Chapter 12 The Girl Whose Perfume Is Skunky Weed Is Beset by Police
The Girl Whose Perfume Is Skunky Weed Is Beset by Police
You thought we were done with Detectives Richie Marino and Jerry Corbin.
You met them the evening that I killed Kenny Foster, when they came to my house, and they were but fleeting cameos, two names you quickly forgot.
Ah, but recall what Chekhov taught us about foreshadowing: if you put a gun on the table in act one, it damn well better go off by act three.
The detectives returned to my home in Tallmadge days after that second deposition, when it had grown more critical to understand the role that the target on the driving range net—or, to be precise, its removal—may have played in the death of Kenny Foster.
I was actually at home, not at my aunt and uncle’s in the city, because I was going to have dinner with my parents and spend a night in my own bed.
The pair arrived a half hour before my father returned from work and my mother from grocery shopping and her weekly stop at the liquor store.
(My mother liked to brag that our monthly liquor bill was bigger than the monthly mortgage payment on our house.) As the three of us stood on the front stoop I heard in my head an Elvis Costello song I’d seen him sing live at CBGB, “Watching the Detectives,” and regretted the bowl I’d finished smoking twenty minutes earlier.
I had learned enough as my father’s daughter and from the amount of time I’d spent at Cleon Barker’s law firm not to invite them into the house or share with them much of anything.
But it was clear that I wasn’t escaping Tallmadge without speaking to them again.
Something had changed. And so I agreed that when my father got home from MetLife, we would call my lawyer, and we would all go to the Tallmadge Police Station.
“Tell me something,” said Richie Marino.
“That depends,” I said, supposing I was very cagey.
“I smell marijuana. Super skunky weed. Are you stoned, Miss Winston?”
“Nope,” I lied.
“Your eyes are just screaming Mary Jane.” (Yes, he did call it that. If I hadn’t been so paranoid—both because I was wasted and because I had two cops on the front steps—I might have burst into a frenzy of buzzed giggles.)
“I was crying,” I said.
“Why?”
“It’s personal.”
He poked his tongue deep into one cheek thoughtfully. “Okay,” he said. “I’m gonna give you the advice of a dad. Not a cop.”
I waited.
“When you come see us with your lawyer and your mom and dad, make sure your head is on straight.”
I thanked him. I’d had to restrain myself from pretending to adjust my head on my neck, as if I were a chiropractor or Herman Munster.
My lawyer, Mr. Barker, joined my parents and me at the Tallmadge Police Station.
He and my father were both still dressed in the dark suits they’d worn to their offices that day, but both had taken off their neckties, a small concession to the reality that this was an after-hours meeting.
We all joined the two detectives a little before eight o’clock at night in a break room of sorts in the squat brick building near the far more monolithic brick buildings on the nearby corners: the school, the library, and the Episcopal church.
We declined the detectives’ offer of water or (Marino’s words) “the sludge the percolator here swears to God is coffee.” My weed buzz was gone by then, and so I’d popped a quaalude to keep my chill.
(There’s that adolescent frontal lobe making another solid decision.)
When we were seated, Marino tried to unnerve me by asking, “So, Miss Winston, your head on straight?”
“What in the world is that about?” my lawyer asked in response.
“She knows.”
“I’m fine, sir,” I said, showing the sort of deference that I hoped would make this go easier. And as soon as we had the pleasantries, such as they were, behind us, Marino got right into it. The other detective, Corbin, had a little pad out and would occasionally jot a note or a couple of words.
“So…how many times had you been to the club driving range before you ‘noticed’ the target was gone?”
There was something sarcastic about his use of the word noticed.
“I don’t know. Two? Three?”
“You’ve said you were there at the range three or four times a week during the summer. Kenny Foster died August third. So, was the target there the last week in July?”
“I guess.”
“You were playing in a tournament July twenty-ninth and thirtieth at the Bobolink Club in Morris Plains, New Jersey, correct?”
“Yes,” I said, a little cowed by the idea that he had clearly been doing lots of digging, though I wasn’t sure what he was looking for.
“You shot a seventy-three and a seventy-two. You won. That was impressive.”
I shrugged and thanked him. I wanted to say that there had been tournaments when I had played better, but knew this wasn’t the time or place.
“As you prepared for that tournament—Bobolink—was the target still up on the net?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“And after the tournament?”
“I was there the Monday afterward—you know, Caddy Day—and it may have been up. Still up. I think it was. But this was a while ago.”
