Hole in One Read online

  Upon which Hanna took off at a rate of, oh, call it sixty miles an hour. Do I exaggerate? Perhaps. Maybe it was only fifty-five miles an hour. She came, inevitably, to the closed gate to the parking lot, but she did not pause nor stay, no sir. She went over it in a stride that would have had any Olympic track coaches who happened to be in the neighbourhood shaking their heads as if to say, “Now, that’s how we do the high hurdle.” She pulled up on the other side, recollected, I guess, that she had left the last of the Witherses to become dog food, grabbed a chunk of a tree branch—the golf-course parking lot edges into the forest primeval—and came back over the fence to where she saw two figures tussling on the ground. Which were, reading from the bottom up: self lying on my back and howling with glee, and Scrap vigorously licking my face.

  Not every pit bull is a killer, you know. You would only be in danger from Scrap if you happened to be soluble in dog spit. The reason the Martins usually keep him penned is that he is always trying to make friends with folks in the middle of a golf game.

  Klovack didn’t get the joke. Women don’t, have you noticed?

  “You realize,” is all she said, “that this means war.” I paid no attention at the time. Scrap’s intervention had somewhat restored my self-esteem by knocking that of another human, always the best way, and I went merrily along until the following Friday, when we were, once more, teeing off for a golf game.

  This was on the first tee, about a hundred feet away from the clubhouse porch, where everyone gathers to comment on the form of those about to launch themselves into a golf game. Of course, if by chance you ever hit a good one, there is no one on the porch at all, but if, as is more usually the case, your opening drive rambles forty yards across the grass, nodding to the worms, before burying itself in a gopher hole, hordes of giggling onlookers appear on the porch to nudge each other and point. This day, I didn’t care. For some reason, I was full of buck and zip.

  She drove first, one of those straight, sweet, looping drives, maybe 180 yards smack down the middle. A hell of a hit, in point of fact, but I knew I could do better.

  As I moved to address the ball, it fell off the tee, as the pesky things will, but Hanna jumped forward to retrieve it.

  “Allow me,” she said, and graciously replaced the Titleist 2 on the tee.

  “You are too kind,” I replied, and doffed my hat, a bilious green thing which some think is a fungoid growth but which is, in fact, a veritable hat and has a label to prove it.

  “Hey, you know, Hanna,” I went on, as she slipped demurely to one side and I stepped forward to paste the pill into another and finer world, “I’ve got a feeling this is going to be a hell of a drive.”

  “I know it will,” she said, with a winsome smile, and it was with the warmest of feelings that I planted my feet and fixed the golf ball with a commanding stare. I gave a preliminary waggle—well, several preliminary waggles—drew back the club until I was almost gnawing on the inside of my left elbow, and uncorked the stroke of a lifetime. The ball took off like a rocket and then, after about fifty feet, dissolved in a shower of white bits which, I swear, began spitting bubbles as they drifted down to settle on the greensward. For my Titleist 2, Hanna had substituted one of those soap balls people stuff in Christmas stockings, with the result that a golf stroke that started out like something by Jack Nicklaus wound up like something by Heloise the Homemaker.

  Ha, Ha, chortled Hanna. Ha, Ha, howled the hordes now swarming all over the clubhouse porch. Well, I can take a joke on myself as well as the next man—which is to say, not at all—but this trifling with the sacred game could not be allowed to pass. I retrieved my tee, rammed my driver back into the parent bag, and left the course. Or, if you want Hanna’s version, stormed away in a sulk. On the drive back to Silver Falls, where Hanna has her apartment, I referred to the fact that no one but a big-city bimbo would pull such a childish stunt; she noted that I took the game too seriously, which was particularly amusing, she said, considering the way I played it.

  Reproaches were uttered on both sides—I believe you can qualify “unsportsmanlike Yahoo” on the one hand and “gold-plated asshole” on the other as reproaches—and diplomatic relations were severed forthwith. While we continued, perforce, to work together, the cold, proud mask of aloofness I wore to hide the hurt within reminded me of some of the best stuff you get out of Thomas Hardy.

