Murder in the Rough Read online

  Copyright

  The events and characters in this book are fictitious. Certain real locations and public figures are mentioned, but all other characters and events described in the book are totally imaginary.

  Copyright of the collection © 2006 by Otto Penzler

  Introduction copyright © 2006 by Otto Penzler

  “Welcome to the Real World” copyright © 2006 by Lawrence Block; “The Man Who Didn’t Play Golf” copyright © 2006 by Simon Brett; “Spittin Iron” copyright © 2006 by Ken Bruen; “His Mission” copyright © 2006 by Christopher Coake; “Water Hazard” copyright © 2006 by Stephen Collins; “Those Good Days” copyright © 2006 by Tom Franklin; “Death by Golf” copyright © 2006 by Jonathan Gash; “Room for a Fourth” copyright © 2006 by Steve Hamilton; “Miss Unwin Plays by the Rules” copyright © 2006 by H.R.F. Keating; “A Good **** Spoiled” copyright © 2006 by Laura Lippman; “The Hoarder” copyright © 2006 by Bradford Morrow; “Graduation Day” copyright © 2006 by Ian Rankin; “Lucy Had a List” copyright © 2006 by John Sandford; “Unplayable Lies” copyright © 2006 by William G. Tapply; “The Secret” copyright © 2006 by John Westermann

  All rights reserved.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: March 2010

  ISBN: 978-0-446-54388-0

  For Michael Malone,

  with affection and admiration for

  his abundant measures of kindness, generosity, loyalty, and talent

  Contents

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD

  THE MAN WHO DIDN’T PLAY GOLF

  SPITTIN IRON

  HIS MISSION

  WATER HAZARD

  THOSE GOOD DAYS

  DEATH BY GOLF

  ROOM FOR A FOURTH

  MISS UNWIN PLAYS BY THE RULES

  A GOODSPOILED

  THE HOARDER

  GRADUATION DAY

  LUCY HAD A LIST

  UNPLAYABLE LIES

  THE SECRET

  GOLF MYSTERIES

  INTRODUCTION

  It has famously been written that the smaller the ball, the better is the literature involving that sport, which would suggest that the greatest sportswriting should be about golf. Or Ping-Pong.

  Try as I might, I could not convince my publisher that a book collecting Ping-Pong mystery stories was just what the world is waiting for, which is just as well, because when I raised the subject with some of the world’s top crime writers, they looked at me as if I had finally taken that last step over the edge of sanity.

  Golf is a different kettle of mackerel, however. It seems that an astonishing number of people who earn their living by putting words on paper in an appealing way have tried their hands at putting a little white ball into a cup cut into a very large and very green lawn. They also liked the notion of writing about it and the violence it can engender.

  There is a long and distinguished history of golf in mystery fiction, with such giants of the genre as Agatha Christie, James Ellroy, Ian Fleming, Michael Innes, and Rex Stout having produced classic works in which golf figures prominently. At the back of the book is a comprehensive list of titles for further reading or collecting—the most complete bibliography of golf mysteries ever compiled.

  Mystery writers have used numerous golf course settings as homes for their corpses: in the rough, in a sand trap, even right there on the green. And the methods and devices used to finish off their hapless victims have been as varied as your previous ten tee shots, including exploding balls, exploding golf clubs, an exploding cup, and even an exploding golf course. Victims have been speared with a flag stick, clubbed with a, yes, golf club, and murdered in a sabotaged golf cart. Most bodies attained their status as the formerly living in more ordinary ways, such as being shot, garroted, or stabbed on a golf course before, during, or after a game.

  Happily, none of the authors in Murder in the Rough have used exploding devices to dispatch their victims, but you will encounter in these pages some fascinating motives for murder and any number of memorable characters created by the champions of today’s mystery writing world.

  Lawrence Block has received the two top awards it is possible to receive in the mystery community: a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the Diamond Dagger from the (British) Crime Writers’ Association, both for lifetime achievement.

