He took the five-iron marked 130-150 on the underside of the head, speculating that a conventional swing with this club would get him to the green without a problem.
Todd said out loud, “Jack, these kind of markings on your clubs would get you thrown out of any major tournament in the U.S. According to the official rules, it’s called cheating.”
Jack looked back at him and gave him a wink. Expecting the club to do all the work, his modest swing failed miserably. He had a nice backswing, but the ball landed in the nearby woods approximately ninety yards to the right from where he struck it.
Only another hundred and eighty-five more yards to the green, and that’s if he can get out of the woods in one attempt, thought Todd.
“Shit, I have no luck today,” Green remarked with annoyance. “I should have stayed in the hospital and watched golf on TV At least there I can take a piss when I need to, not like out here. By the way, what’s the story with three of us getting shot at? I heard that you, Todd, were also shot at but didn’t get hit. Did you learn anything from the police?”
“No, I didn’t, and I don’t like it,” Todd replied. “Why would someone want to kill us? Jack, you got shot at twice and hit with the second bullet. They shot at me twice but only hit my house. Whoever was shooting saw me slide into my house before they could get a third shot at me. So why didn’t they come to my door to finish the job? I just don’t get it. You think we pissed off some nut case here on the golf course?”
“No, I don’t,” Jack said with firm conviction.
“Why not?”
“Because if we did make them angry here, as you so charmingly put it, they’d be after all four of us, including Tony; not just us three. I think it’s a serial killer who just has poor aim at times, thank God. Anyone in Arizona could be the next victim.”
Bloom interjected, “Think about it, gentlemen. This all happened within a couple of weeks of each other. There’s nothing to say that Tony may not be their next target.”
Todd, after making his birdie said, “Once we finish with this hole, I believe we should continue with this conversation where we won’t be such easy targets out here with no protection. It’s bad enough we have to duck when Jack hits the balls, but bullets are another story.”
Jack replied to that last zinger very curtly. “Just another cheap shot, this time no pun intended. Todd, give me a break, will you?”
Todd changed his demeanor and said, “I suggest that we stop playing now, hold onto our scores thus far and talk about the shootings elsewhere.”
Still sitting on a razor’s edge of stress, they all agreed and left the course, driving to a café just outside of town where they’d be able to talk freely.
Todd advised, “Keep your eyes on your rearview mirror to make sure you’re not being followed by anyone other than one of us. If you think you are, call me on my cell phone and I’ll relay it to the others and drive directly to the police station. That should frighten off whoever is following you.”
Later, while driving home, Jack decided to call Andre, the Rabbi’s custodian, whose phone number he had received from Detective Pratt.
“Hello?” Andre answered.
“Andre, this is Jack Green. I just wanted to thank you so very much for saving my life. I want to come over to your home one day and discuss what I can do to convey my gratitude to you.”
“Okay, give me a call whenever you’d like to come over.”
◆◆◆
Carol and Jules had gone out shopping at their local supermarket that afternoon. As they got to the register, Jules leaned over to Carol and gave her a big hug and kissed her cheek. “What was that for?” she asked.
“Because I love you and believe you when you told me why the detective called you down to speak with him,” he replied.
“All right, but you embarrassed me by doing that in front of all of these shoppers.”
“That’s ridiculous! A man can’t hug and kiss his wife?” he asked her.
“Yes, but not in public. Now, tell me what you really had in mind,” she asked, as there were four people still in front and behind of the couple waiting to get to the cashier.
“Well, I didn’t mean to do anything that would upset you; I just wanted to show you how much you mean to me.”
“What brought this on?” she asked.
“The Rabbi’s sermon, in which he preached that we should not believe in rumors unless you know something for sure. The rumor that was going around about one of the congregant’s wives having an affair with the Rabbi just got to me and this was my way of showing you that I don’t believe the rumors being told about anyone, especially any of them hinting that it may be you.”
The customers near the couple overheard their conversation and some looked at each other whispering, “What a strange conversation those two were having here of all places.”
Jules and Carol left the supermarket and got into their car. Jules drove and Carol remained silent but took peeks at him from her peripheral vision and gave him a wry smile.
Fifteen
Tony Pilaris a Black forty-six-year-old single father of four, is the son of a Greek father and a Black mother from Turkey. His father was there for a short vacation and his mother was only nineteen years old. They fell in love, she agreed to marry him, and together they immigrated to America.
Tony’s wife, Estelle, was also Black. She would have been forty-two years old had she not died three years before of uterine cancer. His children Janet, Junie, Jerrine, and Jerrell were all named with the letter J because Estelle father’s name was Jorey, and she loved her father “more than life itself.” She had decided long ago that when she had children, she would name them each with the letter J in honor of her father. She married Tony, who became the love of her life, with similar traits as her father. Tony was six-foot four-inches tall and Jorey was six-foot-two.
