Saratoga Payback

by Stephen Dobyns

  Then, about eight years earlier, Campbell had hired Charlie to discover the identity of an employee who was stealing equipment from one of his barns. Charlie had come to the farm as an apparent stable hand and a day later he found the culprit—a fellow who had been paroled the previous year from the Adirondack medium-security correctional facility in Essex County. He’d been working as a part-time groom for several months and had a drug habit. A sheriff’s department investigator made the arrest and the groom was sent back to prison as a parole violator. Charlie couldn’t remember his name.

  But now it was Thursday morning, and the previous evening Campbell had called Charlie, asking him to drop by “about a money issue.” Then it turned out the money in question was, as Campbell had added, “a delivery issue.” Campbell reached into his drawer and put a checkbook on top of the photographs. “All you do is deliver the cash. A guy like you in his sixties—no offense, Charlie—they’re not going to worry about you jumping them. A grand for an hour’s work, who’s it going to hurt?”

  Charlie glanced at the checkbook, a piece of soft green leather with the initials F.C. embossed in gold. His retirement consisted of Social Security, a small pension from his twenty years as a cop, the rent from his cottage at the lake and a handful of CDs—“chump change,” Victor called it. He thought of the various uses to which he could put a thousand dollars, the bills he could pay.

  “The horse is insured?”

  “Are you saying I should let them lop off its head and settle for the insurance money?” Campbell had raised his voice, and this was another characteristic that Charlie remembered. Campbell was always ready to get angry.

  “Not at all, I was just curious.” Charlie turned his gaze away from the checkbook to look back at Campbell. “How many owners d’you think have been paid off?”

  “It’s hard to tell, since they don’t talk about it. Maybe half a dozen, maybe more.”

  “Were all the victims in New York?”

  “Those guys are New Yorkers.” Campbell gestured again to the photographs. “The others I don’t know.”

  “And how did these people contact you?”

  “They sent the pictures as an attachment from some cyber café.”

  Charlie wasn’t sure what was meant by “cyber café,” but he didn’t ask. He felt increasingly left behind by the technological revolution, if that’s what it was called. Every time he used e-mail, he felt like Columbus crossing the Atlantic.

  “What kind of security did you have?”

  “Electric and chain-link fences, security lights and two big Rottweilers too horny to do their job.” Campbell explained how the horse-nappers had brought along a bitch in heat. “Now I’m putting in more electronic stuff and a full-time watchman.”

  As Campbell described what happened, Charlie realized the theft had occurred right around the time he found the body on his sidewalk. “By the way, did you know Mickey Martin?” It seemed only the coincidence of time that led him to ask the question.

  Campbell pushed a box of cigars across his desk, offering one to Charlie, who refused, and then took one for himself. “Not really. I ran into him now and then, that’s all. I hear he got his throat cut in front of your house.”

  “That’s right.” Charlie was surprised that Campbell hadn’t mentioned this bit of knowledge earlier, but perhaps Mickey’s death hadn’t struck him as significant.

  “Was he coming to see you?”

  “I think so, but I don’t know why.”

  “He had a big mouth. I don’t suppose he’ll be missed.”

  “Did you have trouble with him?”

  Campbell snipped off the end of his cigar with a small knife. “Very little. A few years ago he was saying some stuff about me and I had a chat with him. Or some of my guys did. How’d he know where you live? You’re not even in the phone book except for that crummy office of yours.”

  Charlie wondered about the stories Mickey had spread about Campbell and how Campbell had made him stop—more muscle than verbal, he guessed. “I’m pretty sure a man named Dave Parlucci told him.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He works at some local bars, either as a bartender or bouncer.”

  “Hanging out in bars isn’t one of my bad habits.” Campbell drew a kitchen match from a small brass box on his desk. “So what about Bengal Lancer, will you take care of the money for me?”

  “When does it have to be delivered?”

  “They wouldn’t say. Sometime in the next few days.”

