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GOLF COURSE ARCHITECTS, in recent years, ha v e developed a new concept in design called “stadium golf.” Yet another insult to the traditional idea of using what nature has provided, the stadium golf concept involves heaping up huge artificial mounds of dirt around golf holes for the sole purpose of providing more room for the paying customers to stand to watch golf tournaments. Stadium golf is a gimmick, but it’s one that pays off commercially, and therefore one that’s here to stay.
Still, I doubt the designer of the Bohicket Country Club realized that his grassy amphitheatre surrounding the eighteenth green would ever be utilized as a chapel, and an oddly appropriate place for John Turnbull’s memorial service.
In the cool of twilight, players and their families, tour officials, and several hundred other onlookers quietly gathered on the grassy hillocks surrounding the green. The flagstick had been removed and replaced with a simple white cross. Two tall candles flanked the cross. It was eerie and effective and subduing to all; and the serenity of the evening, with the sound of the surf crashing just over the line of sand dunes, sent chills up my spine.
Becky Turnbull was seated on a chair at the edge of the green, holding tightly to the hands of the two other players’ wives who flanked her. Dressed again in her severe but stylish business suit, she stared straight ahead at the cross and candle tableau.
The Reverend Ed Durkee, dressed in his funereal black clergyman’s suit, knelt on the green behind the makeshift altar, facing away from the people and back down the eighteenth fairway. He was erect and unmoving, head bowed and hands clasped firmly around a large black-leather Bible.
Durkee held his dramatic pose for several long minutes while the crowd assembled around the green, buzzing, and finally fell silent. The whir of camera lenses and motor drives broke the silence of the evening. Durkee remained in his prayerful pose until, at some unheard signal, he rose wearily to his feet, turned and faced the crowd.
“Brothers and sisters in the Lord,” he began in a stentorian preacher’s voice. “Man born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower. He fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. In the midst of life, we are in death.”
I hoped to myself that Durkee was quoting Scripture, not sure if I could abide him speaking Olde English.
“Our brother John was yesterday here among us,” he continued. “Full of life and full of a future filled with hope of success and all the good things of this earth. Today, all that is but a chimera, gone in a flash. We come together tonight, his friends and extended family, not just to mourn his death, but to learn anew the lesson his death teaches us.”
He paused, his deep-set eyes glaring out at us.
“We live accidental lives,” he said. “All that we are today can be as nothing tomorrow. Only the Lord knows when he will call us home. It can happen to any of us, at any time. Even here,” his arm swept across the vista of beach and ocean and grass. “Even here in this most peaceful of places, a place of recreation and happiness, our lives are but accidents waiting to happen.”
He paused and let us all look at the scenery.
“So what do we do, then? Do we just give up? Wait for the final accident that ends all of our lives to occur? No!” Durkee thundered, his voice growing in timbre. “We must reach out for life, not death! We must be not afraid, but extend both hands to the light. Be not afraid, children of God!
“Listen to me!” he thundered. “We all work so hard in this life, to provide for our families, to give them the good things of God’s earth. And yet you know it can all end in an instant. So what do you do? You protect your earthly possessions. You provide insurance so that even after death, your loved ones can go on.
“But what about your heavenly possessions ... your eternal soul? Don’t you want to preserve and protect it against the harshness of the earthly life? Don’t you want to know there is something waiting beyond the grave?”
He was almost shouting now. The wave of emotion he created broke over the people gathered around the green. Some people stepped back in the face of his intangible force.
“There is a way! Invest in the Lord! Reach out to our heavenly Father. Follow His teaching! Do His good works! Give to the Lord...Give Him everything and you will be protected both here and again later when you come to see His Heavenly Face.”
Durkee stopped, shut his eyes tightly and dropped his head down onto his breast. The echo of his last words seemed to reverberate over our heads. It was a powerful bit of preaching, by a man who obviously knew how to reach the people in the balcony.
