Murder in the Rough

by Otto Penzler

  Lucy thought, Holy cow. “Mitchell,” she said.

  “Don’t ask,” he said. “But besides that… you’re sure. About Stevie.”

  “I’m real sure,” she said. “That motherfucker dropped her like a hot rock and she cried for four straight days. She’s crying right now. But she never would have done anything about it.” She looked up the hill toward the bunker. “Nothing like that.”

  “All right… She been out playing lately?”

  Lucy shook her head. “Not much. Didn’t want to run into Stevie, I think. Take the chance.”

  “All right,” he said. He stood up. “I gotta talk to her, though.”

  “How was… umm, I mean, was he shot? Stabbed? What?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll tell you, it’s gonna be in the paper anyway… but I’d be a little happier if you didn’t pass it around.”

  “Sure.”

  He looked both ways, as though somebody might be sneaking up on them, then said, “His skull was crushed.”

  “Crushed?” She shook her head. “Like with a car crusher? Like squashed?”

  “No, no. Like somebody hit him in the temple with a driver.”

  She sat back. “Oh.”

  “What, Oh?”

  “Nothing. I was just trying to think who I’d seen him playing with. But when I think about it, I ain’t seen him playing with nobody, much. Mary Dietz a couple times, John Wilson last week.”

  “He have something going with Mary?”

  Lucy shrugged: “I don’t know. Might of just been playing lessons.”

  “Somebody else mentioned… I thought Mary was seeing Willie Franklin.”

  “Don’t know about that, either,” Lucy said. “Tell you the truth, Mitchell, I been a little out of it, ever since that letter come in from Florida. Gettin’ ready.”

  Drury nodded. “Good luck on that, Luce,” he said. Now he gave her the grin. “You’re the best to ever come out of here. I think you’ll go the whole way.”

  “That kinda talk’ll get you a free lesson,” Lucy said, grinning back.

  Drury laughed and said, “May take you up on that.”

  Lucy stood up, brushed the grass off the seat of her pants and said, “Mom didn’t have nothin’ to do with it, Mitchell. Not a fuckin’ thing. She’s too kindhearted. I think you probably know that.”

  He might have blushed and he said, “Well, yeah, that’s sorta what I think. See you later, Luce. Don’t worry too much about your mom.”

  Lucy went back to hitting balls at the embankment. The first four or five hit too hard and trickled past, and she observed herself for a moment. Adrenaline. She had this feeling, this much adrenaline. Had to remember it: this much would get you nine feet past the pin…

  Her mind drifted away from golf, just for a second or two. She’d made a lot of grammatical and usage errors when she spoke to Mitchell.

  And that was good.

  She thought about going back home. Mom probably could use some diversion. But she tarried at the putting green, trying again to make a hundred six-foot putts in a row. The drill was simple enough—you putted all the balls from the same spot, and after five or six, you could see a little pathway developing in the turf. If you could keep the balls in the pathway, you had a chance. But as the number went up, the stress built…

  After two false starts, she made forty-eight, and missed on the forty-ninth when she saw Dale Prtussin hurrying toward her. “Howya, Luce? Did I make you miss?”

  “Nah. Lost my focus.”

  “How far did you get?”

  “Forty-eight in a row. Forty short of my record.”

  “I’m sorry… Listen. I hate to talk business like this, with Stevie not even in the ground, but do you think you could take over for him? For the rest of the summer, until you get to school? I mean, you aren’t that experienced, so I couldn’t pay you everything I gave him—”

  “How much?”

  “Six hundred a week, salary. You’d have to run the cash register in the mornings, starting at six o’clock, seven days a week. And you know, all the group lessons and supervise the school tournaments, but shit, it’s not nothing you haven’t done.”

  She nodded: “Start tomorrow?”

  “That’d be good. I’ll have Alice put you on the regular payroll, and you got a group lesson tomorrow at four in the afternoon. The ladies from 3M.”

  She poked her putter handle at his gut: “You got it, Dale. And thanks. It’ll help me out at Florida, having a little bankroll of my own.”

