Hole in One (13 page)

“Oh, oh,” I muttered, as we tramped over to the locker room to get our clubs.

“What's the matter?” asked Hanna.

“Check out Mrs. Post.”

“She looks perfectly normal to me.”

“Check the footwear.”

“What's wrong with the . . . oh, I see. Her golfing shoes don't match. She's got one brown one and one black one. Should I say something?”

“I think not.”

“But won't she be embarrassed, if she notices?”

“I don't think she'll notice. I think you'll find,” I went on, with my heart beginning to sink within me for the first time that day, “that our beloved boss and our esteemed leader have been into the Martinis already, and are perhaps six holes ahead of the field.”

“Boy,” said Hanna, “this should be quite a game.”

The trouble didn't start until the third hole, the one where Charlie Tinkelpaugh had finished out in such spectacular fashion. Holes one and two were played in a fairly civilized manner, after an initial pause while Hanna got to work with her camera and clicked a few group shots. The sun had decided to join us after all, and the entire golf course was giving off steam as the morning rain disappeared into water vapour. I should have spotted this for the omen it was. Mrs. Post, with the aid of her liquid lunch, was at the breezy, bonhomous stage, and chatted away to us mere serfs in democratic jollity. Her golf game, which is normally precise but uneventful, had been loosened up somewhat, and she holed out the 525-yard first with a respectable seven. Tommy got a seven, too, by very prudently translating one of his clean misses with a three wood into a practice swing. I was the only one who saw this; I had made a side trip over to the lake that runs down the south boundary of the first fairway, and was just emerging over the embankment when he swung and missed his ball, lying in a low hollow. He was screened from the others by the intervening golf cart.

“Tough luck, Tommy,” I said.

He glowered. “That was just a practice swing,” he said.

“Sure, and that drive of mine, which you saw heading for deep water, actually hit a tree by the shore and bounced back up,” I replied. “Here it is.”

I finished with a ten, counting the two strokes for the lost ball—I could silence Tommy, but what if Hanna found out?—and Klovack, deliberately foozling her putt, holed out in nine. By the rules, because the winners tied, we should all have put a buck into the kitty and carried on to the second hole, but Tommy and Mrs. Post decided that, as they had shared the victory, they would each drink two Martinis and put two bucks into the pool. Which they did.

Then there was a holdup at the second tee, while the lone foursome ahead of us teed off, so Tommy and Mrs. Post killed the time by having another Martini. When Hanna and I refused to join in, Mrs. Post became a trifled vexed. She had progressed from the bonhomous stage, and was verging on the quarrelsome.

“C'mon, Carlton,” she said, “have a drink.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Post, but I'd better not.”

“Pompous poop,” said Mrs. Post, advancing to the tee, and, as she unleashed her driver, she repeated, “poop, poop, poop, poop,” once for every time she swung and missed.

“Just practising,” she said. She was a trifle winded, and her last swing had jerked her hat down over her eyes. She yanked it back up and glared out at all of us from under it.

“Of course,” said Tommy.

Mrs. Post addressed the ball again, and, with one final “poop!” blasted it about two hundred yards, straight down the middle of the fairway.

“Practice makes perfect,” she said, and hiccoughed her way over to the golf cart to wait for Hanna, who was in charge of the transportation.

She had holed out in five, one over par, while the rest of us all got sixes. She was thus, by my reckoning, at least four long, strong Martinis to the good, not counting her warm-ups, by the time she tottered to the third tee, where, as usual, she had the honour.

“What the hell happened to the hole?” she inquired, peering down the short fairway. This, you will recall, was a 150-yard, par-three hole. There was a canvas sheet, about eight feet high, all around what had been the third green, and, we presumed, the cops were hard at work back there, unearthing clues. About twenty yards to the right of the canvas, a new hole had been created, marked by a flag, but with no green around it, just the usual scrub grass of our fairways.

“They've changed the hole for the police investigation,” I explained.

Mrs. Post seemed to take this as a personal affront.

“Bunch of assholes,” she said, and let fly with her five iron. Up, up, soared the ball, reaching for the sky. No, not the sky, the canvas. It disappeared behind the sheeting.

“Shit!” exclaimed Mrs. Post. “What now?”

