Saratoga Payback Read online

  “You think we didn’t know about it? How come you were talking to her?”

  “I thought I could help her out; you know, winding up Mickey’s affairs.”

  “And what business is it of yours? No, don’t tell me. You’re just a Good Samaritan spreading goodness wherever you go.”

  “I was interested, that’s all. Remember, he was killed on my doorstep. Somehow his death was connected to me. Did Parlucci have any money?”

  “Not a dime.”

  “And you talked to Mickey’s parole officer? Maybe he was killed because of something in prison.”

  Hutchins groaned. “Maybe yes, maybe no.” Then he hung up.

  I’m sick of acting like an idiot, thought Charlie. It was clear he wasn’t getting anywhere. Maybe he should quit being foolish and leave it to the police. Yet, five minutes later, when Hutchins called back, his first thought was that the lieutenant was going to ask for help after all.

  “I just wanted to warn you again about jail, Charlie. You’re getting pretty close to getting locked up.”

  “But I don’t have a client.”

  The connection, however, had been cut.

  Okay, I’m an idiot, thought Charlie. Having gotten that off his chest, he called Mickey’s office, hoping to reach Mrs. Penfield. She picked up on the second ring. After identifying himself, Charlie said, “I heard from Joan Miller last night. Mickey’s lawyer had called to say she stood to inherit about seventy-five thousand dollars. And I gather there’s other money to be used for Mickey’s debts.”

  “Really,” she said eagerly. “Does that mean I’ll be paid as well?”

  “I expect so, but you should call Joan and get the lawyer’s number. I’d think he’d put you at the top of the list.”

  —

  Back in Saratoga, Charlie grabbed a ham and cheese sandwich at Bruegger’s and went to his office. It was dusty and gray, filled with ghosts from thirty years. Faces floated up toward him and he wondered, not for the first time, how many were dead. At home he had chores to finish, leaves to rake, storm windows to lower, but he didn’t want to tackle them just yet. He sat at his desk, eating his sandwich and staring at his photograph of Jesse James. What a jerk he was. A bushwhacking sadist and slave owner. Charlie couldn’t imagine why he’d ever romanticized him. He should replace Jesse with a picture of Sing Sing to remind himself of the trouble he was getting into. The trouble with retirement was it made him claustrophobic. The walls were narrowing and he could only go forward, like a cow entering the slaughterhouse. Even before the thought was finished, he remembered Chief Peterson’s gravestone rising out of the wet snow. I should give up this cop stuff, he told himself, I should take classes in yoga.

  Then, once he had sufficiently berated himself, he left his office to drive over to the Greasy Mattress to talk to Bad Maud.

  At least twenty Harleys were parked outside the bar, each at a forty-five-degree angle from the curb in a display of biker obsessive-compulsive disorder. The chrome was polished and the colors ranged from turquoise to red to baby blue, with only one or two black bikes. Charlie approached the door, expecting raucous cries of “Show your tits!” Instead he found the bikers watching the New York Jets play the Buffalo Bills. Would Marlon Brando have ridden a turquoise Harley? Would he have cared two cents about football? Charlie doubted it.

  Bad Maud waved to him from the bar. “If you’re going to hang out here, you gotta get a leather jacket. It’s like the dress code. You ever find Dave’s snake? I’d like it back. It’s got sentimental value.”

  “If someone finds it, I’ll make sure you get it.” Charlie climbed up on a stool and ordered a beer. “Tell me, were you ever Good Maud?”

  “Yeah, before I lost my looks. First I was Good Maud, then I was So-So Maud, now I’m Bad Maud. I’m serious about the leather jacket.”

  Bad Maud’s head was as round as a bowling ball and she maybe outweighed Charlie by twenty pounds. Today she wore neither a motorcycle cap nor a bandanna, and her short black bristles reminded him of a hedgehog. Her eyes were of the sort that Charlie called “flinty” and her nose had been broken more than once.

  “You must have been pretty,” he said.

  “Nah, I wouldn’t go that far. But I was a good fighter.”

  “It’s nice to have a skill. You mind if I ask a little more about Mickey?”

  “You saying I could stop you?”

