When we got back from the beach there was an envelope stuck under my door. It was from the hotel manager, telling me politely that inasmuch as the Ladies Professional Golf Association had declined to honor the charges for my room, would I be so kind as to contact the front desk and make other arrangements. Screw you, too, I thought, and felt my stomach go sour.
I took a long shower and a longer nap. It was dark when I awoke. First thing I saw was that obsequious letter from the manager, and I decided what I needed more than anything in the world was a drink. I dressed casually – no socks – and went downstairs.
I stopped by the front desk and let them take an imprint of my newspaper’s credit card. I could almost feel a collective sigh of relief from the other side of the counter, although all I saw and heard were polite smiles. Loose ends make hoteliers very nervous, and until they have your credit card imprint on file in their hot little hands, you are a loose end.
I headed for my favorite bar off the main lobby. It was getting late and most of the other guests had already headed off to dinner somewhere. I felt like having a liquid meal instead, and ordered up a Scotch on the rocks. I surveyed the room and saw about a half-dozen other customers, talking quietly, heads together. And far off in the corner, all by his lonesome, sat Benton Bergmeister.
He was on a bender. At first glance, you couldn’t tell, but I’m an experienced bar watcher and I could see the signs. He was sitting too rigidly straight, for one. People drinking casually are relaxing. They cross their legs, lean on the table or bar, swing their feet. Their bodies are at ease. Benton looked like he was sitting on the end of a long, brass fireplace poker. He was sitting ramrod straight and his forearms formed a perfect ninety-degree angle to his upper arm as they rested symmetrically on the table. His legs were also carefully placed under the table as if he were posing for an artist. Serious, experienced drunks often look like this. They work so hard to present the appearance of sobriety, so no one will notice them, that they begin to look wooden and contrived. It is one of the signs.
Bergmeister also had two glasses in front of him, another giveaway. One was virtually empty, just ice cubes and a lemon peel. The other was untouched and full to the rim. The waitress had probably tried to take away the empty one when she had brought over the new drink, but he had stopped her, saying there was one sip left. People think drunks are messy and sloppy, but the serious ones are as precise as accountants. I knew that Bergmeister would carefully suck the last vestige of alcohol from the surface of each one of those leftover ice cubes, and then carefully pour the melted water into his new drink. Not a drop to be wasted. Only when the glass was completely empty of any discernable liquid would Benton allow the waitress to carry it away.
This also allowed the drinker to expand the time between drinks so that, again, he could present to the watching world the appearance of pacing his drinking. Only the emotionally distraught drinker will slam down shots one after the other, not caring what people might think. The studious drunk will always take his sweet time making his way into oblivion.
I knew all these secrets after years of experience watching some of Boston’s best drunks. I knew, therefore, as I grabbed my drink and headed over to his corner table, that when I sat down he would first be startled, then perplexed as he tried to recognize and place my face. Then he would be overly effusive in greeting me to try and cover up that alcohol-haze-induced lapse.
Right again.
“Hi, Benton,” I said affably as I sat down opposite him. “Mind if I join you?”
He jumped. Lurched, really, startled out of whatever private reverie he had been in. He turned his rheumy eyes on me and stared for the long count. Who the crap is this? Oh, yeah. Hinker. Holder. Hackley. No…that’s not right… Oh yeah.
“Hacker,” he said thickly. “So nice to see you again. Have a drink?”
Pretty good. The old coot wasn’t totally in the bag...just about halfway there, by my reckoning.
“Got one already,” I informed him, holding my glass up for his inspection. He turned his head to look, then turned it back. “So what’s new?”
“New?” he repeated dully. “New? Ah, Mr. Hacker, until today there was nothing new in my world. Just the old…as in the same old bullshit. But, I am glad to say, there is about to be a whole vista of new in the world of Benton T. Bergmeister.”
Wow. The old guy on the juice was pretty eloquent. Too bad he was totally unintelligible.
“Well, that’s great, Benton,” I said. “But what exactly are you saying?”
He took a good-sized pull from his glass, the full one, then dumped the remaining contents of his empty one into the full one to replace the booze he had just consumed. I’ll bet he was calculating the exact number of milliliters. He glanced around the nearly empty bar and leaned over towards me conspiratorially.
“Can you keep a secret?” he asked in a stage whisper.
I leaned back and gave him my best winning smile. “Secret is my middle name,” I told him.
He straightened up and raised his bushy gray eyebrows in surprise.
“Is it now?” he said. “’Secret’ Hacker? That’s a strange name.”
He took another healthy dollop of booze and thought it over. I could imagine his turgid, swollen brain cells trying to process the information, and all his imaginary brainscreen would give him back would be ‘syntax error.’ I waited while he tried to think. Eventually he gave up and remembered his secret.
“I am resigning as the commissioner of the Ladiesh Perfessional Golfing Ashociation,” he announced grandly, putting some drama into his slurred words. He sat back and waited for my stunned and surprised cries to say it wasn’t so. I kept silent instead and after an uncomfortable pause, he looked at me with some disappointment. It wasn’t the reaction he had hoped for.
