The Fraud (13 page)

“So he came over and I showed him the money and he just started laughing. And he told me, ‘Birdie, you wouldn’t believe it, but the boiler in the church basement broke yesterday, and today the man came over and said it was going to cost five thousand dollars to fix. And I was just starting to fret over where I was going to find that kind of money.’ And we just laughed and laughed and laughed. The Lord provides. He really does.”

She went back to singing, “Jesus has done so much for me. I cannot tell it all. I cannot tell it all.”

Blue Mask finally managed to stammer out: “So what … what did you do?”

“What do you mean, what did I do? I gave him the money.”

“You
what
?” His volume was increasing.

“I gave him the money.”

“Birdie, that was
my
money.”

Birdie stopped stirring the stew, stared at him hard. “Young man, where did you get money like that? You keep telling me you can’t find a job but suddenly you’ve got four thousand dollars? You been selling drugs again?”

“No! I worked for it.”

Birdie hadn’t broken her glare.

“Odd jobs,” he said.

Finally, she let out an incredulous, “Uh-huh.”

Blue Mask took his hands out of his pockets, started waving them around, his agitation growing. “Birdie, that’s my money. You got to get it back.”

“What do you mean, ‘get it back’?”

“Go to Pastor, it’s my money and tell him he needs to give it back.”

“I’m not doing that. I already gave it to him. Far as I’m concerned, that’s the Lord’s money now.”

“But it wasn’t yours,” Blue Mask said, yelling now.

“Well, it sure wasn’t yours, either. You can’t tell me with a straight face you got out of prison three weeks ago with nothing and now you got four thousand dollars from working odd jobs. I don’t know how you got that or what you did for it, but as far as I’m concerned it was wicked money and now it’s blessed. The Lord has taken it for His own work and I think He was right to do so.”

“That’s my money,” he bellowed.

“No, it’s not,” she said, just as fiercely. “Pastor said he’s going to make his whole sermon about it on Sunday. You and I are just going to sit in the front row and hear all about it. If you want to confess what you done to get it and come clean, that’s between you and God. But you are not getting a nickel of it back.”

Blue Mask didn’t really think about what transpired next. It sort of just happened naturally. His hands shot out and wrapped themselves around Birdie’s twig of a neck. And then they squeezed.

Birdie twisted and flailed for a bit, trying to hit her great-nephew with the wooden spoon she had been using to stir the stew. All that really accomplished was to fling a fine spittle of broth on his clothes and parts of the kitchen floor. She tried to scream, but the sound came out choked and garbled.

Through it all, Blue Mask kept squeezing. He squeezed until Birdie stopped flailing. Then he squeezed some more, until he was sure life had departed her.

CHAPTER 17

For the second time that day, I found myself heading out to Fanwood Country Club. Unlike the first time, I had an invitation that would see to it I wasn’t immediately booted off the grounds.

That improvement in circumstances had sufficiently improved my mental state such that, when my phone rang, it didn’t immediately plunge me into a baby-charged panic. I even stayed calm when I saw the number was coming from the
Eagle-Examiner
newsroom.

“Carter Ross.”

“Carter, my boy, how are you? It’s Harold Brodie.”

Sure it was. Just the fifty-years-younger, gay, Cuban version. And I wasn’t falling for it this time.

“Hal, you wrinkly old coot, I’m doing great, buddy. And I’ve been considering your little proposition from before. Tell Madge to put on some slinky little number and I’ll come over dressed up like a plumber. We can do a little fantasy role-playing. She’ll tell me she has a leaky sink and then I’ll pull out the biggest wrench she’s ever seen and make sure she has the cleanest pipes in the whole neighborhood, if you know what I mean.”

“What are you—”

But I wasn’t letting Tommy get a word in. “I’ll probably spank her a little bit, because she’s been such a bad girl and I know she likes it rough. And then, of course, one of her neighbors will come over to borrow a cup of sugar and the three of us will finish off the job together.”

Tommy wasn’t saying anything, so I added: “You can watch if you want. Maybe grab some pom-poms and cheer us on from the sidelines in a cute little pleated skirt? I know deep down inside of you there’s a little girl just crying to get out. What do you say, Hal? You game?”

