Death at the Member Guest

by James Y. Bartlett

  Tierney nodded and raised his eyebrows. “Yeah,” he said. “How?”

  I shrugged. “Could be the Mussolini Excuse – he kept the trains running on time. Took care of all the messy business stuff and let the members just be members. There are plenty of golf clubs run that way, you know.”

  “Or,” Tierney said, “He coulda been greasing his own wheel.”

  “Hard to do,” I said. “He had a finance committee and six hundred members looking over his shoulder. Makes it tough to sneak cash out the back door. And that’s assuming there is a lot of cash to sneak. Clubs like this tend to run budgets pretty close to break-even.”

  Tierney looked at Jack. “You’re the member here. Any hint of funny business?”

  Jack shook his head. “Not that I’m aware of,” he said. “But to be honest, I never paid too much attention to the financial side of the club. They sent out an annual report that I never read, and had an annual meeting, which I never went to. Most guys are only interested in the operations of the club if the greens are dying or the price of drinks in the grill go up. Other than that, most of us don’t give a rat’s ass about who runs the place. Far as we could tell, Vitus paid the bills and everything was hunky dory.”

  “Yeah,” Tierney said. “And Vitus Papageorge probably liked it that way too. He was a sharp one, from what I hear. And he ran a bank that had some troubles with funny investors in the past.”

  “Funny how?” I asked.

  Tierney shrugged. “Go read your own newspaper,” he said. “Feds were looking at him for laundering, false reporting, bunch of stuff. Never made it stick. He skated, but barely, from what I hear. Helped that he was a major fundraiser for the junior senator from New Hampshire. Now the guy is offed in a cart barn. I just find that interesting.”

  Jack and I sat there silently, but I could tell Jack’s little grey cells were whirring as fast as mine. It was more than interesting, and the strings that dangled off the body of Vitus Papageorge, swinging gently in the cart barn of the Shuttlecock Club, now seemed a tangled mess. But it was a helluva story.

  Tierney dismissed us with a wave of his hand, and Officer O’Malley came out his deep REM state to open the door to the RV for us. We walked silently back across the parking lot, into the clubhouse and upstairs to the private lounge. Jack motioned to Roland, who disappeared to his secret lair and quickly emerged with two cocktails. Jack drank most of his with one swallow. I sipped at mine.

  “Velly intellesting, Hacker-san,” Connolly said. “I’m gonna go home and get out my game of Clue. I think Colonel Mustard’s gotta show up any second now.”

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding wisely. “I think I got it narrowed down to about 50 possible suspects now. I think I’ll stick to golf writing. Fewer headaches. Less dead bodies, too.”

  Jack raised his glass in agreement. Dr. Walter Bainbridge walked in, looking as frazzled as everyone else that morning at the Shuttlecock Club.

  “My God,” he exclaimed, throwing himself into one of the leather chairs and running his fingers through his graying hair. “What an unbelievable turn of events!” Roland appeared soundlessly from the back room, but Bainbridge waved him away. Jack looked at him sadly.

  Bainbridge looked at me. “I heard you were the one who discovered the body,” he said. “That must have been awful. Do you need anything? I might have some medication in my locker …”

  I smiled at him. “Thanks,” I said, holding up my glass of bourbon. “This is helping.”

  “Don’t blame you,” he said. “Must have been an ugly shock.”

  “So whaddya think, Doc?” Jack piped in. “Who did it?”

  Bainbridge sighed deeply. “I cannot imagine,” he said. “It’s beyond the pale. I mean, certainly Vitus was not well liked. He was, well, difficult I guess is the nicest word one can come up with. But for this to happen…” He shook his head again.

  “The cops seem surprised that someone so difficult could keep getting elected as president of the club,” I said. “I have to admit, I’ve wondered about that too, and I only knew the guy for a couple of days.”

  Bainbridge nodded wisely. “Well, it’s true that he could rub some people the wrong way,” he said. “Especially out on the golf course. He was so competitive. He just couldn’t understand that not everyone was wired the same way. But as the administrator of the club, most people agreed that he took a thankless task and did it extremely well. I mean, the club is in excellent working order. McDaggert runs a good golf operation, the dining room makes money. He brought in that fella Incavaglia, who’s been an excellent manager.”

