Murder in the Rough
Page 12
She grabbed her light bag of practice clubs and abruptly started walking toward the chipping green, keeping up a convincing smile for the gallery. Hundreds followed. Her short game suffered the most when the Voice took hold, and she had to be ready. A pale, horsey-faced AP reporter in his late twenties struggled to catch up with her. He couldn’t help but notice that her navy wraparound short skirt might have looked more at home on a tennis court, clinging as it did to her round but narrow hips, setting off her long, tanned legs. She nodded noncommittally at him and maintained her stride, hoping to avoid another interview. The reporter, flustered and a little starstruck, straightened his thick glasses nervously and gathered his thoughts as best he could.
“Uh, Miss Bridget?” he began.
“That’s my name,” said Annie, who was smiling in spite of herself, grateful to find his awkwardness charming, even pleasantly distracting.
“Uh, how do you feel?” he asked, as though it were the most original question on earth.
“Well,” she said, sensing his discomfort, “that’s a tough one to answer, believe it or not.”
“Sorry,” he went on, fumbling. “I just wondered…”
You’re a total fraud. Stop trying to charm him.
“Look… Chris,” said Annie as she lay down her clubs in some medium rough about fifty feet below the practice green. “It is Chris, right?”
“Yes,” said the reporter, delighted that she remembered.
“Chris. Could you do me a favor? Can I possibly talk… off the record?” she asked. Her eyes seemed to be pleading.
“Sure, sure,” he replied, touched, shielding the sun from his forehead. His heart, apparently unschooled in journalistic objectivity, thumped.
“Okay: off the record,” Annie went on, “’cause I really need to talk to somebody. So here it is, just between you and me.”
She took a pitching wedge from her trusty old canvas and leather bag and lined up a shot. “I feel more excited than I’ve ever felt in my life. I feel like I want to throw up. I feel like a fraud. I feel like the best player in the world… today. Might not be tomorrow, probably won’t be. But, well, I feel good…”
You stink.
“I also feel like I stink. I feel like I want to die—and I’ve never felt more alive. And I’m really sorry that you can’t print any of this, but you’ve always been kind to me, Chris, and, well, you asked.” She looked into his eyes. “I just really needed to say that out loud, and my caddie, frankly, doesn’t want to hear it, and if you don’t print it, well, I owe you, and I won’t forget. Deal?”
Blushing and trying to think of what to say next, Chris noticed beads of perspiration bobbing up along Annie’s furrowed brow. Strange, he thought. She looks like she might cry.
“Okay,” he said. “Sure. Mum’s the word. But, listen, could you maybe give me something I can print?”
“Well, let’s see,” she began as she chipped a shot out of the rough, dropped her wedge, and pulled out a 9-iron. “I’ve had this bag since I was ten. How’s that?”
“You always use it to practice,” Chris said, nodding, reciting a bit of Annie Bridget lore back to her. “It has a familiar, worn-in smell that calms you down. You’re very into scents and aromas.”
“Okay,” she said, blushing. “You’ve done your homework.”
“I saw your A & E Biography,” he said gently. “So—anything else?”
“Well, everybody knows I grew up on this course. I could play it with my eyes shut. Just say that… I feel… great.” Her shot landed a few feet shy of the pin.
You feel like you’re going to explode.
Annie overswung at the next ball, Chris noticed, slicing it like a 20-handicap club hack. It traveled thirty feet out-of-bounds and disappeared down a steep bank.
That’s the real you. That’s what you deserve.
Not looking at the young reporter, she quickly chipped a shot that flew into a steep arc toward the pin, one-hopped straight for the hole, and dropped into the cup as though on automatic pilot.
“Wow,” said Chris quietly. “Nice one.”