There was still silence on the other end. I could tell Tommy was trying to come up with a retort, but he had been rendered speechless by my masterful plot summation of approximately three-quarters of the pornographic movies made between the years 1977 and 1992.

Then the silence was broken with a high-pitched howling, the likes of which I had never quite heard before.

“Is this your idea of a joke? You’re way out of line, Carter Ross. Way out of line! Who do you think you are, talking about my wife in such a licentious, disrespectful manner!”

I felt a prickle of alarm. There was no way Tommy would risk raising his Harold Brodie voice to such a high volume in the newsroom. The old man would hear it. Plus, I couldn’t imagine Tommy using the word “licentious.”

And that’s when the prickle turned into a full-size, stainless-steel, Vlad the Impaler–style spike ripping through my gut. And I finally realized:

This wasn’t Tommy.

It really
was
Harold Brodie.

In an instant, my mouth and my brain received a jolt of energy that had them both working in overdrive but, sadly, not in concert. The result was that my brain began barking out instructions—like a coxswain with a megaphone sitting in the front of a rowing shell—as my mouth began trying to furiously paddle its way out of trouble.

“I’m very, very sorry, sir. I didn’t think it was actually you. I thought it was…”

Don’t say Tommy’s name. Don’t say Tommy’s name. Be a man. Go down with the ship.

“Someone else, someone else who was just pretending to be you. So I didn’t mean anything personal by it. Trust me when I say I have no desire for Mrs. Brodie whatsoever—”

Attention, moron: you just insulted the man’s wife.

“Not that she isn’t a very lovely woman, sir. I don’t want to insinuate that she’s unattractive in any way. I’m sure there have been many, many plumbers who would have liked to—”

Danger! Danger! Disengage mouth immediately!

“Uh, anyhow, I just mean that I would like to stress that I have total respect for you and for your marriage and I never meant to insinuate that you have any fantasies regarding cheerleaders, either dressing up as one or…”

Stop talking. Stop talking. Stop talking.

“I’m just saying I have nothing but respect for you, and for Mrs. Brodie, and I was just making a terrible, terrible joke, for which I’m very, very sorry.”

The hole I had dug for myself was already deep enough that the antifracking people were going to start coming after me. Having finally gotten to the apology, I figured I’d stop myself before I made it all the way to the Earth’s molten core.

All I could hear on the other end was Brodie’s breathing.

In. Out. In. Out. In retrospect, I can say it took about fifteen seconds. In the moment, it felt like it lasted longer than the fifth grade.

Finally, he spoke in a measured tone: “I was just calling to see how you were coming on that Chariots for Children story. Let me make this very simple for you: that story will be on my desk by five o’clock tomorrow. If it’s not, we’re going to have a long chat about your sick, sick sense of humor. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir. Very clear. Perfectly clear. And I’d like to say again that I meant absolutely no disrespect to you or your—”

But I was already talking to an empty phone line.

*   *   *

My mortification had only subsided slightly as I neared Fanwood Country Club. But I had to buckle down and concentrate.

The dollar-fifty word for what I was doing was “compartmentalize.” Like most guys, I did it quite well. It was the male gender’s consolation prize for being congenitally incapable of multitasking.

I had two objectives. One was to gather more string on Kevin Tiemeyer. The other was to see if I could ascertain how Joseph Okeke had secured his recent invitation to play at the club—and whether it had anything to do with Earl Karlinsky. I reasoned that if I could find out who Okeke’s playing partners had been, one of them might know.

As I passed through the brick pillars that guarded the entryway to the club, I noted with bemusement that one of them was scarred with several dozen small, white pockmarks from where Chillax had used it as a backboard.

There was no sign of Mr. Haughty as I pulled into the parking lot. Then again, it was now after golfing hours. The only members coming into the club now were heading to the bar like me. So they didn’t need help getting unloaded. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I escorted myself into the main clubhouse and around to the back, where the bar was located.

There, sitting on one of the stools in front of a monolithic slab of polyurethane-covered wood, I found Doc Fierro. He had not waited to begin his cocktail hour.

