Hole in One

by Walter Stewart

  “Well . . .” He paused and looked down at the magazine again. “Do you suppose they’re real?”

  “Silicone implants,” I assured him. “You’re working yourself into a sweat over recent advances in the plastics industry. What about this golf-course thing?”

  Reluctantly, slowly, he closed the magazine and gave me his undivided attention. “I want you to get onto this development angle, Carlton, and keep on it. I want you especially to explore the business of what the old bustard’s—Flannery’s—will said about selling the golf course and anything that has to do with that.”

  “What about the murder?”

  He snorted. “We don’t do murders, Carlton. You know that.”

  “But we do do developments. Fine,” I said. “First thing tomorrow I’ll go over to the Land Titles Office and check out the deed. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before.”

  “You do that,” said Tommy. “Make sure you find out everything you can about that deed.”

  “How do you see us handling this, Tommy?” I asked. “The legal-tangle-over-a-will angle, or the village of Bosky Dell pits itself against a big developer? Should we be looking for a series, or will we run one big feature?”

  “We won’t run it at all.”

  “We won’t run it at . . . Then why do you want me to work on it?”

  “Consider this a private project, Carlton. It’s not so much for the paper as for me. Your boss,” he added, in case I had forgotten. “And Mrs. Post.”

  “Mrs. Post? What has the publisher got to do with this?”

  “That’s not your concern. You just do your job.”

  “Aw, come off that crap, Tommy. You’re onto something, and if you won’t tell me what it is, I can’t do my job.”

  He glowered at me. Tommy was happier in the good old days when the peons knew their place, but he really didn’t have much choice. His investigating staff consisted of myself and Billy Haldane, who thought the Land Titles Office was where they give names to properties.

  “Hmm,” he said, and it was not a happy hmm. “Well, I guess it can’t do much harm to tell you a little bit. The other day, we had a visit from The Red Tide.”

  The Red Tide is what the local spokespeople for the Assembly of First Nations are called in Silver Falls, where bigotry is next to godliness. Joe Herkimer must have been in on this.

  “And?”

  “Well, it seems that there maybe used to be an Indian burial ground under what is now the fifth fairway at the Bosky Dell golf course. Those jokers wanted the area roped off, and preserved, for Pete’s sake. They are even applying for a heritage grant, and they want to get an archaeologist in to conduct a dig. Can you beat it?”

  “Maybe they object to the desecration of their burial grounds, Tommy.”

  “What’s to object? Bunch of dead old bones. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that they wanted us to run a story saying that they are thinking about taking legal action, and trying to get an injunction to prevent anyone disturbing the situation until they can have a proper study done. Of course, I told them we don’t run that kind of story. But, if they do get an injunction, it could hold up the development over there, so I want you to find out what effect that thing in Flannery’s will has on the sale of the land, and, while you’re at it, find out who’s behind these troublemakers. No Indian has brains enough to figure out something this complicated.”

  “You’d be surprised, Tommy. Some Indians these days are pretty smart. Drive cars and everything.”

  Tommy just grunted. “You don’t put this stuff in the news files, you understand. Do it up as a memo, with one copy for me and one for Mrs. Post. Leave them both in my mailbox. You got that?”

  “I’ve never submitted my stuff to Mrs. Post, Tommy. What’s this all about?”

  “Never you mind what it’s all about. The publisher has a particular interest in this matter. That’s all you need to know. Just get on with it.”

  “Ah, um.”

  “Now what’s the matter?”

  “Well, to tell you the truth, Tommy, I’m not sure I can keep any research I do on this under wraps.”

  “Yes, you can. I just told you to. My god,” he went on, “I don’t know what they teach you in journalism school these days, but where I come from—”

  “Yes, I know, journalists do what they’re told, and no lip. But there’s a complication.”

  “Oh, yeah? And what’s the complication?”

  So I had to tell him that I had agreed to help Hanna with a story for the Toronto papers, thinking, as I was careful to point out to him, that no conflict of interest could arise, because the Lancer would not want to soil its hands with such a story, so it would be okay for me to work on it, in my own time of course. But now that he wanted me to work on it for the paper, well, not for the paper so much as for himself and Mrs. Post, that made it rather complicated and I really didn’t see . . .

