Danielle asked the woman in black if we could join them and she said yes with a nod. They were opposite each other so Danielle and I sat opposite each other as well. We were all set up for a game of canasta.
“Tough day,” I said.
The woman nodded. “You could say.”
“How do you think this happened?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Health department thinks either the kitchen or the food.”
“Health department can kiss my grits,” said the cook.
“You saying it isn’t remotely possible it came out of the kitchen?”
“That’s what I’m sayin’.”
“That sounds like denial, my friend.”
“I ain’t your friend, snowbird.”
I winced at the snowbird comment. “You might want to check the attitude, pal. I’m the only one here who’s even remotely interested in your side of the story.”
“That so? Who the hell are you, anyway?”
“Miami Jones.”
“Like the ark of the covenant?”
“No, not like the ark of the covenant.”
“There used to be a ball player with that name.”
“You’re looking at him.”
The cook regarded me a moment and rubbed his stubble—the stuff on his chin, not his head.
“So what are you now, some kind of private eye?”
“Yes.”
He smiled. His teeth were nicotine yellow. “What, they didn’t have any bars you could open?”
“I already have a bar I enjoy, and someone already owns it. And I can go there tonight and spend the money I get paid today. You, on the other hand, are looking at being unemployed.” I looked at the woman in black. She had lost her Florida smile. “I didn’t get your name earlier.”
“Natalie Morris. I’m the catering manager.”
“So you were in charge of the wedding food.”
She nodded.
“Then you’re both on the hook. So help me out here. Tell me why it couldn’t happen the way the health department is telling it.”
Natalie looked at the cook and he grunted.
“My kitchen is spotless. It’s fully stainless steel. We follow a two-step cleaning protocol for all dishware and cutlery. I’m not some truck stop short-order cook. I know what I’m doing.”
It was a funny way to put it, because I thought he looked exactly like a truck stop short-order cook. I could see him yelling the orders through the little window in the kitchen while thin waitresses in pink dresses warmed up truckers’ coffees. But that was no reason to assume the kitchen was a pigsty. Some of the best food in the country was served in no-name diners clinging to the periphery of the interstate system. On the flip side, so was some of the worst.
So I asked, “Where’d you learn to cook?”
“CIA,” he said.
I had to give that my impressed lip curl. I knew he wasn’t talking about the staff canteen in Langley, Virginia, where the spies ate their lunch. The Culinary Institute of America was as fine a cooking school as there was on the planet.
“Which campus?”
“Cali.”
“What’s the building called?”
“Greystone.”
“What’s the building made of?”
“I’m no architect. It’s some kind of stone, all right. But it ain’t gray. More like sand color.”
I nodded. He knew the place. He either studied there for real or he really did his research on the con he was running. I’d been there, for a function way back when I played ball in Modesto. Some teammates and I had stayed the weekend and played a bit of golf, done a few wineries. It was nice country, but way above my pay grade.
“What’s the closest winery to the campus there?”
The cook shrugged. “Can’t say for sure. I never paced them out. Beringer is close. But so is Morley, and William Cole. Charles Krug is across the train tracks.”
He sat back in his chair and folded his arms and practically dared me to test him more. But this wasn’t Wheel of Fortune and I wasn’t Pat Sajak.
“So what did the CIA teach you about keeping bugs out of your kitchen?”
“Everything. It’s critical. You can be a three-star Michelin guy, top of the world. On the cover of magazines. But you know full well what happens if the health department shuts you down for violations—let alone the bad press from a food poisoning outbreak. It’s career-ending stuff. That’s what they taught us. Because that’s what it is. So don’t kid yourself that I don’t know what this means. I’ll be done, not just here, but pretty much anywhere in the South. I’ll have to move back to the Northeast and be some clown’s sous chef.” He shook his head and curled his lip.
“So you keep a clean environment. But you can’t see a food-borne virus, can you?”
“Of course not, but we sanitize every night after service. Every surface, even the floor. The walk-in fridge gets the treatment weekly. I use a bleach solution. It’s like napalm on viruses. So they can point the finger, but there’s more chance that a virus came in on you than there is that it started in my kitchen.”
He certainly talked a good game, but he was fighting for his livelihood so I expected that as a minimum. Then again I’d been in enough South Florida eateries where the kitchen staff wouldn’t know bleach from peach schnapps. Those kinds of kitchens were usually the ones that got notices stuck on their front doors, and it didn’t take a genius to see why.
“What about the food?” I asked. “Maybe it came from your suppliers?”
The cook looked at Natalie, the catering manager, and she shrugged.
“It’s possible. But like I said, it doesn’t make sense.”
“Why?”
“How many health department people are here right now?”
“All of them?”
