32

 

 

We dashed out the door to the hospitality space, ran down the stairs and headed out behind it. People were still fleeing the sounds of gunshots in various stages of panic, and I could hear the whoop-whoop of an approaching police car. There was a well-trodden swatch of grass where people walked going to and from the tee box to the green. Behind that was a long row of Port-A-Potties, probably twenty or more. The air was redolent with that delightful mixture of pine-scented disinfectant and ammonia seeping out from the collected gallons of urine in the tanks.

We did a quick scan up and down the length of the walkway. It was full of people, panicked and not so much. No sign of a fleeing Digby anywhere.

Behind the johnnies was a swath of woods: trees, underbrush, pine straw. I could see another fairway through the trees, about twenty yards away.

“C’mon,” I called to Boz and he followed me as I dashed through the woods. Once past the trees, there was a short uphill bank covered in thick rough and then we reached the fairway. I think it was the eleventh hole, but I didn’t stop to check. The tee box was about a hundred yards down to our left, and the fairway continued on to the right another hundred yards or so before turning left and heading up hill to the green, surrounded by bunkers and now in the shadows in the late afternoon.

And heading toward that hill, running in a kind of limping desperation, torn shirt flapping around as he moved, was Digby Allen. He was almost three hundred yards away, and getting further from us by the second.

I heard a motorized cart pull up with the squeaking of the brakes. I turned and looked and saw Willie McLeod, the Gold Club’s Canada goose hunter. Sitting next to him on the bench seat was Bullet, his border collie. Bullet’s head was cocked slightly and he looked at us with a what the hell? expression on his doggie face.

“Problem, gents?” Willie asked. “Heard on the squawkbox that there’s been shots fired.”

I pointed up the fairway at the figure of Digby Allen, who was struggling up the hill in front of the green.

“That’s the bad guy,” I said. “Can Bullet reel him in?”

“Ach, laddie, he was made for this,” Willie said with a nod. “Would help if the yonder lad was a sheep, but not to worry.”

He started to take off the dog’s lead.

“Wait,” I said. “This might help.”

I was still holding the torn shred from Digby’s shirt. I held it up to Bullet’s nose, rubbed it around for a few seconds.

Willie snapped his fingers, twice. Bullet jumped down off the bench seat and went into full attention mode, eyes locked on Willie, body tensed, quivering, ready for action. Willie pushed his hand forward and gave a short, sharp whistle.

The dog took off as if the starter’s pistol had fired for the 100 yard dash at the Olympics. We watched as Bullet tore up the fairway in a streak of black and white fur. It took him maybe ten seconds to cover the three hundred yards, and he caught Digby just as he reached the top of the slope at the front of the green.

Bullet nipped at Digby’s feet, trying to gnaw at his Achilles tendon. He didn’t succeed in actually biting him, but he did manage to trip him up, and Digby tumbled forward. The dog leaped on his back, barking and growling and jumping around in a frenzy. He had subdued his prey and he was not going to let it get away.

Digby seemed to give up. He curled himself into a fetal ball, covered his head with his hands and arms, and lay still.

We had jumped into Willie’s flatbed cart and motored up the fairway after the dog. We arrived at the green at about the same time as three or four uniformed police officers, who converged from several different directions. Guns drawn, they approached Digby slowly and waited until Willie whistled his dog to heel. Bullet obeyed reluctantly and came trotting back to the cart, looking pleased with himself. The cops moved in, put Digby in handcuffs and led him off towards the clubhouse.

Willie gave his dog a couple of pats on the head, then reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a dog bone. Bullet grabbed it in his teeth, jumped up onto the flatbed and, after three revolutions, lay down and began happily munching on it.

“You got a bottle of Scotch in that other pocket?” the Boz asked Willie. “Cause I’m thinking Hacker here could use a wee belt. Or three.”

 

It was several hours later when the IBS crew gathered in one of Conrad Gold’s meeting rooms in the big clubhouse on the hill. The sun had long since set, the people had finally been chased out of the hospitality tents and told to go home, the greenskeeper’s crew had done their night-time duties closing down the course, and the cops had spent a lot of time huddled with Digby Allen, who was now in the back of a state police car on his way back to the city to await arraignment.

Mary Jane and DJ were there, having caught one of the courtesy buses from the Cumberland Arms to the Gold club. I had called her and told her to come down, knowing I’d be tied up for a while in the aftermath.

Kelsey Jenkins had refused all offers for a visit to the local hospital to get checked out. She swore she wasn’t injured in any way, just freaked out when Digby had come up behind her and stuck a gun in her back. She had come up to Boz and me and gave each of us a big hug.

“You saved my life,” she said.

Feeling my wife’s eyes on me, I kept my hug short.

“For the love of God, Hacker,” Ben Oswald said. “What in the hell happened here today?”

Oswald had lost his outward appearance of command and control. He looked shaken, shrunk, completely drained.

“Digby found out that you and Arnie had plans to let him go,” I said. “He pretty much admitted that he’s bugged and eavesdropped on everyone here and back at IBS headquarters. That’s the problem with really top-notch tech guys—they know how to access a lot of private conversations.”

“How did killing Parker have anything to do with our plans for him?” Oswald said. He looked confused.

“I think it was a combination of audition and statement,” I said. “He was showing Arnie—and, by extension, you—that he had the ability to do whatever you wanted. In his slightly addled mind, he thought he would gain points with you by eliminating another problem you had: what to do about Parker Long.”

“Christ Almighty,” Ben said, “We weren’t trying to push Parker out the door. He and I had talked, and I knew he was ready to retire. Arnie and I had just talked about ways that would happen and what we’d do next. I liked Parker…hell, I even loved the guy in a way. How could that idiot Digby think we wanted Parker to be killed?”

