“It’s really better not to know. If we’re not going to clock any more field time, I’m going to take the files home and put some time in on them.”
“Why are you going home?”
“Because it’s already past end of shift, and I want my man and real food.”
Eve scowled at her wrist unit. “Dammit.”
“I can stay if you want to work it here.”
“No. No, go. I lost track. Send whatever you’ve put together to my home unit, and I’ll . . .” She trailed off as she saw she’d lost Peabody’s attention. Her partner had shifted, was currently brushing at her hair and smiling a dopey smile.
“What’s Roarke doing here?” Eve demanded even as she heard his voice.
“Hello, Peabody. I like your hair. Cool, efficient, and feminine all together.”
“Oh.” She fussed some more. “Thanks.”
“The lieutenant working you late?”
“She’s going,” Eve snapped. “Go.”
“Have a nice evening,” Roarke said. “See you Saturday.”
“We’ll be there.”
“Do you have to do that?” Eve muttered when Peabody scurried away.
“Which that is that?”
“Make her go gooey-eyed and stupid.”
“Apparently I have that power, though she didn’t look either to me.” He came in, sat on her desk. “You, however, look tired and cross.” He picked up the PowerBar. “And this is likely part of the reason.”
“Why are you here instead of home?”
“I took a calculated risk that my wife would still be at her desk. Now she can drive me home after we stop and get a meal.”
“I really have to—”
“Work, yes. It can be pizza.”
“That’s fighting dirty.”
“Fighting clean always seems like such a waste.” He two-pointed the PowerBar into her recycler. “Gather up what you need and we’ll eat while I tell you about the round of golf I played today.”
“You hate golf.”
“More than ever, so you owe me. You buy the pizza.”
“Why do I owe you?” she asked as she organized her file bag.
“Because I played eighteen holes with your suspects.”
She stopped dead. “You did what?”
“I arranged to take a golf-mad business associate to the club where Dudley and Moriarity play. We made a foursome.”
She actually felt the temper spurt up from her center to her throat. “Damn it, Roarke, why did you—”
He cut her off by poking a finger in her belly. “You don’t want to start on me after I spent a morning hitting a ball toward a hole in the ground with a club. Which admittedly I’d likely have done anyway, as David loves the bloody game, so it seemed efficient to maneuver it into a little field work. I do occasionally run into your suspects here and there.”
“Yeah, but . . .” She thought about it, and had to admit the spurt ebbed. “Yeah. What did you—”
“Walk and talk,” he interrupted. “I’ve put myself in the mood for that pizza now.”
“Fine, fine, fine.” She grabbed the bag, shut down her computer. “You’ve never played golf with them before?”
“And never will again,” he vowed as they started out. “Though we did end up beating them by three strokes, which didn’t put either of them in a cheery mood. Masked it well enough,” he added and with resignation squeezed into an elevator with Eve and a dozen cops.
“They don’t like to lose.”
“I’d say winning is a kind of religion for them. They cheat.”
“Seriously?” She narrowed her eyes. “Not surprising really. You mean they work together—team cheating?”
“They do. I can’t say how they compete with each other, one-on-one, but with others, they have a system.”
The elevator doors opened. Two cops crowbarred out, three more muscled in. Summer sweat clogged the air like cooking oil.
“How do you cheat at golf?”
One of the cops, obviously a golfer, snorted. “Sister, it ain’t that tough.”
She spared a glance over her shoulder. “Lieutenant Sister.”
“Sir.”
“They use signals, code words.”
Roarke got a wise nod from the uniform. “Bribe a caddy, he’ll maybe shave a couple strokes off. I played a guy who carried balls in his pocket. Dropped them down his pants legs. Asshole.”
“They were a bit more high-tech.” Roarke spoke directly to the uniform now. “They used doctored balls programmed to pocket directional devices.”
“Fuckers. A man who’ll cheat at golf will scam his own mother outta the rent money.”
“At the least,” Roarke agreed, amused enough to tolerate the rest of the ride down to the garage.
“They know the course,” he continued as they walked to her car. “Have obviously mapped out each hole, programmed various lies. They signal each other as they study their positions, the angles and so on. One takes his turn; the other engages the device. They’re smooth about it. I’ll drive since you have a headache.”
“I don’t have a headache. Exactly.” When he cocked his brow at her, she dropped into the passenger seat. “I have an eye ache. That’s different.”
He walked around the hood, slid behind the wheel. “They’re careful not to play so well it causes undo attention. Solid players, is what they come off as. And having a very good game today, a few strokes under their handicap. Until the tenth hole.”
“I don’t know what that means and don’t want to.”
“Neither do I, particularly.”
“Successful businesspeople are supposed to like golf. It’s some sort of rule.”
“Well, by your rules I’m an abysmal failure.” He said it cheerfully, with a definite tenor of pride. “In any case, we started closing the gap on the tenth.”
“How did you beat them?”
“David’s a superior player, and you can say I got into the spirit of the thing, put myself into it more.”
“They were cheating. It takes more than having a good game to beat a cheat.”
“They’re not the only ones who know how to manipulate a game. I screwed up their devices with one of my own. Every time they used one, they sliced or hooked.”
“What, like a fish?”
“I adore you. I do.” Unable to resist, he leaned over and kissed her cheek. Noisily. “You make me feel like a duffer.”
“Okay. If you want.”
“Actually, not at all.” He streamed through traffic. “I’d send their ball far right or left, into a trap or the rough, which added strokes or points to their scores. In golf you want the lowest.”
“I know that much.”
“In any case, by the thirteenth hole, bad luck for them, we were even, and they couldn’t risk using the devices. So we played it straight.”
“Really?”
He turned his head to smile at her. “I was tempted to add an edge, just to rub their faces in it. But I had brought David in for the entertainment, and he got more pleasure out of beating them without it.” He paused a moment, nipped through an intersection. “And the truth of it, so did I.”
“How’d they react to losing?”
“Oh, they were well and truly pissed, masked under hearty laughter and gracious congratulations. Even bought us a round at the nineteenth hole. Dudley’s hands shook, and that was rage. He had to keep them in his pockets until he’d controlled it. And I believe he controlled it with whatever he snorted or swallowed on a trip to the loo.”
“Yeah, I’m betting he snorts, swallows, or smokes a lot. But I meant losing to you in particular.”
Nothing got by his cop, he thought. “I’d say they’ve gone from disdain to loathing, which is also satisfying. If I were the sensitive type, I’d have scraped off their loathing with a putty knife, as it was thick and sticky, but the fact is I enjoyed it quite a lot.”
“That’s because by drinking on their dime and joining their hearty laughter you were actually giving them the finger.”
“And with a modest, just-had-a-run-of-luck smile.”
“You milked it,” Eve concluded.
“Like they were a couple of cows with engorged utters.”
“Eeww.”
“Maybe you had to be there. You’d be interested, I think, to know that Dudley had a bit of a rage in the locker room when we weren’t around and ordered his clubs destroyed.”
“How do you know?”
“I bribed the butler, naturally.”
“Naturally, and naturally locker rooms in your world include butlers.”
“He also smashed his transmitter. I found pieces of it on the floor of the dressing room he used.”