“Play her where she lays,” chortled Tommy, who was also pretty well lubricated by now. “Lay her where she plays.”

“I will,” said Mrs. Post, and began lurching off down the fairway, while the rest of us teed off. I caught up to her—my own tee shot had gone about sixty yards left of the canvas, and was probably further from the green than it had been when I teed off—just as she was ducking under a bright ribbon of yellow police warning tape. “Keep Out,” it said. “Police.”

“Balls,” muttered Mrs. Post to herself, adding, “Lay her where she plays.”

She giggled and stepped through an opening where two pieces of canvas overlapped. I expected to see her emerge in seconds, on the arm of a cop, but nothing happened, so I decided to check on her. As I ducked through the canvas, Mrs. Post was standing, with her chipping iron grounded by her left hand, her right hand in the pocket of her rather short white shorts, and her gaze directed over to one corner of what had now become a roofless tent where sprawled the figures of a partially unclad couple, golf clubs forgotten, engaged upon another, and even more revered, sport. Probably just passing the idle moments until their tee-time came up, and risking grass stains amid the damp.

As I blundered through the canvas, gulped twice, and started to back out, Mrs. Post looked around and jerked a thumb over towards the recumbent couple.

“Hey,” she said. “You wanna do that?”

When I shook my head in nameless dread, she turned on the smile.

“Aw, c'mon,” she said.

I stood transfixed, saying nothing, and she shrugged.

“Pompous poop,” she said once more, and, addressing the ball, lofted it neatly greenwards over the canvas. The sporting couple paid no attention whatever.

As Mrs. Post emerged onto the fairway, she took my arm and leaned rather heavily into me, unleashing the joint fumes of gin, vermouth, and some expensive perfume.

“Don't know what you're missing,” she said.

To change the subject, I said, “Say, Mrs. Post, are you Ontario Corporation 13248994?”

She gave me a sharp glance. “You been spying on me?”

“Checking, Mrs. Post, just checking. As per your orders to Tommy Macklin.”

“Huh. I didn't give any orders to Tommy Macklin.”

“Gee, that's funny. He told me he wanted me to check into this story about the golf-course development and report to himself and yourself by memo. Haven't you been getting my memos?”

She began to chuckle. “Feels left out, I guess. Poor little pipsqueak.” She leaned into me again. “Just between you and me and the fencepost, yeah, I'm Corporation whatever-it-is, with a small group of associates. But I sure as hell didn't tell Tommy to sic you onto it. What have you been doing with my memos?”

“I turn everything in to Tommy.”

She chuckled again. “You got to admire the little prick. He isn't as dumb as he looks.” And she patted me on the bum and lurched off.

Hanna parred this hole—I could see that her competitive instincts were overcoming her prudence—but managed to spill most of her victory Martini.

The fourth hole is a dogleg; it takes a sharp jerk to the left about one hundred and fifty yards from the tee, whereas my ball, in the contrary fashion it has, took a sharp jerk to the right. I asked Hanna—straight down the fairway, as usual—to help me look for it in the woods that spring up any time they see a ball stamped “Property of C. Withers,” and as soon as we were by ourselves, I told her about the little drama on the third.

“You mean she made a pass at you?” asked Hanna.

“Uh-huh.”

“Boy, she really must be sozzled.”

“Thanks. I needed that.”

“No, I mean . . . you know what I mean. Well, never mind. I'll make sure she doesn't get you alone. Gosh, Carlton, they line up for you, don't they? You've got a young magnolia blossom panting after you, and now a rather elderly Post.”

“What do you think Tommy's playing at?” I asked.

“Oh, that's not hard. He must have decided to keep tabs on what's going on at the golf course by having you do the digging, and make it look legitimate by ringing in the boss, that's all.”

“That makes sense.”

“Of course it does. But what doesn't, and what you can explain to me if you wouldn't mind unhanding me long enough to find out, is what the heck is going on on the fifth fairway.”

