Hole in One (2 page)

“Ernie, what the hell are you talking about?”

Ernie gestured over his left shoulder, towards the golf course. There, in the middle of the third green, was a kind of giant gopher hole, an eruption of rocks and earth and grass, with, here and there, bits of cloth, which were apparently pieces of some of the victim's clothing. The rest of the body had been removed, thank heavens, by ambulance.

I gulped several times. “Golly,” I said, “there must have been some sort of explosion, huh?”

Hanna leaned forward confidentially, and prodded Ernie. “The steel-trap mind,” she explained. “Never misses a thing.”

I ignored this. “Who was the . . . uh . . . deceased?”

“Old Charlie Tinkelpaugh,” said Ernie, and took off his hat—whether out of respect, or because it was hot, I don't know.

“Aw, no, not Charlie,” I said. “Charlie,” I told Hanna, “was a nice old boy, even if he did eat paper.”

“He ate paper?”

I nodded. “Uh-huh, He used to work in a bank, worked there all his life and, for some reason, probably boredom, he got into the habit of picking up a piece of paper from one of those piles they have sitting around in all the banks, for withdrawals or whatever, and he would crumple it up and eat it. Said he was never really conscious of doing it; he would be sitting there, thinking about mortgages or long-term debentures or whatever it is bankers think about, and he would look down and the paper would be gone. He was a nice man.”

“He was a nice man because he ate paper, or despite it?”

“He was a nice man, period. When I was a kid, I used to deliver the newspaper to the Tinkelpaugh cottage in the summertime, and Charlie would always give me a big tip on Saturday, when I came around on my bike to collect.”

“He probably thought of you as Meals on Wheels.”

Heartless. Women have no finer feelings, which is another reason among many that the sex should be suppressed.

Hanna turned to Ernie. “What happened?”

Ernie looked back down at his notes.

“On the 14th instant—today—the Subject, Mr. Thomas Heathcliffe Macklin, of 24 Lake Street, Silver Falls . . .”

Well, cutting out all the necessary gibberish, this is what happened: Tommy Macklin, balked of his ambition to be the first golfer of the day off the first tee, because he had chosen instead to waste his time chewing out a valued employee, arrived at the starting point, only to discover that there was a threesome in ahead of him: Charlie Tinkelpaugh, Sam Biddlemyer, and Wayland Forsyth. These old duffers, constant cronies, make up a small portion of the retired population at Bosky Dell, people who let out a glad Yahoo when they hit the age of sixty-five, sell their houses in the city—actually Charlie retired from a town nearby, called Coboconk, but most of our retirees come from Toronto—and rush to the lake to spend the rest of their lives on golf and other forms of lying. These three belonged to the slow-and-deliberate school of play. They always got in a daily round of golf during the season, and could be observed every morning strolling amiably down the course, happily hacking away and calling out to each other, while, behind them, other and swifter golfers bunched up, strained at the leash, and swore. Every now and then, the Trio con Brio, as they were known locally, would recollect the finer points of golfing etiquette and wave somebody on through, but most of the time they stifled passage as effectively as a ten-pin ball in the toilet bowl.

When Tommy unlimbered his clubs, they were most of the way down the first fairway, and so, by the time they hit the third, Tommy was having to delay every stroke until the Trio con Brio ambled out of the way. Tommy normally plays alone, for the good reason that no one who has played with the bad-tempered little bozo once will repeat the performance.

To understand what happened next, you need to know that the first is a long, par-five hole, the second a par four, and the third a short par three, and that two and three are parallel to one. Thus, by the time you have finished three, you are back just about where you started on the first tee, only about a hundred yards downwind, and, if you are me, twenty-seven strokes over par already. If you want to, you can say to hell with it right there, and stalk back to the clubhouse, flinging your clubs away as you go.

