P.G.A. Spells Death Read online

  She laughed again. Tossed her head again.

  “Well,” she said, “If you are going to be the color correspondent for IBS at the tournament in May, we wanted to make sure you had all the color you need.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “Color. I think the network is hoping I come up with golf anecdotes to add to the tournament coverage. Like a story about Tillinghast getting caught in some quicksand while walking around the property and being rescued by the local farmer. You know, stuff like that.”

  “Who is Tillinghast?” she asked.

  I paused. I guess the thirty-something senior vice president of golf marketing operations couldn’t be expected to know about the golf course architects from the Golden Age of golf. I wondered, for a moment, how many generations will pass before no one remembers who Bobby Jones was.

  “He was a golf course architect,” I said. “Back in the Roaring Twenties.”

  “Oh,” she said, smiling. “Well, it’s interesting to know that Conrad Gold worked very closely with Clyde Stewart, who designed the Hudson Links course. Clyde, of course, is from Aberdeen, and is just finishing up an exciting new course on the Isle of Skye. Another of Mister Gold’s projects.”

  “Yes,” I said, “That is interesting.” I stopped wearing wrist watches decades ago, but if I still had one, this is where I would glance at it and then say I had another appointment and get the hell out of here.

  Stephanie, however, was still going great guns. She flopped open an appointment book.

  “Are you planning on joining us for Media Day?” she asked. “We’re shooting for April 25th, a month before the PGA. We’re hoping for good weather, but it can be iffy in April in New York. Can I put you down?”

  I smiled. “I think I’m scheduled to join the broadcast crew from IBS for a preview round,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, a frown turning her smile upside down. “I wasn’t aware of that. Some of those guys used to be tour pros. I’m not sure they’d enjoy having … you know …”

  “A hacker holding them up?” I suggested. “Pun intended, of course.”

  Her face reddened a bit. A voice from the doorway rescued her.

  “Hacker is no bloody hacker,” the deep voice said. We both turned to see Conrad Gold himself standing in Stephanie’s doorway. His famously cueball bald head reflected the overhead can lights beaming down. He was not a tall man, but seemed to be in good shape, and he was dressed in an impeccably tailored pinstripe suit with his trademark gold tie and a pocket square in crimson. He was smiling.

  “This man played on the Tour,” he told Stephanie. “It was a few years ago, but he always had game. He’ll give Jimmy Williams and the rest of that crew a good run for their money. I may lay down a few bucks on him myself!”

  I stood up and shook his hand.

  “I played against Jimmy, both in college and in the pros,” I said, referring to IBS’s main color announcer. “I think the best I ever did against him was a tie for third somewhere. He was always better than me.”

  “Don’t care,” Gold said, shaking his head. “I’m still putting my money on you.”

  He sat down in Stephanie’s other guest chair and I sat down again. Steph just looked at us with wide eyes. Her meeting had just veered off into uncharted territory with the sudden arrival of the main guy, and she was now just trying to hang on for dear life.

  “How’ve you been?” I asked Gold. “How’s the hotel in St. Andrews doing?”

  “Pretty damn good,” he said, nodding. “Sales have been up twelve percent since the Open. Even though I had to rebuild that suite after Mi5 got done.”

  “Well, I guess they figured they had to take the Russian mob by surprise,” I said. “My caddie friend Johnnie was their prisoner, remember. They had to use that flashbang and come crashing in the window. No other way.”

  “I suppose,” Gold said, smiling. “Actually, Her Majesty’s government paid most of the costs to restore the room.”

  “Most?”

  “Well, all of it,” he said. “Plus a little extra for pain and suffering.”

  “Who’s pain and suffering?”

  “Mine, mostly,” he said, and flashed that famous Conrad Gold grin.

  I laughed. Stephanie tittered. Conrad looked at her.

  “Collier here giving you everything you need?” Gold asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “More than enough. I really appreciate her help.”

  “Good.” Gold nodded. He glanced at his watch. Rolex Oyster. Gold, of course. “Well, I have another meeting to get to,” he said. “Good to see you again, Hacker. Thanks, Stephanie.”

