Saratoga Haunting

by Stephen Dobyns

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Streetwise private eye Charlie Bradshaw must face two crimes from his past that suddenly resurface, as well as a commitment ultimatum from his longtime companion, Janie. By the author of Body Traffic. 15,000 first printing. $15,000 ad/promo.

Release date: July 1, 1993

Publisher: Viking

Print pages: 256

Sample

The word bucolic derives from the Greek word for herdsman with the first syllable referring to the oxen that the herdsman is tending. Traditionally a bucolic setting includes shepherds, farmlands, lush foliage. But even the bucolic can suffer the pangs of modernization and in the present instance the ox has been replaced by a bright yellow backhoe, the herdsman by the backhoe operator. It was a warm Tuesday morning in Saratoga Springs in early November and the hinged bucket of the machine dipped and lifted a mouthful of dirt and rotten wood which it appeared to munch thoughtfully before turning and unloading its contents into the back of a blue dump truck.

The backhoe operator’s name was Eddie Gillespie and he was half asleep, having spent much of the night pacing the floor with a colicky baby. In addition he felt stunned by the hairpin turns through which life had whisked him. Not many months before his late nights had been agreeably spent in discos and nightclubs, card games and pool halls: the respectable occupations of a young man about town. He picked up what little money he needed as a bartender or stable guard, even as an assistant private detective. But then one of the party girls with whom Eddie passed his time had turned out to be a party girl with a hidden purpose and before he even felt himself in danger, Eddie had been wearing a powder-blue tuxedo and escorting his bride down the aisle of the Pacified Jesus Methodist Church. “You’re over thirty,” Irene had told him, “you’ve got to look out for your future.” And now Eddie was the father of a three-week-old squawling daughter by the name of Angelina and he couldn’t look the baby in the face without thinking: How the fuck did this happen?

In bucolic poetry, the herdsman who caught a glimpse of a nymph was changed into a tree or flower. These days the nymph transforms the man about town into a herdsman, although in the 1990s to be a herdsman tending a giant yellow ruminant provides a steady income with health and retirement benefits. The sun was warm and heated the yellow metal, which made the beast appear content. Over his ears Eddie wore yellow noise suppressors like stereo headphones that reduced the roar of the backhoe to a digestive rumble. The noise suppressors squashed down Eddie’s skillfully tousled black hair, the perfection of which being the single art form that quickened his pulse. Eddie had stripped off his jean jacket and wore khaki pants and a white T-shirt depicting a ballerina from the New York City Ballet performing an arabesque (a gift from his wife). Although it had snowed on Halloween, these first days in November were mild and even a few dandelions had been coaxed into blooming.

Nonetheless bad weather was coming. There were storms in Minnesota and tales of cars being stranded on Interstate 80 in Iowa. The probability of many more warm days was slight and Eddie’s job this morning was one that should have been completed the previous week: clearing the land where Jacko’s Pool Hall had once stood before the ground froze so that construction of the new library could begin in the spring.

Those who took pleasure in sentimentally exaggerating the mythos of Saratoga Springs and its rapscallion past had found something appropriate in the fact that the public library owned a pool hall. “Only in Saratoga Springs,” they liked to say, thinking more of the old casinos and racetracks than of pool halls. But it amused them to think of the librarians hanging out at Jacko’s, after putting the books to sleep, and betting who could sink the eight ball on the break. Actually the library had no interest in the pool hall itself and only wanted the ground on which it stood and which would eventually be the home of a newer and grander library, although probably not as pretty as the old one located on a corner of Congress Park. The lot was situated in a treeless hollow back behind Caffè Lena and bounded to the east and west by Henry and Putnam streets. At one time there had been a livery stable on the site, although for as long as Eddie Gillespie could remember (which wasn’t very long) it had been the pool hall, which in fact had been built using part of the old livery stable and which was why Jacko’s had a dirt cellar and was freezing in winter.

