“A thing?”
“Your living situation.”
“Cohabitation out of wedlock, is that what you’re asking?”
“Not the legal status, but you are an item.”
An item. It was starting to sound like Mayberry.
“Yes, Keith. We are an item.”
“That isn’t going to be a problem for you, professionally, is it?”
I frowned. It hadn’t so far. Since I’d known Danielle I’d shot one man dead and let another move on to the next world without offering any assistance whatsoever. Danielle had been shot because of my work, but had never been shot because of hers. But we were still an item. Which stopped me in my tracks. We weren’t items, plural. An item. Just one.
“I have no professional involvement here, Keith. Remember? That finished yesterday.”
“That was yesterday. This is today. And today the sheriff has people investigating something that could be very embarrassing for the club in a week where we can’t afford such a thing. I want to rehire you. Your deputy will investigate and the sheriff will do what he thinks is right for the city. I want you to look after the club’s interests. Look at the investigation from our perspective.”
“I won’t run interference for you, Keith. I don’t care if it was you who put the virus on those chairs. Whoever it was will go down.”
“No, goodness no. I’m not suggesting you pervert the course of justice. Let me make that absolutely clear. Nothing of the sort. I’m simply asking you to investigate in parallel. Keep me up to speed. Allow for damage control, should we need it. I want whomever did this apprehended even more than the sheriff does. I told you someone was trying to hurt this club. Now it’s proven. All I’m saying is, let’s find the culprit without fanfare.”
“All right, Keith. I can do that. But you are warned. I won’t mess with Danielle’s investigation. Not one little bit. But we’ll find out what’s going on, and who did what. And we’ll do it as quietly as we can.”
“That’s all I ask. And if the case weren’t to be solved until next Monday, after the tournament, that wouldn’t hurt at all.”
I shook my head and slapped him on the back and walked back to Danielle.
She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to.
“He’s just hired me back on.”
“To mess with me?”
“No. I made it clear that wouldn’t happen, and he was pretty keen to be clear he wasn’t asking for that. He just wants an eye on things from the club’s perspective, and I get to spend the week with you and get paid for it.”
“Well, when you put it like that. What’s first?”
“I have an itch to scratch. Let’s chat with the greenskeeper.”
Chapter Thirteen
We left the executive course and all its hospitality tents and signage, and crossed over to the championship course. We walked down the first fairway across pristine grass. The course was open and lush, dotted with gently swaying palm trees and large but inviting water hazards. Unlike the courses I recalled from my childhood in Connecticut, there wasn’t a lot of rough either side of the fairway. The playing surface looked slightly shorter and a touch lighter than the rough, which still looked like the ball would sit up nice and high if players drove their tee shots wayward. The biggest danger I could see, from a playing perspective, was the water and the sand. There was plenty of it. Just like the rest of Florida.
We saw Diego the greenskeeper from the tee box and he was down on his hands and knees when we reached the green. I stood on the edge of the green and looked it over. Just the previous morning there had been large dead letters across the area. Now I couldn’t tell there had ever been a problem. The green looked like it had been primed for months. It was short and deep green and it looked pretty fast. The hole was placed at the front of green, on the lower of two levels. Most of the damage had been done on the upper level, and it was there that Diego was down on the grass.
“Morning,” I said.
Diego looked up and squinted, and then nodded. “Good morning.”
“The green looks fantastic.”
“Gracias.”
“How did you do that so fast? It really looks brand-new.”
He sat back on his haunches and stretched his back out. “We take it from another green. One not on the tournament course. Same process we use to replace the cup when we move it each day. We dig the grass out of the other green and transplant it.”
“What are you doing down there?” asked Danielle.
“Brushing the grain.” He looked around the green. “It might look good to your eye, but the television cameras are ultra-high-definition. If you have a good TV you can see the individual blades of grass on the fairways. It shows every little flaw. So we must transplant the grass so it matches the grain of this green, and then I brush it to make sure all the blades fall that same way. Makes for better putting, too.”
I never knew grass was so technical. I didn’t even mow mine. It was longer and fatter and thicker than anything on the South Lakes course, and I had a guy who came in every week to give it a haircut.
“What sort of grass is that?” I asked.
Diego stood, brushed his knees off and walked over to us. I suspected I had hit on his favorite topic. He waved his hands across the view, indicating the golf course as a whole.
“The fairways are Bermuda grass, overseeded with rye grass.” He glanced at the green. “The greens are creeping bent grass.”
“Easy to maintain?”
“No.”
“Really?” asked Danielle. “It’s just grass, isn’t it?” It sounded like such a dullard of a question, and I was grateful she had asked it before I had. To his credit Diego didn’t roll his eyes or anything. He just shook his head.
“No, it’s not just grass. It’s specific turf. Bred to do the job. Take Bermuda. It’s grows beautifully, so much so it can take over native grasses. It’s a battle to even keep it from taking over the greens.”
“So why use different grass on the greens?”
