LOOKING BACK ON IT now, if Homer hadn’t died I wouldn’t have been able to move up here to San Valdesto and live a life of boring ease. Then again, if Homer hadn’t died I never would have met Maude Marner, an old biddy who could qualify as my favorite person in snug little, smug little San Valdesto.
Homer was my richest uncle. He had become my uncle by marrying my richest aunt. Homer had earned his money; my Aunt Sheila had accumulated her fortune by never marrying a poor husband. Homer was her fourth. He had brought Aunt Sheila to an economic level where she could afford to stop thinking about money.
So she divorced old Texas-bred Homer and married a younger man who could introduce her to the arts and the finer things of life—which included her money.
Homer sat around in that dank castle she had made him buy in Beverly Hills, sulking and drinking. Homer could always handle booze; it must have been the sulking that flipped him.
I had my last look at Homer and my first look at his new Ferrari on a drizzly afternoon in March. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the Ferrari that was going to permit me to move to San Valdesto and become bored.
I was staring moodily out the window of my little pine-paneled office in Beverly Hills on a drizzly afternoon in March, under the letters that read: Brock Callahan—Discreet Investigation at Moderate Rates. My rates were still moderate, but my investigations covered some areas now to which the words “discreet investigation” might not apply. Substitute “muscle.”
Looking down at the street below, I saw this smooth machine pull into the parking space below the window. I hoped that some sleek young thing would now step out of it and head directly for my office. I love to fantasize about the upper classes, especially if they’re young and feminine.
But Homer stepped out of it, two hundred and forty pounds of Texas flab. He saw me watching him and signaled for me to come down to the street, which I did.
“How do you like it?” he asked me.
“It’s beautiful. When did you get it?”
“Ordered it last week, got it this morning. Almost four and a half liters under that hood. Big engine, huh?”
“Four and a half liters,” I said, “reads out to roughly two hundred and seventy-five cubic inches. My Mustang has two hundred and eighty-nine.”
“Mustang?” He stared at me. “You must be crazy! I could buy half a dozen Mustangs for what that beauty cost me. That is a twelve-cylinder car, Brock.”
“And worth every dime they stuck you for it. Homer, I’m happy to see you have rejoined the living.”
“I’m going to try,” he said. “God damn that Sheila!”
I said nothing.
His face softened. “I’m sorry. I apologize. I keep forgetting that you’re her nephew.”
“She is what she is,” I said, “as we all are, male and female. But I always thought you were too much man to be ruined by a hundred-and-twenty-two-pound woman.”
“I love her, Brock. God damn her! I loved her and I still love her and she ran off with that young puke. I ain’t got too many years left, man!”
“You’re sixty. I’ll tell you the deal I’m willing to make you. I’ll trade you my age for your money.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You don’t know what I’ve gone through. It has been one stinking year!”
All over the world, I thought, even among the poor. “Maybe,” I said, “you should take a trip back to Texas and show your old neighbors this new Ferrari. A dose of nostalgia might bring you back to normal.”
He shook his head. “There’s nothing there for me. Of course, I’ve got only you and Jan here. Those friends of Sheila’s dropped me the day she left me.”
“No loss, from what I’ve seen of them.”
“You are so right! But this is a big town. There must be some live wires I can mix with. I mean, with a heap like this, a young chick might overlook a few wrinkles.”
“Don’t do it,” I advised him. “Find some firm-bodied woman around forty-seven who can appreciate money and a virile husband. In the long run she’ll make you a lot happier.”
“I had one of those,” he said.
Sheila, he meant. She was fifty-one, a month from being fifty-two, but only Aunt Sheila and I knew that.
He sighed and shook his head. “We must both be nuts, standing here in the rain and talking about girls. I’ll see you later, Brock. When it clears up we’ll play some golf, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“I’ve got to get over to Poole’s and buy me a beret,” he explained. “I’ll phone you.”
Homer Gallup in a Ferrari, talking liters and wearing a beret. He was a long way from Texas and Texas thinking.
My dearly beloved, my Jan, was out of town, redoing Glenys Christopher’s house in Montevista, San Valdesto’s swankiest suburb. This was the third time Glenys had redone her Montevista home. Evidently there were no interior decorators up there she trusted like my Jan. I had met Jan at Glenys’s house too many years ago. Glenys had lived in Beverly Hills then, in a house the Christophers had occupied for almost a hundred years.
