by Otto Penzler
Nothing happened, they told everyone the next day at the Sunday brunch. They just did it for laughs, to get everybody all worked up. Oh, such fun! No one believed them.
No one even cared all that much, except Levon, who had spent many pleasant hours alone with Mrs. Karen Krumholt while Jersey Joe was erecting a strip mall back West. Karen and Levon had met first at the club, where Levon adjusted her putting grip, then at the Krumholt summer house, where Levon tightened her stance. Levon believed he had developed a summer-long understanding with Mrs. Krumholt. I knew better, but I kept it to myself. I knew a lot of things I kept to myself this summer—besides the fact that Karen Krumholt hadn’t totally fallen for Levon like the women at the last two clubs we’d worked. I also knew Jersey Joe and Slingblade had paid their wives to swap, and the wives liked it, both the swapping and getting paid. A win-win situation, I believe it was called by Jersey Joe.
Problem was, the inequality was built right in; and it wasn’t long before Jersey Joe took to grumbling at our weekend lessons. Joe had a job running a construction business; Slingblade had a position as a GOP committeeman in Nassau County, New York. Few of Slingblade’s several official titles required his actual attendance, and then only for an hour at a time. Slingblade thereby got the lion’s share of the goodies.
Early August I heard that Jersey Joe had complained to Slingblade after about a week of not being able to reach his own wife on her cell phone, like maybe they could come up for air?
After another long hot week away at his Camden job site, Jersey Joe made a bigger stink. Slingblade commiserated with him in the locker room one Sunday morning and offered to get him some public work in Nassau, the easiest money ever. Jersey Joe thought he was too heavily reliant on the country club for business already.
“You don’t want a no-brainer, I won’t twist your arm.”
“In fact, let’s call the whole damn thing off,” said Jersey Joe as the two walked out to the tee, “even though I only nailed your Sarah twice.”
“Fine. Five a side?”
“You’re on. And don’t cheat. And you’ll leave my Karen alone? You know I know bad people.”
“The same bad people I know, Joe.”
“Answer me one question?” said Jersey Joe. “You took Viagra, right?”
Slingblade winked at Jersey Joe. “Once-in-a-lifetime chance like this?”
That night in the clubhouse dining room Jersey Joe told his wife that the men had decided the swapping was over. He took her velvet hands in his and said he was sorry he had so debased their wedding vows. He would make it up to her. Karen Krumholt laughed in his face right there at the table, then stood and asked if there was a lawyer in the room, announcing that she wanted a divorce, to better pursue Slingblade. “His nickname,” she told everyone, “has nothing to do with him throwing his putter.”
“Sit down,” hissed Jersey Joe. “He’s on the Viagra, you moron.”
Karen Krumholt slapped Jersey Joe across the face and stormed outside to the clubhouse porch. She ordered the valet to summon a cab, and got to their rented summer house on Georgica Pond ahead of her husband, had his things packed and moved into a cheap suite at the ancient Hampton Arms before Jersey Joe honked angrily at the locked front gate. A call was then placed from the Krumholt home to the East Hampton police. The street was quiet when the first of three police cars arrived. Jersey Joe told me later he drove to Camden and spent the night on the couch in a trailer, unable to sleep. He told me he cried till the bricklayers showed up at dawn, which was too much information.
Two nights later, at the third annual membership meeting, the current members met in the west-wing library to winnow the list of probationary members who would be invited to move up in class, to buy an additional bond. This was usually a nonevent, as distinction and breeding were never considered. You could write the check, you made the cut. Not on this memorable night, though. When the name Joseph Krumholt was solemnly announced, and the ceremonial loving cup presented to each member by a waiter, Slingblade Beinstock dropped a coal-black marble into the mix.
“Holy cow,” said President Shank Grucci. “That’s a first for Le Club, breaking three years of tradition. You sure?”
“Not entirely because of him,” said Slingblade. “His wife is bad news, too.”
Shank Grucci turned to his hovering aide. “Draft a letter to Mr. Krumholt immediately. Application denied for cause: Wife bad news. Then go clean out their lockers. I don’t want them dragging their chins around the pro shop Labor Day weekend.”
