Purgatory Gardens

by Peter Lefcourt

  This time, it took only three days to get a response. It was written on Acme Exterminating and Patio Decks letterhead, setting up a consultation to discuss the work the following Tuesday at the Tahquitz Creek Legend Golf Course. They would meet on the first tee at 6:45 a.m. He was instructed to reserve and pay for a tee time and carts for three people, himself and two guests.

  The note was signed by hand. See you there, Walt.

  Six forty-five in the morning was not Sammy Dee’s best hour, but given that it was September in the low desert of Southern California, it wasn’t the worst time to play golf. It would be ninety degrees by ten, a hundred by noon.

  Up until the moment he was in his car driving to the golf course, and even then, he toyed with the idea of just turning around, driving home. For all he knew, the whole thing could be a con job. Or an Internet scam. The contents of his bank account could already be on the way to Nigeria.

  But he had to admit that he was, at the very least, curious about these guys and their operation. It all seemed so painless. Arranging a hit over a round of golf. Maybe it was cheaper and easier than he thought. He was on his way to a public golf course. At six fifteen in the morning of a typical California day, the sun peeking over the rim of the San Bernardino Mountains.

  At the pro shop, Sammy paid for the rounds, bought a range ball card and a couple of sleeves of Titleist Pro V1s, picked up a golf cart, and told the starter that he would meet his guests on the first tee.

  Sammy sat down on the bench beside the tee box at the first hole and waited, staring off at the beautifully manicured fairway. At six forty-five on the nose, a cart with two men in it approached from the pro shop. They got out and walked over to Sammy.

  “Walt and Biff Keller,” they announced, with creased smiles on their faces and outstretched hands. One of them was in his fifties, the other in his thirties.

  Father and son exterminators? A family business?

  They were in immaculate Nike golf shirts, pressed Banlon slacks, and white Footjoy Icons. They each had a set of Prestigio Japanese clubs, probably three grand worth of irons alone.

  “Go ahead. Give it a whack.”

  “Blues or Tips?”

  “Let’s go for it, what do you say?” Walt responded. There went at least ten strokes off his score. Sammy would be lucky if he broke a hundred.

  He walked over to a spot between the championship tee markers, teed up, took a deep breath, and brought his hands back slowly, keeping his left forearm straight and his head still, and proceeded to slice the ball two hundred yards into a thick copse of Joshua Trees.

  “Take a mulligan,” Biff said.

  The mulligan went half the distance, disappearing into the rough at the side of the fairway. “That’ll work,” Walt said.

  The father teed up and hit the ball two-seventy, easy, right down the middle. The son beat him by thirty yards. By the third hole, the son was two under par and the father even. Sammy was five over, with a double bogey.

  Conversation was confined to golf platitudes. They were jovial, relaxed, playfully taunting each other. “We got five bucks on this round,” Walt said.

  “Kiss it goodbye, Dad.” Biff punched his father’s shoulder with manly playfulness.

  They had the preppy Southern California allure of Nixon’s bagmen, smiling cheerfully while they squeezed your balls.

  Sammy began to wonder if the whole thing was a wild misunderstanding. They were scratch golfers who looked like they’d never gone near a cockroach, let alone a hit. Maybe it was just a convoluted way of getting a free round of golf.

  It wasn’t. At the ninth hole, with Sammy fifteen over, Biff asked him if he would care to step into the restroom.

  “No thanks, don’t have to go,” Sammy replied.

  “Yes, you do,” Walt said with his have-a-nice-day smile.

  Sammy looked at the little shack with the doors marked Men and Women and wondered if he wasn’t the target instead of the client.

  Biff took an OUT OF ORDER sign from his golf bag and hung it on the door. The cloying odor of air freshener hung in the room. Biff locked the door behind them and told Sammy to take off his clothes.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. All of them.” The preppy pleasantness was no longer in his voice.

  “You think I’m wearing a wire?”

  “You better not be.”

  “Is this really necessary?”

  “You bet. And get a move on it. There’s a foursome right behind us.”

