Deadly Divots

by Gene Breaznell

  Other Mystery Novels by Gene Breaznell

  The Star of Sutherland

  DEADLY DIVOTS

  DEADLY DIVOTS

  A GOLF MURDER MYSTERY

  Gene Breaznell

  BRIDGE WORKS PUBLISHING COMPANY

  Bridgehampton, New York

  Copyright © 2003 by Gene Breaznell

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published by Bridge Works Publishing Company, Bridgehampton, New York, a member of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.

  Distributed in the United States by National Book Network, Lanham, Maryland. For descriptions of this and other Bridge Works books, visit the National Book Network website at www.nbnbooks.com.

  FIRST EDITION

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Breaznell, Gene.

  Deadly divots : a golf murder mystery / Gene Breaznell.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-882593-74-X (cloth : alk. paper)

  1. Title.

  PS3552.R3577D43 2003

  813'.54—dc21

  2003001129

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  For Susie and Betsy

  A special thanks to my editor, Barbara Phillips, for the insightful way she helped shape this book. If only she could help my golf game.

  DEADLY DIVOTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  Golf is good, golf is great, golf is a guy’s wet dream. Who would commit murder on a golf course? Especially a course as inviting as Broken Oak. Where I wish I were teeing up this morning instead of investigating a murder.

  As I aimed my unmarked Dodge toward the clubhouse, between a pair of plush fairways and perfect greens, I was hoping they wouldn’t mistake me for one of the help and put me to work in the kitchen. Or accuse me of trespassing and usher me out. I’ve played at clubs like this in my dreams. There’s never a blade of grass out of place, the clubhouse rivals Buckingham Palace, and the scenery beats shooting par. I can barely afford the public courses on my cop’s pay. The fairways are a misnomer, the greens aren’t, and the wait’s longer than eternity at Pinelawn Cemetery. Which reminds me. There’s a stiff somewhere out here.

  Stands of tall oaks defined the fairways. Ergo the name Broken Oak, only I didn’t see one looking less than imposing. Oaks that have also caused more than a few broken golf clubs, I presume. It doesn’t take a club member wearing a Panama hat to figure that out. Or Sherlock Holmes in a deerstalker. You don’t need to be a genius to be a good detective. All you need is a little logic and lots of endurance. That’s how I lasted twenty years in homicide on Long Island, with a record number of murder convictions for Nassau County. The highest score down at the Mine-ola Courthouse. Opposite of golf, as the game should be played, though I also run up the score on the links too often. But murder most foul is seldom allowed on gorgeous Gold Coast golf courses like this. On priceless real estate merely a chip shot from the Sound.

  The Gothic-inspired clubhouse/mansion loomed on a rise wreathed in morning mist, oozing old wealth and consummate power. It once belonged to Dame Winifred Randall, a British expatriate who made a fortune writing murder mysteries. My wife read everything she wrote. Carol read everything, anyway, God rest her soul.

  I must admit to reading very few mysteries. They’re like another day at the office. Or unlike it. Especially “cozies,” as Carol described Dame Winifred’s books. Try cozying up to the likes of John Wayne Gacey and Jack the Ripper. And all those suspects, lurking in mansions like Broken Oak’s clubhouse. Or out on the moors. They can’t hide from me. I can smell them, like the fertilizer on these fairways.

  I tried to like Dame Winifred’s work, mostly because of Carol. But the Dame’s plots were too contrived and her prissy little tec was too clever. Real detectives, I often tried to convince Carol, found murder far less puzzling. Especially during Dame Winifred’s era, when suspects were routinely hauled into a backroom at headquarters and convinced they should confess. When the good old “wham-bam” to the back of the head was acceptable, and admired, like a solid tee shot. Before the occasional broken bone and a couple of bruises were an issue, and we had to Mirandize everything that moved.

  I parked at the front entrance to the clubhouse between two marked patrol cars, where even the club members are not allowed to park their Benzes and BMWs. I guess that’s a cop perk, although I’d rather have a Beemer than a preferred parking spot.

  As I climbed out of my car, a grinning uniformed cop glided toward me on a golf cart. “Stiff’s out on the tenth hole, Karl,” he told me, as calmly as a starter with my tee-off time.

  “Where’s that?” I asked.

  “Hop on,” he said.

  “I’ll walk,” I insisted. “You should too.”

  “I know,” he smiled sheepishly. “I’m getting a gut.”

  “I don’t mean that,” I said. “I mean, as a good investigator, you need to get a feel for the premises.”

  “Sure, Karl,” he shrugged, gliding away on the cart.

  I followed on foot, wondering why I had lectured him. He’s a good cop with an excellent arrest record. I was feeling like Tiger Woods stalking the course. “Tiger, Tiger, burning bright,” Carol would say, quoting some old poet, whenever I watched the Golf Channel, whether or not Tiger was on. She knew all the old poets but not Nicklaus, Palmer, Sarizen, Snead, Hogan, Jones. She wouldn’t know Tiger if she bought a Buick from him.

