Saratoga Snapper

by Stephen Dobyns

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

After Victor Plotz becomes the victim of a hit-and-run and his camera is stolen by the driver, Charlie Bradshaw finds himself between the police and an armed robbery scheme in his efforts to track Victor's assailant

Release date: September 10, 1986

Publisher: Viking Adult

Print pages: 256

Sample

In New York State, Route 9 is Broadway. It doesn’t matter if it’s Manhattan, Saratoga Springs or any of the burgs between.
And for Victor Plotz, who had once lived on lower Broadway in Manhattan and now lived on upper Broadway in Saratoga Springs,
it sometimes seemed he’d only moved a little farther uptown.

Victor liked that. He thought of himself as a city creature, at home wherever his sneakers touched concrete. Not that Saratoga
was much of a city as far as size was concerned, but at least it had Broadway and it was far more sensible than living out
at the lake like his friend Charlie Bradshaw. Here at least he could buy a fresh bagel and read the Post. Out at the lake one was limited to the company of fishes—fine in a pan or broiled with a little lemon but of no help in
keeping away the lonelies. There were no women at the lake, in the ordinary course of things, and too few jokes.

A need for bagels, the New York Post and a couple of rolls of film had caused Victor to leave his apartment in the Algonquin shortly after eight o’clock on this
particular sunny Monday morning in early June. The air was decidedly better than anything New York City had to offer. It had
a soft quality as if strained through the stamens of millions of flowers. Victor stood on the sidewalk and breathed deeply. He was a rather rumpled figure in his late fifties
with frizzy gray hair that rose about three inches from his head as if he had just stuck a bobby pin in an electrical outlet.
His face seemed to have been quickly slapped together from bread dough, and his nose had a rough and aggressive quality, more
like an elbow than a nose. He wore khaki pants and a gray sweat shirt and over his left shoulder he carried a camera: a Konica
AE1.

It was as a professional photographer that he now saw himself—a profession begun just in the past three days, Friday night
to be exact. In his role as a private detective, of course, he had been taking pictures for several years, but those were
what he called bad luck pictures, quick takes of people who didn’t want to be photographed, shot through the back window of
a car parked at what someone had mistakenly imagined to be a private spot or through a motel doorway or over a wall—unhappy
pictures which brought little cheer even to the person who had paid to have them taken.

These new pictures were more festive and had nothing to do with the detective agency. He had begun on Friday night to work
as a strolling photographer in the Bentley, which was the hotel owned by Charlie Bradshaw’s mother. The Bentley had been open
a week, opening on June 1 as a matter of fact, and the single reason that Mabel Bradshaw had named the hotel the Bentley was
that she hadn’t had the nerve to call it the Rolls-Royce.

Victor had actually been working at the hotel for the past six months—painting, plastering, putting up wallpaper. It was a
big four-story hotel right downtown—a firetrap according to some, an example of Victorian splendor according to others. Charlie
had also been working at the hotel and was now acting as night manager, just to give his mother a hand until the hotel got going smoothly or until he found a better job. Victor was also in charge of security
and had a little office with a brass plate on the door that said “Hotel Detective,” but so far there had been no detecting
which needed to be done, so he also helped out with room service and had just started taking these pictures in the lounge
and cocktail bar and restaurant—happy pictures of happy people who wanted the occasion remembered, and Victor, for a few bucks,
was glad to oblige—snap, snap, he was your good-natured Saratoga snapper. Then when the people got home they could take out
the pictures and see that despite the bills and heavy losses at the track, despite the overeating and overdrinking and too
little sleep, they had really had a great time after all.

As he turned left down Broadway toward Bruegger’s Bagel Bakery, Victor felt a little wobbly on his pins, a result, he well
knew, of his own overeating and overdrinking the previous night at a bar called the Backstretch, where he had been entertaining
a Mrs. Heinz with low jokes and high-priced drinks, while taking snaps of her various profiles and double chins for posterity.
Despite the attention, Mrs. Heinz had gone home by herself in a cab. Victor had felt somewhat dispirited and stayed at the
bar far later than was wise if he wanted to make a bright start in the morning. Technically, he had been waiting for Charlie,
even though he’d known there was little chance of Charlie appearing. For several years Charlie had been dating a waitress
at the Backstretch but now they had recently split up, or rather she had dumped him for someone else, and Charlie never came
into the bar unless it was to look mournful and make Doris feel bad.

