On number seven, Hedrick hooked his drive into the tall grass to the left of the fairway. “Hell,” he said.
“Shouldn’t hurt you much,” Nicholson told him. He teed up his own ball and sent it down the left edge of the fairway.
“Birds of a feather,” he said, retrieving his tee, returning his club to the bag. His forefinger stroked the silvery head of the big driver before he hoisted his bag and stepped away from the tee. “Hit the ball, drag Fred,” he said.
“How’s that?”
“I love golf jokes,” Nicholson said, as they headed down the fairway together. “Not as much as I love golf, but I do get a kick out of them. Of course they’re all the same joke.”
“All the same joke?”
“The point of every golf joke I ever heard,” said Nicholson, “is the obsessive nature of the game. That’s what they’re all about, and that’s what makes them funny. Like the funeral passing by.”
“I must have missed a couple of strokes there,” Hedrick said. “What’s so funny about a funeral?”
“Two fellows are playing golf,” Nicholson said. “And as they approach the tee for the seventh hole there’s a long string of cars passing by.”
“In the middle of a golf course?”
“There’s a road edging the course,” Nicholson said patiently, “and from the seventh tee, they’re within chipping distance of the road. And there are all these cars passing at slow speed, and the first one’s a hearse and the next two are black limousines, and they’ve all of them got their lights on, so you can tell it’s a funeral cortege.”
“On their way to the cemetery,” Hedrick said.
“Evidently. So the one golfer, he immediately shoves his driver back into his bag, whips off his cap, and stands in reverent silence until the very last car has passed them and disappeared into the distance.”
“Why?”
“Just what his partner was wondering. ‘What a respectful thing to do!’ he says. ‘All the times we’ve played together, and it turns out there’s a spiritual side to you I never saw before.’
“The first golfer shrugs and puts his cap back on. ‘I figure it’s the least I can do,’ he says. ‘After all, she was a good wife to me for twenty-seven years.’ “
Hedrick found his ball, took his second shot, made a good recovery. Nicholson took his own second shot, and they finished the hole in silence. Coming off the green, Hedrick said, “She was his wife.”
“Right.”
“In the hearse. His wife died, and she was being buried, and he was out on the golf course instead of showing up for her funeral.”
“Well, it’s not as though it actually happened,” Nicholson said. “It’s just a joke.”
“Oh, I realize that. I’m just looking at it as a joke. She was his wife and it was a successful marriage, but because golf is the way it is and because golfers are the way they are—”
“The way we are,” Nicholson put in.
“Well, yes. Because of these factors, his idea of showing respect is standing for a couple of minutes with his cap off.”
“When you explain it that way,” Nicholson said, “it’s not terribly funny, is it?”
“Oh, it’s funny,” Hedrick said. “I’m just sort of, oh, deconstructing it, you might say. And I think you said all golf jokes are essentially the same, all based on the same element of humor.”
“I’d say so,” Nicholson said. “Can you think of one that isn’t?”
Hedrick couldn’t, and they played on in relative silence, their conversation limited to compliments on one another’s shots as they played the next two holes. Both men bogeyed the par-three eighth hole. Hedrick scored par on nine, while Nicholson, whose second shot stopped within six feet of the pin, read the green, set himself, and sank the putt for a birdie.
It was, he realized, the first hole he’d won outright.
Approaching the next green, Hedrick said, “But I’m afraid I don’t see where Fred comes into it.”
Nicholson looked at him.
“ ‘Hit the ball, drag Fred.’ Isn’t that what you said? If Fred’s anywhere in the joke about the wife’s funeral, he must have been hiding behind a tree. I have to say I didn’t spot him.”
“It’s another joke,” Nicholson told him, “but in a sense it’s the same joke. Man goes to play a round of golf with his best friend and business partner.”
“Fred, I suppose.”
“Right, Fred. And his wife’s waiting dinner for him, and he’s more than two hours late by the time he walks in the door, and the guy looks terrible. ‘Honey,’ she says, ‘are you all right? Did you have a good afternoon?’
“ ‘I’m not all right,’ he says. ‘And I just had the worst afternoon of my life. I met Fred and we went out together, and everything was fine, it was a beautiful afternoon, and we were both hitting the ball well. And then Fred’s playing his second shot on the sixth hole, he’s set up nicely just to the right of the long fairway bunker, and he goes into his backswing and collapses. He drops dead, right there in the middle of the fairway.’
“ ‘Oh, my God,’ says the wife. ‘Honey, that’s horrible! How awful for poor Fred, and it must have been perfectly terrible for you, too.’
“ ‘I’ll say,’ he says. ‘That was the sixth hole, the long par five. So for twelve more holes it was hit the ball, drag Fred, hit the ball, drag Fred.’ “
Hedrick didn’t say anything at first. Then he said, “I see what you mean. It’s the same joke. It’s different, but it’s the same.”
“It’s a golf joke,” Nicholson said. “They’re all the same.”
“Are you married?”
“I was,” Hedrick replied. “She died, and the funeral’s this afternoon. I’ll tell you, if the hearse passes us, I’m taking my cap off.”
“You’re not wearing a cap.”