  Charlie wished he were someplace else, maybe in town at a movie or getting one of those latte things at the Common Ground, someplace without excessive temptations. Though he understood the job wouldn’t interfere with his role as a defrocked PI, it still might lead to trouble. On the other hand, there was the checkbook right in front of him. And perhaps an element of defiance affected his decision. He disliked Chief Novak telling him to keep his nose clean. He disliked the very banality of the expression. “Okay, I’ll do it.” But he didn’t feel good about it.

  —

  For years Eddie Gillespie had seen himself as a young swinger about town, a man who activated palpitations in the hearts of the sexy and susceptible. But the birth of his first grandchild when Eddie was only forty-two had put a dent in his image. As Eddie had begun fast out of the chute, so had his son, born out of wedlock when Eddie was barely twenty. Accordingly, Eddie’s pride in the apple of his eye had turned a trifle sour, as his son became a father while still in community college. At this rate, Eddie thought, by the time he got to Charlie’s age he’d be a great-grandfather a few times over.

  In addition was the problem of Eddie’s hair, which had once been his Saratoga Springs trademark as much as the Empire State Building and Eiffel Tower were illustrative of their respective cities. Eddie hadn’t simply had hair; he’d had a glossy pompadour of black locks rising above his scalp like Godzilla over Manhattan. But that, figuratively speaking, was yesterday. Now Eddie had to borrow, and each day he was obliged to borrow a little more, with the result that the hair on the sides and back of his head, if left to its own devices, would dangle past his neck, while the top of his head would shine like a fortune-teller’s crystal ball. But with the application of sufficient gel and hair grease, Eddie could cover his Sahara of scalp and shape his last locks into designs reminiscent of the glories of the past, as long as the wind wasn’t blowing or you didn’t get too close. The resulting coiffure had the texture of an overcooked meringue and was hard enough to knock down doors, if such had been Eddie’s pleasure.

  Third was the problem of Eddie’s paunch. Where had it come from? One morning when he was forty, Eddie had awoken from restless sleep and unsettled dreams to find it perched, or at least attached, to his waist, like a gigantic succubus, though the term Eddie had used was “wart.” It wasn’t his; he was certain of this. He must have stumbled through a time warp and caught a bad case of someone else’s karma. In the months to come, he’d learned that exercise and diet did nothing to shrink it. Regrettably, it had become as much a part of him as a child born late in life, and Eddie even began to refer to it in the third person—“me and my pot,” “me and my paunch,” and also “my paunch would like another piece of chocolate cake.” But Eddie didn’t like it; he didn’t like any of it.

  These changes had led Eddie to rethink his life’s direction, or lack of it, and his plans for the future and still-to-be-realized nest egg: his retirement in a Tampa condo. Nowadays he drove a truck for the city, plowing and hauling snow and salt in the winter, transporting gravel and sand during the rest of the year. For this activity he thought himself lucky, except for his hair loss, grandchild and paunch. Nowadays he discussed health benefits as he had once discussed fast women; he talked about his retirement package in the same hushed tones with which he had once discussed his genital package. No longer did Eddie yearn to carry a pistol and follow Cha
rlie down dark alleys and into dangerous situations. Danger had lost its allure. In fact, he wasn’t even supposed to see Charlie, according to his wife, while Victor Plotz was off-limits completely. If the powers in city maintenance knew that Eddie was consorting with known lowlifes, his retirement package would become as fragile as a debutante’s orchid. As for his genital package, it now formed part of his wife’s material goods as much as her vacuum cleaner, plasma TV and Honda Civic. Eddie felt lucky just to use it to take a piss, and even that, these days, was problematic, as middle age began to close the tap on his once powerful flow, leading to occasions of urinary trifurcation as one stream hit the wall, one the bathroom rug and the third dribbled down his pants.

  But dissing Charlie and Victor was going too far. Despite Eddie’s limitations, he was still loyal, or loyalish, though he now mostly saw his old friends late at night in out-of-the-way bars while wearing a large hat to obscure the ruined glory of his former hair. Still, he saw them less often and always with an eye on the door, as if his wife with a SWAT team drawn from her church’s ladies auxiliary might burst into the room waving Bibles.