  “Where’d he come from? I asked.

  “Herbert?” Bainbridge scratched his head and thought a moment. “Someplace in Boston, I think,” he said. “It was a downtown club of some kind. I can’t recall. But he’s done a bang-up job. The staff is well-trained, and the house is ship-shape.”

  “What about that sewer thing?” I pressed. “That was a surprise.”

  Bainbridge sighed. “Yes, a very costly project,” he said. “But how can you blame anyone? This club is more than 125 years old. It figures that the infrastructure will need upkeep as years go by. Who could have predicted that the sewer main would crumble?”

  “Hoo boy, remember the smell?” Jack chimed in. “When that pipe burst and flooded the basement, no one could go near the place without retching!”

  “Nasty,” Bainbridge agreed. “Nasty bit of business. But Papageorge stayed on top of it, got the emergency repairs done and then helped finance the construction project. It was quite extensive. As usual, when you start digging up hundred-year-old plumbing, there are always expensive surprises.”

  A soft but insistent beep went off. Bainbridge reached down and pulled his pager off his belt. “Damn,” he said. “Gotta call the hospital.” He strode off in search of a telephone.

  “Did you notice?” Jack asked, when Bainbridge had left.

  “What? That the good doctor, who a night or so ago was rather harshly critical of old Vitus now considers him the Jack Welch of Shuttlecock? Yeah,” I said.

  “Kinda funny, huh?”

  A group of men came into the lounge and drafted Jack into a game of poker. He looked at me, but I shook my head. Cards were never my thing. Roland the white-suited attendant came in and took drink orders. I stood up, stretched and walked over to the windows that looked down on the first tee and the putting green. I saw a familiar figure standing under an oak, talking on her cell phone and waving her hands.I caught Jackie’s eye and told him I’d be right back. He smiled happily. He had a fresh cocktail at his elbow and a pile of chips in front of him.

  I walked down the stairs, through the pro shop and outside and reached the woman just as she said “Right, OK, call ya back,” into her phone. Angela Murphy worked for the Journal’s state desk. Her beat was covering the cities and towns of Massachusetts, always a fascinating study of public miscreants, shameless nepotism, major and minor malfeasance and, all-to-frequently, downright corruption. She was somewhere around 40 years old and as severely sexless as a woman can get. Her slightly graying hair was pulled back tightly from her forehead and pinned securely in a bun at the back. A pair of thick glasses balanced at the end of her nose. She was short, round, dressed in drab khaki-colored shirt and slacks, with sensible brown shoes, and a large brown leather carry-all bag slung over her shoulder. She looked — and was — serious and no-nonsense, with that professional journalist’s studied look of skepticism, cynicism and heard-this-before at all times.

  “Angie,” I said in greeting. “Wassup?”

  “Oh, hi, Hacker,” Angela Murphy said. “Purcell told me you were here.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Doing some deep background for a series on the country club life in northeastern Massachusetts.”

  “Or just screwing around with the boys for the weekend,” Angie smiled poisonously at me.

  “Yeah, well, whatever,” I said. “Lucky you were in the neighborhood to g
et the call.”

  She nodded, and I saw briefly in her eyes a flash of excitement. After a dozen years of wading through pages of public audits, environmental studies, and tax-law proposals, and hours of ass-numbing small-town council meetings, a real, live, hard-news murder story was something new for her, and although her professional reserve and carefully constructed detachment would never let her admit it, I’d bet she was excited.

  “Were you here this morning?” she asked me.

  “I discovered the body,” I said. “Lucky me. What are the cops saying?”

  She flipped open her notebook. “Victim was seen arriving at the club this morning at approximately 6 a.m.,” she said. “He had one of those whatchamacallits…?

  “Tee time?” I prompted.

  “Right, a tee time scheduled for 7:55 a.m. That’s a gap of almost two hours. Is that normal? Getting here two hours before you’re supposed to play?”