“Thanks,” she said, meaning it, squinting in a way that Chris felt only added to the cover girl appeal that had made her the biggest thing in sport—male or female—in the still-new millennium. He scribbled a note that she looked as though she’d stepped out of a catalog that was half Ralph Lauren, half Victoria’s Secret. The shoulder-length blond hair that had just landed her a half-million-dollar-a-year endorsement from Traité gleamed in the dappled early afternoon sunlight. Annie leaned over for her next swing and Chris wondered if she could tell that he was looking down the front of her scoop-neck sleeveless pale blue sweater. He told himself to look away but hesitated, noticing that her lacy bra was serving up the kind of cleavage that made him wish he worked for a less respectable news outlet. She glanced up for a split second—just enough to bust him—and smiled nonjudgmentally, which had the effect of cementing his crush.
“Maybe you better leave me to this,” she said. “I need to shut up and concentrate.”
“Sorry,” he said, backing away. “Of course. Sure. Yes. Good luck today.” Okay, he told himself… leave her alone… don’t say another word.
“It’s great that you’re so familiar with the course,” he said, ignoring his own advice. Shut up! he ordered himself again, finally moving away.
Yes, she had grown up on this course and played hundreds of rounds on it. She hadn’t mentioned that she’d lost her virginity on St. John’s seventeenth green one June night almost exactly nine years earlier, an hour and two mai tais after her senior prom. With her queen’s tiara slightly askew but still pinned to hair that was breaking free from its yearbook perfection, she and her date, prom king and peerless senior heartthrob David Strickland, had slipped away from the party in her new Saab convertible, a graduation present from her father. She’d handed David the keys with a twinkle in her eye that had made him drive faster than the manual suggested for a brand-new engine, and they’d parked on a dirt service road that ran behind St. John’s. As they approached the seventeenth’s wide and notorious pond in the summery moonlight, she had stunned David by stepping casually out of her strapless white gown—a moment she had rehearsed in her mind for weeks. Freezing the scene in his memory, David Strickland, tanned and mustachioed, had the happy thought that this would be the last thing he would think of when he died.
She smiled at David over her shoulder as the pond’s cool water overtook her ankles, then her knees. David managed to appear unruffled and enjoyed the view as long as he could, but soon he had stripped and joined her in the shallows of the little lake.
She moved close, draping her arms around his wide shoulders, inviting him for a kiss, then teasingly backing away. “This is a water hazard, you know,” she said, laughing softly, licking his ear.
“Doesn’t seem too hazardous to me,” whispered David.
“It will be if you don’t get me home on time.” Annie laughed, finally kissing him deeply, running her hand down his back to the curve of his hip, pulling him to her.
“God,” David said, laughing softly as she touched him. “Take me now.”
“Everyone says you’re a heartbreaker, David Strickland,” she murmured with a trace of sadness that she pushed out of her mind before it could fully surface. “But I don’t care. I love you. Forever.”
“You and me,” he breathed. “Forever.”
They made out to the agonizingly pleasurable point of no return, and Annie took his hand and led a dripping, extravagantly excited David toward the seventeenth green. Tall evergreens shaded the soft grass from the bright moonlight. Annie laid him down and made good on her fantasy, their bodies joining to the sounds of night sparrows, the soft hum of distant sprinklers, and the scent of fresh-cut grass.
To this day, the smell of a newly cut lawn made Annie think of sex. On a golf course, far from being a distraction, it seemed to energize her with picture-perfect memories of that picture-perfect night.
Early in the second round of the Virginia Slims Classic near Charlotte two years before, Annie had severely twisted her left ankle clambering toward a bad lie down a rocky slope off the third fairway. The sprain forced her out of the tournament. David, who now ran a thriving Lexus dealership, had flown in late the night before for moral support. He had slept in, promising to join the gallery to watch her play the back nine. On crutches, Annie had struggled back to their Holiday Inn room unannounced. When she opened the door, she discovered her shining knight, her perfect husband, dressed only in an open, short-sleeved madras shirt she’d given him, spread out on one of the room’s two king beds, lying beneath a naked young brunette who’d apparently delivered a still-uneaten breakfast. In shock, Annie gathered her things before David and the woman managed to dress, left the room, and grabbed a cab to the airport.
