Saratoga Fleshpot

by Stephen Dobyns

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Morally flexible sidekick Victor Plotz takes on the ninth mystery for everyman detective Charlie Bradshaw. Now working at the Horse Pavillion at the Saratoga Springs racetrack, Victor finds himself being followed as a badly behaved horse named Fleshpot begins to make waves. Several murders and a breath-taking car chase see Victor himself come under suspicion while Charlie faces up to his own commitment issues - a fate worse than death.

Release date: August 1, 2013

Publisher: Sphere

Print pages: 256

Sample

I named the horse Fleshpot because he kept trying to grab my ass, take a little nip with his big white teeth. It was pure friendliness on his part. A chestnut colt with a white left front stocking and a white blaze on his forehead shaped like the state of New Jersey. He liked me so much that he wanted to see how I’d taste. He wanted to roll me around on his tongue. I’ve had girlfriends who hankered to do the same thing. And it was because Fleshpot had this passionate attraction to my backside that events turned out as they did and various crimes were uncovered. In such a way can the peculiar cravings of a four-footed creature betray the misdeeds of the two-footed ones. But I am getting ahead of myself.

My name is Victor Plotz and I am an entrepreneur in Saratoga Springs, New York. That is, I used to be an entrepreneur: fast-moving stocks, cattle market futures, hog bellies, buy low in the morning, sell high at night. I had some ladies who trusted me with their cash and over the years I had built up a golden nest egg of my own. I was Mr. High Finance, Mr. Big Bucks. But all that was before the stock market crash.

Let me say that the crash of ’94 had a very narrow focus. I got hit, maybe a couple of others. It was like chalk marks on a blackboard—I got erased. Worse, my ladies took to doubting my expertise and demanded their money back. Hey, I told them, you lost money, I lost money too. My nest egg was depleted. My credibility exhausted. My reputation shot. But it could have been worse. My friend Charlie Bradshaw says I was lucky to stay out of jail. It seems that I had made promises I couldn’t keep. I can’t remember. My mind goes blank. In any case, I got visited by lawyers and plainclothes coppers who kept bandying about the word “fraud” so that it hung in the air like an inflatable shuttlecock. Were there skyscrapers in Saratoga Springs, I might of hopped out of a high window. But Saratoga is a town of squat, stubby buildings and I figured if I jumped I’d only bust my ankle, so I got drunk instead.

All this was back in June. I lost my Mercedes. My four duplexes returned to the bank. Some furniture got repossessed. I’d bought a nice cottage out on Lake Saratoga so I could be near my pal Charlie Bradshaw and the bank snatched that as well. I was lucky that the lawyers didn’t take my cat. The coppers even had a warrant to search my apartment. Do you know what it’s like to have strange hands rummaging through your sock drawer? To tell the truth, I had a few bucks hidden away in a safe spot but if I publicized this fact, I’d lose that money as well. My own lawyer curled his lip at me and called me a doofus. It’s not that I could just start over again. I’m about sixty or thereabouts and I’ve already been about sixty for a few years. Consequently, toward the end of July I was knocking on Charlie Bradshaw’s office door looking for a job, nothing permanent you understand, just something to tide me over and make me look good with the authorities. I mean, if I didn’t work to look humble and beaten, somebody might have guessed that I had money tucked away, and I couldn’t afford that. I’m not the kind of guy who poverty looks good on.

Charlie Bradshaw is a private detective and before that he was a cop. I guess he was a cop for twenty years and now he has been a detective for almost as long. He’s not a big guy and he’s not a ferocious guy and he doesn’t know squat about fancy wines or cigars and the car he drives is a Mazda 323, a pipsqueak of a car. Nowadays he makes most of his money from insurance cases, checking into fires and claims that might be fraudulent. Then he does some low-level missing persons work—husbands on a fling, daughters run off with a boyfriend—and over the years he has made some contacts with the horse crowd and sometimes he provides security for some horse owner or anything that requires a sharp pair of eyes. Unlike me, Charlie is not a guy with a lot of ambition. He moves along at a certain pace and I tend to lap him, sort of like the tortoise and the hare. And that comparison is right on the money, because it wasn’t Charlie who was hurting after the crash of ’94. Haste, Charlie likes to say to me, makes waste. Then he smiles.

