Hole in One (6 page)

Sylvia Post, relict of the late Donald Post, is a widow in her mid-fifties, and what is technically known as a hard-boiled egg, although she looks soft and pleasant. She was a beauty queen in her teens, and still has the carriage and the remains of the figure of a beauty queen. Her husband, Donald, was a bit of a simp, who inherited his money and bought the newspaper in the first place mainly so he would have something to do while a battalion of lawyers and accountants made him ever wealthier. When he departed this life, after a disagreement between his Cadillac and a freight train one liquid February night a few years ago, Sylvia dried her tears, if any, shucked her apron, if any, and took over. She has a natural instinct for what makes a small-town newspaper work, namely lots of flowery praise about the locals, no knocks on business, and no raises for the working stiffs. She is the one who bought our computers, over the objections of Tommy Macklin, and was thus able to dispense with most of the typesetting staff. She also dreamt up a lot of new features, such as my Ramblin' John column and something called Personality Profile, which gives the old oil to some local advertiser every week and is widely read by that advertiser's mother.

She soon turned the paper into a paying proposition, and attracted the attention of the Johnson chain, notorious for its high profits, low wages, and lousy newspapers. The Johnson chain can't stand anybody else making money, so it presented her with an offer she couldn't refuse. It bought out the
Lancer
, then hired Sylvia to stay on as publisher, and they split the swag every year. The day-to-day operations are left to Tommy Macklin, while Sylvia watches the purse strings and takes elderly advertisers out to lunch—they always think they are going to get Sylvia for dessert, but they don't. This minimal activity has allowed her to use the rest of Dear Donald's legacy buying into local businesses, gobbling up real estate, and now, it appeared, extending her reach into the development business.

As soon as Tommy departed, whistling and thumbing his magazine, I fixed myself some supper—the heel of a package of liverwurst, stirred into a can of beans, don't knock it until you've tried it—and called Hanna's apartment. The following dialogue ensued:

Hanna (very friendly): Well, hello.

Self: Hanna, we have to talk.

H (no longer friendly): Oh, it's you.

S: Of course it's me. Whom were you expecting?

H: None of your business. Talk.

S: Not over the phone. I'm coming to see you.

H: No need, Withers. You can say whatever you have to say through Ma Bell.

S: I'll be there in fifteen minutes. Click. Pause, pause, pause. Ring, ring.

H (very friendly): Well, hello.

S: My damn car wouldn't start.

H: Oh, it's you again.

S: I get the impression you are waiting for an important call, and this isn't it.

H: You get the right impression.

S: Well, swell. I just wanted you to know that I have been fired, for real this time, so I will be free to devote my full attention to this freelance proposition.

H: What freelance proposition?

S: You know, working on this murder story for the
Star
.

H: Oh, that. I've been meaning to tell you about that. It's off.

S: Off? How do you mean, off?

H: Off. I've got somebody else to do the story stuff.

S: Oh, fine. I give up a perfectly good job to help you out, and now you tell me you don't need me.

H: Give up? You just said you were fired.

S: Well, technically, but that doesn't alter the main point, which is that, without me, you won't get anywhere on this story.

H: I see. And how many awards have you won for investigative reporting?

S: I won the Blue Ribbon from the Bellingham County Cattlemen's Association last year.

H: Yeah, for a story on the spread of anthrax that you rewrote from a press release.

S: So this new guy, he's an investigative reporter?

H: Uh-huh.

S: Who is he?

H: None of your beeswax.

S: I'll know, ten seconds after he checks into the Dominion House Hotel or the Bide-a-Wee Motel.

H: Peter Duke. Good night.

Click.

Peter Duke. I might have guessed. A TV personality, no less, and not a reporter in the real sense at all. Handsome as a stud horse, and almost as smart, “Call Me Pete” is beamed into our living rooms every Thursday night as one of the celebrity cast of You Asked for It, one of those combination personality-cum-public-affairs shows that multiplied after the success of such real public-affairs shows as
the fifth estate
in Canada and
60 Minutes
in the United States. A team of researchers does the work, and Pete handles the interviews, reading from notes. He has a sincere haircut and a voice like oleomargarine, so the fact that he has less than fifteen watts of brain power doesn't matter. Somehow—probably as part of a joint venture with the
Star
—Hanna had persuaded
You Asked for It
that there might be a story in our quiet, backwater murder.

