A Tight Lie [Hardcover]

Huck Doyle is a professional golfer, a PGA “middler” who just manages to hold onto his tour card as he plays the small tournaments on the circuit. He also happens to be the son of a disgraced LAPD cop, a law school grad without a license to practice, and a registered private investigator. When Joniel Baker, a high profile baseball player, claims that he’s been wrongly accused of murder, he asks his friend Doyle to get involved, to fly under the radar and find out things that the police can’t—or won’t.

Though everything about Joniel and his whereabouts on the night of the murder points to his guilt, Huck decides to take on the case, “because he finds murder investigations a nice distraction from the violent and depressing world of the PGA.”

With the speed of Tiger Wood’s swing, Don Dahler has joined the ranks of Tim Green and Mike Lupica in writing riveting mysteries with a dash of sports. Perfect for thriller readers and golf fans, A Tight Lie

DON DAHLER was a war correspondent for ABC-News during the Iraq War and has worked for 20/20, Nightline, Good Morning America, and CNBC. He is currently a news anchor and reporter for WCBS TV in New York and lives in New Jersey.

Chapter One

 

I found out later it was just about the time I spanked an eight-iron to the edge of the number twelve green at the Bob Hope Classic that someone plunged an ordinary table knife into her heart. Six times. That was after whoever the killer was beat her bloody with a Krups cappuccino machine. Her naked body was discovered lying in her own gore in the kitchen of her moderately expensive Santa Monica beachfront apartment, and the medical examiner later determined she'd had rough sex, or been forcibly raped, shortly before she was killed.

 

It takes a very angry or very psychotic human being to kill another of his species up close with a knife. Try shoving your ginsu into an uncooked chicken if you don't believe me. Gristle and bone are tough and unyielding. So how much angrier, or psychotic, does a person have to be to do that with a dinner knife? A round-nosed, unsharpened, serrated-edged, stainless-steel dinner knife.

 

Six times.

 

That, my friend, is rage.

 

She was a pretty girl, an erstwhile actress and part-time waitress, who was better at rising through the social strata of the movie industry on the arms of various important men than she was at learning her craft and landing roles. Girls like her are cannon fodder for that business, like Russian peasants at the siege of Leningrad getting crushed by German Panzers. And yet somehow, year after year, more and more keep running to the front. Thousands of eager little beavers, maybe hundreds of thousands for all I know, 99.999 percent of whom never make a dime as actresses. I guess they keep coming because every once in a while, a Gwyneth or Julia or Halle manages to rise above the clamoring fray and live a fairy-tale life of money, magazine covers, gossip columns, mansions, and equally famous boyfriends/husbands/lovers.

 

Come to think of it, in terms of the odds against making it big and being a house hold name, it's not that much different from my line of work.

 

She was a pretty girl with an appealing little laugh, a nice little story of making her way from Bumpkin, Illinois, or someplace, all the way to Hollywood, and an earnest little head full of dreams.

 

Dreams.

 

The crack cocaine of the unaccomplished.

 

She was a pretty girl who, like dozens of others that same day around this sometimes violent nation of ours, was in a position to be murdered primarily because she was a pretty girl. Occupational hazard.

 

And while I was trying to close a two-stroke deficit to make the cut on a Friday afternoon on a typical Southern California winter day so crisp and clear it actually hurt your eyes to look up and watch the fight of the ball against the blue, someone who was very, very angry with this particular pretty girl plunged an ordinary dinner knife into her pretty chest. Six times.

 

Her name was Holly Ann Cramer.

 

I didn't know her well, although I ran into her a few times at various parties in the Los Angeles area. Holly would've been a remarkable beauty anywhere on earth except Hollywood. She was, there, just another exquisite tulip in the vast fields of Holland. Sandy blond hair. Slim hips, full lips, perky tips. Brown eyes still unguarded and friendly, which was more a reflection of her limited time in LaLaLand than any realization of her limited chances of success. I recall her being nice to stand near. She smelled like summer.

 

Had she not been dating a guy I knew, I might've even made an effort to connect. But Los Angeles is Holland and the tulips are aplenty, and I've never been one to try to horn in on another guy's squeeze. Not that I even could've in this case. The guy she was dating happened to be the current Savior of the City, a multimillionaire stud-puppy athlete who was supposed to bring the hapless L.A. Dodgers back to their formerly formidable winning ways.

