Chapter 21 I Fear You Don’t Like Me #2
My God, I hated him now. It was Thursday, the fourth day we had all been in this courtroom, including the two days of jury selection.
I had not seen the man in over a year and a half.
He hadn’t aged at all, and I thought to myself, Well, he has no trouble living with himself now, does he?
He might even have looked a little more fit, a little more trim.
But it might have been simply that in the past I’d always seen him in golf shirts or golf sweaters that were a little too tight.
Now he was in a navy-blue suit and repp tie, and he smiled at me as if we were long-lost friends as he passed the defense table on the way to the witness stand.
The state spent a few minutes establishing who he was and then began the character assassination.
“So, let’s turn to Miss Winston. You knew her since she was a little girl. How would you describe her temperament?” asked Mr. Lindley.
“Well, the girl I knew at eight was, of course, very different from the woman I knew at eighteen.”
“Let’s talk about the eighteen-year-old.”
“A great golfer,” he answered. “I thought she might have LPGA potential. She had the concentration of the giants, but also the willingness to gamble on herself and take risks. She was very intense on the links, very competitive. As competitive as any man I ever played with.”
“That’s quite a compliment,” observed the DA. (I urge my younger readers to recall that this exchange occurred in March 1980. In those days, this was quite a compliment.) Then he continued, “That’s her as a golfer. Tell us about the person you know.”
“She’s a very good person. I know her reputation isn’t great, and her impulsiveness would suggest—”
My lawyer’s objection was sustained. But, again, Lindley and Fallows had rehearsed this moment, and it landed well.
“She’s a good person,” Fallows resumed. “But I saw her temper on a number of occasions.”
“Such as?”
“Sometimes she’d get a little angry when she couldn’t get the tee time she wanted. And if there weren’t men she could play with, she’d get a little out of sorts when I’d suggest different groups of women planning to tee off who had room for a third or fourth.”
“Didn’t she ever play golf with teenagers her age?”
“Almost never.”
“Why was that?”
“I assume it was because she wanted a level of competition that would make the game interesting to her.”
“Not because she didn’t have friends her own age?”
Note the double negative. It was brilliant. My lawyer objected, but the judge let the question stand.
“She really didn’t have friends her age that I saw—at least at the club,” said Fallows. “I mean, I never saw her at the swimming pool or in the dining room or snack shack with the other teens.”
“Thank you. We’ve already heard that she didn’t much like the club’s little driving range net. You knew that, right?”
He laughed, loud and abrupt, and in a room that hadn’t heard much laughter that week, it was jarring.
“Oh boy,” he replied, “did I ever. She never let go of that pet peeve. But it wasn’t the net she hated, it was the target.
And the fact is, we didn’t even order the net with the target.
We’d ordered the version without one. But it just seemed like a lot of work to send it back and set up a new one, so we just decided to use the one the company sent us.
I figured, you don’t like the target, ignore it.
And it shouldn’t have been a problem for a golfer of Miss Winston’s caliber.
You just keep your head down and ignore it. ”
“But she wouldn’t ignore it?”
“No. All that intensity that made her great? Well, she took it out on me. Sometimes, in all fairness, it was a little good-natured. She’d say something like ‘Harry, you have any scissors? I have a chore.’ ”
“She called you Harry?”
“Yeah, she did.”
“You’re a grown man. How did you feel about that?”
He shrugged. “It was fine. Her family were members. I understood.”
“So, she’d joke about wanting to borrow scissors to cut off the target?”
“She sure would.”
Yes, I had made this joke. Once.
“Was it always good-natured?”
“Usually. But it did kind of all blow up a day or two after the Fourth of July—”
“This was the summer of 1978, just to confirm, a few weeks before Miss Winston would kill Kenny Foster,” said the district attorney.
“That’s right. Anyway, I was nearby on the practice putting green, giving a lesson, and I saw her throw her visor onto the ground. She looked incensed, so I went over to see what was up. And, well, she was furious.”
“Why?”
“That target. I’m a dad of two kids, and I thought she—even though she was eighteen years old, on her way to Yale, maybe the LPGA—was acting like a spoiled child. So, I tried to calm her down and told her to, you know, just focus on her swing. Pretend the target’s not there.”
“Did she calm down?”
