Hole in One (4 page)

The next morning, I went round to the clubhouse to sort things out with Winifred Martin. I expected the interview to be painful, based as it was on a one-hundred-dollar shortfall between her expectations and my ability to fulfil them, and about twenty-seven times on the mile-long walk from Third Street to the golf course—
Marchepas
was feeling indisposed today—I cursed the day Hanna Klovack had entered my life. Was there ever, I wondered, a woman more high-handed and imperious? Catherine the Great, maybe, but it was hard to think of another. Now, thanks to this autocratic Ukrainian, I was going to have to face Winifred Martin, the Ayatollah of the Nineteenth Hole, and explain to her that the five crisp twenties she was planning to sock away into the old mattress were not going to be forthcoming. She wasn't going to like it. The plan I had in mind, if you can call it a plan, was to explain to her that, when Hanna offered to buy her information yesterday, it was just one of those amusing practical jokes. Then I would slap her on the back, and we would have a good laugh about it. The closer I got to the clubhouse, the less this plan appealed to me, but I had no other. When I mounted the porch and opened the door of the “Pro Shop,” which is what we call the small cubicle off the lounge where Winifred holds sway, she was bending over, rearranging the golf balls in the display case. I was thus able to watch her unobserved for a moment.

She was what James Stephens, the Irish poet, would have called “a lanky hank of a she,” a woman past the first blush of girlish beauty, if she had ever had any, by about two decades. She had tight little lips, innocent of makeup, a large nose, flared at the end and suitable for sniffing out misbehaviour, and mousy brown hair, streaked with grey and pulled back in a bun. She was wearing a dress that bore the unmistakable stamp of her favourite boutique, Bargain Harold's. Taken all in all, she looked quite a bit like the wicked witch in
The Wizard of Oz
, and I was not certain that the Withers charm, even if applied by the bucket, was going to satisfy her as a suitable replacement for a hundred bucks. If it didn't, she would probably have me carried off by flying monkeys.

I let the screen door close behind me, and stepped into the room.

“Well, what do you want?” She straightened up and shot a glare across the counter, modifying the glare a trifle when she saw who it was.

“Oh, it's you, Carlton. I expect you've come to give me that hundred dollars.”

“Well, you see, Miss Martin . . . this is really going to make you laugh . . .”

“Well, you can just keep your money.”

“. . . when Hanna, Miss Klovack—she's a great kidder, Hanna, did you know that?—when she . . .”

“I don't want your filthy lucre.”

“. . . likes to have her little . . . You don't?”

“No.”

“Ah.”

“And it's no use offering me more, because it won't do the slightest good.”

“I wasn't going to.”

“Two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, it wouldn't matter.”

“How about five hundred?”

Her eyes went round.

“Five hundred!”

Why did I say five hundred? I just seemed to get into the swing of the thing, once it started to sound like an auction.

“Only kidding, Miss Martin. I know you wouldn't change your mind on a matter of principle, just for a little more money.”

“Quite right, Carlton. Nor would I.” She put her hands on her hips and gave me the full glare. “So you can just forget about it.”

“I will.”

“The very idea.”

“Hanna's idea, Miss Martin.”

“To think I would betray confidences to the press just because I was offered money.”

“But you didn't, did you Miss Martin?”

“Certainly not.”

“For example, you didn't tell Hanna about the Fearsome Foursome and the stuff in the well at the seventh hole.”

“Carlton! Who told you about that?”

“A good reporter never reveals his sources, Miss Martin. But may I ask you, why did you say yesterday that you would tell Hanna what was going on around here, and then not tell her about the Fearsome Foursome?”

She gave a shifty-eyed look around, found the coast was clear, and leaned across the counter, giving me a pretty good blast of what seemed to have been fried onions that she'd had for breakfast.

“Carlton, can you keep a secret?”

Can I keep a secret? What a question to ask a journalist! Of course not.

“Of course, Miss Martin. Every journalist knows when to keep a secret. It's part of our code.”

She nodded. “I thought so. I know you have a code. Like Lou Grant.” Lou Grant, you will recall, was a TV newspaperman heavily afflicted with ethical codes. We still get his show, along with
Leave It to Beaver
and
I Love Lucy,
beamed at us over the Barrie TV station. Apparently, Winifred was a fan, and drew her mental portrait of journalists from that stern and principled man. I never met an actual, honest-to-God journalist so afflicted in real life, but something told me this was not the time to say so.

