Murder in the Rough Read online

  When I went to Mr. D. L.’s house Luna would be red-eyed in front of the television, eating potato chips, candy bars, cookies, hamburgers, TV dinners.

  “How you doing, darling?” I’d ask.

  One evening after a solitary supper of catfish on the butte I went to talk to Mr. Haskew about it. He was sitting on a bench outside his barn cleaning his pistol. I sat and told him that Luna had lost her affection for me, how we never kissed since I asked was she pregnant. I lit my pipe and offered him my tobacco. He refused with a wave of his hand. He offered me a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, which I accepted. I took a long swig, feeling dizzy. I started crying. He stood up holstering his pistol and limped into the barn, leaving me the bottle. Before long I heard the tractor cough to life. I was drunk but still knew it was too late in the day to start bushhogging. I heard Inez’s steps coming up behind me. She walked barefoot around me wearing the dress she always had on, a blue one with no sleeves. I thought I ought to bring Inez some of the things that Luna never wore.

  “You want a drink?” I asked.

  She reached and took my hand and led me inside. We went into a little room with deer horns and cow skulls nailed to the walls. A bird’s nest hung in one corner. Inez took the bottle from me and put it away. She bent down over me and undid my pants, took out what she found there. She lifted her dress with a rough scratching of material over skin and eased herself down onto me.

  All good things end.

  Luna was gone the next day, and then Mr. D. L. and his boys came home. I watched from the woods as they stabbed a For Sale sign into the yard of the house. They all wore suits. All smoked cigars. T-Bob had grown taller and had his hair cut short. The three of them went past the gate and into the golf course. They looked at one another as they saw its condition, no doubt having expected it to be a gnarled mess, a wilderness. They walked on. I kept pace with them, always a tree, a hill between us. Mr. D. L. took a tiny telephone from his pocket, opened it and talked to someone. Then they walked on.

  Half an hour later I watched as Jimmy Younger drove up in his pickup. I watched as they talked and I knew he was telling them all about me. I watched as they started looking toward the trees, as Jimmy gave them all rifles. At Mr. Haskew’s barn they told the old man and Inez to pack up and go.

  Then they came looking for me.

  I rode Big Steve over the hills and drew him up alongside Lucius’s barn and then turned him loose, watched him gallop off across the meadow. The closed barn doors were so overgrown with kudzu that I had to pry them open and slip inside and let them shut behind me. I slid my feet along carefully, avoiding the larger pieces of glass that were like spikes, and I moved toward the spirits’ chairs. They were dark with cobwebs that sagged with the weight of dust, and sunlit cracks in the walls caught the swirls of dust I made by sitting. Taking off my boots, I picked diamonds of glass from the soles and drank from a bottle of Jim Beam. I left my socks hanging on the back of a chair and leaped and caught a ledge and swung hand over hand around the barn’s interior, sure-handed and -footed as ever, hugging at times the wall while my fingers dug into cracks between boards and my toes clenched an inch-wide outcropping of wood: scaling the wall and moving through the rafters like a thing from the jungle, dropping easily into the spirits’ chairs for shots of whiskey, then back up, around, flying through beams and over nails, feather-light, daring, unstoppable, shooting more whiskey as my speed picked up, going around until at last I crashed the empty bottle on the others and sprang from the chairs and rushed up the wall and through the rafters, and with a scrabbling of hands left red stripes across the board where my fingernails were ripped off, and the ceiling was falling away and there was weightlessness and a spray of noise like spindles of musical notes, then numbness: warmth.

  For a long time. Till the door was slung open and Mr. D. L. and T-Bob and his brothers and Jimmy Younger stood there in silhouette, holding rifles. I couldn’t move. They came forward.

  DEATH BY GOLF

  Jonathan Gash

  Two things in life matter: antiques and women. Get them right, you’re a millionaire in paradise. Get them wrong, you’ll be penniless like me. Should you be barmy enough to believe that there’s a third essential, you’ve no hope. A man can survive two incurable ailments. Three—and one of them golf—you’re into death, quite possibly your own.

  The auction was pretty gruesome, even for a rainy Friday. There was the usual dross—old tables, wartime chairs, threadbare curtains, rusting garden implements. A few junk dealers spent a groat or two. Us antique dealers ignored the mounds of boots, jam jars, warped pianos and wonky wardrobes, scanned the dud paintings and made for the door.

