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THE CHARLESTON COUNTY Courthouse is the oldest continually used public building in the United States.
I know that because there’s a bronze plaque just inside the front door that says so. And I always believe in bronze plaques. After a quick look around, I was ready to recommend to the county government that they go ahead and float a bond issue and build one of those faceless, characterless, concrete-bunker-like modernistic fortresses to replace this one.
Oh, the place has its architectural charms, I supposed. Lots of brick and whitewashed trim work, nice plasterwork inside, a sweeping marble staircase, and you can just about hear Rhett Butler not giving a damn all over the place. But the poor public servants who have to work there deal with inefficient use of space, cavernous hallways that echo unpleasantly to a modern city’s footfalls, noisy air-conditioning that doesn’t work well, and, of course, a regulation issue puke-green color scheme that’s just depressing as hell. I wondered, as I looked for the detective’s squad room, if the walls had been painted puke-green when the place was built in 1734. If so, I could understand why everybody back then dipped snuff.
Bert Lewis, I was told, was incommunicado. The local press had gathered in an antiseptic lounge on the second floor of the Courthouse, waiting for an official pronouncement, while they swilled awful coffee and swapped theories about the murder. The majority opinion seemed to be that Lewis’s long, festering rivalry with John Turnbull had finally led him to snap.
After an hour, Bart Ravenel finally came out from a back office to meet with us.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “I can’t tell you very much right now, I’m afraid. Just that Bert Lewis is being questioned on suspicion of the murder of John Turnbull.”
The questions broke on Ravenel like a storm-driven high tide.
“How do you know it was murder?” “What’s the evidence against him?” “Is it true that he confessed?” “Is he mentally stable?” “Are there any witnesses?”
Ravenel let us rant and rave for a while, then held up his hand for silence. After a while, when some of the more aggressive local reporters realized he wasn’t responding, he got it.
“I’m not in any position to reveal at this time all the whys and wherefores that led us to this point in the investigation,” he said. “But I will say that we have some strong evidential facts including both fingerprints and a witness that place Mr. Lewis at the scene on the night of the apparent murder. I will also state that Mr. Lewis is, perhaps understandably, in something of an upset emotional state, but he is being counseled by a lawyer and has been seen by a medical doctor. It may be that he will require some care, and even hospitalization, but that decision will be made by a judge. And,” he held up his hand again as questions began to swell, “That is all I am prepared to say at this time. I would encourage you not to dwell on speculation on this case, as the facts will be disclosed at the appropriate time.”
With that, he turned and left, while the crowd of reporters shouted out questions, demands for answers, requests for inter- views and other comments that echoed unanswered down the empty halls of justice. The TV boys left to do their stand-ups on the front steps of the courthouse, and the other press straggled away to file stories or await the developments to come.
I stayed around, feeling a bit disadvantaged in a strange town. In Boston, I could have wandered around until I figured out whose desk I could sidle up to, perch on the edge of and begin the dance of questions that would hopefully lead to a nugget of information. Instead, I went downstairs, talked briefly to a uniformed officer and was directed to a newer annex off the back of the old courthouse, where I found the cafeteria. I bought a large coffee and a piece of pecan pie, which was so sweet and cloying that I couldn’t choke it down. I spent the next 45 minutes pushing it around my plate in between sips of the vile coffee, made fresh probably six hours ago.
Patience was eventually rewarded. Doak Maxwell wandered into the cafeteria, looking hungry. I suspected that was his natural state, hungry. He was a big’un, after all. I watched while Doak went through the cafeteria line, loading up his tray with starches and carbohydrates. He took his groaning plate over to a table by the windows that looked over over the courthouse’s inner courtyard, anchored by a concrete and iron fountain. George Washington burbled here. I grabbed my coffee, sidled over to Doak’s table and plunked myself down.
“Hiya, Doak,” I said. “Good bust.”
He looked at me silently, his mouth full and busy. After he swallowed, he took a sip of his extra-large iced tea.
“I ain’t talkin’ to you,” he said. “Lieutenant would fry my ass.”
“Oh, hell, Doak,” I said shrugging. “I don’t want to get you in any hot water. Last thing on my mind.”
He said “uh-huh,” and kept eating.
