Saratoga Payback Read online

  He fired thirty-six more rounds and his aim improved. Then he held the shotgun out horizontally in his outstretched arm. The short barrel and collapsible stock made the weapon about ten inches shorter than the unmodified Benelli—under thirty inches—not much in the natural scheme of things, but short enough to put it under a sport coat. Charlie returned everything to the case and headed back to his car. This had been the easy part. The hard part would be when he got home.

  —

  You moving in or out?”

  Janey had seen Charlie come through the back door to the kitchen carrying the black hard case and backpack.

  Charlie laughed, but Janey could see it was a false laugh, one of those little laughs that take up space while you’re figuring out what to say. “No, no,” he said. “I’m just doing some work. I’ve been at my office.” That was technically true, but he hadn’t been in his office on that particular Monday. It was now early afternoon.

  “What’s in the suitcase? It looks new.”

  So Charlie gave up his plan to sneak the Benelli into the house. He set the case on the yellow Formica table, snapped the clasps and opened it up. The black shotgun made the whole room smaller. It sucked up the light from the ceiling fixture and reflected nothing back. Charlie heard the wall clock tick.

  “Is it loaded?”

  “No.”

  “Get rid of it,” said Janey flatly.

  “It’s a home defense system.” Charlie closed the case. The kitchen got bigger again. One might even imagine, with hard work, that the gun case contained no more than dirty socks.

  “I want you to get rid of it.”

  “I think I need it.”

  “Damn it, Charlie, you’ve got to tell me what’s going on! I’m your wife! Ever since that policeman was here on Friday night you’ve been sneaking around the house peeking out the windows and now I find you with this monster rifle.”

  “Shotgun.”

  “Charlie, can’t you be truthful with me?”

  “Okay, let’s sit down and talk about it.”

  So Charlie told her about the three murders in more detail. Then he told her what Hutchins had said and described the little cardboard figures. “I called him about an hour ago. He said that Campbell and Artemis had been ‘notified.’ So that’s a relief.” He spent a minute describing the figure with the little porkpie hat. He told her about Mickey’s sister and his trip to Glens Falls to talk to Lizzie Whitaker, and told her of Mrs. Penfield and Mickey’s office. Charlie even showed her his copy of Mickey’s secret notebook: Vaccinated axel money maker virgin iffy in Illinois rift clover-bugs interstice zip. Lastly, he explained that the police refused to give him a pistol license, so he’d bought the shotgun, which had no restrictions. He didn’t say that the short barrel and collapsible stock made its legality problematic.

  Janey sat across the table with her arms folded. “Aren’t the police looking out for us? It’s their job.”

  “Hutchins said the police would keep an eye on the house, but it’s a now-and-then sort of thing. Like they’ll drive by. Nothing steady. I got chills listening to him. So I got this. Have you ever fired a gun?”

  “You kidding? I’m a nurse. I’m a patcher-upper, not a shooter-upper. Who’s the man who wants to kill you, or maybe us?”

  “That’s the trouble, I don’t know and neither do the police. They almost caught him at the motel, but he got away. And they don’t know what he looks like, except generally. They know nothing about him. There weren’t even fingerprints.”

  “What did Lieutenant Hutchins mean by saying the police would drive by now and then? What’s ‘now and then’? Did you tell him about Emma?”

  “Of course.”

  Janey stood up with a scraping of her chair. She stepped away from Charlie and looked down at her shoes, the white clogs she wore in the hospital. “I’ve got to talk to this guy.”

  And with that she left the house.

  —

  Lieutenant Hutchins was a man who never felt at a loss for words, never thought he could be surprised, never expected to have his authority questioned except by his boss, No-Neck Novak. None of that interested Janey. She blew past the dispatcher, as she told Charlie later, and barged into Hutchins’s office, where he was joking with two men in plainclothes. “I ripped him a new asshole. I called him an incompetent fuck and when he threatened to throw me out of his office, I told him I’d rip his balls off, then I’d take him to court for assault. Here he’s fucked up catching the maniac who killed Mickey and those other guys, and instead of putting cops in our house twenty-four/seven, he’s going to drive up and down the goddamn street a couple of times a day.”

