Amen Corner

by Rick Shefchik

  “I’ll be around if you hear anything,” Sam said. He started up the steps to the exit.

  “Hey, your caddie looked good on TV today,” Daly yelled after him.

  “Did we make the news?” Sam asked.

  “All day.”

  *

  While Sam waited in the clubhouse for Caroline, he saw Wheeling and Compton coming down the stairs. He’d forgotten to look for their scores in the media building, but their expressions told him how they’d played. Wheeling, who shot 73, was giddy; Compton, who shot a 77, looked like a kid who’d been told he had to wait another year to get his driver’s license. They invited Sam to join them for dinner in the men’s grill, but he told them he had a date.

  There were more security guards around the clubhouse than Sam had noticed the night before. Still, the thought of a lone, unarmed woman walking the grounds of Augusta National suddenly seemed no more prudent than an unaccompanied woman walking through Central Park after dark.

  Sam’s cell phone rang as he waited. It was Dwight.

  “One-eye called,” Dwight said, sounding nervous. “He said he’ll come in to talk, but no cops. I said you’re not a cop—right?”

  “That’s right,” Sam said. “Right now, I’m a private eye. We’re on our way over.”

  “We?”

  “I’m bringing Caroline Rockingham,” Sam said.

  “Shane’s wife?”

  “Yep.”

  “What’s going on there?”

  “She’s my caddie now.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Not yet. But she’s not a cop, either.”

  He was relieved when he spotted Caroline walking from the players’ parking lot to the clubhouse. Her dark shoulder-length hair shone in the parking lot lighting. She wore a pair of black walking shorts and a pink long-sleeved shirt bunched up at the elbows. Her clubhouse badge hung from a belt-loop.

  “So what’s for dinner?” she asked him.

  “Hamburgers.”

  “Did somebody murder the chef?”

  “We’re going into town.”

  They returned to the courtesy car in the players’ parking lot. Sam drove down Magnolia Lane and took a right onto Washington Road. He turned to look at Caroline, whose smooth, tanned face was illuminated by the passing streetlights in the twilight. She sat with her weight leaning slightly against the passenger side door, her left leg bent and pulled up onto the large, plush seat, as though she wanted a better angle from which to examine Sam. They hadn’t had much time to get to know each other beyond the time spent together during that day’s round.

  “Are you going to tell me where we’re going, and what this is about?” she asked.

  “We’re going to Dwight Wilson’s restaurant,” he said. “He’s the caddie you replaced.”

  “And the food’s good there?”

  “I don’t know. I’m doing some detective work for the National. Dwight arranged for me to meet a guy there who might know about the murders. In fact, he might be the guy.”

  “Aren’t you a fun date.”

  “If you’d rather not go…”

  “No, I don’t mind. But why not let the cops handle it?”

  “Porter wants to stay ahead of the cops.”

  “He’s probably protecting someone.”

  “That occurred to me,” he said.

  “I don’t get it,” Caroline said. “Why would you stick your neck out for these people? One of them could be the killer.”

  “That’s occurred to me, too.”

  “Who else cares whether women join their little club?”

  “Most of America, apparently,” Sam said. “It’s in all the papers.”

  They rode in silence for a while, until Sam dialed up his April 1975 playlist on the iPod. The car’s multi-speaker system enveloped them in Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue.”

  “You know, I hope they are forced to admit women,” Caroline finally said with a slow shake of her head. “It would serve them right.”

  She pulled her other leg up underneath her and faced him as they drove into downtown Augusta.

  Dwight’s restaurant was on a wide commercial boulevard with diagonal parking in the center of the street. A group of middle-aged white guys—all in long pants and polo shirts, a few with women companions—were drinking glasses of wine and beer on the sidewalk outside an Italian restaurant with a maroon awning. Masters fans out on the town. Next door to the Italian place was Big D’s Bar and Grill, with large plate-glass windows on either side of the open front door. There appeared to be an apartment above the restaurant.

  Sam knew they looked as though they belonged at the restaurant next door when they walked into Big D’s. The clientele was a mix of black and white faces, couples and groups, sitting in wooden booths eating thick hamburgers and baskets of French fries and drinking oversized mugs of beer. The place smelled deliciously greasy and salty, with the heavy aroma of sizzling onions coming from the grill behind the bar. Dwight was standing at the deep fryer next to the grill, emptying a fresh load of fries into a basket.

  It was about 8 p.m., and the dinner crowd had not thinned out yet. Most of the spacious wooden booths were occupied, and all four of the pool tables at the far end of the long, high-ceilinged room were in use. B.B. King’s “How Blue Can You Get” was playing on the jukebox in the corner.

  Dwight stood behind the bar, watching as a girl of about 12 flipped patties on the grill. He spotted Sam and Caroline and called out to them.

  “How ya doin’,” Dwight said. “Sam, this is my daughter Cammie. She’s a big help around here. Cammie, this is Mr. Skarda and Ms. Rockingham.”

  Cammie turned and offered a shy smile and a quick wave, then resumed her watch over the grill. She had meticulously braided cornrows and wore a white apron over a red crew-neck shirt and a pair of blue jeans. Sam and Caroline took seats at the bar.