  Simon Brett has remained a popular crime novelist for thirty years, most memorably for his work featuring Charles Paris, a frequently out-of-work actor who enjoys the bottle as much as he enjoys solving mysteries; he made his debut in Cast in Order of Disappearance (1975).

  Ken Bruen, one of the hardest of the hard-boiled writers working today, is the author of twenty novels. He has been nominated for an Edgar and won the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America for The Guards, which introduced Jack Taylor, his Galway-based P.I.

  Christopher Coake, who recently got his M.F.A. from Ohio State University, has already published a short story collection with Harcourt, We’re in Trouble, which contains “All Through the House,” which was selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2004.

  Stephen Collins is the author of two suspense novels, Eye Contact (1994) and Double Exposure (1998), but is best known as an actor in the long-running television series 7th Heaven and in such films as All the President’s Men, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and The First Wives Club.

  Tom Franklin won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for his short story “Poachers” in 1999; it became the title story for his first book, Poachers and Other Stories, which was followed by his critically applauded first novel, Hell at the Breech.

  Jonathan Gash, a physician in real life and one of England’s foremost experts in tropical diseases, is most famous for his series about Lovejoy, the not-overly-scrupulous dealer in antiques, portrayed for several seasons by Ian McShane in the popular television program.

  Steve Hamilton’s first novel, A Cold Day in Paradise, won the Edgar and Shamus awards. Like his subsequent novels, it featured Alex McKnight, the former northern Michigan cop who reluctantly becomes involved with cases to help or protect friends.

  H. R. F. Keating is one of the Grand Old Men of the detective novel, having written several distinguished critical works about Sherlock Holmes and crime fiction, plus more than fifty novels, most famously those featuring Ganesh Ghote of the Bombay police force.

  Laura Lippman, formerly a reporter and feature writer for the Baltimore Sun, has been nominated frequently for all the major mystery awards, winning the Edgar for Charm City in 1998. All of her books are set in her much-loved Baltimore and feature Tess Monaghan.

  Bradford Morrow was described by Publishers Weekly as “one of America’s major literary voices.” The founder and editor of the literary journal Conjunctions, he was given the Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  Ian Rankin and his series hero, the Edinburgh policeman John Rebus, have become so popular that Rankin is in The Guinness Book of World Records for having seven books in the top ten in England at the same time. He won the Edgar in 2004 for Resurrection Men.

  John Sandford, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is a perennial on the best-seller list with his Prey novels featuring Lucas Davenport, the Twin Cities policeman who is unlike most cops in that he likes to work alone, drives a Porsche, and creates video games in his spare time.

  William G. Tapply has a successful career as a columnist for Field & Stream and as the author of several books on fly fishing, but it is his series of novels about Brady Coyne, the kindly Boston lawyer who functions as
a private detective, that endears him to mystery readers.

  John Westermann is of the Joseph Wambaugh school of writers about police officers, except that he focuses on dirty cops and corruption. His novel Exit Wounds was filmed with Steven Seagal as Orin Boyd and opened in 2001 as the number one box-office hit in America.

  So it seems appropriate to say welcome to the Masters (though Murder in the Rough allows women to participate).

  —Otto Penzler

  New York, June 2005

  WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD

  Lawrence Block

  Kramer liked routine.

  Always had. He’d worked at Taggart & Leeds for thirty-five years, relieved to settle in there after spending his twenties hopping from one job to another. His duties from day to day were interesting enough to keep him engaged, but in a sense they were the same thing—or the same several things—over and over, and that was fine with him.

  His wife made him the same breakfast every weekday morning for those thirty-five years. Breakfast, he had learned, was the one meal where most people preferred the same thing every time, and he was no exception. A small glass of orange juice, three scrambled eggs, two strips of bacon, one slice of buttered toast, a cup of coffee—that did him just fine.