The next day, David’s brunette, sensing that her fifteen minutes was upon her, rubbed salt on the wound by leaking her version of the story to the Star, whose next week’s headline read ROOM SERVICE FOR ANNIE’S HUBBY. The story managed to paint Annie as a slut who had cheated so relentlessly on David that he had finally been moved to cheat back.
The discovery of her husband’s affair not five hours old, Annie landed in New York, rented a car at La Guardia, and drove north to her father’s house in Yonkers, her ankle throbbing mercilessly. She blamed herself, as was her habit, certain that her endless weeks on the road had led to David’s infidelity. Her mother had been killed in a car accident when Annie was nine. She had been speeding through suburban streets to catch Annie in a school play, and been sideswiped by a van. Despite all the logical explanations in the world from her father and a well-meaning therapist, Annie blamed herself for her mother’s death. And worse, Annie had lost her confessor. She had always told her mom everything. After her death, she started to keep secrets to herself.
Johnnie Bridget, Annie’s father, was a former PGA pro who had never won on the Tour but now made a decent living coaching a private school golf team and giving lessons at a nearby club. His boyish good looks had gone somewhat puffy with drink, and his slightly lopsided, toothy grin had caused people all his life to say how much he resembled a fellow Oklahoman, Mickey Mantle. Annie drove down her old street, lined with once healthy, now struggling oaks, and parked outside the musty, eighty-year-old, two-story stucco house where she’d grown up, a quarter mile from the Yonkers-Hastings border. She silently opened the never-locked front door and soon, amid the comforting aroma of Johnnie Bridget’s pipe tobacco and the hint of bourbon that was always on his breath after six o’clock, Annie was telling him tearfully about David and the waitress. When she finished, Johnnie took a long sip of his now iceless drink and sat, blinking his eyes, looking into the distance.
“I never liked him, you know,” he finally said, quietly.
“You’re a dad. He was my first love. Of course you didn’t like him.”
“No,” said Johnnie, shaking his head. “It’s a guy thing. He’s just not, you know, someone I’d take down the river.”
“Down the river” was Johnnie’s favorite metaphor: people going down a torrid river on a tiny raft. You either wanted someone on that raft or you didn’t.
“Go ahead,” she said, blowing her nose. “Say ‘I told you so.’”
“Nahh,” he answered, wishing he’d kept his mouth shut. “I didn’t want to be right. Who knows… maybe I’m not right. Maybe it’ll all work out.” He hoped she wouldn’t check his eyes and see how little he believed it.
“We were too young,” said Annie. “I knew it when we got married.”
“So did I,” agreed Johnnie, rocking her gently.
“But you were always so nice to him.”
“You loved him. I could never say no to you, kiddo. Not that you’re spoiled. You’re not.”
“You gave us that beautiful wedding,” Annie said, dabbing at her eyes, “and you didn’t like him?”
“Hey, it’s tough being a dad. Especially when your kid is beautiful. And talented. You’re right, I probably wouldn’t have liked anybody who swept you off your feet.”
“Daddy,” she said, crying softly into his shoulder. “What should I do?”
“How ’bout I call Vito and have David’s arms broken?” suggested Johnnie, almost merrily.
She laughed in spite of herself. “Who’s Vito?”
“You know—Vito. Generic, plain-wrap Vito. Some guy who’d break an arm if the price was right. Probably a lot of ’em in the greater Yonkers area. Let me see.” He got up and opened a drawer at the bottom of the sofa’s end table and made a show of pulling out a well-thumbed copy of the yellow pages, opening it with a flourish. “‘Legs: Broken.’ Yeah, okay, here it is: Vito.” He looked up to make sure she was smiling. “No last name. ‘Open 24/7,’ it says. ‘Heartbroken?’ it says. ‘Let Vito break a leg.’” Annie’s smile was widening. “Sounds perfect,” he said conclusively. “Let me call.” He picked up the phone.
“Stop it,” she said, chuckling slightly and elbowing him as he held his finger on the cutoff button and pretended to dial.
“Hello. Is this Mr. Vito?” Johnnie said cheerfully, as though someone had answered. “Oh, just ‘Vito’? Okay, sure.”
