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tequila. I pushed the shot glass in Gary's direction.
    "I'm over my limit. Thanks anyway."

 
    Chapter 5
     
     
    Based on the front page of the Sun, Paul would be collecting five bucks from Lester tonight. Just as he'd predicted, Dr. Bencher headlined the morning edition.
    Outside Dr. Gregory Bencher's office yesterday, protesters picketed his participation in a sexual molestation case. Inside the office, an unidentified assailant shot the psychiatrist dead. Police sources have identified the motive as robbery, denying a connection between the protest and the murder. No suspects have been arrested in the case.
    Robbery? I hadn't intended to go by the bar this evening, but I couldn't wait to hear the latest on this turn of events.
    I rolled into the Palm Lakes parking lot at seven, grateful, in spite of a sour stomach and a pounding headache, that I'd found the good sense somewhere to turn down the second tequila. I was surprised to find the pro shop door still locked. Odell called out to me as soon as I stepped inside.
    "I could use some help here," he said. His voice sounded funny, tinny and strained. I traced it to the back office, where he sat with Kaitlin. She was slumped in a heap on the small sofa across from his desk. Odell was perched on the arm of the couch, patting her shoulder arhythmically. She clutched a ragged golf towel in her right fist, which she used to blot the beads of blood that oozed from cuts along the inside of her left wrist.
    "What happened?" I asked. If she'd tried to kill herself, I'd have to rate it a half-hearted attempt. "Should I call 911?"
    "Too late for that," said Kaitlin. "That might have helped fifteen years ago."
    Odell shot me a look loaded with worry, helplessness, and a touch of annoyance. "It's just a few scrapes on her arm," he said. "Nothing too deep. She's a little upset about her doctor being shot and all. I was hoping y'all could maybe talk while I open up the shop."
    I didn't want to talk with her. I didn't need Joe Lancaster's warning to tell me that the best thing I could have done was to put a good distance between me and this girl. But I knew I owed Odell, going way back to those years after Dad split. All the peanut butter crackers and Pepsi he'd fed to me, and the dollars he paid me to shag balls out of the practice bunker when I was too sad to go home, and the five or six times he tried to talk to me about Dad leaving, even though I snapped each time that there was nothing left to say.
    "Sure," I said to Odell. "Go on and open up."
    At first, we sat without speaking. I balanced on the corner of Odell's desk and let my eyes wander over the bookshelves behind Kaitlin. Jack Nicklaus, Golf My Way. Al Geiberger, Tempo. Harvey Penick's Little Red Book. John Feinstein, A Good Walk Spoiled. And my personal favorite—Stephen Baker, How to Play Golf in the Low 120s. Cataloging Odell's collection was not why he'd left me in here, but I was at a loss for how to help Kaitlin. I was almost certain she'd made the cuts on her arm herself. I had no idea how to handle that. And I'd never mastered the skill needed to offer heartfelt condolences, never mind about a shrink who'd been murdered after persuading someone to file suit against her own father. Other possible topics of conversation seemed impossibly shallow, like golf, or even bigger minefields, like incest.
    "I met your brother at Chili-Dippers last night," I finally blurted out.
    "And he tried to talk you into asking me to drop the suit," she said. I shrugged. "I won't do it. Especially now that Dr. Bencher's dead. Someone tried to shut me up by killing Bencher, but it isn't going to work."
    "You think he was murdered because of the lawsuit?"
    "Maybe," she said. "Maybe it was those people Mother sicced on him—the False Memory Consociation. Fancy name for a bunch of cretins butting into business they know nothing about."
    "You think they'd do something like that? While they're picketing right outside his door?"
    "How the hell