Amen Corner

by Rick Shefchik

  *

  Lee Doggett had driven the blue truck into Augusta, left it on a side street near the banks of the Savannah River and spent the night under a highway bridge. When he woke up he was in cool shadow, the sunlight hitting the knee-high grass on the hillside a few feet away, promising another warm, humid day. He guessed it was at least 9 a.m., judging by the angle of the shadows. The gates at the National would be open by now. The crowds would be filing onto the grounds. Would they be looking for him? Did the media have his name and picture now? He would have to get to a TV—after he shaved.

  He picked up his gym bag and walked down the concrete embankment of the overpass to a grassy path that led to the chain-link fence he’d hopped over the night before. He climbed the fence again and went north on a narrow street that connected downtown to a few warehouses along the south side of the river. Once he reached the river, he found an isolated spot among some rocks and waist-high weeds. He reached into the sluggish water and soaked his face and his hair. He took the twin-blade razor out of his bag and began shaving his head. When he was sure he’d gotten everything, he reached into the water again and rinsed his smooth skull. He caught his blurry reflection in the rippling water. He had achieved the look he wanted: that of a dying man.

  He tossed the razor into the river and waited for his shirt to dry, staring at the barges along the far bank. He figured his new look and his Masters badge would get him past the cops and the guards, even if they did have his name and his picture. But once on the grounds, he needed to become even more inconspicuous. Too bad he didn’t have one of his uniforms from his days on the grounds crew. That would’ve provided all the cover he’d need—but the National had taken them all when he was arrested.

  He got up from the riverbank and checked the angle of the sun. The first groups would be teeing off soon, and he needed to find a TV. He started walking toward Washington Road.

  *

  The sight of Stanwick’s twisted, bloody body inside the trunk of his car had been jarring to Caroline. She turned away, walked back to Sam’s car and sat in the front seat until they were ready to return to the club. After a hearse from the M.E.’s office took Stanwick’s body away, the police sealed off Doggett’s motel room, sent Scanlon’s shoe to the GBI lab, and towed Stanwick’s car to the impound lot.

  “You don’t think this is over, do you?” Boyce said to Sam.

  “No. Do you?”

  “Hell, no.”

  Sam and Caroline followed Boyce and Harwell on the slow drive back to the club. It was time for Caroline to meet Tony Petrakis and start hunting for the killer. The drive down Magnolia Lane had lost its charm for Sam; a sense of foreboding had replaced the awe and excitement he’d first felt driving through that fabled tunnel of branches.

  “Where will you be this afternoon?” Caroline asked Sam as they neared the television compound.

  “Walking the grounds, looking for our boy,” he said.

  “And if you find him?”

  “That’s up to him,” Sam said.

  “I know this is your line of work,” Caroline said. “But I wish…”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Do what you have to do. But be careful, okay?”

  The grounds were now teeming with spectators, none of whom had the slightest idea that they were in the middle of the most extensive manhunt in America.

  The security guards cleared Caroline and Sam into the TV compound, and Sam asked a young man wearing a CBS polo shirt where they could find Petrakis. He pointed to one of the extended white trailers with “CBS Sports” and the familiar eye logo painted in blue on the side. They went up the metal stairs and opened the door. Inside they saw a bank of two dozen TV monitors against the far side of the truck, positioned above the director’s console. The tournament coverage would not begin for another hour, but Tony Petrakis was already swiveling from side to side in his chair, shouting at his camera operators through the microphone attached to his headset.

  Petrakis was a short man with a round middle that he chose not to confine by tucking in his pale blue short-sleeved shirt. He had thick, wavy hair that was either dyed or unnaturally black. Everything on his face protruded—his forehead, his eyebrows, his nose, his cheeks, his chin, and an assortment of little lumps and bumps.

  Boyce and Harwell were already there. Their presence did not seem to have a calming effect on the director.

