An Open Case of Death

by James Y. Bartlett

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Heard of that one.”

  “Anyway, one of the chunks of real estate this company—they called it the Pacific Improvement Company, or PIC—assembled was in Monterey and Carmel,” I said. They owned virtually the entire Monterey Peninsula and way up into the Carmel Valley. Thousands and thousands of acres.”

  “How lovely for them,” Mary Jane said. “Are they the ones who wanted to build tiny little houses all over the Pebble Beach golf course?”

  “Well, yes,” I said. “But you’re getting ahead of the story. There wasn’t a golf course there yet.”

  “How about Jupiter Serra?” she asked. “Had he arrived yet on his mission?”

  “Junipero,” I said. “Pay attention. So the four rich guys bought up all this land, and a bunch of other stuff, and the years go by and the four guys die …”

  “Please tell me they weren’t murdered,” Mary Jane said. “People you know have a terrible habit of getting murdered. Or committing suicide by driving golf carts over cliffs and all.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” I said. “I wonder if Michael Beschloss or Doris Kearns Goodwin ever had this much trouble relating history.”

  “Sorry, dear,” she said, sounding not sorry in the least. “Continue.”

  “So now we’re up to 1915 or so,” I said. “And the heirs of the original four rich guys decide they want more money so they decide to sell off all the assets held by the Pacific Improvement Company. Cash out. Liquidate the lot.”

  “How nice for them,” Mary Jane said. “All that lovely real estate must have been worth a fortune.”

  “Well, it was 1915 and California hadn’t gone as real estate crazy as it is today,” I said. “But yes, the assets were pretty valuable. So the heirs of the four rich guys hired a guy to come in and fix up and sell all the companies and stuff they owned. His name was Samuel F.B. Morse.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I’ve heard of him. He invented the telegraph machine, right? And the code that they used? Dots and dits and all that?”

  “Close, but no cigar,” I said. “That was another Samuel F.B. Morse, a distant cousin or something of this guy. Back then, there must have been a limit on names, so they had to use old ones over and over. This guy, we’ll call him Sam Morse, took a look at the assets the company owned in Monterey and Carmel and decided he wanted to buy them himself.”

  “He wanted to be a rapacious capitalist, too!” Mary Jane said. “They say it’s catching.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “The original four guys had used some of their filthy wealth to build a huge resort hotel outside of Monterey, called the Del Monte Hotel.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Did they also make that delicious fruit cocktail in heavy syrup that comes in the cans?”

  “No,” I said. “Different Del Monte.”

  “Too bad,” she said. “I loved that stuff when I was a kid.”

  “During the Gilded Age, the Del Monte was a famous destination resort. One of the original four rich guys started the Southern Pacific railroad and he ran a spur line down from San Francisco almost right to the front door of the hotel, so guests had an easy way of getting there.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Crocker,” I said. “I forget his first name … Charles or William or something. In addition to the railroad, he owned a big bank in San Francisco.”

  “Was his wife named Betty?” Mary Jane asked. “That would be funny. I think she invented brownies in a box.”

  “Different Crocker,” I said. “Now at this big hotel there was golf and tennis and horseback riding. You could ride in a carriage around the edge of the peninsula, looking at the sea and the rocks and the barking seals and the cypress trees, and over above Stillwater Cove there was a log cabin lodge where they served those three-hour lunches of seven or eight courses and then you could stumble back into the carriage and go back to the big hotel and have another huge dinner of twelve or thirteen courses.”

  “No wonder President Taft was so big,” she said. “Those people ate like draft horses back then.”

  “Rapacious,” I said. “So our Sam Morse decided he wanted to buy that hotel and also have a hand in developing the land around Monterey, including Pebble Beach.”

  “Did he come up with the plan for all those little houses on little lots?”

  “No, he threw those plans away,” I said. “He had a vision for Pebble Beach that was more like Newport, Rhode Island, with big mansions on the sea and society people living there.”