  Even today, as Eddie made his way to Charlie’s office on Phila Street while on his lunch break, he worried about being spotted. It wasn’t that he worried about his wife, who was presumably painting, decorating and extending a variety of fingernails at Gail’s Nails in Ballston Spa, but she had spies, a circle of friends whose only wish was to catch Eddie violating what his wife called the “marital contract”: a document only a trifle smaller than the Oxford English Dictionary.

  The day itself was overcast and cold, with the wind energetically sending the last leaves skittering along the street. Days like these led Eddie to fantasize about his future Tampa condo, which in turn intensified his wish to do nothing to rile up the powers in city maintenance. His lunch hour was his lunch hour only within narrow parameters and conditions, and Charlie lay outside them.

  Charlie, of course, no longer had any need for an office and Eddie knew that he only hung on to it for sentimental reasons. Charlie would read, entertain friends and play solitaire. Very rarely someone would appear looking for a private detective and Charlie would have to say he was retired. Sometimes he would give out PI-like advice—lawyers to call and options available—but he didn’t charge for it. Janey had never asked why he kept the office. It was enough that he thought he needed it.

  The office was on the second floor of a brick building, above a used bookstore, and the stairs and hall Charlie swept himself as a goodwill gesture to his landlord, who wanted to raise his rent. On the opaque glass occupying the upper half of his door, Charlie’s stepdaughter had stenciled in black paint: “Charles F. Bradshaw—Consultant.”

  Inside was a small anteroom with two straight chairs and a brown couch with springs so collapsed that it was scarcely an improvement over sitting on the floor. On a table were ancient issues of National Geographic. A second door with a pane of opaque glass on which was written the word “Private” led to the office itself. The door was open and Eddie passed through it.

  The room was austere, not to say shabby: a threadbare brown carpet, two gray metal file cabinets, a small safe, a cot where Charlie sometimes took naps, two wooden chairs for visitors, a bookcase, an oak desk, a squeaky office chair and Charlie himself, who at the moment was in his shirtsleeves eating a tuna salad sandwich. Behind him on the wall was a framed photograph of Jesse James, looking like a red-tailed hawk on the prowl for baby rabbits. Many years before, Charlie had thought it necessary to have such a photograph; now he wondered why he kept it.

  “You busy?” asked Eddie, pausing by the door.

  Charlie held up his sandwich. “You like tuna salad? I got another if you want it.”

  “The wife doesn’t like me to eat mayo.”

  “She wouldn’t know.”

  Eddie settled himself in a visitor’s chair. “Nah, she’d smell it on my breath.”

  Charlie raised his eyebrows slightly and put his sandwich back onto a sheet of plastic wrap so Eddie wouldn’t feel tempted. “Cholesterol?”

  “Poly fats. She says eating arsenic is safer.”

  Charlie tried to look concerned. “So what brings you here?” He realized that Eddie looked embarrassed, a rare event considering the thickness of Eddie’s skin.

  Eddie shifted in his chair and stared at the photograph of Jesse James. “I thought you were getting rid of that picture.”

  “Sometime next week. I’m getting another picture framed up the street: a painting of Saint Jerome.”

  “You Catholic?”

  “No, but I like lions. You going to say what’s on your mind?”

  Eddie looked embarrassed again and began fiddling with the zipper on his leather jacket. “I heard about Mickey Martin.”

  “You knew him?”

  “Like anyone else, I guess. We’d talk now and then. He had that breath.”

  Charlie waited.

  “You got to see that with Mickey, how he looked, I mean like his expression, it had nothing to do with what was happening inside his head. Like, he had this big smile, he could be a real charmer, but, I don’t know, he was mean as a snake.”

  “I’d heard something like that.”

  “Yeah. Especially if he’d been drinking.”

  “Is that what you came to tell me?”

  Again there was the embarrassment as Eddie inspected a liver spot on the back of his left hand. “I bumped into him Monday after work at Home Depot. My grandkid tossed a ball through the kitchen window and the wife said I had to fix it. You know how it is. A window’s a window, right?”