He shrugged. “Bent grass doesn’t tend to thatch, and it provides a smoother, more consistent surface. And of course because of Augusta.”
“What about Augusta?” asked Danielle.
“It’s where they hold the Masters tournament.” I said. “Augusta, Georgia. It’s kind of like the holy grail of golf tournaments.”
“Yeah, I know the Masters,” she said. “But what does that have to do with grass in South Florida?” She looked at me like I was going to answer that one too, but I was all out of Augusta knowledge.
Diego wasn’t though. “It’s the grass they use on the greens at Augusta. When this course was developed I guess they wanted to copy Augusta. Bermuda grass fairways and bent grass greens.”
“Is that unusual?” I asked. “To have more than one grass?”
“No, not unusual. But there are better grasses now, at least for use in Florida. If I were doing it now, I would keep the fairways as they are but change the greens to a different Bermuda hybrid like TifEagle.”
“So why not do it?”
He smiled. “Very expensive. And we would have to close the course for six months.”
“Doesn’t one of the board members grow grass for a living?”
“Dig Maddox?”
“Yeah. Surely he’d do the club a deal.”
He shook his head. “Dig could do the fairways, sure. He’s got acres of regular Bermuda. But not creeping bent or the hybrids. It doesn’t have much use outside of golf courses, at least down here. It’s better for up north, cooler temps. Makes those New England lawns look like England. At least that’s the theory.”
I knew the lawns of Yale University pretty well. My dad had worked there. They definitely liked that old-school English look. But I didn’t care about the grass in New Haven, so I changed tack.
“Do you know what caused the dead grass on this green?”
He frowned like I’d just messed up my one-times tables. “A person?”
“I mean, what did they use?”
“Oh. Roundup.”
“Weed killer?”
“Si.”
“You sure?”
“Pretty sure. I can see the damage to the roots system, and the dead blades are so localized.”
“So it kills grass, not just weeds?” Like I say, I have a guy. Gardening was not my area of expertise.
“Si. Unless your grass is Roundup-ready.”
“Roundup-ready?”
“They have developed a creeping bent grass that is resistant to Roundup. So you just spray the greens and the weeds die but the grass does not.”
“That’s pretty handy.”
“Si. But we don’t have that.”
“Why not?”
“Same reason. Would have to replace the greens. Expensive. Plus it’s hard on the grass when it’s cut this short.”
“So whoever did the vandalism to your green could have gotten the weed killer at any garden store?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you use Roundup here at all?”
“No. Because we overseed, our grass is never completely dormant.”
“What does that mean, overseed?”
“Bermuda grass goes dormant in the winter. In places further north it can look dead. Here it just goes a tan color. But in Florida we get most of our golfers in the winter. The snowbirds, you know?”
“Yeah, I know the snowbirds.” Those hardy souls who bailed on winters in the Midwest and Northeast and even Canada, locked their houses up after Thanksgiving and headed south for the winter like migratory birds, and then turned around and went back when the snow thawed in March or April.
“But people don’t like to play on brown grass,” continued Diego. “They don’t care if it is natural. They want green, even in winter. So we overseed with a rye grass perennial in the fall. It means we add rye grass seed to the fairways to make them look green when the Bermuda goes dormant.”
“Who knew?” I said.
Diego shrugged.
“Where did you learn all this?” Danielle asked.
“Texas A&M. Best turf program in the world.”
Based on the brief lesson he’d given us I couldn’t argue with that. When it comes to growing stuff those Aggies really knew their wheat from their chaff.
“So we’re saying that anyone could have damaged the green.”
“Si,” he said, looking back to where the letters GUR had been. “Except . . .”
“Except what?”
“It’s nothing, I think.”
“Nothing is nothing. You got an idea, I want to hear it. You know more about this stuff than anyone.”
“The letters that were in the grass? They were uniform.”
“Uniform? Meaning?”
“You know the Roundup you buy at the store? It has a little wand on it so you can spray the weeds.”
I nodded. I had no idea. I’d never bought weed killer in my life.
“So it’s small, and it sprays a small area. But the letters on the green were big, right?”
“They were.”
“So it would take a lot of back and forth to cover that much area. And with a small wand, you would expect the edges of the letters to be inconsistent. Not straight.”
“But they were?” I had seen it, but I was focused on what the letters meant rather than the art behind them.
“They were. Perfectly straight. Which suggests they were made with only one or two sweeps for each part of the letter.”
“Which means?”
“They didn’t use a household wand attachment. When we spray herbicides on course we use either a tank and sprayer attached to a maintenance vehicle, or an industrial wand with a tank that is carried on a man’s back.”
“So you’re saying this was done with industrial equipment?”
“Si. Almost certainly.”
“So that narrows the field some.”
“Some, but not a lot. Every gardening company in South Florida would probably have one.”
I nodded. There were a lot of gardeners in South Florida. With the warm weather and tropical rain, the foliage in Florida was only ever a month or two away from taking back the concrete jungles we had created. If we all spent the summer up with the snowbirds we might not be able to find the roads to get home in the fall.