  “Maybe not, but I like to be polite. It turns out that Mickey had quite a lot of money, could be over a hundred thousand or more. D’you know where it might have come from?” He reached for a bowl of unshelled peanuts a little to his right.

  “The fuck I know. Maybe real estate.”

  “Neither of us believes that.”

  “Yeah, given the choice between straight and crooked, Mickey always chose crooked.” A sudden roaring erupted behind Charlie like big cats at feeding time. Somebody had scored a touchdown.

  “He ever talk about money?”

  “He didn’t talk about shit, as far as I could see. He just complained and gossiped. Why was he so cheap if he had money?”

  “Maybe he was a miser; maybe it was a recent acquisition, maybe he was scared someone would try to take it.”

  “You ever catch up with that girlfriend of his?”

  “She’s up in Glens Falls.” Charlie described talking to her.

  “I’m glad she’s okay. I liked her. Of course, she’s so small I could throw her over my shoulder and run around the building ten times without breaking a sweat.”

  Charlie contemplated the image. “What I’d really like is to talk to someone who knew Mickey in prison. You know anyone?”

  “Just Dave, and he got sliced and diced. Anyway, he wasn’t in Adirondack.”

  “You think you could find someone, maybe make a few phone calls?”

  Maud patted her lips in an artificial yawn. “Sounds like work to me.”

  Charlie put a twenty on the bar. Maud looked at it and looked away. Charlie put another twenty on the bar. “It’s not like I’ve got a rich client; I’m doing this on my own.”

  Maud scooped up the twenties and tucked them in the pocket of her leather vest. “I’d only do this for a friend, but if I find someone, you’ll have to cough up fifty more. This here”—she touched her pocket—“is just a deposit.”

  Ten

  Charlie was driving back to his office when his cell phone rang. He had returned it to a basic ring, like the telephone ring he’d known in the past, an antique ring, but he expected Emma would change it again when she had the chance.

  “Mr. Bradshaw? This is Laura Penfield. I’ve found something you might be interested in. I’m in the office.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “You better come over and see.”

  Charlie continued on to Broadway and then turned right, trying to restrain his speed. He wasn’t sure how to view his excitement. It was like how he used to feel when he’d found a break in a case or discovered a major clue. Excitement like that would only get him in trouble with the police, who, unfortunately, wanted to keep his life sleepy and law-abiding.

  Mrs. Penfield was waiting at the door.

  “It was just luck I found it. Really, it was the footprints that got me thinking.”

  Charlie tossed his coat over a chair. “Footprints?”

  “Yes, sometimes I’d come back from lunch and see dirty footprints on the rug. After I saw the first, I kept my eye out for them. I saw them three or four times, but it wasn’t mud. It was dust.” She looked at him significantly.

  Briefly, Charlie wondered if the woman was losing her wits. Apart from her strange talk, she also had a smudge of soot on her cheek, filthy hands and her blue blouse partially untucked from her skirt. “I don’t get it.”

  “The furnace.” Mrs. Penfield opened a drawer in her desk and withdrew a black noteb
ook. “I realized Mr. Martin had been going down into the cellar and I wondered why. There seemed no reason for it. After you called me about his money, I went down with a flashlight.” She blushed. “I thought I might find some money, but I’d only take what Mr. Martin owed me. The last place I looked was the furnace. I found this in a pipe.” She handed the notebook to Charlie.

  “Why give it to me? Why didn’t you call the police?”

  Mrs. Penfield blushed again. “Lieutenant Hutchins was rude to me. He suggested I was lying. It was bad enough when Mr. Martin was rude to me. I always hated it. Anyway, it’s not as if the notebook makes any sense.”

  Charlie started to say that Hutchins was rude to everyone, but then, opening the notebook, it didn’t make any sense to him either. On the first page, he read: Ink in igloo except voles mickey mouse voila idiot in Iowa gap charming-details. And on the second page: Vaccinated axel money maker virgin iffy in Illinois rift clover-bugs interstice zip. And the third: Vacuumed insects idealistic vampires magic matters vampire iambics in Idaho lacuna axis vacant. The fourth: Xanax kitty kats zany zealous zebras old oxen xmas Kaiser kaftans kale recess ever-finger stoppage egg. The next six pages had further entries.

