27

 

 

Oswald prattled on for about thirty minutes. He went over the tee sheets for the day, talking about the A-level groups that would be playing in the afternoon. The PGA of America sets its tournament pairings like any other professional golf tournament: the better players are placed in hierarchical groups and paired together. Former PGA Championship winners, other major tournament winners, multiple PGA Tour winners…all are tossed in the A-group. This puts the high achievers in the same groups, which the fans like, and the A-group players tend to get better tee times. Mid-to-late morning on Thursday, early afternoon times on Friday. Or vice versa. The others, the hopefuls and the also-rans, like the thirty or forty PGA of America club professionals in the field at this tournament, get assigned to early or late tee times. The dew sweepers, they call them.

So Ben went over the A-listers we would be covering that afternoon and tossed out some informational and biographical tidbits for the announcers to keep in mind. Most of which we all knew about, of course, but your executive producer’s gotta produce, so we just sat there and listened.

Once that was done, there wasn’t much left to say. It was day two of a golf tournament, no matter if it was the PGA or the East Jesus Open. The cameras were still the same, the audio was ready, the chyron was working, the ads were in place. All we needed were the golfers to go out and make their shots, and the early groups were already hard at it.

Oswald finally looked at his watch.

“OK, that’s all I got,” he said. “Get some lunch, be in place at one thirty. On air at two sharp. Questions?”

There were none. Ben nodded and we all got up.

Billy Joe Bosworth met me at the door. He looked like death warmed over: his eyes were bloodshot and his face drawn.

“You look like shit,” I said. “Late night?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, his voice phlegmy. “Very late.”

“I didn’t see you in the lounge,” I said. “Where’d you go?”

He sighed. It was a deep, heartfelt sigh that I recognized as that which comes from a man deeply hung over.

“Went into the city,” he said. “Hit a few clubs.”

“A few?” I said, smiling.

“OK, I lost count after four,” he said. “It’s a big fuckin’ town. Uptown, downtown, the Village. Lotta places.”

“Meet anyone nice?” I asked.

“They’re all nice after a few cocktails,” he said. “But don’t tell Sheila.”

“Lips are sealed,” I told him. “What time did you get back?”

“I dunno,” he said. “What time is it now?”

I laughed.

“You need a long hot shower and about a gallon of coffee,” I said.

“I need a head transplant,” he said. “But I’ll try the shower thing first.”

He waved a weak hand at me and went off to find his room.

I caught the shuttle bus down to the Gold Club. The medieval jousting tournament was in full swing, pennants flapping in a nice breeze off the river, sunshine pounding down, crowds of people milling hither and yon. All that was missing was the sound of heavy hoof beats and the splintering of lances against armor.

I called Delbert Conner down in Savannah.

“Mister Hacker,” he said when I got him on the line. “What a pleasant surprise. Who’s winning the PGA?”

“Nobody yet,” I said. “You’ll have to watch IBS to find out.”

“Which I intend to,” he said. “After I take my boat out for a spin in the morning.”

“Listen,” I said. “Parker Long called in to the control booth when his headphones began to bother him, right?”

“He did,” Conner agreed.

“And Tech sent someone out to help him,” I said.

“They did,” he said.

“Who’d they send out?”

“Ahh, let me see,” he said. “I don’t remember.” I could hear him flipping through some pages, probably from his three-ring binder of a homicide book. “Yeah, here it is,” he said. “Sheila Dunleavy. She told us she replaced some kind of fuse on his audio relay. Said she was up there with him for less than five minutes.”

“And he was alive when she left?”

“Gee, Mister Hacker,” Conner said, “I think she would have remembered and mentioned it if he was dead as a mackerel.”

I was silent. Not what I was expecting to hear.

“Anything else I can do for you on this fine morning?” Conner said. “I mean, I got nothing else to do, no crimes what need solving, while I just sit here and listen to the sound of you breathing.”

“So you think Sheila was the last person to see Parker alive?” I said.

“We have no record of anyone else going up to his booth until you did,” he said. There was a slight pause. “But that doesn’t mean that somebody didn’t.”

“I take it you checked out Sheila pretty good,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” Conner said with a soft chuckle. “Would you like a list of all her boyfriends since high school?”

“Not really,” I said. “I take it you’ve found nothing that connects her to either Parker or Arnie Wasserman.”

“Nothing that makes me think she’s the one,” he said.

“How come every time I talk to you I feel deeper in the dark?” I said.

“It’s one of my many fine qualities,” he said. “That, and my years of experience as a dedicated public servant.”

“I knew it was something,” I said, and rang off.

