Saratoga Backtalk

by Stephen Dobyns

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Morally flexible sidekick Victor Plotz takes centre stage in the eighth mystery for everyman detective Charlie Bradshaw in Saratoga Springs. Wealthy stable owner Bernard Logan comes to Charlie and Victor for help, believing his young wife is trying to kill him. Three days later, a horse kicks him to death. With Charlie away, Victor throws himself into solving the case himself, finding all manner of rats coming out of the woodwork who wanted Bernard dead. The question is, who did it?

Release date: August 1, 2013

Publisher: Sphere

Print pages: 256

Sample

I’m a kind of rat. I take it as a compliment. Generally it means I’m not to be trusted. You know, sneaky, always padding along after the cheese, always looking out for number one. Expediency for me is what Disneyland was for Premier Khrushchev: a must-see kind of place. I’m what you call a high-on-pragmatism, low-on-ethics kind of guy.

But I don’t start out to be bad. Somehow it just happens, like an accident, a slip on the peel of the moral banana.

Rats themselves, the animal variety, are virtuous creatures. They look after each other and lead upstanding lives. Can they help it if they have pointy noses and beady eyes? Unlike human beings, rats almost never kill each other. I make this distinction because in what follows there are lots of rats, both the human and animal variety. The animal rats were just rats, even though I jumped two feet when the first one darted across my sneakers. The human rats came in all shapes and sizes, and some were better than others. Compared to those particular rats, maybe I’m not so bad after all. But that’s what any human rat would say, right? I mean, aren’t we in the business of sticking up for ourselves?

My name is Victor Plotz, and I’m fifty-nine years old, or thereabouts. The age when they say you don’t waste a hardon, trust a fart or bust your noggin on dumb ideas. Anybody who tells you I’m any older than fifty-nine, don’t listen to him. I’m an entrepreneur in Saratoga Springs, New York: the kind of guy with a lot of irons in the fire. I got some investments, some rental property, some little jobs I do. A buy-low-sell-high kind of guy. I spend a lot of time on the phone, a lot of time driving around. I shoot the breeze, drink a lot of coffee and keep my ears open. I know a few women who trust me with their investments and I even make some money for them. It’s a life-style that suits me. I’ve done that nine-to-five stuff and I have learned that it goes against my genetic makeup.

When I was a young man I worked at Schultz’s Men’s Furnishings in the city, that’s New York City, and spent my days lying to a bunch of glad-handing businessmen about how well they looked in a particular suit before my life changed and old Schultz decided that drunkenness on the job was no way to sell men’s clothing, meaning I got fired. I’ve done this and I’ve done that, and my life has proceeded as smoothly as a guy falling down a flight of padded stairs, and this occasion with the rats, which I’m now telling you about, began in Saratoga around noon on a sunny Friday in May: May 14th, it was.

I got a friend, a best buddy who lets me walk all over him, and even though I’m a kind of rat, he forgives me. His name is Charlie Bradshaw and he’s a private detective. Now, I’ve done some of that work, but I don’t like it. Most of what you do as a private detective is sit around, like you spend a whole week staring at a doorway waiting for some bozo to stroll through it. That’s eighty percent of the job. Then there is a less boring fourteen percent when you’re driving all over hell’s half acre trying to find out what doorway to stick yourself in front of—that part of the job at least gets you into the fresh air. Then there is a dangerous and anxiety-ridden five percent when you actually confront the bozo. This can lead to bruises. I’ve had that happen, and my entire being rises up in protest against it. Bruises are an intrinsic insult to human flesh. Then comes the scant one percent of the private detective’s job when you get paid and patted on the back, which is the part I am best at. There is something about the feel of a nice fat check being placed in the palm of the hand which combines the most pleasing aspects of sex and Valium.