  For years Charlie had been impressed by how Janey could drop her pleasant demeanor and take on the abusive language of a gutter ruffian. Had she learned this as a nurse? Charlie felt she had. He was sure that at times she was forced to draw a line around things about which there could be no doubt, times when the business of healing was about to go haywire due to someone’s meddling and Mr. Hyde had to be called in to deal with the shortcomings of Dr. Jekyll. Charlie himself had been a victim of these transformations and they frightened him.

  “And what did he say to that?” asked Charlie, keeping his voice mildly pleasant. He’d been in the living room, once again studying Mickey’s notebook.

  “He jumped on his high horse and said I couldn’t speak to him like that. I told him to take a flying fuck and if he didn’t do his fucking job, I’d go to the mayor. He said the department lacked sufficient manpower to keep someone at our house twenty-four hours a day, and after all we could always call 9-1-1. So I said he had to do fucking better or the next time he showed up in the ICU, I’d rip out his tubes.”

  “That was nice of you.”

  “You bet it was nice. I mean, I didn’t have to give him the warning.”

  “Did Hutchins say anything about the investigation?”

  “Not a word. He said he couldn’t be expected to talk about police business. I thought he’d explode, but instead he tried to stay calm and sensible. Maybe it was because those other cops were watching. He said he’d increase the patrols and keep someone parked outside at night, though he wouldn’t be there till around midnight. Then I said if anything happened to Artemis, I’d seriously hurt him. He said she wasn’t his business. She was the sheriff’s business. I said I’d hurt him anyway.”

  “Did you tell him about the Benelli?”

  “I didn’t want to upset him again. Just keep the case locked, okay? I don’t want to see the damn thing. It scares me.”

  Charlie was glad about the increased patrols, if they actually happened, but he was also glad he had the shotgun.

  Twelve

  Tuesday morning there was sun, but Charlie had felt a chill blowing through the slightly open bedroom window. Faded leaves flew past the glass. After breakfast, he left the house with the Benelli, drove downtown to a sporting goods store and bought six boxes of 2¾-inch shells of 12-gauge buckshot. Then he drove out Route 29 toward Schuylerville. He knew of another rifle range in the hills north of Greenwich that belonged to the Washington County Gun Club. He felt he needed more practice, that he could never have too much practice. But he also worried that he wanted to reexperience the thrill of firing off six rounds in a few seconds.

  Charlie parked in the gravel by the small clubhouse. Two SUVs were parked there as well; smoke was puffing up from the chimney. Charlie had been to the gun club before and he knew people who were members, even people he thought were still alive, youngsters about his age. Four men were leaning back in their chairs around a table, drinking coffee. After Charlie had signed several forms promising not to hold the gun club responsible if he shot himself in the foot, he went back outside to his car and retrieved the Benelli in its case. A minute later he was walking up the dirt track toward the rifle range with a rolled-up target under his arm.
/>   Here, too, was a roofed structure or firing point without walls with stations for five shooters. Six targets had been placed at intervals along the small incline toward the trees. Each was set against a dirt backstop held in place by railway ties and bracketed by two six-by-six red posts. On a stanchion under the roof was a sign reading, “Do Not Shoot the Red Posts” with underlinings and exclamation marks, and printed in a schoolboy’s block letters. Charlie carried his roll of paper out to the 25-yard target and tacked it in place. It showed the silhouette of a Western gunslinger slightly crouched and drawing his six-gun. A target was printed on the gunslinger with the bull’s-eye situated over his heart.

  Returning to the firing point, Charlie at first thought he had forgotten the key to the hard case, but then he found it in his back pocket. He mildly felt he was doing something illegal, not because of the Benelli’s modifications, but in a larger sense, and he felt somewhat silly firing at the paper gunslinger. This time he had earplugs. He stuck them in his ears and began sliding the rounds into the magazine.