  “Glad to do it,” he said. But his tiny eyes were worried: “This is a bad day at Rattlesnake, Luce. Old Stevie was sorta an asshole sometimes, but nobody ought to go like that.”

  “Who’s the hot name in the suspect pool?”

  He shook his head. “Isn’t any pool… yet. But, uh… never mind.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Come on, you got somebody in mind?”

  He looked both ways, like Mitch had earlier, and said in a hushed voice, “I’d like to know where Willie Franklin was Saturday night.”

  She looked away. “Didn’t see him—and I wouldn’t even want to say anything about that. You know, my daddy.”

  “I know; but I say the sonofabitch did it once, and if he can do it once, he can do it twice.”

  That night, Lucy did her vocab list, then lay in bed and thought about Willis Franklin, the man who’d shot her daddy. A group of men from Rattlesnake had been deer hunting, the weekend before Thanksgiving, up in Sawyer County. Out of tree stands. Franklin came running into the hunting shack, late in the day, and said he’d just found Lucy’s dad dead on the ground, under his tree stand. Shot in the heart.

  The body was taken into the coroner’s office, and when it was examined by some state medical people, it was found to have a broken neck and small debris punched into the skin of the face—he’d been knocked right out of the stand.

  Unusual. You’d have to be shooting up to hit him.

  Then, blind luck, they’d found the remnants of a bullet in the tree, and metallurgical tests matched it to the fragments of metal found in the dead man’s sternum. There was just enough of the slug left to match rifling marks made by Willis Franklin’s gun. Franklin had denied shooting the rifle at all during the afternoon, but then admitted it, saying he was afraid of what he might’ve done. Said he wasn’t even sure he’d done it—he’d been driving deer toward the stand, had one jump up close by, a buck with a big rack, and snapped an uphill shot at it… missed… and found Lucy’s dad five minutes later.

  That was all fine, except that Franklin had been after Lucy’s mom like a bloodhound, until her dad stepped in and took her away. And Willis was a man known to have a foul temper and was not a man to forget. There was a trial, but nothing came of it: just not enough evidence, and the jury cut him loose. A tragedy in the woods, a few people said. A few more said, darkly, murder… And that was how Lucy learned the story.

  Lucy thought about it all—her dad, Willis Franklin and Stevie—and allowed herself to snuffle over it for a few minutes. She tried to switch her mind over to the Tour, as she usually did, but it didn’t work: she just kept seeing the dark shape of her father falling out of a tree stand, a bullet in his heart.

  She’d never known him. By the time she first heard the murder story, she was seven years old, and her daddy had been moldering in the ground for seven and a half years.

  Lucy did the early morning cash register, and when Dale Prtussin came in at ten o’clock, walked back to the trailer, found her mom reading the paper. “Gotta do my grips,” she said, and went on back to the bedroom. The grips and turns took a half hour, and then she was back in the kitchen. “You’re still going to the Pin-Hi’s this afternoon, aren’t you?” she asked.

  Her mom nodded. “Yeah. No point in hanging around here.” The Pin-Hi’s were a group of women golfers who played a circuit of eight courses during the summer. “Half the girls will have known Stevie—a couple of them in the biblical sense—and that’ll be all the
talk.” She tried a smile again. “I got to protect my back.”

  “Did you talk to Mitchell?”

  Mom nodded: “We had a good little heart-to-heart. Stevie was fooling with somebody, but it wasn’t me. I’d heard maybe Satin Shorts—”

  “That’s what I heard. Mary.”

  Mom frowned. “And I heard a couple of weeks ago that Willie Franklin… Ah, shit, I’m not even going to think about that.” She forced a bright smile. “So what are you doing, dear? With your new job?”

  Lucy shrugged: “Usual stuff. Pretty much run the place in the early mornings, until the Prtussins show up. Stevie’s job.”

  “So that’s something you can cross off your list,” Mom said.

  “What?”

  “Getting a bankroll together for Florida. A month ago, you were talking about getting a night job with UPS.”

  “Yeah, well. Stevie wouldn’t mind, I guess. If he’d known it had to be this way.”