My course of action was clear. I would solve the murder, single-handed, make Pete and his supporting staff look like a bunch of yo-yos, and then decide whether, in view of her traitorous conduct, I was willing to take Hanna back. This, at least, is how I put it to myself when I hung up the phone. Unfortunately, myself shot back a single word, “How?”

There was a pretty good chance I could starve to death before I was able to fulfil this program, anyway. This latest firing had come at an awkward time; I was flat broke. If Tommy persisted in this foolishness, there was only one thing for it: I would have to go to work over at the Jowett place.

The Jowett place, for those of you who missed the splendid write-up and pictures in
Town and Country
magazine, is a cosy little dosshouse on five acres of land along the waterfront, smack dab in the middle of Bosky Dell, with three kitchens, seven bathrooms, a score or more bedrooms, a billiard room, and a living room large enough to hold a dress rehearsal for the Ascot scene in
My Fair Lady
. It was once the summer residence of Sir John Flannery himself, before that tycoon handed in his papers, and, in a burst of whimsy—the only known burst of whimsy in a long, stern life—he named it “The Eagle's Nest.” Sir John was once described as “an eagle of high finance” in a newspaper profile. There is a wrought-iron eagle on a post by the front gate, which looks, as a matter of fact, quite a bit like a dissipated vulture, and not like an eagle at all. Sir John's daughter and beneficiary finally couldn't keep up the estate, owing to a mistaken belief on her part that she could subsist entirely on eighteen Martinis a day. So, about forty years ago, she bought herself a small cottage instead, and the Jowetts took over The Eagle's Nest.

Conrad Jowett is the head of the clan, a Toronto financier, one of those large, bluff, bullying patriarchs, constructed along lines laid down by Thomas Wolfe in
Look Homeward, Angel.
He is one of the new crop of millionaires that sprang up like mushrooms after the Second World War, when greed wasn't necessarily good, just useful. The way we heard it locally, he made a packet in the grocery business and ploughed the profits into commodity trading, where he made an even bigger packet. Like many of his ilk, once he became rich, he yearned for respectability. He made large donations to the church, and that other holy of holies, the Conservative Party. The purchase of The Eagle's Nest was part of the process. Sir John Flannery had been a pillar of the establishment, and Conrad Jowett picked up at least part of his mantle with the deed to the property.

He was still coining money, of course, but now he was doing it in the bond market, where a chap has to be content with takings that are merely huge, rather than obscene. He had come so far from the rough-and-tumble of pork bellies and silver futures, that we were expecting him, any day now, to win some official favour. Companion of the Order of Canada, perhaps, or the chairmanship of one of those commissions that multiply in Ottawa like fruit flies. The only sticking point was that some members of the clan are a bit strange, and the rumour mill reported that there were, from time to time, nameless orgies in “The Nest Egg,” which is what Conrad has chosen to call the boathouse-cum-apartment where he keeps his yacht.

I was well acquainted with the Jowett spread, although I had never been invited to any orgies, nameless or otherwise, anywhere on the grounds. I knew the place because it is hard to get good help these days. Don't take my word for it; that is what Conrad Jowett is forever saying. It may have something to do with the fact that he constantly badgers his employees, drives down their wages whenever possible, and never, ever, lets on that anyone, anywhere, ever did anything as well as he could have done it if he hadn't been so busy making money. In the good old days, of course, you could get away with this sort of thing, but since the idiots in charge banned child labour, the seventy-hour week, and the practice of “gentle correction” of employees, Conrad has run into some difficulty keeping the battalion of maids, kitchen help, and groundskeepers necessary to the management of a joint like his. As a result, his major domo, a cadaverous-looking albino who has been with Conrad since he watered his first ham in the grocery business, is constantly on the lookout for hired hands.

