His house in Stamford was three hours away, and his tee time was scheduled for an hour from then. He’d called the club the week before pretending to be interested in a membership. The head pro had arranged a preview round with some of the club’s members.
If Jericho were interested in buying the club, he couldn’t meet his potential members smelling like sour milk.
Jericho grabbed the small bag with the socks and his golf shoes, slammed the trunk of his car, and stalked into the pro shop, where a confused blond teenybopper tried to insist that the shop was not open to the general public and onlymemberswere allowed to purchase clothes from the club.
After trying to explain to the ditsy young thing that he was a guest and potential member, Jericho finally called the club pro from his cell phone and asked him to intervene.
The head pro of the Newcastle Golf Club appeared to be in his late sixties but could have been anywhere north of forty. His rough, ruddy complexion testified to the damage that decades of sunshine wreaked on Caucasian skin. Maroon freckles sprayed over his tanned nose and cheeks right up to a distinct line in the middle of his forehead. Above his hat line, his pristinely white scalp shone under the flickering tube lights—those horrid lights would have to go—like a pile of road salt under a blanket of the winter’s first snow. The pro wore a light blue shirt with the club’s logo, a stout tree sprouting white flowers and the wordsNewcastle GCin unreadable cursive on the left side of his chest.
That logo was going to need work.
Mr. Kowalski said to the blonde, “Now, Zoe, Mr. Parr is a prospective member. We’d just love it if he went back to Stamford wearing one of our shirts. Can you see how that works now?”
Zoe frowned as if the concept was difficult for her. “I guess so, Mr. Kowalski. So, it’s okay to sell him a shirt? Even though he’s not a member?”
“I just told you it was.”
Jericho tried not to judge how incredibly daft the poor young thing must be if Kowalski was explaining word-of-mouth advertising and influencer effects that slowly to her. “I’ll take a large red shirt with the club logo and a pair of the khaki Nike golf pants. Thirty-two, thirty-eight, if you have them.”
Zoe dragged her gaze from Jericho’s shoes to his shoulders with enough intensity that he thought she might have wrung the sticky-sweet matcha out of the fabric. “That’s quite an inseam,thirty-eight inches.”
Somehow, even still standing there with warm sugary milk sloshing in his shoes, Jericho felt even more gross. “Just the clothes, please.”
Kowalski showed Jericho to the men’s locker room where, thank the golf gods, there were two shower stalls with dispensers of liquid soap and cans of spray deodorant in a basket on the sink.
Jericho scrubbed the green milk and sugar concoction off his skin. The syrupy liquid had soaked through his clothes to his underwear, so he balled his boxer-briefs up with the rest of his clothes and threw them in the trash.
At the wide mirror above the sinks in the men’s locker room, Jericho finger-combed his dark blond hair back and out of his eyes. The damp strands were beginning to curl over the top of his forehead. He needed a haircut.
Venture capitalists were not allowed to look disreputable nor too young. The four of them had started Last Chance, Inc. when they’d been twenty-five. The dark-haired guys had frosted some gray hair at their temples to look more mature and responsible. Looking back, none of them had still looked a day over twenty-five, and their investors had probably been laughing behind their backs as they ponied up the money.
Jericho meandered through the club, glancing in any door that was not labeledWomen’s Locker Roomto begin to get a feel for the club he was considering buying. Reconnaissance missions into the seedy underbelly of clubs or other businesses told Jericho far more than balance sheets or merchandising materials.
Only a few people wandered the hallways for a club that supposedly had as many members as Newcastle Golf Club was purported to have. The lack of people wandering around sounded warning bells in Jericho’s head. The Narragansett Country Club in Rhode Island where he’d spent New Year’s Eve had half as many members, mainly because the waiting list for membership was three generations long. However, the hallways were more crowded, and the recreational areas of the clubhouse were always bustling with members and waitstaff.
Only two older ladies sat in the lounge area at Newcastle, sipping iced tea.
Tea.Nobody made money off the profit margin oficedtea.
The bar area in a back room off the main lounge was cramped, dark, and unoccupied.
Alcohol was where the money was in a restaurant operation. Unfortunately, the dust on the half-empty bottles on the back shelf did not inspire confidence in the club’s profitability.
When Jericho stuck his head into the kitchen, the shining steel shelves and workspaces appeared clean, but a woman wearing white clothes and an apron tied tightly around her waist shook a knife at him and told him that members were not allowed back there and to get out of her kitchen.
Oh, that was unfriendly.
Jericho dodged back. It wasn’t just that he didn’t want to make a scene. He didn’t want to be caught snooping and then have to evade questions from the manager or Head Pro Kowalski about why he was so interested in the club’s infrastructure.
Another door led to the general manager’s office space, but the lights and the computer were turned off.
He shook his head. On a Wednesday afternoon, the general manager should be in their office to field concerns from club members. Everything about this club provoked a cringe.
As Jericho wandered through the hallway, a young guy with a sunburned nose who was dressed identically to him in a red club shirt and khaki trousers frowned quizzically at Jericho as he passed. Jericho shrugged at him and walked on.
When he thought about it, the kid in the golf cart who’d nearly run Jericho over in the parking lot had been wearing a red shirt with the club’s logo and khaki pants.
Great, Jericho had unwittingly outfitted himself in the club’s staff uniform.