  Mary Jane got up, came into the kitchen and poured herself some coffee. “Well, I guess he did it,” she said. “Isn’t that what’s there now? Big mansions and very rich people?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Plus the golf course, which took up the best real estate, right on the edge of the sea.”

  “Ah,” Mary Jane said, leaning back against the fridge. “We finally get to the golf course, which is the point of this whole exercise, right? Not that I haven’t enjoyed hearing all about Junki Serra, Buzzi Berkeley and Sam the Man Morse Code.”

  I looked at her. “My draft might need some editing,” I said.

  “Ya think?” she said, smiling broadly. “OK, tell me about the golf course.”

  “Well,” I said, “The interesting thing there was that when Sam Morse decided to build the golf course, instead of all those grids of streets and houses, he still was operating under his original assignment, which was to fix up all the assets and sell them off to the highest bidder. So, since he wanted to be the highest bidder, Sam Morse cheaped out and just hired a couple of local golfers to lay the holes out.”

  “No architect?” Mary Jane said, raising her eyebrows. “Was Pete Dye even born yet?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll have to do some research on that.” She groaned, softly but audibly. “There were some famous people building golf courses in 1916—Donald Ross was in his prime, and Alister Mackenzie, who built Cypress Point a few years after Pebble Beach opened, was very active in California. But Sam Morse turned to two nobodies who had won some amateur tournaments in California—Jack Neville and Douglas Grant—and told them to go lay out a golf course.”

  “Did he pay them?” she asked.

  “If he did, it wasn’t much,” I said.

  “Hmmm,” she said. “More of your fine rapacious capitalism at work, exploiting the worker.”

  “OK, Che,” I said. “But it worked out pretty well. However they did it, they managed to find a pretty sporty golf course on those cliffs and dunes. Neville once said all they did was cut down a few trees, sprinkle some grass seed around and stand back.”

  “The simple way is always the best,” she said. “So when did the US Golf Association hear about it?’

  “Well, the golf course at Pebble opened late in 1918, and they held the California Amateur tournament there the next year. People liked the place so much that the Cal Am returned to Pebble Beach for the next forty-five years in a row. But the first USGA event was the US Amateur, in 1929, or ten years after the course officially opened.”

  “And did the USGA decide to hold its tournament there because they heard the golf course was so great?” Mary Jane asked. “Or did the rapacious capitalist pig named Morse lay a big fat donation on their ass in return for the tournament and its national publicity?”

  “My, my,” I said. “Aren’t we Little Miss Cynical this afternoon?”

  “Cynical yes, yet pure of heart,” she said.

  I laughed. “Well, I don’t know why they selected Pebble Beach, but I imagine they were looking for some good west coast golf courses they could add to the championship roster,” I said. “When the USGA was organized, back in 1895, the only one of the six original member clubs not on the East Coast was Chicago. So holding a national championship on the West Coast was good politics. And the course had developed a good reputation.”

  “But Pebble Beach wasn’t a fancy, male-only, private club where no blacks or Jews were a
llowed,” Mary Jane said. “How did they get over that hurdle?”

  “That will be discussed in Howard Zinn’s forthcoming History of the Golfing Proletariat,” I said. “In my book, I will merely point out that Pebble Beach was the first non-private club venue for the Amateur in its 35 year history to that point. And the first resort course ever chosen for a national championship.”

  “Zowie,” she said. “That’s pretty fucking historic.”

  “Cynical and profane,” I said. “How did I get so lucky?”

  “If you ever want to get lucky again, bub, you’d better have that table cleared off by dinner time,” she said. “By the way, who won the ’29 Amateur?”

  I shuffled through some papers. “Jimmy Johnston,” I told her. “He beat Oscar Willing. Willingly, I imagine.”

  “Jimmy Johnson the football coach?” she said. “Or the NASCAR driver?”

  I laughed. “Neither. Johnston, with a T,” I said. “He was from St. Paul, Minnesota, and he made a nice recovery from the rocks on the 18th hole on his way to victory. You know who didn’t win in 1929, though, right?”