  Mrs. Penfield leaned over Charlie’s shoulder. In a hushed voice, she asked, “Is it poetry?”

  “I expect it’s code. Will you show me where you found it?”

  “It’s too dirty. Just look at my blouse. I don’t want to go back there again.”

  So Charlie took the flashlight and descended the cellar stairs. The ceiling beams were hardly six feet above the floor. A low-watt bulb hanging from a black wire threw the corners into shadow. When he bumped it with his head, the shadows swung back and forth. The floor was covered with dust mixed with the powder from crumbling cement and pockets of dirt. It was also crisscrossed with footprints: Mrs. Penfield’s and the larger footprints of men. The air smelt of damp paper. Charlie made his way to the furnace as he tried to quiet his claustrophobia.

  It was an old gravity furnace that had been converted from coal to oil. Now it probably hadn’t been used for about five years, or for as long as Mickey had had the office. Six fat ducts rose up to grates in the ceiling. Charlie bent to open the door. He had a memory of being a child and watching his oldest cousin shovel coal into a similar furnace or carry the ashes out to the ashbin. An “octopus furnace,” his cousin had called it, which, to Charlie, had made it especially sinister.

  Charlie shone his light around the inside. It, too, was dusty and spotted with rust. The dust around the ducts and exhaust flue had been disturbed. One of them might have been the hiding place for Mickey’s notebook, probably the exhaust duct to the chimney. He sneezed and closed the door; it made a metallic clang. He tapped his knuckles on an oil tank and it responded like a brass gong. Empty. Then he stumbled over a shovel, which clattered to the floor. I could make a whole band down here, he thought: Charlie and the Clumsy Rhythm Cats. He retraced his steps to the stairs.

  Mrs. Penfield was coming out of the bathroom, wiping her face with a paper towel. “I must have looked a sight. Now you’ve a sooty face as well.” She turned back to the bathroom. Charlie heard water running. A moment later she brought him a wet paper towel. Charlie dabbed his face.

  Mrs. Penfield nodded to the notebook on the desk. She lowered her voice. “What do you think it means?”

  “I don’t know, but it was clearly important to him and it was something he didn’t want anyone to see.”

  Her voice grew more hushed, hardly more than a whisper. “Do you think it’s why he was killed?”

  “I’ve no idea. Anyway, you should call the police. Do you have a copier here? I’d like to make a copy.” Charlie had already seen an all-in-one printer against the wall, but he’d thought it best to ask.

  “I’ll do it right away.”

  “And don’t tell the police about giving me a copy. They’d have a fit.”

  —

  As Charlie drove home, he guessed that the case was about to get active. The black notebook, Mickey’s unexpected money, his link to Parlucci and whatever had happened in prison, these pieces would come together and the police would make an arrest. Whatever Charlie’s disappointment, he knew it was best that way. Poking around, as he called it, would only get him in trouble. Surely he told himself this one hundred times a day. It was a paradox. How could he tell himself something over and over, and still not be listening?

  But his expectations of sudden police activity turned out to be wrong, because nothing happened. Or almost nothing. For instance, later on Sunday, Charlie went over to the Y to swim his mile, something he did three or four times a week, or tried to. In the locker room, he bumped into the fellow who owned the building where Mickey lived, Frank Pisasale, whom Charlie had hoped to talk to. Pisasale said it was a shame about Mickey.

  “Was he a friend of yours?” asked Charlie.

  Frank shrugged. “As a matter of fact, I couldn’t stand him. But it’s a terrible thing to get your throat cut on a nice quiet street in a nice quiet neighborhood. It fucks up the real estate. I just thank my lucky stars he didn’t get his throat cut in his apartment. I’d never be able to rent the place. It’s bad enough with the police tape everywhere. When can I get Mickey’s shit outta there and find a new tenant, that’s what I want to know? And who’s going to pay the rent during that time? Nobody!”