“Say,” I said, watching him devour a cheeseburger in two bites, “I’ve got a couple of passes I’m not using if you’re interested. They’ll get you into the clubhouse and you can use the same dining room as the players.” He kept eating, his wary eyes on me, face expressionless.
“And,” I continued, “I’m supposed to have dinner tomorrow night with my old friend Lee Trevino.” His eyes widened, but he never stopped chewing. “Don’t know what your schedule is like, but maybe you’d like to join us?”
I thought I had him. His jaws stopped ratcheting. Of course, I didn’t know what I was going to do if he accepted: Trevino always orders dinner from room service and never leaves his hotel room at night. Always. Maybe I could get him to autograph a hat or something. Or maybe Doak would just beat my head in when he found out I was BS’ing him.
I plunged ahead, without waiting for an answer. “So, you got Bert’s fingerprints, eh?” I said. “Where were they, on the golf cart somewhere?”
Doak looked around the room without moving his head much. Seeing no sign of Bart Ravenel, he nodded once, almost imperceptibly.
“Hmmm,” I said. “Interesting. But who’s the witness?”
“No way, man,” he said, shaking his head. “I cain’t do that.”
“Okay, okay,” I said quickly. “No problem. Just tell me ... is it a player? A caddie? Tournament official? Resort employee? Who?”
Doak sighed and passed a big, meaty hand over his forehead wearily. “It’s a player, man, and you didn’t hear that from me.”
“Sure, Doak, thanks,” I said. “I’ll leave your tickets at the will-call, with a note about where to meet for dinner.” I figured that would be a good way to give him the bad news about our phantom dinner with Trevino. I didn’t want to be anywhere near the big guy when he realized I’d hoodwinked him. He might not understand all that stuff about freedom of the press, and such. Not sure I understood it all myself.
He went back to his face-stuffing, and I left him in peace.
On the long drive back to Seagrape, I mentally graded myself on my sleuthing abilities. I felt good that Bert Lewis had been on my list of suspects, but felt bad that he hadn’t been higher on my list. I berated myself for getting sucked into speculation about Brother Ed Durkee, too. It had looked for a time like Durkee was becoming an excellent suspect, what with his financial windfall from Turnbull’s insurance payoff. But Hamilton had told me that all the God Squaders had such insurance riders, and none of the others had been murdered. Too obvious by a long shot, I concluded.
As I thought about the identity of the witness, however, I realized that it was likely one of the Golfers for Christ. After all, they had met that evening, which meant that the dozen or so players in the group were somewhere in the vicinity when John Turnbull had been accosted by Bert Lewis. They were the only players with any reason to be down at the clubhouse late that night. With a little help from Billy Corcoran, who had been there, I could get a list of the attendees. With a little digging, then I could make an educated guess as to the identity of the phantom eyewitness. That would not only make my editor back in Boston happy, but flesh out the story. Now that we had the “who,” there were still the unanswered questions about the “why” and the “how.”
I pondered all this as I drove down the long, tree-shrouded road out to Wappoo Island. It was dark now, and most of the Friday night, escaping-for-the-weekend traffic had died down. The road was mostly deserted.
I found a good local jazz station and when some vintage Brubeck came on, I turned it up loud. The car which came up behind me didn’t have its headlights on, which is why I never saw it until I felt a hard nudge from the rear. My rented Detroit-made box immediately began swaying back and forth, tires squealing in protest. I had just enough time to say “What th’—” and glance quickly in my rearview mirror. I saw the muted gleam of chrome illuminated in the red of my brake lights, and then I was far too busy working the steering wheel to look at anything else.
Superior handling is not one of the options Detroit does well. The high-speed bump from the mystery car behind me set my rear end loose. I tried mightily to get the car back in control, but it was useless. I had been doing about fifty-five on the long, straight road. The car was out of control.
I swayed one way across the median while the rear end swung around to the left so that I was almost going sideways, then the tires grabbed again and it lurched back to the other side. Feverishly swinging the wheel against the spin, which is how one handles spin-outs in the snow, I almost had it back on line when the damn thing drifted inexorably to the right. The front wheels went off the asphalt, hit the loose gravel and dirt, and with a final squeal of protest, the car shot off the road.
