Death at the Member Guest

by James Y. Bartlett

  I swiveled around in my chair to see Frank Donatello staring at me balefully through his plate glass window at the end of the room. Tony Zec started hopping from one foot to the other again.

  “Sit down, kid,” I growled at him, pointing to the chair next to my desk. He practically leapt into the chair in relief and looked at me with the air of an expectant puppy. His eyes were round and wide behind those round, rimless frames. I think if I had said “Go jump out the window over there” he would have obeyed, instantly, gratefully and completely.

  But I didn’t. “What kind of name is ‘Zec?’” I asked him. I knew it was politically incorrect and probably illegal to inquire about the kid’s ethnic background, but after all, this is Boston, where one’s family and religion pretty much determine one’s position in the pecking order. I wouldn’t have asked if his name was O’Malley, Pagliacci or even Cabot Lodge. But I’d never met a Zec before and I was curious.

  “Armenian,” he said. “I think it was longer back in Yerevan. I live in Somerville.” It was the town next to Cambridge where I knew there was something of an Armenian enclave. Armenian-American enclave, I mean.

  “You ever written anything?” I asked.

  “Oh, yessir,” he barked happily, reaching into his backpack and pulling out a thin manila file folder, which he handed to me. My telephone rang as I opened the folder and extracted a thin stack of about ten clippings from the college newspaper. The first two were stuck together, with what substance I dared not imagine.

  “Yo,” I said into the phone.

  “Hack-hack-hack-Man!” sang a cheerful and instantly recognizable voice into my ear. Unconsciously, I broke into a wide grin.

  “Jack-Off,” I replied. “What’s goin’ on?”

  The caller was my longtime friend, former college golf teammate and occasional drinking buddy, Jack Connolly. “Got any extra tickets to the Red Sox tonight?” he asked.

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s raining cats and dogs,” I reminded him. “Besides, don’t you own a skybox at Fenway?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he laughed. “I guess I do.”

  That was Jack Connolly. One of the richest people I knew, Connolly was the publisher and sole owner of the Lowell Citizen, “The Oldest Newspaper in the Merrimack Valley,” as the front-page logo proudly proclaimed. That was probably the only positive thing one could say about the paper. Let’s just say the Lowell Citizen was not an odds-on favorite to win a Pulitzer Prize anytime soon. But it was also the only newspaper in a medium-sized town and, as such, a license to print money for its owner, Jack Connolly. After we had partied our way through college, I went out on Tour while Jack had gone home to Lowell where he found gainful employment at the publishing company long owned by his family, where they had to take him in. He had planned to work as little as humanly possible while drinking, screwing around and generally goofing off as much as possible until his father threw a monkey wrench into Jack’s career plans by unceremoniously pitching over dead from a massive heart attack. It was quite a shock when the lawyers informed Jack that his father had left the whole shooting match to his one and only son. There had been an uncle with a minority interest, but Jack quickly bought him out and took full control of the company. His next move was to sell the newspaper’s ancient downtown Lowell building and build a brand new and modern printing plant on the outskirts of town. Jack’s new presses spent only a small time every night printing the Citizen. Otherwise, they were busy three shifts a day cranking out brochures, annual reports, fliers, magazines and anything else that needed ink applied to paper.

  The newspaper bumped along at break-even, but Jack didn’t care too much about its profit statements. The printing operation made millions. Jack used those profits to buy some radio stations, a couple cable-TV outlets, some small suburban weeklies and then, as the head of a mini-media empire in the Merrimack Valley, he returned to his original career plan. He turned all the operations over to loyal subordinates and began to travel around the world. I’d get postcards and post-midnight phone calls from the strangest places: British Guyana, the Canary Islands, North Efate. Jack loved the life of the international playboy, and I’d see his name in the paper now and then mentioning his exploits with some European countess or a Hollywood starlet. He did pretty much want he wanted to do, and didn’t care a fig about money. Which is why he could forget he owned one of the most sought-after pieces of real estate in New England: an air conditioned, glassed-in, skybox suite at Fenway Park.