Whenever I am up against it as a result of one of Tommy's firings, I present myself, and Robinson, the major domo—he apparently has no second name, unless you count Count Dracula, which is how he is known hereabouts—takes me on staff for minimum wage to cut the grass, repair screens, or do whatever else needs doing. The Eagle's Nest is my version of unemployment insurance. I began working there when I was seventeen, and reaped a solid fifty cents an hour for pushing a hand mower around the main front lawn for about four hours one Saturday afternoon. Conrad came by while I was toiling away, stood around watching me for about twenty minutes, correcting my many faults—it is remarkable how many wrong ways there are to push a lawn mower—and asked me how much Robinson was paying me.

“Fifty cents an hour,” I said.

“Too much,” said Conrad. And, then, like the big, bluff tycoon he is, he smiled, to show he was just kidding, see, dug down into his pocket, and extracted a whole buck, which he gave to me.

“Be sure to tell your mother I gave you a raise,” he said, and he patted me on my tousled head.

“Yazzur, boss, us do surely 'ppreciate it,” I replied, and he looked at me kind of sharply, as if he suspected a lack of sincerity on my part. When I duly reported to my mother, she thought it was amusing, but my father was furious and told me never to work for “that bloodsucker” again. My mother, on the other hand, took the position that being exploited a little wouldn't hurt me, and the work would do me good, and, over the years, I got into the habit of performing odd chores over at the Jowett place whenever I was particularly hard up.

As now. The morning after my departure from the staff of the
Lancer
, I strolled over to The Eagle's Nest, knocked on the kitchen door, and when a maid produced Robinson for me—we still have maids in Bosky Dell, and protect them as an endangered species—asked him if he had any work that needed doing.

“Certainly, my boy,” he said, gesturing for me to come in and sit at the kitchen table, where he had been eating breakfast. “We always have jobs for a good worker. As a matter of fact,” he went on, “if you're available for a couple of weeks or so, there's a rather big job I'd like you to take on.”

He beamed at me. Robinson likes me, the strange fellow, and despite his weird looks—skinny, bent body, totally white skin, dainty, long white eyelashes, and pale, pale blue eyes (he is not a complete albino, with the pink orbs)—I like him, too.

“Well,” I told him, “I'm between assignments down at the paper right now and . . .”

“Fired you again, did they? Well, never you mind. We have work for you here any time you want it, and, as I say, there's rather a big job that needs doing and I haven't lined up anybody yet. I want you to paint The Nest Egg.”

“The boathouse? The whole thing?”

“The whole thing. Scrape it and paint it. It's needed doing for years, but Mr. Jowett hasn't wanted to use one of the usual contractors,” (translation, wants the thing done for minimum wage), “so I've been holding off on it.”

“Well, sure, great. When do I start?”

“You can start this very day, if you will. You can begin the scraping, and repair the screens, and I'll phone and get the paint ordered in.”

“Not paint, mostly; mostly it's stain.”

“There, you see. I knew you'd know. You just tell me what you want, and I'll have it delivered.”

So, sucks to you, Tommy Macklin. Less than twenty-four hours after leaving the staff of the
Lancer
, I was gainfully employed, at a tax-free four bucks an hour, in creative work. I would phone Hanna and tell her I had a new job, and she would sneer and say, “Oh, yeah, doing what?” and I would say I had taken up painting, and she would be impressed. No, she wouldn't. She would say, “House painting, I'll bet,” right off the bat. Not only that, it was going to be rather hard to solve the murder down at the golf course while I was up to my elbows in stain and solvent at The Nest Egg. Well, never mind, it was a job, and within the hour I was down at the lake, hauling the old screens off the lakeward side of the boathouse.

When I say boathouse, do not imagine some crummy little shack with a slip in the middle; this is one of those two-storey jobs, with three boatslips, half-a-dozen changing rooms (when it was built, bathers would no more have paraded across the lawn in their swimming costumes than vote socialist; they wore their street clothes to the bathhouse and changed there, like good, Christian people), a storage room down below, and a two-bedroom apartment perched above, the whole clad in dark brown stain and outlined in white enamel, now chipped and peeling.

I had hauled the screens out onto the acre of cement on one side of the boathouse that constitutes Conrad Jowett's notion of a dock, and I was whistling to myself and wrestling with the screens, when I sensed a movement behind me and turned around and damn near fell into the water at the vision that presented itself to my astounded eyes.