  Mom snorted, poured two tablespoons of sugar into a new cup of coffee. “Bullshit. I’ll tell you something about Steve, honey—knowing that you were going to the pros was eating him up. He had a half year on the Tits Tour and that was the best he’d ever do. No way he’d ever make it on the regular Tour, make it through Q school. He hated every move he saw you make. He hated you out there practicing every day.”

  “C’mon. He was always helping…”

  “Baby, I’ve known a lot more men that you have, and I knew Steve for fifteen years,” Mom said. “That man would have run you over with his car if he thought nobody would catch him. Some goddamn chick stealing his glory at Rattlesnake? I don’t think so.”

  “Then how come you were… seeing him?” Actually, Stevie’d come over and bang Mom’s brains out on the other side of a sixteenth inch of aluminum wall.

  Mom shrugged. “Company. He was a good-looking man, and he could make me laugh. I don’t got that many years left, with men coming around.”

  Lucy fished the Lizard out of the bag in the corner. “Maybe you ought to look for somebody steadier. Somebody who doesn’t play golf.”

  Mom snorted again. “Like that might happen.”

  Lucy did the group lesson at noon, then two private lessons and then went back in and pushed Dale Prtussin out of the cash register station, even though she didn’t have to. At three o’clock, she walked home. Mom was gone, and she went back to her bedroom, found the second pill case, blanked her mind and went into the bathroom, looked at the second pill, took a breath, bent over to suck water from the faucet, looked at the pill and popped it.

  At four o’clock, she had the 3M women. They liked her, but they were all talking about Stevie. At five, she went into the bar, got a salad out of the refrigerator, ate it and then walked back home, twirling the Lizard.

  At the trailer, she lay down, waiting for the pill to work; fetched Dan Jenkins’s Dead Solid Perfect from her rack of golf books and giggled through the best parts, though Jenkins sometimes cut a little close to home—a little too close to the way she and Mom lived in their little trailer off Rattlesnake.

  She was waiting for the pill when she heard a ruckus out by the fence line, and then somebody started banging on the door, the whole trailer trembling with the impact. She climbed out of bed and went to look. Donnie Dell, the boy from the machine shed, the college student she was going to sleep with in a week, stood at the bottom of the steps. His straw-colored hair was sticking out wildly from beneath his ball cap, like the Scarecrow’s in The Wizard of Oz.

  “What?”

  “You hear?” he croaked.

  “Hear what?”

  “The cops arrested Willie Franklin.”

  Lucy stepped out the door. “You’re shittin’ me.”

  “I’m not shittin’ you,” Donnie said. His eyes glowed with the excitement of it. “They found blood in the trunk of his car. And a hair, is what people are saying. Jim Doolittle got it straight from the cops.”

  “How would Doolittle know?”

  “Works up with the hospital… I’m tellin’ you, he knows. Jim’s over in the bar right now. The cops found blood in Willie’s trunk, and they matched it. He’s absolutely fuckin’ toast.”

  That was a moment that Lucy knew she’d remember forever.

  She might someday be an old lady with a mantel full of Open trophies, and maybe a big scroll from the Hall of Fame, and maybe five kids and twenty grandkids—but she’d always remember standing outside the trailer door with somebody playing a Stones record off at the other end of the park, and a car accelerating away from the club, and the crickets in the cinder-block foundations, and the smell of cut grass and gasoline coming off the course, the best smell in the world. The moment she’d heard.

  “Thanks for coming, Donnie,” she said.

  “You coming over to the bar?”

  “I’d like to, but I’m feeling not so good. I ate one of them fuckin’ salads…”

  “Aw, Jesus,” he said. “You know better than that.”

  “I know, I know, but I was hungry… So… see you next week?” She touched his shoulder.

  “Maybe catch a movie,” he said.

  “That’d be cool, Donnie,” she said.

  She went back to the bed, but ten minutes later, a car pulled into their parking space, the lights sweeping over her window. Too early for Mom, unless something happened.

  “Goddammit,” she said. She pushed herself up, went to the door. Mitchell Drury.

  “Mitch?”

  “Hi, Luce. Is your mom home?”

