AHMM, July/August 2012

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Bobby had that hail-fellow-well-met golfer's side to him. I'm making him sound like a dummy. He wasn't. He was just oblivious to certain social cues. He wasn't cruel with his joking, but you could say that he was naive about how others, especially Marcello, might take his ribbing.

  In view of this competitive history between Marcello and Bobby, I wondered why Candy Finn zeroed in on me instead of Marcello. Had she done any follow-up on who benefited most from Bobby's death? Days after the murder, I was asked to appear at her office downtown to give a formal statement. None of the other pros at Gulf Breeze had been called on to go that extra mile. Apparently, I was her chief suspect.

  I asked Finn point blank, “So you actually think I killed Bobby?”

  “You're merely a person of interest,” she answered.

  I glanced at the photos in little frames on her desk, the ones I could see. Instead of a child or husband, they were all of a dog—one of those exotic Afghans with a hairdo like Rod Stewart's. “I know what this person-of-interest stuff means nowadays,” I said.

  She ignored my comment, just said, “Don't leave town anytime soon. We'll be in touch.”

  I stopped at the threshold of her office, thinking of Marcello. I also wanted to ask if she realized Bobby had a new girlfriend. Who was she? Despite my suspicions, I wasn't about to direct her inquiry one way or the other. If Marcello was innocent, I'd be a rat, and I have to admit that I found it hard to look into those soulful eyes of his and pronounce him a murderer. And if I brought the other woman up, it would make me sound bitter and perhaps make my jealousy seem an even more plausible motive.

  “You have anything to add?” Candy asked, seeing me hesitate.

  “Those dogs, Afghans. Good dogs, are they?”

  “Loyal,” she said. “Extremely loyal.”

  “Nice,” I said. “If only more people were.”

  I don't know how that sat with her, or if I'd stepped into it again, since—yes—I was thinking of Bobby when I said the words. Hardly the poster child for loyalty. Suspecting as much, she probably jotted a note on her pad for that one.

  Back to Marcello: Only days after that interview, I learned not to trust his sincere liquid brown eyes. The crux of the matter was Bobby's video camera—one of those gizmos teaching pros can't live without these days. It's a diagnostic tool that intimately analyzes a student's swing.

  I never could save enough to buy one for myself. Bobby, generous soul that he was—and he truly was—let me use his when he could spare it. Granted, it was an antique model—video instead of digital—but a great tool all the same.

  He kept the camera on its stand in a storage closet at the range clubhouse. Bobby had a key, and I had a key.

  I fleetingly wondered if Detective Candy might confiscate the thing, since looking at the swings of Bobby's students might have forensic value. Days later, when I needed to use it, I was happy to find that Bobby's swing analyzer, my friendly robot, was still there in the closet.

  If you don't have one of these expensive things, some students think you aren't legit. But then, Mr. Joe never used one. In a second he could assess a problem swing better than any camera.

  I'd wheeled Bobby's equipment out to my teaching stall and was in the middle of a lesson with the younger guy Bobby had bragged about me to, when a cop showed up and laid his fat hands on my precious camera.

  He flashed a badge and said, “This evidence is being impounded.”

  My student's eyebrows shot up. I'm afraid he thought his swing was such an eyesore, it had been condemned by the city fathers.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I need this machine for my work. You can't do this.”

  Turned out he could too do this.

  Who'd brought Bobby's video equipment to Detective Candy Finn's attention, I wanted to know.

  None other than Marcello.

  Gray told me. He'd heard it from part-timer Riley, who'd gotten it from the horse's mouth: Marcello himself.

  “Pardon, but it was my duty to tell,” Marcello said, hand over heart as if reciting the Boy Scout pledge when I confronted him. “Detective lady—she call me, was there anything I not tell her, and I remember Bobby—so mad when he find you erased his swings. My duty it was, to tell. Sorry, so sorry, Marian, if this cause you inconvenience.”

  “Inconvenience? This woman thinks I killed Bobby, you half-Nazi, fake-pro tattletale.”

  Marcello shoved his hands into his pockets as if afraid I'd cut them off. He hiked his shoulders, then let them fall. “Duty dictates. I tell everything I know.”