  Playing golf at Broken Oak, to Carol, would be a good walk spoiled. To me, it’s poetry: Tintern Abbey in eighteen holes. Tees, fairways, and pins clad in one green hue, waters rolling from their mountain springs with a soft inland murmur, sportive wood run wild, connecting the landscape with the quiet sky. Wordsworth would have loved this course. I love it too, though they’ll never let me play here.

  The body was covered with a black tarp on the tenth fair-way beside a water hazard that looked calmer than Walden Pond and could never have cost anyone a two-stroke penalty. An ambulance and two more patrol cars were parked on a nearby cart path. Several EMTs and uniformed cops milled about, all afraid to act without a superior present, watching their backs closer than the criminals.

  I approached slowly, like Tiger considering a difficult lie. I’ve calmed down over the years. You could even call it mellowing. I used to blast my way onto crime scenes like this: siren wailing, lights flashing. Now the clues, the stiffs, the perps, and my fellow cops can wait a few extra minutes. It could have something to do with Carol dying. Made me stop and think. Whatever. We catch more killers in the crime lab these days anyway. If only the mellowing had helped my golf game. If I still didn’t grip it and rip it, go long and wrong, or dub it for ten yards, believing I’m John Daly. If I could trust the club to do most of the work. If I wasn’t a homicide cop who can’t trust anyone.

  The only civilian in sight was a silver-haired man wearing an Izod shirt, tangerine slacks, and buff-white golf shoes, like he had just stepped out of a Cadillac ad. He was surveying the water hazard and the corpse, as if trying to decide which club would best chip his ball across.

  “Cordon off the hole,�
� I ordered another uniform who was on another golf cart. It seemed that all my fellow cops could do, without a superior present, was commandeer carts. I thought of telling them, Don’t get too used to these conveyances unless you’re planning to hit the lottery or go on the take. I held my tongue, however, wary of the silver-haired civilian.

  “Close the whole course,” I added.

  “Is that necessary?” the civilian asked.

  “Who are you?” I asked back.

  “I am Dr. Fitch,” he said, like I’m the headwaiter in a crowded restaurant and being a doctor will get him a table.

  “I’m Detective Kanopka,” I told him, without bothering to show my ID. “I’m in charge of this investigation.”

  “Good for you,” Fitch smirked, like “you dumb, unqualified Polack,” though I’m half Irish on my mother’s side. Come to think of it, I don’t know too many great Irish detectives either.

  “The whole course is closed,” I ordered.

  “Why not close just this hole?” said Fitch.

  “Evidence could be anywhere.” I shrugged. “You should know that.”

  “Of course,” Fitch huffed.

  “What are you doing out here, anyway?” I asked, further nettling the arrogant bastard.

  “I was in the pro shop,” Fitch said.

  “And?”

  “The greenskeeper dashed in and reported this.” Fitch smirked at the stiff, as if it had cost him a two-stroke penalty.

  “Of course I came at once,” he continued.

  “Why?”

  “As I have already told you, Detective, I am a doctor.”

  Right. You’ve just scrubbed for surgery, and I might contaminate you.

  “Wasn’t he dead already?”

  “I did not know that at the time.”

  “Of course.”

  “Now I know that he has been dead all night.”

  “How can you tell?”

  I squatted and pulled back the tarp. Beneath it lay a middle-aged man, about my height, six feet, about my age, forty-eight. Looking somewhat like me, which is always disturbing, with thinning reddish-gray hair. But he also had a potbelly and bitch tits. I can do fifty push-ups and countless crunches.

  “The obvious signs,” Fitch said, as if instructing a first-year intern. “Rigor, lividity, beginning of bloat. This hazard could have a high degree of salinity.”

  “Lots of salt?” I asked, dumb like a fox.

  Fitch raised an eyebrow. “In the common parlance, Detective.”

  Okay. I am pretty common. But I’ve probably seen more stiffs during my three tours in Vietnam and twenty years in homicide than most doctors. Unless they’re Jack Kevorkian. I looked closely at the corpse, wincing at a deep laceration in the side of the head and at the partly crushed skull. The real difference between me and doctors is that I never got used to the stiffs.

  Fitch caught my wince and said, smiling thinly, “That’s a deadly divot.”

  Ignoring the poor attempt at golf humor, I asked, “It couldn’t have happened in a fall?”

  “The wound is too severe and too deep,” Fitch said. “There is nothing near this water hazard that could have caused it. My guess is a nine iron or a pitching wedge.”

  “The blades are sharp,” I said, “shaped like little hatchets, angled like this head wound. I have a great pitching wedge, a Callaway. Gets me out of the deepest traps.”

  “Nothing would have helped this gentleman.”

  “Lousy golfer?”

  “And hardly a gentleman.”

  “You knew him?”

  “His name is O’Reilly.”

  “You were friends?”

  “Certainly not, though most of the club members know each other.”

  “You golfed with him?”

  “Golf is a noun, Detective.”

  “Huh?”

  “There is no such word as golfed.”

  “I’m a cop, not a college professor.”

  “So I see.”

  “So you and O’Reilly golfed?”

  I can also be a wiseass.