“Sure, Miss Martin, just like Lou Grant.”

“Well, Carlton—you're sure you won't tell anybody this?”

“Cross my heart and spit, Miss Martin.”

“Well, then, yesterday, when I was talking to Miss Klovack, I decided to tell her a little bit about what was going on around here, because someone has to know.”

“I see.”

“Something has to be done.”

“Quite right.”

“The golf course is really becoming quite unmanageable, Carlton, quite unmanageable. What I told Miss Klovack was entirely true; there have been break-ins, and stolen carts, and a lot of vandalism. But of course I didn't tell her about the incident at the seventh fairway well, because that was serious.”

“The break-ins, the thefts, they weren't serious?”

“I didn't think so; I thought they were just, you know, some of the teenagers. Teenagers these days . . .”

I did not want Winifred to get going on the younger generation, one of her favourite subjects.

“So you thought it was okay to tell Hanna about the unimportant stuff, but not the important stuff, is that it?”

“That's it, Carlton. You know, sometimes you're quite quick.”

“Thank you, Winifred.”

“Miss Klovack, she said you were a creep.”

“Yes, well, skipping Miss Klovack and her views, can you think of any reason why anyone would set out to sabotage the golf course? Because that's what it amounts to, doesn't it, Miss Martin, a deliberate campaign of sabotage?”

Winifred's eyes went round, and her nose twitched, giving her the look of a wicked rabbit, if there is such a thing outside the pages of Beatrix Potter.

“You're quite right, Carlton. That's just what it is, a campaign of sabotage. And what the developers are going to do about it, I'm sure I don't know.”

“The developers! What are you talking about? Has the golf course been sold to a developer?”

Winifred's hand flew to her face, the way maidens' hands used to do in Victorian novels. “Oh dear oh dear oh dear,” she said. “Now you've wormed it out of me.”

“Miss Martin . . . Winifred . . . the golf course belongs to the village, in perpetuity, according to Sir John Flannery's will. It can't be sold. Can it?”

“No, no, of course you're right, Carlton. I've just made a silly mistake. And you won't say anything about my foolish slip, will you, Carlton?”

“Well, gee, Miss Martin, if the course has really been sold, that's a news story. I'd have to report it.”

“But it hasn't, don't you see? I just made a silly mistake. We've agreed on that.”

Just then, a foursome of male golfers clumped onto the porch, and Winifred rushed off to sign them in. It was a moody and thoughtful C. Withers who walked back to Third Street. The golf course sold? Impossible. Wasn't it? I was going to have to lay this material before a higher authority, as quickly as possible.

By a higher authority, I meant the Widow Golden, of course. She was out in her garden, massacring plant lice with enthusiasm and a can of Raid when I got back to Third Street, and I wasted no time laying the facts before her. For once, I was able to tell her something she didn't already know. Our lovely little golf course was about to become festooned with town houses and boat slips, with maybe a motel thrown in.

“Oh, Carlton, I don't think they can sell the golf course. Can they?”

“I don't know. I'm on the way to the office now, and I'll see if there's anything in the files about it. But it might explain things, mightn't it?”

“Explain what, Carlton? Why would anyone commit murder just because they sold the golf course to a development company?”

“I don't know, but they might get up a campaign to scare people off. The break-ins, the vandalism, even the stuff in the well on the seventh—maybe it's to frighten off the golfers, so the sale won't go through. Nobody is going to buy a golf course without customers. Or, maybe it's the developers, whoever they are, wrecking the golf course so people won't mind so much when it goes.”

“Seems a strange way to behave, Carlton. Very uncivilized.”

“And maybe they, whoever they are, were getting desperate, and decided to ginger things up with an explosion. In all likelihood, Charlie Tinkelpaugh wasn't meant to be killed; nobody was meant to be killed. The cops told me they found the remnants of some sort of triggering device in the hole with the explosive. Probably, the idea was to set it off when golfers were near, but not too near, just to scare people.”

“I suppose you might be right, Carlton. Although,” she added, “it seems to me just as likely that it was cold-blooded murder.”