The Trio con Brio was milling around on the green at three, while Tommy was on the tee. Charlie's ball was just off the edge, so they hadn't pulled the pin yet, but the others were well up towards the hole. They were mellow and relaxed, exchanging humorous jibes, checking out worm-casts, and all that important stuff, while Tommy was growing ever more enraged on the tee, 150 yards back. Finally, he decided he could bear it no more, and let fly with his five iron. You might think this impolite—which it was—and dangerous—which it wasn't. Not under normal circumstances. Indeed, if you were looking for a safe haven during one of Tommy's tee shots, you couldn't, normally, pick a better spot than the green. This time, however, some concatenation of circumstances—a crick in his neck, a favourable arrangement of the planets, who knows?—caused the little pipsqueak to baff the ball exactly as it ought to be baffed. It rose, soared, dropped on the third green, and trickled into the hole.

Charlie Tinkelpaugh looked up and said, “What on earth was that?”

“A ball, Charlie. That was a ball.”

“Well, it wasn't mine. Was it yours, Sam?”

“No, it wasn't mine. Was it yours, Wayland?”

“No, it wasn't mine. Are you sure it wasn't yours, Charlie?”

The boys might have gone on in this fashion for five minutes, exploring the wonder of it all, except that they were interrupted by Tommy galloping down the pitch, waving his club and carolling his joy.

“A hole in one!” he shouted. “I got a frigging hole in one!”

“Bless my soul,” said Charlie Tinkelpaugh. “I believe you did.”

And the old boy tottered over to the pin and lifted it.

“There's a ball in there, all right.”

“Of course there's a ball in there,” said Tommy. “It's a Blue Goose. My Blue Goose. Gimme.”

And he started across the green.

Charlie bent over with the pin in one hand and retrieved the ball with the other. Then he peered back into the hole. He looked up and said to Wayland, who was still fooling about with his ball on the edge of the green, “Isn't that the darndest thing?”

“What is, Charlie?” said Sam, from over on the other edge of the green. “What's the darndest thing?”

“Well,” said Charlie, “there seems to be . . .”

But that's all he said, because, as he bent back over to check out whatever had caught his eye, there was an explosion. Charlie is—was—built on the solid side, and his 240 pounds absorbed most of the blast. Tommy Macklin, closing in from ten feet away, was knocked flat, showing that the gods had the right idea, even if they didn't finish the job. He and Sam and Wayland, further off, were shaken up, but Charlie went forthwith to take his place among the morning stars. As the blast echoed away across the lake, Tommy said—and this will let you know what kind of a man he is—“You guys are witnesses that I got a hole in one before . . . this . . . happened.”

“Lord love a duck,” is all Wayland said, and Sam burst into tears.

When the cops arrived, they found bits of an explosive device scattered around the green, along with traces of a plastic explosive, which had apparently been triggered either by the ball going into the hole and setting off a time-delayed fuse or the pin being lifted, or however these things are managed. So that seemed to let Tommy out as a deliberate killer. Any murder plan that depended on Tommy getting a golf ball into the hole from some distance away could be dismissed from serious consideration. As far as the cops were concerned, he was, along with the gadget in the cup, merely a device used to get the job done.

By the time I had wormed all this out of Ernie White, two detectives from the Ontario Provincial Police detachment outside Silver Falls had arrived. After a lot more jabber, they told Tommy he was not under arrest, and he could go home, although he should keep himself available for questioning. He was pretty unsteady on his pins and longing—I can read the man like a book—for about four snifters out of the office scotch to restore him to anything like human shape.

“I'm going to leave my car here,” he growled. “Klovack, you can drive me back to the office.”

“I can,” said the impudent shrimp, “but I won't.”

“Why not?”

“You just fired Withers.”

“What the hell do you care? Last I heard, you were describing him as an advanced form of social disease.”

“It's a matter of principle,” said Hanna. “We're thinking of starting a union in the office”—Tommy blanched and tottered, harder hit, probably, than by anything that had happened so far that day—“and Withers has been nominated chapel chairman. You've got to rehire him.”

“Well, I won't.” And he turned and started off for his own car, but his legs buckled, and, as I grabbed him under the arms and stood him on his feet, he grumbled, “Withers, you fathead, you're hired again.”

“Gee, thanks, boss,” I said.

