Saratoga Payback

by Stephen Dobyns

  “One of the red posts was knocked down,” said Charlie.

  “Did you do it?” asked one of the men.

  Charlie considered blaming Victor. Then he shrugged. “Let’s just say it was done. Do I make the check out to the Washington County Gun Club?”

  Shortly, as he got into the Golf, he told Victor, “You owe me a hundred bucks.”

  “Hey,” said Victor, “you were the one that brought me out here.”

  The result of this display of recreational shooting was that this became the day when Charlie asked himself: What’s the point of living like a mouse? It was also the day he moved the Benelli from the downstairs closet to the bedroom closet. And he’d also stopped obsessively cleaning it, unless he’d been target practicing, though he felt that particular activity was over and done with. No more red posts.

  Sitting at home that afternoon, he told himself that seeing the Benelli as a source of strength was a pretext. The main reason he kept the shotgun was that its potency made up for Charlie’s growing sense of decrepitude, or was supposed to. His knees sometimes ached; his back was often sore; he had bursitis in both shoulders from swimming; he was increasingly forgetful; his reaction time was getting longer; he needed glasses. Good grief, he was even getting shorter. But the Benelli wouldn’t cure any of that.

  —

  After several weeks of not hearing from Bad Maud, Charlie made a list of the men he had sent to prison over twenty-five years. He’d done this before in his head and no one stood out. He also knew he must be missing someone, surely more than one. So after a few more days he wrote out the names on paper, trying to go over each year, each season and month, and just when he thought he’d gotten them all, he recalled another. But he was only interested in men from the Adirondack Correctional Facility between Lake Placid and Saranac Lake. On the other hand, some might have been transferred to Adirondack from someplace else. And all had originally received sentences for specific periods of times, which would have been added to or reduced depending on their behavior.

  Eventually, Charlie came up with a list of twenty men who had overlapped with Mickey, or just about. Three he knew were dead, so he crossed them out. And others might be dead he didn’t know about. He tried to think of ways to find out if they were still in prison without having to use the telephone.

  Once again his stepdaughter helped him. The Department of Corrections had a website for “inmate search.” From there Charlie went to Inmate Population Information Search, where he could enter the inmate’s name, year of birth and department ID number, or DIN. The only birth year he knew right off the bat was Mickey’s, so he typed it in. This led to the name search results page and up popped Mickey and the date of his release. Charlie clicked on Mickey’s name, which took him to the inmate information page, where he learned when Mickey entered prison, when he was released and the length of time he’d spent on parole. It also listed three crimes for which he had been convicted, the most recent being extortion. The aggregate maximum sentence was fifteen years. The aggregate minimum was ten. Mickey had served three years; then he’d spent two years on parole.

  “Do they always let people out so quickly?” asked Emma.

  Charlie thought about it. “Not to my knowledge.”

  “He must have been an awfully good prisoner.”

  For a moment Charlie considered what to say; then he said nothing at all.

  —

  So Charlie had seventeen names and for a week he typed them into the Inmate Population Information Search. What took time was he mostly didn’t know the years of their births, so he had to guess, typing in one year after another only to draw a blank. He would sit at the computer with his elbows on the table and his head in his hands and think: Jimmy Delancy, was he born in the 1950s or ’60s? It turned out he was born in 1948 and had died seven years ago. Charlie tried to bring him to mind. Was he that affable con man who had talked Mrs. What’s-her-name out of thirty thousand dollars? Charlie didn’t think so, but he spent about a minute feeling sorry that Delancy was dead, not that he’d been especially fond of Delancy, whoever he was; rather, he regretted anyone’s death.

  What sped up the process was looking through back issues of The Saratogian at the library to find news of the crimes and arrests of the men on his list. He found seven. At last, by the evening of the fifth day, he had finished, or almost finished, because there were three guys he found no trace of.

