Death is a Two-Stroke Penalty

by James Y. Bartlett

  “Near what?” he said, puzzled.

  “It’s ‘faint heart ne’er won fair child,’” I told him. “And I think it’s lady fair, not fair child.”

  He just stared at me. It was pretty early in the morning for Burns, I’ll give him that.

  “Hacker!” somebody called out. “Line four!”

  I strolled back to my desk and picked up the phone. “Monsieur Le Golf,” said a familiar voice. “Bonjour!”

  “Sherman,” I said. “You’re sounding chipper for early on a Sunday morning.”

  “Well, the little woman is out in the kitchen rustling up some kippers n’ grits,” he said. “The typical Dallas Sunday breakfast. But I did find out some stuff on that reverend whosis for ya.”

  “Great,” I said. “Shoot.”

  “Well, the way I figure, the guy’s congregation must be a bunch of midgets,” he said. “Cause he ain’t got a church. All he’s got is a post office box.”

  “You mean the Church of the Holiness—?”

  “Is nothing but an address,” Sherman said. “No steeple, no people. No annex building, no Sunday school, no bean suppers. Remember those, Hacker? No thrift shop, no choir loft. In short, just one big pew.”

  I laughed. “You’re right...something smelly there,” I said. “Hmmm,” he assented. “Anyway, ole whassis-name and his Holiness whatever are on the questionable list. Which means no annual report or any way to track what comes in and what goes out. Or where.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “Glad you asked,” Sherman continued. “By now, of course my own curiosity is aroused –”

  “Which is better than some other parts of your anatomy,” I interjected.

  “Haw! So I kept digging here and there,” he continued. “This Durkee character owns himself a nice ole place out in Eastland. Now I’ve never been out there, but I’m told there’s cattle farms, trees, some chickens, and not much else in Eastland, Texas. Isolated, as they say. Anyway, Durkee’s got himself a little old country estate with about five bedrooms, swimming pool, riding stables. I’d say about fifty acres and worth in the neighborhood of two mil.”

  “Shazzam,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Sherman agreed. “I always wonder where I went wrong. Guess I shoulda been a questionable preacher man. More money in it, apparently, than the newspaper game. Mother always wanted me to be a priest.”

  “Too much weekend work, and no one to bring you kippers n’ grits in bed,” I said.

  “That and a total lack of pussy,” he said, suddenly sounding a lot more like a kid born in Needham, Mass. than a Texas reporter.

  I thanked him for the information, told him I’d call when I blew into town next and we rang off.

  I called Lt. Ravenel. He was already in his office. “Morning, lieutenant,” I said when he came on the line. “Is there ever a time when you don’t work?”

  “Not as long as there are bad guys to arrest,” he said. “Duty, honor and country.”

  “I think I’m going to weep,” I said. “Had any luck finding Rudy Hill?”

  “Nah,” Ravenel yawned. “He’s still hiding. But he’s gotta come out soon. He’ll either run out of booze or girls, and I got all the liquor stores staked out.”

  “Great police work,” I laughed. “I’ve got another piece of the puzzle for you,” and I told him what I had just learned about Brother Ed Durkee. “I know it’s not conclusive,” I said. “And the guy could still be legitimate even though he doesn’t have a real church, but it smells a lot like a bunko deal. And since Turnbull seemed to be on the verge of pulling out ...”

  “Durkee has a reasonable motive for wanting the guy dead and cashing in his insurance,” Ravenel concluded. “Yeah, that makes sense. But what about Bert Lewis? What role does he have in this? He’s not part of the Christian fellowship.”

  “No,” I admitted. “He’s not.”

  “And why would the good reverend want to snuff out poor old Jocko?” he asked.

  “A little earthly retribution?” I suggested. Ravenel snorted.

  “And do you think it was a little pantywaist like Durkee who was trying to force you off the road the other night?” he continued.

  “That sounds a little drastic to me. And more Rudy Hill’s speed.”

  I thought about Ed Durkee, his black shock of hair and pale white complexion. I guess Ravenel had a point.

  “Well,” he said finally. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to talk to the guy.”

  “How about running his name through the computer?” I asked. “Assuming, of course, that you have computers down here in the South.”

