by Harper Lin
I chatted with him amiably enough about how I was interested in making some social connections. He asked me about my work, and I spun him the usual tale that I had spun all my professional life, then he gave me what I really wanted—the tour. I needed to see more of this building and figure out the layout and setting of the murder.
“Allow me to show you our facilities,” he said with a faint hint of weariness and disparagement. I suspected he had spent some time in England. No one could be as simultaneously rude and polite as the English.
First, he showed me the function hall where we’d had the charity dinner. It seemed cavernous and a bit spooky now that it was empty of people. The tables were still in place, and I realized that the murderer would have wanted one of the cheaper tables near the back. He seemed to know his target well, so he would have wanted to sit near the back to watch Garfield drink and gauge the time when he would get up and go to the john. The murderer wouldn’t have wanted to sit in the bathroom stall for too long; his absence might have been noted. I imagined him waiting, watching, perhaps not too far from me and Octavian, counting how long Garfield could hold it.
As we turned to walk back out, I noticed beside the big double doors the stand for the maître d’. I remembered him taking our names and looking in a leather ledger before having a waiter seat us. That ledger still sat on top of the stand.
It would have the names of every guest at the charity dinner. It would have the name of the murderer. I needed to get that ledger.
The membership officer steered me out into a hallway and through a lounge. Men sat in small circles, smoking and chatting. State law forbade smoking in such places, but this was an esteemed country club. They did what they wanted.
Waving my hand in front of my face to clear the air, I listened as the membership officer droned on about all the advantages of the club. He did not mention the advantage of getting lung cancer.
Just as we were turning to leave and hopefully go to a room with a higher oxygen content, a waiter stopped in front of us and let out a shriek.
“It’s the murderer!”
I recognized the young man who had first discovered me in the men’s room. “I am not a murderer, young man,” I told him.
He sputtered. “I mean, it’s the woman who went into the men’s room!”
Everyone was now staring at us, of course. This was just what I needed.
“Albert, get ahold of yourself!” the membership officer barked.
“Sorry, sir,” Albert said. He turned to me. “Sorry, ma’am. I didn’t mean to imply you stabbed that guy. It’s just that, I mean, you were almost standing in a puddle of his—”
“Albert!” the membership officer barked again.
“Um, sorry.” Albert made himself scarce.
We left the lounge as quickly as possible, followed by the gaze of a dozen smoking rich men.
“Sorry about that,” the membership officer said. “We’re all a bit distraught over what happened the other night. You were the woman who rushed to investigate?”
I tensed. Did I note a hint of suspicion in his question? I had hoped not to be recognized, and now Albert the Hysterical Waiter had announced to everyone who I was.
“Yes, I was standing in line for the ladies’ room when someone rushed out saying a man had been killed. I rushed in to see if I could help.”
“It must have been quite traumatizing.”
“More for him than me.”
He gave me an odd look. Gallows humor was common in the field as a coping mechanism. Sometimes I had to remind myself that civilians didn’t do that.
The membership officer seemed to rush through the rest of the tour, obviously wanting to get rid of me. He showed me the terrace, the café, the library, the private meeting halls, the gardens, and even the golf course. I would have rather skipped the golf course, but I wanted to see the layout of the place and figure out how best to break in.
I needed that ledger from the maître d’. The fact that it was still sitting there two nights after the charity dinner told me that it was rarely if ever moved. All I needed to do was break in, photograph the guest list from that evening, and get out without being spotted.
Simple enough for a woman of my talents.
If only.
Seven
I stifled a yawn. Night work had once been a walk in the park for me, but as I got older, I found I tired more easily.
The country club didn’t have the best security. Only one rotund, unarmed officer patrolled at night, zipping around the grounds in a golf cart, of all things. The locks on the doors, I had noticed on my tour, were cheap and easily picked.
On the other hand, the cameras were well placed, covering all approaches. The terrain was what really kept it secure. There was open ground all around, and while the lighting was dim and the property was far enough from the road that the only person I had to worry about spotting me was the aforementioned rotund watchman, there was no way for me to get to a door without being filmed.
That wasn’t such a big deal. My handy disguise kit had turned me into a rotund man not unlike Mr. Golf Cart. I had added a paunch and a short blond beard, wrapped a scarf tightly around my chest to hide my most womanly trait, and hidden my hair under a black cap. The cameras would see a short, fat man of indeterminate age, not a short woman of a certain age.
Having cased the building, I decided my best option was to come at it from the side, through a stretch of woods that was half on, half off the property. I was relieved to see that there was no fence, otherwise I would have had to repeat the embarrassment of trying to cut through the chain links with hands that had lost too much of their strength. That had happened a couple of missions ago and had been a blow to my self-esteem. It didn’t help that I had been breaking into a nudist colony.
But that was another story.
I got to the edge of the woods and looked out over the broad expanse of lawn between me and the side of the building. It would take a good two or three minutes to cross that stretch of open ground.
