Hole in One

by Walter Stewart

  “Right,” I said. “So you are asking for my cooperation in this matter on a strictly professional basis?”

  “Right,” she said. “And you can keep your big, fat hands to yourself.”

  “Certainly, Miss Klovack. You will never have cause to complain on that account again.” I added, “The Witherses do not put their hands where they are not wanted.”

  Not strictly true, this last, but I threw it in for the aloof sound of it, shrewdly calculating that Hanna would never happen to bring the matter up with Edna Watson, or Penelope Ransome, or any of the other local females who have had occasion, over the years, to note down evidence to the contrary.

  “Who are we going to sell the story to?” I wanted to know.

  “The Star, most likely.” Like myself, though not at the same time, Hanna had once worked for the Toronto Star. In fact, she had been a news photographer there until recently, when she came to work for the Silver Falls Lancer, escaping an unhappy personal affair. “But maybe one of the television outlets will pay better. I’ll make a few phone calls, and we’ll see.”

  So I went whistling back to my desk to finish off Ramblin’ John, content that at least Hanna and I would be working together again on a project, even if, as I strongly suspected, we got no closer, ever, to the real story behind the death of Charlie Tinkelpaugh.

  Chapter 3

  We move forward, with the air of suspense growing all the time, I trust, to a point at about eleven p.m. that evening. I had gone to bed early, after a stint of watching what the closest TV station, over in Barrie, chooses to call “Classic Television,” to wit, reruns of I Love Lucy, Bonanza, and Leave It to Beaver. Watching this stuff takes its toll, and I was weary but unable to sleep. Birds, the sensible fellows, were all bedded down in their wee little nests, except for an owl who was chewing on something indescribable in the oak tree outside my bedroom window. A soft autumn breeze was soughing in the pines along Third Street. Down at the lake, which was rippling gently in the mellow, scented air, Old Mr. Moon was beaming away fit to bust, and up at the playground on Forest Road, Stephanie Podmeyer, the brazen hussy, was letting Billy Butterfield think she was about to lean back and relax along the length of the teeter-totter, thus placing him in a strategically advantageous position, when in fact all she was going to do was wait until he eased his weight off his end preparatory to making a move on her, and then she was going to bang her end down and laugh like a hyena. Then she was going to trot off and tell the other girls what a sap Billy looked. In short, a night of magic and moonbeams, as presented in Harlequin Romances, in which men are men and women are the cruel buggers we all know them to be.

  Old Mr. Moon, once he got finished horsing around down at the lake, came up and peered in the back, or bedroom, window of the Withers residence on Third Street, and then, in all probability, recoiled in horror. When I inherited the place from my parents, I resolved to keep it in the tidy manner favoured by my mother, but what with one thing and another, my standards have slipped somewhat. Thus, when the telephone rang at 11:06, C. Withers, who had been tossing and turning upon a fretful pillow—what exactly, did “Hands off, you creep” mean?—leapt from the bed, came a purler over a case of canned spaghetti bought on sale at the IGA and stored in the middle of the bedroom rug (where else?) and began to grope, frantically, among the debris on the couch. Finally, I spotted the light on my telephone-answering machine, installed and paid for by the Lancer so Tommy can give me hell even when I’m not here, and followed the cord down through the flotsam and jetsam to the phone.

  “The Withers residence. C. Withers at your service.”

  “Well, where the heck have you been, C. Withers? You let the phone ring sixteen times. Dead to the world, I guess.”

  “It is customary, when night falls, to allow sleep to knit up the ravell’d sleeve of care, Miss Klovack.”

  “Isn’t it kind of early for your sleeve to come unravelled? I thought you always stayed up to watch the dirty movies.”

  “Is that why you called? To check on my viewing habits?”

  “No, actually, the reason I called is that I’ve been thinking about this thing at the golf course.”

  “Yes, well, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. I didn’t behave very well.”

  “I know you didn’t, you creep, but that isn’t what I’m talking about. I was thinking about the murder.”