  “Up yours, you carpetbagging scum,” Ravenel growled. “Have you seen the good father out there today?”

  “Not me,” I said. “Hang on a sec.” I put my hand over the phone. Billy Corcoran was rushing past my desk. “Hey Billy... whoa big fella! Have you seen Ed Durkee around anywhere today?”

  He ground to a halt. You could almost hear his heels screeching. “Durkee? Uh, no Hacker, I haven’t,” he said. “Come to think of it, he wasn’t at the chapel service this morning. We waited for him for about fifteen minutes.” He rushed off again, little currents of air trailing in his wake.

  “No Durkee sightings,” I told Ravenel. “Didn’t show up to lead his sheep this morning.”

  “Seems like everyone of interest is disappearing,” Ravenel said.

  “Probably they’re all out at the beach,” I suggested. “Nice day for it.”

  “Damn,” Ravenel said. “Why didn’t I think of that? Listen, Hacker, why don’t you just go back to golf writing? I’ve got some police work to do.”

  I felt as dismissed as a sixth-grader who’s been fussed at for hitting Sally Dixon with an eraser full of chalk dust. And, like a sixth-grader, I couldn’t think of a good rejoinder. So I did what I was told.

  Chapter 25

  I WENT OUTSIDE AND stood around the first tee for a while. Wadkins and Kite, the final group, weren’t scheduled to go for another forty-five minutes. The crowd was slowly building, along with the tension and that tactile atmosphere found only at the final round of a golf tournament. Yet I found myself strangely unaffected by the sporting drama being played out in front of me. I was wrapped in a strange lethargy, caused in part by the sapping heat and humidity of the day, in part by my automobile wreck injuries, and in part by the rapid whirring of my mind, tossing and turning over the strange twists and turns of the events of the last week. I kept trying to make them fit together in a way that would form a cogent, sensible explanation.

  “Golf,” someone once said, “Is like life with the volume turned all the way up.” That’s how I felt. Sometimes, all the noise and excitement is energizing. Makes you feel wonderfully alive. Other times, all you want to do is wrap your head in a pillow and find blissful relief in sleep.

  I had to get out of the sun. I headed for the players’ locker room, which was the closest place I could think of that would be cool, dark, quiet, and have ample supplies of liquid refreshment. It was also mostly empty, except for Bert Lewis, who was quietly packing the contents of his locker into a leather duffle. Sitting on the bench watching quietly was a pudgy, casually dressed older man with salt-and-pepper hair.

  I pulled a soft drink out of the cooler and strolled over. “Bert,” I said. “Glad to see you out and about. Hope you can make it back on tour when this is all over.”

  He glanced at me sharply to see if I was serious, and saw that I meant it.

  “Thanks, Hacker,” he mumbled and turned away.

  “Listen—” I started to say. The older man immediately stood

  up.

  “I’m Jack Delancy, Bert’s lawyer,” he said, sticking out his hand. “I’m sure you can understand that under the circumstances, Bert cannot say anything further.”

  “Sure,” I said, “I can understand that. I’m just trying to figure out how Bert fits into the picture. I mean, he got sucked into such an interesting group of figures: Jock
o Moore, Ed Durkee...”

  Lewis snorted. “Brother Ed, the big jokester,” he said, almost under his breath.

  “Bert—” his lawyer cautioned.

  I saw an opening and went for it.

  “Jokester?” I echoed. “I’ve never heard Ed Durkee described as a jokester. But I have been wondering where he went that night. The God Squaders say he went home. But you were there afterwards. Did you see Durkee?”

  “Oh, he was there all right,” Lewis said bitterly. “He was there. And if you ever see that little weasel again, you tell him for me: Joke’s on him.” Lewis turned and looked at me with slightly unfocused eyes that bore a hint of madness. “Fuckin’ joke’s on him.”

  Jack Delancy laid a reassuring hand on Bert Lewis’ arm. Bert turned away from me, zipped up his bag and the two men left.

  I plopped down wearily in an armchair and drained my soda. That unpleasant whirring in my brain started up again as the pieces began to lock and unlock in ever-changing combinations.