I set off in search of Sheila Dunleavy. I had seen her around, of course, had nodded at her pleasantly, but we had never spoken. I went down to Television City and entered the dark recesses of the Tech department’s semi trailer. I made my way to the back, where the workbench stretched across the trailer’s width. Benny Young, the third member of the Tech crew, was working on some piece of equipment with a screwdriver and pair of needle-nose pliers.

“I’m looking for Sheila,” I said. “You seen her around?”

Benny nodded, not looking up from his project.

“She’s up on eight tee,” he said. “FlitePath camera was jostled by someone. Damn things are delicate as fuck. She went up to do a reset.”

I nodded. I had learned from Shooter that the cameras they now use on almost every tee, the ones that track and show the path through the air of a tee shot, were fussy and delicate machines. Once you get them in place, aimed to show a lot of sky above the player’s head so the path of the ball’s flight will stand out, they have to be calibrated so the internal sensor can focus on the ball and the connected computer will calculate and display the ball’s flight path once it is struck and sent down the fairway. And if a fan or an official or a caddie happens to brush up against the camera unit, the sensor and the high-speed computers that do all the millions of calculations won’t work anymore. And then someone like like Sheila has to go manually recalibrate. The network tries to install the machines on poles or tripods that are protected and kept away from people, but at a golf tournament, anything can happen and often does.

“She coming back here when she’s done?” I asked Benny.

He shrugged. “Dunno,” he said. “Depends on what manner of shit happens next. She might come back here, or she might get a call to go over to twelve or down to fifteen. You want me to call her?”

“How does she get called?” I asked.

Benny reached up and pulled a small black pod out of his left ear. He showed it to me.

“Digital walkie-talkie,” he said. “We got our own frequency. One of the directors in the control room calls…we go.”

I looked at it. “You all got these?” I said. “You and Sheila?”

“And Digby,” Benny said. He finished screwing in the last machine screw he was working on and flipped the black electronic box over, right side up. He plugged in a black cord to the back and flipped a switch on the side to the up position. Three green lights on the front of whatever the box was came on and began to blink. Benny made a satisfied sound.

“So anytime you get a call to go fix something, you all three hear the message?” I said.

Benny nodded. “Yup,” he said. “Whichever one of us is free responds and off we go. Sometimes, we can go hours between trouble calls. Other times, it’s like every ten minutes.”

“Do you remember when Parker Long called in about his headphone problem down in Savannah?” I asked.

He nodded. “Sure,” he said. “We all heard that. I was here in the truck. I think Digby was coming back from something he had been fixing out on ten. Sheila was closest and she took the call.”

“They said she replaced a fuse or something,” I said.

Benny shrugged. “I don’t know what she did,” he said. “I was in here, packing up for the day. It was late in the broadcast when Parker called in. Sheila came back about fifteen minutes later. Digby rolled in about ten minutes after that.”

He looked at me.

“How come you’re asking all this stuff?” he said. “The cops down in Savannah went over it all with us the next day. Told ‘em the same thing I just told you.”

“I’m just trying to figure out how Parker could have gotten electrocuted that afternoon,” I said. “Nobody’s been able to explain it.”

“Explain what?”

The voice came from behind me. I turned around and saw Digby Allen standing there. He had a big black toolcase over one shoulder and was carrying a rolled length of black cable in one hand. He was staring at me with a kind of smirky look on his face.

“Oh, hi Digby,” I said. “I was just asking Benny here about the afternoon when Parker Long was killed. Trying to put some of the pieces together.”

“Why?” Digby asked. “You’re not a cop. What do you care?”

“Geez, Digs,” Benny Young spoke up. “Parker was one of us. We all want to know what the hell happened.”

Digby shrugged, dumped his tool kit on the bench and turned away to stow the rolled up cable in a drawer behind him.

“I say let the cops try and figure it out,” he said. “Not Hacker’s job to solve the crime.”

“You’re not curious?” I said.

He shrugged again.

“I guess not,” he said. “I mean, I’m sorry the guy’s dead and all. But they’ll figure it out sooner or later. I got work to do.”

He turned on his heel and left. I heard his footfalls as he walked down the dark central aisle of the trailer and heard the door slam as he went out.

Benny looked at me and shrugged.

“That was the full Digby,” he said. “It’s why some people think he’s cracked in the head.”

“Do you?”

He laughed. “Naw,” he said. “He can be a large dick, no question about it. But that’s just Digby. Kinda weird, much of the time. You get used to it.”

I looked at my watch. It was time to go. I had a golf tournament to broadcast.