“Well,” I said, “We’re talking about the mind of a psychopath, which is often very different than a normal mind. But I think Digby believed that after he’d told Arnie how he had solved his Parker problem that Arnie would be impressed, and maybe a little scared, and agree to keep Digby on. Digby was hoping Arnie would be appreciative, but if it turned out he wasn’t, Digby figured at the least, Arnie would be scared. Either way, Digby would get what he wanted.”

“Why didn’t Arnie call the cops right away?” Van Collins asked. “Somebody came to me and said he just killed Parker Long, or anyone else, I’d have him in handcuffs in ten seconds flat.”

“I don’t know,” I nodded at Van. “And we’ll probably never know. Maybe he thought Digby was just kidding. Maybe he didn’t believe Digby had it in him to kill somebody. Maybe he thought he could use this information against Digby somehow, use it to his, Arnie’s, benefit. From the little I know about Arnie Wasserman, any of those alternatives are possible, even the last. Arnie could be, I’m told, a little manipulative.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” Jimmy Williams said. “I don’t think anybody here trusted Arnie a lot. You could never be sure about that guy.”

There were several heads nodding around the table. Ben Oswald saw that and shook his own head.

“I can’t believe you people thought that way,” he said. “Arnie was good people. He was like a son to me.”

“Sorry, Ben,” Jimmy said. “From my point of view, he was the assistant to my boss. He was always writing shit down in his notebook. He also liked to crack the whip from time to time, remind us who was boss. Nope…I could work with the guy, but I never liked him all that much.”

Ben put his head in his hands. “I must be getting old,” he said. “Maybe it’s time for me to go.”

“Now Ben,” Kelsey said. “Don’t be maudlin. There’s always a chain of command in any organization. We all understood who was who and what was what. Like Jimmy said, Arnie was an OK guy. You just had to remember who he worked for.”

“Man, oh man,” Ben said.

“How did you figure out it was Digby?”Mary Jane piped in, DJ squirming around on her lap.

I smiled at them. “It took a while,” I admitted. “At first, it seemed obvious that someone, probably someone with a strong technological knowledge base, had electrocuted Parker with his own headphones. But then the forensic team down in Georgia reported that Parker’s headphones were fine, except for the loose wires or whatever was causing the static interference. That wasn’t what I expected. I was sure he had been fried with his own headphones. So it was back to square one.”

“Then Arnie got shot,” Mary Jane said. She knew how my brain worked.

“Yeah, that made me think entirely differently,” I said. “If the two deaths were connected, and I thought they were, I had to figure out why. The strongest connection between the two was actually you, Ben.”

“Me?” he sat upright, head thrown back in amazement. “You thought I killed them both?”

“No,” I said quickly. “I didn’t say you were the killer, I said you were the strongest connection between the two deaths. I knew you didn’t kill Parker Long—he was in his booth and you were in the control room doing the broadcast. I was sitting there watching you operate. And I figured the New York cops checked out everyone’s whereabouts on the night Arnie was killed, so I knew that they didn’t like you for that murder.”

“So?”

“So I started to think about other connections,” I said. “Who would benefit from Action A and Action B. Nobody didn’t like Parker Long, making the list of potential murder suspects very short. Everybody, as you heard here tonight, was a little suspicious of Arnie Wasserman. Maybe not enough to kill him, certainly, but at least there were possibilities.”

“So how did you put it together?”Mary Jane asked.

“Well, Kelsey and I talked with Parker’s widow,” I said. “And we learned that Parker was planning to retire at the end of this year, but that Arnie had threatened to move on him sooner. Parker and his agent got hold of Ben and put a stop to that, but it got me wondering about who else knew about that. Information is power. And who controls the information?”

“The tech guys,” Mary Jane said. “Tech guys is shorthand for information technology.”

“Exactly,” I said. “And that fit back into my original theory on Parker’s murder being a tech event. The electrified headphones. So I began thinking of the techies on staff. Right away, I thought about Digby, because he’s a little weird and because he was considered a genius with all the equipment you guys use. I mean, if you thought someone had jiggered around with a pair of headphones, figured out a way to turn them into a murder weapon…well, Digby Allen would be one of the first people you’d think had the smarts to do that. And, being Digby Allen, it wouldn’t be a tough sell to think he might do something like that.”

I paused, thinking.

“And I thought I had him,” I continued. “When I figured out how he had done it…the static phones would lead to a call to the tech department, Digby would run out to the booth, give Parker a new set of lethal headphones and, once he had killed himself plugging them in, Digby would be right there to switch the headphones back again and take the killing pair away.”

“But?”

“But then I found out that it wasn’t Digby who’d answered Parker’s call for help. It was Sheila,” I said. “That also surprised me. But she had just changed a fuse out or something. Then I got the warning note. That’s when I knew it was Digby.”

“How?” Kelsey asked this time.

“Because Sheila wasn’t there when I was asking about headphones and the service call in Savannah,” I said. “It was just Benny and Digby I was talking to. So when I got warned off, I knew it was either one of them. And I always liked Digby more. He’s got the outside-the-box brain that would come up with something elaborate and weird like this.”

“And what about that car bomb?” Van Collins said. “Did Digby do that, too?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That was a pure diversion, which is why it didn’t do much damage. He wanted people around here nervous and thinking about bombers. Gave him the space to sneak away. But then Boz and I accidentally showed up and interfered with his plan to use Kelsey to help him sneak down to Television City. He figured if the cops were looking for lone wolf, they might not notice a man and a woman strolling together. Especially with millions of others milling around.”

“So stopping in for a cold beer actually saved somebody’s life?” the Boz said, and he began to grin.

“You could say that,” I said.

“I think I just did,” the Boz said. “And to tell you the truth, I’m beginning to feel the need to save a few more. Like right now. I’m buying. Who’s in?”