  “Well,” I said, “For a dumb little tournament like this, most guys roll in with just enough time to swallow a couple aspirin with coffee for their hangover, and maybe hit a few warm-up putts. Papageorge took himself kinda seriously as a golfer, so I’m sure he was planning to beat balls for at least an hour.”

  “Hmmm,” Angie said, and she scribbled something into her notebook. “Time of death has not been established yet, but it fell sometime between 6 a.m. when he got here, and 7:25 a.m. when his body was discovered … by you.”

  “How’d he get here?” I asked.

  Angie looked confused.

  “He often had a chauffeur drive him around,” I told her. “Liked to look like a big shot. I wonder if he was driven here, or if he drove himself this morning.”

  “I dunno,” Angie said. “I’ll ask. What else you got?”

  I smiled. I was now the source.

  “Guy was not very much liked,” I told her. “Ran the club here with something of a heavy hand. Tinpot dictator type. Rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.”

  She began writing furiously.

  “Apparently, he was also something of a mover and shaker in the area, politically and business-wise. You probably know more about that than I do.”

  Angie nodded, still scribbling. “Yeah, he was a hard-nosed SOB,” she said. “Got things done, but ruffled a lot of feathers doing it.”

  “Interesting thing is that he kept getting re-elected as president of the club, even though everyone I’ve met here pretty much thought he was an asshole,” I said. “Nobody really has a good explanation for that. He apparently appointed all the members of whatever board of directors the place has, hired the club manager, the golf pro, probably the head chef and the course superintendent, too, for all I know.”

  “Little empire all his own, huh?” Angie said. “He stealing all the money?”

  “That was my first thought, too,” I nodded. “But I can’t figure out if there was any money to steal or how he might have done it. Despite the old money types that belong to a club like this, it’s usually operated pretty close to the bone. Usually isn’t a lot of spare cash lying around for anyone to abscond with. And he didn’t abscond. He was hanged.”

  “I’ll check around, see if I can find anything,” Angie said.

  “There’s one thing,” I said. “Couple of years ago, the pipes burst in the place. Shit hit the fan, literally. By the time they were through, they had to install an all-new sewerage system. Big project. They ended up hitting all the members with a big assessment to pay for it.”

  “I’ll bet they did,” Angie said. “Nobody is supposed to let a drop of poop or anything else into that river.” She nodded her head in the direction of the Merrimac. “There are federal, state and local clean-water commissions guarding this river, and each one of them has a thousand pages of regulations, permits and applications for variations, easements, public hearings …”

  “Stop,” I said, holding my hands over my ears. “I’m getting a bureaucracy migraine.”

  “Welcome to my world,” Angie said and flashed me what passed for her version of a grin.

  “With all that bureaucracy, there must be a paper trail,” I said.

  “And you want me to go dig it out, I suppose,” she said, her fleeting grin turning into an equally unenthusiastic frown.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Probably nothing there. I’ll get my friend at the Lowell paper to see what he can find.”

  “The hell you will,” she snapped. “It’s my story. I’ll do my own reporting.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Just trying to help.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Like a fish on a bicycle. Was Papageorge married?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “In fact, I’ve met her. Younger. Blonde. Attractive. Allegedly active in a John Cheever-esque way here among the clubby set.”

  Angie frowned and stopped writing. “You do her?” she barked at me.

  “Angie,” I protested, holding my hands up to stop her. “What an indelicate question to ask a colleague. I am shocked…shocked! But no, I cannot say I have had the pleasure.”

  She shook her head. “Then I ain’t gonna go there. Maybe she had hot pants, maybe all these pencil-neck geeks around here just wish she did. Until someone official says her sex life had something to do with this guy’s murder, I ain’t going there.”

  “How honorable,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, it’s the oldest trick in the book,” she said, her face getting a little red. “Young, good-looking wife. Older, hard-nosed husband. Everyone immediately assumes she’s some kind of slut, only married him for the money, fucks everything that’s not tied down, and is prime suspect numero uno when the guy gets dead. Well, I’m not buying it.”

