This Game of Murder

Chapter I

As always when he ran into her unexpectedly, Kirk Marshall’s heart did a little flip when he spotted Betty Case alone at a table in the country-club bar. He learned to repress any emotional reaction when he knew in advance he would encounter her at some social function, but even after eleven years of her being another man’s wife, an accidental encounter still threw him.

She glanced up to see who had stopped so abruptly in the doorway, and flushed slightly when she recognized his tall figure. Her flush caused his heart to flip again, for it seemed to indicate she, too, still reacted to their unexpected encounters.

He moved over toward her table, a tall, lean man dressed in rumpled cotton slacks and an open-necked sport shirt. He said casually, “Hello, Betty. Where’s the lord and master?”

“Out on the lake fishing with Doc Derring,” she said in an equally casual tone. “Bud and I got bored spending Sunday afternoon at home alone, and decided to visit the club. Bud’s down on the beach.”

Bud, whose real name was Bruce, Jr., was her ten-year-old son.

Standing the golf bag he was carrying in the corner behind her table, Marshall folded his lanky frame into a chair across from her. He glanced at her nearly empty glass.

“Tom Collins?” he asked.

When she nodded, he called to the club steward, “A beer for me, Al, and a Tom Collins for Mrs. Case.”

It would have been rude not to sit with her, since she was the only other person in the bar aside from the steward, he told himself. He wasn’t going to carry his practice of avoiding her to the point of acting like a juvenile.

While awaiting the drinks, Marshall examined Betty Case critically. At thirty she seemed as lovely to him as when she had been his teen-age sweetheart. She was tall and shapely, with a bust still as firm and a stomach as flat as it had been in high school. Her hair was the same strawberry-blond and her golden tan skin still as creamily smooth.

A good deal of the latter was visible at the moment, for she was dressed in the standard summer afternoon garb of the younger female members of the country club: very short shorts and a halter.

Suddenly glancing up, she caught his gaze on her. “Are you admiring or disapproving?” she asked sardonically.

“Admiring,” he said with a grin. “You always had the prettiest legs in Runyon City.”

“Thank you, sir. If I were standing, I’d curtsy.”

Al brought over the drinks and Marshall paid for them. Glancing around at the empty barroom, he said, “Where’s your clientele today, Al?”

“Those that aren’t out on the beach are on the golf course,” the steward said. “Wait till about five and the place will be packed.”

When Al moved back behind the bar, Betty said, “Where’s Lydia today? I keep hearing you’ve become inseparable.”

“She’ll be along. We have a date for golf at two.” He glanced at the clock over the bar, which said one forty-five. “I’m a little early.”

Betty took a sip of her fresh drink. “Set the date yet?”

“Why’s everyone so eager for us to get married?” he inquired. “We both like the status quo.”

“Both?” she said with raised brows. “She’s an unusual woman if she really means it. It’s been about two years, hasn’t it?”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “She doesn’t have your belief in whirlwind courtships.”

She looked at him reproachfully and he flushed. “Sorry. That was a teen-age comment. I didn’t mean to sound bitter after all these years.”

She made no reply, and they silently sipped their drinks for a few moments. The bar phone rang.

“For you, Kirk,” Al called.

“Excuse me,” Marshall said, going over to the bar and taking the phone from the steward’s hand.

After a short conversation he returned to the table.

“Lydia,” he said ruefully. “An aunt and uncle from Buffalo drove down unexpectedly, so our golf date is off.”

“That’s too bad,” Betty said. Then she cocked an eyebrow at him. “I’m at loose ends. Would it hurt your pride to play a round with a woman who can beat you?”

“That’ll be the day,” he said. “Bring your clubs?”

“No, but I can be home and back in five minutes. It’s only four blocks. You could be locating Bud on the beach while I’m gone to tell him where I’ll be the next couple of hours.”

Finishing her drink, she rose to her feet. Marshall got up also.

“Think he’ll be all right down there that long?” he asked.

“He’d be in the water all afternoon whether I’m sitting here or am on the golf course. There’s a lifeguard. See you in five minutes.”

She walked out the door leading to the main lounge; Marshall turned the other way and left by the door facing the lake.

The Rexford Bay Country Club was right on the shore of Lake Erie, and the beach was only fifty feet from the clubhouse. About two dozen people were sunning on the sand, and another two dozen were in the water. Ten-year-old Bruce Case, Jr. was among the latter. Marshall spotted him in the act of ducking another boy about his own age. The lifeguard spotted him, too, and his whistle blasted.

Both boys looked shoreward. Marshall made a beckoning motion and called, “Bud!”

The boy waded ashore with an abashed expression on his face. He was a wiry, well-built youngster with strawberry-bond hair, the color of his mother’s, and his father’s solidly handsome face.

“Hi, Mr. Marshall,” he said.

“Don’t look so guilty,” Marshall said with a grin. “I didn’t call you in for ducking that kid. I’m just delivering a message from your mother.”

“Oh,” Bud said in a relieved voice.

“We’re going to play a round of golf, so you won’t find her in the clubhouse for a while.”

“Okay,” the youngster said cheerfully. “That all?”

“Uh-huh.”

Bud turned and dashed back into the water.