Me and Levon stood in a corner and watched this small revenge in horror, both of us wondering how a little fun had got so out of hand.
Three nights later Sarah Beinstock called the East Hampton police to her family’s oceanfront estate to report that Slingblade had failed to return from a Nassau County golf outing in Old Brookville. She felt certain her husband had fallen in harm’s way, given the crumbling of our culture, and she cried real tears on the television news.
It took the local cops two days to zero in on the love swap at Le Club, and they scooped up Jersey Joe for questioning at his job site. But Joe had an alibi, as did his newly estranged wife. So did Sarah Beinstock, for that matter, who had been at the same charity luncheon as Karen Krumholt on the afternoon in question, although, reportedly, the two never conversed. Then everybody had a theory, from the sublime to the silly. Nassau Democrats promoted one theory that gained traction, that his life-long interest in municipal garbage had led Slingblade to some ill-gotten cash. He had always bragged that he was leaving public service with his pockets full. Not that I wanted to put something derogatory like that in the annual report. These members pay dearly to feel good about themselves and their fellows. They need the strokes.
The phone at my arm rang once, and I banged my right knee. “Pro shop. Swann.”
“Em Bessler, main gate security detail. There’s a Detective John Marks on his way up to see you.”
I had the picture instantly. Old Emmett, in the front booth, wearing his generalissimo cap and golden epaulets, raising the black-and-white-striped barricade, saluting as the cops rolled past. “Because you told him I was up here, right? Emmett, how many times do I have to tell you—”
“Why? Did I—”
“That little puke Jason Kravitz wants a chunk of your ass, Emmett. Wants to bust you down to admiral.”
“What now?”
“This time I’ll let you be surprised.” I hung up on the brain-dead security guard and quick-stepped through the near-empty racks of the pro shop and outside to the porch. A row of angry gray clouds raced past the portico from west to east, bound for the distant, churning ocean, as the wind, like most days here, merely howled. John Marks, the Suffolk County detective on the Slingblade missing persons case, the detective who had been leaving progressively nastier messages on Levon’s answering machine, had stopped his black Caprice short of the parking lot and whipped his Big Bertha driver out of the still-open trunk. He was presently launching slices from our high-plains driving range.
“Start down with your legs,” I told him as I approached from behind, “then accelerate your hands through the ball. You’ll lose that big banana.”
“Is that The Secret?” he asked, turning to me, exasperated.
“You mean is that the one key move to long powerful shots? No. But it helps.” If that was The Secret, I certainly would not just up and tell Detective John Marks. I would not just give it away. No pro does. We rarely even mention The Secret to each other, fearful our social status and comfortable incomes would evaporate overnight.”
“But there is a Secret?”
“If there was, you’d have to beat it out of me.”
Detective Marks laughed, thank God. He regripped and addressed another ball, then looked back at me, and I’m thinking, Everybody wants free lessons. “Seen your buddy Levon today?”
I kept up my golf-outing smile. “The boss went South already. Couple of weeks ago. Rank has its privileges, you kno
w.”
“Kinda early, isn’t it?”
“Not if you want a golf job. Levon don’t feature flipping burgers.”
Detective Marks wrinkled his nose, sniffed the salty wind like a retriever. “I guess I made a long trip for nothing. You heard from him since he left town?”
“Now and then, sure. Odds and ends for the club. Buncha the members waiting for some Steelheads™ to come in.”
“Got an address on Mr. Greenbriar?”
“Nothing permanent yet. Why?”
“Not for nothing, kid, but I’m about to arrest a very rich and powerful man, and I want to make sure I’m right.”
“What would Levon know? I gave Mr. Krumholt his golf lessons. But he didn’t talk personal stuff. Just the NASDAQ.”
“I say anything about Joe Krumholt?”
“No. I guess you didn’t.”
Detective Marks shook his head and winked at me knowingly. “Start down with the legs, huh? Let me try that. I’m hooked on this crazy game.”