I waited. In the distance, I heard the electric whine of the golf cart. It grew louder, and soon, it whizzed around the corner of the building. I could see the little security man inside. He picked up speed and straightened out. Heading straight for me.
I ducked behind a tree. After another few seconds, he made a sharp turn and rose up on two wheels.
“Yee-haaaw!” he shouted into the night air.
He landed on all four wheels again and zipped off toward the backyard, where the garden and the golf course lay.
Now was the time to move. If he were driving through the golf course, he would be back there awhile.
I hurried, as fast as I could hurry these days, across the open stretch of lawn.
“Yee-haaaw!” I heard faintly from behind the building. He sounded distant. Good.
I glanced around as I moved to the building, seeing no one. Of course, the cameras could see me, but I had noted the name of the security company that had installed them during my tour of the country club, and I knew it was one that didn’t offer real-time monitoring services. Instead, these were cameras meant to deter break-ins and find any culprits after the fact. In reality, they were cameras meant to lower the club’s insurance premiums. This was a common practice. If you could convince the insurance company you had a “security system” and “security guards,” you got a much lower rate, even if the quality of those protections was pretty low, as was the case here.
The quality of the locks was low too. I got through in less than a minute.
The interior was pitch black, the curtains drawn to the feeble light outside. I switched on a mini Maglite and found I stood in a small meeting room.
I moved quickly to the door, wanting to get to an interior room without windows just in case the golf cart stunt driver came past again. It wouldn’t do to see a light shining in the window.
I entered a second room that led me to the main hall. Here, I switched off my light. I knew the way now
, and the exit signs had little red lights on them that gave me just enough light to see.
Within a matter of minutes, I was at the maître d’s stand, had found the right section in his book, and was using my phone to take photos of the relevant pages. Technology could be a wonderful thing. Back when I was still doing this sort of sneaking around for a living, I would have had to write down the names or steal the logbook, neither a desirable option. Of course, I could have always used one of those miniature cameras the government issued us, but then I would have had to develop the film myself. I never could stand the smell of those chemicals. Made me sneeze.
Which was what I did as I finished taking a photo of the last page.
Come now, Barbara, where is your professionalism? Back in the day, that could have gotten you killed!
I sneezed again. What was doing that?
A strange smell tickled my nostrils. It took me a minute to detect what it was—marijuana.
“Bob, is that you?” called a sleepy male voice. Sleepy or stoned.
The voice had come from around the corner of the main hallway. The maître d’s stand stood in front of the double doors to the function room, now closed. The main hall ran to the right and left before turning. One direction went to the infamous men’s room. The other led to that smoky lounge. It was from there that the voice came.
“Bob?” the man called again. It sounded closer this time.
I turned off my phone and hid behind the stand. There was no other cover.
Another wave of marijuana smoke reached me. I held my nose to resist sneezing again.
“Bob! Dude, why don’t you answer?”
I gave a quick peek out from behind the stand and saw a figure come around the corner, looking sinister and dark in the dim light of the hallway.
Well, not really sinister. Sinister people didn’t generally say “dude.”
The footsteps approached. I peeked again. The figure passed under the red light of an exit sign. That was enough for me to recognize him.
It was Albert, the waiter who’d discovered me in the bathroom and later called me out in the lounge, making me look ridiculous in front of all those rich cigarette smokers.
He shuffled along, eyes hooded, a joint in his hand. He held it to his lips and took another toke. I ducked back behind the stand as he drew closer.
Albert let out a rush of air, filling the hallway with a pungent stench.
I let out a sneeze powerful enough to shake the rafters, if there had been any.
“Bob? What are you doing, man?”
The waiter came around to the back of the stand. I shined a light in his face and pointed my gun at him.
“Dude, stop messing around,” he said, shielding his bloodshot eyes from the glare. He blinked for a minute to adjust them then saw who held the flashlight and what she held in the other hand.
“Aaagh! Ugh! Aaagh! Baaaah!”
It wasn’t exactly Shakespeare, but I think it reflected his feelings quite accurately.
“Shut up,” I snapped.
He shut up.
I got to my feet, trying to look menacing. The effect was somewhat ruined by me having to lean on the stand and both my knees making loud popping sounds. Just what was popping inside there, anyway?
“Wh-what are you doing here?” he said, shaking all over. Oh dear, I thought the pot had made him paranoid. Or maybe coming up against someone in the dark with a gun did that. I didn’t know much about drugs except how to take down drug cartels.
“What are you doing here?” I countered.
“I work here!”
“In the middle of the night, with the lights off?” I sneezed. “Put that thing out!”
He stubbed it out on the side of the maître d’s stand, leaving a little black burn mark. I waved my hand in front of my face to clear the air.
“I’m, like, the night watchman,” he said, still trembling.
“No you’re not. The night watchman is racing around the grounds in a golf cart. Is that the Bob you were calling out to?” I needed to know how many idiots I was dealing with here.