After a brief silence, Durkee began to recite the Twenty- Third Psalm, and many of those gathered there joined in with him. I looked over at Becky Turnbull. She was staring down at her hands, folded quietly in her lap. Her eyes were dry. I’ll bet that irritated Ed Durkee, who struck me as the kind of preacher who judged the effectiveness of his funeral orations by the amount of sobs and tears he could draw from the family of the deceased. He had apparently flunked with Becky, who now raised her eyes to stare at the black-clothed preacher.
As Durkee mumbled his way through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I glanced over at a group of players standing together. I recognized them as the most active members of the God Squad, Turnbull’s fellow Golfers for Christ. They all had their heads bowed and eyes shut tightly in prayerful concentration. Except one. Dressed in a white button-down shirt and baggy black pants, this one player suddenly turned on his heels and walked swiftly over the grassy mounds and away from the green.
I thought about going after him, but once the psalm was finished, a church choir bedecked in flowing white robes suddenly materialized atop one of the dunes a ways down the fairway and began a soulful rendition of “Amazing Grace.” It was enough to put lumps in the throats of most of us. When the last harmonies died away on the evening breeze, the Reverend Durkee incanted a benediction and sent us away.
There was a small reception afterwards back in the clubhouse. All the players gathered there, along with the various “regulars” who followed the tour around the country: rules officials, TV guys, sales reps and press.
I waited around making small talk with various people I knew until the crowd that had gathered around Becky Turnbull had thinned. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to give her a hug or kiss or just touch her to let her know they shared her grief. Brother Ed hung solicitously in the background, hovering closer to Becky’s elbow and murmuring softly to his cadre of Christian players. Finally, I made it through the crowd and stood in front of her.
We looked silently at each other for a long moment. “Oh, Hacker,” she finally sighed, her voice a thin waver, and fell into my arms.
“C’mon,” I said, “Let’s take a walk.” That was about all my suddenly closed throat would permit me to say.
Brother Ed coughed, moving in closer.
“Thanks, Ed, for everything,” Becky said coolly. “My friend will see me home.”
Durkee threw me a dark glance. “If there’s anything I can do, please don’t hesitate to call upon me, Mrs. Turnbull,” he said formally.
She said nothing in return, but dragged me outside. Arms linked, we walked slowly through the dark, silent with our thoughts.
“What’s with you and his Holiness?” I asked finally.
She didn’t respond for a while. Finally, she turned to me. “When I was ten years old,” she said. “We moved to a new town. My folks found a church and we started attending. I signed up for the Angel Choir, because I loved to sing. Those old hymns were my favorites. They were so beautiful, I used to believe that God himself had written them. One year, it was spring I think, we had practiced an anthem to sing before the whole church. I was so excited! Mom bought me a beautiful new dress just for the occasion.”
She paused, thinking as we continued to walk down the path. “When the day came, we filed into the church and stood in two rows, getting ready to sing. I felt like I had been practicing for years. Then, just before we started, the minister, a big, old scary guy in his scarlet robes...he always scared the hell out of us kids ... he came over and pulled me out of the line.”
Becky Turnbull’s voice was suddenly filled with tears, angry tears of remembrance. “He pulled me out of that line of little girls, in my beautiful, brand new dress, and announced to the whole church that I was not supposed to sing with the choir because I had not yet been baptized. He made it sound like I was unclean or something. Hadn’t been baptized.” Tears were running down Becky Turnbull’s cheeks now. “I ran home and from that day to this, I have never set foot in a church again. And I never will.”
I shook my head. “I suppose John knew all this?” I asked. She nodded, unable to speak. “And I guess that must have caused something of a conflict between you too?” She nodded again. “We finally came to ... well, to an understanding,” she said, finally gaining control of herself again. “I told him I had no problems with his religion as long as I was never forced to join in.”
“And were you?” I asked.