“Well, if I were. No, I’m not married. Why do you ask?”
“Ever been?”
“Briefly, years ago. It didn’t work out, and I’m in no hurry to repeat the experiment.”
“I’m married,” Nicholson said.
“Oh?”
“Happily. Or so I’ve always thought.”
“Oh.”
“There I was,” Nicholson said, “with a beautiful wife. And a best friend. Do you begin to get the picture?”
“I get a picture,” Hedrick said, “but I don’t know whether or not it’s the picture.”
“There’s only one picture,” Nicholson said, “and you got it a lot quicker than I did. It took me a while. The signs were there, but I didn’t see them at first. Then I began to notice things. Facial expressions, eye movements. Something in the air. Nothing concrete, but there came a day when I just knew, and realized I’d known for a while. Known without knowing I knew, if you follow me.”
“Perhaps you were mistaken.”
“Just what I told myself. Then there came the day when my friend backed out of a foursome at the last minute. It wasn’t the first time he’d done this, and for once I could guess the reason.”
“So what happened? The three of you played without him?”
“The three of us teed off together,” Nicholson said, “and the three of us played a couple of holes together, and then I pulled a muscle hitting a two iron and I was in agony. Or at least that’s the show I put on for the two fellows I was with.”
“You dropped out?”
“And left them to finish the round. I knew they wouldn’t quit just because I’d torn up my shoulder. I mean, they’re golfers, right? Hit the ball, drag Fred. Except in this instance Fred picked up his golf clubs and went home. Where I was not greatly surprised to find my friend’s car in my driveway.”
“It was definitely his car?”
“I suppose it could have been somebody else’s green Olds Cutlass, and that it just happened to have a dented right rear fender, and a license plate reading
undrpar. No, I’m afraid it was his car.” “Still, there might have been an innocent explanati
on.”
“There might,” Nicholson agreed. “I pulled into the driveway and parked behind his car. Then I walked around to the rear of the house and looked in the bedroom window. Again, there could be a perfectly innocent explanation for what I saw. Perhaps, for instance, my best friend had somehow sprung a leak, and my wife was merely trying to reinflate him.”
“Oh.”
“Quite.”
“What did you do? Burst in the door? Confront them?”
“Of course not.”
“Oh.”
“What I felt like doing,” Nicholson said, “was driving straight back to the country club and catching up with the fellows I’d been playing with. But how could I do that after my imaginary shoulder injury? So what I did was go to a chiropractor and get a deep heat treatment.”
“Even though there was nothing wrong with you?”
“You can always find someone happy to give you a deep heat treatment, and what harm can it do? It’s not as though I was in danger of melting. It enabled me to make a miraculous recovery, and I was out on the course the next day.”
“But not with your friend, I don’t suppose.”
“Why not? We’d been playing together for years.”
“But wasn’t it awkward?”
“Why should it be? He didn’t know that I knew anything.”
“And you could just act as though nothing had happened?”
“Not much acting required, is there? All I had to do was play golf and have the sort of cursory conversation one has on a golf course.”
“And inside?”
“In the clubhouse, you mean?”
“Inside yourself.”
“Inside myself,” Nicholson said calmly, “I was filled with murderous rage.”
“I can imagine. You must have wanted to kill them both.”
“Certainly not. Why would I want to kill my wife?”
“But—”
“The woman’s been an ideal wife since the day I married her. An ornament in public, a social asset, an impeccable homemaker, a splendid cook. More to the point, she’s an excellent companion, and, in intimate moments, a spirited partner. I’d have to be out of my mind to want any harm to come to her.”
“But she deceived you,” Hedrick pointed out. “She slept with your best friend.”
“I’m not sure that’s the right word for it,” Nicholson said thoughtfully. “From the look of things, sleep didn’t play much of a role in the relationship. But yes, she deceived me, and with my closest friend. And, quite possibly, with others I don’t know about.”
“And you can accept that?”
“I can certainly forgive it. She’s a woman, for heaven’s sake. Remember your Bible? Eve ate the apple. It cost us all our tenancy in Paradise, but does it make you want to kill the poor woman? Certainly not.”
“But—”
“She was a woman. She was tempted, she was powerless to resist. Not her fault. But as for the one who tempted her . . .”
“The serpent.”
“The snake,” said Nicholson, with feeling, “in the grass. The damned snake. He’s the one you want to crush under your heel.”
Nicholson held the honors, having won the previous hole. He took an unusually vicious practice swing.
“My best friend,” he said. “Fred.”
“His name can’t really be Fred.”
“It’s as good a name as any. And we might as well call him something. He’s the one who betrayed me. He’s the one I want to kill.”
He settled himself, addressed the ball. His swing was picture-perfect, and the ball sailed off down the fairway.
“And I’ll do it, too,” he said, and stooped to pick up his tee.
Hedrick sliced his own drive into the woods, and Nicholson could see the notion of a mulligan cross the man’s mind. But Hedrick walked manfully after his ball, and Nicholson kept him company and helped him find it. The man tried to recover with a daring shot between two trees, but the ball caromed off one of them and he wound up worse than where he’d started. He played safe on the third shot and got out onto the fairway, but it still took him five strokes before he reached the green of the par-four hole.