Also, Charlie wouldn’t have left the hotel, since he took his job seriously even though he disliked it and particularly disliked his daytime counterpart: a dry stick of a man named Raoul whom Mabel Bradshaw had brought up from Atlantic City,
one of those fellows who is only happy walking on tiptoe and speaking in a whisper, as if he didn’t want to insult the world
by calling attention to himself. Of course Victor wasn’t fooled, or Charlie either for that matter, because they had both
heard complaints from the maids about Raoul’s pinchy fingers.

Raoul felt that Charlie had no class and didn’t properly appreciate that Saratoga was a summer town where much money could
be made. On the other hand, Charlie, Victor knew, would not have been heartbroken if Raoul had tumbled into a vat of boiling
milk. But Charlie had agreed to help his mother get the hotel started. Not that his mother did much work except give directions.
Instead, she seemed to see the hotel as her private home, while the employees were her servants and the guests her own guests
and particular friends. She didn’t see the hotel so much as a business but as the setting for her own particular jewel—as
if it was the ring and she the diamond. So most of the time she was to be found glittering in the lobby, welcoming guests
and asking if their travels had been difficult, while Raoul glared at Charlie and shook his head and Charlie looked depressed.

Victor bought a Post from the machine on the curb, then waited to cross the street to go up to the bakery. Staring around him with the paper tucked
under his arm, he seemed to be admiring the lush trees in full leaf and the red brick Victorian buildings. Actually, he was
thinking whether he would have cream cheese on his bagel, raspberry jam, or both.

As a result, he wasn’t paying sufficient attention when he stepped out onto Broadway. When he had gone about eight feet, he
noticed a rapid movement to his left. Turning, Victor saw a dark maroon car rushing down upon him. He jumped back and the car veered toward him; he leapt forward again and
again the car turned to bear down upon him. It occurred to Victor almost without fear that he was being purposefully run down.
The driver was slouched behind the steering wheel, and all Victor could see clearly was a gray fedora hat. There was no other
traffic at that moment, nor were there people nearby on the sidewalk. Someone’s trying to kill me, thought Victor. At the
last possible moment, he leapt into the air. He was not a good jumper but at least it kept him from being crushed.

The car struck his legs and he bounced on the hood, then was thrown up over the roof and down the other side, but all very
fast and violent, a painful tumble that landed him half-conscious on the pavement. The newspaper went flying into the street.
Hearing the screech of brakes, he looked to see the car slide to a halt. Then, instead of someone jumping out and running
to see how badly he was hurt, the car accelerated backward and Victor knew that the driver meant to flatten him under his
wheels.

Victor lay a few feet from a car parked at the curb. Despite the pain he rolled toward it as the maroon car swerved toward
him. Practically at the last moment, he got himself wedged under the side of the parked car as speeding black tires whooshed
by a few inches from his head. Then the maroon car stopped again, swerved forward into the street, stopped again, and Victor
heard the door swing open. Looking up, he saw his nice new camera lying on the pavement almost beneath the maroon car. Then
a hand reached down and plucked the camera from the street, and the car roared off. Victor thought of saying, Hey, that’s
my camera, but his thoughts felt fuzzy and there seemed a lot of blackness. He hurt in about fifty places and didn’t want to move. The matter of the camera could be
dealt with later, and so, slowly, he lowered his head to the pavement and let the darkness fill him in the way water fills
a ditch. The license plate, he thought, I should look at the license plate. But it was too hard to open his eyes—better to
rest, he decided, better to let the darkness do its job.

A phone call from the hospital woke Charlie at ten o’clock. He had gotten back from the hotel at six-thirty a.m., then stayed
awake for another hour reading a book about bank robberies. As a result, his eyes felt gummy and unwilling to focus. When
he heard that Victor had been run down by a car, however, he became completely alert.

“How bad is it?” he asked the nurse. “How did it happen?” Victor had a broken leg, a broken arm and shoulder, several broken
ribs, some internal injuries and a possible concussion. As for how it happened, the nurse couldn’t tell him, although apparently
he had been run down while crossing Broadway. Six weeks before racing season and already pedestrians were being brutalized.

Charlie hung up and quickly got dressed. Normally, he would have worn jeans, but now, as night manager of a big hotel, he
had been told he had an image to project—or was it protect? In any case, he put on a white shirt and a reddish tie with small
blue whales and a rather wrinkled blue seersucker sport coat. Then he hurried out to his car, pushing his fingers through
his sparse gray hair and tugging at his tie to make sure it was straight. On his feet were a pair of ancient brown loafers,
the backs of which were so crushed that he had to walk in a kind of shuffle to keep them from falling off.

