He didn’t tell me. He simply said, “That’s why I’m here.”
I knew there was a quiver in my voice when I asked, “Is she still alive?”
He nodded a yes and my pulse rate went up ten points.
She was alive! My Bettie was alive! I didn’t care how she looked or how she remembered things, what she could see or couldn’t see; my Bettie was alive and that’s all that counted.
The old waitress came over, cleaned up what I had left of my bagel and refilled my coffee cup. I dropped in a couple of Sweet’N Lows and stirred them around. She squeezed my shoulder like she always did, and when she had walked away I asked the vet, “Where, Brice?”
“Safe,” he told me.
“I didn’t ask you that.” There was an edge in my voice now.
“Can I finish the story?”
It was moving too damn slowly, but I wasn’t leading the parade this time. It was his fifteen minutes of glory and, unless I wanted to risk slapping him around and losing his good will, I had to let him spell it out his way.
This is what he said:
“My father raised her. He nurtured her, cared for her in every way, educated her, made her self-sufficient in every manner imaginable. She was like a daughter to him.”
“And a sister to you?”
Brice nodded. Then he leaned forward. “But there was always a little twitch in her memory, so to speak, that indicated she had a past somewhere. Not that it ever bothered anybody. In time even that went away.”
“Did it?” I asked. “You’re here now.”
His smile was thinner than he was. “Very astute, Captain.”
“Where is she?” I asked again.
“Safe,” he said again.
“Where?”
“A prelude first... friend?”
“Make it quick. Friend.”
“My father knew he was dying. The disease was incurable, but it gave him time to accomplish what he had to do.”
“Oh?”
“His priority was to make sure Bettie was well taken care of. She had to be protected.” He paused and added, “Well protected.”
I nodded again, wondering where all this was leading.
Brice asked me, “Have you heard of Sunset Lodge in Florida?”
I bobbed my head quickly. “Sure.”
He waited, wanting a further explanation.
“It’s an SCS place.”
When he scowled, I added, “Special Civil Service. A lot of the retired civil servants from the big city wind up their retirements there. Now they got the Jersey troops and the firemen in for neighbors.”
“What else have you heard?” he asked me.
“Hell, they even have their own fire stations down there and the old cops are playing around with the kind of equipment we used to beg for. Man, the power of retirement voters.”
“Florida loves them,” Brice told me. “The cops all carry badges, legal but generously given, have permits to carry weapons; the firemen have all the best equipment and a real playground to spend their retirement years in.”
“Who pays for all this?”
He didn’t tell me. He simply said, “You’d be surprised.”
We stared at each other across the table.
I finally said, “And she’s there.”
Dr. Brice looked at me sagely and nodded.
“She’s safe?”
“Surrounded by experienced ex-officers, I’d say yes, quite safe. They think she is the wife of a former officer who died in the line of duty. And believe me, those ex-cops take care of their own.”
“But she’s blind....”
“Yes, and she lives alone. But her neighbors know her special needs, and those needs are surprisingly small. Anyone outside of this closed community of cops, well, she could fool into thinking she’s sighted.”
“Don’t shit a shitter, Doc.”
He shook his head. “I assure you, I’m not. Her physical actions... and reactions... are incredible. Her response to voices and sounds belies her blindness. She has a dog... not an ordinary seeing-eye dog, but a greyhound that had used up his running life on a racetrack. They were going to dispose of it until she took him in. That dog is her right hand and as friendly as it is, I’d hate to be a person who tried to attack her.”
“Has anyone tried?”
“Not so far.”
When the waitress came by again, I waved her off. Across the table Brice was watching me closely. But this was an old game with me and I played all my cards right.
I asked, “She lives alone, you say?”
“My late father bought a home outright, deeded it to her, established some investments that feed a healthy account in a local Florida bank that should take care of all her needs for... for as long as she lives.”
The doctor didn’t know that I could read eyes as well as I could. A tight grin was twitching at my mouth when I said, “But that’s the issue, right, doc? As long as she lives? What’s the rest of the story?”
A subtle smile turned the corner of his mouth up and he remarked, “I’m playing in your back yard now, aren’t I?”
I just nodded. There are times when it’s better not to say anything.
“My father left money in a trust and gave me instructions, in the event that I thought it necessary to... well, I bought you the house right next door, Captain Stang.”
“What?”
He slid the folder he had been carrying over to me. “All the paperwork is in there. You also have a bank account opened in your name for one hundred thousand dollars. That and your pension should set you up pretty well. Just sign the papers and turn them in. I’m sure you’ll know what to do.”