  “Here, mate.” Joe Winter grabbed my arm. “You not bidding?”

  “For what, Joe?” He nodded at a trio of old golf balls, Lot 206, with the indented surface that’s supposed to make them fly faster, slower, whatever, like I cared. “Them? No good. They’re old, all right, but didn’t you see who’s over there?” I had more sense than point at the elderly gent waiting by the window.

  “No,” he lied. “Who is it?”

  “That’s Judge Wymond.” I kept my voice low. “He’s been hoovering up golfiana for twenty years. Spends like a drunken sailor. I’m broke.”

  “You’ve got to, Lovejoy,” he said. “Please, mate.”

  I was in time to cadge a lift to the usual Friday drinking session in the Fox and Stork, hoping to collect the usual scuttlebutt. I’d hit a bad patch, living on crumbs from other dealers’ tables.

  Antique dealers are a clone of obsessive neurotics—correction: psychotics. A neurotic is to be helped and sympathized with. Psychos, you keep out of their way. Think of them as politicians with an ax. They’re often antique dealers. This Friday night scene in the Fox and Stork will explain.

  We meet in this ancient pub. Not from friendship, but to undermine each other’s confidence by pretending that we’ve made some brilliantly profitable deals. Most of us are broke, trying not to buy the next round, hoping some other dealer will become maudlin enough to let their antique secrets slip.

  The inn, old as the hills, is now so posh you’ve to call it a bistro, taverna or some such. This was a month ago, before the carnage. Until then, I’d thought golf was a “good walk spoiled,” as that ineffable bore Bernard Shaw once cracked. It was his only witticism. I’ll bet that he pinched it, just as he nicked Pygmalion. He should have been an antique dealer. Maybe he was.

  It had been a hell of a day. Dandy Jack, filthy as a stoat and drunk as an autumn wasp, was leaning on the taproom bar complaining (not an all-time first) about auctioneers. A dozen other dealers were getting sloshed with the economical energy of the dedicated grumbler. I was still thinking about Joe Winter. Odd that he’d been so insistent, wanting me to bid for those golf balls. He’s a gardener like his dad was.

  “Gimbert’s upped his commission to 15 percent,” Dandy was grousing. “Rotten, like Sotheby’s.”

  “Auctioneers are thieving parasites,” Fluke agreed. He’s a disheveled ex-army bloke, rotund and boisterous. He once tried to become an auctioneer but kept telling the truth, so he only lasted three days at Gimbert’s in Long Melford.

  “Did anybody notice that mad buyer? A right duck egg.” Dandy stared morosely into his empty glass. No passing saint offered him a refill.

  “That was Georgina’s ex,” Rowena chipped in. “She’s a bitch.”

  Women get no concessions from Rowena. She hates other females. Reasons are obscure. She sits on a high stool because she has perfect legs, to rile other women and make us men sigh.

  “Was it? I thought he was a snooker pro,” Paltry said, buying himself a drink and ignoring Dandy’s pathetic stare. “Must be a lunatic to pay that much for a glass paperweight.”

  Paltry’s a scruffy giant of a man who deals in Georgian silver and Victorian oils. He smokes a pipe and is the only known antique dealer in East Anglia with a woman barker. She’s called Poppy and is remarkable for loving him. Everybody keeps te
lling her that he treats her like dirt. She’s beautiful and frighteningly frank. “Oh, I know Paltry’s not worth it,” she says, dazzling you with her smile, “but I love him, so there you go.” She’s married to a bookmaker’s clerk in Winchester and goes home once a week. She was seated opposite Rowena, waiting patiently, ready to spring should Paltry signal that he wanted another glass. It’s a rum world.

  A barker, incidentally, is an antique dealer’s sniffer-out of antiques. Every dealer has one. Think of a pilot fish questing ahead of a hunting shark. All barkers conform to a pattern, usually being habitual drunkards who assimilate news of antiques and other tat simply by leaning on some dingy bar all day. They learn by osmosis, I suppose.

  “His name’s Bill Porteous,” Chris Laughton said. “Him and Georgina Porteous split because of That Fight.”

