Saratoga Strongbox

by Stephen Dobyns

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Another winner from the fast-paced racetrack mystery series that gives the listener a run for his money. The latest, and most entertaining installment yet, in this popular series features the return of Charlie Bradshaw's scheming alter ego Victor Plotz, "without whom the world would be a much stuffier place" ( The New York Times Book Review). Victor is as crooked as Charlie is straight, and he'll do anything to make a quick buck, including running up to Montreal to collect a suspicious suitcase for a miserly old man. But when he decides to farm the job out to a bumbling black belt accomplice, all hell breaks loose - and the fun begins. In a slapstick, sinister farce with an unforgettable cast that includes Vic's main squeeze, Rosemary, an Amazon stripper named Sheila, and two kneecapping thugs called Steel and Clover, Victor and Charlie embark on the trail of every deadly sin from dirty money to outright murder. Once again Charlie Bradshaw and his hapless henchmen provide what the Boston Sunday Globe calls "jaunty and colorful, good tongue-in-cheek fun" - and what fans of the series have come to expect.

Release date: August 1, 2013

Publisher: Audible Studios

Print pages: 256

Sample

I was dipping my bill into a Jack Daniel’s Manhattan when old man Weber came into the bar at the Parting Glass and we made eye contact. Maybe there was a little click. I felt it and he must have felt it too because he gave a smile: not a smile of greeting and good cheer, but a little self-satisfied smile. I guess that smile should have tipped me, but to tell the truth I felt flattered to be noticed. Not only was I noticed, but the old guy gave his cane a little shake and made a beeline in my direction.

I had known Felix Weber for some years, but only by reputation. He was Saratoga Springs’ money man. A bunch of fellows of my acquaintance liked to say he was the smartest guy they ever met, but maybe that was because he helped them add up bushels of frequent flyer miles. Because you couldn’t work for Weber without covering a lot of space. He was the money man and you were the courier, which meant Travel with a capital T. That’s one of the details about Saratoga Springs. It lies half way between New York and Montreal.

One time I remember hearing how old man Weber realized there was twenty-nine cents of silver in each Canadian quarter. He bought tons. Maybe it was only a single ton. He melted it down and sold the silver. That was how his mind worked: four cents’ difference multiplied by five, ten, twenty thousand. He was an exaggerator. He schlepped gold, silver, even dollars from one country to another and with the two or three or four cents’ difference, he made himself rich. The total cash involved could be enormous. And all those figures, all those big numbers—that was how I got sucked into it.

I have always been the pal of easy money. What some people call temptation, I call opportunity. In the old days, it knocked; these days, it sends a fax. But isn’t it a lack, a vacancy, an economic deficiency, that leads one into temptation? One would like more than one has got. It isn’t greediness; it’s dream. And I have to say I don’t think of myself as dishonest, by which I mean I’d never rob a bank if there was the slightest chance of getting caught. On the other hand when a scam gets proposed, I find myself thinking up a better scam. Maybe this is human nature or it’s just an example of how one gets fucked up. Someone offers me a deal where I make two bucks on the dollar, and I begin to imagine something more advantageous. But let’s get back to old man Weber.

By now he was standing next to me. “Victor,” he said, “I see by the maraschino cherry that you’re drinking a Manhattan. Let me buy you another.”

You understand how it is when somebody who you don’t think knows your name, turns out to know your name? To tell the truth, I prefer Vic, but who was I to quibble? Weber was a short little guy, about five foot four—skinny with a thin face and a bristly mop of white hair. He resembled a toothbrush in more ways than one, except that he always wore suits and ties. He began to struggle up onto the stool beside me. I took hold of his elbow to give him a little assist.

“Stiff in the joints,” he said.

“Story of my life,” I said, just to be friendly.

The waiter had already caught the drift of our conversation and he set down in front of me another Jack Daniel’s Manhattan, and in front of Weber he set a glass of milk.

Weber lifted the milk and toasted me with it. “To me,” he said, “the cow says it best.”