  All he knew at the end was that three more were dead and five were still in prison. That left him with nine, including the ones he couldn’t find. Three of the nine lived in Florida and one lived in Arizona. These were old guys; they liked warm weather. The website didn’t supply their phone numbers.

  Of the remaining five, only three who’d been released had overlapped with Mickey Martin, including one he couldn’t find. But Charlie thought that meant little, since he was sure there were men he’d forgotten. All that last day, his mind was full of question marks.

  “Are you coming to bed?” Janey called out at about eleven.

  “Right away.”

  Not that he was doing much. He’d only been staring at a blank computer screen, as his mind full of question marks turned to a mind full of zeros.

  After he was in bed and told Janey that he’d wound up with two names, she said, “I don’t suppose it makes any difference for me to tell you that you’re no longer a private investigator?”

  “You’ve told me that before.”

  “Yes, but you keep forgetting.”

  The light was off and Charlie lay on his back staring up at an invisible ceiling. “It’s some kind of awful compulsion. I tell myself it’s pointless, that it’s a dumb thing to do, but I keep right on doing it, like I’m schizophrenic or something. That Benelli and hard case and other stuff cost a lot of money.”

  “Then stop,” said Janey. “Sell that awful gun and we can go on a trip. I’ll take off a couple of weeks. We can spend Valentine’s Day in the Bahamas.”

  “I can’t. Like I say, it’s a fixation and I got to keep going till the end. It’s like being a robot.”

  The room was silent for a bit; then Janey said: “Turn over and let me rub your back. You’re all tense.”

  —

  The next morning Charlie set off to find the last two men on his list. They were no longer on parole and could be anywhere, despite the fact that Charlie had their addresses. One, Frankie Lomax, lived in Albany, and the other, Kentay Benson, lived in Utica. The address in Albany was forty miles away; the address in Utica was a hundred. The whole business, Charlie knew, would take all day, if he was lucky.

  He went to the bedroom closet to look at the Benelli. Not to take it, he told himself, just to look at it. Then he took it after all.

  It was eight thirty and traffic was fairly heavy. Charlie usually drove faster than he should, but with the Benelli in the trunk he kept it right at sixty-five. He was sure he was passed by every car on the road.

  The address he was looking for in Albany was on Van Vechten just off Second Avenue. It turned out to be a small apartment house with eight units. Charlie parked and went up the front steps. A row of eight buzzers was next to the front door. Only four were labeled with names and none were Lomax. Charlie pushed one of the unmarked buzzers. Nothing. He kept pushing it on and off for about thirty seconds. No answer.

  Charlie pushed another buzzer and shortly there was a click. A woman’s voice said: “Is that you, Jimmy?”

  “I’m looking for Frankie Lomax,” said Charlie.

  “Not here.”

  “Does he live in the building?”

  No answer. Charlie pushed the button again.

  After a few more seconds there was a click and the same woman said: “You want I should call the cops?”

  “I am a cop,” said Charlie. “D’you know which is Lomax’s apartment?”

  “Never heard of him.
I only been here a month.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  So one after another Charlie pushed the remaining two unmarked buttons and then the four labeled buttons. In two apartments, no one seemed at home. From another, a man shouted, “I work nights! I don’t give a fuck what you want!”

  Charlie kept trying and the man got angrier, but at last he said he’d never heard of Frankie Lomax.

  From another apartment, a heavily accented voice answered with a series of sounds that might have been Chinese.

  Charlie asked about Frankie Lomax.

  “What you say, what you say?” shouted the voice.

  Again Charlie asked his question and again the voice responded: “What you say?” They went back and forth for a few rounds and then Charlie gave it up.

  The final two tenants were moderately polite, though they made it clear that Charlie was asking a great deal of them. In any case, neither had heard of Lomax.

