by Joan Boswell
“I adamantly opposed my club letting women into membership,” the man went on as though no play had intervened.
His nephew Freddie was up next. Fairbanks advised him to maintain a proper set-up this time and watch that back swing. “Fools never learn.” Fairbanks shook his head as Freddie dribbled off into the rough. Freddie’s face reddened. I knew that expression. I’d seen it on the faces of men just before they knifed somebody in the shower room.
“And so I was forced to resign my membership,” Fairbanks droned on, as though we cared. He stepped up to the tee like Mussolini surveying Italy, then made an abysmal shot, just like all the rotten shots I’d seen him produce since the first hole. And he was smiling and nodding as though this was another brilliant ploy in his grand scheme. Or maybe he was just delusional when it came to his own game.
I looked over at Freddie. He was rubbing his fingers over a ball he had taken from his pocket, the way you do with a gun before a knockover. Thanks to prison, I’ve upgraded my pickpocket skills considerably, which meant I was able to relieve him of the ball for a closer look. What he’d built was as pretty a little death trap as I was likely to see outside prison. Freddie had taken the ball apart and packed the inside with an explosive. Probably had a detonator in the other pocket. One swipe with a club and whammo! If Freddie was the amateur he appeared to be, it would open up a crater the size of an underground parking garage.
I followed him. “Drop something, buddy?” I flipped the loaded ball back his way and a look of horror crossed his face when he slapped his pocket and discovered it missing. “Don’t even think of taking your uncle out while I’m around,” I said.
“He deserves it,” Freddie said stubbornly, his face flushing. “He’s humiliated me for the last time. Today he gets it.”
“Wrong, Freddie. Some OTHER day he gets it. When I’m gone.” I gave him my toughest prison face, the one that made the range boss decide to loan me his TV for the length of my stay behind bars. If anything were to explode in a foursome I was in, the cops would stop investigating when they came to me, what with my record of blowing holes in any bank vault I’d ever encountered. “Now get rid of that stuff,” I told him.
Leaving Freddie shaking in his spikes, I hiked over to the sand trap, pointedly ignoring Fairbanks’ analysis of my stance and shoulders. After three tries with a wedge, my hook shot shanked out of the sand and hit a tree. My game had died and gone to hell.
Meanwhile, Fairbanks babbled on. “I know my former club was devastated to lose a member of my capacity in the field of golf. How often had I instructed some foursome on the art of the proper swing! I gave generously of my time on the putting green to all who ventured forth, nor did I spare analysis when spotting an errant slicer. My departure has cost them dearly, I dare say. Who now beside the pro is there to selflessly aid the individual members by pointing out the flaws in their games?”
They probably held a great big celebration, I thought, as we reached the fourth hole. Fairbanks’ tinny little voice reverberated like a cheap radio in my ears. “They implored me to stay, of course. ‘Oh, no, Fairbanks, we cannot lose you.’ But I remained adamant. ‘Allowing women equal rights and privileges with male members has ruined this club,’ I said, ‘and will no doubt herald the demise of any other where the issue of women’s equality is raised.’”
There was a honking noise behind us. Two carts had come even with us, and the women were gesturing to play through. “Honk, honk.” One of the women passengers wielded a bicycle horn in one hand and a beer in the other.
Fairbanks acted as though he had heard nothing. He stepped to the tee and began to position a scruffy old ball.
“Move it, Mac!” The women were growing restless. They leaned back in their parked carts, feet hanging out as they opened more beer and lamented the lack of proper protocol in our group. “Holdin’ up the game,” one of the women complained. “It sez right here on the scorecard: ‘Faster golfers’, that’s us, ‘may play through.’” I shrugged. Freddie was still sulking, and my father was trying to make up his mind to speak to them.
The ladies were a mixed quartet. The first and noisiest cart held two florid-faced plump women who obviously hadn’t been treated to a rear view of themselves in stretch pants. The other held a slim blonde and a tiny brunette, the kind of women you’d throw your coat across a puddle for.
Fairbanks postured on the tee as though he were under camera scrutiny at the Masters. He hit. I didn’t bother following the track of his ball. Another birdie, ho, hum. He was the only one paying attention to the score anyway. Then he crossed in front of the carts as though they didn’t exist and bent to stow his driver.
“C’mon ladies. No sense letting this particular jerk hold us up,” the brunette said. She revved her little cart engine like a dragster and took aim at Fairbanks. “Go get ’em, Cecily,” one of the women yelled as they bounded forward.
“Ow, ow, ow!” Fairbanks dropped his bag and hopped around, cradling his left foot in both hands. “Did you see that? She ran over my foot! Deliberately took aim and ran over…”
“Why would she do that, Fairbanks?” my father said.