“Aw, come on, Emma. Who would want to kill old Charlie Tinkelpaugh?”

“I don't know. He was a banker, wasn't he?”

“That's no reason to kill him.” I paused and thought about some of the bankers I had known. “At least, it's not a very good reason to kill him.”

“Well, I don't think you should just assume he was killed by accident. The police aren't saying that.”

“Why, what are the police saying?”

“According to the radio, they're considering all possibilities. That was on the news. And one of the possibilities is that somebody set out to kill Charlie, and did. It seems to me you might be more concerned about that than what happens to the old golf course.”

“I am concerned, Emma, but I can't do anything about Charlie. That's a job for the cops. I can do something about the golf course, though.”

“What can you do?”

“I can find out what's going on, and if there is a development in the works, I can write a story about it.”

“You think if you wrote a story, it might stop the development?”

“You never know.” The
Lancer
is crazy for development and the nice, big ads it generates in newspapers. If the
Lancer
had its way, the entire nation would be up to its hips in concrete, so I certainly wasn't dreaming of unleashing a strong anti-development wave in the newspaper. I was just hoping that the news that we stood in danger might bring out the protesters.

“There are lots of lawyers with summer places around here,” I continued. “Maybe when the story appears, one of them will dig into the legal end, and find a way to stop the bulldozers.”

Emma didn't sound convinced, but she said she'd see what she could find out for me, for my story. “Freddy and Henrietta Tompkins are coming over for this afternoon, and we'll see about this business of selling the golf course. The very idea!”

Freddy Tompkins is our deputy reeve, an amiable gent who works from the same precept as the merchant marine: Make No Waves. It would be interesting to see the widow ply him with tea, cakes, and cross-examination, but I would be elsewhere, nobly attending to the stern duties of a professional journalist.

When I got to the office—a nine-dollar cab ride, since
Marchepas
was
hors de combat
—I found Tommy Macklin, of all people, at my workstation, trying to input a story. We used to write stories; now we input them. Tommy was stabbing away at the console, but nothing was showing on the screen except, “ERROR. ERROR. ERROR.”

He didn't like it much, and as soon as I arrived, he started to take it out on me.

“What the hell have you done to this computer?” he fumed. “You've screwed it up. We buy you this valuable equipment, and you screw it up. Well, it's coming out of your salary.”

I soothed the old buzzard down, eased him to one side, and fired up the computer with a few deft strokes.

“There,” I said. “Try it now.”

Was he impressed? Of course not. “If you spent more time reporting and less time fooling around with this thing, you'd be a better journalist, Withers,” is all he said, as he bent to the difficult task of typing in a story. Naturally, I watched over his shoulder.

“Hole in One at Bosky Dell,” he typed, on the top line, and then, underneath, “From Our Golfing Correspondent.”

“Jesus, Tommy,” I blurted, “are you sure you want to do that?”

He whirled in the chair—it's one of those swivel affairs—and glowered at me.

“Mind your own damn business,” he said.

“But, Tommy, if we carry the story about your hole in one, aren't we going to have to mention somewhere along the way that old Charlie Tinkelpaugh got blown to bits because of it?”

“Not necessarily,” said Tommy. “We can run this story, which is a news story, on page one, and run an obit on Charlie Tinkelpaugh on the liner pages.”

The liner pages are at the back, where we stick in items of little import, to keep the truss ads from bumping into each other.

“Hey, that's great,” I said. “We can use the same head on both of them: Hole in One.”

Tommy glowered some more, but a gleam of comprehension came into his eyes, and I could see he was thinking that perhaps this was not such a good idea after all. He shoved himself back from the computer.

“Ah, hell, I've got better things to do than write the news,” he said, and went off to ogle Olga in his office, which was certainly a better thing for him to be doing than writing about his golf game, though equally futile. I wiped out his news bulletin and sloped along to the office library to check the Bosky Dell file for background on the golf course.

That sounds more sophisticated than it is. For office library, read, “back issues.” We keep old copies in piles in one corner of the office kitchen-cum-lunchroom, which has thus become the library. I found there,
inter alia,
half a deceased ham sandwich, a couple of porno magazines, representing the spiritual fodder of my fellow reporter, Billy Haldane, and a four-year-old feature story on Sir John Flannery and his bequest to Bosky Dell.

