Saratoga Payback

by Stephen Dobyns

  Also by Stephen Dobyns

  POETRY

  The Day’s Last Light Reddens the Leaves of the Copper Beech

  Winter’s Journey

  Mystery, So Long

  The Porcupine’s Kisses

  Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides

  Common Carnage

  Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966–1992

  Body Traffic

  Cemetery Nights

  Black Dog, Red Dog

  The Balthus Poems

  Heat Death

  Griffon

  Concurring Beasts

  NONFICTION

  Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry

  Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry

  STORIES

  Eating Naked

  NOVELS

  Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?

  The Burn Palace

  Boy in the Water

  Saratoga Strongbox

  The Church of Dead Girls

  Saratoga Fleshpot

  Saratoga Backtalk

  The Wrestler’s Cruel Study

  Saratoga Haunting

  After Shocks/Near Escapes

  Saratoga Hexameter

  The House on Alexandrine

  Saratoga Bestiary

  The Two Deaths of Señora Puccini

  A Boat off the Coast

  Saratoga Snapper

  Cold Dog Soup

  Saratoga Headhunter

  Dancer with One Leg

  Saratoga Swimmer

  Saratoga Longshot

  A Man of Little Evils

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Stephen Dobyns

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Blue Rider Press is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Dobyns, Stephen, 1941– author.

  Title: Saratoga payback / Stephen Dobyns.

  Description: New York : Blue Rider Press, [2017] | Series: A Charlie Bradshaw mystery

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016041987 (print) | LCCN 2016051670 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399576577 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780399576584 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Bradshaw, Charlie (Fictitious character)—Fiction. | Private investigators—New York (State)—Saratoga—Fiction. | Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General. | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Traditional British. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3554.O2 S267 2017 (print) | LCC PS3554.O2 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041987

  p. cm.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For my daughter, Clio Bize Dobyns, who knows Saratoga

  Contents

  Also by Stephen Dobyns

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  One

  Mickey Martin had what an acquaintance called “urinous” breath: a potent alkaloid whiff mixed with the aroma of rotting meat, which caused those whom he had snared in conversation to stumble back in search of relief. He had a square head, a fringe of short graying hair and wore a pair of thick horn-rimmed glasses, which magnified his eyes, giving him an owl-like expression more suggestive of cunning than wisdom. Apart from his small insurance and realty business, he specialized in gossip, slander and scandal, as well as back biting and stabbing. It was assumed to be a mix of these traits that led him into terminal difficulties, because at an hour or so past midnight during an October cold snap, someone had slashed his throat on a quiet street in Saratoga Springs, leaving his body sprawled on the sidewalk. Then, before disappearing, the killer had reached into Mickey Martin’s mouth and sliced out his tongue. Mickey’s urinous breath would trouble no one any longer.

  It was Charlie Bradshaw’s misfortune to discover the body. He had gone to sleep at eleven thirty, nodding off over a book about Sacco and Vanzetti; then, at three thirty, he woke with a start to realize he hadn’t taken out the garbage. The truck rumbled past between seven and seven thirty every Tuesday morning, and more than once Charlie had been forced to run down the street in his pajamas and slippers, holding out a black bag of trash like a belated Christmas gift toward the truck’s green and rusted maw. Usually, when the driver saw Charlie, he would accelerate and his reflected grin in the side mirror would diminish to a gray speck as the truck proceeded down the block.

  So at three thirty-five, Charlie unpeeled himself from his cocoon of blankets—being careful not to wake Janey—put on his robe and slippers and headed downstairs. The two trash cans were at the rear of the driveway, filled with the accumulated detritus of husband, wife and teenage daughter. Then there were two recycling bins. On this night, however, the bins never reached the street, because as Charlie dragged out the trash cans he caught sight of Mickey Martin lying at the juncture of the sidewalk and the concrete path leading to the front steps, though he didn’t at first realize it was Mickey. The only streetlight was half a block away, which made the figure more resemble an oversized parcel than a corpse, but Charlie had spent enough time investigating the darker side of human behavior to guess the nature of this particular parcel.

  Leaving the trash cans, Charlie made his way across the grass while holding his robe closed at the neck as protection against the chill. A dark stain made an irregular circle on the concrete and half surrounded the dead man’s head like a shadowy halo. Mickey wore a long, dark overcoat, dark pants and small dark Italian shoes with tassels, for he had been vain about his feet. Charlie pondered them briefly and sucked his teeth. Then he walked back to the house to turn on the porch light.

