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I WENT OUTSIDE AND stood around the first tee for a while. Wadkins and Kite, the final group, weren’t scheduled to go for another forty-five minutes. The crowd was slowly building, along with the tension and that tactile atmosphere found only at the final round of a golf tournament. Yet I found myself strangely unaffected by the sporting drama being played out in front of me. I was wrapped in a strange lethargy, caused in part by the sapping heat and humidity of the day, in part by my automobile wreck injuries, and in part by the rapid whirring of my mind, tossing and turning over the strange twists and turns of the events of the last week. I kept trying to make them fit together in a way that would form a cogent, sensible explanation.
“Golf,” someone once said, “Is like life with the volume turned all the way up.” That’s how I felt. Sometimes, all the noise and excitement is energizing. Makes you feel wonderfully alive. Other times, all you want to do is wrap your head in a pillow and find blissful relief in sleep.
I had to get out of the sun. I headed for the players’ locker room, which was the closest place I could think of that would be cool, dark, quiet, and have ample supplies of liquid refreshment. It was also mostly empty, except for Bert Lewis, who was quietly packing the contents of his locker into a leather duffle. Sitting on the bench watching quietly was a pudgy, casually dressed older man with salt-and-pepper hair.
I pulled a soft drink out of the cooler and strolled over. “Bert,” I said. “Glad to see you out and about. Hope you can make it back on tour when this is all over.”
He glanced at me sharply to see if I was serious, and saw that I meant it.
“Thanks, Hacker,” he mumbled and turned away.
“Listen—” I started to say. The older man immediately stood
up.
“I’m Jack Delancy, Bert’s lawyer,” he said, sticking out his hand. “I’m sure you can understand that under the circumstances, Bert cannot say anything further.”
“Sure,” I said, “I can understand that. I’m just trying to figure out how Bert fits into the picture. I mean, he got sucked into such an interesting group of figures: Jocko Moore, Ed Durkee...”
Lewis snorted. “Brother Ed, the big jokester,” he said, almost under his breath.
“Bert—” his lawyer cautioned.
I saw an opening and went for it.
“Jokester?” I echoed. “I’ve never heard Ed Durkee described as a jokester. But I have been wondering where he went that night. The God Squaders say he went home. But you were there afterwards. Did you see Durkee?”
“Oh, he was there all right,” Lewis said bitterly. “He was there. And if you ever see that little weasel again, you tell him for me: Joke’s on him.” Lewis turned and looked at me with slightly unfocused eyes that bore a hint of madness. “Fuckin’ joke’s on him.”
Jack Delancy laid a reassuring hand on Bert Lewis’ arm. Bert turned away from me, zipped up his bag and the two men left.
I plopped down wearily in an armchair and drained my soda. That unpleasant whirring in my brain started up again as the pieces began to lock and unlock in ever-changing combinations.
Eddie Roland had seen Bert Lewis drive up in the golf cart under which John Turnbull had later been found. Roland had seen Turnbull stagger and fall, and heard Lewis laugh and go to pick him up. Turnbull had taken – or been given – drugs, Quaaludes, probably. Who? Who slipped him a mickey? And when?
Now, Bert Lewis had claimed that Ed Durkee, supposedly off to bed, had instead been somewhere near the clubhouse when Turnbull staggered down the walkway. The Reverend Ed Durkee, leader of a questionable organization in Texas, who had been arguing heatedly with Turnbull over money. And who knew that a dead Turnbull would mean a last financial windfall for his so-called ministry. Which apparently meant for his fifty- acre spread in Eastland, Texas.
But could Bert Lewis be believed? Was he trying to save his own skin? Was he even legally sane? What did that curious comment about the joke being on Durkee?
I closed my eyes and tried to think of something else, something pleasant. An image of Jean MacGarrity, naked and beckoning, zoomed into my head, but that only started the gears turning again, the puzzle pieces locking and unlocking, the whole picture whirring out of control like a movie played at extra-fast speed, faster and faster, until the celluloid bursts out of the sprockets, angles crazily across the screen and leaves nothing but an empty rectangle of white. Empty of image, devoid of meaning.
Outside, I heard bursts of cheering as the golfers playing the heat-baked fairways of the Bohicket Country Club drained birdie putts or exploded out of bunkers to within inches of the pin. Out there, the world proceeded apace, totally oblivious to the warp speed of hyperspace that occupied my mind.