“No,” she said fiercely. “Never. We talked a lot of religion... hours and hours. He was a very calm and understanding man.” Her voice quavered again, and I looked away. She drew in a deep breath.
“He really liked his Bible study group. He told me that in his first few years on tour, it had been good for him to get together with some of his peers and just talk about stuff. Then Ed Durkee came along.”
The last bit of sun in the western sky had disappeared. The sky had gone from deep indigo to midnight black. A soft breeze rustled the palm fronds in the trees around us, a whispering, restless sound. In the background, the rhythmic pulsating of the insects in the marshes provided a counterpoint.
“John was uncomfortable with Ed, who is a lot more fundamentalist than John’s tradition,” she said. “Durkee is into control, plain and simple. His God is an angry and vengeful one, whose laws must be followed to the letter. It gives him a very hierarchical outlook on life.”
“You mean, he’s the chief and everyone else is supposed to be an Indian?” I asked.
“That’s right,” she nodded. “And John never quite fit into that pattern, which made both of them slightly uncomfortable with each other. When Ed came on the scene, maybe eighteen months ago, Johnny was starting to play well and make some good checks. Then we got married and –”
She couldn’t continue. She put a hand to her mouth and wept, her shoulders shaking uncontrollably. I stopped and put my arms around her and held her tight until she stopped. By the time she did, my shoulder was soaking wet. She noticed when she pulled back and couldn’t help giggling as she tried to wipe at it.
“I’m sorry,” she said, trying to smile, “I shouldn’t –” “Nonsense,” I told her. “That’s what it’s there for. Tell me more about Durkee and the group.”
“I’ve seen his type in the business world many times,” she said as we continued walking down the path. “Durkee can be so ... so manipulative. Everyone thinks he’s so understanding and helpful. I think he’s a bastard. Every time I see that man, I can’t help but think of that old man in his scarlet robes—” Her voice began to shake again. I grabbed her hand as we walked on. I heard a faint rumbling of thunder rolling in over the marshes, heralding a coming storm. Far off to the west, over the Bohicket Marsh, I could see the faint white outline of thunderheads roiling up into the sky.
“John told me that Durkee actually sets quotas for some of the new players,” she continued. “He tells them how much money they should be winning for Jesus. I couldn’t believe it. John tried to convince me it’s just a form of positive reinforcement and goal-setting. But I think it’s so ...controlling. John told me one guy even had to quit the tour for a year, get his head back on straight. He couldn’t make Durkee’s quota and felt like he was letting God down by playing badly. Couldn’t deal with that.”
“Not too many of us could,” I agreed.
“Then there’s the money part. Each member of the group is supposed to pony up a couple thousand dollars a year to finance the ministry, as Ed likes to call it. That’s about sixty thousand a year that goes straight to Durkee. On top of that, they’re all encouraged to ‘tithe.’ That’s ten percent, and Durkee makes sure he gets ten percent of the gross, not net, money. I mean, a young guy out on tour is usually struggling financially anyway, much less without giving cash away to Brother Ed. And he’s always coming up with new projects that call for extra donations. His latest scheme is this Christian Investment Fund.”
“What’s that?” I asked. I’d never heard of it.
“He wants each member of the group to kick ten thousand dollars into an investment pool, to be invested only in companies run by evangelical Christians,” Becky told me. “There are mutual funds of all kinds, and this is one of the strangest I’ve ever come across. I told John I wanted to see an official prospectus first. Show me the names of the management, the names of the companies, their track records, what kinds of businesses they were in. All the stuff that any investment advisor would recommend.
“Well, that was about two months ago, and I haven’t seen anything yet. Makes me even more suspicious,” she concluded.
“Did John share those suspicions?” I asked.
“Well, he pretty much lets me deal with the financial parts, since that’s my line of work. But he wouldn’t press Durkee too hard. Said he believed in him. Durkee was beginning to press hard for John’s investment money. But I wouldn’t let him write a check. Not until I saw some hard facts and figures. But Johnny was so willing to overlook people’s faults. He was ... was –” She began weeping again, quietly. Another heavy rumble of thunder rolled in over our heads. I saw a flash of lightning in the distance.