I nodded. “Aren’t we all, my man, aren’t we all?”
John Marks addressed a ball and swung hard, legs first, drilling it straight and true. His face lit up. “Damn. Can I try that again?”
“I am kinda busy. You know we’re closing up.”
“No problem, kid. But next time he calls, you tell Mr. Greenbriar to call me or I’m gonna go grab up his ass as a material witness. I like a free trip to Florida as much as the next man.”
I put my hand to my throat. “You think Levon knows something about Slingblade Beinstock? Well, I’ll be damned. Jesus, you work with a guy for two summers and…”
Detective Marks walked to his squad car and gently laid his Big Bertha next to his riot gun. “Looks like rain,” said Marks, opening the driver’s-side door. “Jesus, I hate rain, unless I’m playing golf, hitting it like that last ball. Then I don’t mind.” Marks leaned close to me, looked both ways. “Any chance I could sneak in a round tomorrow? I know you’re closing up, but I wouldn’t be in the way. Place should be empty, right?”
“Levon Greenbriar ain’t gonna be here. I swear it.”
“I know. I believe you. I love this game.”
“We’d be honored.”
I left work at six o’clock that evening and drove my dirty black Neon to the dirty Hampton Arms apartment I had shared that summer with Levon. I packed my dirty clothes in my duffel bags, threw out my mail, broke down my PlayStation. I drank cold coffee and grew nervous as I worked, the local twenty-four-hour news on my nineteen-inch television for background. As it got dark outside, I closed my blinds, feeling I was being watched. When I was ready, prepared to travel at a moment’s notice, I walked down the main staircase to the dining room, intending to enjoy the last good supper I might eat for quite some time.
Jersey Joe Krumholt was at a table near the fireplace. He waved to me and I waved back.
“Join me?” he called across the half-filled dining room.
“Sorry. Getting something to go. How are things going?” I asked while signaling a waiter for a menu.
“You’re joking, right?”
Actually I was just being polite.
“Let’s put it this way, Swann. Drop dead.”
Back upstairs in my room, I picked at my chicken salad sandwich and worried about what Jersey Joe Krumholt was doing out here alone. Pissed off, on a Saturday night. Wasn’t he sick of this snobby town? Hadn’t he suffered enough? I opened my window and kicked back on my creaky single bed, wondering where things had gone wrong this summer, deciding, as usual, the fault lay in the selection process, which was Levon’s domain. See, at every club there are two—ten—women willing to betray their men at every opportunity. Levon left such women to the busboys, preferring for our purposes the wife on the edge—the seething little woman thinking hard about starting fresh. The foolish heart. Levon’s theory was to find that one, tell her repeatedly that you love her more than life itself, and soon enough she’ll be handing you her husband’s fifties from her purse, then the keys to the kingdom. Then she wakes up one day and her jewelry box is light a few stones and the better artwork’s off the walls. Any trouble, we’re names without bodies; but they never ever complain, not to their husbands, their sisters, or the cops. They don’t want to look dumb or loose. They don’t even want to think it was us. And this way we—me and Levon—augment our meager salaries and enliven our workdays, spending every season under a different sun, harboring The Secret, yes, that Secret. The commercials are right: Us guys are good.
I fluffed up my pillow and thought of Amanda Kennedy from last summer, who skipped town in August unscathed, or her husband smelled a rat and they quit Le Club, we never figured out. I thought of the lean winter working we had endured, and the one to come.
I also thought some more about the report to the membership, if I even ought to bother:
Dear Rude Losers,
What a great summer for me and my staff! To make up for playing your bush-league golf course, we got to screw some of the wilder wives and swindle some of the dumber husbands. Your cheapskate swings, bad manners, and seriously funky hair weaves kept us giggling. The golf staff took a year-end survey. No Le Club member likes any other member of Le Club. All are agreed: You people suck. And what the hell is French about golf? Jeez.