  “Good for you, Klovack. It shows the right spirit. And what is the result of your thinking?”

  “I think we should go out and tackle what’s-her-name, the Martin woman.”

  “You mean Winifred?”

  “That’s the one. The green-fees taker. The one who looks at you as if she’s not sure how you got past the admittance committee, and wonders where that bad smell could be coming from. She must have some idea why people are suddenly planting bombs around the golf course.”

  “I told you this afternoon that the cops interviewed her, and she said she had no idea whatever. She thought it must be the Irish Republican Army or somebody.”

  “The IRA in southern Ontario?”

  “Well, we had the Fenians in southern Ontario.”

  “And who in the Sam Hill are the Fenians?”

  “Klovack, your ignorance is a standing wonder to me. The Fenians were Irish nationalists who ran around making things unpleasant for the British in the nineteenth century, and conducted a series of raids across the U.S. border into, yes, southern Ontario.”

  “You know something, Carlton? This place reminds me more and more of life back in the old Ukraine.”

  Then she said something in Ukrainian, which I didn’t get, of course, but which I’ll bet was swearing. “Now you’ve made me forget where I was.”

  “You were about to go and grill Winifred Martin. And the best of British luck to you.”

  “You mean you won’t come?”

  “I mean I won’t come.”

  “Say, Carlton, did I ever tell you the Ukrainian for ‘creep’?”

  “Oh, all right, I’ll come, but not tomorrow. I have to go to the office.”

  “You’re going to the office on a Saturday? What for, to rifle the till?”

  “That series I’m working on, ‘Bygone Days in Bosky Dell,’ is supposed to be ready to go in a week, and I haven’t even started it.”

  “Start it Monday.”

  Ordinarily, I’d have been happy to comply, but Hanna had to be kept in check, so I refused. “I am the slave of duty,” I told her.

  “On second thought, who needs you? I’ll go by myself.”

  “Go with my blessings, child, but watch out for Art Martin.”

  “Who is Art Martin?”

  “Captain Martin, the ex-Air Canada pilot and head of the household. You won’t have any trouble recognizing him. For one thing, he’s the only male on the premises; for another, he’ll probably make a grab at you.”

  There was a pause. Klovack is well able to take care of herself in the presence of bumptious males, as I had reason to know; on the other hand, clocking Art Martin a sharp one across the bridge of the nose was probably not going to lead to a fruitful interview with his daughter.

  “Sunday morning, then.”

  “We don’t receive visitors on Sunday mornings in Bosky Dell.”

  “We do this Sunday. You call and set it up.” The phone went dead.

  Chapter 4

  So, there I was, at 9:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning, banging on the door of the Martin residence, with Hanna at my side. She was radiating girlish innocence, one of the easiest things on earth to fake. We looked like a couple of Baptists come to sell bibles to the folks. I was, on orders, wearing my suit, and Hanna was wearing a dark brown dress, simple, demure, and straightforward, lying in its teeth about its contents. She came as close as dammit to a curtsy when the door whanged open and Art Martin glowered out through the mists of a morning head
and wished us a gracious, “What the hell do you want?”

  I guess, after all those years of being polite to the passengers and laying off the sauce so he could fly at any time, Art Martin, upon retirement, decided to cram a lifetime’s worth of snarling and boozing into a couple of decades. He is one of the large, economy-sized ex-pilots, with fists the size of dinner plates and writhing knots along his upper arms. His eyes are blue, although on this occasion they were mostly red.

  After his wife ran off a couple of years ago, he moved from Toronto to Bosky Dell with his daughter Winifred, and, since they live right next door to the golf course, Winifred got a job looking after the clubhouse. It is Winifred who, most Sunday mornings, will nag him until he can’t stand the torment anymore and she can lug him off to church, where he promptly falls asleep and snores through the sermon. Thus are we reminded of God’s infinite grace. The grace must have been working this morning, because Art, to my astonishment, suddenly reached forward and grabbed my hand.

