The Fraud (14 page)

“No, actually, I don’t,” I said, pleasantly. “
Salut,
” I said, and took a sip of my beer.

And then Earl Karlinsky grabbed my wrist, the one whose hand was gripping the beer, as if he was going to physically drag me out of the place. He forced my wrist down to the bar top, spilling some of the beer.

Now, I am not one for physical confrontation. I believe humanity has evolved any number of better ways to settle disputes, from mediation all the way down to rock-paper-scissors.

That said, I am not a small man. Nor am I stranger to the kind of exercise that makes a body suitable for action. And I am sure as hell not in the market for being pushed around. Plus, he spilled my beer.

In a calm, deliberate voice, I said, “Get. Your hand. Off me. Now.”

He was still glaring at me, like I was some easily intimidated eighteen-year-old caddy. I stood, so I was now taller than him, and may have stuck out my chest a little.

That was when Doc reappeared. “Is there a problem here?” he asked.

Karlinsky released my wrist and turned to Doc. “I’m sorry, Mr. Fierro. But Mr. Ross was here earlier today and I made it very clear to him that he was not to be on the premises. He has to leave.”

“Uh, Carter is here as my guest,” Doc said.

“I explicitly told him that he was not welcome here,” Karlinsky said, apparently not hearing what Doc said.

“Earl,” Doc said, a little more forcefully, “I’m telling you as a member of this club and as a member of its board of directors that Carter is here at my invitation and he is welcome to stay here as long as I or any other member wants him here. I think you’re forgetting your place.”

Karlinsky stiffened, having apparently heard Doc this time. He knew he was beaten. At a private country club, general manager trumps rabble-rousing reporter. But board member trumps general manager. He gave me one last scornful glance, then departed.

“Seriously, what’s going on with him?” I asked.

Doc just held up one pinky, the internationally recognized symbol for a small penis.

But I once again found myself wondering why Karlinsky was so threatened by the presence of someone whose only job it was to seek the truth.

*   *   *

As we settled back into our drinks, Doc began shunting me toward acquaintances and golfing buddies of Kevin Tiemeyer, who soon became the subject of many mournful toasts. Not that it was doing my story a whole lot of good. I was getting the usual empty platitudes people say about the deceased.

One of these days, I would figure out what it was about dying that turned people into saints. Had I been talking to these same guys about Tiemeyer two weeks ago, when he was still alive, I’m sure they would have told me Tiemeyer was a relatively ordinary schmuck: a decent-enough guy who was trying his best despite being as mistake-prone as the rest of us.

But now that he was dead? Kevin Tiemeyer was suddenly a man who everyone loved; who had no enemies, foreign or domestic; and who never said a bad word about anyone.

It’s the last one that gets me every time. Because, I’m sorry, this is New Jersey. We say bad words about
everyone
.

Nevertheless, the best I could get beyond clich
é
s were superficial factoids about him, his foibles and peccadilloes. In addition to his cigar-chewing, he was a bit notorious for giving himself four-foot putts and back nine mulligans. On the plus side, he had an apparently inexhaustible supply of dirty jokes and was quick to buy you a drink after your round.

Tiemeyer was clearly well liked, though I was getting the sense he was not especially well known. No one claimed to be his best friend, or to socialize with him away from the club. And no one was close enough to him to be able to say what his recent makeover might have been about.

About an hour and two beers in, I excused myself for a trip to the men’s room. As soon as I was out of eyeshot, I quickly hooked around the corner, down the stairs. They led to the locker rooms and, more important, the pro shop.

When I was a rookie reporter in the housing projects and tenements of Newark, I can remember feeling like my learning curve was a long one. The environment there was so different from the one I had been raised in, it took a few years to really learn the ways of the ’hood.

Let’s just say snooping around a country club came a little more naturally to someone with my upbringing. And I had been around enough of them to know the pro shop usually contained the starter’s desk, which at a busy place like Fanwood served as the nerve center for the whole operation.