  Chris is colonial tribal artifacts and Great Civil War coinage, but is a better forger than he is an antique dealer. If you’ve got a genuine Zulu impi shield from the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, take it to Chris in Sudbury. He’ll pay you over the odds, then turn out a dozen fakes, all copied meticulously in genuine materials, and swamp the antique market. Like all skilled forgers, he makes money while cheating everybody else. Chris added complacently, “Bill Porteous has started an antiques shop near Georgina’s. He’s ruining her trade.”

  “The darling!” Rowena cooed, radiant at the thought of Georgina starving in some gutter. “I do hope he succeeds! She’s a bitch.”

  “Good luck to him,” George Arrance put in morosely. “My antiques shop lasted a fortnight.”

  Everybody knows the antique dealer’s old adage: If you want danger, try sky falling with an umbrella, or Russian roulette, but don’t do anything really risky like opening an antique shop. George had been talked into it by a meek little lady who wanted a quick sale for her Olde Tea Shoppe in Lowestoft. She’d taken him to the cleaners.

  Then Velcro laughed, shaking his head. He’s a New Zealand sailor who jumped ship, never again to leave our shores. He owns a shoe retailer’s in Wellington. People keep writing asking when he’s coming home. They send him monthly accounts and AGM reports but he bins the lot unread. Sometimes they even send him airline tickets, which he sells. When antipodean lawyers come a-stalking we tell them that we’ve never heard of him. Paltry misdirected the last lot to Manchester. Velcro bought him beer for a week for that kindness. Nice bloke, Velcro. He can drink a pint while doing a handstand, the sort of trick I really admire.

  “Know what?” he said, helpless with laughter and almost falling off his bar stool. “We’re a right load of plonkers.”

  Everybody scowled. Antique dealers hate being thought morons. They know they’re genius level, way above the hoi polloi They’re wrong, but don’t tell them that.

  “We’re obsessed, see?” Velcro could hardly get the words out, rolling in the aisles. We waited threateningly. Chris roughly pushed him back on his stool.

  No, we didn’t see. He subsided, seeing the grim faces.

  “Look,” he said reasonably. “We think there’s nothing in the world except antiques, right?”

  Glances exchanged. “So?”

  “Not counting Lovejoy. He thinks there’s two things in the world—antiques and women. Right?”

  They thought this over. I shrugged, because he was speaking the truth. Rowena gave me a fond smile. She’d wheedled a pair of gold and garnet Victorian nipple rings out of me the previous week for a song. Well, not a song, more of an encounter, but you don’t betray a lady’s confidence. These nipple rings are often sold as “large pendant earrings of unusual design” by dealers who haven’t a clue. Victorian ladies journals carried advertisements for these intriguing jewels. It’s a “silent” field for collectors, as the trade says, meaning waiting to be discovered. You can pick them up in flea markets for a tenth of what they’re worth. Tip: They’re almost always gold, even if the jewel is only garnet, because gold doesn’t irritate tender skin like cheap alloys do. Chromium, used in alloys, irritates skin.

  “So what, Velcro?”

  “Well, think of collectibles,” Velcro said, sobering.

  “What about them?” Paltry said. “Somebody bid a fortune today for a Baccarat paperweight. Did you see it?”

  “It was a fake,” I said. They stared.

  “It can’t have been.” Chris went gray. He had bid, and only dropped out when a determined stranger kicked in. “I examined it. Genuine Baccarats have silhouettes on the colored glass ends in the pattern. I saw a deer, a dog and a horse, all in black, so it must have been genuine.”

  “No, Chris. It felt wrong.”

  “What an escape!” Chris, badly shaken at his narrow squeak, tottered for a brandy. “I bid four thousand before I ducked out. It was dated 1848. That date’s okay, isn’t it?”

  “Forgers can look dates up.”

  This is the trouble with antique dealers. They fix their minds on one minor clue and start celebrating. They don’t think. My mind, on the other hand, is like a ragbag, full of odds and ends—like, Theodore Roosevelt got his pearl-handled revolvers from Tiffany’s, and suchlike dross. Useless, until suddenly bits form a weird pattern to worry me sick.

  “It looked genuine,” a mellifluous voice remarked, starting this particular pattern.

  We looked round. A smart-looking woman sat in one of the armchairs. We all knew she’d been listening, and had sussed her as a visiting dealer, which is why we were being cagier than usual. Wandering dealers come prowling the coast this time of year. I’d sensed money because everything she wore matched. She looked class. She’d followed us.