  He vanished as quickly as he had appeared. Stephanie looked across her desk at me. The dynamic had changed and we both knew it. I was now a Friend of Conrad, and she was ‘Collier here.’ But I don’t play those stupid office politics games.

  I thanked her for her time and left.

  4

  At three a.m., I heard a sound that at first I thought was my cat, Mister Shit, who occasionally—usually during a full moon—prowls around the apartment in the wee small hours and mewls about something. But the cat-like sound turned into a rhythmic sobbing beat…lala break lala break lala.

  Then Mary Jane gave me the elbow in the ribcage, and I was wide awake and in action. DJ’s crib was stuck in the bedroom corner in our North End apartment, and I quickly picked him up, carried him over to the changing table, unsnapped his onesie sleeper, swapped his sopping diaper for a new dry one and brought him back to our warm bed. Mary Jane was ready lying on her side, and he quickly nestled between us on the bed, fastened on to one of her breasts, began sucking and was soon making contented little sighs.

  Most of the time, I could quickly go right back to sleep, but this morning, for some reason, I stayed awake and just watched my son have his early breakfast (there would be another at six, eight and ten). One of his incredibly cute little hands rested on his forehead, the other on his mom’s chest. Each hand had five perfect fingers, matching the toes hidden by the footies of his sleeper.

  DJ was now six months old, and every day was just an amazing experience. I could tell by the way he followed me with his eyes, giggled when I tickled him and looked at his big sister Victoria that he was a genius child with an IQ well into the 200s. Whenever I mentioned that, Mary Jane rolled her eyes. You’ll show her, I silently said to the back of his head, with its wispy threads of hair. Oh yeah, in addition to being a budding genius, he had been born with a good head of hair, most of which he still had. A genius and a good-looking one! He was obviously destined for great things,what with all my brilliant Hacker genes bubbling around inside him.

  I had been back from New York for a little over a week, and was scheduled to fly down to Savannah after the upcoming weekend. While I was home, I got to watch DJ while Mary Jane and Victoria went off to school—MJ as a fourth grade teacher, Vick as a sixth grader. The kid was a good napper, so I usually was able to get in a few hours of research—I was making notes of past events for the golf tournaments we would be broadcasting, since I was now the staff historian and color info man—but when he was awake I kept him fed (Mary Jane always left a few bottles of harvested breast milk), clean and dry, and when the weather permitted, we’d go for a walk around the North End of Boston. We were already favorites among the nonne in our mostly Italian neighborhood, and we usually came home from one of our walks with bags of biscotti and other home-baked treats.

  I’d like to think DJ and I were bonding during these days together, but I suspected that at this age, he looked on me mainly as the tall hairy guy who’d occasionally feed him, change his nappies and give him all kinds of colorful plastic things to gum so the tall hairy guy could get another fifteen minutes on the computer. I made a mental note to ask him about it when he was sixteen.

  “Y’know Hacker,” Mary Jane said to me one night as we took turns dandling the little guy on our knees so the other could scarf down some pasta, “It might be time
to think about moving.”

  “Gack,” I said. That being the universal male word for “OMG, we just had a baby and now you want to disrupt our lives further by moving to a new place?”

  “I know,” she said, as Mary Jane understood the male language pretty well. “But DJ is going to need his own bed before long, and that means he’s gonna need his own room.”

  “He cannot move in with me,” Victoria said with determination. She was twelve now and you could see the teen years gathering speed and coming rapidly down the pike. “I will not share my space with a male. Even if he is my brother.”

  Mary Jane could have reprimanded her daughter, but instead chose to ally with her.

  “See?” she said. “We are going to need more rooms.”

  “I thought you liked the city,” I said. “You guys can walk to the school from here. And I’m just a train ride away from Logan.”

  “I do like the city,” she said. “But Victoria will be moving on to middle school in just another year, and that’s a bus ride away. And you can get to the airport from anywhere. Uber uber alles.”

  DJ was on my lap and wiggling. I held him up so we were nose to nose.

