Death at the Member Guest Read online

  James Y. Bartlett

  Death at the Member Guest

  A Hacker Golf Mystery

  Copyright © 2010 by James Y. Bartlett

  Yeoman House Publishers digital ebooks edition 2010

  All rights reserved.

  This Yeoman House digital edition of Death at the Member Guest is an original publication. It is published by arrangement with the author.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the events, characters, names and places depicted in this novel are entirely fictitious or are used fictiously. No representation that any statement made in this novel is true or that any incident depicted in this novel actually occurred is intended or should be inferred by the reader.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Yeoman House Publishers, 10 Old Bulgarmarsh Road, Tiverton, RI 02878.

  Cover Design: Caleb Clarke

  Printed in the USA.

  ISBN 978-0-9822659-6-3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 20044195102

  For my father

  A true Renaissance man: artist, musician, skier, sailor, teacher and merchant. He taught me the game, imbued me with his rhythm, amused me with his “hittin’ and bitchin,’” and has been a treasured partner, on and off the golf course, in most of my life’s endeavors.

  And for Susan

  Who makes it all worthwhile.

  PROLOGUE

  The kid driving the cart out of the barn almost ran him down. He stopped the kid and read him the riot act. Can’t let these little shits get too comfortable or sooner or later they’ll think they own the place and do whatever they want. Gotta maintain control.

  When he was done with his lecture, delivered in a loud voice and with finger waved in the kid’s face, he walked into the darkness of the cart barn, looking for his clubs. The pro said he had seen them in back against the wall. He waited a moment or two until his eyes began to adjust to the darkness. There. Still about a dozen carts parked in neat rows, electric umbilicals reaching down from the ceiling-mounted chargers. Motorized abominations! Where’s the sport in golf if one is sitting on one’s ass all day, driving through the grass? Sure, the revenue helped pay the bills. But still …

  The damn kid would probably take his time coming back to move these last few out into the morning sunshine, especially after the lecture he had just received. These kids today! Had no concept of what it took to succeed in this day and age. Hard work, playing the angles, getting the other guy before he got you. The world is made up of two groups: predator and prey. If you aren’t the first, you will sure as hell soon become the second.

  He strolled to the back of the barn and found his golf bag leaning against the wall. The thick yellow electrical cord connecting the last cart in the row had been pulled from its socket on the cart, and was dangling on the floor. Damn that kid! Should have been neater! The correct procedure is to coil the cords neatly and hang them from the hooks on the frame up above. Get them out of the way and eliminate the possibility of tripping or, worse, that some member’s kid would wander in and stick his finger in the socket. That would be a 10,000-volt shocker! Must speak to McDaggert. Have the kid disciplined. Maybe fired. God knows there are enough kids out there who’d love to have this job.

  He bent over to unzip one of the compartments in his large staff bag, and rummaged around for the new golf glove he had placed there yesterday.

  A tap on his shoulder startled him. He hadn’t heard anyone come into the barn. He straightened up and turned around. A sudden burst of pain exploded with Technicolor effect in his right eye. He staggered backwards and struck his head on the hard edge of the cart roof. The world went black.

  He struggled out of the blackness. His eye throbbed. Something was wrapped tightly around his neck. He gasped for air. Bright lights in kaleidoscopic effect circled at the edge of his vision. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t breathe. His fingers clawed at his neck, trying to remove the constriction. Have … to … breathe!

  Suddenly, he was swept off his feet, dangling in midair. He scrabbled for a foothold, something to relieve the pressure that was now crushing his windpipe. The pain, the panic. Have … to … breathe!

  He heard a soft laugh, and then nothing. He hung there, fingers pulling at his neck. Couldn’t get hold. The pressure. Have … to … breathe. His mouth was open in a futile attempt to get air through the passageway.

  He kicked his legs, once, twice. Have … to …

  The lights swirling around got faster and faster, blending into one bright halo, which got brighter and brighter and finally exploded and went out. He stopped struggling. One hand fell limply to his side, the other frozen at his neck, still trying to pull the thing away.

  The body hung limply in the darkness of the cart barn; the only sound the low humming of the electrical chargers still running juice into the handful of carts. The door at the front of the barn swung shut. The air grew still.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was rapidly turning into one of those days. I was back in the newsroom at the Boston Journal the day after Labor Day, feeling as I did every September that time and the summer had passed all too quickly. Once, I felt awful after Labor Day because it meant I had to go back to school. Now I felt awful because it seemed everyone else was going back to school and I wasn’t.

  A cold, early fall rain pelted against the ancient windows on the sixth floor just outside the city room. A summer’s worth of grime and grit had built up on the glass and the rain split into rivulets as it ran down the windows. I stared out at the urban vista of wet brick, boarded-up windows and overall gloom while the rain came down hard and Boston’s usually inspiring downtown skyscrapers drifted in and out of view in the wet white mist.