  “No, Goddammit, I want a close-up of Crenshaw’s hands—his hands, for Chrissake, not his crotch! Get me a different angle!” Petrakis yelled. He glanced contemptuously at Boyce and Harwell. “Fuckin’ cops breathing on me, when I’m trying to do a golf tournament here!”

  Boyce took Sam and Caroline aside. Petrakis, he told them, was dead set against having his cameras used to search for Doggett. Of course, it didn’t matter what Petrakis wanted; he could walk out of the trailer, and they’d just replace him with the assistant director. The plan was the same: The camera operators not involved in showing important action would be scanning the crowds slowly, and Caroline was to watch the monitors for anyone who looked like Doggett.

  “I don’t need this shit,” Petrakis muttered. “I don’t need this shit at all. Love’s looking at eagle on 8. I don’t care if he’s 10 shots behind! Get that fuckin’ camera off the crowd and put it on Love! We’re doing golf here, not ‘America’s Most Wanted’!”

  Boyce interrupted Petrakis and introduced him to Caroline.

  “So you’re the one who almost got sliced up,” Petrakis said, glancing at Caroline—then glancing back again for a longer look before turning back to his monitors. “How do you know you’d even recognize this guy?”

  “Anybody ever chased you around a motel room with a hunting knife?” Caroline said.

  “Not yet,” Petrakis said, staring at a shot of the rippling flag on the 12th green.

  He shouted more directions into his headset, then turned to face Caroline.

  “They’ve done tests where a guy runs into a classroom and screams at the professor and runs back out again,” Petrakis said. “Two minutes later, nobody in the class can agree on what color the guy’s fuckin’ shirt was.”

  Petrakis swiveled around in his chair and pulled a cigar out of his shirt pocket.

  “You mind?” he said. He bit off the end and spit it into a nearby waste basket.

  “Go ahead,” Caroline said. “You’re the boss.”

  “If I was, you wouldn’t be here,” Petrakis said.

  He lit a match and puffed on the cigar until the end glowed. He exhaled a cloud of smoke, as though putting up a barrier between himself and his intruders.

  “People overestimate television,” Petrakis said. “Just because you’ve seen Oprah or Jay Leno a thousand times on TV doesn’t mean you’d recognize them on the street. You probably wouldn’t know your next-door neighbor if you saw him on monitor eight.”

  He exhaled another puff of smoke and spoke through the gathering haze.

  “That’s what makes me the best at what I do,” Petrakis said. “I get the perfect angles, the right shots, the views that tell the story I want to tell. I don’t just show pictures of golfers—I show you their souls.”

  “I thought the camera operators did that,” Caroline said.

  “I love those guys, but a chimp could do what they do,” Petrakis said, with a wave of his hand. “They point and shoot. They could make a perfectly good video of your kid’s fuckin’ birthday party, but here they’d be helpless if I didn’t tell them what to do. If you put one of them in this chair, the Masters would be a fuckin’ joke. I tell you, this is the hardest job in television.

  “You take that pencil-pusher in the office…” Petrakis gestured with his cigar toward the cabin where Peter Bukich’s office was located. “He gets paid twice as much as I do, and for what? Kissing ass and staying out of my way.” He lo
oked directly at Caroline through the cigar smoke. “And that’s what I want you to do.”

  “Kiss your ass?”

  “Stay out of my way. Sit over there. Look at the monitors. Don’t talk to me unless you’re abso-fuckin’-lutely sure you see the guy. Otherwise, I don’t want to know you’re here.”

  “Don’t worry, you won’t,” Caroline said, looking at Sam with an expression that said: Are you really going to leave me with this asshole?

  Boyce handed Sam a radio that clipped onto his belt and a connected earpiece, and told him to monitor the main police frequency.

  “If Caroline spots Doggett, you’ll know about it as soon as I do. Same goes for you: If you see him, or anything that looks wrong, talk to us on your handset. We can get a dozen cops almost anywhere on this course within two minutes.”

  “How are you going to take him down if you spot him?” Sam asked.