It was Charlie Bradshaw who got me out of New York City nearly twenty years ago and brought me to Saratoga Springs. There’s no way to avoid saying it: he saved my life. I worked for him for a while. He’d been a Saratoga cop, then head of security for a stable outside of town, then a private detective. His mother has got a hotel in Saratoga, the Bentley, and I worked for her as well. But Charlie is a maintenance-level kind of guy, meaning he tries to keep his life on a certain steady course: few peaks, few valleys. He’s got a small house out on Lake Saratoga, a girlfriend that keeps his clock clean and he’s got a stack of books about the Old West. Charlie is in his mid-fifties and has a swimming regimen. In fact, he’s got a lot of regimens, and if someone came along and offered to hitch Charlie’s wagon to a star, he would say no thank you. I may be talking through my hat, but sometimes I think Charlie believes that if he didn’t keep his life under tight control, then he would just go whanging off into partyland. Dance all day, dance all night. His father was a gambler and his hero is Jesse James, like he can tell you Jesse’s collar size and how he brushed his teeth. On the wall of his detective office on Phila Street in downtown Saratoga Springs, Charlie has hung a big poster of Jesse James just like the post office has hung a big picture of President Bill Clinton.

I’ve seen customers come into Charlie’s office, sit down and stare at Jesse’s rattlesnake eyes, finding something vaguely familiar about them. A famous policeman? they wonder. Perhaps a relative? And when they finally make the connection, they tend to look at Charlie in a new light. Some even get up and walk out without ever stating their business. And Charlie doesn’t mind this. They walk out, so what? That’s what it means to be a maintenance-level kind of guy. He pays the rent, pays his mortgage, keeps his clock clean and breezes through his week as easily as a trout flopping around in a mountain stream. Me, I’m more ambitious. I like the peaks and endure the valleys. I worked for Charlie for a few years, then struck out on my own, except for occasionally helping him with odd jobs. He’s happy driving a little car, I like driving a big car. Don’t think I’m being disrespectful. Charlie is someone who is who he is no matter what. Like his personality fits him like a condom. This is nothing I wouldn’t tell him to his face. Even in a raging blizzard, he’s Charlie Bradshaw. Me, apart from being a kind of rat, I don’t know who or what I am from one day to the next.

This particular Friday in May I was sitting in Charlie’s office around twelve-thirty using his phone while he was off at the YMCA swimming his laps. I had some tenants in a duplex who’d been breaking up the furniture and hadn’t been paying the rent and I had to explain how their ankles would get busted if they didn’t shape up. I find it hard to be threatening on a cellular phone, so I was using Charlie’s square black old-fashioned one. And of course it was his nickel and I had other calls to make as well. It was a bright spring day and the windows were open. A couple of pigeons were making cooing noises on the window ledge and I could hear the sound of traffic from Broadway.

Charlie’s got a drab sort of office over a used-book store. Two windows look out on Phila, facing the big red brick building across the street. A scratched oak desk and gray metal file cabinet, a safe, some visitor chairs, linoleum on the floor and this big poster of Jesse James in an ornate antique frame behind glass. Originally, he had the poster tacked to the wall, but I kept fooling with it: drawing on an eye patch or giving Jesse a handlebar mustache. Charlie would get mad and stamp around. That’s another problem with Charlie—he’s got a sense of humor like, a gambler’s good luck: it comes and goes. So Charlie went out and bought himself a new poster and bought this big frame from an antique store and he screwed the whole thing to the wall just like in one of those upscale fern bars where they are afraid the yuppies will steal the artwork.

Anyway, I was sitting at the desk making my phone calls when there comes a tap tap at the door. Charlie has a small anteroom separated from his office by an opaque glass wall with a door in the middle. On the top half of the door is a sheet of frosted glass with the word OFFICE printed in big black letters, although seated at his desk you see the letters backward so it looks like ECIFFO. And it was against these letters that I saw the knuckles of a hand go tap tap. Tell you the truth, I’d never heard anyone enter the anteroom—that’s how caught up I was in my threatening phone call.

“Come in,” I called, then I said my rude goodbyes to my tenant and hung up. My tenant is a biker and he revs his Harley in the living room: he says he’s tuning it. Tire slashing is too good for him.