As Marshall and Betty pushed their golf carts toward the first tee, he wondered without much concern if their game together would incite any clubhouse gossip. In all probability most people had forgotten by now that they were once childhood sweethearts, he thought. There were probably numerous married women in the club who in their teens had gone with male members now married to someone else, and with whom they were still casually friendly.

As though she read his thoughts, Betty said, “Do you suppose we’ll cause a scandal?”

“Why should we?” he asked.

She gave him a sidelong look. “Bruce has always been a little jealous of you, you know.”

Marshall was honestly surprised because he certainly had never given Bruce Case any cause for jealousy. As a matter of fact he had tended to avoid the Cases ever since their marriage, and had merely been impersonally polite when he was unavoidably thrown into their company.

“If you’re worried about his reaction, why’d you suggest a game?” he asked.

“Who’s worried? I’m not very concerned about Bruce’s reactions to anything at the moment.”

That sounded as though they were having trouble, he thought. Maybe the predictions of the town gossips that the marriage would never last were finally working out after all these years.

As Betty teed up, Marshall thought back with a twinge of pain to the days when she had been his girl. Though there had never been a formal announcement of their engagement, it had been tacitly accepted by both of them from the time she was a high-school freshman and he was a sophomore that someday they would marry. Insofar as he was concerned there had been no change in their future plans when he went off to the University of Buffalo and she went to Byrn Mawr. It had been a total shock to him when, in her sophomore year, she suddenly eloped with a twenty-five-year-old Philadelphia law clerk.

When Betty quit school and brought her new husband home to live with her parents, the local gossips had a field day. Since Bruce Case’s Philadelphia antecedents were never mentioned either by him or his in-laws, it was automatically assumed that he came from a moneyless and socially unknown family, which in turn led to the automatic conclusion that he had married Betty Runyon for her money.

Of course this would have been the automatic conclusion if any outsider who wasn’t known to be a millionaire had married her, for the Runyons were not only the oldest, but the richest family in Runyon City. Betty was the great-granddaughter of old Cyrus Runyon, who had founded the city in 1850 and had made a fortune in real estate. The tradition-conscious community felt the same vested interest in her that it felt in the Memorial Park her grandfather had donated to the city. It was generally felt that she had no business marrying outside one of the other old families.

The gossip that Bruce Case was nothing but a fortune hunter had been reinforced when Betty’s father, Arthur Runyon, had bought his new son-in-law a junior partnership in a local law firm. The local I-told-you-so group drew some satisfaction from the fact that he had never developed more than a mediocre practice which couldn’t begin to pay for the scale on which the couple lived.

The gossips had also done the inevitable counting they always do after a runaway marriage. They were extremely pleased when the bride gave birth to a son just eight months after the marriage.

Actually this lessened the hurt Kirk Marshall felt. At least he had the satisfaction of knowing that there had been a more compelling motive than mere fickleness which caused Betty to marry another man so suddenly.

Because Marshall’s handicap was four strokes less than Betty’s, he spotted her four. She was in good form though, and at the end of the eighth hole he had made up only one stroke. On the ninth, a dogleg, Betty topped her drive and dropped her ball at the edge of the fairway, only fifty yards from the tee. Marshall drove his a hundred and twenty-five yards to the exact center of the fairway, right at the turn.

He stopped with Betty when they reached her ball, and watched as she chose a brassie.

“Don’t you think a midiron would be better?” he suggested.

“I’m taking the short route,” she said. “Right over the trees onto the green.”

The ninth hole was at the end of the club grounds, the course backtracking upon itself from there on. Just beyond the ninth green was heavily underbrushed woods, where it was almost impossible to find a lost ball. For this reason golfers seldom tried to loft above the trees, as overplaying the green even a dozen yards could be disastrous.

Marshall said, “Better let me get down to the turn so I can spot your ball.”

She waited until he had reached his own lie and signaled back to her. Even from where he was he could tell she had hit the ball nicely, with a beautiful follow-through. He watched it loft over the treetops and, for a moment, thought it was going to land directly on the green. But it hit ten yards beyond, bounced mightily and disappeared into the woods.

Mentally he marked the spot where it had gone in, then addressed his own ball and laid it ten feet from the cup. He played it safe by taking two putts and was in with a par four.

Betty dragged up her cart as he sank the ball and gave him an inquiring look.

“It went into the woods just this side of that small pine,” he said, pointing. “By the height of the bounce, I’d say it’s at least twenty-five feet in.”

Making a face, she chose an iron and headed toward the indicated pine. Marshall pushed both carts over to the next tee and waited.

About five minutes passed with no sign of either Betty or her ball. A foursome came along and Marshall told them to play through, as his opponent was hunting a lost ball.

When the foursome moved on, he went over to the edge of the woods and called, “Betty!”

“Still hunting,” she called back from perhaps twenty yards in.

He moved toward the voice, crouching to avoid being scratched by low boughs. He found her in a small, grassy clearing on hands and knees, peering into the surrounding bushes.

“Why don’t you give up, sacrifice a stroke and play it from where it went in?” he said.

“And let you take the hole? I can still make par if I can find the blasted ball.”

Shrugging, he seated himself on the grass with his back against a tree.