  “Well sir, it’s Carlton Withers,” he said. “Come in, come in, my boy. Good to see you. Sit you down, sit you right down. Winifred, perhaps Carlton could be persuaded to take a small drop for medicinal purposes. Fetch the bottle, girl, fetch the bottle.”

  While he spoke, he was propelling me by the elbow through a kitchen where you could eat off the floor—local report has it that Art does, from time to time, when he can’t get into a chair—and into what you, in your heathenish, foreign way might call a living room, but which we of Bosky Dell recognize at once as the best parlour. I was slammed into one of those old, high-backed chairs, and an enamel mug full almost to the brim with some brown, murky hell’s brew was thrust into my hand. I was going to be used, that much was clear, to cancel the church expedition this day.

  “Drink up, for God’s sake. I made this stuff myself and,” he leaned across the oak table and gave me a playful punch on the arm that numbed it to the marrow, “it has a bit of a kick, if I do say so myself.”

  There is a word, meiosis, which means “a picturesque understatement,” and when Art Martin spoke of a bit of a kick in describing his fortified blackberry wine, he was indulging in meiosis. I swallowed about an ounce of the stuff, which ran down my throat with a torch and set fire to my tonsils.

  “Good, eh?”

  I nodded, speechlessly.

  “You’ll want some more.” And he filled my mug back up to the brim.

  Winifred was taking this about as you would expect, glowering with the pure hate we so often find in the uplifted Christian on Sunday morning, and all directed, naturally, at me. I had phoned her to say we wanted an interview for the paper, and she had agreed, reluctantly. Nothing had been said about boozing with her father, although what she thought I could do about it, I don’t know. I shot a look across at Hanna, who was actually wearing white gloves, which she apparently thought were de rigueur in the boondocks on Sunday, and she jumped up and pushed a white-gloved finger onto a framed photo on the wall.

  “Oh, Mr. Martin, is this your aircraft?”

  He looked at her for the first time. “Trim little filly” flashed across his forehead as clearly as if it had been tattooed there.

  “One of them,” he said. “Of course, I flew all sorts. Started out flying a Fox Moth, up in the Northwest Territories. Bush pilot, I was.”

  “My, how wonderful! I guess that’s why Carlton said he wanted to write a book about you. Didn’t you, Carlton?”

  “I did? I mean, uh, I did.”

  There went Sunday. Art Martin began to spout bush-pilot stories, ten percent of which may even have been true, and he stood over me until I wrote them all down in my notebook.

  I staggered out of the house several hours later, awash with homebrew and hero-stories, and tottered over to where Hanna sat behind the wheel of the Corolla, humming to herself.

  “Well, you took long enough,” she said, as she started up the car and backed down the drive. “Did you learn anything?”

  “I learned that the pilots of today have it pretty soft and that if you want to get real, honest-to-God flying, you want to try hauling five-hundred-pound oil drums around in a de Havilland Beaver up north of Sixty. And I learned that there is an Inuit woman in Tuktoyaktuk who once tried to skin Art Martin with her ulu,” I said. “I wonder if it would be possible to track that bold woman down and persuade her to try again?”

  “Yes, well, I knew you’d be a washout, so I helped Winifred with the vegetables for dinner, and got the scoop from her. Too bad,” the maddening creature went on, “that I have to do all the work.”

  “Stop the car, Klovack,” I groaned. “I am about to unship this blackberry wine.”

  Hanna relented, for once, when I returned, groaning, to the car, and, instead of filling me with the tales of her triumph at once, agreed to drop me off at my place and come back later in the evening to, as she put it, “thrash things out.”

  I mentioned that it might be better for her to come in and bathe my temples, hold my hand, and perform other merciful acts, but she told me, rather curtly, to forget it. As she dumped me unceremoniously in front of my cottage and barrelled off homewards, I wondered if I should tell her, when she came back, that, according to Alexander Pope, women have no characters at all.

  Probably not, I decided.