  When he returned a moment later, the dark stain had taken on a red shimmer and he saw that the man’s glasses were lying in the grass. Bending over with his hands on his knees, he identified the corpse as Mickey Martin. The slash across his neck was like a lipsticked, toothless smile. He didn’t notice Mickey’s tongue was gone—that discovery would come later. Mickey’s eyes were open and he wore a dreamy, somewhat confused e
xpression.

  Charlie straightened up and massaged the back of his neck. The neighboring houses were dark and he heard no sound beyond the distant yowl of a cat. For a moment he wondered if it would be possible to drag Mickey out to the curb or even a few houses down the street to be left on someone else’s front walk. It was not a thought he entertained for long. The spilled blood on Janey’s sidewalk marked Mickey Martin as Charlie’s very own dead man. But as someone who’d disliked Mickey and who had been the victim of his slander, Charlie felt no great grief for his passing; rather, he believed, as would others, that the course of Mickey’s life had made early and violent death close to inevitable. Still, it was murder, and no matter how much Mickey might have deserved his fate, such conduct couldn’t be permitted in the Republican community of Saratoga Springs. The trouble for Charlie was that Mickey had apparently been on his way to see him. Although Charlie hadn’t laid eyes on Mickey for at least six months, he could foresee a range of personal disruption, the least of which being that he’d get no more sleep that night. Along with turning on the porch light, Charlie had grabbed his cell phone from the hall table. Once more sucking his teeth, he punched in 9-1-1.

  —

  Victor Plotz also woke up shortly after at three a.m., opening his eyes with a start. But it wasn’t because of garbage. Years before, in what he thought of as another life, he had been the super in a Lower East Side tenement in New York and garbage had occupied a large portion of his time, lugging out thirty cans of it once a week, then lugging them back and cleaning up the messes left from the passive-aggressive and overpaid hulks who worked on the garbage truck—spilled plastic bottles, splops of unrecognizable food and containers redolent of sour milk. Victor had had enough of garbage. It was for him a religious conviction. And a benefit of living with the Queen of Softness, his long-term fiancée, was that he could leave the garbage to her or to one of the men or women employed at the lunch counter—“Family Eats Can’t Be Beat”—attached to her house. Vacuuming, washing clothes, refreshing the cat box, Victor would do it all. But not garbage. And, thanks to his New York tenement, he had finished life’s requisite burden of manhandling garbage cans at a relatively young age.

  No, what woke Victor was a guilty conscience, a phenomenon experienced so rarely that he had lain awake for a minute wondering what the problem was. Beside him on the king-sized water bed, the Queen of Softness made soft purrs and grunts. The room was dark except for a mural of Elvis on black velvet on the opposite wall, which soaked up the glow from the bathroom night-light, giving the late singer’s open mouth and ruby-red tongue a ghostly iridescence.

  Then Victor remembered why he felt guilty. It was Dave Parlucci, who had accosted him earlier in the evening at the Parting Glass as Victor had been chatting up a waitress, Paula Something, trying to catch a glimpse between the open top buttons of her man’s white shirt, down, down to the pink wonder of cleavage dividing her humongous breasts. Circus high divers, Victor felt sure, had leapt into smaller spaces.

  Parlucci had slapped him on the back. “Hey, Vic, don’t you rub noses with Charlie Bradshaw, you know, the busted gumshoe, or whatever he calls himself?”

  The interruption was annoying on so many levels that Victor hardly knew where to begin, except that Charlie was his best friend. “Hunh,” he said as he searched his mental repertoire of derision for a suitable response. Parlucci bounced on the balls of his feet in front of him, a red-haired young man with close-set eyes wearing a Harley motorcycle jacket. Lobster eyes, thought Victor. Parlucci was a day bartender someplace and at night he worked as a bouncer at a kids’ bar, the Tin and Lint, where he was known for tricking out Skidmore cuties with promises of grass.

  “I was out at his place on the lake,” continued Parlucci, “and some colored family was living there. Bradshaw don’t have any colored blood, does he?”

  Here were more verbal provocations to deal with. In the meantime, Victor was aware of Paula Something drifting away and taking her humongous breasts with her. Soon somebody less deserving would be chatting her up.

  “He’s renting the place,” said Victor. “The guy’s a doctor.”

  “Jeez, who’d go to a colored doctor? How’d you like him to shove his fingers up your ass?”

  “If you don’t get lost, I’ll spit in your drink,” said Victor as politely as possible. The doctor was in fact Victor’s own doctor and he had recently warned Victor that losing his temper was bad for his blood pressure and might lead to a paralyzing stroke.

  “Touchy, touchy,” said Parlucci.

  Verbal insult wouldn’t rid him of Parlucci, while the bloody alternatives could land him in jail for what he called “the duration”—Victor admitted to being on the cusp of seventy. So he struggled to content himself with the compromised path. “What’s on your mind?”