  Once again, the Benelli seemed to shoot all by itself, as if it needed Charlie only as a steady platform upon which to be situated, rather than needing Charlie’s finger on the trigger. He kept a tight grip on the barrel to prevent the gun from riding up, and as a result the six-inch spread obliterated the gunslinger’s right foot.

  He stayed till he had finished the sixty shells, and it hadn’t taken him long to center the spread around the gunslinger’s chest. But what interested him most was how quickly he could make himself load the shotgun, and next how quickly he could unlock the case, remove the shotgun and pack in six shells. If he stayed calm, he could do it in thirty seconds, which meant taking the key from his pocket, unlocking the case and so on till he fired his first shot. But if the shotgun was already loaded it took about ten seconds. That left him in a quandary. He’d told Janey he would keep the shotgun unloaded. But what was the harm in keeping it loaded if it was locked in its case? Why, no harm at all. But he wouldn’t tell her about it.

  —

  Fifteen minutes later, Charlie was parked just off the side of the road on a hilltop, admiring the blue autumn sky and looking east over the fields and stands of trees toward Vermont’s Green Mountains. The yellow-leaved birch trees along the top of the embankment to his left swayed as gracefully as antique ladies dancing a minuet. He’d always loved fall, but now that he was sixty-seven he found that spring offered more uplifting pleasures. Autumn’s metaphors were metaphors he cared not to dwell upon. He thought, not for the first time, that few actions in life come to tidy conclusions, while occasionally their outcomes could be like tsunamis wreaking havoc a thousand miles from the earthquake that had set them on their destructive rush. This, he suspected, was also the answer to Mickey’s murder: It was the playing out of a story begun many years before, a story in which Charlie may have played a part, but for the life of him he couldn’t think what it had been. For the life of me indeed, he thought as he again recalled Mickey sprawled dead on his sidewalk and Parlucci’s noseless corpse with the python slithering through the blood.

  —

  Of the two plainclothesmen Janey had seen in Hutchins’s office, one turned out to be an investigator with the Criminal Investigations Unit of the Saratoga County Sheriff’s Office and the other was a state police sergeant with the Bureau of Criminal Investigation attached to Troop G. The Tea Kettle Motel, where the suspect had stayed, was in Gansevoort and out of the jurisdiction of the Saratoga cops. But the city police had already turned the crime scenes over to the county sheriff’s office for crime scene processing, and some of the evidence had been sent down to the state police lab, or Forensic Information Center, in Albany. This pleased Novak. Given the choice, he’d have liked to turn the whole business over to the sheriff’s office and the troopers, but it wasn’t possible. However, as he had told The Saratogian, “I been liaising with sheriff’s boys and the troopers since the git-go.”

  This reduced Novak’s and Hutchins’s role to little more than spectators, or so it seemed to Charlie, though he knew that Hutchins was still investigating within the city. But to Charlie—irrationally, as he told himself that morning—it felt like a rejection, as if in dropping the case, they’d dropped him as well. The thought caused him to laugh out loud—his first good laugh since he’d bought the Benelli. Even so, Novak and Hutchins still knew him, though they disliked him; but Charlie knew no one in the sheriff’s office, while the men he’d once known in the state police were probably retired and gone to Florida. Just to make sure, he made some calls and found he was more or less right: Two had died and two were working out of state as security consultants. Then, when he called the sheriff’s office to ask who was running the Mickey Martin investigation, he was told the information wasn’t available to the public.

  Hanging up, Charlie thought, Public? Who’s public? And he had a sudden impulse to grab the Benelli, crawl into the back of the bedroom closet and stay there till the murderer had been caught. Maybe Janey could toss in a sandwich now and then. This wasn’t garden-variety cowardice, in Charlie’s opinion. Plenty of bad guys in the past had wanted him dead. But none had wanted to put his tongue or nose or ears into a little jar of alcohol. If Charlie had to be dead and buried—an inevitability in any case—he wanted all his little bits and pieces buried with him.

