Saratoga Payback Page 16

  Victor nodded to the nuts, which Charlie had said some weeks before that he could never eat again because of the calories and fats. “I take it this is your last meal. Me, I’d choose surf and turf.”

  Charlie stirred his Manhattan with his little finger and gave Victor an apologetic look. “I guess I’ve been getting frazzled.”

  Victor was drinking an Amstel Light. “Imminent death has that effect on people. You still been working on Mickey’s secret code?”

  “I look at it all the time, but I haven’t made any headway, or not really.” He pulled a piece of paper from his back pocket on which he had written out the ten nonsense sentences.

  Victor leaned over the table. “What d’you mean, ‘not really’?”

  “Look at this.” Charlie flattened out the paper on the table. “You see these next-to-last words or next-to-next-last words?”

  “Penultimate and antepenultimate, what of them?”

  Charlie read them out. “Gap, rift, lacuna, recess, gulch, hiatus, cleft, lapse, hitch and breather.”

  Victor leaned back, passed his hand over his shaved head, glanced around to see which waitresses were working and then looked at Charlie. “So? It sounds like a hip-hop song.”

  “They’re synonyms more or less. They might signify a pause between the first part of the sentences and the last one or two words. Then there’re these words starting with Z. But I don’t see why Mickey should go to all that trouble to hide his notebook when what was inside was already in code. It’s like hiding it twice.”

  Victor thought about it for a moment and then gave a slight start and nodded toward the door. “Why don’t you ask Mr. Professional?”

  Looking up, Charlie saw Lieutenant Hutchins making his way through a group of young women at the door. He was at least a head taller than the tallest of them. Seeing Charlie and Victor, Hutchins turned in their direction. Charlie stuck the piece of paper back in his pocket and took a restorative sip of his Manhattan.

  “Sit down, Lieutenant,” said Victor. “Have some cashews before Charlie eats them all.”

  Hutchins hesitated, afraid to be seen in bad company, and then sat down. He blinked and squinched his eyes shut as if something was caught in one of them. Charlie thought the lieutenant looked not only tired, but balanced on the edge of some inner crisis. He was also surprised Hutchins had joined them, though he guessed it wasn’t for social reasons.

  Victor pushed the bowl of nuts across the table. “Hey, Hutch, you look like your dog just died. Maybe this police stuff is taking its toll. I’ve seen it happen before—a fine, upstanding officer suddenly crushed by a conviction of the world’s wickedness. Believe me, it’s nothing that whiskey can’t cure.”

  Hutchins ignored him and nodded to Charlie. “I ran into your friend Gillespie at City Hall. He told me he was the one who told Mickey where you lived. Why didn’t you say that earlier?”

  “I didn’t want to get him in trouble. He has a lot of anxieties . . .”

  “Like his hair’s falling out,” said Victor. “I told him to shave his head like me so we could look like matching cue balls.”

  Hutchins waited for Victor to finish. “You still should have told me, Charlie.”

  “Eddie’s afraid of losing his job with the city. No offense, Lieutenant, you’ve got no subtlety.”

  Hutchins picked up a cashew, studied it and then set it back in the bowl. “That’s what the sheriff’s investigator told me.”

  “Is that what’s bothering you?”

  “Partly that, partly other things.” He paused, gave the waitress a wave and asked for a Bud Light. “I don’t suppose it matters if I tell you. It’ll be in the paper tomorrow. My son was arrested for shoplifting down at the mall in Cohoes—a pricey pair of sunglasses at Macy’s.”

  “Hey, hey, hey! Ouch!” yelped Victor. “Charlie, you kicked me!”

  “So be quiet.” Charlie turned to Hutchins. “Couldn’t Novak squash it?”

  “The security guy down there’s an ex-cop. I guess he’d had some run-ins with Novak. And Macy’s wants it to go to court. Those sunglasses, they cost about two hundred bucks, so it’s a felony. Then somebody down there called The Saratogian.”