“I’m gonna go nuts,” I thought to myself. I checked my watch. Kite and Wadkins were probably on the second hole. A long way to go. At least an hour and a half before they even made the turn. And one of the oldest clichés in the book is that the tournament doesn’t really start until the last nine on Sunday.
I decided to head back to my villa, take a long, cool shower, sit in the air conditioning for a while and decompress. Then, relaxed and rejuvenated, I could concentrate on my job, cover the end of the tournament, crank out my report in my usual deathless prose, and afterwards check in with Ravenel to see if any progress had been made in finding Rudy Hill. Plan made, the brain waves eased and I was able to get out of my chair and head up the pathway.
My villa was wonderfully cool and dark when I entered. I didn’t remember cranking the AC down so low when I left, but I was glad I had. I trudged slowly up the three stairs past the darkened living room and into the kitchen, thinking I might just take a cold beer with me into the shower. Glancing out the kitchen window onto the golf course, I could see groups of fans walking past, following the yellow fairway ropes strung along the twelfth hole. Beyond them lay the eternal marsh, brown and shimmering in the midday sun.
I pulled a beer from the fridge and headed for the bedroom. I never got there. Ed Durkee was sitting in the cool dark of my living room. He had drawn the drapes closed, turned down the air and was waiting for me. He sat quietly at the far end of the sofa and looked at me, smiling slightly, his dark, swept-back hair perfectly in place. Cool, this guy. His dark, brooding eyes stared at me, So did the third eye, the barrel of what looked like a .38, held quietly but obviously in his lap.
“Mister Hacker,” he said in his deep, preacherly baritone, piercing the sudden, awful quiet of my villa. “You are back earlier than I expected. I believe we have some matters to discuss.”
“Aw, hell,” I said and sank down heavily in the easy chair opposite him. I pulled the tab on my can of beer and drank about half of it. His eyes never left my face. Bulldog O’Shaunnessy probably would have tried to jump the guy, but my aching bones and lack of energy left no room for any heroics.
“I should say something like ‘you’ll never get away with it,’” I said. “But that never seems to work. So what’s the plan, Stan?”
“I admire your attitude,” he said. “Even if it is sheer bravado. I simply needed a fairly secure place to, er, retreat to until dark. I thought your humble abode might do very nicely.”
“And after dark?”
He arched his thick eyebrows at me. “Why, then, of course, I steal away like the Philistines. To, and I quote, ‘a land where the light is as darkness.’ Unquote.”
“Oh, please,” I said. “You can stop with the preacher stuff. I know all about your post office box and your Texas spread, and the insurance scam and the so-called investment fund. What are you gonna do with all that while you’re running from the law?”
“My, my,” he said. “You seem to know quite a bit about me. I am impressed.”
“Oh, I know almost everything about this little scam of yours,” I said. “ I know that Johnny Turnbull and his wife were about to pull out and probably blow the whistle on you. And I know how you killed him.”
“Oh, really?” Durkee grinned. The gun never wavered.
“Yeah, really,” I said. “You drugged him up with Quaaludes that you had Bert Lewis buy. I figure you somehow managed to drop them in his coffee at the meeting that night. After you and he had that heated argument about the fund, you went out and made the coffee. So you slipped a dose into his cup and served it to him. He began to feel it soon thereafter and realized something was wrong. He tried to get home, but went down like a sack outside the clubhouse, where Bert Lewis was waiting.”
Durkee kept smiling at me in the gloomy light.
“I’m betting that you were waiting and watching from someplace inside the clubhouse. And that you told Bert to go on home, you’d take Johnny back to his villa. Then you drove out to the bridge on the fourteenth hole, tossed him over the side and then pushed the cart over on top of him.
“How can you be sure he didn’t drive himself ?” Durkee asked, still smiling his evil little smile.
“Because the marks on the bridge railing showed that the cart did not hit hard and bounce, as it would have if Johnny had been driving it fast, but was slowly pushed over the edge,” I said. “Plus, the position of his body and the way the cart fell on top of him couldn’t have happened if he was driving the damn thing. He would have gone flying well away from the cart. Instead, he landed neatly just under the bridge. Right where you could drop the cart on top of him, and finish him off.”
