Authors: Walter Stewart
Hole in One
Walter Stewart
For Millie and Bill MacLennon
No fooling around: Tommy Macklin did it. If you bought, borrowed, or stole this book just to find out who killed Charlie Tinkelpaugh early one recent September morning, there is no need to flip to the back; it was Tommy who did the deed. No surprise to anyone who knows him, either. The man is a killer clean through. I ought to know; he's my managing editor.
Tommy and I labour in the vineyards of the Silver Falls
Lancer
, “The Voice of the Kawarthas,” as it says on the masthead. Rather, I labour and Tommy sits around in his corner office, drinking the expense-account scotch out of a teacupâto fool the public, you seeâand ogling his secretary, Olga Kratzmyer, also known as Ogleworthy Olga, the Polish Pumpernickel.
Between bouts of lusting after Olga and wishing Mrs. Macklin would fall off a bridge, Tommy carries on the important duties of the managing editor of a chain-owned weekly newspaper of satisfying profit and stupefying dullnessâthe two are not unconnectedâcentred on the town of Silver Falls, in the lake district northeast of Toronto. That is, he spends most of his time putting a golf ball into a water glass, or, just for the fun of it, calling me into his office and chewing me out. This makes Tommy feel that he is a real managing editor. He has seen in the American movies how the managing editor growls out of the corner of his mouth at his ace reporter and the ace reporter then goes out and breaks the Big Story, deposing the president and winning the Pulitzer prize, or unmasking the nasty local business tycoon, with girls, gold, and glory at the end.
Tommy likes girls, gold, and glory, but of course he doesn't want to unmask the nasty local business tycoon. That would be Mrs. Sylvia Post, our publisher, who owns just about everything you can shake a stick at in Silver Falls and all the country round, with the peculiar exception of the
Lancer
. She sold that for a sackful of doubloons to the Johnson chain, and now operates it for them as they would like it to be operated, viz., by underpaying the staff and sucking up to business. This means that the Big Story, hereabouts, consists of unmasking the fact that “Happy Harry” Harston has just revamped his SuperService station on Main Street, with six gas pumps and no waiting. Not many Pulitzers have been handed out for getting the lowdown on gas pumps, so Tommy's chances for g., g., and g. are limited. He gets a little frustrated, and when the strain becomes more than he can bear, he works it off by calling me in and shouting up at me.
I say “up” because Tommy is about five foot three, a pop-eyed, grey-haired little coot who looks quite a lot like the gent that used to decorate the cover of
Esquire
back in the days when the girls in
Esquire
were prettier than the men. I am six feet even, so Tommy shouts up, except on those occasions when he invites me to sit downâI always think I am about to get a raise, but I'm notâbefore he starts in shouting.
Why do I put up with him? I need the job. Those reporters you see on TV getting lippy with the boss; they don't need the job. They're actors. I'm a reporter, and reporters, in real life, don't backchat the managing editor. They just kind of scuff their shoes in the broadloom and save their rich remarks for afterwards. “Ah, gee, boss,” is what the reporter says aloud; and although much better and riper stuff surges around inside his skull, it is not given utterance, and thus the weekly pay envelope continues to be forthcoming. The weekly pay envelope, in my case, comes to a flat $268.30, once the hellhounds of National Revenue have finished with it. This does not allow me to wallow in luxury, but it does keep the lights on in my converted cottage at Bosky Dell, a tiny, mostly summer community fourteen miles down the county road from Silver Falls. It suffices to put tinned goods on the table, and to put gas into
Marchepas
, my elderly, cranky Peugeot.
By a coincidence which I think points a moral that all managing editors should take to heart, if managing editors had hearts, Tommy Macklin did in Charlie Tinkelpaugh right after a session of bawling me out. I had committed some trifling
faux pas
the day beforeâleaving the name of an advertiser out of a roundup of local comment on the world economy for our weekly business page, I think it wasâand Tommy called me at home, at six-striking-a.m. if you can believe it, and ordered me to present myself at once.