Charlie has got a seedy-looking office on Phila Street over a used-book store and across the street from a dentist. The single thing in its favor is that the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shop is only half a block away. The office has a little anteroom with some National Geographics from the used-book store downstairs and a bunch of dead flies who probably scragged themselves out of boredom. The day in question was a Friday, shortly after lunch. The summer stint of thoroughbred racing was to start next week and already the town was getting crowded: eager losers hoping to be winners. It used to be I’d rent out my duplexes during the five weeks of racing season and make a bundle, but now I didn’t have that property anymore. If you think that sixty or thereabouts is an unfortunate age to be dead broke, you hit the nail on the head. It was hard for me to stay chipper, to keep a smile on my lips and a song in my heart. I needed gainful employment and I didn’t care what kind.

I rapped on the glass that says “office” and entered without waiting for a reply. Doors, right? Aren’t they a mystery? Here I expected to find Charlie sitting at his desk reading up on some old outlaw who had caught his fancy—Deadeye Dick or Rapscallion Ralph—and instead he was smooching with his girlfriend, Janey Burris. Considering how he reacted, you’d think I’d caught him with his pants down.

“Jesus, Victor, can’t you knock?”

“I did but you were too caught up in your passion.”

Janey grinned at me. I figured she had just been attending one of those noon aerobics classes at the YMCA because she was wearing a blue tank top and shorts and her ragged black hair looked damp. She’s a good-looking nurse in her forties with the body of a gymnast, which to me means too much bone and gristle. Sleeping with her would be like sleeping on a futon. I like a woman with no hard edges, a woman who spills over at the sides, a featherbed kind of woman. But I’m fond of Janey and if she gained forty pounds I might glance at her more than once.

Charlie still looked exasperated, which makes his gray hair stick up in peaks. He was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt that was a trifle threadbare, shiny blue slacks that probably started life as a gusher of oil and a striped necktie that must have been the veteran of a dozen suicide attempts. You know those Before and After pictures in certain advertisements? Charlie could make a bundle by portraying the Before part of the ad. Around his mouth, just like a Barnum and Bailey clown, was a red smear from Janey’s lip gloss.

“Charlie, I need a job,” I said. “If I don’t get something right away the savage lawyers will think I’ve got money hidden someplace.”

Charlie sat back in his chair and Janey scrambled off his desk and straightened her shorts. The nice thing about friends is they forgive you, although you don’t want to push it too hard. Charlie looked at me thoughtfully and made a little tent out of the fingers of both hands. He’s got big blue eyes half concealed by a pair of bifocals and a round face as smooth as a baby’s rump. Right now he’s someplace in his mid-fifties. He had a birthday back in April and I threw a party with two hundred guests, half of whom had jail time on their vitae. That was when I was still flush. You’ve heard of the Mississippi Scheme and the South Sea Bubble? I was the Vic Plotz Bubble.

“What kind of job do you need?” asked Janey.

“Something to make me look honest and humble.”

“Have you thought of entering a monastery?” asked Charlie.

He likes his little joke. You know how kids will drive you crazy with knock-knock jokes and asking where the sheep gets his hair cut? It’s like that. But if you don’t encourage the little tykes, they never develop a sense of humor and they grow up to become serial killers, or worse.

“They wouldn’t allow conjugal visits from the Queen of Softness,” I told him. That’s my girlfriend, but more about her later. “Seriously, Charlie, I got to make it seem that I’m hauling myself up by my bootstraps.”