So we rode back into Silver Falls
en masse
. A silent
en masse
. Tommy was still shaken up by the explosion, Hanna was thoughtful—probably working up a cockamamie theory to fit the crime—and I was a seething cauldron of mixed emotions. On the one hand, the scene on the golf course had been pretty upsetting. I had covered the police beat for a time when I worked for the
Toronto Star
, but I never learned to snarl out of the corner of my mouth or hop lightly over corpses like the police reporters you see on TV. In fact, I was taken off the beat when I fainted during a visit to the city morgue for a feature on how the authorities handle John Doe crime victims, the ones who have come to a sticky end, but have not been identified. Today's victim was not a John Doe, but Charlie, a man I knew and liked. We shared a passion for licorice jujubes, and I once caught him, in the bulk-food section of the local IGA, adroitly scooping all the other colours aside to beef up the licorice intake in his purchase. I do the same thing myself; these things form a bond.

On the other hand, the Klovack character had lied to restore me to the work force. Didn't that mean something? The stuff about forming a union was codswallop, of course, codswallop of the warmest and runniest variety; ergo, she had made it up and used it, with her characteristic brutal directness, to save my bacon. That did mean something.

I learned what it meant when we got back to town and went up to the office, and I followed Hanna into the darkroom and tried out the old interlocking grip on her.

“Hands off, Withers,” she said, adding, “you creep.”

These were not the accents of love.

“Prithee, explain, then, your actions at the golf course,” I said. Or at least, that is what I meant to say. What I actually said was “Bu-bu-bu-but.”

“Why did I get you your job back?”

I nodded, bereft of speech.

“Because this is a genuine murder case, Carlton, and I need your help.”

“You're not going to try to solve it?”

“No, no, of course not. But I am going to cover it.”

“Not in the
Lancer
, you're not.”

“True. I've been here long enough now to understand that. But I still have a lot of contacts in Toronto, and the Toronto media are going to love this. I should do well out of freelancing the pictures, but I need some help with the story stuff.”

“Story stuff. By story stuff, I gather you mean the digging, the investigating, the tireless research, the writing, the reporting.”

“Yeah, story stuff.”

“And you think that, just because you got me my job back, I'll do whatever you say.”

“Something like that, yeah.” And she gave me the glare, the one that goes through me just about the third buttonhole and then, for some unaccountable reason, warms up the innards on its way out the far side.

“Right,” I said. “So you are asking for my cooperation in this matter on a strictly professional basis?”

“Right,” she said. “And you can keep your big, fat hands to yourself.”

“Certainly, Miss Klovack. You will never have cause to complain on that account again.” I added, “The Witherses do not put their hands where they are not wanted.”

Not strictly true, this last, but I threw it in for the aloof sound of it, shrewdly calculating that Hanna would never happen to bring the matter up with Edna Watson, or Penelope Ransome, or any of the other local females who have had occasion, over the years, to note down evidence to the contrary.

“Who are we going to sell the story to?” I wanted to know.

“The
Star
, most likely.” Like myself, though not at the same time, Hanna had once worked for the
Toronto Star
. In fact, she had been a news photographer there until recently, when she came to work for the Silver Falls
Lancer
, escaping an unhappy personal affair. “But maybe one of the television outlets will pay better. I'll make a few phone calls, and we'll see.”

So I went whistling back to my desk to finish off Ramblin' John, content that at least Hanna and I would be working together again on a project, even if, as I strongly suspected, we got no closer, ever, to the real story behind the death of Charlie Tinkelpaugh.

We move forward, with the air of suspense growing all the time, I trust, to a point at about eleven p.m. that evening. I had gone to bed early, after a stint of watching what the closest TV station, over in Barrie, chooses to call “Classic Television,” to wit, reruns of
I Love Lucy
,
Bonanza
, and
Leave It to Beaver
. Watching this stuff takes its toll, and I was weary but unable to sleep. Birds, the sensible fellows, were all bedded down in their wee little nests, except for an owl who was chewing on something indescribable in the oak tree outside my bedroom window. A soft autumn breeze was soughing in the pines along Third Street. Down at the lake, which was rippling gently in the mellow, scented air, Old Mr. Moon was beaming away fit to bust, and up at the playground on Forest Road, Stephanie Podmeyer, the brazen hussy, was letting Billy Butterfield think she was about to lean back and relax along the length of the teeter-totter, thus placing him in a strategically advantageous position, when in fact all she was going to do was wait until he eased his weight off his end preparatory to making a move on her, and then she was going to bang her end down and laugh like a hyena. Then she was going to trot off and tell the other girls what a sap Billy looked. In short, a night of magic and moonbeams, as presented in Harlequin Romances, in which men are men and women are the cruel buggers we all know them to be.