“Yeah, that’s Bob.”
“Anyone else here?”
“You.”
There was a reason they called it dope.
“Anyone else besides me?”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
“Then no.”
I resisted the urge to smack him.
He peered at my face. My voice did not match my disguise.
“Wait a minute, you’re that old chick from the bathroom.”
“That old chick has a gun trained on you. Mind your manners.”
“Uh …”
“The proper response is ‘sorry.’”
“Sorry.”
“So why are you here killing brain cells alone in the dark?”
“I live here.”
“If this place hired a full-time residential staff member, I seriously doubt it would be you.”
“No, like, they don’t know. Except Bob. He’s cool. I sell him weed. My parents kicked me out of their house, and I don’t have anywhere to live, so I sleep on a sofa in the lounge. I take my showers in the golf club changing room. I’ve been doing it, like, for months, and nobody has noticed.”
He smiled at that then broke into giggles. I waited for him to finish. It took a while. He was quite the giggler.
“Okay, Albert, here’s the deal. I’m investigating the murder of James Garfield, the guy who was stabbed in your men’s room. Another country club member did it. That member attended the charity dinner, so I snuck in here to take pictures of the guest list to narrow down the suspects. Now I’m going to leave. You will tell no one that you saw me, and I’ll tell no one that you’re a drug dealer sleeping on the couch at your place of work. You get to keep your job and your liberty, and I get to get rid of you.”
“Uh, okay.”
Well, that was easy. It looked like he still had a few brain cells after all. I turned to leave.
“Wait!” he called after me.
I turned around. “What?”
“I think I saw the murderer.”
Eight
I studied him. Albert was not what you would call a reliable witness. “Tell me more,” I said.
“You said the victim’s name was James Garfield?”
“Yes.”
“That, like, rings a bell. A guy at the dinner pointed him out to me and told me to give him a free glass of wine on him but not to say who it was from.”
The murderer wanted to get Garfield drunk. That certainly would have made him an easier target.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Uh, let’s see …” His voice trailed off.
“Wake up. Try to see through the fog you put in your brain. This is important.”
He stared at me blankly for a moment, his eyes almost shut, then they opened a little as a couple of sleepy synapses fired.
“Oh yeah! So I, like, went over there with a bottle of red and a bottle of white. People have their preferences. Personally, I don’t like alcohol. It’s, like, unhealthy.”
“You’ve hardly chosen an improvement. Go on.”
“So I go up to him, saying an anonymous friend wants to offer him a free glass of wine, and he just stares at me. Like really stares at me for, like, a full minute. Like it was weird.”
“And, like, what happened next?” Oh dear, now he had me doing it.
“Well, actually, he wasn’t staring at me. He was, like, staring at the bottles. Staring at the bottles like you would stare at a hot woman. Well, not you. Unless you’re a, I mean, like, I wouldn’t want to assume—”
“Go on.” I was losing patience. Actually, I had lost it about ten seconds into this conversation, but now I was fantasizing about shooting him.
“Then he sort of, like, shudders and looks away. He said he didn’t want any.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah, when I came back to give him the large orange juice
he ordered, instead he asked me who offered him the wine. I said the guy wanted to remain anonymous. He kept pressing me and pressing me to answer, and I had to make an excuse to get out of there.”
“What can you remember about the man who offered Garfield the wine?”
“Um, he was sitting near the back. Near the door.”
I smiled. That was what I’d thought.
“What did he look like? Was he with anyone?”
“Um, I can’t remember if he was with anyone. He was, like, maybe in his fifties. Pretty fit. Still had his hair, although it was, like, going gray.”
“Anything else?”
“He gave me a ten-dollar tip. I sure remember that. Let me think … uh … no. I can’t think of anything else.”
“Give me your phone number.”
“Why?”
“I want to question you once you’ve sobered up. Don’t smoke any more tonight and don’t smoke tomorrow. I’ll call you then.”
“You’re not going to tell on me, are you?”
“Not if you behave.”
“So if you’re a cop, why are you, like, sneaking around?”
“Because I’m not a cop, at least not in the way you think. I just like to see justice done, and the cops in Cheerville are useless.”
He laughed. “Dude, they so are! Like, I was smoking with Brad and Chad and Chad’s dad in the park and—”
“I don’t care,” I said. It appeared every criminal in town knew that the Cheerville Police Department was useless. Maybe that was why there was such a high murder rate.
After a final warning to Albert to stay sober, and after confiscating his joint, I headed back the way I came. I got to watch Bob do wheelies on the golf cart before disappearing out of sight, then I did a disappearing act of my own.
I settled in at home for a good night’s sleep. The murderer obviously knew Garfield well and had even tried to get him off the wagon. That was a cruel thing to do to someone trying to kick alcoholism, but considering he planned to plant a knife in Garfield’s back, I guessed he was beyond being nice to the poor guy.