“You and . . . Fred,” he said along the way. “Is this where the two of you play?”
“We’re both members at Ellicott Creek,” Nicholson said. “That’s where we generally play. I’ve been a member here myself for a little over a year now as well, that’s one of the perks my firm extends when you make junior partner, and I’ve had Fred here a couple of times as my guest. But I doubt you’d know him.”
“I was wondering,” Hedrick admitted. They reached the green, and Hedrick, who was away, knelt down to read the green. He got up, stood over the ball. He said, “What you said before. That you intend to kill him. You were just saying that, weren’t you?”
The question was delivered in a tone that suggested it might or might not be rhetorical. One could answer it or not, and Nicholson chose not to.
Hedrick four-putted for a quintuple bogey.
“That big silver club in your bag,” Hedrick said. “Except of course it’s not silver. Titanium or something like that, isn’t it?”
“Some space-age alloy.”
“If they can put a man on the moon,” Hedrick said, “I suppose they ought to be able to add a few yards to a man’s tee shot. That’s the Big Brenda, isn’t it? But you haven’t been using it.”
“Just at the driving range.”
“And did it perform the way it says in the ads? Evidently not, or you’d be using it on the course.”
“I don’t like it,” Nicholson said. “There’s something wrong with the way it’s balanced.”
“I ought to try it on the hole coming up. Par five, 585 yards. A little extra distance wouldn’t hurt.”
“I think the club’s defective,” Nicholson said. “Something wrong with the shaft. I’m planning on taking it back, letting them look at it.”
Hedrick chuckled. “Relax,” he said. “I don’t really want to borrow your Big Brenda. I know better than to try a new club in the middle of a round.”
Hedrick, using his own driver, hit the ball long and straight. It outran Nicholson’s drive by a good thirty yards. They walked down the fairway together, in silence at first. Then Nicholson said, “Over and over I’ve thought about killing him.”
“Your best friend. Except it turns out he’s no friend at all, so I don’t know what to call him.”
“I thought we had settled on Fred.”
“Seems silly, calling him that. But no sillier than talking of killing him.”
“People kill people all the time,” Nicholson said.
“Yes, but—”
“You read the papers, listen to the news, it’s just one murder after another.”
“That’s true, but—”
“A golf club,” Nicholson said.
“How’s that?”
“Be the best way to do it, don’t you think? After all the golf we played together over the years? Bash his treacherous brains out with a golf club, then wrap the shaft around his neck.”
“Can you bend a shaft like that?” Hedrick wondered. “Of course, once you’d bashed his head in, the question’s largely academic, isn’t it?”
They fell silent again when they reached Nicholson’s ball. He sent it on its way with his two wood.
“Good shot.”
“Good old brassie,” he said. “A little left, though. I was afraid of that fairway trap, and I played it a little too safe.”
“Better safe than sorry.”
“So they say. I bought Big Brenda with the idea that I might use her on Fred.”
“Her?”
“Well, it, of course, but since the club has a woman’s name . . .”
“That alone makes it a good murder weapon,” Hedrick said. “Thing lists for close to five hundred dollars, doesn’t it?”
“Five forty-nine, but I got it for a third off.”
“Pretty good
discount.”
“It’s still a lot to pay for a club you’re only going to swing once. But I couldn’t use one of my own clubs, could I?”
“No, I guess not.”
“Although,” he said, “when you come right down to it, what difference would it make? No matter what I used or how I did it, the police would come straight at me.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Because they’d look for someone with a motive to kill Fred,” Nicholson said, “and they’d root around in his life and find out who he was sleeping with. And where would that lead?”
“I see what you mean.”
“And I’m sure I’d break down the minute they started questioning me. I’m not much good at keeping things to myself.” He clapped Hedrick on the shoulder. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.
“You know what I’m thinking?”
“That we ought to trade murders. Like the Hitchcock film, where two fellows meet on a train, and they switch victims. You kill Fred while I’m out getting an ironclad alibi, and in return I kill your wife.”
“I’m not married,” Hedrick said.
“Your boss, then, or the person who stands between you and a huge inheritance. Look, it doesn’t matter, because we’re not going to do it.”
“I should say not,” Hedrick said.
“I couldn’t kill a stranger for no reason,” Nicholson said. “And I couldn’t let you kill Fred, either. I mean, the whole thing’s pointless unless I get to kill the son of a bitch myself.”
Hedrick’s second shot was almost as long as his first, and didn’t stop rolling until it was within a few yards of the green, just to the right of the trap. “Brilliant,” Nicholson told him. “You’re a sure bet to win your honors back this hole. An easy chip and you’re putting for a birdie.”
“If I putt the way I did last hole . . .”
“Well, why leave anything to chance? Sink the chip for an eagle.”
They walked to Nicholson’s ball. He shaded his eyes, looked at the green. “What do you think? A seven iron?”
“Or an eight. Pin’s way at the back of the green, though.”
“Seven iron,” Nicholson said, and drew it from his bag. He took a practice swing, and his eyes tracked the imaginary ball clear to the rear portion of the green.