  “Withers, you’re babbling,” Tommy said. “Stop it.”

  I stopped it.

  “Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” he went on. “You’ve made some kind of deal with this Klovack bimbo to freelance a piece for one of the Toronto papers . . .”

  “The Star, I understand, or maybe the CBC-TV . . .”

  “. . . some scummy Toronto rag, and you think that would interfere with your duty to your employer, who pays you a very substantial salary every week . . .”

  “Substantial, hah!”

  “. . . and you would jeopardize the long, happy relationship you’ve had with this employer for one lousy freelance assignment . . .”

  I could see he had got the whole wrong angle on this thing.

  “No, no, it’s not that,” I explained. “Heck, I would drop the story like a flash. I don’t imagine we’ll ever learn anything, anyway, it’s just that . . .”

  I paused. He got it.

  “It’s just that you’re too chicken-shit to explain to Hanna that you can’t do her dirty work for her because I have told you to find out certain things for me and to keep your big mouth shut about what you find out.”

  It could have been more graciously put, but I had to admit he had it, in a nutshell.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You mean, you can’t work for me, and keep the information from the scummy Star if Hanna doesn’t want you to.”

  “That’s it, exactly.”

  “Well, that’s easily fixed.” He got up. “You’re fired.”

  A man of volcanic passions, Tommy. He does not like to be thwarted, and when he is thwarted, he takes steps. Usually, the same step: he fires me.

  “It won’t last,” I told him. My firings don’t usually hold for more than a week. In fact, it appears to be company policy to fire me whenever there’s a holiday coming up, and then rehire me afterwards, to save holiday pay.

  “Yes, it will,” said Tommy.

  “Well, if you fire me, who’s going to do your digging around?”

  “We’ll hire somebody else. Or I’ll do it myself.” He seemed to like the thought of this. “I haven’t lost the old skills, you know, just because I don’t work so well with those goddam computers.”

  “Going to break another Henry Doyle story, are you, Tommy?”

  This was, and was meant to be, a low blow. When Tommy was a stringer for the Windsor Mercury, working out of Sarnia, Ontario, he had to file a story every week about the level of the Great Lakes. They’re crazy about lake levels down in that part of the country. Of course, it’s rather hard to put much zip into a story like that, because it lacks the personal angle. So Tommy made up an old guy who would comment on the lake levels. It happens a lot more often than you might think in journalism; half the “informed sources” in your daily newspaper are mere wraiths, like Henry Doyle, who kept coming up with colourful comments for Tommy every week. In fact, his commen
ts got so colourful that the Windsor Mercury’s city editor phoned Tommy up one day and said he was sending a photographer down to get a picture of Henry Doyle. They were going to do a feature on him.

  This put Tommy into a bit of a pickle, so he did the only thing he felt he could do. He killed Henry Doyle. At first, he was going to drown him, but he thought that might look suspicious, so he ran him over with a bus instead. It made a tiny item at the back of the paper, and nobody would ever have found out about it, but Tommy got plastered one night years later and boasted about how he got away with it. I had heard the story in the Press Club in Toronto one time, but I had never mentioned it, until now.

  “That’s does it,” snarled Tommy, jumping to his feet. “You’re through. Permanently. And if you want to work on this story for the scummy Star, you go right ahead, but of course, if I find you using any information I have just given you in confidence, I’ll sue you down to your socks.”

  With those cheery words, he was off to the door. As he fumbled with the knob—everybody thinks you have to turn it, but the inner works fell apart years ago, so you just shove—I asked, “Well, anyway, what’s the connection with Mrs. Post? Why has she got a particular interest in this? You might as well tell me; I’m bound to find out, anyway.”

  Tommy got the door shoved open at last, and paused on the threshhold. He was still clutching Billy Haldane’s Penthouse, which I guess he had confiscated. He waved it at me as he replied, “Yes, even an incompetent like you is probably going to get onto it. It’s perfectly simple: she’s the one who bought the golf course and means to develop it.”