  “Aren’t you tired yet of being filthy rich?” I needled him. “Why not sell everything, donate it to the poor and come work with me?”

  Connolly laughed. He loved to laugh. “Up yours, Hacker,” he said. “Listen, I need your help.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I just loaned my last million to the Russians.”

  He laughed again. “No, really,” he said. “This weekend is the member-guest at Shuttlecock and I need you to be my partner.”

  “Whatsamatter, Nicklaus couldn’t make it?”

  He chuckled. “No, don’t be offended, but I first asked a buddy of mine from Tokyo to fly over. I thought I might be interesting to watch the dynamic between the bigoted Irish-Yankee establishment and the new economy from the Orient.”

  That was like Jack Connolly too. Although his own family had struggled its way up the social ladder and ended up quite wealthy and solidly ensconced in what passed for the establishment in the small pond of Lowell, he never failed to try and tweak the comfortable class. Perhaps his eccentricities and strange behavior were the way he dealt with the inner struggle he felt in being one of the upper crust he professed to despise.

  “But Tagaki couldn’t come – his bank’s in the toilet. So I thought of you,” Jack continued. “I figure, let’s bring in a ringer like Hack-Man, keep an ample supply of booze at hand and just have a blast. Whaddya say?”

  It sounded great to me. Spending time with Jack Connolly, even though it usually resulted in a nuclear hangover, had never failed to be anything less than a laff riot. Furthermore, the prospects of playing a few rounds of golf at the Shuttlecock Club whet my appetite. Shuttlecock is one of those hidden gems, a course not famous for anything nor the site of any history-rich tournament, but simply a good, honest test of golf. The course is not overly long, nor particularly difficult, but it’s challenging in a great many subtle ways. Like many courses in and around Boston, it was the work of the peripatetic turn-of-the-century architect, Donald Ross, who never lets the golfer know he’s getting into trouble until he’s already there. Shuttlecock had all the elements of the master’s work: long par 3s, short 4s that seemed easy until the tiny crowned greens rejected an approach; and at least one Redan hole, with bunkers marching diagonally across the fairway. I began to play the holes in my head until I remembered Tony Zec sitting next to me, waiting expectantly for something to do. Dammit.

  “When do you need to know?” I asked Jack.

  “Cripes, Hacker …yesterday!” he replied. “I had to slip the pro a coupla hundred just to let us in; they cut off registration weeks ago. So … are you in or are you in?”

  I drummed my fingers on the desk, thinking hard. Glancing down, I saw the PGA Tour media guide, still open to the page on the B.C. Open.

  “Hang on,” I said to Jack.

  “Zec!” I barked, making the kid jump. He sat bolt upright.

  “Yess-sir?”

  “You got a car that works?”

  "Yess-sir?”

  “You know anything about golf?”

  “Uh-a little, I think.”

  “Can you keep your mouth shut?”

  “I-I think so.”

  “Jack?” I said into the phone. “I’m in.”

  “Far freakin’ out, Hack-Man!” Jack yelled. “Meet me up at the club on Thursday for lunch and a practice round.”

  “Got it.”

  I put the phone down and turned to face Zec. “OK, we got work to do,” I said, wagging a finger at him a
nd enjoying the startled look on his face. “What you are about to hear and do is between you and me. You will not repeat any of this to anyone, or not only will I make sure you flunk out of Journalism 101, but I will arrange to have the interior line of the Patriots come beat the snot out of you. Is that clear?”

  He couldn’t talk. His throat had tightened up. All he could do was nod, once.

  I got busy.

  First I called Suzy Chapman, the PGA Tour’s ever-efficient assistant press secretary, who was already in the newly set up press room at the En-Joie Country Club. I told Suzy I was sending a college intern up to do some golf pieces and interviews, and she promised to look out for him for me and try to find him a safe place to stay.

  “Is he good looking for a college man?” Suzy asked, with a slight wistful tone in her voice that said she knew the pickings of non-scary men in Endicott, New York that weekend were going to be scarce.