I was lonely, but I didn’t want any ready young thing, nor even a Ferrari—at the moment. What I wanted was a tall glass of Einlicher. Only Heinie had it, within walking distance. I alerted my answering service and walked over to Heinie’s.
The Rams’ season was over, the Dodgers’ season hadn’t started. All Heinie wanted to talk about was the Lakers, and I am not a basketball fan. So I sat on a bar stool and drank my beer and listened to all the things Heinie could tell me about the Lakers that I didn’t want to know. While I listened, the drizzle turned into rain, and the rain turned into a downpour.
Around six o’clock, I asked. “Do you have anybody in the kitchen who can fry a steak? I’m hungry.”
“Of course I got somebody in the kitchen! I got dinner trade. What do you think this is, a dump?”
“A joint,” I corrected him. “I’ve had a greasy pan-fried steak here for lunch, but I didn’t know big-city dinner eaters liked that kind of food.”
“You’re not the only gourmet in town. What kind of steak were you considering?”
“Anything that didn’t come off a horse. Whatever your best is, I’ll have that.”
So I had a juicy, greasy filet while his dinner crowd poured in, four men and two women. When the Laker pregame show came on from Seattle, Heinie had no talk for me; his eyes were glued to the tube.
I went home to my little Westwood pad through the slashing rain, through the glaring headlights of Wilshire Boulevard. The unmarried newlyweds in the next apartment were discussing her parents tonight. Their arguments were always louder and longer when her parents were under the adolescent microscope. Some loud and unidentifiable wailing was blasting from the expensive hi-fi of the U.C.L.A. students on the other side of me. The noise died after a while and the angry words from the other side reverted to giggles. Peace and quiet descended on the smoggy village of Westwood.
I slept. I dreamed. In Green Bay, the snow came down and Vilas ran straight at Horse Malone, my flanking partner on defense. You can run around Horse with a minimum of effort and speed. There is no way you can run over him.
But Vilas had never been short on ego. Horse hit him above the hips, and put the top of his helmet into Vilas’s chin. The ball dropped to the frozen ground, and bounced high.
It bounced right up into my waiting hands and away I went, my only moment of glory in all those years with the Rams, my only touchdown.
The dream was interrupted this time. I was two yards short of the goal line when the referee’s whistle blew—and blew and blew. …
It wasn’t a whistle, it was my phone ringing. I was back in my lumpy bed. It was three o’clock in the morning, and my phone was ringing.
The voice on the other end was soft and unctuous. “Mr. Callahan? Mr. Brock Callahan?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry to disturb you at this hour, sir, but the police have insisted on identification and—”
“Who is this,” I interrupted, “and who’s dead?”
“I’m calling for the Westwood Village Mortuary,” he said. “There was an accident out near Malibu earlier tonight and a man tentatively identified as Homer Gallup—”
“ I’ll be right over,” I said.
It was only two blocks from my apartment and the rain had stopped. I walked over. The big double front door of the place was locked; there was a small nightlight over the side entrance to the parking lot.
The door opened as I approached it. A tall, thin man in mortuary black was silhouetted against the dim light from the hall behind him. “Mr. Callahan?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m George Ulver. This way, please.”
He led me down the dim hallway to a door, and paused. “He, uh, went through the windshield. I hope—”
“I’m sure I’ve seen worse,” I said.
The room was cold. The body was on what looked like an operating table. There had been some rearrangement of the facial features, but I nodded. “It’s Homer Gallup,” I said.
“Would you come to my office, please?” he asked. “There are a few papers—”
I should have been sad. I should have been sick, after looking at that disfigured face. But my dominant thought was—that damned fool!
In the narrow office, I asked, “Why here? Why isn’t he at the morgue?”
“The police phoned his home,” Ulver explained, “but evidently he lived alone, without servants. Mr. Gallup belonged to the Los Angeles Funeral Society and his membership card was in his wallet. We handle the funeral arrangements for the society’s members.”
“It’s all arranged, then?”
He nodded. “Mr. Gallup filled out his instruction forms six months ago and we have a copy. He wished to be cremated and his ashes sent to a mortuary in Texas. I’m sure they have his instructions there, but we’ll check it, of course. Now, about relatives …?”
“The only one he ever mentioned to me was a cousin in Houston. I can’t think of his name right now, but I’m sure I can get it for you.”
Ulver checked through the papers on his desk. “Abner Shaw?”
“That’s the man.” I took a deep breath. “Was anybody else involved in the accident?”
