“Carlton. The name is Carlton.”
“Carlton, I mean to say. How are you?”
“Not bad, for someone who was the object of a murder attempt yesterday,” I said.
“You were? Too bad.”
“Too bad? That’s it? Too bad? Don’t you want to follow it up? Don’t you want to interview me for your story?”
“Ah, as to that. We’ve dropped that item from the lineup.”
“You’ve dropped the story? Why?”
“Something much better has come up. Unfortunate; it would have been nice to straighten up this little mess, but that’s the way in the news game, as you know, Charles. Too many stories, too little time.”
“Carlton.”
“Yes, of course. How foolish of me.”
“What’s the big scoop that shoved two murders, Indian burial grounds, a development battle, and a rich man’s dying bequest into the ashcan?”
“Ah. Well, it’s a very special item we’ve been working on for some time now, and the whole thing just came together yesterday, so we’re rushing to air.”
“And what are we rushing to air?”
“Actually, it’s more of a feature than what might be called a regular investigative piece.”
“That’s nice. A feature about what?”
“Um. We’ve managed to track down a twelve-year-old lad in Toronto who builds the most amazing replicas of Second World War aircraft. Quite astounding.”
“This is what you’re rushing to air with? A kid who builds model planes?”
“Not just model planes, Chester. Amazing replicas of warplanes.”
“Carlton.”
“Carlton. Really amazing.”
“Then what the hell are you doing here this morning? Shouldn’t you be back in the studio, cutting tape or doing voiceovers or whatever it is you do?”
“I lost something. You see we . . . uh . . . had to check out in rather a hurry the other day, and I left something in the suite, and this man,” he indicated the desk clerk with an angry gesture, “refuses to relinquish it, although I have a distinct recollection—”
“Fred,” I interrupted, “give the man his property.”
“Not without he identifies it,” said Fred.
“What do you mean, identifies it?”
“I mean, identifies it. The man says he left something in the suite. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the housekeeping staff found something in the suite. Maybe it belongs to this man; maybe to somebody else. All he’s gotta do is tell me what it was, and everything’s hotsy-totsy. Otherwise, no deal.”
“Seems reasonable. What is it, Peter?”
“Personal property. My personal property. Look here,” he extracted his wallet, plucked out a twenty, and laid it on the counter. “Perhaps this will serve as identification enough.”
“No,” said Fred, and actually shoved the twenty back across the counter.
I grabbed it before the Great Man could trouser it.
“Give him his toupee, Fred,” I said.
“Oh, all right,” said Fred. “So long as it’s identified.” And, reaching below the counter, he hauled out a blond, full toupee, which he put on the counter and held on to.
The Duke glared at Fred, glared at me, and tried to grab the toupee, but Fred wouldn’t let go.
“Gotta be entered in the book,” said Fred, and proceeded to write a description of the object, in laborious longhand, into some journal he had behind the desk.
“How did you know what it was?” snarled the Duke.
“Why else would you be kicking up such a fuss?” I replied. “And since I got it back for you, I think you owe me an explanation.”
“I’ve already given you an explanation.”
“You’ve given me a cockamamie story; that’s not the same thing.”
“Well, it’s all you’re going to get.” He grabbed the toupee, which Fred had finished entering in his Domesday Book, signed a form Fred stuck in front of him, and disappeared into the men’s room to don the headpiece.
I ran back out to the parking lot. It was worth a try. Teresa was still sitting alone in the cab, looking furious.
“It means grass-eating,” I told her, as I ducked in out of the rain.
“Grass-eating? Why do you think I’m grass-eating?”
“It was just a little joke, Teresa. And I apologize.”
“Oh.” The Teresas of this world don’t get apologized to much; it shook her.
“Say, tell me,” I went on, putting it on my best this-doesn’t-really-matter-but-just-for-the-heck-of-it tone of voice, “who scared the pants off Peter?”
“Oh, that. Those men.”
“What men?”