“We better get going,” I said and took her elbow to hurry her along the path to our villas. “Why do you think someone killed him?”
She stopped dead in her tracks and stared at me intently. “W-what?” she quavered.
“This morning, right after the doctor gave you that shot to put you to sleep, you told me that someone had killed your husband.”
“I didn’t know—” she stammered. “I mean...oh, Hacker, I don’t know what to think. What was Johnny doing last night? Who was he with? Why did he have to ... have to die?”
The tears came flowing again. They would come frequently for this very pretty, very smart, and very distraught woman. I wished I had a magic wand that I could wave and make it all right again. The same magic wand that would end disease and starvation and homelessness and war and unhappiness for everyone in the world. But I don’t have such a magic wand, and I don’t know anybody who does.
“Those are all good questions,” I said to Becky and held her tightly again while she wept. “The police would like to get some answers, and so would I, but they’ve been told to lay off.”
She pulled away from me and even in the threatening darkness of the oncoming storm, I could see the angry fire in her eyes.
“Oh, I can just bet they have,” she said bitterly. “I know all about damage control and how organizations go about burying their smelly fish. No...John Turnbull wasn’t murdered...it was an accident. Because anything else messes up the tournament and the reputation of the tour and that threatens the almighty dollar and gives them a big black eye.” She strained with vehemence. “Did you hear that Sermon-on-the-Green a little while ago? Talking about accidents? No...they want it to be a nice, clean package they can wrap up and put away. Forgotten in a few days.”
She pulled away from me and stomped her foot in frustration.
“Well, John Turnbull is not going to be forgotten,” she said. “Yes, Hacker. I think someone killed my husband. There! I said it! Do you think I’m totally crazy?”
I didn’t answer her at first. I was dealing with a raging flood of thoughts, all coming at once, all vying for my undivided attention.
Fact: there were unanswered questions about Turnbull’s death.
Fact: the Charleston police hierarchy wanted those questions left unanswered, preferring to use the conservative and most obvious explanation, that Turnbull’s death was an accident.
Fact: The woman standing in front of me was in an extreme state of emotion, which had to be figured into the equation.
Fact: the possibility that John Turnbull had indeed been killed opened a gigantic can of worms that demanded an answer. Like who, and why, and how.
I looked down into her frowning eyes.
“No,” I said finally, “I don’t think you’re totally crazy. But I can’t see a whole lot to go on right now that would suggest what you say is true.”
“Bullshit!” she spat. She grabbed both my arms with a sudden strength born of fury. “You said yourself that there are unanswered questions,” she pleaded. “Who is going to ask and answer those questions? The police? No way. I need your help Hacker. I need you to find the answers. Will you do it for me?”
I didn’t have time to answer. There was a sudden blinding flash followed almost at once by an ear-smashing clap. On cue, the skies opened and rain began pelting down with a ferocious roaring sound. I grabbed Becky’s arm and we dashed toward our villas, about two hundred yards away. Another bolt of lightning turned the ink-black night into day, at least for a split second.
“Wish I had a one-iron,” she gasped as we leapt over the instant puddles that had formed on our path.
“I know, I know,” I answered as we ran. “Like Trevino says, not even God can hit a one-iron!”
We were laughing together when we finally ducked under the awning in front of her open door. Inside, we could see a group of players’ wives bustling around in the kitchen, preparing to spend a long and likely tearful night with Becky. She paused before going in and looked up at me. Her eyes were small and hard and determined. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.
“No promises,” I said. “But I’ll keep nosing around and see what turns up. Okay?”
She leaned up and kissed me softly on the cheek.
“Thanks, Hacker,” she said. “I knew I could count on you. Go on now, and let me be. This part I’ve got to do by myself.”
She went inside and closed the door.