I followed Hanna's pointing finger and, sure enough, the fifth fairway, running off at an angle from the fourth green, was covered with vehicles. Not golf carts, either. There was an ambulance, with its lights flashing, a bright yellow backhoe, and two Ontario Provincial Police cruisers. The foursome ahead of us were milling around on the tee. What did the rules say about driving off into a seething sea of policemen? They didn't seem anxious to find out what all the fuss was about, but I was. We crashed through the wet woods and onto the scene just as the ambulance pulled away. Sergeant Richard Moffitt, ace investigator, was getting into one of the cruisers when I caught up to him.

“Hey, what's going on?”

He looked up. “Oh, it's you. Bodies,” he said, and gestured.

There is a large rock bunker directly across the narrowest part of the fifth fairway, and anyone who wants to know what a golf ball sounds like when it strikes a boulder has only to stand by this while I am playing the hole. Right in the middle of this pile, the backhoe, pulled off now to one side, had been digging, and I could see where it had scooped out the stones for about ten feet along the bunker in a swath about six feet wide. There was a hollow back there—lately, I guessed, a grave.

“How many bodies?” I asked Sergeant Moffitt.

“Two,” he said. “And before you ask, no, we haven't any identification on them yet. They had been there for some time. Not much left of them, in fact.”

“You mean, this
was
an Indian burial ground after all?”

He gave me a look full of scorn. “Not unless your average Mohawk . . .”

“Ojibwa,” I said.

“Whatever . . . used to wear a Bulova watch.”

“How come you went looking for bodies there?” Hanna asked, about fifty yards ahead of me, as usual. “I thought you were investigating a murder at the third green.”

“Information received,” said Moffitt, shortly. Then he relented a little. “We got a phone call in connection with the Rose murder that led us to check the site of his researches.”

Hanna gave me a small nudge. “Who was the caller?”

“Some foreigner. It was a call on the Crime Stoppers line.”

“A helpful citizen.” Hanna nudged me again.

“Exactly.” He gave her a sharp glance. “You know anything about this?”

“No, just curious. But there's one aspect to all this that you might want to look into, officer.”

“What's that?”

“Whoever was trying to close down this golf course has now succeeded, haven't they?”

The Martini Classic had lasted exactly four holes, involved five foursomes, and netted about twenty dollars for charity. Mrs. Post, once she got it through her noggin that the game was actually over—for a time, she went around saying, “Just exactly what in the hell is going on, here?” and prodding people with her putter—declared herself overall winner, and wrote out a personal cheque for $500 to fatten up the take. The last I saw of her, she was being driven home by Tommy Macklin, and she stuck her head out the car window long enough to shout, “Hey, Carlton! Come on over later; we'll have some fun.”

“Thanks,” I shouted back. “Look for Hanna and me about ten o'clock.”

She made a rude gesture.

“It's a good thing you're fired,” said Hanna, “or she'd fire you again.”

“Why should she fire me? What did I do wrong?”

“Tell it to twenty generations of women employees,” said Hanna. “Tomorrow morning, she's going to remember making an ass of herself, and she's going to blame you.”

Joe Herkimer, who had been skulking in the clubhouse lounge, his invariable practice during the Martini Classic, drove us back to Silver Falls.
Marchepas
, in that unaccountable way she has, had gone on strike again. Probably she reckoned that two trips on one day without breakdown was stretching things, and declined to venture a third.

We sat in his car in front of Hanna's apartment—I had been invited to dinner, which made up for a lot—and talked about the baffling developments of the day, without getting anywhere.

“I can't imagine Chuck Wilson ordering Duke out of town,” he said. “It's like something out of a B western.”

“Maybe it was just a joke,” I ventured.

“Peculiar sort of joke,” he replied. “I'd have thought Chuck would be hoping to use Duke for publicity. He said as much to me.”

Hanna spoke up, “Maybe you'd better do some checking into where Wilson was last Wednesday morning, when George Rose got killed.”

“I don't have to; I already know.”

“Where was he?”

“He was taking part in a band council meeting, according to the chief. It was a breakfast meeting, one of the horrible habits we're beginning to borrow from the white side, on the subject of the alleged burial grounds, and it lasted for about two hours.”

“Does that rule him out?”

“I'm pretty sure it does. The
Star
piece said the autopsy placed the death somewhere between seven and nine in the morning, which is just about the exact time of the council meeting.”

“Could he have been working with someone else, who looks after the rough stuff?”