“Those Indian fellows, the other day. We had a meeting, back here at the hotel, and they told him they didn’t want him poking his nose into their business.”
“They did? I thought they wanted publicity.”
“If they did, they went about it in a very peculiar way. That fellow with the eagle feather told Peter that, if he wasn’t out of town in an hour, they’d beat him up so badly he’d never be able to appear on television again, unless it was on World Federation Wrestling, as the Masked Marvel.”
“And Peter said he’d go? Why didn’t he call the cops?”
“They told him not to.”
“You mean he let them run him out of town, just like that?”
“Of course.” She looked at me in wonder. “He’s a coward.”
“I guess. Tell me something. Is it worth it, working for a man like that?”
“Sure,” she said. “I love him.”
Well, why not? Klovack loved me, say what she would, and that could be no more strange, surely, than that Peter Duke, for all he was an empty tub of offal, should win the love of this wired-up woman.
I bade her a civil good day, and ducked through the rain back to my own car. Peter came running out of the hotel, followed by the cabbie, sauntering, just as I pulled out of the parking lot.
I told Hanna about the “Case of the Lost Toupee,” of course, which was a very foolish move on my part, since it meant that all I got for lunch was lunch.
“Not now, Carlton, for Pete’s sake. We have to think this out.”
“What’s to think? Chuck Wilson and his boys, either because they killed Dr. Rose or for some other reason, ran Peter Duke out of town.”
“I wonder how he managed to leave the toupee behind? Don’t you stick them down with glue?”
“He probably worked up so much sweat during his little chat with Chuck and the Slugs that he had to have a shower, and dressed and fled without due care and attention.”
“Yeah, that could be. But I still don’t understand why he was run out of town.”
“Let the cops sort it out.”
“The cops, hah!”
Hanna does not have a high opinion of the cops. She has been off them ever since the Susan Nelles case in Toronto, a few years ago. Nelles was a nurse who was looking after a number of children who died in mysterious circumstances in hospital. She was charged with their murder, but it turned out that the investigating officers didn’t have a whole lot more to go on than the fact that she didn’t burst into tears when they confronted her and demanded a lawyer before she would answer their questions. The charge was thrown out, along with a number of illusions about the care Canadian police officers bring to important investigations.
Hanna kept worrying at the Peter Duke incident right up until it was time to leave for the Bosky Dell golf course.
“Maybe Joe Herkimer can sort it out,” she muttered, as we went out her apartment door.
It had stopped raining, which worried me, since it might mean that Marchepas would die on me again. Sometimes she hated rain; sometimes she loved it. You never knew. Today, she didn’t care, and we zipped out to B
osky Dell, just like people with a regular car.
Tommy Macklin and Sylvia Post, dressed to the nines and carrying enough clubs in a golf cart to arm a battalion of golfers, were waiting for us by the first tee, registering impatience, although we were five minutes early. Our 4:10 tee-time put us among the privileged—only the club president’s party got in ahead of us—and I guess they were worried someone would nip in and grab our spot. Actually, there was nothing to worry about; I knew they closed the course for the entire afternoon of a tournament like this, and the first few foursomes, at least, would have the course pretty much to themselves.
“Oh, oh,” I muttered, as we tramped over to the locker room to get our clubs.
“What’s the matter?” asked Hanna.
“Check out Mrs. Post.”
“She looks perfectly normal to me.”
“Check the footwear.”
“What’s wrong with the . . . oh, I see. Her golfing shoes don’t match. She’s got one brown one and one black one. Should I say something?”
“I think not.”
“But won’t she be embarrassed, if she notices?”
“I don’t think she’ll notice. I think you’ll find,” I went on, with my heart beginning to sink within me for the first time that day, “that our beloved boss and our esteemed leader have been into the Martinis already, and are perhaps six holes ahead of the field.”
“Boy,” said Hanna, “this should be quite a game.”