Eddie Gillespie had learned to shoot eight ball at Jacko’s. He had won money on the cigarette-scarred green tables and had lost even more. He’d been drunk, he’d been in fights, he had sworn brotherhood and sworn revenge, he planned car thefts and seductions, he had puked in the men’s room—all at Jacko’s. And now he was removing the last bits and pieces and making the ground ready for books. Even this amazed him, and as he manipulated the controls of the yellow backhoe (which he called Homer without intending a literary reference), it seemed he could feel remnants of his old drinking and gambling self, his old devil-may-care car-thieving self, his Don Juan and committed-bachelor self, gathered in the warm Indian-summer air around him. And as that rakish self had been at last obliterated by marriage and fatherhood, so was Eddie Gillespie obliterating the final traces of the spot where some of his most disreputable behavior had been enacted or planned. He was patting down the ground as if smoothing the dirt on his own grave. But he wasn’t simply burying himself, because after all he had begun a new life: wife, child, reputable employment, even a little house; rather, it seemed as if he were taking over somebody else’s life, a life that didn’t resemble Eddie’s but which was like his father’s—a serious wage earner with a belly full of ulcers who had always made Eddie Gillespie grind his teeth. Eddie had been sidetracked into his old man’s life and with it came his father’s oft-repeated warning: “You wait ’til you’re my age!”

Jesus, thought Eddie, nothing’s going to be interesting ever again. It wasn’t that Eddie didn’t love his wife and daughter but he felt he had been tricked into becoming another person, as if he had put on a Halloween mask and couldn’t get it off again. It was glued to his face. Nothing fun anymore, nothing dangerous. No more private detective stuff, no more carrying a gun. No more late nights, no more fast lane. No excitement, ever!

As these thoughts assailed him and he felt increasingly sorry for himself, Eddie became aware of somebody shouting but, it seemed, from very far away. Near the dump truck he saw the driver, Louie Paloma, bright red in the face, waving his arms as if attempting to fly. Eddie snatched off the noise suppressors and over the roar of the backhoe he could hear Paloma shouting, “Stop Homer, stop Homer!”

Eddie flicked off the key and the machine sputtered to a stop. Then he looked toward the hinged bucket, following Louie Paloma’s pointed finger. There, stuck on the bucket’s rusted middle tooth was a skull, a human skull. It was tilted slightly to the left and seemed to stare rather jauntily at Eddie. And, after all this thought about the death of his own past life, the death in fact of his youth, even the death of Jacko’s Pool Hall, it occurred to Eddie, certainly irrationally and only for the briefest of moments, that the skull presently attempting to stare him down from its wobbly perch was most probably his own.



“What the fuck’s a seven-letter word beginning with ‘e’ for a bucolic poem?” asked Victor Plotz.

Charlie Bradshaw looked up from his section of the Albany Union Leader and tilted his head so he could see Victor through the top part of his bifocals. “What kind of poem?” It was Wednesday morning and they were sitting in Charlie’s office on Phila Street in downtown Saratoga Springs. Sunlight slanted through the window and warmed the back of Charlie’s neck. He had never liked crossword puzzles. They unpleasantly recalled the intelligence tests that so filled him with anxiety during his grade-school years: glum results and baffled teachers.

“A bucolic poem, it’s probably a poem about Halloween. Don’t you have a dictionary around here?”

Charlie began to ask why a detective’s office should need a dictionary but then he thought that the Pinkertons probably had hundreds of dictionaries. “No, not recently,” he said. “Why is it a Halloween poem?”

“You know, Boo! as in Boo-colic.” The windows of Victor’s lime-green Mercedes 190 had been badly soaped on Halloween and the subject was still near to his heart.

Charlie felt unwilling to accept this definition but neither was he prepared to argue. Victor had been his friend for nearly seventeen years and Charlie knew that once having linked the word bucolic to Halloween, Victor would vigorously defend it without the least need of proof. “Stands to reason,” he would say. Or: “It makes common sense. What’re you, against common sense?”

“Call the library,” suggested Charlie, “you got a phone there.”