He shook his head. “He was alone. He hit a bridge abutment at what the police called an extremely excessive rate of speed. The alcoholic reading in his blood was—”
“High,” I finished for him. “It has been, ever since I’ve known him. Where are those papers I have to sign?”
When I went out again, the drizzle had resumed. There would be no funeral, not even a memorial service, so there was no point in phoning Jan now. He had spelled it all out on his instruction sheet. Though he had lived high, he would be cremated for less than two hundred dollars. Why not? Homer didn’t like to pay for parties he didn’t enjoy.
As for my Aunt Sheila, she was honeymooning with her new conquest somewhere in the Virgin Islands, a strange place to take her. If Jan wanted to notify her, she could. My affection for Aunt Sheila was at its all-time low this damp morning in Westwood.
When I phoned Jan, later that morning, Glenys answered the phone. “Brock? Are you coming up for the weekend?”
“I hadn’t planned to. Could I speak with Jan? I have bad news.”
Jan’s reaction was the same as mine. “That damned fool!” she said.
“I suppose there’s no point in trying to get in touch with Aunt Sheila. She wouldn’t be interested. When are you coming home?”
“As soon as that furniture gets up here from Beverly Hills. When is the funeral?”
“There won’t be any. His ashes are probably on the way to Texas by now.”
“Why don’t you come here? You could play golf with Skip Lund.”
“Not on those crummy public courses he plays. Sandpiper is the only one worth playing, and it’s jammed on weekends.”
“For your information, snob, Skip no longer plays on the public courses. He is a member of Pine Valley Country Club.”
“Skip? When did he get that kind of money?”
“I suppose he got it the day he married June Christopher. You remember June, don’t you—June Christopher, Glenys’s sister?”
“Vaguely. Okay, I have a credit check to take care of tomorrow, but maybe Saturday. I’ll phone you.”
Skip Lund had married money. At Stanford, Skip and I had played in two Rose Bowl games, I as a humble lineman, he as one in an impressive succession of Stanford quarterbacks. Our graduating class had voted him the only one most likely to succeed.
He hadn’t succeeded in the pros, and had gone up to San Valdesto after two bad years in the pay-for-play leagues. There, he bought a small filling station in the Mexican district and earned just about enough for beans and franks.
Three years ago he had become involved in trouble with the law, and loyal Brock Callahan had gone up there (at no charge) to clear him—and make myself no longer welcome, at least to the police, in that perpetual vacationland ninety miles from here.
Now he had fulfilled his classmates’ prophecy; he had succeeded the easy way. Now, maybe, I would get partial payment for a full week of investigative work I had squandered on him. Pine Valley Country Club in Montevista was one sweet golf course.
I could use some clean air and a weekend among the idle rich. Jan is a decorator and all her clients are rich. That is probably the main reason we had never got married.
So, on Saturday I packed my swimming trunks and my golf clubs in the old Ford and drove up to San Valdesto, a town with a minimum of smog and a maximum of rich people, a retreat from reality.
The opponents Skip lined up for two days of best-ball competition were rich enough to make their bets scary to me, but not to them. Or, I suppose, to Skip now.
I’ve forgotten the name of one of them; he was a friend of June Christopher’s, a visitor from Carmel who had sharpened his skills at Pebble Beach.
The other player wasn’t easy to forget; he was a real tiger, who carried his partner on both days. His name was Silas Marner. He had explained to me on the first tee on the first day that he had been named after his mother’s favorite story.
I think that was the last word he said to me until we were drinking in the clubhouse later. Between the first tee and the eighteenth green, Silas Marner insulated himself from all the amenities and concentrated on winning.
After the showers and over the booze, he became a human being again. After the second drink, he invited us all over for dinner the next night.
THE MARNER HOME WAS probably expensive, designed by a famous Swedish architect, a strangely angled tall and wide structure, featuring California redwood inside and out. It was in Slope Ranch, a suburb on the other end of town from Montevista.
To my middle-class, pedestrian taste, it looked a little outré. But the food was great, the company genial, the liquor free. The man, I decided, who threw those kinds of parties could be forgiven both for this house and for his “winning is everything” conduct on the links.
It was a buffet dinner, and we weren’t the only guests; there must have been at least twenty. The dialogue decibels rose as the alcohol went down.
I was seeking a quiet corner when Si’s mother beckoned to me from the doorway to the den. When I went over, she said, “It’s quieter in here, and I’d like to talk with you.”
