Saratoga Payback Page 10

  No, Charlie was investigating; he wanted to know what had taken place and why. He was a professional Nosey Parker, a practiced meddler. “I must be sick,” he said to himself, knowing this was a description he’d never share with Janey or Victor. Maybe he’d tell a psychiatrist, but he doubted it. It wasn’t that he felt he’d succeed where the police might fail, though that was part of it. He was a snoop. He thought how he had disobeyed Campbell’s orders and traced the cab to the Hilton. “I’m worse than sick,” he said as he got to his feet. “Maybe it’s a psychosis.”

  When he reached the bottom of the stairs, Bruiser was waiting for him, wagging his tail. Charlie scratched the Chihuahua’s ears. “I’m a bad person,” he told the puppy, “I might kick you.” Bruiser kept wagging his tail.

  As he drank his coffee at the kitchen table, Charlie considered what he’d learned. Milo and Mickey Martin had known each other at Adirondack, where Mickey had a reputation for being a snitch. Then the two men had met Parlucci at the Albany county jail just prior to release. A bigger piece of information was that Mickey had known someone might be after him, though he said he wouldn’t be able to recognize him. Had the man been hired to kill Mickey? What was the connection? But Parlucci and Milo could recognize the man. After all, they’d talked to him. But it wasn’t clear if they had known the killer before he came to Saratoga.

  Of course, Mickey might have been killed because of something that had happened quite recently. Perhaps a blackmail victim, even someone who’d only been the victim of Mickey’s gossip, had finally reached the point of anger when he’d made up his mind to do something. But Charlie didn’t think so. The mutilations didn’t fit the anger theory. He believed that Mickey had been killed because of something that happened years before, and Parlucci and Milo had been killed to keep them quiet. “Do I only think that because I’m living in the past?” Charlie asked himself. And in a moment of near panic, he admitted that he didn’t know.

  But if Mickey’s death was the result of something in the past, then the killer possibly had only an indirect link to Mickey. So either he’d been hired to do the job or had been motivated by a wish for revenge or something else. It was always the “something else” that caused the most trouble. Charlie pondered the awful intimacy of killing a man with a knife, and this was what the killer wanted: intimacy and brutality. And slicing off the tongue, the nose and ears suggested a specific and personal motivation.

  So was it over? If the killer had a connection to Mickey’s past and wasn’t from Saratoga, then had he finished what he’d come to do and left town? Maybe. And there was another inference Charlie could draw: Mickey came to him rather than the police because Mickey had something to hide. Something he didn’t want the police to know. But it seemed again that Charlie’s argument was based on the fact that he himself was living in the past, that he wanted to believe the murders’ origins lay years ago, not in Hutchins’s and Novak’s time of computers and flashy technology. And this had led to Charlie’s wish “to poke around,” as if the past were his particular business. “I really must be completely nuts,” he said aloud to himself, but now his attitude wasn’t one of censure, but bemusement.

  Charlie got up to pour himself another cup of coffee. The snow was still coming down hard and several inches had fallen, but the temperature was slightly above freezing; the street was nearly bare. Charlie got a bagel from the refrigerator and sliced it in half. Then, by the toaster, he saw a copy of The Saratogian carefully folded to one of the back pages where a short article had been circled with a green highlighter: Mickey’s funeral was set for ten o’clock that morning out of Fogerty’s Funeral Home with interment in Maplewood Cemetery on the other side of the Northway. Charlie had guessed the funeral would be soon, but he hadn’t decided what to do about it. Janey must have seen the article before leaving for work and circled it for him. Glancing at his watch, Charlie saw he just had time to shower, shave, put on a presentable suit and drive across town.

