Deep Rough

by A. J. Stewart

  Barry looked at me but said nothing.

  “And I remembered the place, when Lizzy told me. I recalled that you had brochures for a development in a place called Puerto Escondido. Coincidence? There seems to be a lot of that happening, Barry. Lizzy spoke to a local official in Puerto Escondido. He said that the project was on hold because the correct paperwork hadn’t been filed. I took that to mean you had failed to come up with the cash to pay off the people you needed to pay off, am I right? You’re a little cash-strapped right now, it seems.”

  “You think you’re so clever, Jones.”

  “Barry, let me tell you something. The smartest thing a person can ever do is to surround themselves with folks who are smarter than they are. That’s what I do. That means I have people like Lizzy tracking down a sick American in a region that has been pinpointed by the CDC as ground zero for a new strain of norovirus. A new strain that incredibly seems to have found its way to a wedding ceremony in Lake Worth. How did that happen, Agent Marcard?”

  “According to the Department of Homeland Security, a US citizen by the name of Barry Yarmouth left the United States three weeks ago from Fort Lauderdale to Cartagena, and returned to the US into Atlanta, six days later.”

  “Why Atlanta?” I asked, with a grin.

  “Glad you asked, Miami,” said Marcard. “It seems to have been an attempt to not be traced back to Palm Beach.”

  “But it was traced back, wasn’t it?”

  “It was. A car was rented in the same name at ATL and returned to a Hertz location in West Palm Beach.”

  “Did you speak to the Hertz office?”

  “We did. This morning. The desk agent remembered the return, which is a pretty good memory for the time passed. But she told us that the customer was memorable because he looked, and I quote, like he had the plague. She thought the customer looked so sick that she ordered the car to undergo extra cleaning, which was a smart move on her part. Might have saved a lot of other people getting sick.”

  “But some did get sick,” I added. “Connie Persil told me that the CDC have found cases in Atlanta of people who had visited the hospital with symptoms similar to that of norovirus. The symptoms weren’t severe, so they hadn’t had cause to track it further, until now. Now it seems one of them works at the car rental center at ATL.”

  I looked at Barry. He said nothing. His goose was cooked. But the worst was yet to come.

  “Ernesto wasn’t a bad guy. He wasn’t a good guy, either. He was poorly paid and tried to supplement his income with bribery. That’s no excuse for murder. But what gets in my craw? Not Ernesto, as much as it should. It’s what you did to that poor bride.”

  Barry looked at me and I stared him down. I’m good at it. I had a lot of practice looking at batters from the pitching mound. But Barry was easy, because his world was crashing in around him. He dropped his eyes from me, but I didn’t reciprocate.

  “You got the idea when you learned that one of the members was taking advantage of the tournament prep and using a hospitality tent and the temporary deck for a wedding. You found out that the other side of the wedding was a connected Palm Beach family. And you had learned that the virus you picked up while you were in Colombia trying to piece together your failed deal was easily transmitted. As treasurer, you are responsible for signing off on the ordering. Natalie Morris handles the food, and Chip the bartender does the beverage, and Ernesto did the facilities, but it all came through you. But when I spoke to you at your office, you called him the facilities guy, like you didn’t know his name. Even though he reported to you. But you knew him. You knew that he had ordered a fresh batch of bleach in preparation for the tournament. The order passed over your desk. And you knew his process. You knew he would bring the dining chairs out and then clean them. Natalie told me that was always the process.”

  I stopped for moment, still focused on Barry. The words didn’t come easily, and I had to fight myself to not smack him around with the busted club still in my hand.

  “You went to the storeroom. You have a key. Ernesto had opened the flat of bleach bottles and taken one to the hospitality tent. He left it on the deck while he carried the chairs into the tent. You took it. Then you—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—you switched it out for your own bottle. But your bottle was different. You threw out the bleach, washed it out with water and then put fresh water back in it, with a sample of your own—”

  I looked at Danielle for the word I didn’t want to use.