The starter was the guy who made the reservations for tee times. He paired people up with their favorite caddies, took into consideration who might like playing with whom when making foursomes, fretted over pace-of-play, and generally kept things running smoothly. He also—and this was crucial, from my current standpoint—wrote everything down.

Which meant there would be a record of Joseph Okeke’s day at Fanwood. All I had to do was find it.

From an ethical standpoint, what I was about to attempt was not … well, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it gray. I would also not call it the glistening, virginal white of a wedding dress. It was maybe slightly off-white. A nice clamshell, perhaps.

A reporter with a respectable broadsheet newspaper like the
Eagle-Examiner
cannot misrepresent himself in order to gain information, nor can he break a law to obtain it. I rationalized that I had been invited to enter the club—and, hence, was here legally—and that no one had told me I couldn’t have a little look around.

So I felt I was on firm enough ground as I walked down a hallway, past the oil-painted portraits of past club presidents who presumably had made the turn to the ultimate back nine. On the floor, there was thick carpeting that nicely hushed my footfalls. After two beers on an empty stomach, I knew I probably wasn’t being as quiet as I’d like. Still, the carpet made me feel like I was in stealth mode.

I reached the entrance to the pro shop and paused. The door had four glass panes in its upper half, so I could see the other side was dark and empty, as one would expect at that time of day. I tentatively turned the door handle.

It was open. Softly, I entered.

Then two things happened: the lights came on automatically, activated by a motion sensor; and a pressure sensor in the welcome mat announced my entry with an earsplitting
bee-baaaah
chime.

So much for stealth mode. I halted, in case someone came charged out of a back room to politely but pointedly inquire about my presence. But no one came.

Moving a little faster now, I walked past standing racks filled with clothing, all bearing the Fanwood Country Club emblem; then past racks of drivers, putters, and other implements of golfing mayhem; then past boxes of balls that were soon to be littered about the woodlands and waterways of Fanwood’s eighteen-hole track.

Around the corner, at the front of the pro shop, near a door that led outside to the putting green, I found the starter’s desk. I reached it by pushing through a swinging half door.

The desk itself was chest height. It was neatly kept: scorecards stacked in a small bin, free tees in one circular container, those damnable stubby pencils in another.

The only other objects on it were a computer keyboard and monitor, both of which had wires leading down to a terminal on the floor. I checked the shelves that had been built in underneath, hoping to find a thick book jammed with hand-written pages, like they would have done it in ye olden days of yore. Alas, all the shelves contained were towels with the club logo silk-screened into them.

It was the computer or nothing. I just hoped the thing wasn’t password protected, or this was going to turn into a very unsatisfying expedition.

The computer’s screen saver had been engaged and was busy scrawling never-ending geometric patterns across the monitor. Its keyboard, which wore the dark brown stains of too many fingers over too many years, was probably the first dirty thing I had seen at Fanwood. The mouse was similarly grimy.

I put my hand on it and gave it a quick upward shove. A quarter second later, the screen saver blinked off to reveal the virtual desktop, which was every bit as uncluttered as the actual desktop in front of me. The operating system was Windows 7, which I might have scoffed at, except that our computers in the newsroom were still running Windows 98.

There were a half-dozen shortcuts running down the left side of the screen. The one that immediately caught my eye was the one with an icon that looked like a golf ball. It was called StartPro Green.

Two clicks later, the application had opened. I was just starting to scroll through the menu options when a noise nearly stopped my heart: that
bee-baaaah
chime.

Someone was coming, someone who would almost certainly know I did not belong snooping through the club’s computer. I ducked, making myself as small as I could behind the desk. I wished I could tuck myself in the shelves, but, one, they were filled with towels, and, two, it would make too much noise.

I didn’t have much of a view, but it turned out I didn’t need my eyes to know who had entered the pro shop. Just my nose. It was Earl Karlinsky. The man had once again been preceded by his odor.