Since July Victor had been carrying a cellular phone at all hours of the day and night as if his life would be meaningless without it. First he had used it at the track to be in constant, although spurious, contact with touts and bookies and to bandy about the names of famous trainers (“Say, Wayne, what about Wonder’s Delight in the third?”), which thoroughly unnerved anyone standing within thirty feet. This seemed Victor’s only purpose. It being his belief that a sleeping dog is a useless dog: meaning he liked to rouse them roughly from tranquillity. And recently Charlie had accused Victor of getting Eddie Gillespie and other friends to telephone him in public places (restaurants, bars, movie theaters) for a buck a call so that Victor could shout out: “Buy at two hundred!” or “Sell at three hundred!” Or even: “Has the Japanese market closed yet?”

“What the fuck do libraries know about Halloween?” asked Victor, returning to his crossword puzzle and chewing the eraser of one of Charlie’s pencils. Victor was a man in his early sixties, although for some years he had frozen his age at fifty-nine. Charlie knew that Victor was almost exactly ten years older and now he felt a kind of dismay that he was creeping up on him. Recently Victor had even been threatening to get a face-lift and Charlie considered with aversion the possibility that Victor might be transformed into a younger friend, although when Victor mentioned the face-lift, Eddie Gillespie had remarked that that kind of elevation would require the use of his backhoe. Already Victor had begun tinting his hair, changing it from a light gray to a darker gray: the hair itself stuck out in all directions as if to caution young children not to stick their fingers in light sockets. Victor called it a Jewish Afro. “It’s what Moses brought back from Egypt,” he explained.

Victor apologized for these changes in his appearance, saying they were not due to vanity, but to the requirements of his new occupation as stockbroker, which was how he described his dealings with a number of gullible older women who had entrusted him to invest their money. “I gotta transform myself into glittering 3-D,” he would say: “dapper, dynamic and dependable.” How many clients he had lured into his ventures varied with each telling. How much he knew about the stock market also varied, as did his successes, his hopes for the future, his plans to buy a condo in Palm Beach. There was the flesh-and-blood Victor and there was the mythic Victor and between these two phenomena existed a constantly shifting space. Although as Victor said, “Hey, Charlie, I’m driving the Mercedes and you’re driving the Mazda 323. You figure it out.”

Beyond his new career as a stockbroker, Victor had also acquired some rental property: two duplexes which he rented to Skidmore students during the year and to racing fans during the five weeks of racing, which brought him more money than all the rest of the year combined. In fact, Victor had a variety of money-making schemes, while Charlie limped along as a private detective and on the money his mother paid him for taking care of the Bentley, Mabel Bradshaw’s Victorian hotel in downtown Saratoga, which was closed from Labor Day to Memorial Day while she spent the winter months in Vence: a small perched village on the French Riviera.

All that Charlie could say in favor of his own semi-impoverished state was that it was exclusively his own and that’s the way he wanted it. A stint in the army followed by twenty years as a Saratoga policeman had filled him chock-full of other people’s orders. Better to be half broke by himself than flush while working for someone else. Of course Victor seemed to do all right but it wouldn’t have surprised Charlie in the least if someday the FBI came bursting through the door and led Victor off to jail. What Charlie liked was a life without interference and he wasn’t one hundred percent sure that Victor had that.

Charlie turned back to the paper. November was a slow time in the detective trade, he told himself, although the same had been true of October and September. He had some insurance cases, a couple of surveillance cases which he had farmed out, several missing persons and a woman who kept getting threatening letters that Charlie suspected she was mailing to herself. Charlie liked to think that his expanded leisure time gave him the opportunity of painting his small house out on Saratoga Lake, of developing a serious swimming regimen, which meant losing another pound or two, and of seeing more of Janey Burris, the woman whose face drifted across his consciousness like a robin across a blue sky perhaps one hundred times a day.

But despite these pleasures there were bills to be paid and Charlie knew he was barely scraping by. He sighed and glanced over at the poster of Jesse James that was Scotch-taped to the wall. Once he had thought that he liked Jesse James because he was a symbol of the romantic outlaw life, then he thought he liked him because Jesse seemed a symbol of American expansionism and unlimited frontiers. Now he thought he liked Jesse James because Jesse had been without existential dilemmas: no doubt, no hesitation, no scratching his head and wondering what it all meant, no loneliness, no vaguely looking out the window, no uncertainty as to what to do next. Action—that was Jesse James: a soul like a karate chop. And certainly it was significant that his one aesthetic moment—standing on a chair and straightening a picture—had been the moment when Bob Ford put a bullet in the back of his head.