It was headed, “They Called Him ‘St. John,'” which, incidentally, nobody ever, ever did, but which gives you some of the flavour of the thing. The story said that it was a condition of the Flannery bequest to the village that neither the golf course nor the church was to be sold; they were to be held in perpetuity for the “pleasure and instruction of future generations.” The village council had given the necessary undertaking at the time, which was sixty-four years ago. It was possible, of course, that the story was dead wrong; they often are, and since, as I noticed, this was one of my own effusions—I knew the subject had a familiar ring to it—there was a pretty good chance that it was wrong. There was also a chance that the council had said, “Yassiree, Bob,” six decades ago, and a new council had, more recently, said “Nuts to that.” We all know that “in perpetuity” in legal terms means whatever a gaggle of lawyers and a judge decide.

Just the same, it seemed, on the face of it, that Winifred Martin was talking nonsense, and I was feeling more than somewhat puzzled as I laid the back issues to rest, chucked the sandwich in the wastebasket, stuffed the porno magazines in a jacket pocket—I would give them back to Billy Haldane and tell him to keep them out of the office—and strode briskly out into the newsroom and right smack, dab, into the form of H. Klovack, Photographer, who happened to be passing the library-cum-kitchen door just as I popped out of it. I clutched her for support, and Hanna clutched me for ditto, then drew back, affronted.

“Carlton,” she snapped. “What is this? Lying in wait, are we?”

“No, we're not,” I informed her. “If you come barrelling along, not looking where you're going . . .”

“Lurking around corners until something female shows and then pouncing . . .”

“. . . not honking your horn or anything, accidents are bound to occur.”

“Accidents! Hah!”

“If you think, Miss Klovack, that I would stoop so low as to force my attentions, unwanted . . .”

“Well, if you think they're wanted, Buster, you've got another think coming.”

“. . . that I am so starved for female companionship . . .”

“Oh, you're not starved for female companionship, eh?”

“No, of course not.”

“Oh, yeah. Name one.”

“One what?”

“One female companion that you're not starved for—you know what I mean.”

“Surely, Klovack, you don't expect a gentleman to . . . to bandy names?”

“Yes. Sure. Bandy me a name.”

“I would never,” I remarked stiffly, “bandy a name. One doesn't treat the opposite sex as merely the plaything of an idle hour, and boast of one's conquests; one doesn't—

“You know, Carlton, that line of talk would go down a lot better if you didn't have a copy of
Penthouse
leering out of your coat pocket when you delivered it.”

Argh. A guilty hand flew to my side. Too late.

There was a stricken silence, and then it seemed to me that, all in all, it mightn't be a bad idea to change the subject.

“Klovack,” I said, “there are some new developments in this golf-course story. Literally.”

And I told her about the supposed sale of the golf course and my theory as to how the prospect of a development might have pushed some nutcase over the edge and led to the planting of the bomb that killed poor old Charlie.

“Pretty thin,” she said. “In fact, it's about as thin as your explanation as to why you jumped me back there. But never mind, I can check it out this afternoon.”

“This afternoon? What's happening this afternoon?”

“Oh, nothing much. I telephoned Winifred Martin this morning and asked her to make an appointment for me with the club's golf pro. I plan to grill him, between strokes, about the staff and everything else at the golf course. Winifred fixed my first lesson for right after work this afternoon.”

She turned on her heel and went into the darkroom, leaving me musing on that. I filed a preliminary story on the possibility that, any day now, they might be digging up the golf course with bulldozers instead of nine irons—“The
Lancer
has learned from usually reliable sources of a major real-estate development,” and so on and so forth. It wasn't any more misinformed or full of guesswork than most of what appears in print. I dumped a copy marked for Tommy's attention on Olga's desk, and then went into the darkroom, where Hanna glowered through the infrared gloom.

“Well, what do you want?”

“Gee, Hanna, you sound a whole lot like Art Martin.”

She smiled. I smiled back, and begged a ride out to Bosky Dell with her, giving as my excuse the immobility of
Marchepas
. The real truth, though, was that I was dying to be on hand for the first encounter between this puffed-up personage and our golf pro, who rejoices in the name of Running Elk.