  After his shorts were off, Biff made him turn around and spread his cheeks in case he had the wire up his ass.

  “You ought to work out a little,” the man said. “Get yourself a personal trainer. I know a chick in Rancho Mirage who’ll harden you up a little. One way or the other.” Biff smiled at his joke and told Sammy to get dressed and meet them out at the tee.

  His clubs had been transferred to Walt’s cart.

  “Get in,” the father ordered.

  “I haven’t teed off yet.”

  “Yes, you have.”

  Sammy climbed in. They took off down the cart path with Biff following.

  “Let me ask you a question, Sammy. How come you didn’t let your own people handle this?”

  Sammy tried to conceal his astonishment. How did these guys make him?

  “I don’t know this for a fact, but I’m guessing you’re mobbed up, or used to be until you dropped out or copped out.”

  “Does it make a difference?”

  “We like to know as much as we can about our customers.”

  He stopped the cart a hundred yards from the hole and handed Sammy a golf ball. “Drop it in the middle of the fairway. I’d use a pitching wedge—well, the way you hit, maybe a nine.”

  His nine iron in hand, Sammy walked to the middle of the fairway. He dropped the ball and sliced the shot badly into the greenside bunker. He walked back to the cart, got in, and said, “I’m in the cement business.”

  “Okay. We’ll go with that.”

  They rode up to the green, where Sammy hit out of the bunker fat and then three-putted for another double. On the way to the eleventh tee, Walt got down to business.

  “Here’s how this works. You give us five grand to study the problem. We check it out, see how difficult the job is, then quote you a price. If we proceed, the five grand goes against the price of the job.”

  “If you don’t?”

  “We keep the money. Think of it as research and development.”

  “Can you give me a number?”

  “There’s a big range, depending on who we’re doing. You talking about Obama, we’re into seven figures. You talking about a guy works nights at the 7-Eleven, we could do it for twelve . . . maybe fifteen. This is not a one-size-fits-all kind of business, you understand?”

  Sammy nodded reflexively, understanding only that the negotiation had already begun. It was like buying a car. There was a price point that they each had in mind. Where they wound up would be determined by who needed the deal more. And at this point, he wasn’t sure.

  “My guy lives alone,” he said as they drove up to the eleventh hole, a short par 3 over an artificial lake.

  “Where?”

  “Condo complex out on 111, toward the airport.”

  “He work?”

  “At home. He’s in import/export.”

  “Drug dealer?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “What do you mean, not that you know of?”

  “I don’t know the guy very well.”

  “Well enough to not want him around.”

  “Long story.”

  Actually, it wasn’t a long story. It was short and sweet. Marcy Gray. A woman he barely knew. A woman he was spending twenty-five grand over. It didn’t make any fucking sense. But nothing much in his life did any more.

  “The guy is a foreigner, an African.”

  “Black?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s gonna jack up the price.”r />
  “Huh?”

  “They could consider it a hate crime. White on black. We get caught, they could go for life without parole.”

  Sammy watched Biff hit a beautifully lofted nine-iron shot that plunked on to the green and rolled to within three feet below the cup.

  “I’ve got twenty grand. All in.”

  Walt nodded, then got out of the cart, grabbed an eight iron, and hit his ball between Biff’s and the cup. Then he turned back to Sammy and said, “Tell you what—you get it on the green from here, we’ll do it for twenty. You wind up wet, twenty-five.”

  “Come on. You see the way I play golf.”

  “That’s why I’m offering the bet.”

  A hundred and sixty-five yards over water. Cross-wind, sun in his eyes. His knees were already shaky. He hadn’t driven the green on the two previous par three’s. It was dumb. Stupid dumb. But no dumber than anything else he had been doing lately.

  He decided to let the golf shot determine whether or not he went through with putting a hit out on the African. Leave it in the lap of the gods. Why not? At this point, rational thought didn’t seem to matter.

  Reaching into his bag, he took a seven iron, then switched to a six. A little extra distance wouldn’t hurt.