Chapter 21
The trouble didn’t start until the third hole, the one where Charlie Tinkelpaugh had finished out in such spectacular fashion. Holes one and two were played in a fairly civilized manner, after an initial pause while Hanna got to work with her camera and clicked a few group shots. The sun had decided to join us after all, and the entire golf course was giving off steam as the morning rain disappeared into water vapour. I should have spotted this for the omen it was. Mrs. Post, with the aid of her liquid lunch, was at the breezy, bonhomous stage, and chatted away to us mere serfs in democratic jollity. Her golf game, which is normally precise but uneventful, had been loosened up somewhat, and she holed out the 525-yard first with a respectable seven. Tommy got a seven, too, by very prudently translating one of his clean misses with a three wood into a practice swing. I was the only one who saw this; I had made a side trip over to the lake that runs down the south boundary of the first fairway, and was just emerging over the embankment when he swung and missed his ball, lying in a low hollow. He was screened from the others by the intervening golf cart.
“Tough luck, Tommy,” I said.
He glowered. “That was just a practice swing,” he said.
“Sure, and that drive of mine, which you saw heading for deep water, actually hit a tree by the shore and bounced back up,” I replied. “Here it is.”
I finished with a ten, counting the two strokes for the lost ball—I could silence Tommy, but what if Hanna found out?—and Klovack, deliberately foozling her putt, holed out in nine. By the rules, because the winners tied, we should all have put a buck into the kitty and carried on to the second hole, but Tommy and Mrs. Post decided that, as they had shared the victory, they would each drink two Martinis and put two bucks into the pool. Which they did.
Then there was a holdup at the second tee, while the lone foursome ahead of us teed off, so Tommy and Mrs. Post killed the time by having another Martini. When Hanna and I refused to join in, Mrs. Post became a trifled vexed. She had progressed from the bonhomous stage, and was verging on the quarrelsome.
“C’mon, Carlton,” she said, “have a drink.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Post, but I’d better not.”
“Pompous poop,” said Mrs. Post, advancing to the tee, and, as she unleashed her driver, she repeated, “poop, poop, poop, poop,” once for every time she swung and missed.
“Just practising,” she said. She was a trifle winded, and her last swing had jerked her hat down over her eyes. She yanked it back up and glared out at all of us from under it.
“Of course,” said Tommy.
Mrs. Post addressed the ball again, and, with one final “poop!” blasted it about two hundred yards, straight down the middle of the fairway.
“Practice makes perfect,” she said, and hiccoughed her way over to the golf cart to wait for Hanna, who was in charge of the transportation.
She had holed out in five, one over par, while the rest of us all got sixes. She was thus, by my reckoning, at least four long, strong Martinis to the good, not counting her warm-ups, by the time she tottered to the third tee, where, as usual, she had the honour.
“What the hell happened to the hole?” she inquired, peering down the short fairway. This, you will recall, was a 150-yard, par-three hole. There was a canvas sheet, about eight feet high, all around what had been the third green, and, we presumed, the cops were hard at work back there, unearthing clues. About twenty yards to the right of the canvas, a new hole had been created, marked by a flag, but with no green around it, just the usual scrub grass of our fairways.
“They’ve changed the hole for the police investigation,” I explained.
Mrs. Post seemed to take this as a personal affront.
“Bunch of assholes,” she said, and let fly with her five iron. Up, up, soared the ball, reaching for the sky. No, not the sky, the canvas. It disappeared behind the sheeting.
“Shit!” exclaimed Mrs. Post. “What now?”
“Play her where she lays,” chortled Tommy, who was also pretty well lubricated by now. “Lay her where she plays.”
“I will,” said Mrs. Post, and began lurching off down the fairway, while the rest of us teed off. I caught up to her—my own tee shot had gone about sixty yards left of the canvas, and was probably further from the green than it had been when I teed off—just as she was ducking under a bright ribbon of yellow police warning tape. “Keep Out,” it said. “Police.”
“Balls,” muttered Mrs. Post to herself, adding, “Lay her where she plays.”