  Part of my feelings of gloom could be laid to the fact that the golf season, for the most part, was over for the year. After the PGA Championship and one of the World Golf events, the golf season peters out. There were still tournaments scheduled every week until November, but they were not events worthy, in my editor’s eyes at least, of justifying the expense of my leaving this depressingly damp city to go cover. It was not a Ryder Cup year, so I didn’t have that biennial international madness on the schedule. In early November, the season-ending Tour Championship would dole out millions, but that was probably the only tournament left that I could get approval to attend. Mainly because my editor, the world’s largest jackass, had always wondered what it would be like to try and make a five-foot putt for a half-million bucks. “Jeez,” he’d say every year, “I’d never be able to pull the putter back for that kind of money.” I always resisted, so far anyway, the urge to tell him that if he took his overweight, under-exercised flabby body out on the first tee of a PGA Tour event, the stress would kill him dead in seconds.

  No, after Labor Day, golf recedes into the background of American sports. There are still a few story lines: The handful of players trying to make it into the top-30 money list to qualify for that Tour Championship. But even that field is pretty much set by the end of August. Or the rush of the Tour’s wannabes and has-beens to make the top-120 money list for the year, so they can avoid going back to the Tour Qualifying School. That annual event is hardly a school, but a six-round do-or-die tournament that makes Chinese water torture seem like a refreshing soak in the hot tub.

  The truth is that the fans of the golfing world, so attuned to the exploits and achievements of Tiger Woods and the ten or so pros who try to keep up with him, could care less if Hobie Millcot can somehow find the game to make a top-ten finish in th
e Texas Open and avoid going back to the Tour School for the sixth time in seven years. Hobie probably cares a lot, along with his wife, Mom and Dad and whoever is putting up the cash to keep him on Tour, but the rest of the world has trouble giving a rat’s behind.

  I sighed, took another sip of the acidic black coffee in my Styrofoam cup and stared out the grimy window. My nine-month season of golf writing was about over. From now until Christmas, I would be doing fill-in duty. Sidebars on Boston College’s new ace quarterback, who couldn’t throw a neat spiral if they grafted Joe Montana’s arm on him. Personality features on the football coaches of the Yankee Conference (“Northeastern’s Hendrick ‘Spuds’ Deirdorff raises dinner-plate dahlia’s in the off season.”) Previews of hot new talent on the Bruins hockey squad. (“According to 18-year-old right winger Pierre LaChance, that PlayStation computer hockey game is ‘awesome, eh?’”)

  I was contemplating prying open the window, probably for the first time in that window’s fifty years of existence, and dropping myself the six floors down to Dorchester Avenue, when I heard my name being bellowed.

  “Hacker! Get in here!” The dulcet bark came from the office of my boss. I walked back down the hall towards the city room, bright with its rows of neon lighting, alive with the constant clang and clatter of telephones, reporters running back and forth, keyboards softly clicking as the staff of the Boston Journal cranked out yet another edition of the important news of the day to a waiting public of damp and unhappy citizens who didn’t, really, give a damn.

  I turned into the last doorway on the left, home of executive sports editor Frank Donatello. His office overlooked the city room through an impressively large plate glass window, which helped block out most of the undercurrent of noise that enlivened the place. Frank’s office looked pretty much like every other newspaper editor’s office I had ever seen: an unmitigated disaster zone. The only unoccupied space was a small wooden folding chair in front of Frank’s desk. Every other usable square inch of space was covered with something: stacks of old newspapers, file folders spilling over with papers, printouts of stories ready for editing or ready to send back to the writer, pink telephone message slips, press kits, media books, dictionaries, telephone books, and Post-It notes. Growing out of this pile of stuff were Frank’s computer screen, his keyboard, a green-shaded desk lamp and his telephone, on which he was talking loudly as I walked in.

  Frank’s appearance matched his office décor. He was fat and disheveled from his head to his feet. His face hung with thick jowls, which jiggled as he talked. His hair, thin, gray and greasy, was scattered atop his head in a style that was too chaotic to actually be termed a comb-over. His thick, bushy eyebrows fought for attention with his large ears, and the huge bulbous nose in the center of his face carried the evidence of many years of smoky, boozy late nights. He wore a short-sleeved blue dress shirt over a huge chest that expanded outwards as it disappeared below the desk line. Dark half moons of sweat had risen underneath his arms. He wore a loud necktie in a width that had been in style during the ’70s, with the knot loosened and pulled down to the second button. The collar was open, but still seemed to cinch against his thick and burly neck.

  There was a waxy bag from Dunkin’ Donuts on top of the stack of papers on his desk, and an ashtray next to the telephone was filled with crushed butts, save for the one which sent a thin trickle of sickly gray smoke up into the air, in weak defiance of the Journal’s prohibition on smoking in the building. Frank Donatello had apparently been grandfathered in for most of the company’s new politically correct rules and regulations.

  Frank ended his conversation and slapped the phone down. He took a final drag on his cigarette and tamped it out. With a smooth and practiced motion, he tapped out a new one from the crumpled pack on his desk and lit it.

  “I believe the official smoking area is outside near the parking lot,” I told him helpfully.

  He wagged his bushy eyebrows at me. “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s raining,” he growled at me. “Put that in your official pipe and smoke it.” I just shrugged. I figured the more he smoked, the quicker he might die and get off my back.