“Well, hello there,” said the vision.

“Ah . . . er . . . um,” I said, which is what I always say when I am confronted by beauty on this scale. Do not condemn me. This was about five-foot-two of svelte blonde loveliness, wearing a demure-yet-revealing bathing suit—they can do that, these days—a red kerchief through which a shock of golden hair poured backwards and down onto tawny, bare shoulders, and what can only be called a dewy-eyed smile.

“You must be Carlton?” said the vision, and thrust out a long, nail-polished, slim hand. “Robinson told me you were working down here? I'm Amelia? I'm staying upstairs in the apartment?”

Most of her sentences sounded like questions, which I for one found entrancing.

“Um,” I said, to keep up my end of the conversation.

“I hope I won't be a nuisance to you . . .”

Vigorous shaking of head on my part.

“. . . but I just wanted to get a little sun? Don't you just love the sun?”

“Er,” I responded, courteous to a fault.

“Do you know that John Denver song ‘He Loved the Sun'? I just think it's just so beautiful, don't you?”

Vigorous nodding of head.

“Well, I'll just lie here on this chaise longue and watch you working, if you don't mind? No, please don't put your shirt on? I so admire to watch a man work when he's got such nice, smooth muscles? But if I'm a nuisance, you just shoo me away, you hear?”

Nodding of head. Shaking of head.

“Ah,” I found speech at last. “You're Uncle Willie's daughter.”

“No, silly, his granddaughter.” She gave me the full, slow smile, which nearly knocked me off the dock again. “What gave me away?”

“That ‘you hear?' Your branch of the family moved to Maryland, didn't they?”

“Why, Mr. Carlton, I do believe you know all about us Jowetts?”

“A little bit. You're quite a local institution, you know.”

“Little old us?”

She batted her eyes at me. You know, the way they do in the old movies: the eyes go down, then up again, then very wide. Very corny. I liked it fine.

“Are you here for a visit, then, Miss Jowett?”

“Amelia. You must call me Amelia, if we're going to be friends? And we
are
going to be friends, aren't we, Carlton?”

Well, of course. I was feeling friendly already, especially when she put her hand on my arm, where the smooth muscles rippled away like the dickens, looked me in the eye—her eyes were a kind of tawny colour, with flecks of gold—and gave a little squeeze on the old smooth muscles.

“As for your question, yes, I'm here for a visit. I love September at the lake, don't you? When the outsiders are gone? When it's still warm in the days, but crisp and cool at night? Maybe I'll stay longer, who knows? I've finished school and done the European trip? And I'm not doing anything particular these days?”

So, I went to work, and Amelia lay down on the chaise longue and soaked up sun, while I soaked up Amelia in between bouts of banging myself on the thumb with the hammer. And so the weary day wound to a close.

The next morning, needless to say, I was on the job bright and early, ready to ripple those smooth muscles fit to bust. However, Amelia didn't appear until about ten a.m., when she wandered out of the apartment on the top floor and came down the outside stairway to the chaise longue. Apparently she hadn't heard me moving around, and I was working inside one of the changing rooms by this time. I could see Amelia through the window, but she obviously couldn't see me, because, just as I was about to shout out a merry “Good Morning,” she suddenly doffed the top of her bathing costume—she was lying on her stomach on the chaise longue—and lifted her face, among other things, to bask in the warmth of the sun. She was wearing a different bathing suit from yesterday, but the same red kerchief, which she kept on, and the effect, for some reason, was to make her seem even more naked.

We had now achieved a delicate point of etiquette. I could not allow this delicious moment to go on, could I? And yet, on the other hand, to reveal myself now would certainly startle the girl, quite possibly offend her. What to do? I stood there, with my brush full of paint and my heart full of a number of conflicting emotions, and I had just decided that the best thing would be to drop down below the window and begin to bang the screens about, to let Amelia know that I was there; I had determined, fully and absolutely to do this honourable thing, when suddenly a voice went off about six inches behind my left ear.

“I see. Painting from life, are we?”