Free Hole in One by Walter Stewart Page B

Yeah, for a story on the spread of anthrax that you rewrote from a press release.
    S: So this new guy, he’s an investigative reporter?
    H: Uh-huh.
    S: Who is he?
    H: None of your beeswax.
    S: I’ll know, ten seconds after he checks into the Dominion House Hotel or the Bide-a-Wee Motel.
    H: Peter Duke. Good night.
    Click.
    Peter Duke. I might have guessed. A TV personality, no less, and not a reporter in the real sense at all. Handsome as a stud horse, and almost as smart, “Call Me Pete” is beamed into our living rooms every Thursday night as one of the celebrity cast of You Asked for It, one of those combination personality-cum-public-affairs shows that multiplied after the success of such real public-affairs shows as
the fifth estate
in Canada and
60 Minutes
in the United States. A team of researchers does the work, and Pete handles the interviews, reading from notes. He has a sincere haircut and a voice like oleomargarine, so the fact that he has less than fifteen watts of brain power doesn’t matter. Somehow—probably as part of a joint venture with the
Star
—Hanna had persuaded
You Asked for It
that there might be a story in our quiet, backwater murder.
    My course of action was clear. I would solve the murder, single-handed, make Pete and his supporting staff look like a bunch of yo-yos, and then decide whether, in view of her traitorous conduct, I was willing to take Hanna back. This, at least, is how I put it to myself when I hung up the phone. Unfortunately, myself shot back a single word, “How?”
    There was a pretty good chance I could starve to death before I was able to fulfil this program, anyway. This latest firing had come at an awkward time; I was flat broke. If Tommy persisted in this foolishness, there was only one thing for it: I would have to go to work over at the Jowett place.

Chapter 11
    The Jowett place, for those of you who missed the splendid write-up and pictures in
Town and Country
magazine, is a cosy little dosshouse on five acres of land along the waterfront, smack dab in the middle of Bosky Dell, with three kitchens, seven bathrooms, a score or more bedrooms, a billiard room, and a living room large enough to hold a dress rehearsal for the Ascot scene in
My Fair Lady
. It was once the summer residence of Sir John Flannery himself, before that tycoon handed in his papers, and, in a burst of whimsy—the only known burst of whimsy in a long, stern life—he named it “The Eagle’s Nest.” Sir John was once described as “an eagle of high finance” in a newspaper profile. There is a wrought-iron eagle on a post by the front gate, which looks, as a matter of fact, quite a bit like a dissipated vulture, and not like an eagle at all. Sir John’s daughter and beneficiary finally couldn’t keep up the estate, owing to a mistaken belief on her part that she could subsist entirely on eighteen Martinis a day. So, about forty years ago, she bought herself a small cottage instead, and the Jowetts took over The Eagle’s Nest.
    Conrad Jowett is the head of the clan, a Toronto financier, one of those large, bluff, bullying patriarchs, constructed along lines laid down by Thomas Wolfe in
Look Homeward, Angel.
He is one of the new crop of millionaires that sprang up like mushrooms after the Second World War, when greed wasn’t necessarily good, just useful. The way we heard it locally, he made a packet in the grocery business and ploughed the profits into commodity trading, where he made an even bigger packet. Like many of his ilk, once he became rich, he yearned for respectability. He made large donations to the church, and that other holy of holies, the Conservative Party. The purchase of The Eagle’s Nest was part of the process. Sir John Flannery had been a pillar of the establishment, and Conrad Jowett picked up at least part of his mantle with the deed to the property.
    He was still coining money, of course, but now he was