Either Silas Marner was a great reader or a compulsive book buyer; three of the four walls in the room were lined with books.
Mrs. Marner was a woman of about sixty-five, thin and short. Her gray hair was pulled straight back, her simple yellow linen dress could have been expensive, but I didn’t think so. Her bright blue eyes in that thin, tanned face seemed to sparkle in the room’s dim light.
“Si told me you’re a private investigator,” she said.
I nodded.
“Have you done any missing persons work down there in Los Angeles?”
“Some,” I said. “Let’s sit down. That noise was getting to me out there.”
“And me,” she said. “Yakety-yakety-yak. And nobody says anything. I can’t understand how Si can stand it. He’s not nearly as dumb as he looks.” We sat together on a leather couch.
“Judging by his library,” I said, “he can’t be very dumb.”
“Oh, not that way. But when he isn’t playing golf or reading, he’s throwing parties. Is that a constructive life?”
“I guess not, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me ma’am. I’m not that old. My name is Maude.”
“Okay, Maude. Who is this missing person, a lover?”
“Watch your tongue, Callahan. It’s a girl. I’m not sure she’s down in Los Angeles, but that’s the last place her friends up here know about. She stopped writing to them some time ago.”
“Do her parents live up here?”
“Yes. Her mother is a waitress and her father is a slob. It’s the mother I worry about. She’s a good friend of mine.”
“Has she made any effort to find her daughter?”
“None.”
“Then why—”
“Never mind the why. I want to find her. You could send the information to me and the bill to Si. I don’t live with him here. I live down where the people live.”
“I knew we were soul mates,” I said. “There won’t be any bill. You give me your address and her name and I’ll prowl around when I’m not working on a case. Okay?”
“Okay.” She handed me a slip of paper. “It’s all right there. Now, go and join your drunken playmates.”
“I’d rather sit here with you,” I said.
“I don’t blame you. So run out and get me a glass of sherry and yourself another tumbler of booze, and we’ll talk about something besides golf and bridge and capital gains.”
I brought her the sherry and myself another jolt, and we sat in that book-lined room and talked about other things. Si was her only child, I learned. His father had died when he was twelve, and that’s when she had begun to work. Si had started as a carpenter’s helper when he finished high school, and wound up as one of the state’s biggest builders, a real Horatio Alger story.
“I can’t understand a man who worked that hard winding up with these—these butterflies!” she said.
“It couldn’t have been all work with him. Nobody who plays six-handicap golf could have spent all his time working.”
“He started caddying when he was ten, during the school vacations,” she explained. “He was always tall and he lied about his age.”
“The habit persisted, he’s no six-handicapper. I’ve played against scratch players with weaker games than his.”
“He is a very competitive man. I suppose golf is the only outlet he has for it now.”
Then, from the doorway, my beloved said, “What are you two party poopers doing in here?”
“Getting away from a poopy party,” said Maude. “When are you going to marry this wonderful man, Jan?”
“When he decides to get into some sensible work. Brock, if you’re going home tonight, we’d better leave. It’s almost midnight.”
“Okay. I’ll be in touch with you, Maude.”
“Thank you. Jan, you’d better grab this man while you can.”
An hour later, Jan stood next to my waiting Mustang and asked, “Why can’t we get married and live up here?”
“What could I do up here?”
“I have about seventy thousand put away. You could buy some kind of business with that. You’re not dumb, Brock.”
“And I’m not Skip Lund. I earn my own way, lady.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake! Seventy thousand dollars hardly ranks me with the Christophers. Call it a loan.”
“Dump me,” I said. “There must be a dozen solid citizens you could marry in this town. You really don’t need me. I need you, but you don’t need me.”
“No more than my heart,” she said. “Damn you! Get the hell out of here! Go!”
“When will I see you?”
“When I come over the horizon. Good night!”
I kissed her and headed for home, back toward Westwood, back to reality.
Skip was sure living high off the hog, the worst thing that could have happened to him. At university he had been considered a great passing quarterback, but Stanford had turned out other quarterbacks who, though with far less natural talent than Skip, had gone on to fame, fortune and glory in the pros. In the play-for-pay leagues, everybody on the squad puts out two hundred percent, or you can forget about the Super Bowl. Skip had been born too good; it had made him less than he should have been.
He had never had to work that hard in college, not learned to work that hard when it paid off. He had his skill and his charm and his looks. It had been easy for him to marry money. He could have done it a half dozen times when he was at Stanford.