  “Same here,” I answered. “Like, duty dictates I tell how you've picked up nearly all of Bobby's students. Pretty good motive, I think.”

  “A woman's scorn. Good motive too.” He turned his back to me. “Pretty good.”

  I seethed at him behind his back, though his body language said he was more wounded than angry.

  That damn swing camera.

  Candy Finn called me on the carpet again because of the footage I'd erased. See, a few days before Bobby invited me up top to drink beers and to inform me that once again he'd found the love of his life, I'd borrowed his camera.

  I'd never before much looked at videos of Bobby's students, but this time, a blinking light let me know that no space was left on the tape. On my way to clearing a spot for my own student, I caught sight of some of Bobby's. The guys’ photos were boring and straightforward. But then some female students popped up, caught on camera just before their swings. Several struck me as seriously flirtatious.

  A fire crackled in my chest. One young gal in particular—a beauty pageant blond of the kind who all look alike, wearing a breast-hugging white knit top with a print of pastel-outlined golf balls traveling across her nipples—really hacked me off. I paused on her swing. Addressing the ball, she ran her tongue a complete circuit around the orifice bordered by bee-stung lips, shook her back end like a Playboy Bunny in heat, reared up on her toes, leveled off, and then smacked the ball. A beautiful shot, actually.

  I pushed the erase button.

  Bobby always said that if he croaked early, he'd will me his camera. Now Candy Finn had it. And Marcello had ratted me out, saying I'd erased Bobby's students out of spite.

  My fingerprints were all over the apparatus. No mystery why. I expected any minute to be handcuffed, if not hogtied. But my anger was directed more at myself than at the dimwitted detective with the ridiculous neck. Marcello had successfully deflected suspicion away from himself and onto me. If only I could have been more serene when I saw the swing videos of Bobby's girls. If I'd exercised some control, perhaps Marcello's greedy motives might have caught Candy's fancy instead of my own jealous peevishness.

  When she asked about the missing video footage, I summoned my deadpan look. I have a good poker face. When you hit as many bad shots as I have in my career, you learn to stare each one down as if it'd just crashed a party, acted rudely to the extreme, and yet you don't much care.

  “You're excused,” Candy Finn finally said, like an exasperated high-school principal. Her tone seemed even more disapproving and suspicious than before, but I wasn't detained. They had nothing on me.

  Sadly, they didn't have anything on anybody else either.

  I was so mad at Marcello, the next Monday I stared him down as he approached my stall. He gave me a cheery buenos dias as if this were just another day. Then he stopped by Mr. Joe's to converse, only two slots down from me.

  My student was already ten minutes late, a sure sign that I'd been stood up. Doctors might fine you for ditching an appointment; we golf pros can't recover a dime. Students have the upper hand and know it. If they don't like your rules, they cancel the rest of their contracted series, get a refund, then talk you down behind your back. As a result, golf teachers are the most smilingly tolerant professionals on God's green earth.

  Stood up, I had nothing better to do than practice my own swing, and eavesdrop on Mr. Joe's latest diatribe.

  In his bass monotone belch of a v
oice, Mr. Joe resorted to his key word—dame—a favorite word, which refers to a woman, any woman, from eighteen to eighty.

  “So this dame comes up to me and asks if I can teach her how to spin the ball backwards on the green on an approach shot. ‘You know, the way the professionals do.'” Mr. Joe used his best falsetto to mimic her.

  “Ye-sss?” Marcello responded, lengthening the word as if trying to yank Mr. Joe's point out of him.

  “I said, little filly, that's a highly specialized skill and girls can't spin the ball on the green. Period.”

  “Hoo, you say that?” Marcello rocked back on his heels. “Don't you get it, Mr. Joe? If you say yes you can teach that, you have student for life.” He rubbed thumbs against fingers to signal dollar signs. “Money in bank.”

  Mr. Joe ignored him. “So then this dame says, ‘But what about those LPGA women? They can spin the ball on the green.'”