So he thought about it and Janey Burris thought about it too. Charlie’s office is a barren sort of place with an old desk and visitor’s chair, green linoleum on the floor, a file cabinet and an antique safe where he keeps his revolver. For some time I’ve been urging him to get a computer but the idea seems to frighten him. I tell him that he wouldn’t need to use it but the computer would give his customers confidence. On the wall behind his desk between the two windows looking out on Phila Street, Charlie has hung a poster-size photo of Jesse James in an ornate Victorian frame. Jesse has a birdlike face, not one of those birds that tweedles, rather the kind that snatches mice and voles away from their law-abiding errands. For Charlie, Jesse James is a guy who did what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it. No lesson plans for him. No social security payments. No insurance forms. Jesse was a guy against whom nagging never worked, until he got shot, of course.

“What about a job at my mother’s hotel?” asked Charlie.

“Washing dishes?”

“Busing tables.”

“That’s a trifle too humble, Charlie. Besides, your mother can’t stand me.” Charlie’s mother runs the Bentley, right on Broadway in downtown Saratoga: one of those hotels where you walk through the front doors and suddenly it’s the 1880s but with antibiotics and TVs hidden in the armoires. I worked there for a while as assistant manager, winter caretaker and hotel detective: three different stints, three different painful memories. Charlie’s mother claims I nearly put the hotel into receivership. I tell her that it’s a source of pride on my part that I don’t suffer fools gladly.

“I could probably get you a job at the hospital,” said Janey. She stood with her hand on Charlie’s shoulder. She had a husband once but he ran off to Australia. Sometimes he sends her postcards with pictures of sheep ranches with the message: “Wish you were here.”

“Would I have to see blood?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Even swellings upset me.”

So that was how it went for a while. Charlie or Janey would suggest some humiliating form of employment and I would find a flaw. Yard work would wreak havoc with my hay fever. (“I didn’t know you had hay fever,” said Charlie. “I just got it,” I told him.) Working in a men’s clothing store would be bad on my arches and besides I had done that for twenty years in New York City and if I ever did it again I’d go berserk. Working in the kitchen of a chowhouse would give me pimples.

“What about a lifeguard at a pool?” I asked.

“Do you swim?”

“I could learn.”

Then Charlie thought of a couple of surveillance jobs where I got to watch a doorway for forty-eight hours a day. No thanks.

“Baby-sitting?” suggested Janey.

“I’m not good with kids,” I said. “I get them riled up.”

“I’ve an idea,” said Charlie. He picked up the phone and dialed a number. Janey and I stared at him. To tell you the truth, I was beginning to lose confidence. Somebody picked up on the other end and Charlie went through half a minute of boy talk about the Red Sox and life in the trenches. Then he asked, “Are you still looking for someone for that security job?” He paused, nodded, then said, “I think I’ve got the right guy for you.”

“What kind of security job?” I asked when he had hung up the phone. I’m a little overweight, a little out of shape, and the only rassling I do these days is with the Queen of Softness.

“It’s over at the yearling sales,” he said. “You know, the horse auctions?”

“Do I guard the horses? I thought the Pinkertons did that.”

“No, not the horses.”

“Do I guard the people, all the fat cats and pretty women?”

“No, not the people.”

“Do I keep an eye on the tables and chairs? Keep the lowlifes from swiping the bar glasses?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Then what the hell do I do, Charlie?”

“You know the Humphrey S. Finney Pavilion where they auction the horses? Well, they’re putting up an exhibit of nineteenth-century English and French paintings on the second floor. Paintings of horses and racetracks, landscapes and portraits. Henry Brown Limited from London. They’re hoping to sell quite a few. They need someone to guard the paintings.”

So that was how it started.

