Golf. Tennis. Murder.

By William J Palmer

At the end of the weekly 9 holes of the WDGA (Wednesday Drunken Golf Association) Nick Jones, a.k.a Sherlock to his golf partners, finds a well-dressed potential client waiting for him. Nicknamed “The Suit” by one of the friends, the client came to Sherlock in his search for a low rent private investigator. When Sherlock takes the job of surveilling the client’s young tennis star mistress, the gorgeous Sasha, he is drawn into the corrupt, sexually active, flexible, and ultimately murderous world of the Los Angeles ultra-rich.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: May 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638290513

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About the Author

After earning his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame, William J. Palmer taught Literature and Film at Purdue University. Golf. Tennis. Murder. is his 11th novel. Previously, the four novels of his Mr. Dickens Victorian murder mystery series were selections of multiple book clubs. His Wabash Trilogy, a sports novel, a crime novel, and a comic novel, explored Midwestern life in the 1970s and 1980s. He now divides his time between Indiana and Southern California.

Dedication

In memory of

Dashiell Hammett,

Raymond Chandler,

Ross Macdonald,

and

all the other hard-boiled yeggs,

and for, as always,

Maryann.

Copyright Information ©

William J. Palmer 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Ordering Information

Quantity sales: Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Palmer, William J.

Golf. Tennis. Murder.

ISBN 9781638290490 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781638290506 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781638290513 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022907387

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302

New York, NY 10005

USA

[e-mail]

[phone]

Other Works by William J. Palmer

Fiction – Novels

The Detective and Mr. Dickens

The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens

The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens

The Dons and Mr. Dickens

The Wabash Trilogy:

The Wabash Baseball Blues

The Redneck Mafia

Civic Theater

The Uses of Money

Two Cities

Eidetic Transubstantiation

Non-Fiction – Books

The Fiction of John Fowles

Dickens and New Historicism

The Films of the Seventies: A Social History

The Films of the Eighties

The Films of the Nineties: The Decade of Spin

Chapter 1

W.D.G.A.

The W.D.G.A! That stands for the Wednesday Drunken Golfers Association. Every Wednesday afternoon, four forty-five or five o’clock for most of us who still work, or are looking for work, or in my case are waiting not all that eagerly for work, we load up the golf carts with beer and other various intoxicants (like booze for shots and maybe, when available, weed) and tee off at the Venice Public, the nine-hole public golf course wedged between the Santa Monica Airport and the homeless encampments on the far east end of Venice Beach. Most Wednesdays we play until dark thirty or until we get so drunk that the carts start running into each other…or trees.

Ours is sort of semi-serious golf on Wednesday nights. We’re not just a bunch of drunks flailing away. We are all acceptably qualified players with handicaps loosely calculated between six and ten (maybe 12 at the most). We’re not all that bad for a fluctuating group of six to eight public course players. At least five of us are dyed-in-the-wool regulars who wouldn’t miss our Wednesday night golf game unless one of L.A.’s fairly frequent earthquakes cut us off from the course. In fact, the only time our Wednesday night game has ever been seriously interrupted was when the actor Harrison Ford crash-landed his 1940s vintage prop plane in the bunker on the third hole. We were playing the second hole when he came screaming in low right over us. At least three members of our group blurted Holy Shit! as we watched him put it down in the fairway about a hundred yards in front of us and go careening into the bunker on the next hole. The movie-star dude climbed out and walked away from it like he was Han Solo exiting a rough landing in the Millennium Falcon. We all just stood there bug-eyed as he walked past us. After it was over, Dougie Fresh spat, Sumbitch never even yelled Fore!

Anyway, we of the W.D.G.A. all have one thing in common, one thing about our golf games that we share. We can all still play pretty well when we are drunk. In fact, some of us play better under the relaxing influence of either Budweiser or Busch Light. Of the five W.D.G.A. regulars, every one of us at one time or another in our golfing histories has shot a round under par. We also had seven holes-in-one among us (I had three myself, the first one coming when I was fifteen years old and playing at Briarwood, the fancy country club where my parents belonged). So, we of the W.D.G.A. are a semi-talented, congenial group of social misfits who play decent golf, enjoy drinking together, and tell lies with the very best of fivesomes. The management and workers at the Venice Public know who we are, know that Wednesday nights belong to us, tolerate us, and keep the bar open late, well after dark, for us on Wednesdays. The bartender loves us because when we’re drunk, we’re pretty good tippers.