  As he stood over the ball, he almost broke out laughing. This was fucking ridiculous. A five-thousand-dollar golf shot.

  He concentrated so hard on getting lift on the ball that he jerked his head up just enough at the last moment to top it. It flew low over the grass and right into the water.

  “Fuck!” As the word escaped his lips, he saw his ball skid over the surface like a skipped stone, hit the wooden piling on the far side, bounce back off it with enough spin to hop onto the green and come to rest between Walt’s ball and the cup.

  Holy shit. The gods were talking to him.

  The five thousand dollars he’d saved on the eleventh hole was to be delivered to Acme Exterminating and Patio Decks—in non-sequential hundred-dollar bills, stacked in rubber bands and placed in a FedEx envelope—at a car wash on Gerald Ford Drive.

  Between the eleventh and eighteenth holes, Sammy provided as much information as he possessed on Didier Onyekachukwu. Walt seemed not to know or care where Côte d’Ivoire was, but he asked very specific questions about the African’s habits, acquaintances, business, vehicle, sexual proclivities, health—very few of which Sammy was able to answer.

  “The guy a diabetic?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “Overdose of insulin is much cleaner than a shot in the temple. Heart problem, we can O.D. him on digitalis.”

  On the eighteenth green, Sammy asked them for a time frame.

  “We’ll let you know. A lot of variables.”

  “A week? A month?”

  “Let’s say sometime between tomorrow and Christmas.”

  “That the best you can do?”

  “You want it done well, or you want it done Thursday? One other thing—your patio?”

  “My patio?”

  “Right. The twelve by fifteen concrete slab you indicated in your application. We’re going to redo it for you. It’s part of the deal. You want to do business with us, you need to have your patio redecked.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You don’t have to get it. We’re going to send you a construction contract. Twenty grand. Out the door. You’ll need to get it co-signed.”

  Sammy three-putted to 109. They shook hands and Walt said they’d give him a better time frame as soon as they cased the job.

  “Remember. We haven’t committed to do this yet. If we don’t like the way it smells, we walk away. By the way, if I were you, I’d fix that slice. You’re coming over the top. Try keeping the right elbow in.”

  Sammy watched them walk to a van with ACME EXTERMINATING AND PATIO DECKS: WE GET THE JOB DONE lettered on the side. Biff got behind the wheel, and Walt waved goodbye as they pulled out of the lot and onto Route 111.

  The license plate read: PATSNUFF.

  II

  MARCY

  Marcy Gray (née Madeleine Greenspan) had slept with a number of men for more or less professional reasons. From the perspective of time, however, she had to admit that she hadn’t slept with the right ones. If she had been more judicious in her choice of sexual partners, she may not have found herself at a delicate age living on a SAG pension and social security in a one-bedroom condominium on Paradise Road in Palm Springs.

  The problem began with her choice of husbands. There were two of them, one still alive. The dead one hardly counted. They had met just out of college, in an acting class on Hollywood Boulevard, in a storefront east of Highland, doing Breakfast At Tiffany’s in front of a group of wannabes.

  His name was Troy, and he was seriously gorgeous. Six-two, slim, pale blue eyes, with a dancer’s grace and a soft Kentucky accent that rolled off his tongue like a shot of Jack Daniels. She had seen him do Nick in Virginia Woolf and had been smitten enough to approach him to do a scene from the Capote play with her.

  When he suggested that they, in the interest of authenticity, rehearse the bathtub scene naked, she was there. Why not? Be in the moment. It was the sixties. Everyone took their clothes off. Everyone slept with everyone.

  Five minutes into the scene, they were rolling around on the carpet of Troy’s studio apartment on Wilcox. The scene killed, and a couple of weeks later, they took a trip to Vegas in Troy’s ’65 Mustang, top down all the way. They won twelve hundred dollars letting it ride on a two-dollar crap table, decided it was an omen, and went off, stoned out of their gourds, to a wedding chapel downtown to get married with an Elvis impersonator singing “Love Me Tender.”