  Chapter 5

  Many hours later, with the throbbing echoes of a hangover beginning to release their vice-like grip on my temples, I sat in my own living room and peered through the clearing mists, as Hanna, decently clad now in blue jeans and a sweater, told me about her little chat with Winifred Martin.

  “She wanted money,” Hanna said.

  “Don’t we all? No, you mean Winifred Martin wanted money to tell you her story?”

  “Uh-huh. She’s heard about cheque-book journalism, and she wants some of it.”

  I got up and poked the fire.

  “I always thought Winifred was one of those stern, non-materialistic types. So you didn’t get her story after all.”

  “Sure I did. I already told you.”

  “But you know the Lancer never pays for stories; it doesn’t even pay the staff a living wage.”

  “Oh, that part’s all right. I told her you were working on this as a freelancer, and you’d bring around a hundred dollars tomorrow. Golly, Carlton, you nearly hit me.”

  I had given a convulsive twitch at the words “you’d bring around, etc.,” with the result that the poker had flown from my nerveless grasp and clattered to the floor beside Hanna’s chair. This cheered up the fire, for some reason, and it began to blaze merrily. All the better for my purposes, which had nothing to do with solving murders. Surely the romantic ambience, especially a crackling fire in the fireplace, could be counted on to melt the female. This, after all, was more or less our former love nest. Over there, behind that pile of old newspapers, blankets, and miscellaneous kitchen debris, was where I discovered that Hanna is ticklish in a most unusual place. Here, where a couple of pots containing decaying vegetable matter lay athwart what was probably, a few layers down, the old green plush armchair, was where I proposed, and drew a round-eyed look, but no response whatever. Back yonder, where the broken vacuum cleaner sagged against an overflow of sweaters, shoes, pillows, and tennis rackets from the open door of the Welsh dresser, was where I demonstrated, for the first time, the advantages of the interlocking, as opposed to the overlapping, grip. The girl must be moved by this rich treasure house of memories, right?

  She got up and ambled through the debris towards the kitchen.

  “Say, Carlton, you got anything to eat around this joint?” Well, of course I did. There were three jars of peanut butter, half a lemon, a slightly soiled slice of pizza left over from last Tuesday, which could easily be scraped off and heated up, a green substance at the bottom of the fridge, and, of course, that case of canned spaghetti in the bedroom.

  “Let’s check in
the bedroom,” I said. “I know there’s something there.”

  “Cut it, Carlton,” snapped Hanna. “You’ll have to call Mrs. Golden.”

  Emma Golden is a comfortable widow in her mid-forties who lives just across Third Street from me. She likes to keep an eye on the neighbourhood, as she puts it, and it is well known that the gumshoes in the KGB and the CIA alike take her correspondence course. She is, nonetheless, a good sort, friendly and tolerant—she rolls her eyes at my housekeeping methods, but never nags—and she always manages to produce, from some inexhaustible source, possibly a well in her backyard, a steady supply of soups, stews, pizzas, lasagna, buns, and bread, which she lugs over and showers down on me. I told her once that she reminded me of the goddess Ceres, well known for her full figure and generous ways, but Emma replied that the only Ceres she knew about was the World Ceres, and how about them Blue Jays?

  I phoned her at once, and told her that Hanna had come to visit and was just saying how nice it would be to see her again.

  “I’ll be right over,” said Emma. A few minutes later, there was a smart rat-tat-tat on the door, and in she marched, with a pot of stew in one hand, a loaf of bread in the other, and a smile wreathing her face.

  “I brought a little something,” she said, five of the finest words in the language.

  Soon, we were all gathered around the kitchen table, and Hanna was letting us in on what she’d gotten out of Winifred Martin.

  Which was not, to my way of thinking, a whole lot.

  “She said there were things going on at the golf course,” Hanna reported.

  “What sorts of things?”

  “Stolen golf carts, smashed windows; somebody broke into the clubhouse last weekend and trashed the place. She said it was like a reign of terror—she wants you to use that in your story, Carlton. She said you should call it ‘One Woman’s Brave Fight Against a Reign of Terror.’”

  “What brave fighting has she done?”