“Hey, what’s happening?” he asked, his smile already loosened by whatever amber-colored liquid was in his highball glass.

“Dr. Fierro, a pleasure, sir.”

We shook hands in that way that men comfortable with themselves do. Which is to say, neither of us tried to prove anything by crushing the other’s hand. The bartender appeared and I ordered a Flying Fish HopFish IPA. Doc and I touched classes and I savored my first sip. For anyone who doesn’t think craft brewing when they think New Jersey, I urge them to try Flying Fish’s fine line of beers.

“This is actually my second trip to your fine club today,” I said as I brought my glass back down to the table. “I was out here earlier with one of our interns. Your general manager took umbrage to our presence and ran us out.”

Doc looked a bit startled by this. “Why?”

“I don’t know. We’re trying to give Kevin Tiemeyer some nice posthumous press and your guy was acting like we were out here to do a hatchet job on him.”

Doc ran a finger along the edge of his glass. “I guess maybe at his next performance review the board needs to reemphasize the section of his job description that begins with the words, ‘public relations.’”

“No kidding. What’s his deal, anyway?”

“I don’t know. Small penis, maybe?” Doc said, then sipped his drink. “So, Kevin Tiemeyer, huh? I kind of figured you might be asking about him. Poor bastard.”

“You knew him?”

“Sure.”

“And?”

“Good guy,” Doc confirmed. “I divide the members here in two broad categories. There are guys that you’re happy to have be a part of your foursome. And then there are guys that, when the starter says, ‘Oh, Mr. So-and-so is going to be joining you,’ you just sort of roll your eyes. Luckily we have a lot more of the former than the latter. Kevin was definitely in the first group. He liked to chew a cigar while he was playing, which was a little gross. But he was good company.”

“How was he as a golfer?” I asked, not because I particularly cared about Tiemeyer’s pitching and putting but because I wanted to see if I could work Doc around to telling an amusing story or two. In the business, we call it mining for anecdotes. And I would like to consider myself a seasoned pitman.

“He played what we call Army golf,” Doc said. Then, in a marchlike cadence, he added, “Left, right, left, right.”

“Did he ever, I don’t know, unexpectedly win a member-guest or something?”

“Not lately, that’s for sure,” Doc said. “Not many people around here would know this—I only know because I’m on the board—but he had recently asked for his membership to be suspended for a few months.”

I took a sip of my beer. “Didn’t realize you could do that.”

“We only let people do it once every few years. You can’t let them do it every year, or else every Florida snowbird would go inactive for three months during the winter and it would play hell on club finances.”

“Did he give a reason?”

“Not that I heard,” Doc said.

As I considered this, Doc announced he needed to hit the men’s room. The Kevin Tiemeyer file now had a definite pattern to it. According to Chillax, Tiemeyer stopped going out to dinner as often and started mowing his own lawn. Now it comes out he had gone inactive at his country club. Maybe he really was just on a diet. Or trying to save some money. Or maybe it was part of some larger lifestyle change. Was he going vegan? Or quitting drinking? Or training for a marathon?

Whatever was happening, it felt like it was important for fleshing out the Tiemeyer side of my story. There was just something about a man being interrupted in the midst of an ambitious self-improvement plan that I found poignant. And if it touched my heart, I’m sure it would touch a reader’s, too. I’d have to run it past Chillax and see how it meshed with the rest of his notes.

I tilted my glass back for another dose of hoppy deliciousness, only to smell a gust of musky scented air coming from my right.

It was brought in by Earl Karlinsky, in all his emblem-jacketed, overscented, self-important glory. Fanwood Country Club’s general manager had parked himself just off my right elbow, between my bar stool and where Doc would have been sitting if he weren’t in the bathroom. It was a pronounced invasion of my personal space, which I suppose was the point.

He was holding his head high and, being as I was sitting, he had a slight height advantage. He used it to peer down at me through the bottom of his glasses.

“Mr. Ross, I thought I told you, you aren’t welcome here,” he said in a voice even a porcupine would have found too bristly.

I lifted my glass in a mock toast. “Ah, but it appears I am here all the same,” I said.

“You have to leave. Now.”