  “Hacker,” he said. “You like kids.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. I said nothing. But I didn’t like the sound of this. At all.

  “We got a deal with the local J-schools,” he went on, waving his cigarette in little circles over his head. “Every term, they send over a half dozen kids who wanna spend a few weeks watchin’ what we do, working on small stuff … you know …”

  “Interns,” I said, glaring at him. I really didn’t like where this conversation was headed.

  “Whatever,” he waved his smoke at me again. “So, Human Resources got this one kid wants to be in sports. God knows why. Need to set him up with someone who can show him the ropes, y’know?” He took a drag on his butt and chased it with a bite from a jelly donut and a swig of cold coffee.

  “I want you to do it,” he finally said.

  “No.”

  “Won’t be that bad…maybe a couple hours every other afternoon.”

  “No.”

  “Might get to like it, y’know? Like Big Brother or something. Bond with him.”

  “No.”

  “I ain’t askin’. I’m tellin’ ya.”

  So I did what any mature adult would have done in my situation. I stood up, called Frank a few unprintable names, and went back to my desk to sulk.

  The gloom of the day had finally and officially hit home. Bad weather, end of the golf season and now I had some snot-nosed college kid to babysit. I thought about calling my friend at Sports Illustrated to see if they had any job openings, but, as was always the case when I contemplated bolting for the big city, I quickly came to my senses.

  Just in case, I flipped open my PGA Tour media guide to see where the boys were playing this weekend. The B.C. Open. I sighed again. Of all the places in the world I didn’t want to go — and with all that was coming down on me I would have gone anywhere — the B.C. Open in Endicott, New York was probably at the top of the list.

  First of all, there is no there, there. Endicott is upstate and outstate New York, and about as far away as one can get without leaving the country. Between Owego and Johnson City and just down the road from East Boondocks, Endicott sits alongside the Susquehanna River, about eight million miles from anywhere.

  Why the PGA Tour elects to hold a golf tournament there with all the Orlandos and Las Vegas’s and Los Angeles’s to choose from is one of life’s eternal mysteries. The En-Joie Golf Club, where the tournament is held, is not listed among the top courses anywhere, for any reason. It was originally built for the workers of the Endicott Johnson Shoe Company, the only horse in that one-horse town. When the shoe business went bad, the company sold the course to the town of Endicott. Money or some pretty detailed sexual photos of the commissioner of golf must have changed hands at some point along the line, is all I could ever figure, because the PGA Tour comes in every year. The tournament, now called the B.C. Open, is named after that prehistoric comic strip, yet another unusual distinguishing characteristic for a golf tournament on a Tour otherwise supported by multinational companies like Mercedes-Benz, Shell Oil, and American Express.

  Most of my fellow golf writers, none of whom have ever covered the tournament on purpose more than once in their lives, agree that the tournament’s sponsor is appropriate: the place is a joke. There’s nothing to do out there in East Boondocks. Because of the lateness of the season, most of the marquee players have gone home to watch college football and practice a little for the Tour Championship. So the tournament frequently comes down to a close battle between the 68th and the 101st leading money winners, about whom nobody in the world of sports much cares. The only semi-interesting event of the entire week is the annual caddie tournament, when the loopers get to play and the players carry their bags. Fun, yes, but hardly the stuff of which daily newspapers are made.

  In addition, ther
e’s just one hotel in town, and it’s always booked solid with players and Tour officials. And it contains the only halfway decent restaurant within 30 miles. So everyone else scrambles for places to stay. The nice folks of Endicott try to help by offering spare bedrooms. But the one year I went, I ended up staying at the home of a single gentleman of late middle age who kept me up until two in the morning explaining to me in a cold dead monotone how it was that the U.S. Supreme Court had secretly converted all the Congress to Judaism and were awaiting just the right time to have the President and all the governors executed and bring in the Knesset. Or something like that. It was the most frightened I have ever been, and I have followed Boston PD SWAT teams into drug lords’ rat-infested tenements. I nodded politely through the guy’s monologue, finally interrupting him to tell him I had to get some sleep, and barricading myself in my tiny attic room for the rest of the night. I didn’t sleep a wink, and bolted out of there at first light, never to return.

  I was musing on these and other charms of Endicott, New York, when a shadow fell across my desk. I looked up.

  The kid standing there was tall and thin, with stringy, slightly greasy black hair spilling down over his forehead. He wore rimless glasses, a good case of acne and an attitude of sheer fright. He was dressed in light khakis, a solid brown sport shirt and a necktie underneath a high school letter jacket. He was a bit damp from the rain, and was hopping from one foot to the other as if in imminent need of the men’s room.

  I stared at him wordlessly.

  “Uh, they said you were Mr. Hacker?” the kid said, his voice thin and nervous.

  I continued to stare.

  The kid’s face turned red. “Uh, well, my name’s Zec? … Tony Zec? … And I go to Northeastern? And I’m supposed to, like, you know … intern here?”

  He kept putting question marks at the end of his sentences, waiting for me to gasp in recognition, jump joyfully to my feet and embrace him into the brotherhood of journalism. Which I didn’t do. Hell, nobody embraced me into the brotherhood of journalism when I was a young punk.