Charlie had lived out at the lake for several years, ever since resigning from the police department as a sergeant in the
Community and Youth Relations Bureau, what any normal police department would have called a juvenile division. He liked the
water. He liked looking at it when he was worried. He liked the sound of it lapping the small pier behind his house when he
felt lonely. He liked how the air tasted having crossed all that wet acreage. He liked being seven or so miles from town where
people didn’t drop in too often or stay too long. It seemed that Saratoga had always been full of people who wanted him to
do things and then felt dissatisfied with how they were done, and so, when he had a little money, it seemed wiser to put some
distance between himself and his … were they tormentors? No, that was part of the trouble, they all meant well.

The car was a 1974 red Renault station wagon and definitely creaky. Even so, Charlie gunned the motor, passing several slower
cars as he rushed toward Saratoga. Hearing about Victor had pushed everything else from his head. Not that any of his current
thoughts would be missed. Although he was normally a fairly cheerful individual, the past six months of preparing the hotel
for the summer season had so frustrated him and sapped his energy that he hardly had time to follow the box scores in the
paper. Added to this was the dismal fact that the woman with whom he imagined himself in love had decided she would be happier
with a high school science teacher.

In ninth grade exactly thirty-four years ago, Charlie had gotten a D in general science, which had been the last bit of science
he had ever studied, apart from looking at the stars and trying to learn the names of the more obvious constellations. When
Doris told him how she felt about Roger Phelps, one of Charlie’s gloomy reactions was that here was that D in general science come back to haunt him after all these years.

The trouble was that Doris didn’t even dislike Charlie. She just liked Roger Phelps more. He played squash and had a sort
of ruddy vigor. If he could just forget her, Charlie told himself, he could continue with his life and maybe meet other women—women
who liked him and didn’t mind if he wasn’t too tall and was a little overweight and getting bald. The awful truth was that
despite his age he was still liable to the paralyzing crushes which had plagued his high school years. These were never appropriate.
Nor had he much interest in “sensible” women. Even recently one of his respectable cousins had introduced him to a perfectly
nice Sunday school teacher. But although Charlie thought her pleasant, what he really fantasized about were boom-boom girls,
or women who did dances with feathers, or even cheerleaders, and though Doris Bailes was no cheerleader she was certainly
pretty and the touch of her skin left Charlie breathless.

Reaching the hospital, Charlie parked on Van Rensselaer, then ran across to the front entrance. He didn’t see why Victor should
have been hit by a car, especially at a time when there was little traffic. He kept hoping it might be some other Victor and
not his friend at all. At the desk, he gave the nurse’s aide one of his cards identifying him as Charles F. Bradshaw of the
Bradshaw Detective Agency and learned that Victor was on the third floor. Not wanting to wait for the elevator, Charlie took
the stairs. The hospital had an antiseptic smell that seemed to bring to mind every injury he had ever had.

Victor’s door was open, and crowded into his double room were a family of eight Hungarians, two policemen and a nurse. It
took Charlie a moment to realize the Hungarians were visiting someone on the other side of the curtain and the policemen were there because of Victor. Charlie knew them both, although they had been hired since he left
the department and represented the cool and efficient ex-military men whom Chief Peterson tended to favor: emotionless young
men who had traveled to Saratoga from other places, mostly the south, and saw Saratoga as a town where a lot of money was
being made and people were needed to protect it. The detective, Ernest Tidings, was as thin and sharp-featured as a race dog.
The sergeant, Ron Novack, lifted weights at the Y, and some years before Charlie had noticed that Novack never stood still
but was constantly flexing. He must have had a nineteen-inch neck. Both men wore dark suits and looked at Charlie with disappointment.

Charlie hardly paused but pushed past to where Victor was lying. Victor’s left leg was up in traction, his left shoulder and
much of his left arm were in a huge cast, and there was a white bandage wrapped around his head. But what was most frightening
to Charlie was how pale he was, how old he looked. He had never thought of Victor as being any age, and now he looked not
only old but frail and ill-used. On the other hand, Victor also looked angry, and Charlie judged that to be a good sign.

“Charlie, for cryin’ out loud,” said Victor, “will you tell these guys there must have been more to me being run down than
the simple swiping of a camera?” A plump middle-aged nurse stood on the other side of the bed adjusting the IV in Victor’s
right arm. When Victor spoke, he tried to wave the arm and the nurse tried to hold it still. She kept making exasperated little
sighs.

“But you told us that somebody in the car stole the camera,” said Novack patiently. He stood at the foot of the bed with his
hands in his back pockets. Tidings stood a little to his right. The Hungarians kept looking at them, then disappearing behind the curtain to whisper in a language that sounded more like chewing than talking.