I nodded solemnly. “I started on the white stuff.” If Weber had wanted to drink tiger piss, I would have been equally cordial, because, after all, he was paying for the drinks. But mostly I was curious. As far as I could recall, Weber and I had never swapped a single syllable, yet here he was with something on his mind. And whatever it was—at least this was what I told myself—it had to be connected to hard cash. Money was the country of which Weber formed the little flag. He had no other interests, no other topics, no other loyalties. So I composed my face into a respectful expression and waited.

“So, Victor,” he said, “how’s every little thing?”

“The market’s been treating me kindly again,” I answered. I had had some rather desperate stock market troubles a while ago, but now, like that Greek guy with his boulder, I was creeping back up the hill. “Not that I wouldn’t like to do better.”

Weber sipped his milk. It and his hair were the same color, except maybe the hair was whiter. “There’s never been a stack of bills that couldn’t be made higher,” he opined.

“God’s truth,” I told him. Now this was pleasant chat but I was getting impatient for him to pare away the rye and get to the pastrami. Like just how many big bucks did he mean to toss in my direction?

“You got an automobile?” he asked.

“A Mercedes,” I said.

“I like a man who drives a Mercedes.”

“It’s not new,” I told him.

“The age isn’t important. It’s the spirit of the thing.”

Actually it was twenty years old, had some rust and was painted an odd mustard color, but I understood what Weber was saying. “You feel it the moment you turn the key,” I said.

He sipped some more milk, which gave him a little white mustache. “I’d heard you were driving a Yugo,” he told me.

I assumed a humble expression. “It seemed politically correct for me to drive a Yugo for a while, but fortunately it passed away.” I didn’t know how much he knew about my problems but for some months I had a bunch of lawyers after me and the Yugo was meant to show that I was dead broke. Sad to say it didn’t work.

“Then I heard you had a big new van.”

“A passing fancy. It made me realize I’m a Mercedes kind of guy, not a van kind of guy.” I didn’t wish to say that the bank had relieved me of the van.

Old man Weber peered at me with a pair of light blue eyes. “How well do you know Montreal?” he asked.

I chuckled. “Montreal?” I said. “I know Montreal the way Batman knows guano.” Actually, I had never been to Montreal.

“You ever drive up there?”

“The Mercedes loves long trips.”

“I respect a man of the open road.”

I smiled and nibbled my maraschino cherry. My wallet was in my back pocket and I was sitting on it. When Weber spoke, I could feel my wallet throb.

“You mind if we move over to a booth?” he asked.

So we moved to a booth. It was a Tuesday night in early March and only a dozen other people were in the bar: a couple of Skidmore students, a couple of drunks, a couple of red-nosed Irishmen researching their heritage by staring into pints of Guinness. I carried Weber’s milk and he tottered after me, banging the chairs with his cane. I like old guys. Even though I’m sixty, or thereabouts, old guys always make me feel younger.

Once we were sitting easy, Weber twisted his face into an affable expression. “You think you could stand to make a little extra money?” His smile made him look like he had a chicken bone stuck in his throat.

“I never heard of anyone complain about having too much,” I told him.

“I need someone to drive up to Montreal and pick up a suitcase.”

So there it was. Opportunity, as they say, had whacked my gong.

“The call of the road,” I told him.

“It has to be done on Thursday evening,” he said. “You pick up the suitcase at eight P.M. and you can be back here by eleven. How does two grand sound to you?”

Being an older guy, these figures were sometimes confusing. I mean, I had to tell myself that two thousand was no longer a fortune. Still, it was a pleasant hunk of change.

“Fan-tastic,” I told him. “I feel tremendously honored by your confidence.” But that wasn’t quite true. Thursday night was March 10, a date that I might have easily forgotten had not the Queen of Softness threatened to carve it into my forehead with an Exacto knife. The Queen of Softness is my significant other, my half an orange, as the Ricans say. Her real name is Rosemary Larkin and she owns a lunch counter on the road to Schuylerville. I met her five years ago in the Parting Glass and it was love at first sight. She was so soft that her body seemed constructed from marshmallow and feathers. One sank into her like an alligator descends into the Okefenokee Swamp. The trouble was I had met her almost exactly five years ago and this Thursday was our anniversary and she had made big plans: dinner, dancing, soft lights and late-night games in the hot tub. I also knew that if I broke the date, she would feed me bit by bit into her Waring blender and serve me up as the blue plate special to the truck drivers and local farmers who came to taste her culinary wares. “Spicy,” they would say. Nonetheless, I had no intention of kissing two thousand smackers good-bye.