  Hutchins’s son, Bobby, was in the same eleventh-grade class as Emma at the high school. She’d described him as loud and obnoxious. But since Emma was class secretary, president of the French Club and militantly bookish, she found many boys loud and obnoxious. Her particular boyfriend was Cecil, a freshman at Skidmore from New York City who liked to talk about Derrida, which Charlie had first thought was a square dance term, like do-si-do.

  “It’s still his first offense, correct? He’ll probably get a warning and be banned from the mall.”

  “I don’t know. My lawyer says they want to make an example of him. And Novak says the Cohoes cops are jealous because we run a tight ship up here.”

  “Tight jockstrap is more like it,” said Victor. “Don’t kick me, Charlie.”

  “What kind of kid is he?”

  “He’s fine, maybe a little loud. I was worse at that age. All I cared about was pussy, gin fizzes and fast cars.”

  Charlie laughed. “I was too shy to get in much trouble, though I’d have loved the chance. Anyway, my cousins would have smacked me around if I’d been bad.”

  “So, Hutch, tell me,” said Victor, “why’re you cozying up to us?”

  Hutchins leaned violently back in the booth. “Not you, fuckhead. You’re the same asshole you’ve always been. I just wanted to say something about Gillespie—”

  “And then one thing led to another—”

  “Be quiet, Victor.”

  Hutchins glanced around the room, which had gotten crowded and noisy. He looked uncertain. “That trooper, Sergeant Evans, who was in my office when your wife barged in, he said a teacher of his at the academy had talked about you, Charlie. He said you could be clumsy, but you were also clearheaded and stubborn. And he said you had sharp eyes. I’ve never liked you, Charlie, maybe I still don’t, but it doesn’t mean you’re stupid. Anyway, forget what I said about Bobby. He’ll straighten out or I’ll beat the shit out of him. It’s been on my mind, that’s all.”

  Hutchins still looked uncomfortable, though his voice had regained a bit of its old truculence. Charlie decided he needed to be distracted from his personal problems. He took the paper with Mickey’s nonsense sentences and set it again on the table. “I happened to look at Mickey’s black notebook when I was in his office last week. What I wonder about is why hide the notebook if it’s already in code?”

  Hutchins looked at Charlie in exasperation. “Jesus, Charlie, you shouldn’t have done that. You’re incorrigible.”

  “Yes, I guess I am. Sorry about it.” Charlie glanced at Victor, who was grinning; then he turned back to Hutchins. “Well, why should he hide it?”

  Hutchins didn’t answer at first. He looked around the room and then, when he spoke, his voice was so low that Charlie had to lean forward to hear him. “Maybe he thought it was something someone else would recognize, or maybe he didn’t trust the complexity of the code.”

  “Have you figured it out yet?”

  Hutchins put some money on the table for his beer. “Not so far, but we’re getting close. The troopers turned it over to the professionals. But, Charlie, you shouldn’t be asking me this shit. It’s none of your business. And if you’re working as a PI without a license, I’ll have to slap your ass in jail.”

  Victor laughed. “That’s the Hutchins we know and love.”

  —

  When Charlie got home an hour later, Janey was in the kitchen. Sometimes Charlie cooked, but decades of bachelor cooking had crippled any culinary skills he might have had, making his attempts, in Janey’s view, unfit for polite society. His last attempt had been a Spam roast with prune slices, which he’d had to eat by himself. Janey felt he’d made it j
ust so she wouldn’t let him cook again.

  “Artemis invited us for tea for Sunday afternoon,” Janey called from the kitchen. “Do you want to go?”

  “Tea?” Holding the Benelli’s hard case loosely in his right hand, Charlie entered the kitchen and gave his wife a kiss on the cheek.

  “Not tea, a tea. I gather other people are invited. But if you don’t leave that thing at home, I’m not going.”

  “I’ll keep it in the trunk of the car.” He got a Heineken from the refrigerator, a handful of pretzels from the cupboard and headed back to the living room.

  “Don’t ruin your dinner.”

  “No way.”

  Emma was sitting at the end of the couch reading a book for her civics class: Sexual Harassment in the Workplace. Charlie ruffled her hair, which was still damp from her shower. She was on the high school cross-country team and had gotten home half an hour earlier. Her short dark blond hair smelled of raspberry junket. She wore an extra-large Irish fisherman’s sweater that had been passed down by her older sisters, a mixture of off-white, dirt and a catalog of stains. It fit Emma as a large mitten might fit a monkey’s paw.