Marchepas
, for a wonder, condescended to start, and I rushed to the officeâfrom the note in Tommy's voice on the phone, I knew this was a Force Nine callâand spent about thirty minutes receiving information on the subject of my shortcomings as a journalist. This done, Tommy fixed me with one of his quizzical looks, and asked me if Olga had, you know, ever said anything to me about, you know, him. And he leered.
Tommy dwells in the delusion that Olga lusts after him, which is not the case, because she is always so polite to him and calls him, always, “Mr. Macklin.” Journalists never know what to make of politeness, so Tommy chooses to believe that, in secret, Olga mutters to herself, “Tommy, darling,” and “Tommy, precious.” Then, his delusion continues, she addresses him in public as Mr. Macklin to conceal her passion. Actually, she always calls him mister in private, too. Mostly, she calls him Mr. Numbnuts; sometimes, Mr. Hothands, and, occasionally, Mr. Drool. However, discretion suggested that I keep this information to myself, so I just said “Gosh, no,” and Tommy muttered, not for the first time, “Calls himself a reporter.” Then he grabbed his golf clubs, touched the back of the Kratzmyer chair wistfullyâshe doesn't show up till nineâand stormed out of the office. He always likes to be the first one off the tee, and since he plays at the Bosky Dell course (cheaper green fees than at the Silver Falls layout), that means leaving Silver Falls before 7:30.
After he left, I scoured the room for the scotchâlocked up, as usualâand then wandered off down to the O.K. Café for breakfast. By the time I got back to the office at nine o'clock, the staff, all nine of them, were settling in for the day. I exchanged a curt good morning with Hanna Klovack, staff photographer, and sat down at my workstation. I called up the word-processing program, an ill-tempered god, made propitiating signals on the keyboard, and started in to write “What's Doin' Around Town,” a column of drivel I produce weekly under the byline of Ramblin' John Perkins.
I was just working (or workin') up some good stuff about what the gang down at the firehall thinks of the snappy new display in Foster's Department Store window, when the phone rang. I glanced across at Hanna, who was lounging in her chair, looking delectable, God rot the wench, and peering at her fingernails. She did not move. The phone rang again. It was on the desk, between us, within easy reach.
“The phone,” I said.
“Ah,” she riposted. “I wondered what that sound was. The telephone, you say. How amusing.”
I cursed, and picked up the instrument, which immediately attacked my ear.
“For God's sake, Carlton,” shouted Staff Sergeant Harry Burnett, “don't you ever answer the phone?”
“I just did, Harry. What can I do for you?”
“You better get out to the golf course,” said Harry.
“Which golf course? Why?”
“Your golf course. The one at Bosky Dell. You know where that is?”
I know where it is: out Main Street, hang a left, and keep going until the water hits the hubcaps; you can't miss it.
“And, to repeat, why?”
“Because there's been a killing out there, that's why.”
“Bless you, Harry, for this bit of news, but you know we don't cover murders.” The
Lancer
leaves all the crude sensationalismâor, to put it another way, the newsâto the newspapers from Toronto, eighty miles away; we prefer to concentrate on flower shows and the revamping of gas stations and other warm, human-interest stuff that doesn't upset the advertisers
“You'll cover this one,” said Harry. “We've already got the killer.”
“What difference does that make, Harry?” I asked in my languid, journalist's voice.
“It's your boss, Tommy Macklin,” he shot back. The chair in which I had been leaning back to show how cool and relaxed I was crashed to the floor as I uttered a startled squawk into the phone.
“You know what, Harry?” I said. “I think I'll just take a drive out to Bosky Dell.”
“You do that,” said Harry.