I leaned over the table toward old man Weber. “It sounds like I’m your man.”

The job was a piece of cake: a simple drive to Montreal, then I grab the suitcase and drive back to Saratoga. But though greedy, I wasn’t completely foolhardy.

“So how come you want me to do this?” I asked. “I mean, you got to have other people you know better.”

Weber rubbed his palms together and gave one of his bone-in-the-throat smiles. “I employ three couriers. One’s down with the flu, one’s in jail and one’s on a trip to Miami. To tell the truth, I didn’t think of you until I saw you at the bar. Then a single word popped into my head: ‘Mercedes.’ You seemed a natural choice.”

Did I realize that my vanity was being toyed with? Maybe I didn’t care. I’d already decided I could farm this job out to somebody else for five hundred. Even a grand if I had to. I could turn it over to a confrere, keep my date with the Queen of Softness and be making money as I smooched.

“We got a deal,” I said and I stuck out my hand.

We shook. Old man Weber’s eyes glittered and my eyes must have glittered as well. We both trusted each other about as far as either of us could throw a Labrador retriever. Still, money spends sweetly no matter where it comes from. In this, sad to say, I turned out to be mistaken.

I got a pal named Charlie Bradshaw who’s always short of cash. He is a private dick with a conscience, which is like a puritanical prostitute. If the Boy Scouts needed an in-house private cop, Charlie would be the guy for the job. I sometimes worry about his future. Like he’s not much younger than I am and his health insurance is iffy, though he had been a Saratoga cop for twenty years and I expect he’ll get a small pension. He does insurance work mostly, but he also goes after runaway teenagers and does surveillance. He is the kind of guy you tend to look across on your way to looking at something else. Maybe he is five nine, a little overweight, losing his hair, with round cheeks and a bump of a nose. As a fashion statement he resembles the Edsel. Rumpled seersucker is still important in his life. But if you look twice at his eyes you might rethink your hasty judgments. They are attentive: a light blue that rests on you like a bee rests on a flower. Very thoughtful. And he stands very still, almost as still as a brick. He stands still and watches and what he sees he feeds into his brain like feeding numbers into a computer. But most people don’t notice his eyes or how he is standing, with the result that Charlie tends to be overlooked. You know how a heron stands in the water pretending to be a motionless bundle of sticks? That’s how Charlie is. And that’s how the little fishes get nabbed.

For twenty years Charlie has been living out at Saratoga Lake in a cottage: a gloomy place to my way of thinking with no company but loons and squirrels—nut cases one and all. He moved out there when he quit his job as a cop and divorced his wife. But, thank goodness, man cannot live on isolation alone and over the years Charlie has had several little romances. His most recent, now about six years old, is with a nurse named Janey Burris who has been after him to move into her house in town. Well, a few months ago Charlie took the big step, although he still has his cottage on the lake and he goes there at times to rest his ears because Janey has three teenage daughters who have a thousand qualities but on top of that they are loud and each has her own little stereo and several times when I’ve visited all three stereos were going like blazes and Charlie was sitting in the kitchen with cotton in his ears or wearing those noise suppressors that guys wear when they work with heavy machinery or jackhammers.

So it seemed to me that Charlie might jump at the chance to drive up to Montreal and make a few bucks. I would even let him use the Mercedes.

It was ten o’clock when Weber and I shook hands on the deal and I watched him gulp down the rest of his milk. Then he toddled to the door, gave me a wave and vanished into the night, presumably to count his lucre or however he passed his time during the wee hours. He had given me a five-hundred-dollar retainer and said he would tell me the details of my jaunt to Montreal at noon on Thursday. It was then I decided to drive over and talk to Charlie.

