Death in a Green Jacket

by James Y. Bartlett

  We set off down the middle of the fairway again, at a more controlled trot this time. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tiger back away from his putt on 12 and hold his hands out as if to say “What the hell is this?” I wondered if CBS would show these two crazies interrupting the first major golf tournament of the year. Maybe I could be a highlight on SportsCenter tonight.

  There was no time to stop and explain, apologize to Tiger, make nice to Stevie, or wave to the folks back at home. Jacoby had disappeared over the back of the dam. Jack and I followed him around the left side of the pond in front of the 11th green. We crashed through some hedges, crossed over a hidden maintenance round and threaded our way through the thick stand of young pines before we reached the edge of the creek. While the entire golf course represented the artifice of eternity, as Yeats called it, down behind the dam was the real world. The creek bed below the dam was rocky, almost dry and filled with dead branches and leaves. And it smelled of rotting things, rancid and chemical. Down here, out of sight of the television cameras and the thousands of “patrons,” we had come face-to-face with the ugly realities of life, where the world was smelly, untidy, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. It was the antithesis of Augusta National.

  And Brett Jacoby was down here, too. He had stopped on a rocky shoal in the middle of that almost dry creek bed. His chest was heaving. He faced away from us, looking at the wall of impenetrable greenery that surrounded the creekbed, filled with thorns and brambles, dark and hidden away from the sun. A burst of sound washed over us from the golf course, a sound that meant Tiger had holed a good putt. Even so, the mass of sound was muted down here, unlike the crystalline beauty of the massed decibels when they rip across the manicured green fairways and played in the branches of the sun-kissed trees.

  Jacoby turned to look at us. He bent over and grabbed a baseball-sized rock in each of his hands. His chest was still heaving from the effort of flight, as ours were from the effort of pursuit.

  “It’s over Brett,” I said quietly. “It’s finally over.”

  We all heard the sounds of the others coming behind us, through the woods. Coming from the light into the dark. Brett Jacoby heard it too, and knew. The kid and I watched as he sank to his knees, dropping the rocks, and folded himself over into the shape of an egg. He began to keen, rocking himself slowly back and forth.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  They took Jacoby out through the Augusta Country Club, which adjoins the National past Amen Corner on the far side of Rae’s Creek. Travis Kitchen had shown up with the other Pinkertons who had followed us down from the clubhouse. The chief Pink decided it would be better to take him out that way, rather than further disrupt play during the tournament. They apparently didn’t mind driving their police cars all over the Augusta CC course, however. That’s what happens when your neighbor is Augusta National Golf Club. You get trod upon.

  Kitchen took Brett downtown. I got one of the other cops to drive me back around to the National and drop me off. I had work to do. Timmy Herron made a hell of a run, playing faultless golf on those last few holes, with birdies on thirteen, fourteen and fifteen. But, a few groups later, Tiger eagled the thirteenth, birdied the fifteenth and nailed the door shut with a spectacular shot on the short sixteenth, that caught the side of the hill on that green and spun back to within six feet. Of course, he made the putt, as all 75,000 souls at the golf course, and the 75 bajillion watching at home knew he would. He strolled home, champion again. We are fortunate to be live in a time when we can watch this remarkable athlete.

  When I got back to the press room, Quigs looked at me and said “Where the hell have you been? Swinging through the trees?”

  I looked down at myself and noticed, for the first time, that I had a long green grass stain on both knees and one hip from my high-speed spill down the hill at 10, and my shirt wasn’t much better after bushwhacking through the forest.

  “Hey,” he said. “That wasn’t you they showed running down the 11th was it? What a couple of idiots. Stevie Williams looked like he was gonna chase after those two and drown them in the pond.”

  I just smiled enigmatically, and Quigs eventually went back to watching the events unfold.

  During the long, long aftermath of the tournament—the ceremony in Butler Cabin, the insipid interview with Jim Nance, the series of press conferences in our comfy little theater, the hour or two writing our stories and notes and sending them to our home desks—I was operating mostly on automatic control. Like the best golfers, I didn’t think, I just did. Write down that quote. Check the stats for the back nine. Come up with some narrative theme. Explain what happened and why. All of it done without any conscious thought. Was I thinking about the events of the last several weeks? Of course I was, but not on any recognizable level. All that was just background to doing my job. Writing golf. One step and then the next.

