Death from the Ladies Tee

by James Y. Bartlett

  “So what was last night’s third degree about?” I pressed.

  “You,” Honie sighed.

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. You know, how could I invite such an asshole like you to come down? What did I think I was doing? Didn’t I know anything about you? Didn’t I think to have someone approve the plan before I did it? What were my plans to get rid of you? Stuff like that. What a bitch.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I finally told her that my job was to get press coverage for the tour and what the press chose to write about was basically out of my control. And I told her that I’d known you for years and that you were basically OK in my book. Then I packed up my stuff and left.”

  “So when you left, she was basically pissed?” I pressed.

  Honie opened both eyes and looked at me, blinking once. “Well, yeah, I guess so,” she said. “But then, Julie’s always pissy. After a while, you just ignore it. I was tired of listening to her ranting after half an hour, so I just tuned her out, basically. I had other things more important to do, so I said what I said and left.”

  She thought for a minute. “But you aren’t thinking that maybe Julie was the one who …?”

  Her thought was cut off by the arrival of the doctor, who greeting Honie cheerfully, as doctors are wont to do, then turned and asked me to leave the room. I went out and stood in the hallway, thinking. I remembered the sight of Julie Warren’s red and angry face when she had threatened me in the lunch room a few days ago. Julie certainly looked big and strong, but could she have inflicted the damage on Honie? More important, would she? What possible advantage could there be for Big Wyn that would cause her to order one of her own employees beaten up? It didn’t add up.

  The doctor came out into the hall. “I’ve ordered another shot of Demerol,” he said. “She’s still in a lot of pain, so I think we’ll keep her here one more day. She’s young and healthy, so we should be able to get her out of here by tomorrow.”

  “Let me ask you something,” I said.

  “Shoot.”

  “Do you think she could have been beaten up by another woman?”

  “Only a very big or very angry one,” he said. “Funny you should ask, though.”

  “Why?”

  “The police asked me that same question two hours ago.”

  * * * When I got back to the Doral, I went over to the pressroom and found that Julie Warren’s pro-am tee time was in about an hour. She was probably over at the practice range warming up, I was told. To get to the range, I had to walk around the back of the hotel, past that fountain that Honie had thought so pretty in the pink twilight before someone concussed her nearly to death. There was no sign of violence today, just neat rows of yellow mums and red coleus, some trimmed box holly and a palm or two for tropical effect.

  The practice tee was busy. The women professionals were warming up side-by-side with their amateur partners for the day, who in turn were busy trying to figure out how not to be embarrassed on the golf course today. There was a great deal of camaraderie going on, as the woman pros tried to help their partners find a semblance of a swing.

  Most of the amateurs playing in the pro-am were male, as usual, drawn from the ranks of the tournament’s sponsors, program advertisers and others connected with the resort. Watching them flail away on the range, I could tell that most of them were twice-a-month golfers. They all seemed to have herky swings that resulted in a lot of topped shots and violent slices. Still, the women pros were trying to help, providing hints and words of encouragement, It was something you don’t usually see on the PGA Tour, were the pros pretty much show up because they have to. While some do take the time to be nice, many can’t abide pro-ams, and their attitudes show it.

  Which reminded me of my favorite pro-am story, featuring a gruff old pro from the Virginia mountains. As was his usual practice, this pro had, after the initial introductions, said nary a word to his playing partners throughout the rest of the round. No stories, no jokes, no “nice shots,” or “that’s too bad.” He was so intimidating, in fact, that the rest of the group just tried to keep out of his way, putting out quickly and moving on to the next tee. It was a miserable day for all of them.

  Until the last hole, Walking up to the green, the pro glanced at the scoreboard and noticed that his team was in position to win the event. One of the amateurs had reached the green in regulation and within birdie range, but, following the procedure of the rest of the round, was about to just pick it up in order not to delay the pro’s day any further.

  “Hold on, son,” the pro finally spoke. “If you make that putt, it’ll be a net eagle and we can win this thing.”