  So here we were, together again, but not together, if you follow me, rocketing through the open gates of the Bosky Dell course and skidding to a halt within a few feet of a trio of men who were obviously embroiled in an argument: namely, two Silver Falls policemen and Tommy Macklin. Tommy began to curse and shout as soon as we approached, and tried to cover his face when Hanna came up with the Nikon and started snapping pictures of him. I have seldom seen a more edifying sight than Tommy cringing from the camera.

  “Withers, you’re fired!” he shouted. I paid no heed. Extracting the notebook, I addressed the awful majesty of the law.

  “The prisoner Macklin,” I said, “I presume you have him on a murder charge?”

  “Well, no, actually,” the perplexed flatfoot replied. “To tell you the truth, things are kind of confused around here.”

  Wouldn’t you know it. A just fate finally catches up to Macklin and he gets off on a technicality. The cop, Constable Ernest White of the Silver Falls squad—not that it matters, but I promised his mother to work in his name—explained that, while Mr. Macklin had been involved in the death of a local citizen, it seemed unlikely that the perpetrator, Thomas Heathcliffe Macklin, had actually been guilty of a felony on the day in question—to wit, today—namely, the slaying of one—fumble through notes—male Caucasian, aged about seventy, late of Bosky Dell.

  “Ernie, what the hell are you talking about?”

  Ernie gestured over his left shoulder, towards the golf course. There, in the middle of the third green, was a kind of giant gopher hole, an eruption of rocks and earth and grass, with, here and there, bits of cloth, which were apparently pieces of some of the victim’s clothing. The rest of the body had been removed, thank heavens, by ambulance.

  I gulped several times. “Golly,” I said, “there must have been some sort of explosion, huh?”

  Hanna leaned forward confidentially, and prodded Ernie. “The steel-trap mind,” she explained. “Never misses a thing.”

  I ignored this. “Who was the . . . uh . . . deceased?”

  “Old Charlie Tinkelpaugh,” said Ernie, and took off his hat—whether out of respect, or because it was hot, I don’t know.

  “Aw, no, not Charlie,” I said. “Charlie,” I told Hanna, “was a nice old boy, even if he did eat paper.”

  “He ate paper?”

  I nodded. “Uh-huh, He used to work in a bank, worked there all his life and, for some reason, probably boredom, he got into the habit of picking up a piece of paper from one of those piles they have sitting around in all the banks, for withdrawals or whatever, and he would crumple it up and eat it. Said he was never really conscious of doing it; he would be sitting there, thinking about mortgages or long-term debentures or whatever it is bankers think about, and he would look down and the paper would be gone. He was a nice man.”

  “He was a nice man because he ate paper, or despite it?”

  “He was a nice man, period. When I was a kid, I used to deliver the newspaper to the Tinkelpaugh cottage in the summertime, and Charlie would always give me a big tip on Saturday, when I came around on my bike to collect.”

  “He probably thought of you as Meals on Wheels.”

  Heartless. Women have no finer feelings, which is another reason among many that the sex should be suppressed.

  Hanna turned to Ernie. “What happened?”

  Ernie looked back down at his notes.

  “On the 14th instant—today—the Subject, Mr. Thomas Heathcliffe Macklin, of 24 Lake Street, Silver Falls . . .”
/>   Well, cutting out all the necessary gibberish, this is what happened: Tommy Macklin, balked of his ambition to be the first golfer of the day off the first tee, because he had chosen instead to waste his time chewing out a valued employee, arrived at the starting point, only to discover that there was a threesome in ahead of him: Charlie Tinkelpaugh, Sam Biddlemyer, and Wayland Forsyth. These old duffers, constant cronies, make up a small portion of the retired population at Bosky Dell, people who let out a glad Yahoo when they hit the age of sixty-five, sell their houses in the city—actually Charlie retired from a town nearby, called Coboconk, but most of our retirees come from Toronto—and rush to the lake to spend the rest of their lives on golf and other forms of lying. These three belonged to the slow-and-deliberate school of play. They always got in a daily round of golf during the season, and could be observed every morning strolling amiably down the course, happily hacking away and calling out to each other, while, behind them, other and swifter golfers bunched up, strained at the leash, and swore. Every now and then, the Trio con Brio, as they were known locally, would recollect the finer points of golfing etiquette and wave somebody on through, but most of the time they stifled passage as effectively as a ten-pin ball in the toilet bowl.