  “Slow down,” I said, holding up my hand again. “I agree with you. Even though I might have something a bit stronger than hearsay or malicious gossip to suggest that she might have been fooling around –” She started to protest again before I hurried on – “There’s no good motive for her to kill him. Be more the other way around.”

  “Was Papageorge having an affair?” Angie asked.

  “Dunno,” I said. “Good question. That’d create a motive.”

  Angie nodded, and glanced over my shoulder at a gaggle of Lowell cops gathered around a police car. “Look, I gotta go see if these geniuses have any further information to divulge,” she said. “I’ll ask about the chauffeur and let you know if I find anything out about the sewer mess. Thanks.”

  “Okay,” I said. “If I learn anything else, I’ll call.”

  She started to walk away.

  “Hey Angie,” I called, remembering something. She stopped and looked at me.

  “Does the name Herb Incavaglia ring any bells with you?”

  She thought for a minute, eyebrows furrowed, chewing on her pencil. “Nope,” she said.

  “Okay, thanks,” I said, waving my hand. She gave me one of her quick smiles, a mere twitch of her lips that carried zero warmth and just a smidgen of gratitude, and strode off quickly. Walking back into the clubhouse, I almost collided head-on with Fred Adamek, who was pushing out the door. Freddie! I had almost forgotten about Papageorge’s long-suffering partner. He was wearing a thin blue blazer, an oxford dress shirt and a wide necktie. His whitish shock of hair was wet and plastered down on his round and motley head. He carried a small athletic bag in one hand and his golf shoes in the other.

  We stood for a moment looking at each other. What do you say to a guy whose partner has been murdered? I reached out and put a sympathetic hand on his rounded shoulder.

  “Geez, Fred,” I said. “This has been quite a day, hasn’t it?”

  He nodded, his eyes grateful. He shrugged his heavy shoulders.

  “Hell of a thing,” he said, shaking his head. “Hell of a thing.”

  I pulled him outside and out of the way of people streaming into and out of the door to the grill. “Got a minute to talk?” I asked.

  “Guess so,” he said, casting a longing look at th
e parking lot. “I was heading home. The party’s over.”

  “Drink?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “I’m tuckered out. Cops made me stick around all morning. Telling my story, over and over. I need to get home and get some sleep.”

  “What did they want to know?” I asked.

  He threw his hand up. “Oh, just where was I and when did I see Vitus last and what did he say and stuff like that.” He pushed his thick glasses back up his nose and sighed.

  “I got here pretty early this morning,” he said, launching into his story again. He had obviously been on automatic pilot most of the day and didn’t need much prompting for the story to come spilling out one more time.

  “Vitus wanted us to get to the practice range first to get some work in,” he continued. “He was a great one for working out the kinks. Anyway, when I got here, he was already here, on the putting green. Said he had been waiting for me! This was about 6:15 this morning! Keee-rist! He was an intense little son-of-a-bitch!”

  Freddie looked up at me and smiled. I smiled back encouragingly and he went on.

  “I came upstairs and changed into my shoes and went back down. He met me outside here, gave me a bucket of balls and a few of my clubs. Told me to go work on my wedge. He was going to get his three-wood out of his bag back in the barn and meet me up on the range.”

  Fred stopped and rubbed his head wearily. I nodded to keep him talking.

  “That was it,” he said. “That was the last time I saw him. I went on up to the range, and hit the entire bucket. There were a couple other guys up there and we got to talking and I finally noticed that Vitus hadn’t showed up when the bucket was gone. I went back to the clubhouse to look for him. He wasn’t in there having breakfast. He wasn’t upstairs in the lockers. He wasn’t in the crapper. “

  He shrugged his shoulders again, mournfully.

  “I figured he’d find me eventually. I came back down to the grill, got some coffee and a doughnut and was sitting over by the windows, reading the sports pages. Next thing I know, I hear somebody run in and say ‘Vitus Papageorge got strangled out in the cart barn’ Then there were the sirens, the cops . . .”