  I looked over at Tony Zec, whose greasy hair had fallen even further over his eyes, and whose acne-covered face had turned even redder since he first walked in.

  “He’s a dreamboat,” I told Suzy and hung up.

  Next, I called down to accounting and had them send up $250 from petty cash, which was the most I could get without Frank’s approval. They sent the money up in an envelope with a runner. Is this a great country, or what?

  I gave Zec the money. “This is for gasoline, food and incidentals,” I told him. “Keep track of it and bring me back a receipt for everything including toilet paper. If you play your cards right, it won’t cost you much to eat. The pressroom will have free breakfast and lunch every day, and you can usually find some party to go to at night with pretty good eats. At your age, we won’t worry about cholesterol.

  “Don’t play cards with the caddies—they’ll skin you alive. If you go out drinking, and you should, don’t flash your wad at any bimbo dressed in a black mini with thigh-length leather boots. OK? I do not want to be driving to Endicott, New York this weekend to bail your ass out of jail.”

  His head was bouncing up and down rapidly.

  I tossed him some reporters’ notebooks, the tall skinny kind that fit perfectly into your hip pocket, and a handful of Flair pens that are newsroom standard issue. I fished around in my desk drawer to find the embossed press card I hadn’t used in years, and handed it to him.

  Then I told him what I wanted. Story a day. Tournament updates. Personality profiles on local players. Maybe a feature on the caddie tournament. Whatever. I wanted the kid out of my hair and busy for the entire weekend, so I loaded him up with assignments. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that none would see the light of day in the newspaper, since the sports desk, if they found space for the B.C. Open anywhere in the section, would just grab a couple graphs from the AP wire. He didn’t need to know this. He was just trying not to pee himself in excitement.

  He wrote down his assignments, my cell phone number, and the telephone number for Suzy Chapman. I got him directions to the golf course, about a six-hour drive from Boston. Then I looked up the number for the clubhouse phone at the Shuttlecock Club and told him to call me there or on my cell phone every afternoon at 6 p.m. for an update.

  “Go home, pack some clothes and get going,” I finished. “You want to get there a day early and get the lay of the land. Just watch what the other guys do and sort of follow their lead. Find Suzy if you run into trouble. Got it?”

  “Yes-SIR!” There was no question mark this time. I looked up in surprise and saw the excited spark in his eyes. His shoulders and spine had straightened up. The kid was into it.

  “OK. And remember…this is between you and me. Nobody else. You pull this off and you get an A-plus from me,” I told him.

  We walked out of the newsroom together. As we passed in front of Frank Donatello’s window, he looked up at us, frowning, with the phone screwed into his ear. I smiled and put my arm affectionately around Tony Zec’s shoulders, and gave Frankie a little wave. His frown deepened.

  CHAPTER TWO

  By Thursday morning, the rain had moved off and the sky was so cloudless and blue that the sun hurt your eyes. It was a perfect New England fall day. The air was fresh and clean, carrying a tang of the sea, and the weatherman had predicted an afternoon high of at least 75 and more of the same for the weekend.

  I stood on the balcony – really not more than a slightly overgrown window ledge– in my third-floor North End apartment and craned my neck out and down to the right where, on a nice clear morning like this, I could see a tiny sliver of water in Boston harbor. The street below was quiet and empty at this hour, except for Enrico sweeping the sidewalk in front of his little bodega.

  The North End is Boston’s Italian neighborhood and I was the only non-Italian I knew who lived there. As usual, there was a good story behind the explanation. It had been about four years ago, as I was working a late shift at the paper, when a call came in. It was a friend of a friend of the cousin of a nephew once removed of Carmine Spoleto, the capo of the North End mob. It was made known to me by the caller that a close relation of Carmine’s, a young man named Cappaletti, had met an unfortunate end that morning. Something involving a business disagreement in a grimy apartment in Everett. Anyway, the unfortunate stiff now lying in the city morgue had a young wife and daughter, and Carmine didn’t want them to read any scurrilous gossip in the man’s obituary the next day.