  “This is all your fault,” I told him. “We may have to send you back.”

  He giggled.

  “Do you have some ideas?” I asked.

  Mary Jane got up from the table, went into the bedroom and came back with a manila folder. It looked pretty full.

  “I withdraw the question,” I said. Mary Jane took DJ from me and went into the living room and laid him down on a blanket on the carpet there. I began leafing through the New Housing File, as it was labeled. Mary Jane had been busy. There were notes and brochures about two or three large apartment buildings in the Back Bay, one in Cambridge, and some letters and printed emails from some real estate agents in the ‘burbs. Newton, Westwood and even Cohasset, down on the South Shore.

  “Houses?” I said, surprised. “Aren’t you supposed to have saved up a bunch of cash for the down payment before you buy a house?”

  She smiled at me from the living room. DJ was on his back, kicking his legs in the air like one of those huge summer beetles, occasionally grabbing one and stuffing his toes into his mouth.

  “Carmine said he could help,” she said sweetly.

  I thought about that for a bit. Carmine Spoleto was Victoria’s bio-grandfather. He had been Mary Jane’s father-in-law until her husband, Angelo, had joined the Choir Invisible in a mob hit in Charlestown when Victoria was just a few months old. Oh, yeah: Carmine Spoleto was also the capo di tutti in the Greater Boston area, and had been for more than forty years now. Strangely, I actually liked the man, he had been good to me, and was the most doting of grandfathers to the kids. Even though he was a vicious criminal with buckets of blood on his hands.

  “Are you sure you want to borrow money from a leg breaker?” I asked.

  “Well,” she said, “It would probably be your leg that got broke if you didn’t pay him back. Me and the kids are family.” But she smiled sweetly as she said it.

  “Why don’t we just move into his place out in Milton?” I said. “He’s got about fifty thousand square feet out there. We only need one or two.”

  “Now, Hacker,” she said. “It wouldn’t look right to do that. Plus, how would you feel as a man and a provider if you just took your family to live with your father-in-law?”

  “I’d feel like security was good,” I said. “Doesn’t he have some staff goombahs living out there with him?”

  Mary Jane leaned down and spoke into DJ’s face. “Your daddy is such a joker,” she cooed. DJ smiled at her.

  “And if we move out of the city, we’ll need another car,” I said. I had been feeling pretty good about the salary I was making from IBS. But the contract was only for ten months. And there were no guarantees it would last another season. Especially given The Assassin’s feelings about me. I suddenly saw the rent payments, and the car payments, and the insurance payments and the auto maintenance payments and the heating bills and God knows what else stacking up like planes over Logan at rush hour. My stomach began to hurt.

  “Now honey, don’t fret,” Mary Jane said. “It’s not like we have to move next week or anything. But it is probably time to start thinking about it.”

  I went into the kitchen and poured myself a couple of fingers of Bowmore, a fine single-malt Scotch whisky from the island of Islay, dark and peaty. I usually saved it for special occasions. It was my thinking whisky. Until I had three of them. Then it was my stop-thinking whisky.

  There are pros and cons to everything, I thought, as the fiery malt burned its way down my gullet. While it would be better if I was fabulously wealthy and able to buy any piece of property in and around Boston, I was decidedly not. Not after my long career as a golf writer for the Boston Journal, a job which had never paid better than just above lousy. I suppose I should have worried about that more during all those years, but instead I was mostly enjoying my work and the people and the freedom to follow the Tour and my bliss at the same time. Piling up wads of cash had never been a major goal.

  So now I had to rely on the kindness of family to provide for my own. There was part of me that protested about that: that’s not what real men do, said that small inner voice. On the other hand, buying a house was a big, important step and I knew lots of men who had accepted, even welcomed, help from their families to do it. Of course, their families were not The Family. That presented even more problems to think about.

  “Honey?” Mary Jane called from the living room. “Can you come watch DJ? I’ve got a lesson plan I need to work on for tomorrow.”

  I tossed back the last of my Islay malt. Slainte! Then I went out to play with my son. Thinking time was over, for now.