  Charlie said that it turned out that Mickey had quite a lot of money in the bank and maybe Frank would get a piece of it, which cheered him. But about Mickey’s life and how he made his money, Frank knew little and he’d never been disposed to learn more.

  “Sometimes he’d take off for a few weeks or so and I’d be afraid he was bailing on the rent, but he always came back. Actually, my big hope was he’d move out; I’m just sorry it had to happen this way.”

  And over the next few days, Charlie bumped into other people who had known Mickey or Parlucci, but none knew them well, nor had they been tempted to know them better. As for Mickey’s unexpected wealth, it seemed a surprise to everyone.

  Twice Charlie had gone back to the Greasy Mattress to see Bad Maud.

  “Hey, let me tell you two things. One, I haven’t dug up any ex-cons who knew Mickey, and two, when I do, you’ll be the first to know. At this rate you’ll owe me another hundred bucks.”

  Then, for a few hours each day, Charlie brooded about the black notebook, going over the ten entries until he knew them by heart, even muttering them as he wandered around the house: “Ink in igloo except voles mickey mouse voila idiot in Iowa gap charming-details,” and “Vaccinated axel money maker virgin iffy in Illinois rift clover-bugs interstice zip.”

  One morning when Charlie was washing the dishes, Janey came into the kitchen. He hadn’t heard her because of the noise he’d been making with the pots and when she spoke it startled him.

  “Charlie, what in the world are you talking about: ink and igloos and idiots?”

  He wiped his hands on the dishtowel. “Oh, it’s just a poem I was reading.”

  Janey stood with her hands on her hips. “It doesn’t sound like a poem to me. You’ve been muttering that stuff all week. Just promise you won’t go crazy on me, Charlie, it’d put a dent in our relationship.”

  The trouble was that Charlie had promised Janey not to do any more detective work and he swore he’d hardly thought of Mickey for days. If she knew about the notebook, she’d have given him one of those looks that made his stomach knot. So Charlie set the notebook aside for a while. Instead, he concentrated on being a good homeowner, or co-owner, and sought out tasks that would require his 18-volt cordless drill-and-driver combo. He fixed a rickety bookcase, and then built a three-shelf bookcase for Emma’s bedroom. Both required painting, which required another trip to the Home Depot for brushes, paint, a drop cloth, turpentine and other odds and ends. However, before he painted, he realized he had to clean up the basement so he’d hav
e a place to put his new purchases. This meant building more shelves, a workbench and hanging up several new lights. During this flurry of activity, he almost forgot about Mickey’s notebook, but not quite.

  Friday night, Artemis was coming over to dinner. Charlie had invited her the previous Monday and she had gladly accepted. Janey wasn’t sure how she felt about this. “You were never mixed up with her, were you? Kissing and hugging?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. She’s . . . not my type.” He’d been about to say that Artemis was too classy for him, but he knew Janey would take it the wrong way.

  “And what am I,” she’d ask, “sliced carrots?”

  Friday afternoon Janey asked, “So what’s this woman’s last name?”

  Charlie scratched his head. “I don’t remember. Maybe she doesn’t have one.”

  “Come on, Charlie, everyone’s got a last name.”

  “Not necessarily. She’s got one of those old Greek or Roman names. They only came in ones, not twos or threes. I mean, you wouldn’t say Zeus McCarthy or Apollo Schmidt.”

  Despite Janey’s uncertainty, she and Artemis liked each other right away. She couldn’t quite explain it afterward, but it had to do with the fact that Artemis said exactly what she felt, without exaggeration or softening the edges. She wasn’t rude or abrasive, but she said what she meant. “You can believe her,” said Janey, “even if you don’t agree with her. But mostly I do. We’ve the same ideas about stuff. I like that. And I see why you weren’t involved with her. She’s too classy for you.”

  Janey had served baked salmon with a dill sauce, rice pilaf and a green salad. Artemis brought a bottle of white wine—some Austrian thing. They talked about their lives over the past years before Charlie had run into her at Home Depot; Artemis asked Janey about her daughters and her job as a nurse. They both agreed that Charlie could be difficult. It wasn’t that he was deceptive, but he could be less than forthright. They laughed about this; they also laughed about his porkpie hat.