The guy who entered the office was a little guy maybe a few years older than me. He was little without being small, or maybe he was small without being little. In any case, he seemed very sure of himself and he walked up to the desk without even glancing around the office and he kept his back straight. He wore a natty blue suit, a necktie that didn’t call attention to itself and his lackluster gray hair was scattered across his balding scalp like fragments of grass on a school playground. His eyes were sharp. He looked like money. He looked like he was used to giving the orders and paying the tab.

“Mr. Bradshaw?” he asked.

“I’m his partner and financial adviser,” I said, taking my feet off the desk. “Plotz, Victor Plotz.”

“Will Mr. Bradshaw be back soon?”

I don’t know what it was about the guy’s tone that irritated me. Maybe I felt he was being dismissive. There’s no sucker you want to catch as much as the sucker who doesn’t want to be caught. “That depends,” I said. “Mr. Bradshaw’s a busy man and I screen his appointments.”

“Isn’t this his office?”

“Let’s say this is the office you get to before you get to his real office. I don’t think you told me your name.”

The little guy in the blue suit was looking at the picture of Jesse James. I guess if Charlie had other pictures, like a picture of me for instance, then it wouldn’t be so striking. And the frame is big and black with gold filigree. Stuck up there on the wall behind Charlie’s desk, Jesse James looks like the founder of the firm. The little guy was looking at Jesse as if he were just about to articulate the words “Isn’t that…” but he was the kind of guy who believes that Doubt is a kissing cousin to Weakness and he wasn’t about to show any weakness. Tough—that was the impression he wanted to make.

“I’m Bernard Logan,” he tells me in a way supposed to make me think I’m supposed to recognize his name. He gives me a card that says Battlefield Farms and a P.O. box in Schuylerville, a pokey town on the Hudson about ten miles east of Saratoga. “I want to hire a private detective.”

I rubbed my hands together in a soothing manner. “Take a seat, Mr. Logan. Mr. Bradshaw is pretty busy right now, but if I know what’s bothering you, then maybe I can twist his arm.” This was a downright lie, because Charlie hadn’t had a case all month, apart from some insurance stuff. I knew for a fact that he was broke. On the other hand, he’s got a little garden around back of his house on the lake and in May he likes to spend the warm days fooling with the lettuces and weeding his snap peas.

Logan put his hand on the back of the visitor’s chair but couldn’t quite bring himself to take the plunge. “This is a sensitive matter,” he said.

I shut my eyes, leaned back in the swivel chair and nodded slowly. What was it about his tone that made my skin itch? It seemed to suggest a group of people from which I was excluded. “I see myself as a sensitive kind of guy,” I said. “You own this place, this Battlefield Farms?”

“I’m the major stockholder.” Logan sat down. It was as if he had just taken the hook into his mouth, and I waited to give the line a tug. Still, there was no anxiety about him, no nervousness. Most people who turn up in a detective’s office show some discomfort. After all, they’ve got a problem. Logan had gray skin, like wet cardboard, and his face showed all the emotion of a guy buying a pair of shoes. “It’s a family-run business,” he continued. “My wife, plus a son and stepson from my first marriage. We have a lot of horses, both our own and those we train or breed for others.”

“And you’re near the battlefield?” This was the place where General Burgoyne lost the Battle of Saratoga for the British and where Benedict Arnold played hero. Now it’s a big national park a few miles south of Schuylerville right on the Hudson.

“Our land abuts the park. You must know it.”

Sometimes in summer the park is full of all kinds of crazy guys with muskets and old-timey uniforms. They run around trying to stab each other with rusty bayonets and shouting like wild men. I wouldn’t go near it for a million bucks. “Like the palm of my hand,” I said. “You must feel proud living next to the place where history took such a big step forward. I mean, where would we be without the Battle of Saratoga, right? We’d be Canadians, most likely. Or Brits.”