  —

  Although it couldn’t be said that Charlie enjoyed funerals, in the past few years he’d come to face them with increasing trepidation. First his mother had died in Florida five years before, then four years ago the oldest of his three cousins, James, had died of prostate cancer, only to be followed a year later by his middle cousin, Robert, who’d dropped dead on Broadway from a massive coronary. Then in May his youngest cousin, Jack—a year older than Charlie—had a quintuple bypass. Though Charlie loved his cousins, he’d never liked them. They were too full of advice and disapproval. Visiting one of them was like visiting the dentist. Yet he had sat with Jack in the hospital and offered to bring him whatever he wanted. Not that Jack had wanted much; he had been too appalled by the knowledge of his mortality to take any pleasure in the living artifacts of ongoing life.

  Then there were Charlie’s friends and acquaintances, who seemed to slip away too soon from life’s party, as if they had babysitters at home whom they’d promised to relieve at an early hour. Several had been men and women he’d known since first grade; others had been more recent, relatively—men and women he’d worked with in the police department, people from the track, from local restaurants and bars, even people he had put in prison.

  Charlie’s trepidation had little to do with a fear of his own eventual demise; rather, he was losing the people who could corroborate his recollections of the distant past. Although he’d never been chummy with his cousins, they had shared similar memories of his grandparents, his many aunts and uncles who had now been gone for at least a dozen years. They could remember Christmases in the 1950s and the time when Uncle Rupert on his eightieth birthday had blown out the candles on his cake so forcefully that his false teeth shot from his mouth and lodged in the pink frosting. With whom could he now share this memory except his cousin Jack, who was too concerned with his own fragility to take an interest in anything else? Two cousins, a number of friends and his teachers in school were gone. Many had attended the same church as Charlie as a kid. Many would recall the day when the vast Grand Union Hotel had been demolished in the 1950s. This wasn’t a matter of nostalgia, but a wish to avoid revisionism, to make sure that his memories remained accurate, or pretty much. And there had been times late in the evening when Charlie was tempted to call his first wife, Marge, who now lived in Phoenix, and ask, “Did this really happen or am I imagining it?”

  So when Charlie entered Fogerty’s Funeral Home on West Avenue—a building more resembling an oversized ranch house than a funeral home—he felt a weight, like a heavy wooden ox yoke he’d seen in a historical museum, being lowered onto his shoulders. The service was in a kind of secular chapel—religion-like but with no specific religious reference to cause offense. An inexpensive casket stood at the front of the room; there were few flowers and those, Charlie guessed, had been supplied by the funeral home. The casket was closed and the mourners were made up of two plainclothesmen who appeared on the very cusp of sleep, and a man and a woman in their fifties whom Charlie found elusively familiar. He’d hoped that Mickey Martin’s girlfriend, Lizzie, might make an appearance, but there was no sign of her. Charlie wiped the snow from his shoes and walked quietly across the somber carpet to the man and woman. Vague organ music played in the background, not quite a tune, more like the linking together of melancholy chords.

  Charlie introduced himself. There was a shared timidity about the couple, like a family resemblance. “Awfully early for snow, don’t you think?” said Charlie as he sat down. Despite his innocuous remark and smile, the couple’s apprehension increased. They seemed unwilling to commit themselves to his comment on snow one way or another. “I haven’t seen a weather report,” Charlie continued. “Is it supposed to stick?”

  The man and woman rustled in their chairs. They still hadn’t offered their names, and the man’s handshake was even limper than Mickey’s must have been inside his casket. “I haven’t seen the paper,” said the man slowly. “I’m Lewis Penfield, this is
my wife, Laura. She was Mr. Martin’s secretary.”

  Laura Penfield glanced at her husband as if he had given too much away.

  “It’s a sad occasion,” said Charlie, looking briefly down at the carpet. “Mickey was on his way to my house when he . . . died.” Could he say “passed,” he wondered, if someone had his throat cut?

  “So I read in the paper,” said Penfield. A note of mild dissatisfaction crept into his voice. “Mr. Martin owed my wife three months’ back salary. Were you his friend?”

  “I rather doubt that Mickey had any friends,” said Charlie, “though that seems a harsh thing to say of a person. I gather he’d had a girlfriend.”

  Laura Penfield abruptly spoke up. Her staccato voice reminded Charlie of an ice pick attacking a block of ice. “If you mean Lizzie Whitaker, she wouldn’t come here if you offered her a million dollars. Mr. Martin was terrible to her.”