  “Hi, Pop.”

  Charlie sat down at the other end of the couch and put the hard case on the floor. Once again he began to study the ten nonsense sentences. Not nonsense, he thought, it’s code. But what if it really was nonsense, what if Mickey had left it in the furnace as a joke designed to drive people—people like me, thought Charlie—absolutely nuts? The fourth sentence read: Xanax kitty kats zany zealous zebras old oxen xmas Kaiser kaftans kale recess ever-finger stoppage egg.

  “Absolutely nuts,” said Charlie out loud.

  “Problems?” asked Emma. She’d raised an eyebrow and her pretty face had an aggressively adult expression, slightly condescending and bemused.

  “This guy who was murdered out front had a notebook in which he’d written these ten crazy sentences and then he hid it in a furnace that wasn’t working. I’m sorry it was ever found. ‘Ink in igloo except voles mickey mouse voila idiot in Iowa gap charming-details.’ How’s that going to do anything but drive me crazy?”

  Emma held out her hand. “May I see?”

  Charlie hesitated, and then decided it couldn’t do any harm. “Sure.”

  Emma settled back in her corner. “‘Vaccinated axel money maker virgin iffy in Illinois rift clover-bugs interstice zip.’ Cool!”

  “I bet Mickey’s looking down or up from wherever he is,” said Charlie, “and laughing his guts out. He always had a sadistic sense of humor.”

  Charlie worked on his Heineken and chewed pretzels as Emma muttered to herself. After a few minutes, she took a pencil from behind her ear and began writing in her notebook.

  She’s just showing off, thought Charlie. But then why shouldn’t she get it as well as anyone else? After all, she had young brains, limber synapses.

  After several more minutes she put her pencil back behind her ear. “They’re Roman numerals.”

  “What!?” Charlie felt he’d been thumped in the stomach.

  Emma scooted across the couch. “Look at all the Is and Vs and Xs in the first four. ‘Ink in igloo except voles mickey mouse voila idiot in Iowa gap charming-details.’ That’s ‘IIIXVMMVIII.’ If it’s a date, it could be three, fifteen, two thousand eight. Then ‘gap’ simply means space. See how the synonyms figure in more or less the same position: rift, lacuna, recess and the rest? While ‘charming-details’ might be C with a bar over it, which would be a hundred thousand.”

  “I guessed that part about the spaces,” said Charlie.

  “See? You’re not so bad. The second one—‘Vaccinated axel money maker virgin iffy in Illinois rift clover-bugs interstice zip.’ That’s VXMMVIII, space C with a bar over it, another space: zip. So that’s five, ten, two thousand eight, then a hundred thousand and then ‘zip.’ The hundred thousand might refer to money.”

  “What are these Ks in the fourth one: ‘Xanax kitty kats zany zealous zebras old oxen xmas Kaiser kaftans kale recess ever-finger stoppage egg’?”

  “He’s moved up two letters from I to K. Instead of VIIXXX, it’s XKKZZZ. ‘Old oxen’ is two thousand, ‘xmas Kaiser kaftans kale’ is eight. So the date is seven, thirty, two thousand eight. Then there’s a gap and probably another hundred thousand with ‘ever-finger,’ and then another gap and ‘egg.’ I expect that ‘egg’ is like ‘zip.’ And he’s got two more later on: ‘vacuity’ and ‘null.’ Then on the ninth entry, he’s moved up again. So the last entry is ‘Babies’ breath bother mother quit queens zowie matches make messes breather gravy-horn’ and he’s using Bs where he’d used Zs before and Xs before that. It translates into ten, twenty-one, two thousand eight, then a space and another hundred thousand. That’s about two weeks ago. But there’s nothing after ‘gravy-horn.’ Isn’t that when Mickey was killed? Maybe he didn’t have the chance to write down the final words.”

