Amen Corner (3 page)

But Stanwick didn't dare attempt to influence the Sentence Review Panel. As a resident of Connecticut, he knew no one on the panel, and didn't have enough pull with anyone who did. The new sentence—eight years—had not been long enough, and the eight years were up. Doggett was out now.

“Ralph?” his wife called from the bedroom. “Did you get lost?”

Stanwick picked up his reading glasses and returned to the bedroom.

“You are so distracted lately,” Lorraine said, turning her back to him again with the ends of the necklace in her hands. “Is something wrong?”

“Nothing's wrong,” he said. He put on the glasses and began the aggravating task of trying to fasten the tiny clasp. He fumbled the little lever that opened the hook several times, and finally gave up in disgust.

“Wear something else,” he said.

“We're having dinner with Harmon and Annabelle tonight, and I want to look nice,” Lorraine said. “I'll bet you don't even remember when you bought this string for me.”

He didn't. He knew it had probably been a gift some years back to cover up for something else he'd bought at their usual Manhattan jewelry store for one of his girlfriends. How could he be expected to remember which girlfriend, or when it was?

Stanwick returned to the living room and sat down again, his mind returning to the subject that had worried him ever since he and Lorraine had left Connecticut for their annual trip to the Masters. He had no doubt that Doggett knew he had been behind the planted drugs and the excessive sentence, and he had no doubt what Doggett would do to him if they were somehow to meet. He glanced at the date window on his watch. April 6. Doggett had been out for a full day. Where was he now? Would he dare come back to Augusta? Even if he did, could he somehow get inside the gates and find me? Not likely…but not impossible. Masters Week, after all, was the one week of the year that the club opened its gates to the outside world. Stanwick was vulnerable—and the green jacket that members wore when they were on club grounds would make him that much easier to identify.

He didn't dare call the police. That might stir up old business that was best left forgotten. They'd want to know why he'd be afraid of a former groundskeeper who'd served his time. Best to just get through the week, be wary, and get out of town as soon as the Masters was over. Maybe Doggett wouldn't come back. By next year, things could be different. There were ways to have Doggett taken care of permanently.

Stanwick hated Lee Doggett for ruining springtime in Augusta—a time and a place he loved best in the world. More than winter in Palm Beach. More than summer in the Hamptons. More than autumn on Wall Street.

He loved the sincere, “Hello, Mr. Stanwick! How was your winter?” that he received from nearly every employee on the grounds, from the locker room attendants to the waiters to the pro shop crew to club manager Bill Woodley. He loved seeing his friends from around the country, the captains of industry, finance, and government who forgot about business at the National, and instead just played cards, smoked cigars, drank good scotch, told filthy stories, and played golf on the finest and most coveted course in America. Most of all, Stanwick loved the looks of envy he received from gawkers on Washington Road every time he made the turn onto Magnolia Lane.

Now, he was afraid to look at those gawkers. One of them could be Doggett.

It was the one mistake Stanwick wished he could go back and fix. That first year as a member, he was so enthralled with the sense of power and privilege that came with the green jacket that he felt he could do anything. When that maid caught his eye, coming in to clean his cabin as he was leaving for a round of golf, he got the stupid idea that, with Lorraine back in Connecticut, this was just another easy opportunity.

He had stayed in bed the next morning, pretending to be sick. He told the boys he might catch up with them on the back nine. When the maid came in—Laverne Evans, according to her name badge—she saw him in bed and said she'd come back later. He asked her not to go; he asked her to come into the bedroom and feel his forehead. Stanwick was young then, almost handsome—and with more hair. He was obviously well-off financially—how was a cleaning woman supposed to resist that combination? Besides, technically he was her boss—the employees were told they worked for the club members.

She had been nervous, but she came into the bedroom. He put her hand up to his forehead, and she said he didn't feel warm. She tried to take her hand away, but he held it, kissed it, ran his hand up her arm, told her she was beautiful, eventually drew her down to the bed with him and began unbuttoning her maid uniform. He could tell she didn't want it to happen, but she didn't pull away, either.

When he saw her the following year at the club, her name badge said Laverne Doggett, and she would not look at him. In fact, they didn't speak a word to each other for another 19 years, until the day she stopped him as he was getting into his car behind the Firestone Cabin and told him they had a son named Lee who desperately needed a job. Stanwick laughed at her, but she showed him a picture of Lee. It could have been Stanwick's picture from his prep school yearbook.

“I'll make you take a blood test if I have to,” Laverne had said, her voice shaking, yet iron determination mixed with the fear in her eyes.

That would be a disaster, Stanwick realized. He wasn't as worried about Lorraine's reaction as he was about being booted from the club if it became known he'd fathered a bastard child with one of the maids.

“Does he know?” Stanwick asked her.

“No. He thinks his real daddy's dead.”

“Don't tell him. I'll take care of it. But don't ever—ever—speak to me again. If any of this gets out, you know you'll be fired immediately.”

I should have found a way to be rid of both of them right there, Stanwick had told himself many times since then. Instead, he arranged an interview for Doggett with Jimmy Fowler, the club's superintendent.

Doggett was hired as a greenskeeper, seemed to do a good job, and never gave any indication that he knew who Stanwick was the few times they passed each other on the grounds. Laverne, petrified of losing her job, avoided Stanwick from that point on.

Then came the counterfeiting arrest. Stanwick couldn't believe Doggett would be stupid enough to risk one of the best jobs in Augusta for a few thousand bucks. There was something wrong with that kid. He'd had his chance. Now it was time to get rid of him.

