I heard a siren in the distance, which got louder and louder as it got closer. Then I heard another. The klaxons pierced the night air. I heard a noise up above and saw a helicopter flying by. I watched as it headed out to the point of land where the seventh green and eighth tee was located, on that rocky headland extending out into Carmel Bay. The copter flipped on a search light and began circling around. The sirens stopped, but then I could see the flashing red lights of two emergency vehicles driving down the sixth fairway: a fire engine and an ambulance. Something was going on out there. But what? A boat on the rocks?
I heard another siren coming up from 17 Mile Drive, and decided maybe I should go take a look. The old newspaperman instinct, I guess. Get it first, get it fast, get it right. I went back inside the Lodge, then out the front door and turned right towards the golf clubhouse above the first tee. Someone had turned on the floodlights on the clubhouse roofline, and the tee area and cart path area next to the tee was bathed in a pool of golden light. A couple of green, roofed carts were parked there, and a couple of men came bursting out of the clubhouse and down the stairs. I jogged over.
“What’s going on?” I asked one guy, who was wearing a white shirt with epaulets and a golden badge over one breast. He looked like a security guard.
“There’s been an accident out on eight,” he said. “Cart over the cliff.”
He jumped behind the wheel of one of the carts. I jumped in next to him. He looked at me, frowning.
“Maybe I can help,” I said. He shrugged and we took off.
It took us about five minutes to drive all the way out to the eighth hole, including a couple full-speed jumps over the four-inch asphalt curbing. I had to hand on for dear life to avoid being jarred out of the cart and left to tumble down the green grass. My driver didn’t apologize, but kept his foot on the gas.
The emergency vehicles—the fire engine, ambulance and a police cruiser—were parked on the bluff high above the beach when we arrived. The flashing lights washed across the darkness. There are little white posts hammered into the turf along the edge of the cliff up there, with yellow rope strung between. You have to be blind not to see the barrier; you have to be suicidal to drive over them. But somebody had. Two of the posts were dislodged and the rope stretched out towards the edge of the cliff. A group of firemen and a police officer were gathered at the edge, peering down over the side, pointing down with their flashlights.
The security guy and I joined them. The hovering helicopter’s search light was now focused on the rocky scrim at the bottom of the cliff, where the orange rocks had eroded off the face of the cliff over the years and gathered on the white sandy beach. The search light was centered on one of the Pebble Beach’s dark green carts, crushed nose first onto those rocks, its white plastic roof crumpled and broken off to the side. Whoever had been sitting in that cart was now hanging out what had been the windshield. We could see an arm, the torso and part of a leg. Nothing was moving.
Two police ATV units came buzzing up the beach from the direction of Carmel, blue lights flashing and their single front headlights showing the way. They parked near the crashed cart and the officers went to examine the victim.
There was a rasping sound from the radio mic from the police officer standing next to us on the top of the cliff.
“We got a 10-50 here base,” the disembodied voice said over the radio. “Victim unresponsive. Appears fatal. No pulse detected. We’ll need the meat wagon.”
“Roger that,” came the response. “10-53 at Pebble Beach, Arrowhead Point. Units responding.”
The cop whistled softly to himself. “Hoo, man. Been a long time since someone went over the cliff,” he said. “I’m guessing alcohol was involved. Pounded the wine at dinner, found a cart, went for a little joyride, and boom!”
“Isn’t there usually a woman involved?” I asked. “Guy showing off, maybe hoping for a little action once he impresses her with his driving skills?”
“Good point,” the cop nodded. He pressed the mic on his radio.
“Uh, 1445 … any passengers down there?”
There was a short delay, then the response.
“Negative. One male.”
The cop sighed. “I’d better look around. Maybe she jumped out.”
He pulled out his flashlight and began sweeping its beam around the area. A couple of the firefighters, with nothing else to do, did the same. They checked all around the clifftop, looking back toward the tee and over towards the sixth fairway. But it was all empty out there. Not a soul in sight.
The security guard had his phone out and was busily calling someone. Probably his supervisor. The death of a guest is always a tragedy. It’s also a huge potential liability for a company. There would be hell to pay, and unless the Pebble Beach lawyers could step in quickly, there would be millions in damages to pay as well.
I edged away from the group of first responders and made my way carefully in the dark around towards the eighth green. From there, using the flashlight feature on my cell phone, I was able to make my way to climb down through the weeds and scrub to the beach and then over to the base of the cliff where a small crowd of onlookers had gathered. It doesn’t seem to matter where or what time a tragedy occurs, there are always people who come out to gawk.
One of the police officers who had ridden up the beach on his ATV was talking to a young couple holding a dog on a leash. The woman was tearfully relating her story.
“We were just out for a walk with Chippie, and we heard this awful crunching sound,” she was saying. “Like a bang and a squish together, y’know? We were way over there…” She pointed down the beach back toward Carmel…but it sounded like it was right next to us, it was that loud. Bobby here ran up, saw the cart, and called 9-1-1.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the cop said, writing in his notebook. “Did you see anyone else? Anyone up on top of the cliff?”