  “No, she’s got the Pin-Hi’s over at the Hollow tonight. Donnie Dell was just here, said you arrested Willie.”

  He nodded: “I was coming to tell her. ’Cause it’s so much like what happened with your dad.”

  “How’d you catch him?” Lucy asked, crossing her arms and leaning on the door frame.

  “Got a note from somebody at the club—said they saw him running off the course with his bag the night Stevie disappeared. Looked like he was panicked…”

  “A note? From who?”

  “We’re trying to figure that out,” Mitchell said. “Anonymous. Kind of think it might be one of the schoolteachers. One of the profession guys. The language was… high-level.”

  “No shit,” Lucy said.

  “Had access to a computer and a laser printer. We’ll find him, one way or another.”

  “What’s Willie say?”

  “Same thing he did with your dad—that he didn’t have anything to do with it. Now he’s got an attorney, and he’s not saying anything.”

  “Well, fuck him,” Lucy said fiercely. “Two people? Fuck him.”

  “That’s sort of what I think. I was talking to…” Drury paused and took a half-step back. “You feel okay?”

  “Ah, I got an upset stomach from one of the Prtussins’ fuckin’ salads,” Lucy said.

  “Well, uh, you got…”

  He looked down, and Lucy looked down and saw the dark spot near her crotch. “Oh, Jesus.” Her hands flew to her face. “Oh, God, I’m so embarrassed, Mitch. My period, I, God, it’s early, God…”

  “That’s all right,” he said hastily. “You go take care of it, honey. Tell your mom to call me at home whenever she gets in. I’ll be up till midnight or later.”

  “Aw, jeez, Mitch…”

  He was still backing away. “Take care of it, honey…”

  She shut the door and got a Kotex from the box under her bed, strapped it on, pulled on a fresh pair of pants, then squirted ERA all over her stained underpants and shorts and threw them in the washer. She grinned at the thought of Drury’s face: men would generally cut off their arms rather than have to deal with something like that, she thought.

  Men.

  Like that goddamn Stevie. Fuckin’ Mom all night, then coming on to little Lucy in the shop. Holding her hips during the lessons, when he was showing her how to turn; hands on her rib cage, standing her up straight. Hands all over her. And more than his hands, down there in the basement room of the
club, after he’d closed it down. He called her tasty, like she was some kind of fuckin’ bun. Nobody knew because Lucy had to deal with stealing her mother’s boyfriend; and Stevie had to deal with the problem of statutory rape, which he knew all about.

  Then last week, when she told him she’d missed her period, out there on the fairway, he’d laughed at her: “So much for the fuckin’ Tour,” he said, and he turned away, laughing. If there’d been anybody else out there in the semidark, they’d have heard him, laughing, laughing, laughing.

  The driver had been right there, poking out of her bag. She’d had it out in an instant, a lifelong familiar. Stevie’d started to turn when the clubhead caught him in the temple, and he’d gone down like a shot bird.

  She’d buried him in the bunker, because it was convenient, and she had a lot of thinking to do; lists to make. She was back in the house before she noticed the blood on the club. She went out to wipe it on the grass when she noticed the taillights blinking in the club parking lot, and down on the far end, where it always was, the hulk of Willie Franklin’s Tahoe. He never locked the back doors…

  Mom was home by eleven and knocked on the bedroom door. “Okay in there?”

  “Yeah. Gotta get up at five,” Lucy called back.

  Mom opened the door: “You heard about Willie Franklin?”

  “Yeah. Oh—you’re supposed to call Mitchell if you get in before midnight. He wants to talk to you about it.”

  “I’ll call him,” Mom said. “See you in the morning.”

  Lucy listened to her footsteps down the hall, then got up and looked at the latest Kotex. It was fairly bloody, but the flow seemed to be slowing. That’s what the instructions had said: the onset would take a couple of hours, then the flow would be heavy for a couple of more, and after that, it would be more or less like a regular period. She switched pads and crawled back in bed.

  This was what it took to go on the Tour, she thought. A fierce determination: nothing would stand in the way. A fierce organization: determination was nothing without focus.