  “I thought the boy was about fifteen months.”

  “He’s got a good arm. He’s going to be a pitcher. I was teaching him how to pitch.”

  “You have any more to say about Mickey Martin?”

  “Yeah, we talked a little.”

  “And?”

  Eddie went back to inspecting the liver spot, which, he was sure, had appeared overnight. “He asked about you.”

  The office was warm, the radiator clanking, and Charlie had begun to feel drowsy. Now he perked up. “Me?”

  “That’s right. We’d been talking about this and that and Mickey asked if you’d moved away. I guess he’d driven by your place on the lake and seen some other people living in it.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing really, I mean, I said you and Janey had gotten married and you were living at her place.”

  “So you told him where I lived.”

  “Not directly, but I guess someone might interpret it like that. All I said was, she had an old house on the west side.”

  “She’s in the phone book.”

  “That’s what I told him. Me and the wife are unlisted. She says it’s crazy to put your name in the phone book where anybody, like serial killers, can find you.”

  “What else did Mickey ask?”

  “Not much. It was very casual, but later I felt bad about it. I felt I shouldn’t have said anything. Like he had a big mouth, right? He asked if you were still a PI and I said you’d retired. Mickey, he just smiled, but with his mouth shut on account of the breath. Know what I mean?”

  “Was there more?”

  “I said you’d wanted more time to read and he said he’d heard you had a big stash of dirty books. That was Mickey all over.”

  “I guess so.” Actually, Charlie was thinking of Dave Parlucci. He had assumed that Parlucci had told Mickey Martin where he lived, but instead Mickey had learned it from Eddie. So then why had Parlucci asked Victor where Charlie could be found? “Do you know Dave Parlucci?”

  “We’ve crossed paths. He tossed me out of a bar about five years ago. Believe me, I’d hardly had a drop. After that we were never close.”

  “Do you know if he and Mickey Martin knew each other?”

  “T
hey must have seen each other around, but neither of them were guys that had a lot of friends. Why?”

  Once again Charlie realized he was no longer a private investigator. “No real reason, I guess.”

  —

  The knife was an old bowie knife with a twelve-inch blade and a handle carved from an antelope’s horn. It wasn’t good for delicate work but it was sharp. His dad had bought it from Herter’s back in the 1950s and his mother had let him have it when he’d left home at sixteen. Now it was the only thing he had of his dad’s. He didn’t even have a picture. And he hadn’t seen his mother for years.

  But the man had kept the knife with him, sometimes in a trunk for safekeeping, sometimes in a stiff leather sheath shoved down over his butt with a jacket to cover the handle. The army had taught him to do tricks with it, had taught him to make it dance. But mostly he didn’t need to use it. He just showed it. A knife like that was like a whole brass band. There was nothing subtle about it.

  Next to the knife on the table was a long whetstone on which the man had been sharpening the blade. Now it could split a hair in half. Lifting the knife, he balanced it on his palm, then ran his thumb lightly across the blade. It made a noise like a kitchen match dragged across a rough surface, but softer, barely a whisper. He slipped the blade into the sheath and tucked it into his pants behind his back. It felt comfortable there, like everything was ready.

  Also on the table were six cardboard figures cut from a shoe box, each about six inches tall and set into a slot on a circle of wood the size of an orange slice so they’d stand up. The man had decorated them with a ballpoint pen, giving them clothes, faces and hair. Two were heavyset, two were thin and two were in between: five men and one woman. One of the in-between figures was lying facedown. The man picked it up. He didn’t quite smile, but his lips bent upward a fraction. A red X was drawn across its neck and a smaller X over its mouth. At least that bad business was over. The man set the figure back on the table, laying it down on its face. Then he picked up one of the thin figures. It had a nose made from a bit of twig stuck to the face with Elmer’s glue. The man put it to one side of the table, away from the others. “That’s limbo,” the man said to the empty room. “You’re in limbo.” Then he got to his feet.