  I called Conn to see how Mary Jane was when I had a moment. He told me she was fine. She had risen from bed in late afternoon and watched the end of the tournament with Conn. They hadn’t spoken much, he said. At one point during the telecast, he said he looked over at her, and she was weeping, quietly. That didn’t sound so good.

  Nobody noticed that Brett Jacoby never came back to the media center. Charlie Grosvenor, who had a long list of other things to do, post-tournament, also never reappeared before the media, but then he almost never does. By the time I finished all that I had to do, it was about 10 p.m. I was suddenly bone weary and ravenously hungry.

  I grabbed a sandwich, packed up my gear, said goodbye to some of the guys, and drove back to Conn’s house. He and Mary Jane were sitting in the living room, reading quietly. Something Mozartian was playing in the background. When I arrived, Conn folded his book closed, nodded at me, and disappeared into his bedroom.

  I looked at Mary Jane, but she kept her eyes glued to her book. The silence began to smother me, sucking all the air out of the room, so I went outside onto the deck. The air had chilled after the sun went down and my breath created soft clouds of condensation in the air. The sky was clear and the stars formed interesting patterns.

  I shivered once and was about to go back inside, when Mary Jane came out. She went over to the railing, looking out at the darkness where the river was, flowing silently and endlessly down through the land on its way to the sea. I stood there, waiting.

  “When he took me, it reminded me of Gerry, my late husband,” she said. “Of all the evil that he represented. Of all the bad things he did. In a way, those things became mine, too. I know they really weren’t, of course. He was the one who did the shooting and the beating and the stealing. I tried, and I think I succeeded, in keeping that away from Victoria. But as much as I told myself that this was his life and not mine, I knew that wasn’t really true. When you are with someone, even if it’s not working out all that much, his life is still your life, too. His goodness becomes yours. His evil does too.”

  I said nothing. She needed to say these things. I needed to listen.

  “I thought I had gotten over those feelings,” she continued. “But when that man kidnapped me in the mall, it all came back. Those feelings of being wrong, somehow. Not unclean, really, but connected to the wrong things.”

  “It wasn’t you,” I said. “It was me.”

  “But that’s just it,” she said. “It’s neither you nor me. It’s us. I am part of what you are. It can’t be separated. It’s like you don’t stop over there, and I don’t stop over here. We are.”

  She stopped and fell silent and looked out at the darkness.

  “And?”

  She turned to face me, her eyes wet. “And I don’t know if I can be us, if it involves living with those feelings again. And I don’t know if I can bring Victoria into a life where you might be there one day and gone the next. Where maybe Conn slips instead of Rico. Or you don’t get out of the way of the rifle, like Kitchen did. That wouldn’t be fair to her. Or to me.”

  It was my turn to star
e out at the night, thinking.

  “I called Poppy tonight,” she said. “I wanted to talk to Victoria, of course, but when he came on the line, I started telling him all about what had happened down here this week.”

  “Great,” I said, half-seriously. “Your father-in-law the mobster knows that you got kidnapped and almost killed because of me. Tell me, can I ever go back home again?”

  “I don’t know why I started telling him all this stuff,” she said. “But I guess it’s because I knew he would understand. That’s a life that he’s lived his entire life.”

  “And what did he say?” I asked.

  “He said there are two ways you could look at it,” she said. “One, that you are irresponsible, you think you have to save the world and that one day you may get us all killed.”

  “I would never do anything that …”

  She cut me off. “I know you would never do anything to put either me, or worse, Victoria, in any danger. I know that. But I also know that because of the way you are, and the way you go through life, it’s unrealistic to think that it would never happen again.”

  “What’s the other way to look at it?” I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know.

  “He said I could look at it that you are an honorable man, with an over-developed sense of right and wrong,” she said. “And he said that perhaps I could look at it that you are a good man and a strong man. And that despite the scrapes you find yourself getting into, you also get yourself out of them, and that I should look at you not as a faulty man, but as a good one. One that I should consider myself lucky to have, because good men are rare.”

  I let the silence build around us again.