And that wasn’t the only reason I was holding my breath. Had he thought it strange that the light in this normally darkened area was on? Would he notice that someone had logged on to the computer? Could he smell me the same way I could smell him?

His feet brushed softly against the deep carpet as he walked briskly through the room. Then he paused. He was no more than ten feet from me on the other side of the desk. I heard him trying the handle of the door that led outside.

Locking up. He was just locking up, making sure everything was safe and secure. It was part of his routine, something he did automatically, without much thought, before he, I prayed, left for the night.

It sounded like the door handle had not yielded. Someone had already locked that door. Satisfied, he turned back around. I heard his shoes squish on the carpet as he pivoted. Then he departed the same way he came, leaving behind only his musk-tinged wake.

Slowly, quietly, I exhaled, counted to twenty, then stood up. The computer was still waiting for me. I shoved the mouse again, though this time I noticed my hand was shaking.

Calming my jittery mind, I returned to my systematic study of the menu items. On the fifth tab over, I found a search function. I pulled it up, typed “Okeke,” and hit enter.

Only one entry came up. He had played a little less than a month earlier—a week and a day before he had been killed, to be exact. The start time for the round was 2:08
P.M.
It would have been a nice afternoon round that, perhaps, preceded dinner at the club.

He had just one playing partner. I had expected the name might mean nothing to me. Instead, it was a name that meant everything:

It was Kevin Tiemeyer.

CHAPTER 18

You learn about all sorts of things in prison: mainly, things that make you a better criminal.

How to sell drugs in a way that won’t make you as vulnerable to police buy-busts. How to mangle a gun so it becomes untraceable. How to buy a woman, a baby, an endangered species.

Even how to get rid of a body.

On that last front, one of the more interesting facts Blue Mask had learned, courtesy of a former cell mate, was that there were few better places on the East Coast to dispose of an unwanted corpse than the New Jersey Pine Barrens.

The Pine Barrens are the state’s largest tract of open space, more than a million acres. And thanks to the foresight of a governor named Byrne—who understood that America’s most crowded state might someday appreciate a little room to breathe—development was no longer allowed there. The few houses that remained were slowly emptying out.

That’s part of what made the Pine Barrens such a good receptacle for a body, according to Blue Mask’s cell mate. The other part was simple science. The man had said the soil was so acidic, from untold eons of fallen pine needles, that it greatly accelerated a body’s decay. After a few months, the acid ate through everything. Even the bones. There would literally be nothing left of it.

That’s if he could get there. The only problem was, Blue Mask didn’t have a car. Birdie didn’t have one, either.

Blue Mask considered what to do about this problem as he began tidying up the kitchen. He poured the stew broth down the drain. Then he tossed the vegetables in the trash. Then he cleaned the dishes, just like Birdie would have done. He didn’t want anything to look out of place, should someone happen to drop by.

Once he was done, he turned his attention back to Birdie’s corpse.

She had been one of those women who was constantly in motion—always cooking, cleaning, or just puttering around. To see her so completely still was something of a novelty.

There were dark marks on her neck where Blue Mask’s hands had been. Her head was tilted back. Her mouth was agape. Her eyes were wide open, staring up at the ceiling with that deathly incomprehension that life had ended.

Eventually, Blue Mask made up his mind he was going to have to do
something
with her.

First thought: the basement. There had to be somewhere down there he could stash her. An old trunk? Maybe a garbage barrel?

But there would be the problem of smell. Even if he kept the lid on, she would eventually start to stink up the place, wouldn’t she?

The attic? No. Same deal.

If he tied her up in a couple of heavy-duty plastic garbage bags, would that do the trick? He had no idea.

Problems. Nothing but problems. Why did she have to give his damn money away to that preacher? Why couldn’t she have just made macaroni and cheese instead of stew? He could have saved up his five thousand and been gone.

He needed to get the body out of the house. The more he thought it through, it was the prudent course of action. Birdie was an active socialite. Between the church and the senior center, she was doing something pretty much every day. If she stopped showing up for things, people would come looking for her.