“That’s what I thought. A lot of folks for one possible outbreak. Now I know there were some pretty powerful people got sick yesterday, so the health department is probably motivated. But here’s the thing. If a virus came in from a supplier, what are odds that ours was the only delivery that was contaminated? I mean, if it was on the lettuce, for example. Wouldn’t it be on all the lettuce? And if it was, wouldn’t there be other venues having the exact same issue? I mean this happened on Saturday night. Every restaurant in the state is open on a Saturday night. There should be outbreaks everywhere. But the health department doesn’t seem stretched to me. Like you say, they all seem to be here.”
I nodded and looked at Danielle, who raised her eyebrows at me. It was a fair analysis and a good argument. Unfortunately it put the focus right back on the kitchen. Bleach or no bleach, sometimes people got sloppy. Sometimes they got lazy. Sometimes the bleach ran out and they just wiped down the counters with water. Anything was possible. I focused back on the cook.
“Do you use gloves in your kitchen?”
“No.”
“Isn’t that unsanitary?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Gloves are stupid. It’s the kind of thing politicians put in the health regs to be seen to be doing something rather than actually doing something. Look, if you’ve got dirty hands and you put on gloves, what happens? You have to touch the damn gloves to put them on. Defeats the purpose. Plus gloves are usually latex, and some people are allergic, so that’s a new problem you’ve created. And no restaurant owner wants to pay for latex-free gloves. They cost a fortune and you’d have to change them constantly or they’d be just as likely to get contaminated as bare hands. The real solution is simple. Wash your hands. Wash ’em good. Wash ’em frequently. We’re not home cooks. We’re not sticking our finger in the soup. I use a utensil and discard the utensil each time. I’ve got a collection of teaspoons you wouldn’t believe. I go through plenty during a service. Start clean, stay clean. That’s the only way.”
The guy looked like he belonged on an oil rig but he spoke the right lines, and I was starting to think there
was something to what he was saying. But there didn’t seem to be an alternative theory, and mistakes could get made. Even NASCAR car drivers crashed occasionally. It felt inevitable to me that Connie Persil would find what she was looking for and close the place down, at least temporarily. And temporarily was going to be long enough to kill the tournament. I’d done what I’d said I would do, and the results were in. Just because the club board members didn’t like the answer didn’t change it. And it was better they dealt with things early rather than late. I didn’t know whether the tournament could be salvaged. That wasn’t my area, and to be honest it wasn’t my concern.
I was happy to help Ron out. The country club had been a bit of a lifeline for him a few years prior. The woman who was the love of his life had passed away, and he had spiraled downhill. He got remarried hastily, to a woman who enjoyed the finer things in life that Ron had access to. But those things—the cars, the clubs, the fancy apartment—were a mirage. They all came about because of Ron’s employer. So when he realized that his work was the major source of his melancholy, he decided to give it up. And when the work went, so did the employer-supplied cars and club memberships. He had to downgrade his apartment. And his wife didn’t stick around for the lower-rent party. But Ron’s a sociable guy. He’s like one of those apes that go all funny in the head when they get shunned by the other apes. Solitude doesn’t suit him. Me, I could sail away on a solo voyage and be as happy as a clam. At least if Danielle came. That would be better. But I didn’t need more than that. Ron did. So Keith Hamilton had done Ron a favor and waived the initiation fee to join South Lakes, and Ron had found a new family in West Palm. The country club and the yacht club on the Intracoastal gave him a new group of apes to hang with. And gave us an excellent source of clients to boot. So I was more than happy to help out. But these were not poor people. They weren’t Palm Beach rich, but they did just fine. So if they wanted more than a morning out of me they’d have to pony up. But I just didn’t see the point.
We left Lex the cook and Natalie at their table in the empty bar. They said they were hanging around because they had nothing better to do. We wished them good luck and went downstairs to find the board and break the news that they there were basically up a tributary without a canoe. We ran into Keith Hamilton as we wandered back through the dining room. He wore the mood of a Wall Street banker during the depression.
“It’s a conspiracy, I tell you,” he spluttered as if he couldn’t get the words out fast enough.
“We need to talk.”
He kept moving. “Come with me.”
Danielle and I turned around and followed him back outside. He marched past the practice putting green, out near the first tee. A golf cart was sitting there waiting for us. A stocky Latino guy was behind the wheel. It was a double bench seat cart. Keith dropped in beside the driver and Danielle and I sat facing backward, our feet in little slots where golf bags could sit.
The driver hit the gas, or whatever the appropriate phrase was for accelerating away in an electric cart, and we silently whizzed down the first fairway. I hung on for dear life. We couldn’t have been going more than fifteen but it felt like Daytona. We zoomed down the side of the fairway, scooting around a large sand trap that was as white as a beach, and then up a slight slope to the green. The driver stopped suddenly just before the green and Danielle and I were pressed back into our seats.
I heard Keith leap out and let out a groan, the kind of noise you might expect from a teenage boy awoken with the words time for school. I stepped off the cart and offered a hand to Danielle. She took it with a smile that made me feel like a million bucks. She was like that. Perfectly capable of getting off a damned golf cart by herself, but perfectly happy to take the hand of a gentleman when offered. We stepped around the cart and up to the edge of the green. The Latino guy removed his cap and scratched his head as if what he saw defied explanation. Keith Hamilton just stood in silence. I looked at the green.