  “As quietly as possible,” Boyce said. “He won’t be able to get a gun in here. We shouldn’t need to use ours. Now, let’s find this asshole.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  No one gave Lee Doggett a second glance as he walked with the crowds on the sidewalk along Washington Road. His shaved head was protected by his blue bucket hat; his eyes were shielded by a pair of cheap sunglasses. He looked, as did hundreds of others around him, singularly focused on getting into the Masters.

  He was almost weak with hunger. Some eggs and bacon would taste good, he thought, and maybe a beer or two. Someplace with a TV.

  Up ahead he saw the Hooters sign, and four waitresses wearing tight white shirts with the owl logo, waving their arms at passing cars.

  “Hi there!” one of the Hooters waitresses said as he approached. She had wispy blonde hair teased into the consistency of cotton candy, average breasts squeezed toward significance by a push-up bra, and a tired, frozen smile on her face.

  “You serving breakfast?” Doggett asked.

  “Same menu all day,” she said. “Wings and sandwiches and all that. The grilled cheese sandwich is good. Are you going to the Masters today?”

  “I wouldn’t be anywhere near here if I wasn’t,” Doggett said.

  “Oh,” the blonde said, her smile slipping. “Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s kind of a zoo out here. I’ll be glad when the week is over.”

  “Me, too,” Doggett said. He stared at her chest for several seconds longer than was polite, then crossed the Hooters parking lot and went inside.

  He chose a booth from which he could see the wide-screen TV over the bar, and set his gym bag down next to him. The tournament coverage hadn’t started yet. The Fox News crawl reported: “No new developments in The Masters Murders…” Good. The news media didn’t have his name and photo yet. The public wouldn’t be looking for him. But the cops and security guards would be.

  A waitress came by, with larger breasts than the one he’d talked to out front. He ordered the grilled cheese sandwich and a beer while staring at the double O’s on the front of her shirt, and when she left he stared even longer at her tight orange shorts. He drained his beer while he was waiting for his food, waved the waitress over, and ordered another. He never took off the bucket hat or the sunglasses.

  As he drank his second beer, he saw a discarded newspaper on the seat of an empty booth. He got up and brought it back to his table. There was a front-page story about police efforts to find the Masters Murderer, but there was nothing new about the investigation. Milligan’s funeral would be held Monday, to allow his former CBS colleagues to attend before leaving town. Scanlon’s body had been flown back to New York. Ashby had been cremated before a private ceremony on Friday, with speculation that his ashes would be spread somewhere on the golf course; David Porter said the club would have no comment. No indication whether they’d found that guy in the canal. Even if they did, there was nothing to tie him to the Masters Murders. And it was too soon for the papers to have any news about Stanwick.

  The WOFF was still demanding the cancellation of the tournament. Rachel Drucker had called the National “a monstrous evil.” The mayor and sheriff both expressed hopes that this year’s Masters could be concluded without further incident. Security had been greatly increased at and around the golf course. Police were checking out many leads, but still had no suspect they could name.

  Just another lie from the cops. They always lie.

  Doggett turned to the sports page and found the same kind of banner headline the Masters always got on Saturday: garcia, mickelson tied for halfway lead. As if there was nothing else going on at the National. Well, that would change soon enough.

  Paging farther into the sports section, Doggett found a quarter-page ad for a Masters memorabilia sale at the Augusta Antique Market on Washington Road. He’d seen the place many times; it was just a few blocks away, at a strip mall. The ad said the sale had begun on Monday and would run through Sunday. Doggett looked at a clock by the cash register: 1 p.m. He had time to check it out. There might be something he could use.

  *

  Half an hour later, Doggett paid $5 admission to enter the Masters Memorabilia Show and Sale at the Antique Market. Inside were dozens of vendors at display tables, hawking hats, towels, shirts, jackets, beer glasses, pins, and golf balls with the Masters logo.

  He wandered through the displays, maneuvering around souvenir shoppers who either didn’t have tickets to the tournament or thought they might find better deals here than in the National’s merchandise building. No one seemed to be buying anything, and Doggett wasn’t surprised. Bunch of junk.