“Yes, but there musta been some other reason for the fella to smack me in the first place. I mean, what’s a camera worth?
It’s not enough to kill a guy for, no matter how hungry he is. Shit, if he was that hungry, he could of sold the car.”

“You mean someone hit you on purpose?” asked Charlie, not entirely following.

Victor rolled his eyes. “That’s what I been trying to tell you.”

“Do you hurt?” asked Charlie, looking at his friend’s injuries. Victor’s eyes were glazed and the bandage around his head
came down to his eyebrows like a football helmet. But it was really the expression of fragility, a sort of dazed look, that
bothered Charlie the most.

“Nah, they got me full of chemicals. Slap my face and I don’t feel a thing. Apart from these two guys, I haven’t felt this
good in weeks.” The nurse finished adjusting the IV and filled Victor’s glass with water.

“It seems your friend was a victim of a hit-and-run,” said Tidings. “There’re two other witnesses but no one got a license
number. The part that’s difficult to understand is that Plotz said the driver backed up to roll over him, then reached out,
grabbed his camera and took off.”

“Do the witnesses corroborate that too?” Charlie wasn’t sure if it was as complicated as it sounded or if he was just suffering
from a lack of sleep.

“They say the car backed up and that something was definitely going on, but for the theft of the camera we only have Plotz’s
word. Not that we doubt him, but it seems hard to credit unless it was in order to steal the camera that he was run down in
the first place.” Both Tidings and Novack looked somewhat severely at Victor as if he was the culprit and not the victim. The nurse also wore a disapproving expression, but whether she disapproved of
Victor or the policemen, Charlie couldn’t tell. She had blond hair with gray roots that tumbled out from underneath her little
white cap.

“Jesus, Charlie, tell these guys. I mean, why should I make anything up?”

“What kind of car was it?” asked Charlie.

“A maroon Oldsmobile or Buick,” said Novack. He was a tall, squarely built man who gave the impression of wanting to knock
something down like a door or brick wall. “We’ve put out an all-points, but we didn’t even know about the car until an hour
later, so it could be anywhere.”

“What we’re trying to ascertain,” said Tidings, “is whether this was a chance event or if the person had a motive. We understand
that Mr. Plotz works for you?”

The trouble with Tidings and Novack, thought Charlie, was that, like many of Peterson’s new policemen, they had both wanted
to be FBI men but either flunked out of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice or hadn’t gotten in or hadn’t had the money,
but the result was there was an element of parody about them, as if they spent several hours a day washing, slept on boards
at night, and practiced looking immobile before mirrors as a major form of recreation.

“Well, we have the detective agency, as you know,” said Charlie, “but for the past few months we’ve been working for my mother.
She owns the Bentley Hotel downtown. If someone ran Victor down on purpose, it would seem the person must have had a motive.
Did you get a description?”

“He was all hunkered down behind the wheel of the car,” said Victor. “Could even be a broad for all I know.” Victor lay staring at the ceiling, as if it hurt to focus first on one person, then another.

“Is there anything in your personal life,” asked Novack, flexing his arms, “which could have angered someone to the extent
that he or she might have wanted to do you an injury?”

“Come again?”

“He wants to know why someone would want to hurt you,” said Charlie.

Victor was gently touching his bandaged head as one might try to touch a soap bubble. “I got people who like me, people who
don’t like me and a lot of others in between, but there’s no one I can think of who’d want to run me down.”

“What was in the camera?” asked Charlie.

“Nothing. I mean, I was just on my way to buy film.”

“What kind of pictures have you been taking?”

“Nice pictures. The last role was mostly full of a Mrs. Heinz. Otherwise, I’ve been taking pictures at the hotel—honeymooners,
people celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, retirement parties, happy vacationers who’ve got tickets to the ballet. Nice
people. At least no one you could figure would want to run me down.”

“Where’s the film?” asked Charlie.

“I’m not sure. Last night got a little hazy. Probably someplace in my apartment, although there’s some back at the hotel as
well. I been a busy snapper.”

“If we had the film,” said Tidings, “maybe that would tell us something. You sure you’re still not doing those divorce pictures?”

“Nah, haven’t done any of that for a coupla months.” Victor was beginning to sound tired, and there was a faraway quality
to his voice.

The nurse finished making some marks on a sheet of paper attached to a clipboard and hung the board on the back of the bed. “You have to let Mr. Plotz get some rest. He’s been
badly hurt.”

“You tell ’em, sweetie,” said V. . .