“N-no,” she stammered. “I mean, we weren’t looking at anything. We were just walking Chippie and holding hands and talking and then we heard this crunch. It was awful. But no, I couldn’t see anyone else around at all.”
“Any voices before the crash?” I said. “Yelling? Screams?”
The cop looked at me like he wanted to say something, like butt out, bub, but he didn’t. The couple looked at me.
“No, sir,” the woman said. “I just remember the crash.” She turned and looked at the man. “Bob?”
“No, I just remember the crashing sound,” her male friend said. “It was quiet before that.”
The cop began taking down their names and other information. I edged away and wandered over to the crash scene, which was now illuminated by several flood lights. Several other emergency vehicles had driven down the beach and stopped at the base of the cliff, and five or six of responders were working to extricate the body from the wreckage of the cart. They carefully pulled him through the shattered windshield and carried him over to the beach, laying him down on the white sand.
One of the cops flashed his light on the face. I sucked in my breath. There was an unruly shock of red hair illuminated in the lights.
It was Charlie Sykes, assistant golf professional. And he was very, very dead.
Back in Boston, the black hole of Christmas sucked in all other activities for the next two weeks. The old town actually looks pretty festive at Christmas: the shops and stores are all nicely lit up, people trade in their usual snarly countenances for something that resembles a smile, and the ice rink on the Commons is filled with kids having some noisy fun in the cold. Maybe not quite the full Dickens with plucked geese hanging in the butcher’s window, but close enough.
I returned from Pebble Beach in a somber mood. Death will do that to you. I had given a statement to the police, of course. I had played a round with Charlie that morning, yes. He had won forty dollars from me, yes. I was not angry enough about that to push him and a cart over the cliff, no. I think the cops believed me, because they let me go home. Or maybe because they chec
ked with Jack Harwood who had confirmed that I was having dinner with him at the House of Harwood when young Charlie went over the cliff.
Everyone seemed to believe that it was a suicide. Or maybe everyone wanted to believe it was a suicide. Certainly the Pebble Beach Company wanted to believe that. Far less liability for that. The police sent the body off to the coroner and promised a full toxicology report in due course.
Then we all went home. Back to our normal lives. It was Christmas, after all. Not the season to be thinking about death. I came home in a foul mood. But Mary Jane helped jolly me out of it. Well, actually, she told me to damn well snap out it, it was Christmas and she wasn’t going to let me ruin Victoria’s holiday. She was right, of course.
So, once Mary Jane and Victoria were out of school, we did the normal family holiday things: shopping along Newbury Street, buying and decorating the tree, attending a matinee performance of the Nutcracker at the Boston Ballet, drinking cocoa and watching all the Christmas movies on TV. Even Mister Shit the cat seemed to get into the spirit of the season and sought out my lap for a brief midwinter’s nap on the afternoon I watched some playoff football games.
On Christmas Eve, we delivered Victoria to her grandfather’s house where all her cousins would gather for a traditional Italian feast and midnight Mass. Many of them probably had a lot to seek redemption for. We promised we’d be there bright and early the next morning for breakfast and to see what Santa had brought. Then we went home. I grilled a couple of ribeyes on the balcony hitachi, baked a couple of potatoes, tossed a green salad and opened a nice bottle of Bordeaux. Mary Jane was busy as a bee, wrapping the last few presents and singing carols to herself softly. I smiled.
“I’m feeling rather domesticated,” I said when MJ swept through the room, trailing wrapping paper, ribbon and tape in her wake.
“Is that OK?” she asked. “No second thoughts about this whole marriage thing?”
“Oh, hell no,” I assured her. “I’m as happy as an unfried clam. It’s just all this … activity … is a little different for me.”
“How did you usually celebrate Christmas?”
I thought back. “When I was a kid, my aunt and uncle never made a big deal out of the holidays,” I said. “They had a fake tree from Sears when I was still a little kid. But once I hit my teens, they even quit doing that much. We usually gave each other one gift. I usually got a sweater or a pair of woolly socks. I would buy them a tin of Danish sugar cookies from the supermarket. That was about that.”
“How sad,” she said, plopping down next to me and picking up a glass of red wine to sip. “I had six brothers and sisters, so Christmas for us was basically unqualified madness from Thanksgiving through New Year’s. What did you do for Christmas when you grew up?”
“I’d go out on Christmas Eve and buy a bottle of bourbon and a new book,” I said. “And on Christmas, I’d drink the bourbon and read the book.”
“That’s it?”
“Sometimes I’d splurge and order in a pizza, extra cheese,” I said. “That was if it had been a good year.”
“That’s pathetic,” she said.
“I never thought so,” I said. “I thought it was nice. Peaceful.”
We ate our dinner, washed the dishes and snuggled for a bit on the couch. Then, around ten, we bundled up in our warm coats and boots and went out into the frosty cold. The nearly full moon cast a silvery glow on the narrow streets of the North End, which were also decorated in garlands and Christmas lights.