Janey Burris lived in a ramshackle three-story Victorian house over near the train station. She used to be married to a doofus who dumped her and ran off to Australia to wrestle with sheep and I guess Janey and him had originally bought the place as a love nest. But the trouble with a three-story Victorian love nest was it needed constant painting, plastering, plumbing and care-taking until Mr. Burris reached the decision that sheep were in fact preferable. Of course that would not have been my own preference, but I understand the reasoning by which he made his choice.

So now Charlie was doing the painting and plastering and, I have to say this in his favor, he was doing it with a good heart. He loved Janey and what he got from her was worth, for the time being, a little house work.

It was raining that night, a good March rain that would turn to snow before morning. There were still heaps of old snow along the curbs and they glistened in my headlights. Tree trunks gleamed. I parked in front and puddle-hopped to the front door. Inside, I found Charlie sitting at Janey’s kitchen table wearing his noise suppressors. Janey must have been at work, jabbing people with needles and banging on babies’ bottoms. Charlie didn’t hear me knock. He was reading a book about Jesse James, his pal, and didn’t care that the air was acoustically charged with Bob Marley, Pearl Jam and Blind Melon—all played loud. When he didn’t hear me knock, I opened the door. When he didn’t notice me, I tapped him on the shoulder.

He looked up with a smile. “Victor,” he said.

“Vic,” I answered.

“What?” Then he took off the noise suppressors.

“Why don’t you tell them to turn it down?” I asked.

“If they’re happy, I’m happy.”

“Jesus, Charlie, don’t go all nice on me.”

By this time he was getting me a little whiskey—Jim Beam green—and pouring himself a splash as well. “So what brings you by so late?”

“You know old man Weber?”

“The money man?”

So I told him about seeing Weber in the Parting Glass and how he had hired me to pick up a suitcase in Montreal and how I wouldn’t be able to do it. Of course, I didn’t tell Charlie how much Weber had offered to pay me.

“How does a hundred bucks sound to you?” I said.

“What’s wrong with his regular couriers?” asked Charlie.

“They’re either busy or out of commission.”

“But he must know dozens of other guys, why pick you?”

I rattled the ice cubs in my glass. “He likes the fact that I drive a Mercedes.”

Charlie gave me a skeptical look. As I thought about it I had to admit that the whole business sounded a tad bogus. The music was still whanging away from the three stereos and I felt lightheaded.

“But the money’s real,” I said.

“How much did he offer you?”

“More than a hundred.”

“How much more.”

“Jesus, Charlie, I got to make a profit, don’t I?”

“How much more?”

“He offered me two grand.”

“And you offered me one hundred.”

“I was willing to go up. You know how it goes. You haggle a little and I haggle a little.”

We both had our elbows on the table and were leaning toward one another because of the noise. “I don’t like this, Victor.”

“All right, I’ll give you five hundred.”

“I don’t mean the money. I just don’t see why he’d hire you over someone else.”

“He likes me. He thinks older men are more responsible.”

Charlie didn’t even bother to answer that.

“Okay, I’ll give you a thousand. That’s my last offer.”

“Can’t do it, Victor, even if I wanted to. Rosemary has invited Janey and me over to her place on Thursday for dinner. She said it was your anniversary or something.”

So I was stuck. Beaten down by my own romance. But this defeat was only temporary, because I knew I could find somebody else to make the drive. There had to be lots of folks who were willing to pick up a few hundred extra.

“Just don’t stay at Rosemary’s too late,” I said. “The Queen of Softness and me will have some serious smooching to do.”

Charlie raised his eyebrows and had begun to edge his way toward a rudimentary wisecrack when there was a knocking on the kitchen door. Before anyone had a chance to say “Who is it?” pushy Eddie Gillespie pushed his way in. He wore a wet raincoat, which he stripped off as he entered. Underneath he had on white pajamas.

“You been selling Good Humor bars?” I asked.

Eddie looked indignant. “I just earned my black belt.”

Charlie jumped up and began pumping his hand. “That’s great, Eddie. It really is.” He looked as happy as if Eddie had just won a lottery.

Eddie is in his mid-thirties but he likes to think himself a teenager, that is, irresponsible and irrepressible. He is an ex-crook—a car thief—who Charlie rescued long ago, and Eddie has hung around ever since, doing the odd job, sometimes working at Charlie’s. . .