  “Yes, dear,” Rowena said in a voice of sleet. “We all saw your bungled attempts to bid.”

  The visitor ignored her. Bonny and cool, her casual manner showed that she could be as frosty as Rowena any day. Makes you wonder if convent schools teach some 101 course in social sniping. She had an American accent, so we knew instantly that she must be a millionaire. All Americans are.

  “Are you one of those divvies?” she asked me, casually curious.

  “Of course he is,” Chris said. “I’m still narked, Lovejoy. You might have tipped me the wink that the Baccarat was a fake. I could have gone on bidding and wasted a fortune.” He went pale at the thought. Other dealers shuddered.

  “Not you, Chris,” I said bitterly. He still owed me for a Spode dinner set. Two months, and not a penny. “You’re too tight.”

  The rest chuckled. They love debt, in friends.

  The exquisite stranger wouldn’t let go. “You can detect genuine antiques without even examining them? I’d always thought it was a fable.”

  She lit a cigarette, pouting to release a plume of smoke into the taproom air. Lots of symbolism there. We were all so mesmerized that nobody reminded her of the no-smoking rule that had come in the previous Sunday.

  “He’s the only divvy in East Anglia,” Chris said, anxious to ablate my mention of his debt.

  Ingratiation, but no money.

  “So you can tell me whether that Staffordshire spaniel figurine was genuine,” she remarked. I watched her smoke rise. Symbolism’s a pest.

  “I saw you buy it. You’ve been had.”

  She looked her astonishment through the haze.

  “You didn’t have time to examine it, Lovejoy.”

  “Tip it upside down, lady, and look inside.” I was suddenly tired. Dealers always blame me when they’ve been stupid. “It’ll be too thin-walled. Look with a probe light—you can get one in a toy shop. You’ll see no potter’s finger dabs there. Genuine figures should show them clearly. And the glaze’s craquelure will be even, not patchy. There are other signs.”

  “Told you!” Paltry said proudly. “Lovejoy’s never wrong.”

  “Then why is he so shabby?” She was now well and truly narked. “He looks off the road, worse than a tramp. If he’s infallible, why doesn’t he make some stupendous finds of his own?”

  “Women, dear,” Rowena purred. “Didn’t you hear? You were flappi
ng your big ears hard enough. Lovejoy falls prey to any coarse tart that happens by.”

  Which from Rowena… I said nothing.

  The woman smiled. The radiance was brilliant, so warm we didn’t need the taproom’s log fire. I felt myself go red. She scrutinized me.

  “Fern Margrave, Norwich, a dealer. I’m doing a sweep through the Eastern Hundreds and need an adviser. I can pay a retainer plus expenses. Interested?”

  “Starting when?”

  “He means yes!” Chris exclaimed, desperate to see money come into the area instead of ebbing as usual. We dealers have this saying: Money in rather than money out. The others chorused agreement, except for Rowena, who was doubtless plotting some poison for the lovely newcomer.

  She dazzled me with a look and remarked, “I’ll remember your law about only two things in life, antiques and women. Quite a doctrine!”

  “He’s wrong,” a voice said.

  We all looked. There in the inglenook sat Bendix. You’d hardly notice him. In fact, we rarely ever do. Bendix is a quiet, reserved geezer, wears a waistcoat and watch chain. He’s creakingly old, always wears his bowler hat. Black boots, crumpled suit, spends all evenings in the Fox and Stork sitting alone. Whenever you look at Bendix he’s asleep. I could only remember hearing him speak a few times before.

  “Wrong?” Paltry said, grinning. The village kids use their peashooters on Bendix’s bowler hat. They bet who’ll hit it first in three goes. He’s harmless, just another dullard on the East Anglian landscape. Paltry winked at us and asked innocently, “What else is there besides antiques and women, Benny?”

  “Golf,” Bendix said quietly.

  Crime doesn’t come stealing in any quieter. I think I was the only one there who had the slightest feeling of foreboding as everybody instantly launched into golfing memorabilia we’d all missed at a million auctions and a jillion trunk sales.

  As the evening ended, my new employer let me cadge a lift to my cottage. I ignored the others’ knowing looks. She hadn’t given Bendix a single glance. A small incident just made for my ragbag mind. It stayed in me, as we drove into the darkness.