  “1929? Warren Harding.”

  “Good guess, although I don’t think the President played the Amateur that year,” I said. “He was getting ready for the stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression. No, it was Bobby Jones who didn’t win the Amateur at Pebble Beach in 1929.”

  “How come? Disqualified for niceness?”

  “He won the medal qualifying, but lost in the first round of match play to a young caddie from Omaha,” I said. “Big upset. Jones was gunning for his third straight Amateur. And the next year, he won the Impregnable Quadrilateral.”

  “The whosy what?”

  “The Grand Slam,” I said. “US Amateur, British Amateur, US Open and British Open. Never been done before, nor since. When he lost at Pebble that year, he went down the road and played the new Mackenzie course at Cypress Point. He liked it so much, he hired the architect to design his new course over in Augusta, Georgia. And the rest is history.”

  “Well, the history is interesting,” she said, “But maybe it’s still running a bit long.”

  “True,” I said. “But always bending towards justice.”

  She snorted. Kinda a laugh. I’ll take it.

  February found me back on the West Coast. Jake Strauss thought I should attend the AT&T National Pro-Am at Pebble Beach, since the USGA would have a small army of officials in attendance making sure the grass was growing properly in anticipation of the US Open in June. I wasn’t all that excited about leaving home, since I had managed to get a good bit of work done in January, writing chapters on Shinnecock Hills, Winged Foot and Baltusrol.

  Mary Jane told me to go. “Vic and I are fine,” she told me one morning. “School keeps us busy. We won’t even know you’ve gone.”

  “Gee, thanks, I think,” I said.

  She was about to say something else, when she suddenly held up a finger, turned and ran for the bathroom. I finished washing up the breakfast dishes and making sure Victoria’s lunch box was packed. Mary Jane came back a few minutes later. She looked a little pale.

  “You feeling OK?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I’m good. I think it’s just a little bug I picked up. It’s been going around the school.”

  “We got Pepto?” I said. “I can go get some today if you need it.”

  “No, we’re good,” she said. “Book your tickets. Really. We’ll be fine.”

  So I did. This time, though, Dottie van Dyke couldn’t find me a free room at the Lodge, or at the Inn at Spanish Bay a few miles down 17-Mile Drive. The best she could come up with was a room at a motel in Monterey where the rest of the press, TV crews and assorted other tournament people were staying. I remembered that place—it was famous for crack whores, Saturday night stabbings and rental car thefts—so I called Sharky Duvall to see if his back bedroom was available for the week.

  “Sure, Hack,” he told me when I called. “I’ve got a few other friends crashing here, so one more won’t matter. As long as you don’t mind sharing the bathroom, you’re welcome.”

  So I flew out to San Francisco on the night of the Super Bowl, rented a car and headed down the 101 to Carmel. It felt a little strange. Once upon a time, I did this almost every week from January to October: fly and drive somewhere to watch professional golfers stage their little weekly dramas. But this time, I didn’t need to come up with a column, pages of notes or a final game story. I was just there to … well, truth to tell, I wasn’t sure why I was there. But the USGA had paid for my ticket, so I figured I’d just go with the flow.

  It was pretty late when I arrived at Sharky’s place, but he was still awake, watching a movie on television. He offered me something to eat or drink, but I was pretty beat. He pointed me toward the bedroom at the back of the house.

  “There are two single beds in there,” he said. “Take the one not occupied.”

  “Does he snore?” I asked.

  “How do you know it’s a he?” Sharky said with a smile.

  “You do realize I’m a happily married man, right?”

  He waved his hand in the air. “Whatever,” he said.

  I used the bathroom first, brushing the six hours of air travel out of my teeth. I really wanted a shower, too, but decided to postpone that until the morning. The back bedroom was dark as a crypt, but I managed to locate the empty bed, disrobed and crawled under the covers. My roomie stirred slightly, turned over and began a steady, rhythmic snoring that would have made a chainsaw jealous. I spent about two minutes worrying about never being able to get to sleep and then I was gone.