“That would have been July thirty-first.”
“I guess.”
“The Monday before Kenny Foster died.”
“Okay.”
“You sleepy?”
Instantly Mr. Barker leaned across the table: “Are you trying to intimidate this child?”
“A: She’s not a child. She’s nineteen. Soon, she’ll start college, I understand. B: Why is asking her if she’s sleepy a threatening question?”
“The implication is that she’s phoning in her answers, Detective.”
Marino shook his head. “Not at all. It’s just that when Jerry here and I dropped by the house earlier today, she seemed, well…dozy. Drowsy, maybe.” He shrugged. “Just being a concerned parent.”
“I’m fine,” I volunteered, not wanting this conversation to crash-land into the swamp of my drug habits.
“Good,” he said. He folded his hands on the table. “Very good. So, Harry Fallows first noticed the target was gone after that Monday. After that Caddy Day. On Tuesday. That sound right to you?”
“I told you, it was a while ago,” I said.
“Sure was. But Harry was clear. He did not take it down. And on Tuesday, he realized it was gone.”
“Okay.”
“And his assistant, Curt Bolger, says he didn’t take it down.”
Curt Bolger was a fixture at the country club, a guy in his late sixties whose hair had migrated from the top of his head to his eyebrows, but who, in the right light, could seem threatening: an aging hit man in a golf sweater.
(Some of the older caddies actually referred to him once in a while as “Harry’s hit man,” because he was more likely than Harry or even the caddy master, Dom Gorski, to chastise a caddy—withhold a loop, send the caddy home for the day, exile him for a weekend—if a member complained.) He was so slender that he always looked a little gaunt to me, but I’d watched him hoist members’ golf bags over his shoulders as if they were small purses.
“Okay,” I said again.
“Harry and Curt both figured you did it,” said Marino.
“Did what?”
“Took it down. Took it off the netting.”
“I told you, I didn’t.”
“Perhaps you misremembered.”
“Misremembered? No. I didn’t misremember.”
“Yeah,” he muttered dubiously.
“Look, Harry never talked to me about it,” I insisted. “Neither did Curt. Not Tuesday, not Wednesday, not Thursday.”
“Well, did you two talk about anything those days? You and Harry?”
“We didn’t talk much. It’s not like we’re friends.
I know he was threatened by the idea I had an outside golf coach.
I mean, it’s math. My family was paying Heidi Romming, not him, to improve my game.
Also? That must have been sort of insulting to him.
Anyway, I don’t think we talked that week until Kenny died. That Thursday afternoon.”
“So, you didn’t talk about the target those days?”
“No.”
“Interesting.”
I said nothing in response. Neither did my lawyer.
We didn’t have to, and so we just waited.
I think Mr. Barker was about to inform the detectives we were finished when Marino went on, “We all know the charges that the district attorney can consider if this becomes a criminal as well as a civil case. Your lawyer here does. Your dad does. They also know that how honest you are tonight can affect the charges. You know, being helpful makes everyone’s life easier and, ipso facto, everyone happier—including the district attorney.
So, I’ll ask you again, Miss Winston: Did you take down the target? ”
“Mira, don’t answer that,” said Mr. Barker, but this all seemed crazy to me, and as scared as I was, it just seemed easier to tell them the truth.
“No!” I said, and I was adamant. “I did not take it down. I hated it and wanted it gone, but it never crossed my mind to take matters into my own hands and rip it off the net!”
“I hear you, young lady,” Marino told me.
“We all do. Loud and clear. But here’s the thing: the target was on the net the weekend you were at Bobolink.
We have a photo that a club member took of a friend of his—a guest—hitting a bucket of balls at the range.
It was taken that Sunday, and in the photo you can see the target clearly on the net.
There it is, obvious as the sun in the sky.
And then Monday. The next day. Practically no one’s at the course except the groundskeepers mowing the fairways and tending the greens, Curt Bolger doing a little maintenance work, and a couple of caddies playing a round.
And you. You, Miss Winston. At the net.”
Mr. Barker looked disgusted. “Come on, Detective, the girl has already told you that she didn’t remove the target. That’s all there is to it.”
“I mean, it was Harry Fallows’s day off,” Marino continued, ignoring him.
“He wasn’t even at the club that day. There are plenty of people who can attest to that.
So, the target is on the netting on Sunday and gone on Tuesday, and the only person at the club who was anywhere near it on Monday was you.
The only person with a reason to get rid of it was you. ”