  Charlie sat down on the front steps. Maybe Lomax had one of the apartments where no one seemed to be home; maybe he lived in one of the others and either the people were lying or they themselves were Lomax. Charlie felt this never happened in movies. Filming was too pricey to waste on empty apartments. Usually the bad guy skedaddled out the back door, jumped over a fence and the detective gave chase. Sometimes he was successful, sometimes not. In any case, Charlie knew he couldn’t run after anyone. At best he might manage a slow-motion rush as the bad guy got farther and farther away. He got up and walked to his car. After he was done in Utica, he’d come back to the Van Vechten address and try all the buzzers again.

  —

  By the time Charlie reached Utica, it was two o’clock and he hadn’t had lunch. He stopped for a beer and corned beef sandwich at a bar on Genesee Street. As he ate, he asked himself just what in the hell he was doing. It was a thought he was having so often that he felt he should have it printed on a T-shirt.

  The second man, Kentay Benson, lived on Blandina Street and Charlie asked the woman behind the bar for directions. She pointed over Charlie’s shoulder and opined it was half a mile. Charlie thanked her and walked back to his Golf, which, he discovered, he’d left unlocked. He hurried to the back and lifted the hatch. The hard case was where he’d left it. Shaking his head, he climbed into the car.

  Most of the small houses on Blandina were covered with old siding and all had big yards with brown December grass that could still benefit from cutting. A few lots had been covered with macadam long before and now had a chewed look, with almost as much grass pushing through the cracks as in the unpaved lots. Some had rusted junkers that would never be driven again. Small apartment houses and double-deckers, a body shop, a mom-and-pop store mixed with the houses.

  The address Charlie wanted was near Albany Street: a small two-story with old mustard-colored siding. Two front doors stood side by side on the porch, with a single rusty mailbox by each. Neither had a name. The door on the left led to a flight of stairs; the one on the right was for the first-floor apartment.

  Charlie knocked on the right-hand door and listened. Nothing. He knocked louder. This time Charlie thought he heard a rustling. He hammered on the door with the soft part of his fist. Seemingly in response, a side door banged opened, and by the time Charlie managed to get a look, he saw a guy in jean overalls hightailing it down the driveway toward an empty lot.

  This was so similar to Charlie’s imagined movie scenario that he paused before hurrying down the steps and down the driveway. But, after all, it was only a hurry, and with each jarring step it seemed that a nail was being driven through his knee. Ahead, he saw the running man reach the far end of the lot. Then, when he disappeared around a house on the next street, Charlie took three more steps and stopped. There was a siren in the distance, but otherwise everything was silent. As he walked back up the driveway, he heard another door slam, this one on the front porch. He hurried a few more steps. A big-bellied man in a Yankees cap was waiting for him.

  “Was that Kentay Benson?” asked Charlie, still catching his breath.

  The man turned away from Charlie and spat. “He was a white guy, right?”

  Charlie nodded.

  “How many white guys you know named Kentay?”

  “Then why was he running?”

  The man leaned back against the wall. He’d remained on the front porch, several feet above Charlie. “Child support. He thought you had papers. You aren’t much of a runner, are you?”

  Charlie thought of three or four answers, none of them polite. “So does Kentay Benson live here?”

  The man spat again. “He used to live downstairs, but he took off about two months ago still owing rent. You a cop? He’s had a bunch of cops looking for him.”

  Charlie decided not to answer. “You know any of his friends, or family?”

  “A guy like Kentay don’t generally have friends. He only spoke to me once. It was like a growl. His family lives downstate. They sent postcards now and then.”

  “Which you read.”

  The man shrugged. “So arrest me. It’s no crime. His mother sent them; she was worrying about him. So what else is new, right? As I see it, that’s a mother’s business: worrying, shouting and burning the biscuits.”

  “Was there a return address?”

  “Not that I noticed.”

  “Do you remember the town on the postmark?”

  “Nope.”