  “Poop,” she suggested.

  “Right. Norovirus-contaminated poop. You were sick and kept some. I’m sure you learned on the internet that the virus can live for ages in a water solution. And you put your bottle back in the storeroom, where Ernesto was sure to see it and use it. And he did use it. He sprayed it all over the chairs, and then everyone came to enjoy a dinner between two families coming together as one. And you made them very, very sick.” I thought again about the bride, stopped in the middle of the aisle, the look of horror on her face.

  “You make me sick, too,” I said. “But you messed up. Ernesto was supposed to put the bottle back in the store room and then you were going to take it away and put the uncontaminated bottle back. But he didn’t. He got called up to the bar, and while he was there he forgot it. But Ernesto figured it out later. When he discovered he was suspect number one, you went and asked him where the bottle had gone, didn’t you? And he figured out that the spray was the answer. That’s what he confronted you about. But you had already panicked. You didn’t know which bottle was yours, so you decided to take all the bottles.”

  I shook my head at him. “You thought you could move around the club like a ghost. Like you were invisible. But you weren’t invisible. Someone saw you. Someone who was invisible to you. Jackie Treloar. He sits at the club barroom every day, watching the world go by. He’s invisible to almost everyone except Chip. Jackie saw you take the bottle from the deck. Then as he was being helped into his access bus later he saw you carry the flat of bleach bottles to your car. Eleven full bottles. But not the right one. That one is with the authorities, and a DNA test will show it belongs to you. And I’ll bet Heath McAllen’s prize money today that the other eleven bottles are in the locked storage locker in your model home at Capricorn Lakes.”

  I felt my grip tighten around the half club in my hand. I wanted to use it, and not to play a round. Danielle sensed it, as she always does. She stepped forward and put her hand on my shoulder.

  “We’ll take it from here,” she said. “Haven’t you got a tournament to finish?”

  Chapter Forty-One

  I didn’t take the stealthy route back. I cut straight across the course, running the breadth of the first fairway like it was the main street of a ghost town. I was carrying the two halves of the broken club in one hand and my caddy’s coveralls in the other. The scoreboard near the clubhouse told me the last group had just finished the sixteenth hole. I hit a roadblock before I hit the seventeenth. The gallery that had been spread across the entire golf course had now focused its mass on the final two holes, and it was like a Westfield mall on Christmas Eve. Having all eyes focused on those holes had worked in my favor when I wanted Barry Yarmouth to feel invisible enough to follow Martin Costas to the maintenance shed, but now it was against me.

  That was until I was noticed by a guy who was so far back in the gallery that he couldn’t see the actual golf being played if he were ten feet tall. He was watching the event on his cell phone, and I wondered if he wouldn’t be more comfortable at home. But the television network had covered my unlikely exit, so the guy at the back knew more than the folks at the front. He glanced at me, and then did the old double take. On the third try he grinned.

  “You’re him,” he said.

  I nodded.

  He smiled. “Get your suit on, man.”

  I dropped to the grass and slid my feet in and then pulled the coveralls up. Then the guy in the gallery let out the kind of bellow you rarely hear at golf. In a
game where camera clicks brought the ire of all but the most tolerant or deaf of players and caddies, shouting was generally not considered good form. But this guy must have been in the navy, because he yelled make a hole, like he were a Klaxon. Everyone turned to the noise, some amazed and some just annoyed, but they did as the man said and he acted as my point man and drove a wedge into the crowd. He kept repeating the command like he was making his way the length of a submarine, until we finally burst out the other side of the gallery, onto the fairway on the clubhouse side of Gator Alley.

  A volunteer who had made a beeline to shut down the noise saw me. I nodded thanks to the guy with the megaphone voice and he nodded back, happy to have assumed a prime viewing location. The volunteer put his hand firmly in my back and ushered me away back toward the tee.

