralls and put them on over my shorts and polo. I hung a pair of trousers in the locker in case Keith Hamilton and the fashion police happened by after the round. Once dressed I removed Heath’s bag. I counted all the clubs and came up with fourteen, which was where I wanted to get to. It was then I noticed a number of the other caddies were looking at me. Not a welcoming committee exactly. They shared knowing glances like they knew something I didn’t know. Which was a state of affairs I took as read. They did this for a living. They knew plenty. But I knew some stuff as well. I’d spent years in locker rooms. Real locker rooms, not this fancy kind with leather-topped benches and lockers where you didn’t have to supply your own padlock. I’d lived through ballpark locker rooms where the dominant scent was a mix of sweaty jock straps and tiger balm, and hijinks involved low-grade explosives.
I checked that I had everything that Alfie said I should have. I knew I was getting plenty of smirks from the other guys, being the newbie who checked everything twice over. But I didn’t care. They didn’t know that it was exactly how I had prepared when I played ball. Once I was in the locker room my focus got locked in and preparation was everything. And I knew a second thing. It was clearly how Heath McAllen prepared. He was focused and fastidious to a fault.
And I knew a third thing. I didn’t give a damn what these guys thought. I got everything together and hefted the bag up onto my shoulder.
“You got the new pin placements, right?” asked one of the caddies. He wore a grin like he’d thrown me a curve ball. I knew that the hole locations were changed for each round. I had no reason to know what those new placements might be yet.
“I live here,” I said. “The pin placements will be where I say they’ll be.”
I didn’t wait to see the guy’s reaction. That’s the problem with posing a zinger and then making a dramatic exit. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you hang around to see the reaction, you lose the drama of the exit. If you go with the drama, you lose the opportunity to see the dumb look on his face.
I could live with my decision. I wandered out to the putting green and waited in the shadow of the clubhouse. I looked over the large scoreboard. Heath McAllen’s name was third down the list, having been overtaken by players with afternoon rounds. Heath wandered out about five minutes later. He stopped by me.
“You’re here early,” he said.
“Early round, right?”
“It is. Those guys give you a hard time in there?”
“Nothing I can’t handle.”
He nodded and looked across the course. “Shall we go and hit some balls?”
I carried the bag over to the driving range and Heath did some stretches and then asked for the six
ty-degree wedge. I pulled the loft club out, wiped it down with a towel despite having cleaned it and gave it to him. He took a couple of air swings, and then pulled a ball toward himself with the club. Then he fired the ball high into the sky. He repeated the process ten times, and landed ten balls within the space of a dinner plate about a hundred yards out. He handed me the club and asked for the next one. I wiped the used club with the towel and put it away as Heath went through the process again. He did it over and over, from the shortest distance wedge all the way through to his long driver. The driver sounded like two Italian cars hitting each other and went farther than I could see. He used thirteen of the clubs in his bag before he handed me back the driver.
“Nice drive,” I said.
“Ta,” said Heath. He watched me wiping down the large head of the driver.
“You look like you played a bit of sport, in your time.”
“In my time?”
He smiled. “You know what I mean. Most sports careers are done by midthirties. Golf is different.”
“Golf and quarterbacks. How old are you?”
“Twenty-four. You?”
“Older than that.”
“But you didn’t play anything before?”
“Baseball.”
“At university?”
“Yes. And then professionally.”
“You look like a baseballer. What’d you play?”
“Pitcher.”
“Nice. You guys play much golf?”
“A bit. Some guys played a lot.”
“Why don’t you take a swing?”
I frowned at him.
“Go on,” he said. “I’d like to see you take a swing.”
“I don’t think caddies are supposed to hit. I think it’s a rule.”
“It’s not a rule. I’m sure they frown upon it, but I don’t care if you don’t.”
He shot me the smile. It was all teeth and pretty darn cocky. It reminded me of someone, a few years previous. I held up the big driver and looked at it. And I shrugged.
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