  “And what have you decided?” I asked finally.

  “I haven’t made any decisions,” she said. “Except that maybe I don’t want to come back here.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “It may take me a while to work through this experience,” she said.

  “OK.”

  “I may decide that you and your adventures are too much for me and my daughter.”

  “OK.”

  “I have decided to put off any further decisions for a while.”

  “OK.”

  “I want to go home and hug my daughter.”

  “OK.”

  There was more silence.

  “I love you, you know,” I said.

  “And I you,” she said, her voice trembling. “And one thing I do know, more than any other,” she said. “Is that you are a good man. Poppy is right about that.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I just wish the recommendation was from someone other than one of New England’s greatest mobsters.”

  She stared at me for a moment, her eyes wide. Then she chortled. I stepped forward and took her in my arms, and we stood like that for a long time, while the stars overhead blinked down at us unconcernedly.

  About the Author

  James Y. Bartlett is one of the most-published golf writers of his generation. His work has appeared in golf and lifestyle publications around the world for nearly twenty years. He was an editor with Golfweek and Luxury Golf and even was the editor of Caribbean Travel & Life magazine during what he calls his “golf hiatus” period.

  Yet even while reclining on various tropical beaches swilling down countless pina coladas, he was still writing about the world of golf. He was the golf columnist for Forbes FYI magazine for more than twelve years, and continues to churn out witty and informative golf pieces for Hemispheres, the inflight magazine of United Airlines under the pseudonym “A.G. Pollard, Jr.” The best of Bartlett’s nonfiction golf writing has been published in the Yeoman House book Back Swings: A Golf Omnibus.

  His first Hacker golf mystery novel, Death is a Two-Stroke Penalty was published by St. Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne Books in 1991, followed soon thereafter by Death from the Ladies Tee. The third Hacker novel, Death at the Member-Guest, was published by Yeoman House in 2005, and the series turned into a foursome with publication of Death in a Green Jacket. The much-anticipated Death from the Claret Jug will continue the series as it visits each of golf's major tournaments when it is published at the end of 2010.

  Today, Bartlett’s Hacker novels are published in trade softcover editions by Yeoman House.

  A native of Massachusetts, former resident of Atlanta, Orlando and Manhattan, Bartlett currently lives in Rhode Island.

  Have you read the other Hacker golf mysteries?

  Now available in convenient eBook formats

  An Open Case of Death

  Hacker’s back as the US Open heads to bucolic Pebble Beach. But change is in the air: newly married, newly laid off, Hacker finds the celebrity owners of the Lodge at Pebble Beach locked in a corporate succession battle. And when a young assistant pro drives his cart off the cliff at the eighth hole, things start to get serious. Can Hacker avoid danger, uncover the truth and manage to enjoy watching the championship unfold? Is Pebble Beach the greatest meeting betwixt land and sea in the world?

  Death from the Claret Jug

  Hacker and Mary Jane are in Scotland for the Open at St. Andrews. But a dead golf official sets off a chain reaction, with Russian mobsters, stuffy aristocrats, Mi5, an alcoholic caddie, an anti-golf professor and even a flamboyant American developer creating a Royal & Ancient mystery for the ages!

  Death at the Member-Guest

  Hacker thinks he’s signed up for a fun weekend of golf with a good friend ... but soon finds himself in the middle of a murder that might involve the Boston mob, and might be dangerous to his own health!

  Death from the Ladies Tee

  As a favor to an old family friend, Hacker agrees to spend a weekend in Miami covering the LPGA. But he finds all kinds of conflict and power-trips going on inside the Tour, and his own life may be in danger before the tournament comes to a close.

  Death is a Two-Stroke Penalty

  Behind the scenes of the Carolina Open, golf writer Pete Hacker is confronted with the death of an up and coming young star. Was his death an accident? Or was it murder?

  A drug-dealing caddie, a desperate golf groupie and a strange, Bible-thumping chaplain are just some of the characters Hacker encounters as he tries to sort out the truth.

  The story turns deadly when Hacker’s own life is threatened. From the first tee to the last putt, this first Hacker golf mystery (slightly updated and revised from the original hard cover edition published in 1991) is an exciting trip behind the scenes of professional golf.