“If you were a real pal,” said Victor, giving the paper a reproachful shake, “you’d get a dictionary. I know lotsa people who’ve got dictionaries and I could do the crossword with them a heck of a lot easier, but no, I hang out with you because I like you best, even though it fucks up my crossword.”

But Charlie wasn’t listening. He had noticed a vaguely familiar name at the back of the paper, and then, thinking about it, he was chagrined to realize that the name belonged to someone who had at one time filled his thoughts. “They let Virgil Darcy out of prison!” he said. “They paroled him.”

“Who the heck’s Virgil Darcy?” asked Victor, feeling it unlikely that any human being could compete with the elusive meaning of the word bucolic.

“A kid I arrested about twenty years ago. I’d known him a long time.”

“Well he ain’t a kid any longer,” said Victor, giving the paper another shake. Then, after a moment, “What did you arrest him for?”

“He was the driver for a bank holdup in Albany and a guard got killed. The two guys that did the holdup never got caught. Virgil claimed he hadn’t known they were going to rob the bank and had no idea where they had escaped to. He must be in his early forties now.”

Looking again at the short news article, Charlie saw that Virgil’s age was forty-three. It mentioned the robbery of the Marine Midland Bank and that the other two robbers, Joey Damasco and Frank Bonita, were still at large. About two hundred thousand dollars had been stolen and the bank was still offering a ten-thousand-dollar reward for its recovery. The robbers had planned the holdup so meticulously that no one believed Virgil’s protestations of innocence, although later Charlie felt that Virgil had been telling the truth, even that Frank Bonita might have been getting even with Virgil for some quarrel or stolen girlfriend or imagined insult by convincing Virgil to drive the car. And it had also occurred to Charlie that Bonita had at some point gotten rid of his partner Joey Damasco, taken the money and gone off to start a new life under an assumed name, although Charlie had no evidence of this. But Bonita was cagey, intelligent and as cold as a snake—wiping out his old life and starting a new one would have meant little to him. At least this is what Charlie had thought for years, but now he wondered what evidence he had ever had for that.

As for Virgil Darcy, Charlie guessed he had first met him in the early sixties, about the time when Charlie had been promoted from patrolman to plainclothesman. Virgil was twelve years old and had been picked up for shoplifting at the Grand Union. The store manager said it was the third time he had been caught—each time he had been stealing candy: gumdrops and Hershey’s Kisses. Charlie had been touched by the idea of a clumsy shoplifter with a sweet tooth. Virgil Darcy had light-blond hair of the kind that invariably gets a kid nicknamed Whitey, but Virgil didn’t want a nickname. He said his name was Virgil and didn’t want it fooled with. And Charlie liked that too, that the kid seemed to have some sense of himself, despite a lousy home environment with a missing father, too many younger siblings, a mother who had to hold down a waitressing job and a grandmother who was too old and tired to care. In fact, it was a common story, except that Virgil was proud of the name Virgil and had a sweet tooth. The name made him different and when other kids made fun of him for it, Virgil would fight, even though he was small for his age and got beaten.

“Twenty years is a long time in the slammer,” said Victor. “How’d you happen to arrest him if the robbery was in Albany?”

“He lived here, or at least his mother did. When the call came over the radio about the robbery there was a description of the driver and it said he was a young man with nearly white hair. Virgil had hair like that and I sort of knew it was him. Not just because of the hair but because of the guys he’d been hanging out with. One of them, Frank Bonita, had been up for armed robbery before. Anyway, I went by Virgil’s mother’s house. It was clear something was wrong, although they said they hadn’t seen him. Virgil had had a part-time job at a marina out at the lake. I drove out there and found him hiding in an old boathouse. Actually I had to talk him into giving himself up. Then at the trial they thought he was holding back and protecting his friends so they threw the book at him, giving him life for. . .