  Next he called Fletcher Campbell.

  “I’ve beefed up security,” said Campbell, “and some of my stable hands know how to shoot. I don’t want to go into details. The sheriff’s had a few men out here. We’re pretty well covered.”

  Then he called Artemis.

  “Such a nuisance, Charlie. There’s a police officer in the driveway, a sheriff’s deputy. I looked out the front window this morning and saw him urinating on a fence post. So I informed him that if he had to use the bathroom, he could come into the house. Now I’m making him a sandwich. I wish I could just send him away. I’m sure I’m in no danger. Why should anyone hurt me? I’ve been in Europe for years.”

  A little later, standing by the living room window, Charlie saw a Saratoga police car drive slowly down the street. Inside were two uniformed cops, while the one closest to Charlie had his head back and was guffawing so loudly that Charlie thought he heard a distant spluttering noise. Neither took the briefest glance at his house. Great, he thought, that’s just great.

  Over the next few days, Charlie stayed inside the house. He didn’t surrender to the temptation of crawling into the closet, but he kept the Benelli nearby without leaving it around on the furniture. Like a big box of condoms, it wasn’t something to be left on the coffee table. He tried to get Janey and Emma to stay in the house as well, but they said they had more important stuff to do.

  “More important than living? Come on, give me a break.”

  At least a dozen times Charlie saw a police car drive past the house, but the men inside never seemed to be paying attention.

  “Get a dog,” said Victor. “It’ll bark and carry on.”

  “There’s Bruiser. He yaps.”

  “You mean that Chihuahua puppy? That’s not a dog; it’s a snack. You need a dog like a junkyard dog. I bet you can get one from the pound.”

  “Even a dog from the pound would have to be trained.”

  “Then rent one. There’s got to be a place that rents multifunctional pit bulls. It stands to reason. It’ll save you money in the long run, like funeral money.”

  By Friday afternoon, Charlie was bored silly with skulking about the house. He also felt guilty. Parlucci’s funeral had been on Wednesday and Charlie missed it because he didn’t want to go out in public. He’d heard nothing about Milo’s funeral, but he doubted he’d have gone in any case. He was suspicious of everyone who drove down the street, even the cops. Once, when the doorbell rang, Charlie ran to get the Benelli and then forgot where he had put it. Looking through the glass, he saw it was the postman. But how do I know it’s
a real postman? he had asked himself. Why does he look familiar?

  The postman turned out to be one of Charlie’s ex-wife’s nephews.

  “You forgot to put a stamp on this one to Verizon, Charlie. One of those senior moments, right?”

  Charlie began to say his wife took care of the bills and then said nothing.

  When Victor came through the back door unannounced around four on Friday afternoon, he heard a kitchen chair tip over and found Charlie by the refrigerator fumbling with the latches on the Boyt hard case.

  “You’re a little jumpy, Charlie. You’d be upset if you shot me. It’d weigh on your conscience. Let’s grab a coupla beers and chill, as the kiddies say. The Parting Glass?”

  Charlie put the case on the Formica table. “Too many people.”

  “That never bothered Wild Bill Hickok. You think you might be overdoing the Nervous Nellie business? We could grab a six-pack and drink it in the park.”

  Charlie disliked the allusion to Nervous Nellie. “The Parting Glass is okay.”

  As they walked to the door, Victor saw that Charlie was carrying the hard case. “You better leave your blankie here in the closet or something.”

  Charlie put the case behind the couch and felt his sense of fragility increase.

  They arrived shortly before five and Charlie got a booth opposite the door, where he could sit with his back to the wall. He figured that a dozen of the men in the bar roughly fit Hutchins’s description of the murderer. This has got to stop, thought Charlie. He ordered a Jack Daniel’s Manhattan and a bowl of cashews.