  These days, of course, he prepared it himself. He hadn’t needed to learn how—he’d always made breakfast for both of them on Saturdays—and now the time he spent whisking eggs in a bowl and turning rashers with a fork was a time for him to think of her and regret her passing.

  So sudden it had been. He’d retired, and she’d said, in mock consternation, “Now what am I going to do with you? Am I going to have you underfoot all day every day?” And he established a routine that got him out of the house five days a week, and they both settled gratefully into that routine, and then she felt a pain and experienced a shortness of breath and went to the doctor, and a month later she was dead.

  He had his routine, and it was clear to him that he owed his life to it. He got up each morning, he made his breakfast, he washed the dishes by hand, he read the paper along with a second cup of coffee, and he got out of the house. Whatever day it was, he had something to do, and his salvation lay in doing it.

  If it was Monday, he walked to his gym. He changed from his street clothes to a pair of running shorts and a singlet, both of them a triumph of technology, made of some miracle fiber that wicked moisture away from the skin and sent it off somewhere to evaporate. He put his heavy street shoes in his locker and laced up his running shoes. Then he went out on the floor, where he warmed up for ten minutes on the elliptical trainer before moving to the treadmill. He set the pace at twelve-minute miles, set the time at sixty minutes, and got to it.

  Kramer, who’d always been physically active and never made a habit of overeating, had put on no more than five pounds in the course of his thirty-five years at Taggart & Leeds. He’d added another couple of pounds since then, but at the same time had lost an inch in the waistline. He had lost some fat and gained a little muscle, which was the point, or part of it. The other part, perhaps the greater part, was having something enjoyable and purposeful to do on Mondays.

  On Tuesdays he turned in the other direction when he left his apartment, and walked three-quarters of a mile to the Bat Cave, which was not where you would find Batman and Robin, as the name might lead you to expect, but instead was a recreational facility for baseball enthusiasts. Each of two dozen batting cages sported a pitching machine the standard sixty feet from home plate, where the participant dug in and took his cuts for a predetermined period of time.

  They supplied bats, of course, but Kramer brought his own, a Louisville Slugger he’d picked out of an extensive display at a sporting goods store on Broadway. It was a little heavier than average, and he liked the way it was balanced. It just felt right in his hands. Also, there was something to be said for having the same bat every time. You didn’t have to adjust to a new piece of lumber.

  He brought along cleated baseball shoes, too, which made it easier to establish his stance in the batter’s box. The boat-necked shirt and sweatpants he wore didn’t sport any team logo, which would have struck him as ridiculous, but they were otherwise not unlike what the pros wore, for the freedom of movement they afforded.

  Kramer wore a baseball cap, too; he’d found it in the back of his closet, had no idea where it came from, and recognized the embroidered logo as that of an advertising agency that had gone out of business some fifteen years ago. It must have come into his possession as some sort of corporate party favor, and he must have tossed it in his closet instead of tossing it in the trash, and now it had turned out to be useful.

  You could set the speed of the pitching machine, and Kramer set it at Slow at the beginning of each Tuesday session, turned it to Medium about halfway through, and finished with a few minutes of Fast pitching. He was, not surprisingly, better at getting his bat on the slower pitches. A fastball, even when you knew it was coming, was hard for a man his age to connect with. Still, he hit most of the medium-speed pitches—some solidly, some less so. And he always got some wood on some of the fastballs, and every once in a while he’d meet a high-speed pitch solidly, his body turning into the ball just right, and the satisfaction of seeing the horsehide sphere leap from his bat was enough to cast a warm glow over the entire morning’s work. His best efforts, he realized, were line drives a major-league center fielder would gather in without breaking a sweat, but so what? He wasn’t having fantasies of showing up in Sarasota during spring training, aiming for a tryout. He was a sixty-eight-year-old retired businessman keeping in shape and filling his hours, and when he got ahold of one, well, it felt damned good.

  Walking home, carrying the bat and wearing the ball cap, with a pleasant ache in his lats and delts and triceps—well, that felt pretty good, too.