“I see,” he said, pushing back a stray filament of black hair that had slipped down onto his forehead. I thought I saw a slight trembling in his hand as he moved it. A crack in the façade? “Your theories are quite interesting,” he said. “But I’m under the impression that Mr. Turnbull’s death was related to that caddie of his...what was his name?”
“Jocko Moore, as you well know,” I said.
“Ah, yes, Mister Moore,” Durkee agreed amiably. “He was known to be involved in the drug trade, was he not? I should think that both men’s deaths could be laid to that unfortunate moral failing in our society. Drugs are such a sad affliction...”
“Oh, cut the crap,” I stopped him. “You killed Turnbull and you probably killed Jocko, too. I know it and the cops know it. Right from the start, Johnny’s murder was too cute to be drug- related. You went to a lot of effort to make it look accidental, but it doesn’t add up. And you must have known they’d do an autopsy on him and find the drugs in his system.”
I stopped suddenly. Then I slapped my forehead.
“So that’s why you got Bert Lewis involved in this,” I said. “It didn’t make sense until now. Once they found the ’ludes, they’d trace them back to Bert, figure the rivalry thing as motive and pin the murder on him. Jeez, that’s positively brilliant.”
Durkee smiled broader. He was obviously proud of his criminal prowess. I decided not to remind him that it had all fallen through and that the cops were likely to close in on him at any time.
“It just never made any sense before,” I said. “Now I know why Bert was involved. I crossed my legs comfortably and took another sip of beer. I tried to look relaxed, as if we were just a couple of guys sitting in the villa chatting about this n’ that. Loaded .38 pointed at my forehead? Bah, a minor detail. I felt a cold trickle of sweat down my back and hoped it wouldn’t soak through my shirt. Like they say on TV, never let ’em see you sweat.
“Actually, Lewis was quite easy to manipulate,” Durkee said with a slight sneer. I noticed he had not officially admitted complicity in Turnbull’s killing. Neither had he denied it. “With such a one-dimensional personality, it’s usually quite easy to discover a motivational factor and act on it,” he said. “There’s quite a lot in the literature on the subject.”
“Yes, quite,” I said, one Oxford don to another. “Unfortunately, one slimebag named Jocko Moore apparently figured out your scam, too. When he heard about the autopsy results, he must have figured out his ass was about to become grass and that his role as the supplier of drugs to Bert Lewis would be backtracked to him. And knowing what a dumbshit Jocko was, I’ll bet he came to you and tried to make a deal.”
Durkee laughed aloud, a deep, barking laugh of assurance that sent a chill down my spine.
“Very observant, Mr. Hacker,” he said in his stentorian tones. “You should consider joining me in my next venture. I could use a quick-witted person who’s an excellent judge of character like yourself.”
“So Jocko sought you out and tried to make a deal?” I pressed.
“Of course,” Durkee nodded. “I told him I couldn’t be totally sure of his, umm, character until he fulfilled a certain request I had. I called it his quest.”
I stared at him for a long moment. “So his test was to knock me off ?”
“Yes,” Durkee said. “I am sorry about that. But I had heard that you were becoming quite inquisitive. I suppose it’s the nature of your business. But I believe in nipping problems in the bud.”
“You had heard?” I said. I thought a moment. “Oh, wait. Ricky Hamilton, the agent. He told you about my call. He must be part of your scam.”
“Indeed,” Durkee said.
“And then Jocko tried to run me off the road, which he did, but I didn’t get killed.”
“No,” Durkee said, sounding a bit sad. “Young Mr. Moore failed. Which meant I was forced to negate the arrangement we had worked out.”
“I’ll bet Jocko didn’t like that,” I said.
“No,” Durkee said nodding. “He was rather upset. Threatened me with bodily harm, if I recall. Said he had some connected friends.”
“Scared the hell out of you, right?”
“Not exactly,” he smiled at me. “Irritated me briefly. But I dealt with my irritation.”
“Guess you did,” I said. “But that was probably a mistake. It got the cops off Bert Lewis’ ass and made them start thinking about other possibilities. And there you were.”
“I know,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “But it couldn’t be helped, now, could it? Just goes to show, there are problems and stresses in all walks of life.”
“Which is why we turn to the Lord,” I said. He looked at me with flat, emotionless eyes.
“So true,” he said. “So true.”