Levon and Jay
I slept badly, then scarfed down a buttered roll and coffee outside a 7-Eleven on empty Montauk Highway at dawn. There were puddles in the parking lot, but it wasn’t raining at the moment. Dismal, a nice day in Scotland. The full force of the threatened nor’easter was still hours away, high-wind and flood warnings going up for the low-lying areas. Hell of a day for Le Club staff to be loading moving vans, I thought. And way too early to shut down the club at all. The leaves on the trees along the highway were still green, with the best golf weather coming up, autumn in New York. But perhaps even more than playing it, the members loved their course simply sitting empty by the side of the highway, a flaunted jewel which could never be stolen.
I pulled my Neon into the wide driveway. Officer Emmett Bessler put down his coffee mug and activated the U.N.-approved security bar. He slid open the bulletproof window, no doubt to grill me about Kravitz, but I blasted right past him and up the hill. I parked behind the pro shop, near the door where we take deliveries, thinking all I needed from this dump were my magic wands and three pairs of golf shoes, but I ought to hang around, stick to the normal routine, finish upbeat.
I ran up the back stairs and said good-bye to my girlfriends on the kitchen staff, Bridget and Mary Katherine, then ducked into the main office, only to learn from our comptroller, Mrs. Whitney, that our final paychecks would not be cut until two o’clock; and that the annual employee gratuity drive had been discontinued for lack of member interest.
I went back down to my office and was about to call Levon when I wondered if the cops were monitoring the pro shop phone. And as I was thinking just that, Detective John Marks called. “Hey, Jay. I stopped and hit balls on my way home last night. Crushed ’em. Thanks for the leg tip. Still okay to play?”
My heart was hammering in my chest. “You been outside yet?”
“We got hours before the rain. I just checked with our air bureau.”
“Your call,” I said. “Where are you?”
“Down at the front gate. I brought my boss. Is that okay?”
My stomach flipped. “Absolutely. Come on up.”
I met Detective Marks and Sergeant Tony Giordano in the pro shop, hooked them both up with complimentary monogrammed Le Club Fantastique rain gear, which I assured them they would need. They oohed and aahed at the opulence, the class, my generosity.
Marks even patted me on the back. “Mind if we poke around Levon’s office? While we’re here?”
“Nope. Not at all.” I unlocked the wooden door next to my office and flipped on the track lights, showed them through Levon’s empty file cabinet, the wide wooden desk holding the few written communications that had passed betwee
n us. It was easy to be smooth. I was innocent. And I was leaving, hopefully before they did. I said, “I hope it doesn’t get too wet out there.”
“Can we pay you?” asked Detective Marks, his mind back on golf, where it belonged. “Even under the table?”
“Don’t be silly.”
On the first tee I wrestled the wind with a Titleist umbrella as the homicide cops teed off, then I walked back into my office to catch my breath. My phone message light was beeping, Jersey Joe on the answering machine. “Pick up the damn phone, Swann.”
I’d seen enough of Jersey Joe. I hated Jersey Joe. So I damn near fainted when Jersey Joe walked into the pro shop two minutes later, calling my name.
“What are you doing here, sir?” I said, leaning out of my office.
“I came to play golf on my last day of membership. Maybe my last day of freedom. My clubs are in my car. Go get ’em.”
“But the detec—”
“The hell with them. I didn’t do it. And I’m playing golf today.” He lifted the cuff of his black polyester trousers to show me the snub-nose strapped to his ankle.
“I’ll ready a cart.”
“Put your clubs on it, too. I want a game. And let’s play for decent money,” he said. “A thousand bucks. Medal play. No handicaps.”
Jersey Joe couldn’t beat me at that game if I had a bullet in my brain. “Look, Joe, I don’t want to—”
“Consider it your annual tip.”
We teed off in twenty-mile winds and occasional light rain, conditions I can handle. I was up twelve shots in ten holes, and we were heading for the farthest corner of the course, near the infamous hole in the privet hedge, when the rain began to fall in earnest, like rain in Florida. Water pounded the roof of the cart and poured over the sides. This was senseless, unless Joe planned to shoot me dead. Glove soaked, arms and legs shivering, I turned to Joe and suggested a gentleman’s draw. “Forget the thousand dollars.”