  The amateur stopped and looked at the pro, amazed that he had actually spoken.

  “What do you mean?” the guy asked.

  “You get a stroke here,” the pro explained. “Knock that baby in and we’ll win.”

  “What do we win?” the amateur asked next.

  “Well, y’all will get some nice prizes and I’ll get about a thousand bucks,” the pro said.

  The amateur nodded. He marked and cleaned his ball. Studied the putt carefully. Took his time. Finally, he was ready. He walked up to the ball, took a couple of careful practice swings. Settled in over the ball. Everyone else fell quiet.

  Then he looked up at the pro, standing by the side of the green, gave him an evil smile, and whacked the ball clear off the green and into the nearby lake. “Up yours,” he said and walked away.

  The stocky figure of Julie Warren was laboring in the next-to-last practice area on the long, wide tee. Dark patches of sweat colored her light-blue shirt and her white visor held back her mass of sweaty black hair. I noticed right away that she was wearing a golf glove on both hands. Unusual. Interesting.

  I went and stood directly behind her, standing behind a yellow rope strung some five yards behind her. She was punching low, hooking seven-irons at a flagstick in the distance. She didn’t pay any attention to anyone else, so I ducked under the rope and walked closer. Nobody noticed.

  “Where’d you learn your boxing skills?” I finally asked out loud.

  She jumped a little, turning to see me standing right behind her. Recognizing me, she puffed out a sharp burst of air, then turned back to her practice.

  “I figure you must have lots of brothers, you’re probably the youngest, so you grew up learning how to defend yourself,” I said. I might as well have been speaking to a tree. Julie Warren went back to hitting balls, ignoring me. “They probably taught you the basics and I’ll bet you became the playground bully with lots of opportunities to practice. What I want to know is, do you like the feeling of punching someone’s face in? The sound of it? The sight of the blood? Which part is it that turns you on?”

  She turned to look at me again, her face red and flushed. “What the hell are you talking about, Hacker?” she cried. “Leave me alone.”

  “When you beat the shit out of Honie, did it give you a sexual thrill?” I continued. “You like beating people?” I was starting to get loud, ignoring the dangerous buzzing sound in my head. I knew I was beginning to lose it, and I sensed some of the other golfers around us had stopped their practice to look our way.

  “You’re crazy, man,” she said, although I saw her cast her eyes nervously down the range. “I had nothing to do with that, and you can’t prove I did.”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t suppose I can. But I’ll bet that if you take off those gloves, we could all see some bruised knuckles. Must be hell on the old grip the next day after you pound someone’s face in. How do you hold onto the club?”

  I took a half-step towards her. My eyes had narrowed and the sky turned another shade red and ugly. She raised her golf club menancingly above her head.

  “You take one more step, shithead, and it’ll be the last one,” she growled.

  We glared at each other. Why is it not nice to hit a woman? They
can be as hateful and ugly as men, sometimes worse. And this one, with her stocky shoulders, muscular arms, thick, strong legs … she was no delicate flower of womanhood. Even if I could get the seven-iron out of her hands before she planted it in my cranium, she would be tough to take. Especially if she did have some boxing or fighting skills, as I suspected. But still I hesitated, for no other reason than the stricture long drilled in, that boys don’t hit girls. I think she knew that, because she began to grin at me, an evil, you-can’t-touch-me kind of grin. It almost tipped me over the side, again.

  “Here, here,” said a clipped, British-accented voice behind us. I didn’t take my eyes off Julie and her raised weapon. It would have been just her style to clock me one when I wasn’t looking. Women can be dirty fighters in a clinch. The voice came into view, and a woman stepped between us. “If you feel you must grapple, I will thank you to do it elsewhere,” she said, taking command. “We are trying to practice golf here.”

  She was a tall woman, dressed in a stylish navy golf skirt and a red-and-white striped polo shirt. Her reddish blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, revealing a face that, while not pretty in the classic sense, was strong and well defined. She had wide shoulders and a trim, athletic build.