So, meet the W.D.G.A. regulars. There’s Doug E. Fresh, the Panda, the Doctor, Clay Boy, and me. They all have real names, but we haven’t used any of them for years. In the W.D.G.A. once one of us comes up with a nickname it tends to cling like a rabid succubus. And, without any question, all the nicknames and their origin stories are incredibly stupid. Doug E. Fresh is a good example.

One W.D.G.A. evening we were on the sixth hole and Doug had already hit and was sitting in the shade out of the blistering sun while the rest of us hit. I came up beside him under the tree.

Good shot, I said. It’s on the green. Hell, his iron shots are almost always on the green. They are one of the things we all genially and genuinely dislike about him.

I know, Fresh answered. You go on. I’m gonna just sit here freshin’ for a few minutes.

‘Freshin’?

Yeah, freshin’.

What the hell is freshin’?

Just keepin’ cool, not all sweaty like you mooks.

Is this how you keep your golf wardrobe so impeccable?

Pecker this! he spat at me and flipped me the bird as I drove off.

Everybody just called him Fresh from then on.

After that, whenever any one of us ducked into the shade with him while waiting for the others to hit or the group in front of us to get the hell out of our way, we were always just ‘freshin’. But about a year later I got the golden opportunity to get back at him. He had a downhill lie on the bank of a pond. He took a mighty swing at it, hit it in the water, his feet slipped out from under him, and he fell on his back in one of his impeccable pink golf shirts right in the middle of a large pile of goose shit. When he got back on his feet, we all sniffed the air and I said, Man, you are really ‘freshin’ now!

Then there’s the Panda. No complex story surrounds his nickname. He really looks like a Panda, the only difference being that he isn’t Chinese. Our Panda is a happy-go-lucky bear of a man, six foot and about 250 pounds of huggable, smiling muscle. He is pretty much perfectly square. He hits his drives low and hard most times for about 280 to 300 yards. They come off his driver’s clubface like tracer bullets. Then he usually proceeds to take three chips around most greens.

The Doctor’s nickname came when he once, quite drunk, wised-off to a waitress when we were all sitting around in a bar in Venice on a Saturday night. We called these non-golfing nights the executive board meetings of the W.D.G.A. It was a slow night in this bar and the waitress, probably trolling for nice tips, decided to hang out with us and strike up a conversation. Big mistake.

Hi guys. I’m Heather, she teed it up.

Fresh decided to introduce all of us to this bubbly, blonde, twenty-something: Hi Heather, I’m Fresh and this is Panda, and this is the Doctor…

At that point Fresh stopped for a breath and Heather, puzzled and nosey, giggled and asked: Don’t you all have real names? Bigger mistake.

Of course, I’m Doug E. Fresh.

I’m James, also known as The Panda.

And I’m Doctor Feldersnatch, the gynecologist.

It took Heather about a half a minute to get it and then she went running into the kitchen in horror as we all broke up in rib-quaking laughter. We couldn’t believe he actually said it to her, but in his drunken courage he did, and it wouldn’t be the last time he revealed his title’s origin story to some poor unsuspecting millennial. Despite his sick sense of humor, the Doctor is the steadiest, most consistent player in the W.D.G.A. He drives it straight and long, hits crisply down and through his irons, and putts like a bandit. Our only salvation is that he tends to get drunk faster than the rest of us and starts making bad swings.

Then there is Clayboy. Young, 27-yrs-old, short, stocky, strong, a baby bull. He is possessed with the shortest, fastest, backswing in America and he totally pulverizes the golf ball with it. He hits his drives 300 yards as just a matter of course. Get it? Course? Never mind.

As for me, I guess you could call me a Southern California golf bum. L.A. has lots of surfer bums and actor bums and real homeless bums, but not very many golf bums like me. Wednesdays is not the only day of the week I play golf like it is for all the other W.D.G.A. regulars who have real day jobs they have to go to. If my poor excuse for a job isn’t interfering, I play golf every day of the week except Saturday and Sunday when the courses are too crowded with hackers. I had to manufacture a business for myself where I can pretty much play whenever I feel like it, but especially on W.D.G.A. Wednesdays.