  Mr. Joe let his heavy head drop, and wagged it to and fro, as if holding it erect might signal agreement with this nutty dame. “I swear,” he said, “this dame's eyes—beautiful eyes—get really big, piercing, like this is the biggest issue on earth. And that's when I say, little filly, you're making my point for me. Those LPGA gals you're talking about—well, you can't exactly say they're bona fide females, hormonally speaking, now can you?”

  He started in on a series of chuckles—deep bass, belly-rattling, yet toneless esophageal eruptions which, for Mr. Joe, signify mirth. Marcello joined in.

  “She don't have a clue of you.” Marcello, hands on hips, arched his spine backwards to give his raucous laugh emphasis. A hint of sputum clogged his bronchial tubes. He said, “You old female-hater, you.”

  Mr. Joe's freckled scalp, showing through thinning gray hair, glistened in the sunlight. He pointed his cigar at Marcello. “Don't get me wrong, you Mr. PGA professional golfer. Women hold this world together. Don't you forget it. They just don't belong on a golf course.”

  I could have spoken those words in perfect sync with him, I've heard them so often.

  Marcello's fake laughter continued as he sauntered back to his own teaching stall on the far end, as if he, Marcello, truly endorsed Mr. Joe's views, when the very opposite was the case, especially since Mr. Joe had just made a dig at Marcello's professional standing.

  My guess is that Marcello was dumbfounded by the number of students Joe maintained, all of them guys, even though in the last few years Joe showed little inclination to swing a club himself. Now and then he'd play a round with an old friend, and he'd bring his Scottish terrier along for the ride in his golf cart—the best-behaved dog I've ever seen. But otherwise, Mr. Joe mainly sat in a webbed lawn chair at his habitual stall, just a few paces from the stairs leading to the upper tier, smoking cigars, sipping a mixture of whiskey and water, and generally dishing out his eccentric take on the universe.

  A week later, we suffered an extremely rainy Wednesday. Few patrons, as we like to call them, came out to practice their swings. Only one of my students showed up: Brett, the young guy with talent Bobby had passed on to me.

  When I first pushed through the range's clubhouse doors to the outside, I noticed that Marcello was walking several yards ahead of me, heading out toward the teaching shed with a bucket of balls and a few clubs. That's where we take our students if the heat's bad or if rain threatens. Or, in Marcello's case, if he wants privacy with a hot lady.

  Since a light rain was blowing in, I ushered my student, Brett, to a stall several away from my usual spot, one more protected from the spatter. On the way, we passed Mr. Joe, who gave us a wave, along with a disapproving eye squint that said: Why would this young buck want a lesson from a little bit of a female like Marian?

  I've known Mr. Joe for nearly twenty years. Aside from this insane hobbyhorse about women golfers, he's got a soft heart, and he loves dogs. Anyone like that can't be all bad, I tell myself. Maybe not even Detective Candy, I guess, with her exotic pooch.

  Sometimes I had to suppress a desire to hug Mr. Joe's rotund frame, because his flat, monotone, woman-bashing monologues reminded me of my cigar-smoking Uncle Fred so much. Like Uncle Fred, Joe was a cream-puff on the inside.

  During the lesson with Brett, my back was to Mr. Joe. Nearing the end of the hour, thunder rumbled. A concentrated clap of discontent followed. The earth rocked beneath our feet. I stopped the lesson and promised Brett to add ten minutes onto the next session. When it comes to lightning, discretion is the better part of valor.

  The raindrops came farther apart. I walked down to the teaching shed to hit a few balls off the grass, and was surprised that Marcello wasn't still there. I didn't realize that he'd passed us again, going back toward the range clubhouse during our lesson.

  I lingered in the shed. Hit a few more balls, thinking of Bobby, the good times we shared. I stared at myself in the full-length mirror that leans against one wall, the mirror we keep there to witness good form, or bad, for our students. I stared at myself and wondered where Bobby was now. It felt so odd to be here still, Bobby somewhere else.

  There hadn't been a funeral, at least not in town. Bobby was from Nebraska. His son from an early marriage still lived there, and had Bobby shipped home. I gazed at the mirror and my throat did one of those painful knotted spasms, and I cried out loud, “Bobby, where are you?”