  Five minutes later Charlie was back on the turnpike driving east. He’d wasted the whole day. But he was a retired guy, sort of. What used to be a waste of time was now time well spent, or so he told himself. He wanted to go back to the apartment house in Albany to ask again about Frankie Lomax. It would be after five o’clock when he got there and more people should be home. And what have I learned in my travels? he asked himself. Almost nothing, and the whole time he kept thinking there were other names he couldn’t remember.

  Fifteen

  At three thirty the next morning, Charlie woke from a sound sleep as if he’d been kicked. This time, however, his sudden wakefulness had nothing to do with forgetting to put out the garbage. He sat up straight and stared at the window, where there was a faint glow from the streetlight. “Petey LaBarca!” he said.

  Janey rolled over. “Are you doing a recitation or is that it for now?”

  “That’s it for now.” Charlie got out of bed and found his robe and slippers. Having thought of the name, he knew he’d get no more sleep that night.

  Charlie had collared Petey LaBarca eighteen years earlier. Someone had been selling cocaine to Skidmore students, and after the police came up empty-handed, the college hired Charlie to see if he could do better. He was supposed to be a custodian, wore a gray uniform and wandered around with a push broom.

  Three days later, about four o’clock in the morning, he caught Petey LaBarca halfway through a dormitory window. Charlie had grabbed his feet and pulled. After a certain amount of tugging, Petey slid out like a splinter from a thumb, fell onto his stomach and had the wind knocked out of him. By the time he recovered, the police were on their way. Petey’s pockets were filled with little bags of cocaine.

  Unfortunately, Petey had served time for selling weed some years before. This time he was sentenced to twenty years. People said he was lucky the judge was so lenient. He was sent to the Adirondack medium-security prison. But what had seemed bad luck for Petey turned into good luck. Right away he began a twelve-step program to kick his drug habit and then he passed his GED. And every time something good happened to Petey, kicking drugs, getting his GED and being assigned to the prison library—oh, lots of stuff—he wrote Charlie to say it was all due to him and if he’d continued selling and using, he’d be dead. Charlie, himself, didn’t feel he’d done anything special, but he was glad of the praise and mostly he wrote back to tell Petey he was pleased things were going well.

  After two years, Petey beg
an taking distance-learning classes in acupuncture from a school in New York City. Charlie felt this was karmicly fitting for a former junkie, as if Petey were fated for acupuncture all along but had been sidetracked by the dark side of needledom. In time, he finished the classwork for his bachelor’s and needed only two semesters of clinical work till he got his degree. He then began to take classes toward a master’s degree and practiced acupuncture on other inmates. He seemed particularly skilled in dealing with stress, anxiety and penile dysfunction.

  Petey served ten years of his sentence and moved to Queens. He finished his clinical requirement, got his master’s and branched out into energy work, medical intuition and Reiki. Every six months, he sent Charlie a note saying what he was doing and how much he owed him. Then, three years earlier, he moved to New Paltz and started a practice, sharing office space with several other holistic workers. He also began to teach tai chi.

  It was now seven years since Petey had been in prison, and Charlie thought that if he hadn’t overlapped with Mickey, he must know people who did. He made coffee, ate some raisin toast and kept looking at his watch. New Paltz was a hundred miles south. If Charlie shaved, showered, dressed and left right away, he’d be knocking on Petey’s door around six a.m. He tried to convince himself that Petey would surely be up by that time. In this he wasn’t successful.

  He got ready in any case, then moped around the house for an hour, cleaning the kitchen and feeding the dog and cat. By six o’clock, he was on the road. It was still dark, but to the east a bit of dark was fading to gray. As he drove, he continued to think about Petey. Charlie had last seen him after he’d been in prison for nearly a year. Petey had been lifting weights and had his hair in a greasy pompadour. He was Charlie’s height and had a wrinkle in his nose where someone had once decked him. They spoke in the visitors’ room.

  “I owe you one, Charlie. That’s God’s truth. I’d take a bullet for you.”

  Charlie had been embarrassed. “Hey, if I hadn’t caught you, someone else would’ve pretty soon. You were getting sloppy.”