She giggled and stepped through an opening where two pieces of canvas overlapped. I expected to see her emerge in seconds, on the arm of a cop, but nothing happened, so I decided to check on her. As I ducked through the canvas, Mrs. Post was standing, with her chipping iron grounded by her left hand, her right hand in the pocket of her rather short white shorts, and her gaze directed over to one corner of what had now become a roofless tent where sprawled the figures of a partially unclad couple, golf clubs forgotten, engaged upon another, and even more revered, sport. Probably just passing the idle moments until their tee-time came up, and risking grass stains amid the damp.
As I blundered through the canvas, gulped twice, and started to back out, Mrs. Post looked around and jerked a thumb over towards the recumbent couple.
“Hey,” she said. “You wanna do that?”
When I shook my head in nameless dread, she turned on the smile.
“Aw, c’mon,” she said.
I stood transfixed, saying nothing, and she shrugged.
“Pompous poop,” she said once more, and, addressing the ball, lofted it neatly greenwards over the canvas. The sporting couple paid no attention whatever.
As Mrs. Post emerged onto the fairway, she took my arm and leaned rather heavily into me, unleashing the joint fumes of gin, vermouth, and some expensive perfume.
“Don’t know what you’re missing,” she said.
To change the subject, I said, “Say, Mrs. Post, are you Ontario Corporation 13248994?”
She gave me a sharp glance. “You been spying on me?”
“Checking, Mrs. Post, just checking. As per your orders to Tommy Macklin.”
“Huh. I didn’t give any orders to Tommy Macklin.”
“Gee, that’s funny. He told me he wanted me to check into this story about the golf-course development and report to himself and yourself by memo. Haven’t you been
getting my memos?”
She began to chuckle. “Feels left out, I guess. Poor little pipsqueak.” She leaned into me again. “Just between you and me and the fencepost, yeah, I’m Corporation whatever-it-is, with a small group of associates. But I sure as hell didn’t tell Tommy to sic you onto it. What have you been doing with my memos?”
“I turn everything in to Tommy.”
She chuckled again. “You got to admire the little prick. He isn’t as dumb as he looks.” And she patted me on the bum and lurched off.
Hanna parred this hole—I could see that her competitive instincts were overcoming her prudence—but managed to spill most of her victory Martini.
The fourth hole is a dogleg; it takes a sharp jerk to the left about one hundred and fifty yards from the tee, whereas my ball, in the contrary fashion it has, took a sharp jerk to the right. I asked Hanna—straight down the fairway, as usual—to help me look for it in the woods that spring up any time they see a ball stamped “Property of C. Withers,” and as soon as we were by ourselves, I told her about the little drama on the third.
“You mean she made a pass at you?” asked Hanna.
“Uh-huh.”
“Boy, she really must be sozzled.”
“Thanks. I needed that.”
“No, I mean . . . you know what I mean. Well, never mind. I’ll make sure she doesn’t get you alone. Gosh, Carlton, they line up for you, don’t they? You’ve got a young magnolia blossom panting after you, and now a rather elderly Post.”
“What do you think Tommy’s playing at?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s not hard. He must have decided to keep tabs on what’s going on at the golf course by having you do the digging, and make it look legitimate by ringing in the boss, that’s all.”
“That makes sense.”
“Of course it does. But what doesn’t, and what you can explain to me if you wouldn’t mind unhanding me long enough to find out, is what the heck is going on on the fifth fairway.”
I followed Hanna’s pointing finger and, sure enough, the fifth fairway, running off at an angle from the fourth green, was covered with vehicles. Not golf carts, either. There was an ambulance, with its lights flashing, a bright yellow backhoe, and two Ontario Provincial Police cruisers. The foursome ahead of us were milling around on the tee. What did the rules say about driving off into a seething sea of policemen? They didn’t seem anxious to find out what all the fuss was about, but I was. We crashed through the wet woods and onto the scene just as the ambulance pulled away. Sergeant Richard Moffitt, ace investigator, was getting into one of the cruisers when I caught up to him.
Hole in One Page 14