“Oh, I guess so. What I can't see him, or anyone from the Circle Lake Band, doing, is carrying on a long campaign of sabotage against the golf course, or working out that time-delay thing that killed poor old Charlie. It just isn't an Indian sort of thing to do.”

“Boy,” I said, “you're beginning to sound like Tommy Macklin. What's an Indian sort of thing to do?”

“I put it badly, but you know what I mean. If you feel so strongly about tribal customs and sacred sites, and all that sort of thing, that you're willing to murder for them, you're not going to get into a lot of crap like sticking laxatives in the well, are you? It doesn't make any psychological sense. The Rose killing, with the tomahawk and the banner, sure; that's just combining a modern message with an ancient one. Wilson might go along with something like that. But I swear he wouldn't pull anything like the blast that killed Charlie Tinkelpaugh. And I can't imagine how he would be connected to today's batch of corpses.”

Hanna looked at me. I looked at her.

“You tell him,” I said.

“You found it out; you tell him.”

So I told him about the Far Lake robbery, and the possibility that Wilson might have had a strong motive for killing either Charlie Tinkelpaugh—an argument over shares in the loot—or Dr. Rose—because he found the bank pouch.

“I flatly refuse to believe that Charlie Tinkelpaugh had anything to do with a bank robbery. I've given the man golf lessons and watched him go around the course. He would never think of cheating.”

Hanna commented, “From which you deduce that he would never arrange a bank holdup at his own branch?”

“Well, I wouldn't go that far, but I would say that someone who is as scrupulously honest at golf as old Charlie was would be an unlikely suspect for anything crooked.”

Hanna pointed her finger at me. “Using that logic, here is your killer right here.”

“Very amusing, Klovack,” I said, “but we are losing sight of the main issue, which is that Chuck Wilson is not what he seems, even if he has an alibi for the Rose killing. Hell, he may not even be an Ojibwa.”

“Oh, he's Ojibwa, all right. When he turned up here, he would have had to prove that he was a status Indian before he was admitted to the band council. You know,” Joe added, “it's perfectly possible that he told the exact truth about what happened during the robbery at the Far Lake bank.”

“Then why did he change his name?”

“Because he knew that most people, like you two, would take one look at him, register the fact that he was an Indian, and conclude that he was a crook, even though nothing was ever proved against him. The bank probably fired him as soon as they could, and he probably knew that any job he applied for using his real name would disappear. God knows, it's hard enough for a native Canadian to get work as it is, especially one who is getting on in years, without carrying around something like that.”

There was a rather embarrassed silence in the car.

“I think I feel a bit cheesy. Do you feel cheesy, Hanna?”

She nodded.

“Never mind,” said Joe. “Look at the bright side. Maybe he is a crook and a murderer. The fact that he's of the first nation doesn't make him any more innocent than it makes him guilty. Well, out of my car, you two. Darlene will be wondering what became of me.”

We got out of the car and went into Hanna's apartment. At her suggestion, I put in phone calls to the deputy reeve and all three of the village councillors, but got nothing but a series of empty rings and, in the case of Freddy Tomkins, the deputy reeve, a recording inviting me to leave a message. I asked him to call me at Hanna's, which would make it necessary, I explained to her, for me to stay the night.

“Nice try, Withers,” is all she said.

What with one thing and another, it was well after midnight when the gabby representative of Friendly Cabs—Silver Lake's Congenial Cab Company—deposited me in front of my darkened Third Street abode back in Bosky Dell. On top of the other warm memories of that evening, I could count the distinct thrill it gave me to pay off the cabbie with part of the twenty bucks I had swiped from Peter Duke that morning. Was it only that morning? It seemed eons ago.

Mrs. Golden was still up; I could see the light on in her living room. She was watching the late-night movie, no doubt, and scoffing popcorn. I decided to drop in and tell her not to pay across that five bucks from her bet with Marianne Huntingdon, but I didn't get a chance. I banged on the door, her porch light came on, she gave me one look and shouted, “I win my bet!”

“You do,” I said, stepping in and ducking through the plants that she always has slung on hooks about her living room—she talks to her plants, by the way, so they must, in consequence, be the best-informed asparagus ferns and philodendrons in the county. “How did you know?”