  “Julie, please put down that club and stop this nonsense at once,” she snapped sternly at my opponent.

  Julie obeyed. The woman then turned to me, her eyes flashing with anger. “And you, sir,” she said coldly. “This area is reserved for players only. Spectators are limited to areas behind the yellow ropes. Kindly take yourself there. At once!”

  Now that Julie had lowered her murder weapon, I could afford to take my eyes off her and take the time to study our mediator in more detail. I decided she was pretty, especially those flashing blue eyes. Even if they were flashing at me.

  “Hacker, Boston Journal,” I said to her. “Miss Warren and I were just discussing some alternative uses of a golf club. I believe Miss Warren intends to become an ecological big-game hunter when her days on the Tour are over. Her ideas about clubbing the game into submission are much more sporting than firearms, don’t you agree?”

  The eyes stopped flashing in anger and began to glitter, and her face broke out in a toothy grin. She opened her mouth and brayed a hearty laugh.

  “Ha ha!” she bellowed, “Jolly good! That’s the spirit, eh, Julie?”

  Julie Warren apparently didn’t agree. She turned on her heel, grabbed her other clubs and stalked off, throwing a last evil, hateful glance my way. The laughter of my new friend followed her down the long green range.

  “Jolly good line, Hacker,” she gasped. “I say, I fear we’ll both be in for it now.” She stuck out a hand. “Sybil,” she introduced herself. “Sybil Montgomery.”

  I knew the name. She was one of Britain’s better woman players and one of a growing contingent of foreign-born players now competing on the U.S. Tour. Unlike the men, who had a successful, big-money tour to play in Europe, women’s golf was lagging overseas, so the best players migrated to the U.S. There was the cadre of Swedish stars, trained from youth to compete in athletics; a few French and Italian girls, several Irish, English and Scottish women, and a ton of new arrivals from Japan and Korea.

  “C’mon then.” Sybil said, grabbing my arm and pulling me away from the practice range, where golf activity had resumed after our brief interruption. “It’s lunchtime and I’m famished. Thank God I don’t have to play in the pro-am today. You buy lunch.”

  What else could I do? “Right-o, then,” I said. “Off we go!”

  She laughed again. It was a sound I was beginning to like.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  "So,” I said when we had filed through the buffet line, loading up with chicken salad, a cold pasta and sliced tomatoes with basil and mozzarella and ensconced ourselves in a corner of the Grill Room, “What’s your opinion of the Queen?”

  “Needs more sex,” Sybil said.

  I choked on a sip of iced tea and spent a minute coughing and laughing into my napkin. Sybil beamed at me. “Well, she does!” she said, joining in my laughter. “Just look at the poor woman!”

  I finally calmed down.

  “Besides,” Sybil said between bites, looking across the table at me with narrowed and calculating eyes, “Don’t change the subject. I want to know why it is you wished to throttle the lovely Miss Warren a few minutes ago. Lord knows the creature deserves it.”

  “Would you believe a lover’s spat?” I tried.

  “Dear me, I don’t think so,” she responded smartly. “Without the benefit of a peek inside your boxers, I suspect you don’t have the correct parts to appeal to that one.”

  “Ah,” I said. Brillliant, witty repartee, that.

  “No, you’ll have to try again, Mister Hacker,” she said. “I must warn you, the gossip about you is deliciously wicked.”

  “Gossip?” I said. “Someone is gossiping about me? What, pray, are they saying?”

  She paused while she attacked her plate with some gusto. She gazed at me while she ate, sizing me up. I did the same back at her. She was not All-American pretty, but she was an attractive woman. Instead of the perfect cheerleader features – a pert nose, the perfect cheekbones – Sybil; Montgomery’s classic English features – long face and smallish chin – were offset by a lovely, creamy complexion and very pretty eyes. She looked intelligent and interesting and somewhat intriguing … three descriptions that cannot usually be ascribed to the models on the cover of Vogue. But I liked her frank and forthright way.