Danielle said, “We’ll let you get back to it. I’m sure you’re busy.”
“Yeah, I got the PGA Tour guys coming down. They like to point out the problems.”
“Thanks for your help.”
“De nada.”
Diego nodded and wandered back onto the green and I smiled. He looked as Latino as Cheech Marin but had no accent at all, yet he liked to pepper his speech with Spanish phrases. Spanglish was practically our local dialect in South Florida.
It didn’t feel like we were getting very far, but in my experience in order to catch fish you first had to cast your net wide, before you pulled it back in. So far we had a viral outbreak that was looking suspicious and green vandalism that definitely was. We had a president who saw saboteurs around every corner, a board member who thought it might have been a disagreement between in-laws, in-laws who blamed each other, a groom who suggested it was a business competitor, a cook with a temper and a facilities guy who had gone AWOL. And we hadn’t even gotten back to the first tee.
We reached the tee and wandered up past the practice putting green where we ran into Natalie Morris, directing a burly guy with a dolly full of stacked chairs. She smiled and then frowned at me. I frowned back and I’m better at it.
“You need a pass,” she said.
“A what?”
“An access pass.” She held up a plastic card that was hanging around her neck from a lime-colored lanyard with the sponsor’s name on it. Apparently I needed to be branded. “It’ll get you anywhere on course you need to go. Otherwise you’re going to get stopped a lot.”
“Okay.”
She told us to hold fast, and I wondered if she was a sailor. She ran inside and we waited. I looked up at the upper floor of the clubhouse where the bar was. I wasn’t all that surprised to see Ron standing behind the window, waving like he was leaving on a cruise ship. Natalie dashed back out and draped a lanyard around my neck like I had won the Congressional Medal of Honor.
She smiled again. “There you go. All official.”
“You need to slow down, it’s only Monday.”
“Keeps me trim.” She doubled up on the smile. She really had the whole Florida thing down.
“So it does,” I said.
I felt a nudge against my hip and glanced at Danielle.
“Doesn’t the deputy need one of these?” I said, fumbling with the access pass.
Natalie shook her head. “Deputy Castle is wearing her access pass.” She gave Danielle the smile and then turned and sped away, arms out and ready to point at something that needed doing. I looked Danielle up and down and had to agree that her sheriff’s uniform would open most doors at a golf tournament.
“You done?” she said.
“Done what?”
“Flirting with the help.”
“This is Florida. That’s just being friendly.”
“You’re not as Florida as you think, Mr. Connecticut.”
“You jealous?” I couldn’t help but grin. That wasn’t my first mistake, but it was a goodie.
Danielle leaned her weight onto one leg and put her hands on her hips so that her right hand rested on the holster clip of her sheriff’s issue sidearm.
“When I’m jealous, you’ll know.”
I dropped the grin. It felt like the smart thing to do. But I was amused. I couldn’t imagine why a beautiful, intelligent woman with a sidearm would ever feel jealous about a scruffy ballplayer like me. It should have been the other way around. But I had to concede that knowing which pasta sauce a woman preferred was not the same thing as knowing how she thought. The former was mere observation, the latter was as likely as counting to infinit
y.
I said, “Ron’s upstairs. I think we need a word with him.”
“Nice segue.”
Chapter Fourteen
The view from the bar was a panorama of Bermuda grass green and Aqueta lime and tangerine. Ron stood by the window like a king surveying his kingdom. He was in his usual getup of chinos and a button-up shirt. His silver hair sparkled in the sunlight breaking through the UV barrier in the wall-to-ceiling windows. He was lined and tanned and wore the marks of where the skin cancers had been removed, but he had the smile of a raconteur. It was still morning but I was surprised he didn’t have a beer in his hand.
“It’s coming together,” he said as we arrived.
“It’s quite the production,” I said.
“Isn’t it? Like a traveling circus, only more money and fewer elephants.”
Danielle said, “They still do elephants in the circus?”
Ron shrugged.
“I spoke with Barry, your treasurer, yesterday.”
“Aha.”
“He more or less suggested that the club was in financial trouble. Especially if the tournament had been canceled.”
“The club bears a fair bit of the risk, that is true. But I wouldn’t say there’s any financial trouble. The club’s financials are solid.”
“But if you take all the risk, you must get a good payday out of it.”
“You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you?”
“So you don’t?”
“Not really no.”
“So who’s making money here?” I asked. “Because there seems to be plenty of it.”
“The players, mostly. A tournament purse needs to be well north of six or seven million dollars to attract a decent field.”
“Not bad.”
“Not at all, for a game they’d all pay to play.”
“Is there any profit after that?”
“No. PGA Tour tournaments are essentially run as charity events. The naming sponsor covers most if not all of the purse, and the other sponsors cover the rest. The money made from tickets sales and merchandise goes to cover hosting costs, and anything left is donated to a nominated charity or charities.”
Deep Rough Page 9