  Eddie Roland had seen Bert Lewis drive up in the golf cart under which John Turnbull had later been found. Roland had seen Turnbull stagger and fall, and heard Lewis laugh and go to pick him up. Turnbull had taken – or been given – drugs, Quaaludes, probably. Who? Who slipped him a mickey? And when?

  Now, Bert Lewis had claimed that Ed Durkee, supposedly off to bed, had instead been somewhere near the clubhouse when Turnbull staggered down the walkway. The Reverend Ed Durkee, leader of a questionable organization in Texas, who had been arguing heatedly with Turnbull over money. And who knew that a dead Turnbull would mean a last financial windfall for his so-called ministry. Which apparently meant for his fifty- acre spread in Eastland, Texas.

  But could Bert Lewis be believed? Was he trying to save his own skin? Was he even legally sane? What did that curious comment about the joke being on Durkee?

  I closed my eyes and tried to think of something else, something pleasant. An image of Jean MacGarrity, naked and beckoning, zoomed into my head, but that only started the gears turning again, the puzzle pieces locking and unlocking, the whole picture whirring out of control like a movie played at extra-fast speed, faster and faster, until the celluloid bursts out of the sprockets, angles crazily across the screen and leaves nothing but an empty rectangle of white. Empty of image, devoid of meaning.

  Outside, I heard bursts of cheering as the golfers playing the heat-baked fairways of the Bohicket Country Club drained birdie putts or exploded out of bunkers to within inches of the pin. Out there, the world proceeded apace, totally oblivious to the warp speed of hyperspace that occupied my mind.

  “I’m gonna go nuts,” I thought to myself. I checked my watch. Kite and Wadkins were probably on the second hole. A long way to go. At least an hour and a half before they even made the turn. And one of the oldest clichés in the book is that the tournament doesn’t really start until the last nine on Sunday.

  I decided to head back to my villa, take a long, cool shower, sit in the air conditioning for a while and decompress. Then, relaxed and rejuvenated, I could concentrate on my job, cover the end of the tournament, crank out my report in my usual deathless prose, and afterwards check in with Ravenel to see if any progress had been made in finding Rudy Hill. Plan made, the brain waves eased and I was able to get out of my chair and head up the pathway.

  My villa was wonderfully cool and dark when I entered. I didn’t remember cranking the AC down so low when I left, but I was glad I had. I trudged slowly up the three stairs past the darkened living room and into the kitchen, thinking I might just take a cold beer with me into the shower. Glancing out the kitchen window onto the golf course, I could see groups of fans walking past, following the yellow fairway ropes strung along the twelfth hole. Beyond them lay the eternal marsh, brown and shimmering in the midday sun.

  I pulled a beer from the fridge and headed for the bedroom. I never got there. Ed Durkee was sitting in the cool dark of my living room. He had drawn the drapes closed, turned down the air and was waiting for me. He sat quietly at the far end of the sofa and looked at me, smiling slightly, his dark, swept-back hair perfectly in place. Cool, this guy. His dark, brooding eyes stared at me, So did the third eye, the barrel of what looked like a .38, held quietly but obviously in his lap.

  “Mister Hacker,” he said in his deep, preacherly baritone, piercing the sudden, awful quiet of my villa. “You are back earlier than I expected. I believe we have some matters to discuss.”

  “Aw, hell,” I said and sank down heavily in the easy chair opposite him. I pulled the tab on my can of beer and drank about half of it. His eyes never left my face. Bulldog O’Shaunnessy probably would have tried to jump the guy, but my aching bones and lack of energy left no room for any heroics.

  “I should say something like ‘you’ll never get away with it,’” I said. “But that never seems to work. So what’s the plan, Stan?”

  “I admire your attitude,” he said. “Even if it is sheer bravado. I simply needed a fairly secure place to, er, retreat to until dark. I thought your humble abode might do very nicely.”

  “And after dark?”

  He arched his thick eyebrows at me. “Why, then, of course, I steal away like the Philistines. To, and I quote, ‘a land where the light is as darkness.’ Unquote.”

  “Oh, please,” I said. “You can stop with the preacher stuff. I know all about your post office box and your Texas spread, and the insurance scam and the so-called investment fund. What are you gonna do with all that while you’re running from the law?”