  Wednesdays provided a very different sort of exercise. Physically, he probably got the most benefit from the walk there and back—a couple of miles from his door to the Murray Street premises of the Downtown Gun Club. The hour he devoted to rifle and pistol practice demanded no special wardrobe, and he wore whatever street clothes suited the season, along with a pair of ear protectors the club was happy to provide. As a member, he could also use one of the club’s guns, but hardly anyone did; like his fellows, Kramer kept his own guns at the club, thus obviating him of the need to obtain a carry permit for them. The license to own a weapon and maintain it at a recognized marksmanship facility was pretty much a formality, and Kramer had obtained it with no difficulty. He owned three guns—a deer rifle, a .22-caliber target pistol, and a hefty .357 Magnum revolver.

  Typically, he fired each gun for half an hour, pumping lead at (and occasionally into) a succession of paper targets. He could vary the distance of the targets, and naturally chose the greatest distance for the rifle, the least for the Magnum. But he would sometimes bring the targets in closer, for the satisfaction of grouping his shots closer, and would sometimes increase the distance, in order to give himself more of a challenge.

  Except for basic training, some fifty years ago, he’d never had a gun in his hand, let alone fired one. He’d always thought it was something he might enjoy, and in retirement he’d proved the suspicion true. He liked squeezing off shots with the rifle, liked the balance and precision of the target pistol, and even liked the nasty kick of the big revolver and the sense of power that came with it. His eye was better some days than others, his hand steadier, but all in all it seemed to him that he was improving. Every Wednesday, on the long walk home, he felt he’d accomplished something. And, curiously, he felt empowered and invulnerable, as if he were actually carrying the Magnum on his hip.

  Thursdays saw him returning to the gym, but he didn’t warm up on the elliptical trainer, nor did he put in an hour on the treadmill. That was Monday. Thursday was for weights.

  He did his circuit on the machines. Early on, he’d had a couple of sessions with a personal trainer, but only until he’d managed to establish a routin
e that he could perform without assistance. He kept a pocket notebook in his locker, jotting down the reps and poundages on each machine; when an exercise became too easy, he upped the weight. He was making slow but undeniable progress. He could see it in his notes, and, more graphically, he could see it in the mirror.

  His gym gear made it easy to see, too. The shorts and singlet that served so well on Mondays were not right for Thursdays, when he donned instead a pair of black spandex bicycle shorts and a matching tank top. It made him look the part, but that was the least of it. The close fit seemed to help enlist his muscles to put maximum effort into each lift. His weight-lifting gloves, padded slightly in the palms for cushioning, and with the fingers ending at the first knuckle joint for a good grip, kept him from getting blisters or calluses, as well as telling the world that he was serious enough about what he was doing to get the right gear for it.

  An hour with the weights left him with sore muscles, but ten minutes in the steam room and a cold shower set him right again, and he always felt good on the way home. And then, on Fridays, he got to play golf.

  And that was always a pleasure. Until Bellerman, that interfering son of a bitch, came along and ruined the whole thing for him.

  The driving range was at Chelsea Piers, and it was a remarkable facility. Kramer had made arrangements to keep a set of clubs there, and he picked them up along with his usual bucket of balls and headed for the tee. When he got there, he put on a pair of golf shoes, arguably an unnecessary refinement on the range’s mats, but he felt they grounded his stance. And, like the thin leather gloves he kept in his bag, they put him more in the mood, as did the billed tam-o’-shanter cap he’d put on his head before leaving the house.

  He teed up a ball, took his Big Bertha driver from the bag, settled himself, and took a swing. He met the ball solidly, but perhaps he’d dropped his shoulder, or perhaps he’d let his hands get out in front; in any event, he sliced the shot. It wasn’t awful—it had some distance on it and wouldn’t have wound up all that deep in the rough—but he could do better. And did so on the next shot, again meeting the ball solidly and sending it out there straight as a die.