Tony grew up on the streets of south Chicago. From his late teens until he was twenty, things were pretty cool for him because he was accepted as Black, although he was more-light skinned than other Blacks in th neighborhood. Local gang members left him alone if they believed he wasn’t a member of a rival gang.
On the other hand, the police often rousted him by trying to provoke him into losing his cool and throw a punch or break a store window or anything else they could hang their hats on. Tony wasn’t stupid. A few times they tagged him with cuffs under some concocted story, like telling their captain that he was a member of the Black Hawks street gang. The Black Hawks were considered the most vicious and feared gang in all of Chicago. The police were unable to provide the DA with any proof to formerly charge Tony with a crime that would stick with a jury.
At the age of seventeen, Tony was accepted to Harry S Truman Community College in Chicago, thanks to having committed to his mother his intention to get out of the ghetto and make something of himself. After two years, he received his associate degree in accounting; but that wasn’t good enough for him. He wanted a four-year bachelor’s degree and nothing less.
He mailed applications to Howard University, The University of Michigan, and Morehouse College. With his straight A average at Truman Community College, he was accepted by the University of Michigan, which happened to be a three-and-a-half-hour drive each way from his home. However, he knew he couldn’t afford the cost of living in their dorms.
Why would he put himself through this? Because in his words, “I will be a success in life, so help me God.” The school was so expensive it required getting a student loan, in addition to working sixteen-hour days at a lumberyard on weekends. He commuted on I-94, but it took almost eight hours of his day, so he found a cheap room in Ann Arbor’s student ghetto. To his delight, the University of Michigan transferred all his credits from Harry S Truman Community College and permitted him to retain his major.
He met his wife Estelle at the University of Michigan, and they hung out together until their graduation, which occurred concurrently. They got engaged six months after their gr
aduation. She too was an accounting major and wanted to take the CPA exam along with Tony. Two years later they got married. It lasted for nineteen wonderful years and four great children.
Tony never cheated on Estelle because, he said, “I would never do anything to ruin this marriage.”
As his father-in-law Jorey used to say, “When you got the chicken at home, why settle for chicken shit?”
Estelle had died three years earlier in Chicago, where they both had accounting jobs with different employers. She battled uterine cancer for four tough years, undergoing chemotherapy, hair loss, weight loss, and worst of all, her loss of friends who stupidly feared her cancer was contagious. They weren’t stupid, just stupidly superstitious, because they knew better. They just didn’t want to hang out with her because it reminded them of their own mortality.
Tony felt abandoned by Estelle’s death, a feeling that haunted him for three months. He was angry with her for dying and leaving him alone and their kids without a mother. Tony swore his kids would not grow up in the slums of Chicago as he had. He researched numerous web sites for the right location and settled on Sedona, Arizona, because it seemed so much safer and warmer. They didn’t have a ghetto and there was plenty of activities for the kids. He also was able to obtain an accounting job right after moving there, but first he registered each of the four kids in their respective schools.
Tony’s children took the loss of their mother extremely hard. Their grades declined and his son started hanging out with the wrong crowd while living in Chicago. That, too, was a positive reason to move his family to Sedona where everything changed for his kids. They now aced their school grades and three of them tried out for sports, while the youngest learned to ride horses. She loved equines and decided she would become a horse trainer when she grew up.
After Estelle’s death, Tony took graduate school courses while working in Sedona. He then earned his master’s degree and became a CPA for a major accounting firm. After working there for five years, he decided to start his own firm. This had to be in a bigger city than Sedona, so he opened an office in Scottsdale. Within two years he was earning six-figures annually. Thanks to owning his own company, he was able to lease a new Volvo each year and write it off on his corporate taxes. His company provided him fully paid family health benefits and a well-structured 401K. His accounting firm soon became the largest such company in town with seven accountants, two bookkeepers and a receptionist occupying the entire twenty-sixth floor of the Andrews Building in Scottsdale.
Being the owner of the company, he could leave a little early most days to get home in time for his kids to arrive. Four days a week, he cooked for the brood; on the other three days, he took them out to local eateries. He let the kids pick the one location out of perhaps twelve in town that provided scrumptious dessert choices for the end of a dinner meal. Tony never partook of any desserts because he wanted to remain lean when he met with a client. He had read that people who stayed fit are better liked and trusted than obese people.
A few days later, Tony came home to shower and change after working out at the local community center. As he entered his front door, he heard shots fired. He dropped to the front porch while trying to turn his house key to open the front door and get to safety. Once inside, he kicked back at the front door with his heel to close it behind him. He stood up, walked over to the living room, and gradually opened the drapes of his window to peer outside, trying to see who might have been shooting at him, but he saw no one. He didn’t see a car passing either. Luckily, his kids were in school.
Immediately, Tony called 911. “My name is Tony Pilaris, I live at 213 St. Germaine Road and someone just shot at me while I was opening the front door of my house.”
“Were you hurt?” asked the dispatcher?
“No, I wasn’t hit.”
“Did you see anyone shooting at you?”
“No, I didn’t,” Tony replied.