  “So she still lives in Saratoga?” asked Charlie.

  “I should say not. She moved to Glens Falls just to get away from him.”

  Charlie nodded his head sagely. “I’m certainly glad of that. Is she in sales again?”

  “No, she took a position at the Hyde. It was a real step up for her.” Mrs. Penfield quickly glanced at her husband, who pursed his lips and stared at the floor.

  The Hyde Collection was a small art museum situated in an Italian Renaissance–style mansion once belonging to Louis and Charlotte Hyde. The couple had collected works of art with the profits from their paper mill.

  “That’s great,” said Charlie. “Does she have a background in art?”

  Before either could answer, a middle-aged man in a black suit entered through a side door. He seemed to carry silence with him like a smell. He positioned himself in front of Mickey’s coffin and nodded to the visitors.

  The best Charlie could say of the service was it was short and the plainclothesmen managed to stay awake. The prayers seemed addressed to the concept of a benevolent idea or a questionable but well-meant premise, about which the man in black was vaguely approving but otherwise noncommittal. About Mickey, he had little to say, though what he said was conveyed in a whisper indicative of grief. Mickey had moved to Saratoga a little more than six years before and had opened an insurance agency. He had also been a Realtor. Although Mickey had neither wife nor children, he had become a figure in the business community and now he had been taken from us prematurely. There was no word whether he would be missed. Lastly, he read a prayer to the effect that wherever Mickey had gone, if indeed he’d gone anywhere, we all, he was sure, wished him well. The moment he finished, four brawny men entered to hurry the casket to a waiting hearse.

  Charlie stood up. “Do you plan to go to the cemetery?” he asked the Penfields.

  “We think not,” said the husband. “The weather, you know.”

  “And what about Mickey’s insurance agency, will you be keeping it open?”

  Mrs. Penfield squinched her eyes as if suffering a little pain. “His sister in Troy asked me to close it up. Accounts need to be transferred to other agencies; papers need to be put in order. At least I’ll be paid. Although to tell the truth, I hate to spend another day in that awful place.”

  Charlie didn’t ask why; he planned to speak to Mrs. Penfield again. “And was it the sister who took care of the funeral arrangements?”

  “She said she felt it was her duty, though she felt no obligation to attend.”

  With that, Mr. Penfield drew his wife toward the door. The casket and plainclothesmen were already gone. A moment or two later, the organ music stopped midnote. Charlie scratched the back of his head. He tried to think of a good reason why he shouldn’t go to the cemetery, other than the weather and his own disinclination, but none sprang to mind.

  Before leaving, Charlie stopped by the office of the funeral home to get the address of Mickey’s sister. “I’d like to write her a sympathy note,” he explained.

  Fogerty’s was a family-run funeral home and the youngest Fogerty—Larry—was seated behind the desk. He had thinning red hair, very white hands and, though in his midtwenties, he’d already acquired the look of generalized commiseration that went with the trade. “Sympathy!” said Fogerty. “You’d think I was telling her the price of potatoes or that we were talking about a complete stranger. At least she paid for his funeral, though between you and me, it was the cheapest available.”

  “I’d still like to write a note,” said Charlie. “And how d’you spell her name?”

  Larry Fogerty gave Charlie an ironic look. “Joan Miller, the usual spelling.”

  “Who gave the . . . homily?” Charlie couldn’t think what to call it.

  “Oh, that was my cousin Bob. Public speaking is a hobby of his. He fills in when we don’t use a minister.”

  Shortly, Charlie left the funeral home with Joan Miller’s address in Troy.

  By the time Charlie got to Maplewood Cemetery, the black hearse was driving away and Mickey’s casket was being lowered into the ground. It was still snowing, but at any moment the big wet flakes would turn to rain. Still, it was pretty, with the snowcapped tombstones poking up through an unruffled expanse of white. A single plainclothesman in a dark overcoat was glancing around rather gloomily. A yellow backhoe stood waiting about fifty yards away. Charlie parked his car and got out. He had forgotten to wear boots and the snow slopped into his shoes. It was twenty yards to Mickey’s grave and he tried to place his feet in the footprints of the men who had walked ahead of him, with little success.