  The hangover didn’t kick in for a while. They were running to auditions, dreaming the dream, living off the State of California’s liberal unemployment benefits. Life was good. Everything was possible. They were more like roommates than a married couple sharing a life plan. The sex was more often than not stoned and athletic, lacking, she began to realize, any sense of intimacy. Afterward, he was up, bouncing around the apartment, showering, and checking his messages, instead of lying with his arms around her.

  Little by little, the picture began to get clearer. Troy spent a great deal of time grooming himself, joined a gym they couldn’t afford, avoided kissing her on the mouth. He had more clothes than she did in their communal closet. And she caught him with tears in his eyes while watching Shane on TV.

  “I bet he likes to do it doggie style,” her girlfriend Kay said when Marcy had confided her feelings. Duh. . . .

  But it wasn’t until she came home and found him in the shower with a waiter from their favorite Mexican restaurant that she had to admit that she’d married a gay man. They hung on for six more months, distracted by the erratic adrenaline hits of auditions, scenes, workshops. This producer might be coming to class, that agent was looking for new clients, this casting director was a cousin of someone that someone used to know . . .

  The gossamer labyrinth of Hollywood dreams.

  But it was a losing battle, and they both knew it. They stopped having sex, stopped talking about anything important, started stashing money away separately and fighting over who was paying for what. Marcy saw the fear metastasize inside him as he realized that his desire for men could sabotage his career as an actor, that he was destined to live his life in the big closet that Hollywood provided for gay actors.

  She found a place to live in Laurel Canyon, and he became just another girlfriend. They stayed in touch—long phone conversations, dishing late at night when both of them were blue and drunk—until years later, when they bothered to get divorced so that she could marry her second husband. They drifted apart. One phone call a week, then one a month, twice a year, and finally a Christmas card. She had been married to Neil for five years when she went to Troy’s memorial service—dead from AIDS at 44.

  Neil was at least straight, though she wouldn’t have minded if he was just a little bit gay. With some
of the wit that her gay friends possessed. He was a writer she’d met when she’d landed a job on Owen Marshall: Counselor At Law. Or was it Petrocelli? During the seventies, she was booking jobs as damaged women—junkies, abused wives, schizophrenics—and they all blurred together in her memory.

  In theory, Neil Breslau was the nice Jewish boy her parents had always wanted her to marry. He was Jewish, all right, but he wasn’t all that nice. Deep inside him was a vein of passive aggressive anger that bubbled up to the surface and expressed itself in a wounding sarcasm that she grew to hate. Over the six years of their marriage, his frustration with a writing career that remained below the radar expressed itself by his inability to find any pleasure in anyone else’s success. Including hers.

  Not that Marcy Gray had ever become a marquee name. But she managed to cobble together a decent living from guest actress jobs on television and the occasional damaged woman role in low-budget features. She got so good at it that she could virtually phone in the performance: vacant eyes, aspirated, brittle voice. In the early eighties, Marcy Gray was the go-to actress if you needed a hooker, a junkie, or a divorcée, with or without a heart of gold.

  She didn’t get rich, but she wound up taking home more money than Neil, and that turned out to be the deal-breaker with a man whose self-esteem was as flimsy as Neil Breslau’s. He spent his days writing depressing, bitter scripts about depressing, bitter men that no one wanted to make. He refused to get a day job or consider Plan B. When she came home at night, it was like coming home to a beaten dog who didn’t even want to go out for a walk.

  She began staying later at classes, auditions, eating out with her actor friends, avoiding going home. From some primal sense of morality, she avoided having the affairs that she easily could have had. They were out there—smart, good-looking, funny men who came on to her. But she remained faithful to the sullen depressive she had married. For five years, at least.

  Then she met Yves, a French director fifteen years older than her, who had a brief flash of cachet in the movie world. Marcy met him on a movie he directed about a drug dealer. Who else but Marcy Gray to play the damaged junkie who falls in love with the lead? She nailed both the audition and the director. And after the first day of shooting, she broke her wedding vows and slept with him in his hotel room in Fresno, where they were filming. And the second and third night as well.