“I got a woman that’s crazy for me, she’s funny that way.”
Harry Bright. Poor dumb son of a bitch. He wondered where Trish Bright had met Herbert Decker. He’d bet it was while she was still a dutiful cop’s wife. He knew all about cop wives and greener pastures. In fact, Trish Decker reminded him of his ex-wife, Lorie. The coloring, the refined profile, the lopsided sardonic smile. And the sad eyes.
Trish Decker had sad eyes all right, but she’d never live in a tent, not that girl. He vaguely realized that he was starting to feel sorry for a suspect in a murder case. He was about to examine that bit of silliness when there was a knock at the door and a voice said, “Room service.”
The Johnnie Walker Black and a hot bath made him forget just about everything for two hours. He dozed without dreaming and was startled to see that the sun was already behind the mountain when he awoke.
Otto Stringer was starting to see two tees, two balls and two Fionas and that was a whole lot of flesh. They were nearly on the back nine. It was so late in the afternoon that nobody pushed them. They’d already let five foursomes and another twosome play through and they’d stopped keeping score when each of them figured to top 160. Which Otto said he couldn’t face, but which Fiona said was her average round.
After a quart and a half of mai tais, Fiona’s blouse was sticky with brown rum and fruit juice. The more she drank, the harder she’d whack Otto’s right shoulder when he said something funny. And by now everything was funny.
It was clear to Otto that this incipient romance might go somewhere and he decided that when he finally got the fat old doll in bed, he was going to show her his freaking shoulder, which was turning purple from all the slugging, and explain that he couldn’t go around feeling like he’d spent fifteen rounds trying to slip punches with Marvelous Marvin Hagler. But he’d cross that bridge when he came to it, as now he crossed the actual bridge over the fairway to the ninth tee where Lucille Ball lived. He sniffed the grapefruit and tangerine trees and Fiona promised to introduce him to Lucy and to Ginger Rogers.
“Lots a bucks around here,” Fiona said, as he pumped her for information that would permit him to estimate her wealth. “A house in Thunderbird Cove sold in only four months for one million bucks profit. The owner of the San Diego Padres lives there.”
“That’s a tidy sum.” Otto Stringer was exceedingly blasé.
“Not excessive considering the property,” Fiona said, belching wetly.
“I wouldn’t say so, no,” Otto agreed, hoping he didn’t run over a Mexican gardener. He’d almost hit two already. If they gave sobriety tests for golf-cart driving, he’d be in the slam before Fiona could think it was a caution.
“Fiona,” Otto said, as she was putting on number eight, a pretty three par protected by a lake with a tiny island containing three palms surrounded by red azaleas. “Is your house rather … sumptuous? Or do you prefer a more simple arrangement?”
“I got a big one, Otto,” Fiona said, doing better than she had on the seventh green where she six-putted. One of the earpieces on her glasses was now hanging loose and she was squinting at him through only one lens. “Look at my blouse!” she cried. “I seen tablecloths at an Irish wake cleaner’n this!”
The second batch of her homemade mai tais was stronger than the first. Otto hit a ball off the toe toward a home near the thirteenth green, causing a nice young fellow in shorts and a golf shirt to jump up from his patio chair and rush toward Otto as the detective staggered out of the cart to chase the shot. The young man kicked the ball out onto the fairway saying, “There you go, sir.”
“Thanks,” Otto said, and shanked it the other way with his three wood.
“You get a free drop,” Fiona belched. “Anytime you get near that house you get a free drop.”
“Why?”
“Can’t go too close. That kid’s a Secret Service agent.”
“Is that where he lives?”
“Yup,” Fiona said, looking like she might fall asleep before they got back.
“I can’t believe it!” Otto cried, and he stopped the cart on the fairway to watch some people come out the back door of the unimpressive fairway home.
“Fiona!” Otto whispered, and now he was whacking her on the arm, jarring her out of a stupor. “It’s him! No, it ain’t! Yes, it is!”
“Does he look like Herman Munster?” Fiona Grout mumbled, her glasses once again askew on her face.
“Yeah. He just tripped over the garden hose. It’s him!”
Otto was not so drunk that he could forget a thousand past mistakes he’d made in this condition. He didn’t want to risk losing his chance with Fiona. He was just sober enough to know that in this lifetime he was never going to have another shot at the sweepstakes.
Otto was plotting his strategy as well as he could, and trying to keep from smacking his fairway shot into ball-grabbing palm trees when, near number fifteen, Fiona said, “We got bass in these little lakes, Otto. You like to fish?”
“Oh, yes, Fiona,” Otto said ardently. “I’m quite a fisherman.”
“I got the bait for those suckers on my wall,” she said. “I bought a Peruvian tapestry from one of our bigtime desert interior decorators, and you know what? It was full of moths!”
“I had a tapestry like that once,” Otto said. He remembered buying it for thirteen bucks in Tijuana. It was black velvet with a naked redhead in a sombrero painted across it. “I never had no luck with tapestries.”
“Well, my moths turned to worms before I knew they were there. Now I got maggots!”
“Ugh!” Otto belched. “You should not have maggots on a tapestry, Fiona.”
“If my husband was alive he’d deal with that little pansy decorator,” she said. “He’d have two black eyes.”
“Mauve or puce,” Otto said. “Not black. It ain’t becoming.”
Then it occurred to him. He had it: an opening. “You need a husband, Fiona.” Otto fondled his driver preparatory to destroying the tee on number fifteen.
“I know, Otto,” she sighed, opening the ice chest to demolish the last of the mai tais. “It gets lonely.”
“Yes!” He sighed even deeper. “We shouldn’t be alone at this time a life!”
“Otto!” she said. “You shouldn’t talk like that. You’re just a kid.”
Otto Stringer had an inspiration. Though he’d never been a smoker in his life, he took two from her pack, put both of them in his mouth just like Paul Henreid did for Bette Davis in his mother’s favorite movie. Then he lit both and took one from his lips, gently inserting it in hers. He said, “I’m not young anymore, Fiona. I’m middle-aged outside but I’m elderly inside. I’m bald and I’m so fat I could breast-feed six Ethiopians. Yet I believe the right woman could light my old embers!”
“Otto, you lit the filter end,” she said. “Boy, do these things stink when you light the wrong end.”
“Here, smoke mine, Fiona,” Otto said, quickly jerking the smelly one from her droopy lips and sticking the other one in. “Anyways, Fiona, we shouldn’t be alone, us two.”
“You’re up, Otto,” Fiona said, adjusting the radio volume. “We don’t finish pretty soon, we’ll need coal-miner hats.”
Otto stalled for time by improvising with Duke Ellington. “ ‘It don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing! Doo-ah doo-ah doo-ah doo-ah …’ ” Otto sang it as he staggered around the tee, trying to pull it all together for the 513-yard five par.
Fiona said, “I almost forgot, Otto. Behind you across the water is where Billie Dove lives.”
“Who’s Billie Dove?”
“Oh, Otto!” Fiona cried. “See, you are just a kid. She was a great actress of the silent screen. She starred with Douglas Fairbanks!”
“I’m old, Fiona!” he cried. “Please don’t talk to me like I still gotta sweat out chicken pox!”