“Finally got tired of the bullshit, eh?” I said finally.
It was like I had clicked a switch that released something deep inside the man. Even as heavily boozed up as he was, Bergmeister’s tank emptied with a rush, and he spoke to me without any pretense.
“Ain’t that the truth?” he gushed. “Ain’t that the goddam’dest truth? You will never know the crap I have had to put up with in this job. Incredible.”
“How long have you been commissioner?” I asked.
“Seven and a half years, Hacker,” he said somewhat sadly. “Seven and one half long and trying years. I still don’t know why they hired me. I was with the network in sales, you know, and was looking forward to retiring in another few years. I guess Wynnona figured I could help obtain a better TV deal for the Tour.”
“Did you?” I asked.
“It’s not bad,” he said. “Could have been better. But I had very little to do with it. Wynnona Stilwell thought she could do it better. Woman negotiates with the best of them. Brass balls. Brass fuckin’ balls, the woman has.”
“She must be hell on wheels to work for,” I commented.
“I have a bleeding peptic ulcer,” Bergmeister told me, looking at me with pitiful eyes. “I’m taking six different kinds of medications. Every drink I take could be the one that kills me. Can I stop? Can I heal? Not so long as that woman continues to rule my life. I am a wreck. Can’t sleep. Can’t eat. I have had enough.”
“Why did you wait so long?” I wondered.
“Hah!” he snorted. “That’s what everyone says. ‘Why don’t you just quit, Benton? Why don’t you tell her off? Just leave!’ they say. Hah! You just don’t understand. You don’t just work for that woman. She has to own you, lock, stock and barrel.”
“Nobody owns you, Benton,” I said. “I think there’s a constitutional amendment against it. You either let her push you around like that for all these years, or she’s blackmailing you. And that’s illegal, too.”
His back straightened. “I do not get pushed around,” he said gruffly, but with some pain in his voice. He turned his eyes on me and I had to look away. There was pain in those eyes, too, and I couldn’t bear to look.
“I can see you don’t believe me,” he whispered. “No one believes me. The woman is evil.”
“Evil?” I echoes. “That’s a pretty strong word, Benton.”
“Not strong enough,” he claimed, shaking his head dolefully. “The woman is a manipulator. It’s not enough that she holds all the reins of power. She must control everything, every little detail. No decision, no matter how small, can be made without her approval. Any revenue source must include something for her. She doesn’t manage this Tour, she dominates it. It’s a need she has…”
His voice trailed off sadly. He stared into his glass, his thoughts far, far away. Finally, he sat up with a jolt and took another sip.
“What did she have on you, Benton?” I asked quietly. If I hadn’t heard Mary Beth Burke’s story of Big Wyn’s vicious episode with young Carol Acorn, I wouldn’t have asked the question. But I was beginning to understand something about Big Wyn’s management techniques.
“Wh-what do you mean?” he stammered.
His response told me I was on the right track. I zeroed in.
“Benton,” I said. “You’ve been here more than seven years. Nobody with any dignity would take that much crap from somebody like Big Wyn. Like you said, you were ready to retire when you took this job. So I’m guessing you stuck it out only because you had to. She had something on you. What was it?”
He took another long drink before answering. This time, he pretty much drained his cocktail. Instantly, the waitress appeared and Benton nodded affirmatively. She disappeared.
“I’ll tell you,” he said when she left. He turned toward me with a sigh of what had to be relief. His hands were shaking slightly and color had come up in his face. He seemed anxious to spill something, to someone. And it was more than just the booze talking. Benton Bergmeister had a Lake Meade-sized pool of anguish built up inside, walled in by his own personal Hoover Dam. He had been longing for a way to punch a hole in that dam for a long time and let the truth come gushing out through whatever thick, reinforced walls had been built. He now felt that he could safely do so, and I was the lucky one, or unlucky, to be close at hand when he broke through. And that was now.
“I’ll tell you,” he cried again. “I’ve needed to tell someone for a long time.”
“Is this off the record?” I interrupted. Normally, if a guy wants to spill his guts, you let him and figure out later what you can publish and what you can’t. But I didn’t want to take advantage of Benton’s alcoholic state.
He thought for a minute. “Aw, screw it,” he said finally. “I don’t care what you print about that bitch. She deserves everything she gets.”
Benton took one last fortifying swallow of his drink and prepared to let the waters flow.
Suddenly, there was a high-pitched scream from outside the bar, followed by a hysterical cry for help. Bergmeister was frozen to his chair by the effects of his nine or ten drinks, but I leapt to my feet and ran out to the hallway outside the bar, where the door led to the outside patio.
A well-dressed matron in a blue satin dress was standing there, her fist held to her shocked, gaping mouth. She was staring out the double glass doors. A long, red smear of blood on one of the doors led downward to the figure of a slumped heap on the walkway outside. The heap was Honie Carlton.