“No. I must have hit some weird nerve. She said something like I was just a club pro. I suppose she meant it as an insult. To make me feel like a failure because I wasn’t a PGA superstar.
Anyway, she demanded I take down the target, and so I just walked away.
I was in the middle of a lesson, and I didn’t want to get into a shouting match with a club member—a young woman—over this. ”
Mr. Lindley went to the prosecution table and picked up a calendar.
Studied it for a moment as if he were a surgeon and it was an X-ray.
“Kenny Foster would die roughly four weeks later on August third,” he said.
“The target would be removed on, we all believe, Monday, July thirty-first. Did you cut off the target that day?”
“No.”
“Day after?”
“I did not.”
“Were you even at the club on Monday, the thirty-first?”
“No, I was not. Monday is a day off for me. My family and I were in Westport, Connecticut, that day. We went to the beach. Sherwood Island.”
“So, you never removed the target?”
“That’s correct.”
“Why not?”
“Well, it was part of the net. And while Miss Winston was a big deal at the club because of her enormous talent, it seemed disrespectful to the other members to mess around with a product that I figured they all liked as it was.”
“No other club members complained about the target?”
“Not to me. At least not seriously. Some of the guys actually liked it. It was fun to see the ball thwap into the target. They felt good when they’d use their driver and hit the spot that read two hundred fifty.
That meant that, maybe on a real tee, they’d just walloped the ball something like two hundred fifty yards.
I have no idea if it was at all accurate, but I suppose it was close enough and it was fun. ”
“It worked to make someone a better golfer?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Unless you were Miss Winston.”
“Well, like a lot of great athletes, she thought pretty highly of herself. She always thought she knew what was best.”
Yes, there was an objection. Yes, it was sustained. But, for the moment, the state had no further questions.
I fear you don’t like me.
Heaven knows, readers on the online book sites complain all the time that a character in one of my books is dislikable, and—thus—they dislike the whole book.
Well, if we wanted only likable characters in our novels and movies and plays, there’d be no Macbeth, Anna Karenina, Pulp Fiction, Sharp Objects, or The Talented Mr. Ripley. And that’s just off the top of my head.
Still, a member of a book club I visited last year in person told me I was more likable when I drank.
(The group had “won” me as the high bidders in a fundraising auction for a homeless shelter I support and, long ago, used in a novel.) The woman had seen me discussing fiction on a book festival panel years earlier and appreciated my sharing different Negroni recipes from the stage.
“You’re nothing like the wild child who took golf clubs to car windows,” she said.
We were in her well-appointed living room: Pottery Barn meets an Eton library.
“Singular. One club, one window,” I corrected her. “And, I mean, there are nights when I pop edibles like M&M’s.”
“Your books should have trigger warnings,” said another member.
“So should life,” I responded.
“I’m serious,” she insisted. “I found that one about the woman who dies in labor very disturbing. That should have a warning for pregnant women. And your book about the young Puritan wife who’s abused by her husband: that should have a warning, too.”
I raised my club soda to her. “Maybe,” I said. “But you know what? No one gets out alive. No one escapes unscathed. They’re novels. I’m sorry they upset you. But I like to read books that leave me gutted and make me cry. And, I guess, those are the books I try to write.”
Now, obviously, I could share my late adolescence in a fashion that only makes me look good. I control the narrative. But I want you to be there as, to the best of my recollection, that part of my life actually unspooled.
Also? Well, I tried to kill myself once. Let’s not forget that. Clearly, I should be okay with the idea you might not like me. After all, I’m not overly enamored of myself, either.
I think Cleon Barker enjoyed his cross-examination of Harry Fallows.
(I know there were moments when I did.) He was brief but methodical, and very protective of me.
He cast aspersions on both the state’s case and on Fallows in ways that suggested all Mr. Barker cared about was logic and common sense, and that he saw this whole prosecution as absurd.
“Tell me, Mr. Fallows,” he said after the preliminaries, “you noticed the target was gone from the driving range net on Tuesday?”
“Well, I don’t remember the specific moment.”
“But it was Tuesday?”
“Yes.”
Barker picked a piece of paper up off our table and said, “In your statement to the police the day Kenny Foster died, did you mention that the net had had a target?”
“No.”
“That’s because you had removed the target, correct, and knew that it had been a mistake to do so?”
Instantly, the DA objected, and just as quickly the judge sustained it.