I had thought that crummy little gas station he ran in San Valdesto would finally make a man of him. When you are making a living selling an independent brand of cut-rate gasoline in competition with the major oil companies, man, you are putting out. Those big firms take a dim view of free enterprise. Skip had survived. Given time, he might have been successful.
I cut over to the coast road at Oxnard, to get away from the jammed freeway traffic—and spent an extra hour in the going-home traffic from the beaches.
I had no job scheduled for tomorrow; maybe I could prowl Sunset and then the Venice district and ask my contacts there if they had ever run into a girl named Patty Serano.
She could be living the free will, free speech, health food life in Venice or the life of a hooker on Sunset Boulevard. With today’s kids, there was no way of knowing.
Nor, as I settled into my lumpy bed, did I have any way of knowing that I, too, would be starting a new life tomorrow.
THE NAME OF THE law firm was Weede, Robbins, McCulloch and Adler. The woman who phoned me next morning was Grant Robbins’s secretary. Could he see me at two o’clock this afternoon?
Business on Friday and now a new job to start the week. Things were picking up. “I’ll be there,” I promised.
They were a prestige firm and would pay my top rates. It probably wouldn’t be divorce work. If it was, I’d take it. Earlier in my career I wouldn’t accept divorce work. Earlier in my career I didn’t handle bail bonds, either. Hunger and the advancing years can alter adolescent attitudes.
His office was spacious and paneled, with a couple of Degas pastels on one wall and a Matisse print on another. He was a tall man, well tailored and quiet voiced.
He shook my hand and said, “You don’t remember me, do you?”
I smiled, admitting nothing.
“You nailed me for an eighteen-yard loss,” he prompted, “when you were at Stanford.”
I remembered him now, a sub quarterback for Cal. “I remember,” I said. “You almost beat us before the afternoon was over.”
“My best day,” he admitted. “We never had a winning day against Stanford when you and Lund were there. But who did? Sit down, Brock, and prepare for the news. Unless you’ve already heard it?”
I shook my head and sat down. This didn’t sound like divorce work.
“We represent the estate of Homer Gallup,” he started—and my mind went blank.
Maybe I suspected. I don’t know. I didn’t hear anything for almost a minute.
Then his voice broke through. “Are you all right? You’re pale. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing serious. Start over from where you told me to sit down. I missed most of the rest of it.”
In nonlegal terms, Homer’s cousin in Houston and Brock Callahan of Westwood-Beverly Hills were the only heirs to the estate of Homer Gallup. Our shares would be equal.
It was a vulgar thing to ask, but I’m vulgar. “How much?” I asked.
He shrugged. “It’s almost impossible to estimate, with estate taxes what they are these days. It should be substantial.”
“More than twelve dollars?”
He smiled comfortingly. “At the most conservative estimate, you can be assured, once we’re through probate, that you’ll be able to live very well without diminishing the principal.”
I didn’t go back to the office. I went directly to Heinie’s for a shot of bourbon and a beaker of Einlicher. Then I phoned San Valdesto from Heinie’s wall phone.
Jan was there. I told her. “You always wanted me to amount to something and I finally have.”
“You landed that insurance company retainer,” she guessed.
“I don’t need it. I have inherited half of Homer’s money.”
A silence on the line.
“Jan?”
The silence continued.
“Jan, are you there?”
“Have you been drinking?” she asked quietly.
“I had an ounce and a half of whiskey and one tall beaker of beer—after I got the news.”
“You got the news from a man in a bar?”
“I got the news from a partner in the most distinguished law firm in town, Grant Robbins of Weede, Robbins, McCulloch and Adler. They’re handling the estate. We can be married now, Jan. When?”
“Tomorrow, if it’s true. You stay in the office this afternoon and you stay home tonight!”
“I’m picking up my golf clubs and coming up there,” I told her. “To hell with the office!”
“Brock, are you sure?”
“Once we’re through probate, I’ll be solvent. Until then, we’ll skimp along on your little seventy grand. Tell Glenys to lay an extra plate for dinner.”
“I’ll be waiting,” she said.
I still had another duty to perform before I left town. I drove over to Wilshire and down to the impressive offices of the Calvin National Investigative Service.
They had offices in every major city in the country, and they handled all the kinds of investigative work anyone would never need. Lately they had been doing a lot of missing persons searches. The daughters of the rich had turned into wanderers and the fathers of these girls wouldn’t be likely to hire any cheap peeper for that delicate a mission.