  Chapter 10

  Sylvia Post, relict of the late Donald Post, is a widow in her mid-fifties, and what is technically known as a hard-boiled egg, although she looks soft and pleasant. She was a beauty queen in her teens, and still has the carriage and the remains of the figure of a beauty queen. Her husband, Donald, was a bit of a simp, who inherited his money and bought the newspaper in the first place mainly so he would have something to do while a battalion of lawyers and accountants made him ever wealthier. When he departed this life, after a disagreement between his Cadillac and a freight train one liquid February night a few years ago, Sylvia dried her tears, if any, shucked her apron, if any, and took over. She has a natural instinct for what makes a small-town newspaper work, namely lots of flowery praise about the locals, no knocks on business, and no raises for the working stiffs. She is the one who bought our computers, over the objections of Tommy Macklin, and was thus able to dispense with most of the typesetting staff. She also dreamt up a lot of new features, such as my Ramblin’ John column and something called Personality Profile, which gives the old oil to some local advertiser every week and is widely read by that advertiser’s mother.

  She soon turned the paper into a paying proposition, and attracted the attention of the Johnson chain, notorious for its high profits, low wages, and lousy newspapers. The Johnson chain can’t stand anybody else making money, so it presented her with an offer she couldn’t refuse. It bought out the Lancer, then hired Sylvia to stay on as publisher, and they split the swag every year. The day-to-day operations are left to Tommy Macklin, while Sylvia watches the purse strings and takes elderly advertisers out to lunch—they always think they are going to get Sylvia for dessert, but they don’t. This minimal activity has allowed her to use the rest of Dear Donald’s legacy buying into local businesses, gobbling up real estate, and now, it appeared, extending her reach into the development business.

  As soon as Tommy departed, whistling and thumbing his magazine, I fixed myself some supper—the heel of a package of liverwurst, stirred into a can of beans, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it—and called Hanna’s apartment. The following dialogue ensued:

  Hanna (very friendly): Well, hello.

  Self: Hanna, we have to talk.

  H (no longer friendly): Oh, it’s you.

  S: Of course it’s me. Whom were you expecting?

  H: None of your business. Talk.

  S: Not over the phone. I’m coming to see you.

  H: No need, Withers. You can say whatever you have to say through Ma Bell.

  S: I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Click. Pause, pause, pause. Ring, ring.

  H (very friendly): Well, hello.

  S: My damn car wouldn’t start.

  H: Oh, it’s you again.

  S: I get the impression you are waiting for an important call, and this isn’t it.

  H: You get the right impression.

  S: Well, swell. I just wanted you to know that I have been fired, for real this time, so I will be free to devote my full attention to this freelance proposition.

  H: What freelance proposition?

  S: You know, working on this murder story for the Star.

  H: Oh, that. I’ve been meaning to tell you about that. It’s off.

  S: Off? How do you mean, off?

  H: Off. I’ve got somebody else to do the story stuff.

  S: Oh, fine. I give up a perfectly good job to help you out, and now you tell me you don’t need me.

  H: Give up? You just said you were fired.

  S: Well, technically, but that doesn’t alter the main point, which is that, without me, you won’t get anywhere on this story.

  H: I see. And how many awards have you won for investigative reporting?

  S: I won the Blue Ribbon from the Bellingham County Cattlemen’s Association last year.

  H: Yeah, for a story on the spread of anthrax that you rewrote from a press release.

  S: So this new guy, he’s an investigative reporter?

  H: Uh-huh.

  S: Who is he?

  H: None of your beeswax.

  S: I’ll know, ten seconds after he checks into the Dominion House Hotel or the Bide-a-Wee Motel.

  H: Peter Duke. Good night.

  Click.

  Peter Duke. I might have guessed. A TV personality, no less, and not a reporter in the real sense at all. Handsome as a stud horse, and almost as smart, “Call Me Pete” is beamed into our living rooms every Thursday night as one of the celebrity cast of You Asked for It, one of those combination personality-cum-public-affairs shows that multiplied after the success of such real public-affairs shows as the fifth estate in Canada and 60 Minutes in the United States. A team of researchers does the work, and Pete handles the interviews, reading from notes. He has a sincere haircut and a voice like oleomargarine, so the fact that he has less than fifteen watts of brain power doesn’t matter. Somehow—probably as part of a joint venture with the Star—Hanna had persuaded You Asked for It that there might be a story in our quiet, backwater murder.