“My God, Carlton, you're glowing with it,” she said.

Well, maybe I was. Why not?

We chewed a companionable bowl of popcorn together, and watched the tail end of a movie in which a giant monster, for reasons that were never clear—perhaps he was merely hungry, poor fellow—ate about half of the city of Tokyo, before catching an atomic bomb in the midriff and signing off. Over the obligatory snack afterwards—grilled-cheese sandwiches—I asked Emma if she knew what had become of the village councillors. I told her about putting in phone calls to all of them, in vain.

“Wasn't Freddy Tomkins, the deputy reeve, due at your place for tea the other day?”

“He was, but he never showed.”

“Where did he get to, do you know?”

“Oh, I guess he went where the councillors went.”

“Which is?”

“Sylvia Post's yacht.” She chuckled. “Henrietta Tomkins told me, she was so excited about it. The entire council, with their wives, were invited to take a cruise, all expenses paid, on Sylvia Post's yacht. Around the Caribbean, for ten days. She even came up with airplane tickets to Miami.”

“She got them out of the way until this development hassle is cleared up.”

“I guess so. She's a pretty shrewd lady.”

“She's a pretty ladylike shrew.”

“Does it matter?”

“Oh, I imagine it matters, or she wouldn't have done it. It must have something to do with the trusteeship of the golf course.”

“Carlton, don't you know anything?”

“Why? What do you mean?”

“The trustees for the golf course: they're the three members of the council and the reeve. Well, now the deputy reeve. That's what it said in old John Flannery's will. Shoot, I thought everybody knew that.”

“I didn't. How come you do?”

“Harry was interested in that kind of stuff. He had a copy of the Flannery will for that history of the village he was always going to write. It's probably still around somewhere.”

Harry, the late Mr. Golden, had been gathered to the bosom of Abraham some years before. He was, as advertised, an amateur historian and collector of odd items. Any odd items. A regular packrat. I once saw him haul the broken wheel that had come from a deceased industrial wheelbarrow of my father's out of our garbage and lug it off home, so I asked him what he hoped to do with it.

“Well, I'll tell you, Carlton,” he had said. “If somebody should happen to give me a wheelbarrow without a wheel, all I have to do is fix this baby up, and I'll be in business.”

Yes, we could rest assured that, if the late Harry Golden had been given a copy of the Flannery will, he had not chucked it out.

“Could you find this copy of the will, Emma?”

“I imagine so. Why? Is it important?”

“It could be, if it reads the way you say it reads.”

It did. Emma wanted to look for it the next day, but I kidded, bullied, and chivvied her into getting after it right then, and it only took her about twenty minutes. It was in a box labelled, simply, “Village Stuff'—I said Harry was an amateur—in an envelope that said “Important Stuff.” It was marked, “Certified Copy,” which Emma said meant it wasn't done on a copying machine, because there were no such things when this document was created, but was photostatted in a notary public's office. It even had a seal in the corner.

The will was pretty straightforward and written in clear English, which probably meant that Sir John, a shrewd old bird, hadn't let a lawyer within fifty feet of it. It set forth the bequest to the village, in perpetuity, of both the church and the golf course, and set down the old boy's request that they be kept “as unchanged as possible, for future generations.” The church was to be managed by the church committee, under the guidance of the minister, but the golf course, lacking celestial protection, was more directly governed. “To oversee the operations of the golf course, and to take whatever steps may become necessary in a world we can't even visualize today, I hereby appoint as trustees of this arrangement, the serving councillors and reeve of the village of Bosky Dell. They must take whatever action they see fit to meet future requirements, by a straight majority vote, but,” it said, finishing with a typical Flannery touch, “bearing in mind that if they violate my clearly stated intentions, I will find some way to punish them, even from the other side of the grave.”

“Well, does it help?”

“I don't know,” I told Emma. “I don't have enough legal knowledge to form an opinion. It might, though, depending on . . . oh, hell!”

“Why ‘oh, hell'?”

“Because the importance of the Flannery will probably depends on the answer to a question I should have answered at least twenty-four hours ago, but I completely forgot about it.”

“And what is the question?”

“Who are Mrs. Post's partners in Ontario Corporation Number 13248994?”