Old Mr. Moon, once he got finished horsing around down at the lake, came up and peered in the back, or bedroom, window of the Withers residence on Third Street, and then, in all probability, recoiled in horror. When I inherited the place from my parents, I resolved to keep it in the tidy manner favoured by my mother, but what with one thing and another, my standards have slipped somewhat. Thus, when the telephone rang at 11:06, C. Withers, who had been tossing and turning upon a fretful pillow—what exactly, did “Hands off, you creep” mean?—leapt from the bed, came a purler over a case of canned spaghetti bought on sale at the IGA and stored in the middle of the bedroom rug (where else?) and began to grope, frantically, among the debris on the couch. Finally, I spotted the light on my telephone-answering machine, installed and paid for by the
Lancer
so Tommy can give me hell even when I'm not here, and followed the cord down through the flotsam and jetsam to the phone.

“The Withers residence. C. Withers at your service.”

“Well, where the heck have you been, C. Withers? You let the phone ring sixteen times. Dead to the world, I guess.”

“It is customary, when night falls, to allow sleep to knit up the ravell'd sleeve of care, Miss Klovack.”

“Isn't it kind of early for your sleeve to come unravelled? I thought you always stayed up to watch the dirty movies.”

“Is that why you called? To check on my viewing habits?”

“No, actually, the reason I called is that I've been thinking about this thing at the golf course.”

“Yes, well, I've been meaning to talk to you about that. I didn't behave very well.”

“I know you didn't, you creep, but that isn't what I'm talking about. I was thinking about the murder.”

“Good for you, Klovack. It shows the right spirit. And what is the result of your thinking?”

“I think we should go out and tackle what's-her-name, the Martin woman.”

“You mean Winifred?”

“That's the one. The green-fees taker. The one who looks at you as if she's not sure how you got past the admittance committee, and wonders where that bad smell could be coming from. She must have some idea why people are suddenly planting bombs around the golf course.”

“I told you this afternoon that the cops interviewed her, and she said she had no idea whatever. She thought it must be the Irish Republican Army or somebody.”

“The IRA in southern Ontario?”

“Well, we had the Fenians in southern Ontario.”

“And who in the Sam Hill are the Fenians?”

“Klovack, your ignorance is a standing wonder to me. The Fenians were Irish nationalists who ran around making things unpleasant for the British in the nineteenth century, and conducted a series of raids across the U.S. border into, yes, southern Ontario.”

“You know something, Carlton? This place reminds me more and more of life back in the old Ukraine.”

Then she said something in Ukrainian, which I didn't get, of course, but which I'll bet was swearing. “Now you've made me forget where I was.”

“You were about to go and grill Winifred Martin. And the best of British luck to you.”

“You mean you won't come?”

“I mean I won't come.”

“Say, Carlton, did I ever tell you the Ukrainian for ‘creep'?”

“Oh, all right, I'll come, but not tomorrow. I have to go to the office.”

“You're going to the office on a Saturday? What for, to rifle the till?”

“That series I'm working on, ‘Bygone Days in Bosky Dell,' is supposed to be ready to go in a week, and I haven't even started it.”

“Start it Monday.”

Ordinarily, I'd have been happy to comply, but Hanna had to be kept in check, so I refused. “I am the slave of duty,” I told her.

“On second thought, who needs you? I'll go by myself.”

“Go with my blessings, child, but watch out for Art Martin.”

“Who is Art Martin?”

“Captain Martin, the ex-Air Canada pilot and head of the household. You won't have any trouble recognizing him. For one thing, he's the only male on the premises; for another, he'll probably make a grab at you.”

There was a pause. Klovack is well able to take care of herself in the presence of bumptious males, as I had reason to know; on the other hand, clocking Art Martin a sharp one across the bridge of the nose was probably not going to lead to a fruitful interview with his daughter.

“Sunday morning, then.”

“We don't receive visitors on Sunday mornings in Bosky Dell.”

“We do this Sunday. You call and set it up.” The phone went dead.