I don’t know if you have ever guarded paintings before, but it can be tiresome work. I mean, after you’ve looked at them ten times, they become so much wallpaper. They don’t talk, they don’t make jokes or give you a sly wink. And these paintings depicted a life that won’t be seen again on this earth: lazy summer afternoons on English farms with a kid in fancy duds walking a leggy horse from a thatched barn, Derby Day scenes with the women with parasols and wearing antique clothes that covered every inch of their skin but the pale circles of their faces. Maybe there were one hundred and twenty of them. It was pretty stuff but even the cheapest started at five grand. A young blond woman named Fletcher with an accent like breakable crystal told me what to do (to walk back and forth authoritatively but to speak to no one and get in nobody’s way), then drifted off to check her makeup. Until the yearling sales started in two weeks’ time, it seemed I would hardly have any company, except workmen and the odd browser. I didn’t even get to carry a pistol.

I showed up at noon on Monday and practiced my casual walk for eight hours. Ms. Fletcher had provided me with a brown uniform that gave me a vaguely military air. It was brown, I figured, because the company name was Brown: Henry Brown Limited of London. I felt lucky his name wasn’t Henry Magenta or Henry Chartreuse. I also had a brown baseball cap. I got fuzzy hair, like somewhere back on my family tree is a dandelion clock. This brown baseball cap had “Henry Brown Limited” printed in yellow across the front and it didn’t so much fit upon my head as rest on my hair like a surfboard rests upon the sea. It also kept falling off. Sometimes I pinned the cap to my hair like a yarmulke but mostly I just carried it in my hand except when Ms. Fletcher was nearby.

The Pavilion is a round building of naked concrete. Inside are two levels of red plush seats. The very rich people sit in the twelve rows downstairs, the moderately rich sit in the four rows upstairs. No prospective buyer gets in without a credit check. The rows make half a circle with the auction ring and the auctioneer’s pulpit in the very center. The pictures I was guarding hung on the wall behind the last seats on the second floor and above the auction ring. Also above the auction ring was a press box and a big electric sign suspended from the ceiling that said Fasig-Tipton Saratoga on top and 1994 Selected Yearlings on the bottom. In between would flash the current bid on a particular yearling and then the closing price. All told that year there were one hundred and ninety yearlings with about sixty-five being auctioned each night: the seventy-fourth annual yearling sales in Saratoga Springs. Some of the horses might bring thirty grand, some upwards of a million, with the average coming in at a hundred thousand. Not bad for an adolescent that has never had a saddle on his back.

But in these first days before the sales, I was about the only activity in the Pavilion, or rather the paintings were, as well as some folks cleaning and putting pink geraniums in the flower boxes. At the back of the balcony, right across from the auctioneer’s pulpit, was a bronze bust of Humphrey S. Finney himself, complete with buck teeth and reading glasses, the Brit after whom the Pavilion was named and who had conducted the auctions for so long. He was my main company, and when I wandered by I patted his head.

Ms. Fletcher was the saleslady, or agent as she liked to be called. She was one of those women who dislikes chitchat and when I asked about the possibility of me making a sale and getting a commission, she led me to understand that Elvis would rise from his grave and sing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” before that was likely to happen. She was as cold-hearted as a Gila monster and twice as shiny. I don’t know what she did for boyfriends, probably chummied up to a parking meter. I guessed she was thirty-five going on ninety.

Unfortunately, I needed the job. Even my lawyer said he would send me packing unless I had gainful employment and starting attending synagogue. He whispered the words “grand jury” as others might whisper the words “acid bath.” The authorities seemed to think that I had sold the exact same stock shares to several different old ladies. A silly idea. But it required me to put up with Ms. Fletcher’s chilly exterior and save the backtalk for my dreams. I had to be deferential, generous, sweet-talking and humble. It’s unfair. When Christians act like that they get made into saints.

But I was not completely alone, and here is where the complications began. In order to push the humility gimmick as far as Bad Breath, Idaho, I had got myself a little bicycle, one of those black three-speed British jobbies, that looked as if it had once swum the Channel: rusty. Maybe it was a dozen blocks from my apartment in the Algonquin on Broadway over to the Humphrey S. Finney Pavilion on East Avenue right across from the Oklahoma Track, now used as a training track. They say that once you learn to ride a bike you never forget. I didn’t find that to be true. . . .