Hole in One Read Free Page B

Macklin had been involved in the death of a local citizen, it seemed unlikely that the perpetrator, Thomas Heathcliffe Macklin, had actually been guilty of a felony on the day in question—to wit, today—namely, the slaying of one—fumble through notes—male Caucasian, aged about seventy, late of Bosky Dell.
    â€œErnie, what the hell are you talking about?”
    Ernie gestured over his left shoulder, towards the golf course. There, in the middle of the third green, was a kind of giant gopher hole, an eruption of rocks and earth and grass, with, here and there, bits of cloth, which were apparently pieces of some of the victim’s clothing. The rest of the body had been removed, thank heavens, by ambulance.
    I gulped several times. “Golly,” I said, “there must have been some sort of explosion, huh?”
    Hanna leaned forward confidentially, and prodded Ernie. “The steel-trap mind,” she explained. “Never misses a thing.”
    I ignored this. “Who was the . . . uh . . . deceased?”
    â€œOld Charlie Tinkelpaugh,” said Ernie, and took off his hat—whether out of respect, or because it was hot, I don’t know.
    â€œAw, no, not Charlie,” I said. “Charlie,” I told Hanna, “was a nice old boy, even if he did eat paper.”
    â€œHe ate paper?”
    I nodded. “Uh-huh, He used to work in a bank, worked there all his life and, for some reason, probably boredom, he got into the habit of picking up a piece of paper from one of those piles they have sitting around in all the banks, for withdrawals or whatever, and he would crumple it up and eat it. Said he was never really conscious of doing it; he would be sitting there, thinking about mortgages or long-term debentures or whatever it is bankers think about, and he would look down and the paper would be gone. He was a nice man.”
    â€œHe was a nice man because he ate paper, or despite it?”
    â€œHe was a nice man, period. When I was a kid, I used to deliver the newspaper to the Tinkelpaugh cottage in the summertime, and Charlie would always give me a big tip on Saturday, when I came around on my bike to collect.”
    â€œHe probably thought of you as Meals on Wheels.”
    Heartless. Women have no finer feelings, which is another reason among many that the sex should be suppressed.
    Hanna turned to Ernie. “What happened?”
    Ernie looked back down at his notes.
    â€œOn the 14th instant—today—the Subject, Mr. Thomas Heathcliffe Macklin, of 24 Lake Street, Silver Falls . . .”
    Well, cutting out all the necessary gibberish, this is what happened: Tommy Macklin, balked of his ambition to be the first golfer of the day off the first tee, because he had chosen instead to waste his time chewing out a valued employee, arrived at the starting point, only to discover that there was a threesome in ahead of him: Charlie Tinkelpaugh, Sam Biddlemyer, and Wayland Forsyth. These old duffers, constant cronies, make up a small portion of the retired population at Bosky Dell, people who let out a glad Yahoo when they hit the age of sixty-five, sell their houses in the city—actually Charlie retired from a town nearby, called Coboconk, but most of our retirees come from Toronto—and rush to the lake to spend the rest of their lives on golf and other forms of lying. These three belonged to the slow-and-deliberate school of play. They always got in a daily round of golf during the season, and could be observed every morning strolling amiably down the course, happily hacking away and calling out to each other, while, behind them, other and swifter golfers bunched up, strained at the leash, and swore. Every now and then, the Trio con Brio, as they were known locally, would recollect the finer points of golfing etiquette and wave somebody on through, but most of the time they stifled passage as effectively as a ten-pin ball in the toilet bowl.
    When Tommy