Judge Gantry adjourned court shortly after 5:00 p.m and called the lawyers into his chambers for what promised to be a tense meeting. Theo hurried outside and looked for Julio, but there was no sign, no trail. A few minutes later, Theo parked behind the family’s law office and went inside. Elsa was tidying up her desk, getting ready to leave.
“A good day at school, Theo?” she asked with her customary warm smile as she hugged him.
“No.”
“And why not?”
“I’m bored with school.”
“Of course. And school is especially boring when there’s a trial under way, right?”
“Right.”
“Your mother has a client. Your father was putting the last I heard.”
“He needs the practice,” Theo said. “Bye.”
“Bye, dear. See you tomorrow.” Elsa left through the front door and Theo locked it behind her.
Woods Boone kept a putter and a few balls near his desk. He practiced on an old Oriental rug that had very little in common with a real putting green. Several times a day, when he “needed to stretch his back” he would tap a few balls. When he missed, which was more often than not, the balls rolled off the rug and across the wooden floor and made a distinct sound, one that was not quite as loud as a bowling ball roaring down the alley, but a racket nonetheless. The entire firm downstairs knew that the errant golfer upstairs had missed once again.
“Well, hello, Theo,” Mr. Boone said. He was at his desk, not putting, sleeves rolled up, pipe stuck between his right rear molars, a mountain of paperwork in front of him.
“Hey, Dad.”
“A good day at school?”
“Great.” If Theo complained, which he occasionally couldn’t help, then he would get the standard lecture about the importance of education and so on. “I stopped by the courthouse after school.”
“I figured. Anything exciting?”
They talked about the trial for a few minutes. His father seemed to have almost no interest in it, and this baffled Theo. How could any lawyer not be consumed with such an important event in the town’s judicial system?
The phone rang and Mr. Boone excused himself. Theo went downstairs to check on the rest of the firm. Vince the paralegal was working with his door shut. Dorothy the real estate assistant was gone. Theo heard serious voices coming from his mother’s office, so he eased along the hall. He often heard people crying in there, women who were overwhelmed with marital problems and were in desperate need of his mother’s help.
Theo couldn’t help but smile at his mother’s importance. He had no desire to be her type of lawyer, but he was very proud of her anyway.
He went to his office, spent a few minutes chatting with Judge, and started his homework. A few minutes dragged by and it was getting dark. Judge growled at a sound from the outside, then someone knocked on his door. Theo, startled, jumped to his feet and looked outside. It was Julio. Theo opened the door.
“Can we talk out here?” Julio said, nodding away from the building.
“Sure,” Theo said, and pulled the door closed behind him. “What’s up?”
“I don’t know.”
“I saw you in court a while ago. Why were you in court?”
Julio took a few steps away from the office, as if someone in there might hear him. He glanced around, very nervously. “I need to trust someone, Theo,” he said. “Someone who knows the law.”
“You can trust me,” Theo said, quite anxious to hear the rest of a story he’d been thinking about the entire day.
“But if I tell you something, you cannot tell anyone else, okay?”
“Okay, but why would you tell me something if I can’t tell anyone? I don’t understand.”
“I need advice. Someone needs to know.”
“Know what?”
Julio stuck both hands in the pockets of his jeans. His shoulders dropped. He looked frightened. Theo thought about him, his mother, and his little brother and sister. Living in a shelter, far from their real home, abandoned by their father. They were probably afraid of almost everything.
“You can trust me, Julio,” Theo said.
“Okay.” Julio looked at his feet, unable to make eye contact. “I have a cousin, from El Salvador. He’s here, in Strattenburg. He’s older, maybe eighteen or nineteen. Been here a year or so. He works out at the golf course. He cuts grass, puts water in the coolers, all that sort of stuff. Do you play golf?”
“Yes.”
“Then you see the guys who take care of the course.”
“Yes.” Theo played with his father every Saturday morning on the Strattenburg municipal course. There were always a few workers—mostly Hispanic, now that he thought of it—around the fairways and greens taking care of things.
“Which golf course?” Theo asked. There were at least three in the area.
“Out there, where the lady was murdered.”
“Waverly Creek?”
“Yes.”
Theo felt something tighten in his upper chest, a knot of some sort, one that had just formed. “Go on,” he said, though something told him he should drop this conversation at once, run back into the office, and loc
k the door.
“You see, he was working on the day of the murder. He was eating lunch. His lunch break starts at eleven thirty and goes to twelve. He is very homesick, and on most days he sneaks away from the others and eats alone. He carries a family photo of his mother, father, and four little brothers, and while he eats he looks at the photo. It makes him very sad, but it also reminds him of why he’s here. He sends them money every month. They are very poor.”
“Where does he eat lunch?” Theo asked, but he already had a clue.
“I don’t know much about golf, just what he has told me. Fairway and dogleg, you know these words?”
“Sure.”
“Well, my cousin was sitting under some trees in a dogleg, sort of hiding because his lunch break is the only time he can be alone, and he saw this man in a golf cart going real fast down the path along the fairway. The man had a set of golf clubs on the back of the cart, but he was not hitting balls. He was in a hurry. Suddenly, he veered to his left and parked the cart near the patio of the house where the lady was murdered.”
Theo, who was holding his breath, said, “Oh my gosh.”
Julio looked at him.
“Keep going,” Theo said.
“And so this man jumped from the cart, walked to the back door, quickly took off his golf shoes, opened the door, and went inside. The door was not locked and the man was moving fast, like he knew exactly what he was doing. My cousin didn’t think much about this because the people who live out there play golf all the time. But it did seem a little odd that the man took off his shoes on the patio. And he did something else that my cousin thought was strange.”
“What?”
“The man was wearing a white glove on his left hand. This is normal, no?”
“Yes. Most right-handed golfers wear a glove on the left hand.”
“That’s what my cousin said. So the man was playing golf somewhere and decided to stop by this house—”
“And he forgot to take off his glove,” Theo said.
“Maybe, but here’s the strange part. After the man took off his shoes and put them by the door, he reached into his pocket, pulled out another glove, and quickly put it on his right hand. Two white gloves.”
The knot in Theo’s upper chest now felt like a football.
“Why would the man wear two gloves before he opened the door to the house?” Julio asked.
But Theo didn’t answer. His mind was locked on to the image of Mr. Pete Duffy sitting in the courtroom, surrounded by lawyers, with a smug look on his face as if he’d committed the perfect crime and couldn’t be caught.
“Which fairway?” Theo asked.
“Number six, on the Creek Course, whatever that means.” The Duffy home, Theo said to himself.
“How far away was your cousin?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been out there. But he was well hidden. When the man came out of the house, he looked around, very suspiciously, to make sure no one saw him. He had no clue my cousin was watching.”
“How long was the man in the house?”
“Not long at all. Again, my cousin was not that suspicious. He finished his lunch and was saying prayers for his family when the man came out of the same door. He walked around the patio for a minute, took his time, looked up and down