My business is Archer Investigations, a private detective agency that only occasionally does any private detecting. I actually pay most of my overhead bills and my bar bills by sitting on my ass at a computer investigating fraud claims, conducting background checks, doing repo locating, bill collecting, and skip tracing. Only occasionally do I get a client who asks me to do surveillance or evidence gathering. And most of those are divorce cases. So, you can see that I’m not much of a detective, though I do have a car trunk full of disguise material, and I own two handguns that have never been fired. Things the P.I.’s handbook suggested, and I took seriously I have not a clue why.

And my name isn’t Archer either, despite the sign on the mailbox in the lobby of the half empty tenement where I rent a cubby-hole of an office just off the boardwalk in Venice Beach. Archer Investigations also graces the door of that self-same cubby hole which I irregularly visit only because my computer is there. I make it to the office to work most weekends because that is when I am not playing golf and I know that no one will disturb me there. As for Archer Investigations, it does give away that I am an avid reader of detective fiction (one of my favorite writers being Ross Macdonald whose detective is Lew Archer) and of detective movies (like The Maltese Falcon where Sam Spade’s partner in Spade and Archer: Private Detectives, Miles Archer, is gunned down in a dark alley early in both novel and film). I guess my literary naming of my agency gives away the fact that I am semi-literate as a reader (sometimes even going beyond detective fiction) and a film freak (shamelessly attracted to the more classic noir films of the golden age of black and white).

Actually, I had almost three years of college before I got kicked out of U.S.C. for getting drunk and high and arrested for public indecency while pissing in the aisle at the Coliseum in the third quarter of a U.S.C.-Notre Dame football game. I had to go something fierce, and it seemed only reasonable in my beer-addled mind that when everyone jumped up to cheer a U.S.C. touchdown that I should just turn to my right and relieve myself in a small yellow waterfall down the stadium steps. My college days were pretty much a blur. Actually, I hated them, but I did realize that I liked to read, especially hidden away in the stacks of the library. That inevitably led me to taking several English and American literature courses where I could get some credit for what I liked doing anyway.

After my dishonorable discharge from academia, I hit my father with yet another disappointment to hold against his prodigal son; I joined the Marine Corps. My mother was there, but the old man never even showed up to see his twenty-two-year-old son off to basic training. I huffed and puffed and puked and staggered through basic OK. Those three months of sadistic torture didn’t make a man of me (to this day I don’t think that has happened), but they certainly got rid of my beer belly and got all the poison of my alcohol-sodden and drug-laced college years out of my system. After I got through basic and was fully (they thought) Semper Fi’d, I was assigned to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and dropped, a move totally unconsidered considering my past history with law enforcement, into a Military Police (MP) company. Go figure!

Lejeune is the biggest, best appointed, Marine/Navy base in America. It is located right outside of Jacksonville, North Carolina, at the mouth of the New River with miles and miles of Atlantic Ocean beachfront that the Navy and the Corps employ for both amphibious assault training and jarhead sunbathing. When I was there, and I doubt it is much different now, Jacksonville was a trashy whistle stop of dive bars, strip joints, gun stores, tattoo parlors and whorehouses. Lejeune, however, is a city unto itself. Not only is it huge, 246 square miles (about the area of Austin, Texas) according to Wikipedia, but it has all the infrastructure, amenities, and neighborhoods of a small city. It has the biggest PX you can imagine, a PX that makes COSTCO look like a convenience store. But more importantly, for my purposes, it boasted two golf courses, one for the officers and one for the jarheads. It took me one weekend’s leave exploring the delights of downtown Jacksonville to decide that I really didn’t want to waste any of my time in that hillbilly shithole. So, the Camp Lejeune golf course became the absolute salvation of my time there in the Corps.

When I was a kid, nine or ten, my dad gave me a miniature set of golf clubs for Christmas. My parents were rich, self-satisfied, Conservative, Republican and clubby. All qualities that as I grew older I would delight in rebelling against. While I couldn’t forgive all those flaws in their lifestyle, I am eternally in my father’s debt because he gave me the tools to play golf which I came to see as a game closely akin to art. As I got older, the game and the golf course became my refuge, my church, my art form, my escape from a world that I never really felt comfortable in. Really early, even as a teen-ager in high school on the golf team, I realized that golf was a game of arcs, and lines, and distances, and balance, and rhythm, and beauty all taking place in a green world of nature. Hell, I made my first hole-in-one when I was fifteen years old. If that isn’t a work of art, I don’t know what is!

