Saratoga Swimmer

by Stephen Dobyns

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Charlie Bradshaw, ex-policeman and security chief for Lew Ackerman's vast horse stables, assumes the role of private detective when Ackerman is murdered amidst the splendor of Saratoga's horse country

Release date: July 28, 1983

Publisher: Penguin Books

Print pages: 256

Sample

IT WAS A COLD EVENING for July, not quite 55°, and it had been raining since noon, but the man climbing out of the gray Mercedes parked in front
of the Saratoga Springs YMCA intended to go swimming. His name was Lew Ackerman and in his left hand he held a brown leather
attaché case, which contained a green Speedo suit, goggles, shampoo, and a large yellow bath towel.


Behind him, Ackerman’s bodyguard and chauffeur, Jack Krause, grabbed a copy of the Racing Form off the front seat and locked the car doors. He didn’t know how to swim and found even baths suspect. In his twenty years
as a boxer, swimming had never been part of his physical routine and now, despite his devotion to Ackerman, he couldn’t help
but regret his employer’s nightly visits to the pool.


Ackerman passed through the double glass doors and Krause hurried after him. The clock above the security desk said 9:30.
Ackerman checked it against his digital watch and decided the clock was two minutes slow.


The young man at the desk glanced up. “Good evening, Mr. Ackerman.” He had been reading a magazine on jogging.

Ackerman slowed slightly. “How you doin, Bobby? How’s the knee?”

“Better. I’m keeping it taped.”

“That’s the way.” Ackerman turned right and passed through the door to the men’s locker room with Krause behind him. In the
game room to the left of the desk, two small boys who had paused to watch Ackerman walk through the lobby resumed their sword
fight with broken pool cues.


Ackerman pulled off his tie and began unbuttoning his pale blue shirt as he passed through the locker room door. Removing
the jacket of his tan three-piece suit, he handed it to Krause who shook it slightly and hung it in a locker. As Ackerman
undressed, leaving his clothes on a bench, Krause folded the vest and shirt, gathered the shoes and socks and put them away.


Ackerman’s body was well-tanned except for the white area at the hips normally covered by his bathing suit. As he pulled on
the green suit, the white area disappeared. He was a tall, muscular man in his late forties, with wavy, blond hair and a square
jaw. His nose had once been broken in a brawl and improperly reset so that it formed a vertical ripple in the middle of his
face. In the fleshy part of his left arm above the elbow was the craterlike scar of an old bullet wound.


Ackerman went to the toilet, then returned tying the string of his suit. “That tomorrow’s Form?” Ackerman nodded at the newspaper on the bench.


“Just came in.”

“Red Fox is running at Belmont tomorrow. That’ll be his last race before we bring him back up.”

Krause picked up the paper and put it under his arm. “I’ve already put down my ten bucks,” he said. “I just want to look over
the competition.”


Ackerman shook his head. “He’s not ready. Just don’t forget about him opening day, that’s all. You sure you want to watch
me swim? You know how you hate it.”


Krause looked embarrassed. He was a heavyset man in his early fifties, nearly bald and with a round ragged face that seemed
to bear a souvenir from each of his one hundred fights. He wore a dark brown suit and shiny black wing-tip shoes. “I don’t
mind,” he said. “Anyway, you said I should keep an eye out.”


“Go on. A night like this, it’s warmer in here. Sit down and read your paper.”

“Maybe I’ll lift some weights,” said Krause.

“Maybe you will.” Ackerman walked to the shower room on the balls of his feet, turned on the water and remained under long
enough to wet his hair, which he pushed back out of his face with one hand. Then he walked to the door of the pool on the far side of the showers. “See you later,” he called.


The pool was twenty-five yards long and eight lanes wide. Ackerman entered by a door near the shallow end. To his right on
the deck beyond the deep end sets of collapsible bleachers were pushed up against the wall. The air was thick and humid, smelling
of chlorine. Sitting Indian-fashion on the diving board, the lifeguard, a high school girl in a blue tank suit, was reading
a copy of Cosmopolitan.

Ackerman waved and walked toward her. “That’s not going to help your swimming,” he said.

The girl glanced up and smiled. “You take care of your stroke and I’ll take care of mine. How many you going to do tonight?”
Their voices echoed in the great empty space.


“Maybe I’ll try a mile. I feel pretty good.” Ackerman slapped his belly.

“Remember to keep your feet up.”

Nodding, Ackerman spat into his goggles, then smeared the saliva around with one finger until there was a squeaking noise.
He walked to the edge of the pool, rinsed off the goggles, and began to put them on. Two other men were swimming and Ackerman
knew them both: Philip Nathan, a blind swimmer, was slowly swimming laps in the far lane near where Ackerman had come in,
while Jim Connor, a young man who tended bar and worked on a novel about racing, swam in the middle. As Connor approached
the deep end of the pool, he waved at Ackerman without breaking stroke, did a flip turn and headed back the other way.