  “My, my,” he said. “You seem to know quite a bit about me. I am impressed.”

  “Oh, I know almost everything about this little scam of yours,” I said. “ I know that Johnny Turnbull and his wife were about to pull out and probably blow the whistle on you. And I know how you killed him.”

  “Oh, really?” Durkee grinned. The gun never wavered.

  “Yeah, really,” I said. “You drugged him up with Quaaludes that you had Bert Lewis buy. I figure you somehow managed to drop them in his coffee at the meeting that night. After you and he had that heated argument about the fund, you went out and made the coffee. So you slipped a dose into his cup and served it to him. He began to feel it soon thereafter and realized something was wrong. He tried to get home, but went down like a sack outside the clubhouse, where Bert Lewis was waiting.”

  Durkee kept smiling at me in the gloomy light.

  “I’m betting that you were waiting and watching from someplace inside the clubhouse. And that you told Bert to go on home, you’d take Johnny back to his villa. Then you drove out to the bridge on the fourteenth hole, tossed him over the side and then pushed the cart over on top of him.

  “How can you be sure he didn’t drive himself ?” Durkee asked, still smiling his evil little smile.

  “Because the marks on the bridge railing showed that the cart did not hit hard and bounce, as it would have if Johnny had been driving it fast, but was slowly pushed over the edge,” I said. “Plus, the position of his body and the way the cart fell on top of him couldn’t have happened if he was driving the damn thing. He would have gone flying well away from the cart. Instead, he landed neatly just under the bridge. Right where you could drop the cart on top of him, and finish him off.”

  “I see,” he said, pushing back a stray filament of black hair that had slipped down onto his forehead. I thought I saw a slight trembling in his hand as he moved it. A crack in the façade? “Your theories are quite interesting,” he said. “But I’m under the impression that Mr. Turnbull’s death was related to that caddie of his...what was his name?”

  “Jocko Moore, as you well know,” I said.

  “Ah, yes, Mister Moore,” Durkee agreed amiably. “He was known to be involved in the drug trade, was he not? I should think that both men’s deaths could be laid to that unfortunate moral failing in our society. Drugs are such a sad affliction...”

  “Oh, cut the crap,” I stopped him. “You killed Turnbull and you prob
ably killed Jocko, too. I know it and the cops know it. Right from the start, Johnny’s murder was too cute to be drug- related. You went to a lot of effort to make it look accidental, but it doesn’t add up. And you must have known they’d do an autopsy on him and find the drugs in his system.”

  I stopped suddenly. Then I slapped my forehead.

  “So that’s why you got Bert Lewis involved in this,” I said. “It didn’t make sense until now. Once they found the ’ludes, they’d trace them back to Bert, figure the rivalry thing as motive and pin the murder on him. Jeez, that’s positively brilliant.”

  Durkee smiled broader. He was obviously proud of his criminal prowess. I decided not to remind him that it had all fallen through and that the cops were likely to close in on him at any time.

  “It just never made any sense before,” I said. “Now I know why Bert was involved. I crossed my legs comfortably and took another sip of beer. I tried to look relaxed, as if we were just a couple of guys sitting in the villa chatting about this n’ that. Loaded .38 pointed at my forehead? Bah, a minor detail. I felt a cold trickle of sweat down my back and hoped it wouldn’t soak through my shirt. Like they say on TV, never let ’em see you sweat.

  “Actually, Lewis was quite easy to manipulate,” Durkee said with a slight sneer. I noticed he had not officially admitted complicity in Turnbull’s killing. Neither had he denied it. “With such a one-dimensional personality, it’s usually quite easy to discover a motivational factor and act on it,” he said. “There’s quite a lot in the literature on the subject.”

  “Yes, quite,” I said, one Oxford don to another. “Unfortunately, one slimebag named Jocko Moore apparently figured out your scam, too. When he heard about the autopsy results, he must have figured out his ass was about to become grass and that his role as the supplier of drugs to Bert Lewis would be backtracked to him. And knowing what a dumbshit Jocko was, I’ll bet he came to you and tried to make a deal.”

  Durkee laughed aloud, a deep, barking laugh of assurance that sent a chill down my spine.