  A while later, heading back to the range office, the rain nearly over with, I passed Mr. Joe once more. He was positioned in his webbed chair as always, chin resting on his chubby chest, apparently napping. I was about to call out a soft goodbye.

  But as I neared I saw that this was no nap. The left side of his head, which from my initial vantage point had been the dark side of the moon, was a bruised mess. Joe's own 7-iron, lying at his feet, appeared to be the weapon.

  Mouth open, squinting against the dipping sun on the west side of the slight crescent our stalls describe, I made out the figure of Marcello, methodically hitting one ball after another to the medium range flag, his form perfect.

  I ran to the range office. “Mr. Joe,” I called, again and again. “Mr. Joe—he's dead.”

  I couldn't believe it. He seemed so much a part of Gulf Breeze, as solid and enduring as one of the concrete struts that supported the second tier. Sure, he was bullheaded, but he knew what he wanted to pull out of his students, and he succeeded even in his later years without so much as rising from his chair.

  * * * *

  Once again, I'd been the last to see the victim alive. At least, the last anyone could attest to. Another interview with Detective Candy followed. Once again, nothing at the scene pointed to any one person. No prints on the club. And Mr. Joe didn't work with a camera, bragged he didn't need one of those newfangled things. His record-keeping wasn't much better than Bobby's, but I believe the police contacted all the students of his they could reach. The strange case of the Gulf Breeze Range was blared on the evening news, but the police obviously didn't have a clue.

  In the days that followed, the atmosphere at work was grim. Use of the range fell off, if not by much. Guys and gals who want to become better golfers will do anything, even ignore murder statistics. Besides, perhaps our patrons felt they could rest easy since it was only us teachers getting the ax. But the feel of the place, as balls pinged off clubs, was strange.

  I love Florida, but I started Googling other places for employment. Scottsdale, Arizona, for instance. That dry heat, as opposed to Florida's extreme humidity, was sounding more and more attractive. I took notes.

  And I wondered. Who would be next? Me?

  The day of Mr. Joe's funeral, Marcello stood next to me as the priest finished his homily. “Poor old guy,” he said. “A good, God-loving man.”

  I loved Mr. Joe in my own way, but didn't think of him as pathetic, or overly religious. Maybe it was just Marcello's way of filling an awkward pause with the usual culturally approved talking points. He seemed sincere, but something about his manner made me uneasy. I'm not sure if the look he gave me was a suspicious one, implying my p
ossible guilt, or a sly one, weighing whether or not I might be successfully conned. I let myself fantasize. Was he the one? A suave sociopathic killer. His aim: collecting more students for himself and getting even with any who questioned his credentials. If so, had he reached his economic goals? Surely, he now had more students than he could manage.

  Creepy musings. At least, days after the funeral, I was happy to hear that one of Joe's students had taken on the care of his Scottie, Chipper.

  * * * *

  I sent out resumes. Waited.

  While waiting, unfortunately, I still had to work. I just made it a point of common sense never to be at the range after hours or when it was nearly deserted, which is midday, usually. Above all, I avoided Marcello.

  September was doing its best to turn summer into fall, not that the difference is terribly noticeable in the Panhandle. By the first week of October, my favorite month, I still hadn't gotten any nibbles.

  I felt okay with that. We potential victims at the range, and the killer, whoever he was, seemed to achieve a truce. That is, no one else got his head bashed in.

  Still, I didn't let down my guard, was careful not to come in too early or stay too late.

  After Mr. Joe left us, Marcello seemed depressed. But by mid October, his spirits picked up. One afternoon, passing my usual teaching spot, he ruffled my hair with one hand and called me his skinny amiga.

  “He's walking on air,” Gray told me later, standing behind his counter. “New girlfriend.”

  Nothing special about that. Marcello always had a new girlfriend, though I'd never before heard Gray say he was walking on water, much less air, after the fact.

  “How lovely,” I said. “You know her? Can you pick her out of a crowd?”

  “Sure. She's blonde. I've seen her around.”

  “They're all blonde. I mean, can you truly pick her out of a crowd?”

  “Right, I get ya.” Gray gave me a good-natured wink.