  “The gossip says you have managed to alienate our fuhrer,” She said finally. “And it is known to be dangerous to clash wills with Big Wyn. The gossip further says that Big Wyn is trying to have you thrown the hell out of here.”

  “Well, even Big Wyn can’t do that,” I said. “We have something here in the Colonies called the First Amendment.”

  “But she can make life unpleasant,” Sybil said. “And Julie Warren is often used for unpleasantness-making.”

  “Is she often used for physical assault?”

  “How’s that?” Sybil asked. I told her about the attack on Honie the previous evening and my suspicions about the identity of her assailant. Sybil’s face darkened with concern and shock.

  “Dear me,” she said. “That does go beyond the pale. How is the poor girl?”

  I told her Honie was recuperating. I took a sip of tea and looked out the window, gathering my thoughts.

  “Look,” I said. “What the hell gives here? What kind of operation is this? Wynnona Stilwell can have someone beat up and all you can say is that it’s ‘beyond the pale?’ This is supposed to be a professional golf tour, not a Central American banana republic. You’re not supposed to be able to have people you don’t like rubbed out. What’s going on?”

  She reached over and patted my hand. “Now, now…calm down m’dear,” she cooed. “You’ve got to understand that Wynnona Stilwell is one of those people who wear power like a suit of clothes. It is what she lives for, and she is very, very good at it. She has amassed a great deal of it running this Tour and she can expend it as she wishes.”

  “But—” I started to protest. Sybil held up her hand to silence me.

  “She worked very hard to gain control of the sponsors and their money,” she explained. “She controls who they are, what they pay and what they get in return, which is virtually anything they want. Because she’s controlling the money, she has weight. She is able to control which players get certain endorsement deals, corporate outings and all kinds of other little sweetmeats. She controls who gets nice hotel rooms and free courtesy cars. She determines who gets interviewed by the media. If you are her friend, you get lots of perks that make one’s life easier. If you’re not her friend, life on Tour can be an unholy grind.”

  “So everyone sells out for the money,” I said sadly.

  “No, not necessarily,” Sybil corrected me. “She has and uses other methods to ga
in control of some of the girls. Some not-so-nice ways, in fact.”

  I thought about the Carol Acorn episode. “You mean sexual.”

  Sybil nodded. “Keeping your sexuality hidden is one of the first rules on the Tour,” she said. “We’re supposed to be athletes, not women. The sponsors would like us all to be hetero and married, so they can get away with making sexist and leering comments. The Tour would like to pretend that none of us have sex with anyone, male or female. Yet at the same time, they have hired beauty consultants to come out on Tour and give us makeup lessons and other tips to make us more…presentable, I think was the word.”

  “They want you to be sexy looking, but not sexual,” I said.

  “Exactly,” she nodded approvingly. “And it’s a heterosexual model of sexiness that they promote. The beauty consultant was talking all about softness and femininity.”

  “I’ll bet Julie Warren was taking lots of notes,” I said.

  She trilled her laughter, high and delicate.

  “Anyway, that brand of heterosexual bias means that a lot of girls are running as fast as they can to get into the closet and stay there,” Sybil said. “It’s sad sometimes. I’ve know girls who tell their partners not to follow them around the golf course because it might not ‘look right.’ Can you imagine such a thing?”

  She paused to eat some more. “Wynnona Stilwell, I think, knows all about that, and knows which ones she can exploit,” she concluded. “And she does it without the slightest hesitation because of the power it gives her.”

  “But what about good old Harold?” I wondered. “What role does he have?”

  “Perfect cover,” Sybil laughed. “He spends his time fishing or fixing engines, but he’s the official husband who can be trotted out whenever Wynnona needs an escort or the appearance of normalcy.”

  “She’s sick,” I said.

  “Oh, absolutely,” Sybil nodded as she munched on a carrot stick.