A large portion of the smooth cut grass was dead. I’m no horticulturist, but I do know some things about lawn care. I know, for example, that green grass is good, and yellow grass is not good. And much of the so-called green I was looking at was not green at all. It was the color of wheat. It was crusty and dry and dead. And it wasn’t from lack of watering. It wasn’t some freak natural occurrence. Mother nature did all kinds of crazy stuff, but she rarely wrote things out using the roman alphabet. And this dead grass was in the form of three large letters, writ across the width of the green. Three capital letters.
GUR.
Chapter Six
“What’s gur?” asked Danielle.
“Not gur, G-U-R. It’s a golf term,” I said. “It means ground under repair. Right?” I looked at Keith but he didn’t look at me and he didn’t respond. The Latino guy nodded at me and pulled his cap back on.
“It doesn’t look under repair,” Danielle said.
“It’s not, at least in this case. Ground under repair usually refers to a section of the golf course that is being fixed up. It could be some tree plantings, or it could be a section of new green, or even part of the fairway that has been churned up and needs resodding. The thing is, it’s grass. It doesn’t just happen in five minutes. Things need to be given a chance to grow, to take root. So the greenskeepers rope off the area in question and put a sign on it. Ground under repair, or GUR for short.”
“I would have thought the sign was somewhat superfluous.”
“Not really, because it relates to the rules of golf. On fairways and such, a player must play the lie he or she has. You can’t pick up your ball to get a better lie or clean your ball. If you do, you receive a penalty. But GUR is different. The rules allow a player whose ball lands in an area marked as GUR to remove their ball and drop it outside the sectioned area, no closer to the hole, for no penalty.”
“This doesn’t look like repairing damage,” said Danielle. “It looks like someone’s causing it.”
“Someone is,” said Keith. “This is vandalism, Deputy. And I’d like to make an official complaint to the Palm Beach sheriff.”
Danielle looked at the president and then at the green. Then she nodded. “All right, Mr. Hamilton. Let’s talk.”
“Give me a moment,” he said, and he turned to his Latino greenskeeper.
“Diego. It’s tournament week. What can we do?”
Diego scratched his head through his cap this time, and looked at the green as if he had no earthly idea what do to. But that was just the impression he gave, and it was a misleading one. He clearly wasn’t considering the what—he was considering the how.
“We can remove the dead parts. I can get replacement green from the executive course and patch it in.”
“We’re on national television this week, Diego. We can’t have the first green looking like Frankenstein’s monster.”
“No, señor. With some water and some brushing, I can do it.” He waved at the front section of the green that was unharmed. “For the practice rounds we keep the pin at the front here. That will give me five days to make the rest bueno. Before the TV comes. Si?” He looked at Keith and Keith nodded.
“Do your magic, Diego.” The greenskeeper strode up onto the green and Keith turned us toward the distant clubhouse.
“You don’t mind if we walk back, do you?”
“Not at all,” said Danielle. I was okay with it. It was a beautiful morning. The sky was a deep kind of blue. There are three kinds of sky in Florida: blue, which was most common, and spoke of pleasant days and tourists and beaches—the chamber of commerce gang loved the blue days; then there was the white days, when the sun got so hot that the atmosphere lost all its color and the ground oozed moist warmth from below—the chamber gang didn’t love white days, and neither did anyone else bar Florida Power and Light; and the third kind of day was grayscale, when the mood swept in from the Bahamas and clouds choked the color from the sky and then everything turned black. The humidity bubbled and sooner or later the heavens opened a
nd pelted the earth with rain that could knock a horse off its feet. The chamber of commerce’s position on those days was variable. Rain meant lots of income for restaurants and bars, and indoor places like theaters and the children’s museum. Their impression of those days was based more on wind speed than color. Rain squalls happened plenty in Florida. There was no topography to slow the passage of storms. The weather swept across the flat state as if it were nothing but open ocean. So rain came and then went. It didn’t hang around. But the warm Gulf Stream waters also brought hurricanes. Tourists could live with a refreshing burst of rain to wash away the humidity, but no one liked to spend their tourist dollars bunkered down against the ravages of a hurricane. The commerce folks were most definitely not keen on hurricanes.
But there was zero chance of rain as we wandered back up the first fairway. Danielle dropped in between Keith and me.
“So what is that all about?”
Keith considered his words before he spoke. “I believe there is a concerted effort to damage the club.”
“By whom?”
“I don’t know. I have my suspicions, but I have no evidence.”
“What do you mean by concerted effort?”
“This is not the first incident. It started with small things. Tires being let down on members’ vehicles in the lot. Half of our fleet of golf carts was disabled.”
“Disabled?”
“We discovered that the battery terminals had been disconnected.”
“Cut wires?” I asked.
“No, the terminals had been physically disconnected. The wires were fine.”
Deep Rough Page 4