  My course of action was clear. I would solve the murder, single-handed, make Pete and his supporting staff look like a bunch of yo-yos, and then decide whether, in view of her traitorous conduct, I was willing to take Hanna back. This, at least, is how I put it to myself when I hung up the phone. Unfortunately, myself shot back a single word, “How?”

  There was a pretty good chance I could starve to death before I was able to fulfil this program, anyway. This latest firing had come at an awkward time; I was flat broke. If Tommy persisted in this foolishness, there was only one thing for it: I would have to go to work over at the Jowett place.

  Chapter 11

  The Jowett place, for those of you who missed the splendid write-up and pictures in Town and Country magazine, is a cosy little dosshouse on five acres of land along the waterfront, smack dab in the middle of Bosky Dell, with three kitchens, seven bathrooms, a score or more bedrooms, a billiard room, and a living room large enough to hold a dress rehearsal for the Ascot scene in My Fair Lady. It was once the summer residence of Sir John Flannery himself, before that tycoon handed in his papers, and, in a burst of whimsy—the only known burst of whimsy in a long, stern life—he named it “The Eagle’s Nest.” Sir John was once described as “an eagle of high
finance” in a newspaper profile. There is a wrought-iron eagle on a post by the front gate, which looks, as a matter of fact, quite a bit like a dissipated vulture, and not like an eagle at all. Sir John’s daughter and beneficiary finally couldn’t keep up the estate, owing to a mistaken belief on her part that she could subsist entirely on eighteen Martinis a day. So, about forty years ago, she bought herself a small cottage instead, and the Jowetts took over The Eagle’s Nest.

  Conrad Jowett is the head of the clan, a Toronto financier, one of those large, bluff, bullying patriarchs, constructed along lines laid down by Thomas Wolfe in Look Homeward, Angel. He is one of the new crop of millionaires that sprang up like mushrooms after the Second World War, when greed wasn’t necessarily good, just useful. The way we heard it locally, he made a packet in the grocery business and ploughed the profits into commodity trading, where he made an even bigger packet. Like many of his ilk, once he became rich, he yearned for respectability. He made large donations to the church, and that other holy of holies, the Conservative Party. The purchase of The Eagle’s Nest was part of the process. Sir John Flannery had been a pillar of the establishment, and Conrad Jowett picked up at least part of his mantle with the deed to the property.

  He was still coining money, of course, but now he was doing it in the bond market, where a chap has to be content with takings that are merely huge, rather than obscene. He had come so far from the rough-and-tumble of pork bellies and silver futures, that we were expecting him, any day now, to win some official favour. Companion of the Order of Canada, perhaps, or the chairmanship of one of those commissions that multiply in Ottawa like fruit flies. The only sticking point was that some members of the clan are a bit strange, and the rumour mill reported that there were, from time to time, nameless orgies in “The Nest Egg,” which is what Conrad has chosen to call the boathouse-cum-apartment where he keeps his yacht.

  I was well acquainted with the Jowett spread, although I had never been invited to any orgies, nameless or otherwise, anywhere on the grounds. I knew the place because it is hard to get good help these days. Don’t take my word for it; that is what Conrad Jowett is forever saying. It may have something to do with the fact that he constantly badgers his employees, drives down their wages whenever possible, and never, ever, lets on that anyone, anywhere, ever did anything as well as he could have done it if he hadn’t been so busy making money. In the good old days, of course, you could get away with this sort of thing, but since the idiots in charge banned child labour, the seventy-hour week, and the practice of “gentle correction” of employees, Conrad has run into some difficulty keeping the battalion of maids, kitchen help, and groundskeepers necessary to the management of a joint like his. As a result, his major domo, a cadaverous-looking albino who has been with Conrad since he watered his first ham in the grocery business, is constantly on the lookout for hired hands.