  A bright California sun was streaming in the window when I opened my eyes again. I raised my head and looked over at the other bed, which was empty. I lay there for a while until my bladder began to complain, then finally arose, threw on my pants and went in search of coffee.

  Sharky was up, bustling around in his small kitchen. He nodded at me when I walked in, turned and poured a mug of coffee and handed it to me. “Cream’s in the fridge, sugar’s over there,” he nodded.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Black’s fine.”

  The kitchen opened into a large space at the front of the house that was mostly the living room, with the large flatscreen TV hung on the far wall. Just outside the kitchen, separated by a pass-through counter, was a wooden table with six chairs. A man wearing a crimson Stanford T-shirt and some flannel sweatpants was sitting at one of the chairs, sipping his own mug of joe. He was in his forties, with some flecks of gray showing at the temples of an otherwise full head of dark brown hair. He was bent over, peering at the tiny screen of his smartphone.

  “Hack,” Sharky said, “This is your roommate for the week, Benji Connover.”

  He looked up from his screen long enough to shake my hand.

  “Hope I didn’t snore too much,” he said.

  “I dunno,” I said, “I was asleep most of the time.”

  He went back to his screen, and I sat down at the table. Sharky looked on from the kitchen.

  “Breakfast?” he asked me. “I got cereal, granola, toast. There are eggs in the fridge, but you gotta make them yourself. Anything else, just ask and I’ll say ‘no.’”

  “I’m good for now,” I said. “Coffee is good.”

  Benji groaned audibly from the other side of the table. “Shit,” he said. “The Pinkston kid from San Diego is going to UCLA. Dammit. His mother never liked me.”

  Sharky grinned at me. “Benji is the golf coach at Stanford,” he said. “It’s recruiting season.” He looked at him. “You were never going to land Pinkston,” he said. “He’s Southern California down to his toenails.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Benji said, shaking his head sadly. “All beach, no brains. But his mother is still a bitch.”

  Sharky laughed and refilled the man’s coffee mug.

  “Stanford, huh?” I said. “Did you have Charlie Sykes on your team?”


  He put his phone down and frowned. “Yeah,” he said. “What a tragedy that was. Geez.”

  “Have they figured out what happened yet?” I asked.

  “They’re not a hundred percent sure yet,” Sharky said. “The toxology report came back inconclusive. He had some alcohol in his system, he had some weed in his system.”

  “Like most twenty-somethings,” I said.

  Sharky nodded. “Indeed. But he also had Valium in his bloodstream,” he said. “More than usual. They think he took maybe three or four tabs.”

  “That much would knock out a good sized horse,” I said.

  “True,” Sharky nodded. “But it would also deaden one’s nerves if one had decided to drive an E-Z-Go over the edge of a cliff. So, like I said, inconclusive.”

  “So he did it on purpose?”

  “That’s the operating opinion,” Sharky said. “But I know some of the boys at the Monterey sheriff’s shop, and they’re not totally convinced he did himself.”

  “I’ll never believe it, not for one second,” Benji Connover said. “Not a chance in hell that kid killed himself.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “He had everything going his way,” Benji said, sipping his coffee. “He had a great job at a great place. He knew that in another year or two, he would be able to have his pick of a head professional job. We talked about it all the time.”

  “You stayed in touch with him after college?”

  “Oh, hell, yeah,” he said. “I keep in touch with all my guys. Charley came from a good family, one with some money. Hell, his Dad knew Harold Meyer, who owns Pebble Beach. That’s how he got the job here. His parents live up in Marin County. Good, tight family, no problems. Good job. Good future prospects … no reason to off himself. None at all.”

  “There doesn’t always have to be a good reason,” I said.

  “C’mon man,” Benji said hotly. “Nobody is going to drive a golf cart off a cliff like that unless there’s something big going on in his life. Going wrong in his life. Charlie had everything going his way. That’s what drives me nuts about the whole thing. It’s totally senseless.”