“Then how do you know you were shot at?”
“Because, I felt the bullets, go right past my head and heard them land in the wall next to my front door,” he replied somewhat annoyed.
The dispatcher asked him again, “Are you sure you didn’t see anyone walk by or drive by your home?”
“No, I didn’t, otherwise I would have said so in the first place,” Tony replied, now really annoyed. “Please get the police over here right away.”
“Sorry sir,” the dispatcher responded. “I have to ask these questions. The officers are on their way.”
The police arrived soon after his call and searched the property, finding two .45 caliber bullet holes on the outer wall of his home with the bullets still intact, but no shell casings, which presumably fell inside of the shooter’s vehicle.
One officer put on latex gloves and dug out the bullets from the building and placed them in a plastic bag. Since Tony couldn’t name a person or a reason as to why someone wanted to shoot him, the cops wrote it up in their incident report as probably an accident caused by someone trying out their new gun and shooting up in the air somewhere in the woods near his home. They explained he could pick up a copy of their report at the police station the next day.
Tony did just that and it infuriated him. He found it astonishing that they called it a “probable accident.” Some coincidence, he thought, somebody shoots up in the air and both bullets land next to each other in the same wall just inches apart. “Bullshit,” he yelled loud enough for neighbors to hear. He figured the cops were bullshitting about the accident because the complaint came from a Black man.
Detective Pratt heard of this fourth incident happening to another member of the golf foursome, forcing him to reprimand the two officers for writing a report that was “unadulterated crap.” He directed them to inform him of any shootings, especially involving a .45, angrily pointing out that people in Sedona do not take practice shots up in the air when trying out their new guns, and that it could be no coincidence that both bullets landed on the same wall of a person’s home.
“Hold on,” the second officer said, “the marshal told us to report it that way.”
Stunned, Pratt asked the two officers if the victim happened to be Black or Hispanic. They confirmed Pratt’s hunch. “So, I suppose you would you have shot him in the knees if the marshal told you to do so?” Pratt asked, extremely angry with the officers.
“I guess we wouldn’t have, but this was different, and we didn’t see a big issue with it,” one of them replied, adding to his bigot list by two.
That prick Whitaker, thought Pratt, he’ll do anything to undermine the minorities. We’ve got to get him out of office and soon as possible before he ends up causing someone’s death. If I ever do get promoted and become their boss, those two idiot cops will be fired, too.
Marshal Whitaker was a burly and prejudiced local marshal, affecting an upscale cowboy look with heavily starched white shirt, highly polished boots, and crisply creased jeans, topped by a white cowboy hat with a feathery decorative hatband and sweat stains bleeding through the bottom of the crown. The marshal had a theory that Tony might have shot Jack Green and put bullet holes in his own house as a cover-up.
“After all, what else can you expect from their kind?” he said to Johnny.
Pratt had to use every ounce of self-control not to punch his boss in the mouth. The stupid bigoted asshole, Pratt thought. Whitaker exhausted Pratt, not only for his bigotry, but the marshal’s only concern was his own career while expecting others to make him look good.
The dilemma that Marshal Whitaker had to acknowledge, however, was that Tony’s alibi was foolproof. He was ninety-six miles away at the time of Green’s shooting. His business partner confirmed Tony was on the job in Scottsdale at the time of the shots at Jack. To the marshal’s chagrin, he also learned that Pilaris is only half Black, the other half being of Greek heritage. But to him, half Black was no different than all Black.
Sixteen
Two lower-level detectives, an older, gray-haired, timeworn man
and a younger man who appeared to have recently been promoted off the street beat, were sent to interview Todd Stern at his office.
The older detective asked, “Mr. Stern, can you please tell me where you were between approximately 12:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. the day Mr. Green was shot at the synagogue?”
“Please call me doctor, I am a dentist.”
“I’m sorry, sir. Dr. Stern, can you please tell me where you were between 12:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. the day of Mr. Green’s shooting, and, more recently, where you were you when Tony Pilaris was shot at?”
“Ask your uniformed police officers, they confirmed my alibis for both dates with my receptionist and three patients. I was treating patients in my office. I told them on the day Jack was shot, I had one patient in the chair for a cavity filling, while two others were in the waiting room. Same answer, different patients for the second day in question when Tony was shot at.”
“We were told of your alibis by the uniformed officers,” the older detective chimed in. “Would you please give me the names, addresses and phone numbers of the first three patients? You do understand that this would not fall under doctor-patient confidentiality unless you discussed their dental conditions with us. We just want to confirm your alibi for the record.” The detective thought if the first three confirmed his alibi then there’d be no reason to check out any other patients.
“Absolutely,” Todd replied, going to the file cabinet behind his receptionist’s desk containing patients’ records. Todd searched through files and retrieved the information for the requested patients. He had double checked the dates and found that Shirley Metzger was in the chair; Enrique Hernandez was the second patient; and the third patient was George Gerwig. Todd gave the detectives the addresses and phone numbers they requested.
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