  “I’m looking for Bradshaw. I already said.”

  “Why are you looking for him?”

  Parlucci was drinking a green concoction with a maraschino cherry. Ducking two fingers in his glass, he drew out the cherry by its stem. A lime-green sludge clung to his fingernails. “Have I ever shown you how I can tie the stem of one of these suckers in a knot just with my tongue?” He stuck out his tongue, the same green color as his drink, though a shade lighter.

  Victor repeated his question and Parlucci tossed the cherry in his mouth. “Maybe it’s none of your business. I mean, I got business with Bradshaw, not with you.”

  Victor turned back to his Guinness. “Then forget it.”

  “Hey, don’t be so sensitive. I owe him a hundred bucks going back a few months. I hit a lucky horse at the simulcasts this afternoon and thought I’d pay what I owe him. It’s easier than avoiding him all the time.”

  Victor didn’t necessarily believe Parlucci, but he wanted to end the conversation without further delay. “Why’d he lend you the money?”

  “Come on, Vic, I needed a coupla tires for my truck.”

  Although an irritant, Parlucci seemed harmless. Let Charlie deal with it. “He’s married now and living with his wife in town. Over on the west side.” He gave Parlucci the address. As he did so, Victor swore he’d have to remember to tell Charlie about it. In fact, he knew he should have asked Charlie before he gave Parlucci the address. Still, Parlucci could have just used the phone book, except, as Victor then realized, the phone was in Janey’s name.

  “Did he ever get his detective license back?” asked Parlucci.

  Charlie had lost his license, or so the district attorney had claimed, for constantly sticking his nose into police business.

  “No, he’s retired.”

  “He’s doing nothing?”

  “He’s thinking of opening a bar.” This possibility had just occurred to Victor. Charlie himself had never spoke of such a thing.

  “That’s what I’d like—free drinks and waitresses scared of losing their jobs. You pinch ’em and they can’t complain.”

  After Parlucci left, Victor turned his attention to luring Paula Something back into his immediate environment. She had breasts the size of a pair of Maltese pups and Victor imagined throwing himself into their pink gully and wiggling his feet in the air—a fantasy that sped the blood through his geriatric veins. Soon he forgot all about Parlucci; that is, till three o’clock that morning when he woke from a sound sleep to realize he had forgotten to call Charlie.

  —

  Also at three a.m., a dark blue Ford F-350 pulling a horse trailer drew to a stop on a dirt road ten miles east of Saratoga. The truck’s lights had been off as it moved slowly forward, its path lit only by the half-moon and a flashlight that the man riding shotgun flicked on and off to make sure they weren’t heading for a ditch. Anyway, the driver knew where he was. For the past week, he’d been taking practice drives.

  “That’s it—five-point-eight miles,” said the driver.

  “Make sure the door light’s off,” said a man
riding on the bench seat in back.

  The driver made an exasperated noise. “I already told you. It’s out.” He opened the door. Although no light came on, a ringing sound chimed through the night.

  The man riding shotgun cursed. “For shit’s sake, take out the key.”

  The driver removed the key and the ringing stopped. The three men sat quietly, listening. The only sound was a distant roar of a tractor-trailer downshifting as the driver descended toward the Hudson River on Route 23.

  “Remember,” said the man in back, “one bark and they’re on their way. They won’t bark again.”

  “What if they’re bitches?” said the driver.

  “They’re not.”

  “What if one of them’s gay?”

  The man in back had a harsh smoker’s laugh. “You dumb shit, whoever heard of a faggot Rottweiler?”

  “Let’s get moving,” said the third man.

  Once out on the road, the third man went to the rear of the trailer, removed a backpack, a few burlap bags and another bag in which a creature was squirming and whining. The man slapped the bag. “Shut up.” The whining stopped. He tossed a couple of burlap bags to the driver. “Wrap these around your arm just in case.”

  “Aw, fuck. What about the bitch?”

  “Like you said, one of them might be gay.”

  The driver fixed the bags around his arm, securing them with string. The other man did the same. The one who’d ridden on the bench seat was on his knees by an eight-foot fence, pulling squares of sod away from the soil. Then he began shoveling. “Don’t forget the electric fence.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t you forget to cut it,” said the driver.

  “Just give me the sign when you’re coming back. We’ll only have a couple of minutes after I cut it.” In another moment, he’d finished digging, having made enough room for the men to crawl under.

  “Can’t you dig a little more?” asked the driver.

  The man put the shovel back in the truck. “Suck in your gut and don’t drink so much beer.”

  “You ready, Hank?” said the driver.