  “Why me?” had been my question. It turned out that the dead Cappaletti was a distant cousin of Gino, once a famous placekicker for the old Boston Patriots, and it was felt someone in sports could put the proper spin on the young man’s obit. What the hell, I wasn’t busy and it sounded fun, so I called the morgue, talked to the city desk and ended up writing a ten-grapher. I made much of the fact that the dead Cappaletti had played football a couple years at Boston English High School, and made him sound like he coulda been a Heisman contender if only he’d gone on to play college ball. Which, of course, he couldn’t since he got busted for armed robbery in his senior year and got sent to Concord for three-to-five. I left that part out and waxed eloquently about how he was considered an up-and-comer as an executive in the family business.

  It was a couple days later that I got another call from the friend-friend-cousin-nephew expressing Carmine’s heartfelt appreciation for my work. It’s always a plus to get good reviews from that quarter. I mentioned that I was looking for a new apartment, something in the $800 a month region, and within an hour an envelope arrived on my desk with a key and an address to the third-floor flat in the North End. I took it.

  In one of the little ironies that make life so interesting, it turned out that my downstairs neighbor was the widow Cappaletti and her daughter Victoria, who was now six. I had never mentioned to her my role as her husband’s obit writer, and she had only mentioned him to me once, when she told me he was dead. Mary Jane had quickly become a dear friend, who watched over my apartment when I was out of town, which was a lot, and invited me over for coffee and canolli when I was home. Victoria was a doll who never failed to brighten my day.

  I had dropped in on them the night before, along with a hopelessly fat and lazy cat named Mister Shit who had adopted me, for some strange reason. I had been planning to take him on a one-way drive out to Milton or some other fancy suburb, but hadn’t quite gotten around to it yet. Mary Jane said she and Victoria would love to cat-sit for the weekend.

  “C’mon in, Hacker,” she had said. “I’m making us a cappuccino. ‘Toria! Mister Hacker is here with his kitty!”

  Victoria’s little feet had pounded down the hall and she burst around the corner, all dark curly hair and ribbons. She immediately took control. She took Mister Shit in her arms and cradled him like a baby, cooing and clucking at him. Mister Shit looked resigned to his fate.

  “What’s his name?” she asked.

  “Mister Sh—.” I caught myself just in time.

  “That’s a strange name for a kitty,” Victoria said serious
ly. “I’m going to call him Ducky. C’mon Ducky, let me show you my room.” She disappeared.

  Mary Jane cocked an eyebrow at me and then grinned. She was in her early thirties, with a pretty face and fine black hair swept back in a ponytail tied with a red ribbon. She wore a man’s white oxford shirt knotted in front at the waist and tight blue jeans that showed off a trim, athletic body. We took our coffee into the living room and caught up on the neighborhood gossip.

  Mary Jane and I had always kept our relationship on the “just friends” level, by mutual consent. She had often told me of the attempts of various men to get her to go out, and while we laughed together at their feeble attempts, I always heard an undercurrent that said “hands off – not interested.” And, I knew that she was connected, in whatever strange, labyrinthine way, to that other world that kept the streets of the North End safe from punks, but could in other circumstances be dangerous to one’s health. So I always kept it nice and light.

  I told her about my plans for the weekend. And about Jack Connolly.

  “Rich, huh?” she took a thoughtful sip of coffee. “Think he’d want my number?”

  “He’s the last playboy of the western world,” I said. “I’m not sure he’d appreciate what you have.”

  “Oh, thanks a bunch,” she said, sticking her tongue out at me. “You mean, he wouldn’t like a stay-at-home mom with a six-year-old and no life.”

  Just then, Victoria came around the corner pushing a baby carriage. Inside, Mister Shit, wearing a pink bonnet, was lying on his back and looking strangely content.

  Mary Jane and I laughed aloud. A few minutes later, as I was leaving, I turned to her and said, “He wouldn’t appreciate the love that keeps this place together.”

  She punched my arm, lightly. “Didn’t think you’d noticed,” she said. “But nice recovery, anyway.” She was smiling as she closed the door.