  When Tommy unlimbered his clubs, they were most of the way down the first fairway, and so, by the time they hit the third, Tommy was having to delay every stroke until the Trio con Brio ambled out of the way. Tommy normally plays alone, for the good reason that no one who has played with the bad-tempered little bozo once will repeat the performance.

  To understand what happened next, you need to know that the first is a long, par-five hole, the second a par four, and the third a short par three, and that two and three are parallel to one. Thus, by the time you have finished three, you are back just about where you started on the first tee, only about a hundred yards downwind, and, if you are me, twenty-seven strokes over par already. If you want to, you can say to hell with it right there, and stalk back to the clubhouse, flinging your clubs away as you go.

  The Trio con Brio was milling around on the green at three, while Tommy was on the tee. Charlie’s ball was just off the edge, so they hadn’t pulled the pin yet, but the others were well up towards the hole. They were mellow and relaxed, exchanging humorous jibes, checking out worm-casts, and all that important stuff, while Tommy was growing ever more enraged on the tee, 150 yards back. Finally, he decided he could bear it no more, and let fly with his five iron. You might think this impolite—which it was—and dangerous—which it wasn’t. Not under normal circumstances. Indeed, if you were looking for a safe haven during one of Tommy’s tee shots, you couldn’t, normally, pick a better spot than the green. This time, however, some concatenation of circumstances—a crick in his neck, a favourable arrangement of the planets, who knows?—caused the little pipsqueak to baff the ball exactly as it ought to be baffed. It rose, soared, dropped on the third green, and trickled into the hole.

  Charlie Tinkelpaugh looked up and said, “What on earth was that?”

  “A ball, Charlie. That was a ball.”

  “Well, it wasn’t mine. Was it yours, Sam?”

  “No, it wasn’t mine. Was it yours, Wayland?”

  “No, it wasn’t mine. Are you sure it wasn’t yours, Charlie?”

  The boys might have gone on in this fashion for five minutes, exploring the wonder of it all, except that they were interrupted by Tommy galloping down the pitch, waving his club and carolling his joy.

  “A hole in one!” he shouted. “I got a frigging hole in one!”

  “Bless my soul,” said Charlie Tinkelpaugh. “I believe you did.”

  And the old boy tottered over to the pin and lifted it.

  “There’s a ball in there, all right.”

  “Of course there’s a ball in there,” said Tommy. “It’s a Blue Goose. My Blue Goose. Gimme.”

  And he started across the green.

  Charlie bent over with the pin in one hand and retrieved the ball with the other. Then he peered back into the hole. He looked up and said to Wayland, who was still fooling about with his ball on the edge of the green, “Isn’t that the darndest thing?”

  “What is, Charlie?” said Sam, from over on the other edge of the green. “What’s the darndest thing?”

  “Well,” said Charlie, “there seems to be . . .”

  But that’s all he said, because, as he bent back over to check out whatever had caught his eye, there was an explosion. Charlie is—was—built on the solid side, and his 240 pounds absorbed most of the blast. Tommy Macklin, closing in from ten feet away, was knocked flat, showing that the gods had the right idea, even if they didn’t finish the job. He and Sam and Wayland, further off, were shaken up, but Charlie went forthwith to take his place among the morning stars. As the blast echoed away across the lake, Tommy said—and this will let you know what kind of a man he is—“You guys are witnesses that I got a hole in one before . . . this . . . happened.”

  “Lord love a duck,” is all Wayland said, and Sam burst into tears.