Ackerman chose a lane between Nathan and Connor. “Hey, Nathan,” he called, “when’re we going to race?”

“That you, Lew? Anytime, fella, anytime.” Nathan’s stroke was more of a slow dog paddle and he usually did one lap to four
of Ackerman’s or six of Connor’s.


Ackerman put on his goggles, pushed his toes over the edge of the pool, and dove into the lane, keeping his head down so the
goggles wouldn’t be forced off. He had a long smooth stroke and he liked how the evenness of his stroke made his body feel like a machine. He arched his back slightly to keep his legs near the surface. Beneath him through the clear turquoise
water was the black line he would follow back and forth. On either side of him he could occasionally see those parts of Nathan
and Connor that were underwater: Nathan rough and angular, seeming to go against the water, Connor smooth and rhythmic like
himself.


As the black line beneath him ended in a T, Ackerman dunked his head and swung up his legs in a flip turn. He didn’t, however,
blow enough air out through his nose and consequently took in water. He wrinkled his nose, trying to ignore the pain and maintain
his smooth stroke, as he swam back toward the deep end. He was just learning the flip turn and still couldn’t blow out properly.


For the next ten minutes, the swimmers continued without pause. The only noise was the sound of splashing, the whirr of the
pumps circulating the water and the slight sound of the rain on the roof twenty-five feet above the pool. The whirr of the
pumps, however, was loud enough to obscure other noises, and when the back door, marked Fire Exit, opened about six inches,
the lifeguard, Judy Dunn, didn’t look up from her magazine.


The fire exit door was at the bottom of five steps at the left hand corner of the shallow end of the pool. It let out on a
narrow walkway between the south side of the YMCA and Sharri Tefila, the Jewish Community Center next door. The door was now
open about a foot, letting in a cold draft of air. Because of the five steps, the shoulders of anyone outside were at the
same level as the deck of the pool.


Philip Nathan stopped at the shallow end and stood up. He felt the draft from the open door, cocked his head, but didn’t hear
anything. He assumed someone was coming or going and thought no more of it. Then he began flicking both hands rapidly above
the water, because he enjoyed the cool touch of the air on his wet skin.


When Nathan stood up, the door closed a few inches. Now it slowly opened again, although not wide enough for anyone to be
seen. Ackerman was swimming toward the shallow end and had reached the middle of the pool. He had become comfortable with his stroke and was engaged in what he called violent
meditation, making his mind go blank or simply remembering old poker hands. Connor was just negotiating another flip turn
and was also swimming toward the shallow end.


When Ackerman was about twenty feet from the end, the fire exit door opened wide and a figure in a white raincoat and rain
hat swiftly climbed the stairs and walked toward the edge of the pool. Disguising and mutilating his face under the white
hat was a nylon stocking. As Ackerman approached the shallow end, the figure took a pistol from under his coat. Attached to
the barrel was a long black tube. Sighting down the tube, the person fired. The bullet struck Ackerman in the middle of the
back, catching him in mid-stroke with his left arm raised above his head and bringing him to a complete stop in the water.
The next two bullets blew off the top of his head. The sound made by the pistol was no more than three loud puffing noises,
which was heard by nobody but Nathan who lifted his head and stared blankly at the killer.


The first Jim Connor knew that anything was wrong was when the clear turquoise water turned pink, then red all around him:
a great red cloud which grew thicker and thicker until he burst gasping from the water in time to see a person in a white
raincoat and rain hat hurrying down the stairs to the fire exit. This hardly registered, however, as all his attention became
fixed on Ackerman sinking below the surface a few feet away.


From her spot on the diving board, Judy Dunn could tell something awful had happened and she jumped to her feet. Seeing the
far end of the pool slowly becoming red and Ackerman sinking into the water, she began to scream, dropping her magazine into
the pool and pressing her fists to her face. She had not seen the person in the white raincoat or noticed the closing of the
back door.


“What’s wrong?” shouted Nathan. “Tell me what’s wrong!”

The door to the locker room slammed open and Jack Krause came barreling through holding an upraised .38 revolver in his right
hand.


PERHAPS THE TERRIBLE Harpe brothers as they swam out to plunder and slaughter the settlers drifting on flatboats down the Ohio River; perhaps
any number of pirates, such as Captain George Wall who robbed and sank fishing boats off the Isles of Shoals after they had
responded to his distress flag; or perhaps the Indians who swam out to kill Joshua Slocum as he rode at anchor for the night
near the opening of the Straight of Magellan—perhaps these men had swum through blood. But Charlie Bradshaw thought it improbable.
More likely it was the victims themselves who swam through blood, unfortunately their own, as they made their futile attempts
at escape. True, Slocum’s Indians, driven off by tacks spread on deck, must have swum back to shore with bloody feet, but
the amount of blood must have been negligible.


Jim Connor stirred the ice cubes in his Vichy with one finger. “Does this mean you’ll be out of a job?” he asked.

“It depends what Field does with the stable.”

“What if they arrest Field?”