Anyway, back to Camp Lejeune. Its golf course was the salvation of my time there, a world apart into which I could escape from the phony masculinity of the military and the trashy sordidness of Jacksonville. And even better, I learned to play pretty quality golf there. Since the Marine Corps had all of the free jarhead labor it wanted, the golf course had to be one of the best manicured tracks in America. The fairways and greens were perfect, rivalling, I imagined, though I never played there, the fairways and greens at Pinehurst up the road or at Pebble Beach back in California. To this day, I am convinced that the one valuable thing I took away from my years in the Marine Corps was my short game. I perfected my chipping and putting on the military manicured greens that were as fast as an ice rink and as smooth as a supermodel’s yoga pants. I came out of the Marine Corps with a Phil Michelson polished short game that served me well for several years until advancing age and the return of my beer belly and my other assortment of vices robbed it of its touch and spin.

When my tour ended, I fled the Marine Corps like a prisoner from a chain gang. Back in California, I worked in a bank for a while (Yikes!), a job my father got me. I hated it with such a passion that after only four months I disappointed my father yet again and quit to take a job on a landscaping crew with a Mexican friend named Jose that I met at the Venice Public golf course. But after two years of that, poor Jose got deported and I was back on the streets. Then I worked as a Security Guard at night. I had saved up a little money, and (somewhat motivated by my experience as an MP at Lejeune) I decided to strike out on my own and describe myself as a private detective. Viola! Archer Investigations was born. I was issued a PI’s license on the strength of my MP training in the Corps and my Security Guard experience. And so now I’ve been languidly at my lackluster version of being a private detective for the last five years. I’ve just turned thirty-five and I really have no complaints. My business is not demanding at all, and its proceeds keep me in beer and golf. There have been two or three women who did short tours in my lackadaisical life. They moved on when they realized that life with me was going nowhere the way caddies do when they tire of carrying doubles. As for my golf game, it now has more holes in it than a pound of Swiss cheese. I drive straight but not very long. Occasionally, on a short par four I can stick a wedge for a birdie. My short game comes and goes like the Santa Ana winds. Most of the time I chip like I am afflicted with seizures and my putting usually is the golf equivalent of Tourette’s Syndrome. But occasionally, I have one of those days when everything is working and I’m in the seventies and I surprise all the other W.D.G.A.ers. That doesn’t happen all that often anymore, but when it does it is enough to keep alive my love for this graceful and artistic game.

But the most positive aspect of my mid-life stasis is the W.D.G.A. and the happy-go-lucky outlaw gang that we have formed for ourselves. That naturally brings me to my nickname. My real name is Nicholas Jones and before I entered the W.D.G.A. everyone just called me Nick. But that wasn’t nearly good enough for the likes of Fresh, Panda, Doc and Clayboy. My nickname turned out to be an obvious and easy one for all concerned. As soon as they found out that I was a PI, they immediately dubbed me Sherlock. It was a no-brainer. What else for a private detective? That’s me now at my office away from the golf course. Sherlock Jones, yikes!

Secretly, I really enjoy my nickname. As a legend in my own mind, as a pretend detective, I sort of enjoy being associated with the greatest detective who has ever lived. Well, not actually lived, but certainly fictionally lived. I loved the Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle a.k.a. Doctor Watson. In fact, there is a good chance that those Holmes stories were a major contribution to my choice of a detective agency as a life’s work (such as it is). The only problem is that, certainly in my case, my nickname is a hard one to live up to. No one knows better than I that I am not on the detectiving scale of good old Sherlock Holmes. I’m always just going to be ordinary old Sherlock Jones of the W.D.G.A. I’m a real private investigator, but thus far in my professional career (such as it is) I haven’t really earned the right to be called a Tec or a Dick or a Shamus in the grand tradition of Spade and Archer, or Marlowe, or Lew Archer, or Poirot, or Lord Peter, or Miss Marple, or Father Brown, or Harry Bosch. Yes, I’ve read them all, every one, imagining myself like them. Yes indeed, I have quite an active imagination. But if you want to know the truth, reading them has really come in handy for me. They have imparted to me all the secrets of my profession (such as it is). I have often fantasized about living up to my nickname. Holmes and Jones, partners in crime (solving them