  “I thought I’d take Caroline out for a meal at the best restaurant in town,” Sam said.

  “Where’s that at?” Cammie asked.

  “He means here, baby girl,” Dwight said, smiling at his daughter. “When you finish those burgers, go see if your grandma can come down and help for a while.”

  Dwight led Sam and Caroline to a booth. He smiled as he presented menus to them, but Sam could tell Dwight was on edge.

  “Got time to sit down, Dwight?” Sam asked. Dwight nodded and eased himself into the booth on Sam’s side, taking up what was left of the bench seat. He glanced at his watch, then at the door. Sam knew he was worried about One-eye showing up, and what might happen if he did.

  “So what’s good here?” Sam asked Dwight.

  “Burgers, fries and beer,” Dwight said. “We keep it simple.”

  Dwight’s mother had come down the stairs and moved behind the cash register to handle the bills of the departing diners. She was a slightly overweight woman with a net over her short, gray Afro. She had a brisk manner and lively eyes, and looked perfectly at home in the role of part-owner, manager, cook, waitress, cashier, and cleanup crew of her son’s bar and grill.

  After two groups paid their bill and left the restaurant, she came over to the booth. Dwight introduced her as Helen—which Sam already knew from looking at her Augusta National employment file.

  “Can you join us?” Caroline asked.

  “Sorry, but somebody’s got to run the place,” Helen said, giving Dwight a stage glare. She had a rag in her hand and almost reflexively wiped the tabletop in front of them. “But I’m pleased to meet you both. Dwight says you are a fine golfer, Sam, and a good man.”

  “I would have been clueless if Dwight hadn’t helped me with the greens Monday,” Sam said. “He’s amazing.”

  “Who picked up your bag?” Helen Wilson asked.

  Sam s
miled and pointed his thumb at Caroline.

  “Now, why do you want to be lugging around a man’s golf bag?” Helen said to Caroline with an exaggerated frown. “It’s bad enough all the things we have to do for them. Dwight here is a big, strong man. He’s made for carrying stuff. You ain’t.”

  “I’m sure she does just fine, Mama,” Dwight said.

  “And you—you should be ashamed of yourself,” Helen said to Sam, enjoying her lecture. “Making a woman carry your bag. That’s like Dwight doing a load of laundry.”

  Everyone at the table laughed.

  “And I don’t like you asking One-eye Morton to come here,” she said, still looking at Sam. “He’s been no good his whole life, and worse since he got fired at the club. He’s better off in jail.”

  “Never mind now, Mama,” Dwight said. “We’re just going to be talking, is all. Can we get a couple of cheeseburger baskets, and two glasses of beer for these people?”

  “I’ll see if the kitchen’s still open,” she said with mock indifference, then turned to shoot them a sly smile as she left.

  When the hamburgers arrived, Sam and Caroline both devoured the meal as though they hadn’t eaten in days. They were finishing their fries when the door opened and a thin black man stepped hesitantly into the restaurant. His mouth was framed by a caterpillar moustache and a scraggly gray soul patch. His graying sideburns extended below his ears from under a light green bucket hat that bore the yellow Masters logo. He wore his frayed blue nylon jacket unzipped and held an open can of Budweiser in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other.

  “D?” the man said, looking around the room.

  “Over here,” Dwight said from the booth.

  “Can I smoke this in here?” the man asked, walking toward them.

  “Sure,” Dwight said. “Ashtray’s on the table there.”

  The man pulled out a plastic lighter and lit his cigarette, exhaling nervously, and waited for somebody to say something.

  “Sam Skarda, Caroline Rockingham,” Dwight said. “This is One-eye Morton.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  One-eye stood five feet from the booth. He took a swig of his beer and came no closer. Sam recognized the look of uncertainty on One-eye’s face: He expected that this was some kind of set-up, but couldn’t figure out exactly how it would go down, and he didn’t want to risk missing out on free money. Sam didn’t know whether to feel pleased or disappointed that One-eye had come in. If he had killed Ashby, Scanlon and Milligan, it was unlikely that he’d be here now. On the other hand, there was always the chance that he was greedy and overconfident as well as homicidal.

  “Have a seat, Reggie,” Sam said, choosing to call him by his given name.

  “Might as well call me One-eye,” he said. “Everybody does.”

  “Okay, One-eye, then.”

  Caroline slid deeper into the booth, glancing back and forth between Sam and One-eye. She did not seem alarmed by the idea of sitting next to a man who might have committed the nation’s three most publicized murders.

  “Before I say anything, I gotta see the money,” One-eye said.

  Sam expected as much. He pulled out his wallet and extracted two hundred-dollar bills. He put them on the table and slid them across to One-eye, who picked them up quickly, folded them in two, and stuck them into an inside pocket of his jacket. The private eye business was already getting expensive.

  “I don’t know nothin’ about no killing,” One-eye then said. “I was out of town.”

  “Where?” Sam asked.

  “Down in Waycross, seeing my sister.”

  “You ain’t got a sister, One-eye,” Dwight said.