So, now I had a problem. It would make sense, in the unlikely event that we were actually to publish something of these stirring events in the
Lancer
, to take a photographerâto wit, the Klovack menaceâout to the golf course. However, relations between this person and myself were, as you may already have noticed, a trifle strained. If I, in my capacity as acting management in the absence of Tommy Macklin, were to instruct this person to grab her camera and accompany me, would she say, “Yessiree,” or would she tell me to stick it in my ear? I could but ask.
“Hanna,” I said.
“Ur.”
“That was Harry Burnett, down at the police station.”
“Ur.”
“It seems there's been a killing out at the Bosky Dell golf course.”
“Ur?”
“And the cops have arrested Tommy Macklin.”
With one lithe move, she bounced out of her chair, grabbed her camera bagâthe Nikon .35 was already hanging on a cord around her neck, laying its weary head where, to be perfectly frank about it, I longed to lay my ownâand shot out of the newsroom. I caught up to her just as she was opening the door to her car, a nearly new Toyota Corolla.
“We'll take my car, Klovack,” I said out of the corner of my mouth, just like a regular reporter. She gave me the up and down.
“Wanna bet?” she asked.
I froze her with a dignified, yet masterful, look, strode over to
Marchepas
, climbed in, turned the key, and then commenced cursing as the damn thing hummed and whined to itself and then just went dead, the way it does. Very temperamental, my Peugeot. When I re-emerged and stalked over to lower myself into the passenger seat of Hanna's car, she asked curiously, “Why did you want to take that wreck, anyway, Carlton? You know you can't count on it.”
“Twenty-five cents a kilometre.”
The expense account, you understand; it is not often that C. Withers gets to hit the employer for expenses, and I did not wish to miss a chance. The Klovack eyebrows rose; the Klovack eyesâblack and snappingâshone merrily; the Klovack noseâa bit hooked, but very nice, withalâtwitched; and the Klovack mouthâa bit wide for classic beauty, but with a taste as soft and sweet as . . . (not that one cares, one just likes to get things right for the record) drew into a smirk.
“Broke again, are we?”
She rammed the car into drive and we rocketed out of there at a speed that froze the blood, whitened the knuckles, but would not, if it killed me, bring a word of protest to my lips. As we belted along County Road 32, scaring the bejabbers out of the cows, I thought about the terrific irony of our situation. The sort of thing the Greeks used to write aboutâAeschylus or Euripedes, or one of that gang. Here we were, Hanna and I, driving back together to the very place where, not long ago, Cruel Fate had driven us asunder.
A few weeks back, when the city dwellers headed home at summer's end, thinning out the local populace to manageable proportions, I very unwisely undertook to instruct Hanna in the rudiments of that most splendid of all games, golf. I have been playing golf since I was about knee-high to a niblick, which is what we used to call a nine iron in the old wooden-handled set I inherited from my grandfather. I like the game, but I do not do well at it. I play it with a fierce and hopeful joy that Mundane Whittaker, our local sage, once said reminded him of G. K. Chesterton's crack about the amateur, who proved, Chesterton said, “That anything worth doing is worth doing badly.”
Not for me the 220-yard drive singing down the fairway to bounce on the green. The record will show that the only time one of my drives ever actually landed on the green was the day I uncorked a snifter from the thirteenth tee that started life soaring north-northeast, drifted northeast, then caught a passing breeze and finished dead east, on the ninth green. My playing partner that day, a narrow-minded churl, refused to let me putt out.
I spend more time in the rough than I do on the actual cut part of the course, and my golfing skills include use of the foot-mashie, the hand-wedge, and the sly drop of a new ball out of the corner of the bag when the old ball refuses to show itself and take its punishment. Every now and thenâcall it every ten thousandth shotâI strike the ball well, and this keeps me hooked on the game.
So, back when Hanna and I were still friends, I took her down to the golf course, since she had evinced a desire to take a greater part in the sweet tenor of non-urban life, or, as she put it herself, “mix with the rubes more.”
