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 labeled Women’s Locker Room to 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 of iced tea.
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.
Maybe that was why it was so easy for him to wander the hallways unchallenged.
Huh. He’d have to try that little trick more often when scoping out possible business purchases. It might come in handy.
When Jericho reached the lower level, one door led into the pro shop where he’d already been, so he turned left instead and found himself in the bag room, a staff-only area where members’ golf clubs were stored for them between rounds. Most clubs employed bag boys, the modern equivalent of the caddie, except that bag boys ferried members and clubs to the fleet of electric carts instead of carrying the heavy bags and clubs around the golf course while the members played.
The bag room smelled musty like the carpet was overdue for shampooing. The members’ clubs and bags were tucked into cubbies labeled with each member’s name and alphabetized. The clubs themselves were generally mid-range sets, adequate for a recreational golfer but certainly not a caliber designed to impress their playing partners with status or prestige. Many of the clubs’ blades were worn and scratched as if the golfers did not replace their clubs regularly.
That didn’t bode well. These members were playing golf but not spending money on it. For Jericho to increase the club’s value, he needed members who opened their wallets, not golfers who squeezed their nickels until they screamed.
“Hey!” A woman’s voice rang through the bag room. “Is anybody in here?”
Jericho continued to inspect the bags and shelves.
“Hey, you!”
He peered through the rows of shelves at a feminine figure pointing at him. “Who, me?”
“Yeah, you! Mrs. Lombardi said she has been waiting for twenty minutes for her clubs!”
Jericho ducked and looked around the room, intending to helpfully poke one of the club’s employees to alert them to the problem with Mrs. Lombardi and her clubs, but no one else was in the bag room.
So staffing was another problem at NGC.
The problems were piling up.
Jericho stepped out from between the shelves, intending to inform the unseen woman who’d called out to him that none of the staff members were available at that time, but the sight of her shapely silhouette backlit by the spring sunshine caught him off guard.
She was tall for a woman, and her form was a series of languorous curves as she braced herself with one raised arm and her hip against the doorframe. Her pinched waist balanced her hourglass figure, and her long legs that extended to the lower corners of the door made him think that she might’ve been a dancer at some point in her life.
He stopped as he came around the corner, distracted by the sinuous flow of her body as she strolled into the bag room and demanded, “Are you the new bag boy?”
As the overhead lights illuminated her, the breath left Jericho’s body, and his skin prickled from the buzz of the fluorescent lights above. Her dark eyes were lively, sharp with intelligence, and directed right at him. The room’s blue light flowed over her ebony skin as if it were too awed by her beauty to touch her, and her black hair was braided into perky cords that fell to her shoulders and bounced when she walked.