“Cecily, the brunette in the second cart, is in the process of divorcing me. She has an acrimonious nature. And did I mention extravagant? Probably playing with brand-new balls.” He gestured towards the women. “Cecily knew Freddie and I were playing today. Perhaps she even managed to discover our tee-off time?” He turned to his nephew.
While he read the kid out, I moved ahead and approached Cecily, who was finishing her drive.
When I got her alone, I said, “That’s the last run I want you to make at the guy. I imagine your plan is to get him jumping when he sees the cart coming till you see your chance to run him off one of the cliffs.”
“Was I that obvious?” Cecily said, clenching her lovely fists. “The man’s a monster, and this divorce is a nightmare. Besides, accidents happen all the time on golf courses.”
“Things like heart attacks or heat strokes or getting beaned with a ball happen,” I agreed. “Not murder. A golf cart’s not heavy enough to kill him. I don’t want anything to happen to the guy while I’m playing with him, okay?”
She put her head down and fluttered her eyelashes, but in the end she agreed with me. I wandered back to the others. Fairbanks was too caught up in lecturing my father on the length of his swing to notice where I’d been, but Freddie gave me a look that said he’d play it my way.
“Your game needs a lot of work,” Fairbanks said to Dad. “Under my tutelage you stand a chance of improvement. I think the best thing would be to make ours a permanent foursome, at great cost to myself, I don’t mind telling you. Perhaps I might even be persuaded to spare a little attention to your son’s game as well.” He looked over at me.
The red haze behind my eyes turned crimson. My fingers yearned for his throat. Dad shook his gracious old head, but Fairbanks chose to interpret his refusal as undue modesty. “You’re probably thinking you’re not good enough to play with me,” he said. “Which is undoubtedly true, but I have to work with what I can get.” He laughed immoderately.
“Don’t worry, son,” my father muttered to me as we followed Fairbanks to the next hole, a tricky shot over water, “I’ll take care of it.” That probably meant he’d write a gentle note that Fairbanks could claim had been lost in the mail. What can I say? We were Canadians. Polite unto death. On an American course, someone would surely have shot Fairbanks by now.
We watched the occupants of the carts tee off, sending two balls apiece to watery graves. Then the rest of us followed, our hopes sinking like our balls. It was a good-sized pond with cattails, sunken logs, frogs and a duck or two.
“Take a look at this, Fairbanks,” my father called, pointing to something on the ground. Since the bushes would screen the two men, I followed them.
Fairbanks bent close to the tee and my gentle father raised his driver. If I hadn’t been there to grab the shaft, it would have embedded itself
in the right temporal lobe of the man below us. Three attempts at cold-blooded murder in one game. Nightmare golf.
“No, Dad!” I cried. Startled, Fairbanks straightened up.
“Sorry. He was about to use the wrong club,” I said. I didn’t care if he believed me or not.
“Leave the guy alone,” I told Dad when we were out of earshot.
“But he’s getting to you, son,” my father objected. “Besides, he’s humiliating poor Freddie, and he’s causing his wife to behave rather badly. I set up today’s game to give myself another chance at forgiving him for all the times he cheated me in business when we were younger. But I realize I hate him now as much as ever.”
He put his old grey head to one side and studied me. “You realize we’ll never have another peaceful game to ourselves as long as Fairbanks can come around and horn in. And this is the only course we can afford.”
“So you decided to do something about it,” I finished up. “Better to kill him off than behave rudely. Well, take a number.” I shouldered my driver as though it was a loaded gun and we moved towards the others. All that time in prison thinking about golf had not prepared me for the vindictiveness that seemed to have taken over the game while I was inside. Certainly neither Freddie nor Cecily had abandoned their plans. They were waiting like outplacement agents to downsize our foursome by one. And now my watchfulness had to include Dad, previously a complete stranger to violence.
Suppose one of them succeeded in polishing off Fairbanks before we finished? If either Freddie or Cecily knew my background they might contrive to pin the crime on me. On the other hand, I didn’t dare go somewhere else to establish an alibi for fear my father might kill Fairbanks in the meantime. The thought of him going to prison wasn’t something I could handle.
No, I had no choice but to stay and guard this man I despised as much as they did, even though they’d all known him much longer. Just four more holes, I told myself. If only he could keep that big mouth shut, I might have a chance. At the fifth hole his monologue had been replaced by jottings in a notebook.
“Those women aren’t replacing their divots,” he observed, kicking aside a piece of uprooted turf. “Nobody raked the sand trap on that last shot. And look. Litter.” He gave the word a sepulchral sound, pointing a bony finger at an empty beer can, conceivably from one of the carts. I noticed he didn’t pick it up.