I’ve forgotten the name of the local manager, a gray man. Gray hair, gray complexion, dark gray suit.
“Brock Callahan?” he said, and I thought he sniffed. “Aren’t you a—a private investigator?”
“Yes. But I have to go out of town for a while, and I’ve a case I was supposed to start on today. I thought, perhaps, as a professional courtesy, you boys could work on it.”
“Professional courtesy? Our rates, Mr. Callahan, are based on our rather expensive overhead. Is your client prepared to pay our rates?”
“I doubt it. But I am. This is more than just business, the woman who hired me is a good friend.”
“I see. You realize we require a retainer.”
“I do. Unfortunately, at the moment I am rather low on funds. I could give you a couple hundred. And if you wanted to check my credit, you could phone Grant Robbins, of Weede, Robbins—”
He held up a hand. “I know the firm. You’ve done work for them?”
“At the moment,” I said, in my most refined voice, “they are working for me. They’re handling an estate in which I am a major beneficiary.”
“One moment, please.” He got up and left the room. When he came back to sit behind his desk again, he asked, “Is this a local case?”
“It’s a girl who is missing,” I said. “She lives in San Valdesto but the last knowledge of her whereabouts was in Los Angeles.”
His phone buzzed. He picked it up said, “Yes. I see. Thank you.”
He smiled at me. “There will be no need for a retainer, Mr. Callahan. If you’ll just give us what facts you have? It’s a runaway case, I presume?”
“More or less.” I gave him what facts I had, including Maude Marner’s address. I said, “I appreciate your trusting me.”
He didn’t even blush. He smiled and said, “Professional courtesy.”
Jan and I were married by a Unitarian minister in the formal garden of the Christopher acreage in Montevista a week later. A week after that, she found a little cottage in the same general area that she was just aching to redo, a little cottage of three bedrooms, den and three and a half baths. Because it was what is known in the real-estate trade as a “fixer-upper,” we were able to buy this gem for two hundred and eighteen thousand dollars.
Hard work, honest dealing, persistence, intelligence—and being Aunt Sheila’s nephew had finally earned me the financial security that is every American’s birthright.
I had always been told by my seniors that retirement can be boring, and I learned some new truths in the next couple of months. Golf should not be played seven days a week, unless you’re inclined to masochism. There are actually men with I.Q.’s over seventy who play gin rummy. There are otherwise rational people who think bridge is a serious game.
On the personal level I learned that raising my voice and drinking more didn’t make me any less dull.
“You’re bored,” Jan said, one morning at breakfast.
I had shared many breakfasts with Jan over the years. The moral novelty of having her sit there as a wife was still new. I nodded.
“You miss padding around in the smog, playing the Junior G-man,” she went on in a way she has. “You can’t get conditioned to success.”
“Success? An accident of birth, a chance marriage and then an inheritance—is that the road to success?”
“Many of the people we have met here inherited their money,” she explained patiently. “They’re not as unhappy as you seem to be.”
“Maybe they’re dumber. They’re certainly dull enough.”
“Because they aren’t always arguing or getting stoned?”
“Let’s not fight,” I said. “Why don’t we drive up to Solvang today and window-shop and eat some Danish food?”
“I’d love that. But Julie Marner is expecting me for bridge this afternoon and it’s too late for her to find a substitute. We’ll do it, though. Tomorrow, I promise.”
Julie’s husband, Six-Handicap Si, was over at the club, looking for a game when I got there.
“If you’re willing to play for small stakes,” I told him. “I know when I’m overmatched.”
“I’ll tell you what,” he offered. “We’ll play for the same stakes and I’ll give you one more stroke on each side.”
That was the way we did it; that was the way I lost. The man was a natural gambler, a legitimate tiger. If he needed a thirty-foot putt, he made it. If a two-footer didn’t matter, he missed it. I shot my best round ever on the course and he took me all three ways on the Calcutta, plus four presses.
At the nineteenth hole he reverted to his off-course decency and bought me a beer. I had decided to forego the hard stuff for at least one day.
“How’s your mother?” I asked him.
“I can’t be sure,” he said. “She’s become very secretive lately. She mentioned you this morning when I phoned her.” He shook his head. “She wanted to know if you were still a working detective.”
“Tell her I’m a nonworking bum.”
He frowned. “It can’t be that girl again, that one she was looking for a couple months ago?”