  “Not one you know about,” One-eye said defiantly. Dwight looked at Sam and shook his head. Sam looked back at One-eye, who was exhaling smoke away from Caroline. Quite the gentleman. Caroline took out her own pack and lit one up.

  “Look, One-eye, I’m not the cops,” Sam said. “You could be telling the truth that you didn’t kill anybody. I don’t think you’d be here if you did, but that’s not my call. If I give your name to the Sheriff and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, they’ll find out soon enough where you were and if you have a sister. I don’t have time for all that. I work for the National, and they don’t want anybody else getting killed.”

  “I got no reason to help you or the National,” One-eye said. “They never helped me none.”

  “Now, see, that’s just the sort of talk that’s going to make Mark Boyce suspicious,” Sam said.

  “Who’s he?”

  “A cop with the GBI. He’s good. You don’t want to get to know him.”

  “Why would I?”

  “Because he needs a suspect,” Sam said, as One-eye exhaled again, this time in his direction. Sam waved it away. “You got pissed off at the club and got fired. You know what that makes you?”

  “It don’t make me no killer.”

  “It makes you what we call a disgruntled ex-employee. If they can’t find the killer right away, cops always start looking for disgruntled ex-employees. I know. I was a cop.”

  “That how you come up with my name?”

  “Yep. So give me something for my two hundred bucks.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like some reason to think you didn’t do it.”

  One-eye stubbed out his cigarette and pulled another one from his pack. Caroline reached over with her lighter and lit it for him. He nodded at her, exhaled and took another sip from his can of beer.

  “Sure, I’m pissed off at the National,” One-eye finally said. “Wouldn’t you be? When they took the Masters away from us, how was we gonna survive on the money we made caddying for club members? That’s maybe a couple thousand bucks for eight months’ work. And you can’t work no other job if you caddie. You got to be there at 6 in the morning, and you might not get out till the afternoon. You might not get out at all, but you gotta be there.”

  “So why not do something else?” Sam asked.

  “What the fuck am I trained for?” One-eye said. “All I did was carry golf clubs till I was 30 years old. It’s okay for D here—he got the restaurant. I ain’t got shit.”

  “Hey, man, I worked my ass off to get this place,” Dwight said. “Nobody handed me anything. When we lost the Masters, I saved my money and bought this place.”

  “You own it clear?” Sam asked.

  “Still making payments,” Dwight said. “It’s tough. But it beats passing bad checks to your friends.”

  He and One-eye locked eyes for a moment. Sam glanced at Caroline, who seemed fascinated by the conversation.

  “Yeah, I been in some trouble,” One-eye finally said. “Everybody knows that. But I’m trying to go clean. And I didn’t kill nobody.”

  “Somebody did—somebody who knows the course, somebody who’s leaving messages.”

  “What kind of messages?”

  Sam looked intently at One-eye. Was he pretending not to know what had already been in the papers and on the news?

  “The words this is the last masters.”

  One-eye thought for a minute, puffing absently on his cigarette.

  “Shit, that could be anybody. You went through all them names, and mine’s the only one you come up with?”

  “No, there were some others who were fired,” Sam said. “But they were either too old, or dead.”

  “Lee Doggett ain’t old or dead.”

  Sam tried to recall if he’d seen a Doggett in the files. If he had, nothing made it worth closer examination.

  “Who’s Lee Doggett?”

  “Big D, you remember that dude?” One-eye asked Dwight.

  “Let me see,” Dwight said, rubbing his forehead. “Nah, can’t say I do.”

  “He worked on the grounds crew,” One
-eye said. “I used to see him driving one of them big old mowers. They caught him printing up his own Masters tickets and sellin’ ’em. Fired his ass.”

  Now Sam knew he hadn’t seen that file. He’d have pulled it out and looked it over carefully if he’d seen that reason for dismissal.

  “Do you know where he is?” Sam asked.

  “I seen him just yesterday, or the day before. Over at the Food Lion, buyin’ beer.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Right across the street from the National.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “White dude, goin’ bald. Tall. You remember him now, D?”

  “Oh, yeah…kinda thin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you figure he’s got a grudge against the club?” Sam asked.

  “You ever get fired?” One-eye said.

  “Once. Summer job as a janitor where I was in college. I overslept.”

  “Didn’t that piss you off?”

  “Not enough to go back and kill somebody,” Sam said. “Besides, why would he care whether the National lets in women?”

  No one spoke. Doggett was somebody Sam would have to look into, but the pieces didn’t fit. If revenge was his motive, why pick out Ashby? Why kill Scanlon? And why spray “this is the last masters” on the grass?

  Sam wasn’t ready to dismiss One-eye as a suspect, either. The story about his sister in Waycross sounded phony, and it wasn’t surprising that he’d come to the restaurant ready to offer up somebody else’s name. Somebody had to check out One-eye’s alibi.

  “I’ll try to find Doggett,” Sam said to One-eye. “But I need somebody who can vouch for you the last few days. Your sister, or somebody who’s seen you since Sunday and knows where you’ve been.”

  “I ain’t killed nobody,” One-eye repeated sullenly.

  “Where are you living now?”

  “Noplace special,” he said. “I ain’t really got settled since the last time I got out of the joint.”