We strolled arm in arm over to Salem Street and got in the line that had already formed for the eleven o’clock service at the Old North Church, of the “one if by land” fame. They let us file in early to get out of the cold and we sat up in the balcony on the side of the old church, gazing down at the box pews on the main floor of the sanctuary. Christ Church, the proper name of the Old North, used to sell those boxes to its vestrymen and other wealthy members of the church, and families often passed them down over the generations. Some of Boston’s most famous early fathers—Revere, Hancock and others—once worshiped here.
The church was decorated to its arched ceiling in greenery and bunches of candles cast a calming glow. When the service began, the white-robed choir marched in and we all sang the old familiar Christmas hymns and carols. It was pleasant. It was peaceful. We felt connected, for a while, to the rest of the world, both the living and the dead.
When we got home, there was a little of the wine left in the bottle, which we shared. Between that and the residual warm feeling from the church service, we were both glowing a bit. We sat in our darkened apartment, with our tree alight, and the cat sleeping silently in his favorite chair. Mary Jane put something classical on and we enjoyed the peace.
Eventually, Mary Jane put her wine glass down, took hold of my hand and led me into our bedroom. We unwrapped each other like the best present ever, and got into our warm bed. Then we made sweet love until we fell into a deep sleep, dreaming of sugarplums and fairies, holes-in-one and woolen socks.
In the week between Christmas and New Year’s, I took over our little dinette table, spreading out the file folders and pages of information Dottie van Dyke had sent home with me. I had dutifully underlined and highlighted passages I might need, and the papers and my notes began to spill over onto the floor around my feet. Organized? Nah. But I knew where everything was. Mister Shit came over, sat down on a manila folder, cocked his head and gave me one of those “you can’t be serious” looks that cats do so well.
I didn’t think I was bothering anyone until one afternoon, when Victoria had gone off for a play date with a school mate, Mary Jane walked in with her own armload of papers for a curriculum-planning session, sat down in an empty chair, looked at the mess I had created, cocked her head and gave me one of those “what the hell are you doing?” looks that women do so well.
“Sorry,” I said, and tried to move some stuff out of her way. “My research is getting out of hand.”
“You know, Hacker,” she said, glancing at the piles of paper on the table, two of the three chairs and several square feet of floor, “You don’t have to go all the way back to Christopher Columbus to write the history of the place.”
“Junipero Serra,” I said.
“What?”
“Father Junipero Serra,” I said. “Now he’s Saint Junipero Serra. He was a Spanish priest who founded a Catholic mission in Carmel-by-the-Sea that became the headquarters for all the missions in Alta California. Put the place on the map. The mission has a name…” I began shuffling through some of the papers. “I just had it a second ago.”
“Hacker.” Her voice was calm, but there was an undeniable undertone of disdain.
“What?” I was still looking for the pages on the Spanish mission of 1752 or thereabouts.
“I’m not a big golfer, and I do like history, but I’m pretty sure the name of the Spanish mission in Carmel has absolutely zero relevance for how the U.S. Golf Association came to hold their national championships on the golf course at Pebble Beach.”
She took her notebooks and papers and went into the living room where she sat down on the couch.
“You think I’m overdoing it?”
“Yes, dear,” she called, even though she was only about ten feet away.
I sat there and thought about this for a minute.
“So the stuff about how Monterey was once the capital of colonial California, until they discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill outside Sacramento in 1848, after which they moved lock, stock and governor … I should deep-six all that?”
“Don’t see how it’s important, dear,” she said sweetly.
I flipped through a few more pages of notes.
“How about the Pacific Improvement Company?” I asked. “And the plans to develop what is now the exclusive neighborhood of Pebble Beach into an early twentieth-century version of Levittown, with rows and rows of little boxy houses on quarter-acre lots?”
�
��Well, that sounds partially interesting,” she said, although I could tell she was only half-listening. “Tell me more.”
“Ah,” I said, and reached for my stack of PIC papers. “OK, it was right after the Civil War and the U.S. government decided to build the Transcontinental Railroad across the U.S. of A..”
“Yes,” she said. “I heard about that. In seventh grade.”
“So these four guys moved out West from New York to seek their fortunes, and they formed a company to build the railroad from Oakland heading east. They got paid something like twenty thousand bucks a mile except for the mountains, for which they got paid twice as much. Naturally, they told the government most of the roadbed was in the mountains. And they used Chinese coolie labor, paying subsistence wages, so they made even more. These four guys ended up as rich as Warren Buffet.”
“Ah, yes,” Mary Jane said, her head buried in her course planner. I heard her pencil scratching furiously away. “Rapacious capitalists suckling at the public teat while exploiting labor. Kind of the story of America. I believe you’ll find it continues to this day.”
“It does?”
“You’ve heard of the military-industrial complex? Same thing.”
“Right,” I said. It was too early in the day to start drinking, and thus not an auspicious time to begin a political discussion. “So these four rich guys started up a company which began investing its profits in real estate and other companies and all kinds of things.”
“Of course they did,” Mary Jane said. “That’s what rapacious capitalists do.”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “One of the four used his money to start a university.”
“Was his name Berkeley?” she asked.
“Ha ha,” I said. “No, it was Leland Stanford.”
An Open Case of Death Page 9