  “Never together,” Fitch insisted through clenched teeth. Then he smiled thinly again, adding, “This is the earliest he has ever been out.”

  “What does that mean?” I frowned.

  “He could never make the dawn patrol.”

  “I get it,” I said. I sure did, having slept in my car, who knows how often, to get out early on crowded public courses before the galloping hordes.

  “Can you also understand,” Fitch smirked, “that it is past dawn and I should be on the second hole by now?”

  “Not while I’m patrolling the course,” I told him. “Patrol okay as a verb?”

  Fitch smirked again. I had no idea what kind of golfer he was or what kind of doctor, but he was great at smirking.

  “Very clever, Detective,” he said.

  I ignored the comment, noticing that the corpse was wearing a gold Rolex, ruling out robbery as a motive. It was also dressed in a blue blazer and white slacks, with the fly wide open. O’Reilly could have been relieving himself into the water hazard when somebody whacked him from behind. Or flashing the frogs. Or getting a blow job. I smiled slyly. Being a good detective also takes a dirty mind.

  “O’Reilly owed me some money,” Fitch said, tantalizingly, as if trying to get me back for my misuse of the language.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” I warned.

  “Am I a suspect?” He raised an eyebrow but admitted in the next breath, “He owed me twenty.”

  “A small golf bet?”

  “Hardly, Detective. Twenty thousand.”

  “Dollars?”

  Fitch nodded. “That is not enough for me to kill him, if that is what you are thinking. And now I shall never get it back.”

  I stared at him. He stared back without blinking. He could be a good poker player. But what kind of doctor? He cared more about the course being closed than about the deceased.

  “Guess you’ll have to sue his estate,” I said.

  “There is no use,” said Fitch.

  My turn to raise an eyebrow.

  “O’Reilly owed everyone,” he explained. “He was always promoting some business deal or another, guaranteeing to get you in on the ground floor. He was flat broke, however, and I found out too late. I should have known when he was posted in the clubhouse every month, though some members pay their bills late on purpose.”

  “Why?” I’d be in bankruptcy court.

  “So everyone is impressed by how much they spend here. The more they owe the better—an insecure, nouveau riche tactic.”

  “Isn’t nouveau better than no riche at all?”

  “To some, I suppose,” Fitch sighed.

  “To O’Reilly?” I asked.

  “As nouveau as they come,” Fitch told me.

  I shook my head. Some things never make sense, even to the cleverest detectives.

  “Why is he all dressed up?” I asked.

  “Simple,” said Fitch. “There was a cocktail party at the club last night.”

  “You attended?”

  “My wife and I left early. And now, Detective, I would like to leave, unless you open the course.”

  “You speak with Mr. O’Reilly?”

  “Hardly, though I could not avoid hearing him.”

  “Was there an argument?”

  “He was loud, as usual. Also imbibing heavily.”

  “Drunk?”

  “Possessed, as usual, with that beggarly damnation.”

  Even my Irish half is not fond of drunks. But I liked Fitch’s superior air even less. I made him stay for more questioning and made sure the course stayed closed.

  “What was he like in that state?” I asked.

  “A drunk is a drunk.”

  “Happy? Surly? Sad?”

  “Horny, to use the common parlance.”

  “He thought he was God’s gift to women?” I know the type and I don’t like them.

  “He chased anything in s
kirts, Detective—except for his poor wife, I understand.”

  “Was she with him last night?”

  “I did not see her. I believe they were separated.”

  Fitch fielded my questions like an expert. He was a cool customer. Even in the good old days of law enforcement, when tough interrogators could have hit him like a solid tee shot, he wouldn’t have cracked easily.

  “Ironic, is it not?” Fitch smirked yet again, like a Born Again who knows he’s going to heaven and you’re not.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on, Detective. He was floating facedown in this water hazard. The greenskeeper pulled him out.”

  “So what?”

  “So a bad golfer ends his days in the same hazard where he must have lost a thousand balls?”

  “That is ironic,” I admitted, though I wouldn’t mind dying of natural causes on a course like this. I’ll never get this close to heaven. I empathized with O’Reilly lying helplessly dead on the ground, however, while an arrogant fellow club member made ghoulish golf jokes. A drunk’s a drunk, but a victim’s also a victim. No one deserves to die this way. And the corpse looked too much like me. My Irish half. I replaced the tarp, trying to shield the body from further verbal abuse. Dignifying the mortal remains, as my priest might put it. Since Carol’s passing, I’ve made more confessions than I ever coerced.

  “But he died on the back nine,” Fitch said testily. “Can you at least open the front?”

  “That reminds me of Uncle Miltie,” I said.

  “You mean that he and O’Reilly are both dead?” Fitch looked quizzical. A genuine smile would have cracked his face. “What does a comedian have to do with it?”

  “He once asked to play only the front nine at Augusta National,” I explained, “since he’s only half Jewish.”

  “They let him?”

  “Could he play here?”

  Fitch’s facial expression flat-lined as he said, “Broken Oak does not discriminate against anyone, Detective.”

  “Of course not,” I said, just as flatly. Only against African Americans, Orientals, Hispanics, and a long list of undesirables including cops.