  Heath and the Kiwi had both hit their tee shots on the seventeenth. Heath was ambling along the lake side, deep in thought. Ron was a step behind, his face the color of pickled beets. I walked toward them until the volunteer with me stopped suddenly. He nodded at the ground, and I noticed a ball laying on the grass. It was well off the fairway, closer to the water than not, sitting up in the deep rough. I stepped over to it and waited for Heath to arrive. He saw me and nodded. I could hear Ron puffing from twenty yards away.

  “You made it,” said Heath.

  “More or less,” I said.

  “You get him?”

  “We did.”

  “Brilliant.”

  “So what’s happening?”

  Ron arrived and dropped the bag down. “Here,” he puffed. “This is a young man’s game.”

  I wasn’t sure if he meant playing or caddying, but I take a comment about being a young man wherever I can get them these days. I watched Ron walk back to the gallery, and then glanced at Heath.

  “I dropped one on fifteen, and he got one on sixteen,” he said, nodding in the direction of the Kiwi. So a one-shot lead had become a one-shot deficit. The Kiwi hadn’t hit his drive as far as Heath, so he had farther to hole and would hit his second shot before Heath. We turned our attention to Heath’s ball. It was then I noticed the white line. It had been painted on the grass with some kind of spray paint. I looked along it back toward the tee and saw the white wooden stake bisecting the line. It was then I realized what the line was.

  We were next to the lake formerly known as the Pacific, now known as Alligator Alley. The scene of the crime. The spot I had argued should be turned into an out-of-bounds area so as to ensure the tournament could go ahead with a crime scene in the middle of the course. Now we looked at the out-of-bounds line that Ron had painted on the ground. And Heath’s ball.

  “What does this mean?” I asked, although I was pretty sure I knew.

  “Out-of-bounds is stroke plus distance,” he said. “I run back to the tee and play my third shot from there.”

  “That’s not great,” I said, helpfully.

  “No, not great. Except . . .” He bent over and looked at the ball. Then he stood up. “We need a ruling.” He repeated the request to a volunteer, who repeated the request to another guy. The guy in the Panama hat. He was standing just on the fairway side of the rope that was keeping the gallery in place. I noticed the Kiwi wandering over to see what all the fuss was about. The Kiwi and the Panama hat arrived at the same time. The Panama hat asked what the issue was. The Kiwi guy said nothing.

  “I need a ruling,” said Heath again. He looked at both his playing partner and the rules guy. Everyone looked at the ball. It was a white ball sitting for all intents on a white line that itself was painted on the long grass. I knew the line marked the out-of-bounds of the course. Outside that line was like a foul line in baseball. The ball was no longer in play and had to be hit again, back from the place where it had last been hit, plus a penalty of one stroke.

  “What’s does on the line mean?” asked Heath.

  The rules official looked at the ball and sighed. “Sorry, Heath. The line is out-of-bounds. So a ball on the line is also out-of-bounds.”

  Heath looked at me. “As they say back home, bugger.”

  I nodded. He was taking it well. Playing his third shot from the tee essentially put him out of the tournament unless the Kiwi had a major and unlikely meltdown.

  “Hang on, mate,” said the Kiwi. He got down on his haunches and was careful to not disturb the ball, but he pointed in close. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but the out-of-bounds mark goes straight up from the inside edge of the line.”

  “Correct,” said the rules guy.

  “Well, from where I’m standing, the edge of the ball is inside the line, and therefore on the playing surface. And again, correct me if I’m wrong, but the entire ball must be out-of-bounds. If any part of the ball is in play, then the ball is good.” He looked up at us standing around him, his face a blank, like the smart kid in class who had just explained string theory as if it were the two-times tables.

  The rules official stepped around me and straddled the white line, one foot out-of-bounds, the other on the course. He put his hands on his knees and looked hard. He took longer than was necessary to evaluate the situation. Then he stood up and nodded.

  “Matt’s right,” he said. “Part of this ball is in play. And part is enough. This ball is good.”