  He approached the plainclothesman, who was blowing his nose. “So, did Novak send you,” asked Charlie, “or was it Hutch?”

  Charlie hadn’t meant to startle the man, but he turned so quickly that he nearly fell. Charlie put out a hand to steady him and the man batted it away. He was about forty and his face had the shape and pasty, pockmarked appearance of an English muffin. “I don’t know who you’re talking about,” he said.

  “No-Neck Novak, your boss. You must have noticed him around the station.”

  “You’re mixing me up with someone else.” The plainclothesman trudged off through the snow toward his car, or rather the department’s car.

  Charlie watched him go. Their brief exchange had exemplified what he’d disliked about being a cop. A simple yes or no was almost always rejected in favor of the ambiguous or evasive. There was a roar from the backhoe as it rumbled toward the grave. Charlie pushed forward through the snow, wanting to catch a glimpse of Mickey’s coffin before Mickey was tucked away for the long night. If asked why the glimpse was important to him, he wouldn’t have been able to answer.

  The coffin was covered with a smattering of snow and Charlie stared down at it. Although he’d disliked Mickey, the moment bore a certain solemnity. All the turmoil and animosity, envy and deception, gossip and slander that had described the man in the cheap coffin had been swept away and here he was with no one to grieve for him. In fact, most of his acquaintances were glad.

  “You fucked up, Mickey,” said Charlie. He tried to think of something else to say, but nothing came to mind. It occurred to him, however, that Mickey hadn’t always been bad. Most likely his first year or so had been relatively innocent, maybe even his second and third years, though those might be open to question. On the other hand, it was something he could ask Mickey’s sister. The yellow backhoe had nearly reached Mickey’s grave. Charlie headed toward his car.

  He’d walked about halfway when his eyes fixed upon an imposing granite headstone and he came to a stop so quickly that he almost slipped. The name read “Harvey L. Peterson.” Beneath his dates were the words “Protector of the People.”

  Peterson had died six years earlier and retired ten years before that, but for more than thirty years, he had been Saratoga’s police chief, or, to use Peterson’s preferred title, Commissioner of Public Safety. More important, he’d been police chief during most of
the time Charlie had been a cop, as well as chief during Charlie’s years as a private investigator. A large man, except in his last years, Peterson had been pompous, vain and a stickler for bureaucratic formality. The only creatures for which he showed affection were his show dogs, two glossy Irish setters practiced in striking noble attitudes, but which probably shared half a brain between them.

  Charlie and Peterson had sometimes worked together, but they never got along. Charlie was too intuitive and hunch-driven, while Peterson, as he liked to say, did things by the book, uttering the word as if he meant the Bible itself. Nevertheless, Peterson had occupied space in Charlie’s head for more than thirty years. Looking at his tombstone, Charlie couldn’t say he missed him, but it was hard to imagine life without him, as if Peterson’s absence were a kind of amputation. In fact, Charlie wasn’t exactly sure what he felt. Instead, it felt like a hole in his emotional self, which made it seem significant. Not that it made him consider his own mortality, but it was like seeing half of his life encapsulated in one spot. All the shouting and quarreling and threatening, even the venomous rivalry to solve a forgotten case—where was it now except in his memory? “It made me feel a little philosophical” was what he told Janey later, and that was the best he could do. But now, as he stared at Peterson’s stone, the snow began to turn to rain, and he hurried to his car, glad for any excuse to get away.

  Eight

  The Northway was almost free of snow as Charlie drove south toward Troy, though big trucks threw buckets of mush and salty water onto his windshield. He drove barefooted with the defroster on full blast and his shoes and socks drying out on the dashboard. His feet were icy. He tried to tuck his left foot under his right thigh, but his car swerved threateningly. James Bond had never had such problems. That, too, made Charlie philosophical.