All her life when she was upset, Johnnie had tried to make her laugh, with mixed results. It wasn’t as good as a mother’s shoulder to cry on, but the effort always meant the world to her.
“Vito, tell me, uh… what does a castration go for these days?”
Annie snorted unself-consciously.
“No, no,” Johnnie went on as though he were ordering flowers. “It’s for my daughter’s husband. Oh, great. Lemme tell her.” He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece. “They have a castration special for unfaithful husbands: two balls for the price of one.”
Annie’s laughter, part relief, part embarrassment at Johnnie’s crudeness, became borderline hysterical.
“Daddy, stop!” she begged, trying to catch her breath.
Johnnie hung up, a little less anxious now that her tears had been momentarily stayed.
“Vito’s got an early bird special,” he said. “But I have to order before dawn.”
“Stop,” she repeated, chuckling in spite of herself, almost guilty not to be crying.
“He’ll castrate and make that miserable son of a bitch disappear.”
“Does he take American Express?” she sighed, quieting down.
They sat still for a few minutes, looking out the window as an elderly couple walked a small dog under a streetlight.
“You know,” he said, his voice far away, “there actually are Vitos out there.”
She dabbed at her eyes. “If only it were that easy,” she said.
They talked until Annie fell asleep on his shoulder, and Johnnie carried his only child upstairs to her old bed, tucking her in with her clothes on, propping a pillow under her swollen ankle. In the morning, he canceled his golf lessons for the day. He hadn’t spent concentrated time with his daughter since her marriage, and, gloomy as he felt, he was grateful for her company.
After a few days, she began to snap out of it and started the process of rehabilitating her ankle and getting back on the Tour.
She succeeded, but failed to make four straight cuts. A magazine unearthed yet another affair of David’s. Annie decided to cut her losses and began divorce proceedings. One of her attorney’s paralegals leaked news of the divorce to a clerk in the county courthouse. The clerk, his face digitally smudged out for the cameras, turned up on Access Hollywood. The interview told of how David was countersuing for divorce on the grounds that Annie had conducted “an endless series of extramarital affairs” prior to his.
Guilty until proven innocent, Annie was crowned Golf’s Bad Girl. In her mind, she deserved it. A year earlier, lonely from three months on
the road away from David, who had steeped himself in his business, she’d been attracted to a charismatic and renowned sportswriter who was doing a profile on her. After taping a long interview in their hotel’s bar, they were riding up to their respective rooms on the elevator when he surprised Annie with a kiss. He had led her to his suite, where they necked and eventually undressed, but, just as impulsively as she’d gone to his room, Annie guiltily bailed out moments before consummation, leaving him high and dry and landing herself on his shit list forever. When the bad-girl rumors began to fly, his column fueled them.
For the first time in her career, she developed a case of what golfers call the yips. Even with her ankle healed, she found herself botching easy putts and losing confidence in her always reliable chips. She’d have a superb round or two, then lose her touch and finish out of the money.
Johnnie Bridget, whose publicly controlled temper and attention to detail had made him an extraordinary coach, became increasingly distracted and edgier than usual after his nightly bourbons. David Strickland seemed to be developing into a monster with an appetite for any kind of publicity. He fought the divorce and stalked Annie on and off the course, one day making seemingly sincere statements to the press about his love for Annie, his contrition, and his desire to get her back, and the next night club-hopping with his new girlfriend, Rachel. Miserable, Annie sequestered herself between tournaments, refused to date, and tried to focus on her game. She was barely making expenses when Reebok, despairing of the negative publicity, let its deal with her lapse.
“I stink and I’m pathetic,” Annie said one night in Johnnie’s kitchen, after yet another poor showing in a western Massachusetts B-level tournament.
“Shush,” he whispered mock-disapprovingly as he filled the dishwasher. “Your brain will hear you.” It was something he always said when she put herself down.
“Sorry, Dad,” she said, more discouraged than he’d ever heard her. “But this is killing me.”
“Me, too,” said Johnnie under his breath, slapping the dishwasher door shut. “I’m gonna take care of it.”