Logan gave me his glassy stare, like history for him was just so many dead calendars. “My wife wants to kill me, Mr. Plotz. That’s why I’m here.”

Well, there were a lot of humorous things I could have said in response to that remark, but I kept my mouth shut and looked concerned. Personally, I think most spouses want to kill one another. It’s what marriage is all about. Death practice—that’s marriage, which is why I specialize in girlfriends.

“She’s younger than I am by almost thirty years and she’s got a lover, my own foreman. I guess you’ve heard this story before, correct? We’ve been married eight years.”

Instead of looking ashamed or embarrassed, Logan looked angry. His fingers were curled into tight little fists and he glowered as if daring me to disagree. I figured I could also make a few wisecracks about the foreman poking his wife, but I hung on to my sympathy face and pursed my lips. After all, I was trying to do Charlie a favor. “What makes you think that she wants to kill you?”

“I heard her talking to Randall, he’s the foreman, Randall Hanks. What do they think, that I can’t see what they’re doing?” Logan’s body grew stiff for a moment as if from an electric charge. “She has an insurance policy on me, a big one, and it’s new. She and Randall have been carrying on, I don’t know, maybe for a couple of months or longer. I heard her talking to him on the phone. She told him that very soon their problems would be over and they’d have the farm. The only way for that to happen would be if I was dead.”

“Did she say how or anything like that?”

“No, just that it would be soon.”

“Did you actually hear her use the word ‘kill’ or ‘murder’? You know, a violent-death-type word? Maybe she’s just been buying Lotto tickets.”

Do you know those stares called glacial stares? Narrowed eyes and a curving trajectory down the nose. Even the chin seems more pointed and chilly. Logan gave me one of those, and I gave him a happy smile to show I was basically okay.

“They want me dead. They want the farm. They want the freedom to continue their sexual romp without my interference.”

“Where’s your proof?”

“I told you I heard her on the phone…”

“Look, Mr. Logan, Charlie Bradshaw’s a busy man. That’s why he’s got me to screen his visitors. If I go to him with a story about an overheard phone call, he’ll laugh me all the way down to Brooklyn. You got to have some hard facts.”

“The insurance policy…”

“Hey, I got a policy on my cat. It wouldn’t stand up in a court of law.”

Logan snapped his fingers at me. “If I had something that could stand up in court, I’d go to the police. I wouldn’t bother with a private detective.”

I figured he had me on that one, so I cleared my throat and sucked my teeth. “What happened to your first wife?” I asked.

“She’s been dead fifteen years. Cancer.”

I nearly said, Just like me, because my wife had died of cancer as well, although that was more like thirty years ago.

“And her son works at the farm?”

“There are two. The son we had together, Carl, who’s twenty-three and who graduated from Cornell last year. Then there is the son she had by a previous marriage: Donald Croteau, he’s thirty-five.”

Mentioning these two guys, it was like Logan was talking about warm weather and cold. I had the feeling that Logan didn’t waste a lot of love on his stepson, whereas this Carl fellow was the apple of his eye.

“And they all live with you?”

“It’s a big farm. There are several houses. Donald has his own place. So does the foreman, Hanks.”

“Anyone else?”

“The trainer, Frankie Faber.” Logan kept rubbing his hand across his jaw as if it itched.

“One big happy family,” I said, and again Logan gave me one of his arctic expressions. “Why don’t you just fire the foreman, this Randall Hanks?”

“I used to like my wife, Mr. Plotz, and I’m not much good as a husband. When they started their affair, I pretty much accepted it. Better that she has her fun at home, right? Or at least on the property. She’d had affairs before, but none of them were serious and I didn’t much worry about them. This one has become serious. She took another bedroom in the house. We don’t talk. We don’t get along. She wants me out of the way and by that I mean dead and she wants it to happen as soon as possible.”

“What’s the rush?”

“I’m not a weak man, and I have a temper. She can see that relations are getting worse. I’ll fire Hanks and get rid of her as well, but if you or Bradshaw can come up with evidence th. . .