  5

  Ten days later, I was in Savannah, Georgia, preparing for the telecast of the Southern Plantations Open, which would be my first IBS tournament as the network’s color and history correspondent. Be still, my beating heart.

  Most of the broadcast prep work, so far as I could tell, involved my fellow correspondents, a.k.a. the “talent,” heading out to play golf somewhere nice. On Monday, they all went up to Hilton Head and played Harbour Town at Sea Pines, that narrow, unforgiving course carved through the lagoons and pines by Pete Dye, aided and abetted with advice from a young Jack Nicklaus. Today, they were out at one of the courses out at The Landings, an exclusive, multi-course real estate development to the south of Savannah. Wednesday, they were scheduled to drive up into the South Carolina Lowcountry coast a ways and play a fancy private course called the Secession Club. Politically incorrect, but said to be a nice track.

  I had not been invited to join the on-air personalities for all these golf outings. I wasn’t upset about that. After all, I was the FNG—effing new guy—and although I had met and knew most of the IBS crew, it was still their party, not mine. Besides, I wanted to spend some time focusing on my job—to provide some interesting color and history to the telecast. Because I didn’t want to get yelled at by the Assassin, Ben Oswald. Nor did my colon.

  I had gotten a call from Arnie Wasserman, Oswald’s major domo, who told me that I had been assigned to work with Tony Sciutto, one of IBS’ longtime cameramen.

  “Ben wants a three-minute segment,” Arnie told me.

  “About what?”

  He laughed. “He didn’t say,” he said, “But you’re the color and history guy, so I’m guessing something colorful about history.”

  He was still laughing as he rang off. Arnie seemed to be one of those types who likes to stir the pot and watch what happens. Probably hoping for some fun colon stuffing.

  I called Sciutto’s cell number. He was out at Plantation Pines, the private country club on the outskirts of Savannah where the weekend’s tournament was to be played.

  “Oh, hi Hacker,” he said, “Listen, I got some stuff to do out here today. Can we hook up in the morning, maybe? Talk about the script
for the weekend?”

  “Script?” I said.

  There was a moment of silence. Then I heard a chuckle.

  “Sorry, I forgot,” he said. “You’re brand new to this game, aren’t you?”

  “If you mean the television game, yes,” I said. “Golf I know something about.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I meant,” he said. “You’re a newbie. That’s OK, I’ve worked with newbies before. Not to worry. Do you have anything in mind for the history segment?”

  “Not really,” I said. “Didn’t know until twenty seconds ago that I had to write a script.”

  “That’s OK,” he said reassuringly. “We’ll sort it out in the morning. Just be thinking of some interesting things we can shoot. We’ll sort of wing it on this first one. I’ll make sure Becky Ann is standing by.”

  “Becky Ann?”

  “Becky Ann Billings,” he said. “She’s the best video editor we got. Fuckin’ Scorsese can’t cut film like she can. And don’t tell him, ‘cause we don’t wanna lose her.”

  “Right,” I said. “Secret’s safe with me.”

  “Beautiful,” he said. He stretched the syllables out: bee-yoo-tee-ful. “How about we meet for breakfast. Eight o’clock. Hotel cafe. Roger?”

  “Ten-four,” I said. “See you then.”

  So with nothing else to do except worry about writing a three-minute television script about who knows what, I headed out to wander around Savannah. Like most people who had visited Savannah casually, as a tourist, I was familiar with the city’s grid-like layout, broken up every block or two by a lovely public square, all shaded by gnarled-limb liveoaks draped in Spanish moss, with brick sidewalks and lots of public benches and the occasional spurting fountain or Confederate statue. Street after street is filled with rows of Georgian and Edwardian mansions, all brick and wrought iron, brass and gas-light, containing fortunes in treasured antiques and populated by as strange a collection of American weirdos as can be found anywhere in the lower 48. The people of downtown Savannah are not normal: they all have twisted Gothic pasts, they all drink like alcoholic fish and their interest in the rest of the world does not extend very far past Forsythe Park on the city’s outskirts.