They told me later how lucky I was. They sang hosannas that I had been fortunate enough to be wearing my seat belt. I didn’t bother explaining that it just takes one close-up look at a decapitated accident victim on Storrow Drive to become a lifelong convert to seat belts. I might have been lucky, but I didn’t remember much about what happened after my car left the roadway. They told me that it had rolled in the ditch, flew airborne and mostly upside down through a privet hedge, caromed sideways off a tree, rolled upright again and ground to a halt in the newly ploughed field of a local farmer named Old Tom.
The car, of course, was a mess, and I wasn’t in much better shape. I woke up late that night in a hospital. My first waking impression was of a pretty nurse hovering. That was nice. My second was the wall of pain that pressed me down on the bed. I thought about sitting up, but my body responded quickly and firmly to that idea. All I could do was moan. So I did.
When I opened my eyes again, the pretty nurse was gone and a doctor was standing next to my bed. At least, I assumed he was a doctor. He wore a white coat and was shooting something into my arm. “Just relax, Mistah Hackah,” he drawled. He sounded a long way away. The room did a slow dissolve into a kind of fuzziness.
“Call Ravenel,” I croaked, or tried to. I don’t know if they heard me, or understood. In a short time, I didn’t much care. I was off again to dreamland.
It was morning when I next struggled up out of the deep black pit. Dawn. An opaque light filled the room. It was dim, like dawn is, but it still hurt my eyes. I closed them again quickly and stirred a little.
“How you doin’, bucko?” said a voice to my left.
I opened one eye, very slowly, and turned my head. Bart Ravenel was sitting in my bedside chair, looking like he had spent the night there. I suddenly felt guilty for causing so much trouble.
“You rang?” he said, smiling a little. “I should issue you a ticket for speeding on Wappoo Island Road, We lose a couple of teenagers a year out there. Too many beers, couple of funky curves. What’s your excuse?”
He was smiling a little, his grizzled face in the good-cop look: head cocked, chin jutting out, half-smile on his lips. But I looked into his hard, unblinking eyes and saw the message: tell me.
“Pushed,” I croaked. “Someone came up from behind me...no lights...bumped me from behind. Almost had her back, but I lost the wheels on the right ...” I had to close my eyes again. Everything I owned hurt.
When I opened them again, he was stroking his stubbly chin. I took the opportunity to make a quick personal inventory and was glad to discover that all my body parts seemed to be present and accounted for. There was a bandage on my left arm and my right knee was packed in ice. It was also throbbing in counterpoint to the big beat going on in my head. Count Basie never had such a steady rhythm section.
“Anything busted?” I croaked at Ravenel, who was staring out into space, still stroking his day-old growth on his chin.
He looked down at me, startled for an instant. He seemed to have forgotten I was there. “Huh? Oh, no...X-rays all negative. You gashed your arm, but it wasn’t too bad. Took a good whack on the knee and a concussion. Doc said y’all should be out a’here in a couple days. Damn lucky you were wearing that seat belt, sonny.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Give ‘em a second chance.”
“Hmmm,” he nodded. “Got any brilliant ideas about that? I don’t suppose you happened to notice anything about this mysterious car that knocked you off the road?”
“Get serious,” I said. “I didn’t have time to stop and get a life history or jot down the license number. All I saw was a flash of his front bumper in my brake lights.” I sighed, remembering my frantic efforts to control my lurching car. “Shit, I don’t know why the entire auto industry hasn’t gone broke with the crap they put on the roads.”
Ravenel chuckled. “Why the hell do Americans think they need high-performance,” he asked rhetorically. “Most of us live in square blocks, sit in rush-hour traffic on the interstate and only have to maneuver in and out of parking spaces at the grocery store. They make cars perfect for that kind of driving. But you gotta make like Richard Petty comin’ around the fourth turn at Daytona, and you wonder why you lose your car!”
He smiled down at me. I was glad someone found it amusing
“Anyway, you can file that shitcan away,” he said, and then he told me what had happened to my boxy rental car. It was scary to listen to, and I was glad I couldn’t remember anything about it.
“So,” he said finally, after we had finished shaking our heads together. “Looks like we got us a whole new problem to consider here.”
“Or a new twist in the old one,” I said, looking up at him. He pulled up a chair and we began to talk.