 

I first met Joniel Baker at a pro-am charity tournament. I was the pro, he was the am. Although that day it would've been hard to know the difference. Joniel is one of these natural athletes you really just have to hate. He's gifted at all sports, period. Took up golf three years ago and already has a gorgeous, effortless, loopy swing similar to the one he used to get on base two hundred times last season. There are guys on the tour who would kill for a swing like that. He's a long-ball hitter with good extension and only a little wild off the tee at times. Easy, consistent iron play. If not for his heavy hands around the greens he would be a scratch player.

 

As it was, we won the tourney handily, grinned while we took a half-million-dollar check from the tournament sponsor, and handed it over to the nice lady from the Red Cross, and pocketed five grand each from a side bet with Phil Mickelson and his clarinet-playing amateur partner. Which really, really bugged Lefty.

 

Over beers at his enviable estate near San Diego he challenged Joniel to a double-or-nothing free-throw shootout on his home all-weather composite-surfaced basketball court he was so damn proud of, and Joniel sank fifty-two in a row to take another five k from our host. Phil plays everything like he plays golf: with full-out balls-to-the-wall confidence. As a result, up until the last few years he famously lost tournaments he should've won, but he always looked like he had a lot of fun doing it. Still, who in their right mind would go up against a former collegiate two-sporter in a game of horse? If Joniel had a few more inches coming out of UNLV, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he would've been drafted by the NBA, too. But God love him, Lefty thinks he can beat anybody if he just tries hard enough, so he talks trash with Joniel and convinces him to have a shoot-out. What a wonderful lunatic. Ten grand is nothing to the Masters champ these days, but his pretty wife, Amy, didn't look exactly overjoyed.

 

Back in the desert oasis called La Quinta, about a hundred and fifty miles away from where Holly lay sprawled on the Saltillo tile with a knife protruding from her chest and every last wisp of dignity and light and promise and dreams vanishing to wherever such things go, I chipped in from a foot off the green for a birdie three. Six more holes to make one more birdie and live to play another day and maybe even finish in the real money, although that was something I refuse to let enter my mind during a match. Nothing dims your focus like thoughts of winning. You tighten up, start to overthink every shot, and the putts . . . God, the putts . . . like some force field surrounds the cup. I don't know how the other guys do it, but when I feel those I'm-playing-great-today-jeez-what-if-this-is-it? thoughts start to well up from my gut, I pull out the big guns. The really big guns.

 

Pamela Anderson's breasts.

 

I picture those impossibly round, impossibly high, impossibly fake globes, and my heart rate lowers, my hands steady, and my mind empties of extraneous crap like wondering if I'm going to win, and how much money would that be after taxes and my caddie Kenny's cut, and who'll interview me on the Golf Channel. Works every time.

 

Try it. I bet you just glazed over for a second and thought about her enormous breasts, even if you're a woman. Know why? Because we've all seen them. It's a fact. Every single person in the Western world has at some time or another seen Pamela Anderson's tits. And maybe because they're so familiar to me, pictorially speaking, of course, they act as a sort of hypnotic talisman, or sacred religious relic, or . . . juvenile erotic distraction. Probably the last.

 

The thirteenth hole was a downhill par-three with a tricky little swale just behind the cup that, if you hit the slightest bit long, would take your ball and run it all the way down to a bitch of a bunker. I know: That's what happened to me here the day before. I had asked Kenny for my eight-iron; he squinted the way he does when he's not sure that's the right club, but he couldn't argue with the distance. I smacked an easy, smooth, pretty little shot that landed four feet short of the flag, bounced past it, and ended up a good twenty yards away in a steep-sided sand trap. I walked away with a miserable double bogey.

 

I'm not by any means the biggest guy on tour, just a hair over six feet, but like most of the younger generation of players, I work hard at conditioning. That pays off in distance, with every club in the bag. Most of the time that's a good thing. Sometimes, I have to remind myself to dial it back a bit. So this time, lesson learned, I reached for the nine, aimed a little left of the green, swung a little firmer than usual, and let the club face cut through the ball. It started left then floated in a wide curve and plopped on the fringe in front of the green, slowly rolling to a stop seven feet from the cup. I smelled my birdie.

 

Oh, if it were only so easy.

 

I two-putted, of course. Then got a bogey on number fourteen, birdied the fifteenth to put me back just below the expected cut line, and made a tidy pair of recovery shots from the trees and a greenside bunker on the sixteenth to save par.

 

The seventeenth was a dogleg left par-five, 581 yards, with a water hazard in pla...