  Heath let out a long slow hiss of air, and the Kiwi I now knew as Matt stood, nodded and walked away to his own ball.

  “What about Heath?” I asked the rules guy. “He’ll have to stand out-of-bounds to play the shot. Can he do that?”

  The rules guy shrugged. “He can stand where ever he wants. It’s the ball that counts.”

  I nodded definitively and the rules official stepped back out of the way. Heath and I gathered around his bag. We looked down the fairway. It was a par five hole but the flag looked a long, long way away. Like different zip code away. I fumbled for my notebook that Alfie the caddy had given me.

  “From here, 282 yards to the green. Pin is ten yards on and tucked in behind a sand trap in front of the green on the right side.” I looked at him. “What do you think?”

  “Fairway wood,” he said.

  That didn’t make me feel like a million dollars. His fairway wood was in my hand. In two pieces. I held it up.

  Heath smiled. “Not the fairway wood then. I can’t reach the green with a hybrid. I could lay up, and maybe still make birdie.” Heath looked over at Matt the Kiwi. “But so can he. So I go to the eighteenth one down. Best I can do is equal him with a birdie on eighteen and get a play-off, assuming he only makes par.”

  “That’s not the worst result.”

  “But I haven’t made birdie on eighteen this week.”

  “There’s that.”

  We looked over at Matt as he hit his fairway shot. It went long and straight and landed on the left side of the fairway, still about twenty yards from the green but well away from the sand on the right. It was a smart shot for a guy one shot in the lead.

  “Maybe he doesn’t have a short game,” I said.

  “He has a short game,” said Heath.

  “So?”

  Heath looked at his bag and pulled out the driver. It was a long, unwieldy club with a massive head on the end that made it nigh on impossible to control off the tee. But on a tee there was a margin of error. Players didn’t generally hit the driver off the grass. The face didn’t have enough loft to get it high up off the ground, and the lack of precision made it more likely to fly wide and ugly rather than straight and handsome.

  “You sure?” I asked.

  Heath shrugged.

  “Can you hit it off the grass?”

  “I can. Sometimes it even goes straight.”

  I nodded.

  “What would you do?” he asked.

  It was the same question Danielle had asked me, although not on the same topic. I tossed it around. There was time. There was no group behind us, and the network was going to stay with this tournament until the end. It was the Gator tournament after all. I took some time because again I w
anted to give Heath an answer worthy of the both of us. But the rub was this. I’ve never had a million-dollar shot. I made it to the big leagues, the majors, The Show. But during twenty-nine days in major league baseball I never got to pitch in a game. I wasn’t bitter about it, but it did leave its marks. Perhaps I took risks in my life now because I had failed to take risks then. I didn’t think so. I just liked to leave it all out on the field. I had shaken off my share of catchers and pitched a fastball to a fastball hitter. Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost. I won a college world series and I won minor league pennants. But I never did it with a million bucks on the line.

  “I’d take the shot,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “How badly do you want the money?”

  Heath grinned. “Pretty bad. It’s a nice car.”

  “If you come second, and come second again next week, can you buy it a week later?”

  “Sure.”

  “So, the question is, how important is the win?”

  He frowned for the first time I could recall.

  “How important is the win to you?” he asked.

  Now I grinned. “The win is the only thing. Money comes and goes. Bruises fade.”

  Heath nodded. “Heroes last forever.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  “You sure?”

  “You can make a lot of money on tour getting nothing better than top twenty results. But your last win might be your last win. I never take that for granted.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Talk me through it.”

  We moved behind the ball and looked at the shot ahead. It was still a long way. We stood in the deep rough on the left side of the fairway. The pin was on the right side of the green behind a sand trap.

  “It’s gonnae look ugly. I have to aim my feet and body like I’m gonnae shoot way out left over the gallery. You might wannae warn them, ’cause they’re gonnae think I’m crazy. But the ball is gonnae fade. Even if I hit it clean, it’s gonnae fade plenty.”