Charlie shook his head. “I can’t believe he murdered Ackerman. He’s not that kind of guy.”

Charlie and Jim Connor sat in a corner booth at the Backstretch, a bar on the west side of Saratoga Springs. Ackerman had
been murdered the previous Friday, and this Tuesday afternoon he had been buried in Green Ridge Cemetery. Charlie had gone
to the funeral, partly because Ackerman was his friend, partly because he was Charlie’s employer.


“It’s common knowledge they weren’t getting along,” said Connor. “Even Peterson asked me if the guy in the raincoat could
have been Field.” Connor scratched the back of his head. Although only in his mid-twenties, his blond hair had begun to recede
radically. When teased about it, he said it made him look like Lenin. It did, sort of. Connor wore a tight green alligator shirt which showed off his swimmer’s shoulders. When
he wasn’t fiddling with his drink or his matches, he was picking at the alligator on his shirt.


“Could it have been Field?” asked Charlie.

He disapproved of Peterson giving Connor leading questions. Peterson was police chief of Saratoga Springs and had been Charlie’s
boss for ten of his twenty years on the force. However, two years ago, after returning to Saratoga after a mistaken adventure
in New York City, Charlie had quit the police department. Most people assumed Charlie had been fired: an assumption Peterson
never tried to contradict. Lew Ackerman, when he offered Charlie the job of head guard at Lorelei Stables, hadn’t cared if
Charlie had been fired or quit. He never asked about it. He knew Charlie would be first-rate and the rest didn’t count.


“I couldn’t see who it was,” said Connor. “Maybe I saw a white blur. You know how it is. You don’t really see anything in
front of you.” Connor’s round, placid face seemed to tighten as the memory of Ackerman’s death in the pool again took shape
in his mind.


“You know, it didn’t strike me until later,” he continued, “I mean all that shit I was swimming through, the blood and brain
tissue and, whatever it was, it didn’t strike me until later that that was Ackerman. I took a long shower at the pool, then
at home, thinking about the whole thing, I took another, really scrubbed myself. I haven’t gone back yet. You been there?”


“No. They drained the pool. It’s supposed to open tomorrow.” Charlie had been swimming regularly for the past year and now
swam half a mile to a mile three days a week. Vaguely, he hoped that his improved physical condition would allow him to move
through middle age with as much of his personal vanity intact as possible.


Charlie had meant to go to the pool the night Ackerman was killed, but it had been cold and rainy and Charlie hadn’t felt
like driving in from his small house on the lake. Since then, he had felt a little guilty, thinking he might have been able
to do something had he been there. That was unlikely. But perhaps, he told himself, he might have seen the man in the white raincoat.
Field was small and thin and would look so even in a heavy raincoat. Still, Charlie didn’t believe Field would have murdered
his partner, no matter how badly they were getting along.


“Were there a lot of hoods at the funeral?” asked Connor.

“I don’t know. They didn’t wear buttons.”

“I liked Ackerman,” said Connor, “but they say he knew a lot of crooks, you know, organized crime. He could have been killed
for all sorts of reasons we’ll never know about. Some mechanic could fly in here from the West Coast, waste Ackerman in the
pool, and buzz back to L.A. the same night.”


“Mechanic?”

“That’s what they call them on TV. You know, hired killers.”

Charlie nodded uncertainly. What Connor had said again made him question the theatrical nature of the murder. It was more
like a murder on television than one in real life. He wondered if there was a reason for that. Then he gave it up and looked
around for the waitress. The one he particularly wanted hadn’t come in yet, so he ordered a beer from the bartender.


Despite the name of the Backstretch, the four walls of the long narrow room displayed eight-by-ten framed photographs of boxers.
There must have been over a hundred and each bore a different inscription: “To Berney, a great guy, Jake La-Motta;” “To Berney,
one in a million, Willie Pep.” Berney McQuilkin was the owner of the Backstretch. Charlie had once studied these photographs
with some care only to realize that the handwriting on each picture was the same. Tonight the bar was nearly empty. In the
back room, which was a Chinese restaurant during the day and early evening, the topless dancer was lazily gyrating to “Sympathy
for the Devil.” In her right hand, she held a ham sandwich. Her audience consisted of a boy shooting pool and four poets from
a nearby artists’ colony who sat as close as possible to the miniature stage. At the bar, Berney McQuilkin was playing dollar
poker with a wizened ex-jockey who had given up the track to become a TV repair man. The jockey’s chin just reached the level of the bar, and whenever he won or lost he would slap the counter with a diminutive
hand and shout, “Ha!”


“I heard Field didn’t go to the funeral,” said Connor.

Charlie nodded and drank some beer.

“Don’t you consider that suspicious?”

“Maybe, I mean, perhaps he hated Ackerman, but that doesn’t mean he shot him. Field didn’t seem friendly with Lew, but then
he isn’t friendly with anyone. He’s an accountant and he’s got a lot of investments and he handles a lot of people’s money,
but he d. . .