It had been easy enough to find a friendly cop who was willing to plant drugs in Doggett's house in return for some political favors with his higher-ups, and the judge—in return for a couple of extra Masters badges—was amenable to using Doggett as an example for those who thought they could rip off Augusta's most important fixture.

If only that sentence had stuck…

“In other state news, authorities are investigating the disappearance of a farmer from rural Claxton, Georgia,” the news anchor said. “Sixty-one-year-old Don Robey has not been seen since Saturday afternoon, and Tattnall County authorities report evidence of a robbery at his farmhouse…”

The locator map on the screen showed Claxton about 50 miles west of Savannah—and about 100 miles south of Augusta. Not that far from Reidsville.

“Ralph, are you going to put your tie on?” Lorraine said, now standing next to him. “We're supposed to meet the Ashbys on the veranda in five minutes.”

“Aren't we spending enough time with them already?” Stanwick said. “Let's just order something from the kitchen.”

“Ralph, what's gotten into you?” Lorraine said. She was used to being shut out of her husband's business dealings, and she wasn't naïve enough to believe he didn't have his little flings now and then. But when she was with him at Augusta National, he was usually compliant with her social requests. Dinners at the clubhouse with the other members were their special times together.

“Ashby should have kept his mouth shut when that reporter talked to him last week,” Stanwick said. “If he wants women to join this club, that's nobody's business but his.”

Stanwick turned his back on his wife and re-knotted his tie while he watched the newscast.

“Also last night, an unexplained explosion rocked the Georgia Southern campus in Statesboro,” the anchor continued. The news footage showed the charred remains of a small wooden grandstand; then a new locator map came up behind the anchor, showing Statesboro to be 80 miles south of Augusta. “No one was injured in the blast that occurred at approximately 1:30 a.m., though Georgia Bureau of Investigation authorities estimate the apparently homemade device could easily have injured or killed dozens, had the grandstand been occupied. University officials and Statesboro police have turned up no motive for the blast…”

“Ralph, are you listening to me?” Lorraine said. “We have to go. Harmon and Annabelle are waiting.”

Stanwick turned off the TV and put on his green jacket. Yes, he thought, feeling a chill that seemed to begin between his shoulder blades and descend down his spine to the pit of his stomach. We should go.

The phone rang as they were heading out the back door.

“Let it ring,” Stanwick said.

But Lorraine waved him off and went back into the living room to answer the phone. She said hello, then called to her husband.

“Ralph, it's for you,” she said.

“Who is it?”

“I don't know.”

Stanwick took the phone and said hello. The line was dead.

It couldn't be Doggett. How would he know where to call? Then again, he worked at the National for five years. Maybe he did know…

“Who was it?” Lorraine asked.

“No one,” Stanwick said. “They hung up. Come on, we're late for dinner.”

Chapter Three

It was a few minutes before midnight when Lee Doggett parked the blue pickup truck in front of the playground on West Vineland Road and turned off the ignition. The playground—sparsely equipped with a plastic climbing structure, a swing set, and a couple of benches—and the houses on either side of it were separated from the densely wooded eastern boundary of the Augusta National property by a six-foot chain-link fence.

There were no lights on at any of the neatly kept brick houses up and down the street. Nevertheless, Doggett remained in the cab, making sure there was no one moving in the middle class neighborhood. Doggett knew there were security guards patrolling the grounds, but at night they tended to stay close to the clubhouse. He would avoid them by going in over the playground fence. He'd be finished in a few hours, and he'd be back at the truck long before the newspapers were delivered along West Vineland.

He put the Smith & Wesson and a small flashlight that he'd stolen from the farmer into the pockets of his windbreaker, got out of the cab, closed the door softly, and walked through the deserted playground to the back fence. Glancing over his shoulder a final time to be sure he wasn't being watched, Doggett put his toe into one of the metal holes and hoisted himself up and over the fence.

It's good to be back at the National. Did anybody miss me?

Eight years had done little to impair his sense of the club's geography, and the moon filtering through the tops of the towering loblolly pines provided all the light he needed. He set out westward through the woods and soon came to the large parking area for the television production trailers, surrounded by trees and positioned well away from the golf course. The public never saw this area, even though it was less than 100 yards from the eastern edge of the par 3 course that wrapped around Ike's Pond.

There were still lights burning in the one-story wooden cabin that was used as CBS' production headquarters. A Securitas guard—wearing the company's standard-issue dark windbreaker, black pants and black baseball cap—walked leisurely across the lot, keeping an eye on the mobile production trailers and satellite trucks with their millions of dollars' worth of broadcast and editing equipment. Doggett stayed well back in the trees as he skirted the TV compound to the south, eventually finding the dirt service road that led to the golf course. He passed through an area so thick with trees that even the moon could barely penetrate, crossed a bridge over a creek, and came up a steep hill to a clearing in the woods. The open-ended auxiliary storage facility was still there, adjacent to a 30-foot greenhouse, just as he'd last seen it eight years ago, except that the wooden roof and corrugated metal sides of the shed were even more dilapidated than they used to be. It was funny how they operated at the National: Anything that might be seen on TV or by the ticket-buyers was kept in pristine condition; stuff set back in the woods, away from the public eye, looked as though it could have belonged to an under-funded municipal golf course.

There were no lights at the 40-by-100-foot shed, and as he'd assumed, no guards watching it. Perfect. He slipped inside and, turning on the flashlight, maneuvered past a flatbed maintenance cart to a cabinet above a workbench. He opened one of the doors on the cabinet and found a small squeeze bottle of herbicide. He slid it into his pants pocket and cast the flashlight's beam around the shed. Yes—everything he would need was right there, free for the taking.