The Bosky Dell course is stiff with rubes. It was given to the village some decades ago, by Sir John Flannery. He was a lumber baron around the turn of the century, and since they never found anything actually to slam him into jail for as he went about the countryside accumulating wealth and laying waste the environment, he was made a sir. (This was back in the days when Canadians could still be translated into baronets on the native soil, as long as they coughed up enough money to the ruling party, and when people who made their fortunes wrecking the environment were looked up to and admired, instead of merely being secretly envied, as today.) Sir John salved his conscience by giving the village a church and a golf course, reckoning, probably, that if one of these didn't ensure him immortality, the other would. Thus, it would be cheap for me to teach Hanna how to play golf, because our green fees are scandalously low. How she would admire me!
Well, of course, it didn't work out that way. Everything started out all right. One evening, I took Hanna out to the sixth tee, away from the goggling eyes of the clubhouse, and amid much laughter and extraneous activityâthe possibilities of the interlocking grip can be applied to more than the handle of a golf clubâfinally got her lined up to hit her first golf shot. Which she promptly pasted 160 yards down the fairway, or, to put it another way, about 60 yards past where my demonstration shot had come to rest between two rocks. She then whacked her second onto the apron of the green and finished out with a six, after some errant putting. I garnered my usual ten.
“Oh, Carlton,” she said, “you're just letting me win.”
Mumble, mumble, I said. After about six rounds over the next two weeks, she began to offer me a stroke a hole, which wouldn't have been so bad except that she still cleaned my clock. One evening, we finished our usual ritualâmyself grimacing in imitation of the good-sport smile, Hanna glowing with self-worthâand were heading for the parking lot out behind the clubhouse, when a savage bark smote the darkening air.
“Omigosh,” I cried. “Scrap's got loose!”
“Scrap? Who or what is Scrap?”
“Captain Martin's dog. A pit bull.”
“Who the heck is Captain Martin, and what is he doing with a pit bull?”
“Retired Air Canada pilot,” I explained. “They live right next to the golf course. That's his daughter, Winifred, who takes the green fees.”
“Oh, well, just as long as the dog doesn't bite. Hey, he does bite, doesn't he, Carlton? You're really scared.”
“Scared? The Witherses do not scare. Let us just say that I feel an onrush of prudence. I wonder how the damn dog got loose? Scrap is always kept behind wire.”
“Well, never mind. We'll just get the car and go.”
“Didn't you hear where that bark came from? He's between us and the parking lot. We'd better go back to the clubhouse.”
“How can we? It was locked up when we came off the course.”
True, too. After we had put our clubs away and, if you want to get nosy about it, strolled down to the dock for a little fooling around, the place was closed down, and now we were on our own, a good hundred yards from the parking lot on one side and the Martin house back in the woods on the other.
“Well,” said Hanna, “we'd better call for help.”
I grabbed her arm. “For God's sake, don't,” I begged her. “If Scrap is loose, he's likely to attack at any loud noise.”
“Yikes,” said Hanna, but she said it quietly.
We began to move towards the parking lot, walking on the sides of our shoes, at my suggestion, to keep the noise down. I think we'd have made it, too, except that the weird walking upset me, and I went base over apex across an empty paint drum that some idiot had left out, apparently for that express purpose, and I let out a startled bellow as I went down. I was up in a second, though, when I heard Hanna shout, “Carlton, quick! Here he comes!” followed by the fearful scrabble and throaty bellow of a charging pit-bull terrier.
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 branchâthe golf-course parking lot edges into the forest primevalâand 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 waggleâwell, several preliminary wagglesâdrew 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 manâwhich is to say, not at allâbut 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 sidesâI believe you can qualify “unsportsmanlike Yahoo” on the one hand and “gold-plated asshole” on the other as reproachesâand 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 squadânot that it matters, but I promised his mother to work in his nameâexplained 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 questionâto wit, todayânamely, the slaying of oneâfumble through notesâmale Caucasian, aged about seventy, late of Bosky Dell.