  “Sure, but it’s unlikely he was writing down the date of his own death.” Charlie asked himself what else had happened on the twenty-first. Right away, he thought of the theft of Fletcher Campbell’s horse. But wasn’t that too much of a coincidence? But perhaps the one hundred thousand referred to the amount of money Campbell paid to get his horse back. Charlie sighed. “Maybe you’re right.”

  Janey knocked on the woodwork between the dining room and living room. “If you two don’t stop whispering and come to dinner, I’ll give your food to the dog.”

  Thirteen

  Charlie pulled his Golf up to the curb across the street from Mickey’s office at eight thirty Saturday morning. A light rain was falling and the wet leaves stuck to the pavement like polished mahogany. He saw no car that might have been Mrs. Penfield’s, nor did he see a light inside the building. Maybe she’d finished her work in closing up Mickey’s business affairs. If that were so, he’d go to her house. But he would prefer to see her without the interference of her husband.

  The case with the Benelli was in the backseat covered with an old blanket. He was tired of lugging it around, but the chance of being caught without it when attacked by a man with a knife convinced him that he could put up with it for a while longer. Surely its presence made him feel more relaxed, or sort of relaxed.

  Mrs. Penfield arrived in front of the office at nine o’clock in a yellow Toyota Corolla, punctual even though her boss was cold in the ground. As she climbed the front steps, Charlie got out of the car and crossed the street.

  Mrs. Penfield heard him as she was opening the door and turned. At first her face was blank, even anxious, and then she broke into a smile. “I’ve wonderful news. Mr. Martin left me fifteen thousand dollars. That’s more than double what he owed me.”

  “That’s great!” said Charlie, joining her on the top step. “Shall we go inside?”

  Mrs. Penfield wrinkled her brow and then smiled again. She wore a gray raincoat and slacks of a lighter gray. Her brown hair was tied up in a ponytail. It, too, was getting gray.

  “I was afraid you might be finished here.” Charlie shut the door behind him and removed his hat.

  “The police brought back the files they took, though they kept the computers. I hope to be done by Wednesday at the latest. Anyway, I can’t stand it here. It’s too quiet. Shall I make coffee?”

  “That would be nice.” It struck Charlie that she hadn’t asked what he wanted. Maybe that was just as well. He took off his raincoat and put it over a chair.

  After hanging up her coat, she filled a carafe from the bathroom tap and went to the coffeemaker on top of a file cabinet.

  Charlie cleared his throat. “You’ve disappointed me, Mrs. Penfield.”

  She turned quickly, spilling a little of the water. “What do you mean?”

  “I think you know what I mean.” When Mrs. Penfield didn’t speak, Charlie continued. “It wasn’t Mickey who hid the notebook in the furnace. It was you, and you
did it after the police searched his office.”

  Mrs. Penfield’s face grew more pinched. “I don’t understand.”

  “There was no reason for Mickey to go to all that trouble to hide it. So it must have been you.”

  “That’s a silly idea.”

  “Would you prefer to talk to Lieutenant Hutchins?”

  Mrs. Penfield still held the carafe. Her eyes began to tear up.

  “My guess is the notebook wasn’t here when the police searched the place. You probably had it at home and were trying to figure out the code. Where’d you originally find it? In a desk drawer? But you were afraid other people might know about it, and if they came forward, the police would wonder where it’d gone. So you did all this foolishness with the furnace. You wanted me to find it and turn it over to the police. Am I right?”

  “Mr. Penfield said we couldn’t keep it.”

  “But you made a copy.”

  She nodded and wiped her eyes with a handkerchief with tiny red and blue flowers. Charlie remembered that his grandmother had had one exactly like it.

  “What do you think those sentences mean?”

  “I’ve no idea. That’s why I took the notebook. I thought Mr. Penfield might make sense of it.”

  “Did he?”

  “He said they might include some dates, but he wasn’t sure. The next day I put the notebook in my purse and went to the office at my usual time. Mr. Martin always came two or three hours later. The office was full of policemen searching everything and I learned that Mr. Martin had been murdered. I thought of leaving the notebook in a drawer, but the police had already searched the desk. I was afraid they’d guess I had it. So I waited till they’d left and put the notebook someplace they hadn’t searched.”

  “The furnace.”