  He was about to leave when he spotted a booth with a white drapery behind it, from which hung the usual array of Masters hats, photos, and shirts—and a white Augusta National caddie jumpsuit, with a green “22” over the left breast pocket and the Masters logo over the right. Doggett had seen those suits many times over the years, and this one looked authentic.

  The man and woman sitting at the table in the booth were playing cards when Doggett stopped.

  “That thing real?” he asked the man, who laid his cards face down on the table so the woman couldn’t see what he had. She did the same. They were both about 45, with the same short, frizzy brown hairstyle. Each wore a green Masters sweatshirt and blue jeans.

  “What thing?” the man asked.

  “That caddie suit,” Doggett said. “Where’d you get it?”

  “A guy came in this week and sold it to us,” the man said. “Said he’d caddied at the Masters himself. It’s real, all right.”

  “Let me see it.”

  The man got up from his chair, took the caddie suit off the hanger and handed it to Doggett, who turned it over and looked at the back. Perfect—a player’s name was still on it.

  “How much do you want for it?” Doggett asked.

  “Two seventy-five,” the woman said. “You don’t see many of these for sale.”

  Doggett said, “I’ll give you two hundred.”

  The man and the woman looked at each other, trying to decide.

  “Two fifty,” the man said.

  “Two,” Doggett said, shaking his head.

  The man looked at the woman again.

  “Cash,” Doggett said.

  “Sold, mister,” the woman said.

  Doggett counted out $200. Then he put another $15 on top.

  “I’ll take that green Masters hat, too,” Doggett said, pointing to a solid green baseball cap with the yellow Augusta National logo. The man put the hat on the table and handed him two dollars change. He asked Doggett if he wanted all his purchases in a bag. Doggett said no.

  “Is there a bathroom around here?” Doggett asked.

  “Down that aisle, all the way to the back. It’s on your right.”

  Doggett picked up the caddie suit and the hat and walked to the back of the hall, where he found the me
n’s room. Inside a man wearing shorts and sandals stood at the urinal. Doggett ignored him as he slipped off his shoes and took his pants and shirt off in the middle of the bathroom. The man at the urinal turned to look at him over his shoulder as Doggett stepped into the caddie suit and zipped it up.

  “Oh, man, I saw that suit,” the man said, as Doggett put the hat on. “That’s so cool. You could pass for a real Masters caddie.”

  Doggett didn’t respond. He pulled his pants on over the caddie suit, then put on his T-shirt and windbreaker. The suit wasn’t a bad fit—just a little short in the arms and legs. It would be hot and bulky, but a little sweat didn’t bother him.

  He put his shoes back on and stared at the other man in the bathroom, who had finished at the urinal and had moved over to the sink, standing with his back to Doggett. Would this guy get suspicious? Would he mention to somebody that he’d seen a guy changing into an Augusta National caddie suit in the men’s room? Doggett could strangle the guy with his belt in about ten seconds. Then he wouldn’t have to worry about him.

  “You going to a costume party or something?” the man at the sink asked, glancing into the mirror at Doggett, who was staring at him.

  “Yeah,” Doggett said. “A Masters theme party. Lots of laughs.”

  “I’ll bet,” the man at the sink said. The water continued to splash as the man pumped away at the nearly empty soap dispenser. He finally managed to get a few drops onto his hands, and lathered up as much as he could. The water was getting too hot, so he turned the spigot on the cold water to balance the temperature as he rinsed the soap off his hands. He heard the guy in the caddie suit doing something with his belt buckle, so he knew he was still there.

  “Who do you like this year?” the man at the sink asked as he turned off the water. He pulled a couple of paper towels from the dispenser on the wall to his right. Then he turned around.

  The man wearing the caddie suit was gone.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Doris Higgins figured she and her husband Jim had rented their last motorized scooter for the day. Spectators had to be off the Augusta National grounds at about 6:30. It was 2:30 now, and nobody wanted to pay a full day’s rent for just a few hours.