  When the cops arrived, they found bits of an explosive device scattered around the green, along with traces of a plastic explosive, which had apparently been triggered either by the ball going into the hole and setting off a time-delayed fuse or the pin being lifted, or however these things are managed. So that seemed to let Tommy out as a deliberate killer. Any murder plan that depended on Tommy getting a golf ball into the hole from some distance away could be dismissed from serious consideration. As far as the cops were concerned, he was, along with the gadget in the cup, merely a device used to get the job done.

  By the time I had wormed all this out of Ernie White, two detectives from the Ontario Provincial Police detachment outside Silver Falls had arrived. After a lot more jabber, they told Tommy he was not under arrest, and he could go home, although he should keep himself available for questioning. He was pretty unsteady on his pins and longing—I can read the man like a book—for about four snifters out of the office scotch to restore him to anything like human shape.

  “I’m going to leave my car here,” he growled. “Klovack, you can drive me back to the office.”

  “I can,” said the impudent shrimp, “but I won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “You just fired Withers.”

  “What the hell do you care? Last I heard, you were describing him as an advanced form of social disease.”

  “It’s a matter of principle,” said Hanna. “We’re thinking of starting a union in the office”—Tommy blanched and tottered, harder hit, probably, than by anything that had happened so far that day—“and Withers has been nominated chapel chairman. You’ve got to rehire him.”

  “Well, I won’t.” And he turned and started off for his own car, but his legs buckled, and, as I grabbed him under the arms and stood him on his feet, he grumbled, “Withers, you fathead, you’re hired again.”

  “Gee, thanks, boss,” I said.

  So we rode back into Silver Falls en masse. A silent en masse. Tommy was still shaken up by the explosion, Hanna was thoughtful—probably working up a cockamamie theory to fit the crime—and I was a seething cauldron of mixed emotions. On the one hand, the scene on the golf course had been pretty upsetting. I had covered the police beat for a time when I worked for the Toronto Star, but I never learned to snarl out of the corner of my mouth or hop lightly over corpses like the police reporters you see on TV. In fact, I was taken off the beat when I fainted during a visit to the city morgue for a feature on how the authorities handle John Doe crime victims, the ones who have come to a sticky end, but have not been identified. Today’s victim was not a John Doe, but Charlie, a man I knew and liked. We shared a passion for licorice jujubes, and I once caught him, in the bulk-food section of the local IGA, adroitly scooping all the other colours aside to beef up the licorice intake in his purchase. I do the same thing myself; these things form
a bond.

  On the other hand, the Klovack character had lied to restore me to the work force. Didn’t that mean something? The stuff about forming a union was codswallop, of course, codswallop of the warmest and runniest variety; ergo, she had made it up and used it, with her characteristic brutal directness, to save my bacon. That did mean something.

  I learned what it meant when we got back to town and went up to the office, and I followed Hanna into the darkroom and tried out the old interlocking grip on her.

  “Hands off, Withers,” she said, adding, “you creep.”

  These were not the accents of love.

  “Prithee, explain, then, your actions at the golf course,” I said. Or at least, that is what I meant to say. What I actually said was “Bu-bu-bu-but.”

  “Why did I get you your job back?”

  I nodded, bereft of speech.

  “Because this is a genuine murder case, Carlton, and I need your help.”

  “You’re not going to try to solve it?”

  “No, no, of course not. But I am going to cover it.”

  “Not in the Lancer, you’re not.”

  “True. I’ve been here long enough now to understand that. But I still have a lot of contacts in Toronto, and the Toronto media are going to love this. I should do well out of freelancing the pictures, but I need some help with the story stuff.”

  “Story stuff. By story stuff, I gather you mean the digging, the investigating, the tireless research, the writing, the reporting.”

  “Yeah, story stuff.”

  “And you think that, just because you got me my job back, I’ll do whatever you say.”

  “Something like that, yeah.” And she gave me the glare, the one that goes through me just about the third buttonhole and then, for some unaccountable reason, warms up the innards on its way out the far side.