“Management co-operates no better than the police,” he complained on the sixth hole. “You’ll see. This report of mine will go unenforced, despite documentation. I’m expecting each of you to sign as witnesses.” Freddie rolled his eyes in a long-suffering gesture towards me. I gritted my teeth and stared straight ahead.
The women zigzagged on the seventh as if by design, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind. “How’d you ever let that big ol’ stud muffin get away, Cecily?” one of the women shrieked across to the other just as Fairbanks swung on the eighth tee. “Lookit the buns on that guy,” her friend hooted back. Fairbanks’s shot soared straight up and down again. travelling only a few yards. There was derisive laughter from the carts.
“Would you ladies like to play through?” my father asked in a voice that said he had had enough.
The way to number nine was steep. The usually slow-moving combination of my father and Freddie surged ahead in the wake of the carts, while Fairbanks beat about in the bushes for what was presumably a lost ball. I had been falling back to shepherd the trio while watching for warning signs.
“Anger muddies the water. Calmness makes it clear.” I repeated quickly to myself, but maxims weren’t working any more. I stared at the smug set of Fairbanks’ shoulders as he mooched up the hill. Behind my eyes the crimson haze deepened to purple. Then a wave of adrenaline so strong I could not restrain it washed over me. Like a tornado going after a trailer park I stormed up the hill.
The ninth hole was crater-shaped, surrounded by bushes and cut off from the clubhouse by a grove of cedars. On its rim, scant inches from the cliff, Fairbanks was arrogantly tempting fate. He had set his bag down to tie his shoe. Nearby were Freddie, Cecily and my father, each a check on the other.
Without slackening my pace or caring if anyone saw, I scooped the bag up in a single motion.
“Nooooo!” Fairbanks straightened up and lunged for me.
Unflinching, I dashed the whole works, tacky mottos, snotty towel and all, over the cliff. Then I stepped aside as his beefy body grabbed for mine.
It was a ballet moment, worthy of a full orchestra and the best work of the kettledrums. In slow motion, I saw Fairbanks sail right past me and over the rocky edge of the cliff.
A sound that must’ve been crushed bone and human flesh splattering against ancient granite came back to us. Then there was a profound silence. “Geez,” someone said behind me.
“Where are the other women?” I asked when my throat stopped choking up. Both carts were parked a short distance away.
“Peeing in the bushes. I suppose we’d better round them up and go report this,” Cecily added, turning to my father. “Is there any chance my husband might’ve survived the fall?”
“None,” he said, “Not going over head first like that. I’m sorry to say he’s probably broken his neck.”
“Odd sort of accident,” Freddie said as we headed towards the clubhouse. “Knocking his clubs over the edge, then tripping and falling when he tried to retrieve them.”
“I threw the bag over,” I corrected him. Was the man blind?
“Don’t be a martyr,” Cecily said sharply. “My arrogant husband thought he was the god of golf. So he sets his bag down anywhere he wants. Which turns out to be the edge of the cliff. When it topples over, he topples over after it.” She gave me a beseeching look. “If I hadn’t had too much to drink, maybe I could’ve done something.” She spread her hands in an appealing gesture.
“I was fiddling with my clubs,” my father said. “I’m afraid I missed the whole thing, but I’ll back you two up,” he told Freddie and Cecily as though I was the invisible man. “I think you two must have it right.”
“As long as we’re clear on what happened,” Freddie said to Cecily. “Do you know if he changed his will?”
“He was seeing his lawyer about it this afternoon,” Cecily said. “Cutting me out and probably you as well.”
• • •
I felt numb. Throwing the bag over hadn’t been my imagination. I could still feel its old leather fastenings slipping through my fingers. However, since the sworn testimony of the other six players failed to mention me, there seemed no point in volunteering the information. The cops, who had been treated to many lectures by Fairbanks on the proper performance of their duties, weren’t disposed to much investigation.
The coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of accidental death, recommending tighter controls on alcohol on the fairways and that a guardrail be installed in the proper place.
• • •
“Thanks for coming to the funeral,” Cecily said the following week. She looked me square in the eyes. “I hope you understand how grateful we all are for what you did and that you don’t blame yourself for my husband’s death. If a man thinks he can fly, who are we to stop him? After all, he also thought he could teach golf.”
Golf is a devious game, and deviant are the men and women who make it their own. Still and all we don’t make a bad foursome, Dad, Cecily, Freddie and I. Only one rule between us. No one ever gives advice on another player’s game unless asked. Not to anybody, ever.
ROSE DESHAW is a Raging Granny who plays the great game of golf on a regular basis in her head. She has written a regular column on out of print mysteries for The Mystery Review since that magazine began. She is on the second volume of a trilogy about an out of print bookseller in Churchill, Manitoba, who is a Raging Granny.
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