I didn’t bother to look. Crazy as it sounded, I knew what he was telling me was the truth and small shivers were beginning to run up my back. Not the money shivers. Not shivers from the owning of property. Just shivers from knowing that she was alive. She was twenty years older. She had a seeing-eye dog and now she was living next door to me. At Sunset Lodge. Damn.
Only I was twenty years older, too. And I’d always been older than Bettie, and...
No. Hell no. Age was gone. Age was something that was starting all over again. Starting now.
I grinned and wouldn’t let Dr. Brice pay the tab. Not after his father’s generosity — and his own. I laid a ten-dollar bill on the waitress’ check, and we walked out.
On the sidewalk we shook hands solemnly and Brice said, “For a minute there I thought you were going to shoot me.”
“For a minute there,” I said, “I was.”
Maybe he thought I was just fooling, but there was a cloud in his eyes. When I grinned at him the cloud bled away and he smiled back.
I know I slept that night. I didn’t think it possible, but I did. I dreamed wild, exotic dreams that had vicious overtones because a face kept appearing that I recognized but couldn’t identify and hot, mean hatred crept into that mental picture and I knew I would have to find that face because twenty-some years of life had been twisted into nothingness to satisfy his ambitions.
No, not ambitions — that wasn’t the word at all. It was too damn scholarly.
Desires? No. It was more of a primitive, unhealthy demand. Like rape. Disgusting, unnatural, vicious. Temporarily satisfying to the rapist but it was going to kill him eventually.
The face was there in my head and I couldn’t make out the features at all. But I would. I would.
In the morning I went to the offices that housed the old files of known criminals, stuff that hadn’t ever made it onto the computers, and sat at a table with three mugbooks dating back to twenty-some years ago and opened the dusty cover on the earliest.
Duffy Gross gave me a big smile and wanted to know if he could be of any help. I told him I just wanted to refresh my memory and saw him wink at Hump Bailey, another near-retirement cop, and knew what they were thinking. The retired ones never really come off the Job, they were thinking. Someone was always out there they had to catch. After the real heart-stoppers of w
ild chases and riotous shootouts, TV was dull, plain civilian life too damn quiet.
I said, “Don’t laugh, wise guys — I might have a million-dollar joker in mind.”
Hump muttered, “Sure, Jack.”
Duffy did better than that. He added, “I still got three on my mind.”
It was like going through an old photo album. There were a lot of faces you recognized, but today most of them would be dead or shriveling up behind bars. A few had gotten too old to be troublesome and were rotting away in a rocker somewhere on a back porch where the neighbors couldn’t see them. Lucky neighbors.
I didn’t find anybody I was looking for. I closed the last of the battered old books and put them back on the shelves and went downstairs to have lunch. But the face was still there. It was blank, but there was a word that could describe it.
Damn. Now I had to find a name for it and I didn’t even know what it was.
Patience is something that cops learn. The initial eagerness of putting on a uniform is like training a puppy. All bounce and yips with lots of circles to run in. Ambitious, but without direction. Impatient, and after a lot of snags and pratfalls, he learns to look where he’s going. He may get to use the acquired knowledge for a while, then all of a sudden he gets the retirement party and he becomes a sleepwalker people have to watch out for.
And Hump and Duffy were thinking that was just what I was, an old sleepwalker who couldn’t get off the Job.
I went downstairs and walked over to Maxie’s shooting range in the sub-basement of the Bryant Building, fired off a box ... .45’s, cleaned up and went back on the street again.
It was starting to rain.
A New York miracle happened on the corner when a cab stopped, disgorged a passenger and took me in before I had a chance to get wet. I gave him my address and leaned back against the cushions. There was a curious scent in the compartment, a mix of stale perfume, a touch of cigar smoke and the penetrating bite of gunpowder that still hung in my suit. It was a real city odor.
At my address I paid off the driver, said hello to the doorman and went up to my single-bedroom apartment. I turned the TV on to the weather channel, then kicked off my clothes, took a shower, half dressed again and eased into the leather La-Z-Boy lounger and watched the downpour wash away the dirty sins of the big city.
The apartment seemed practically new. When I lost Bettie, I got out of my old place that we’d shared briefly, where too many memories hung like a sweet smell in the rooms, and came here, a comfortable little warren with all the goodies of easy solitary living I could use and a few pieces of Bettie’s furniture that had been handed down to her by her maternal grandmother. I slept in her four-poster bed and kept some of her clothes in my closet. Next to me was her favorite piece, a desk built back in the seventeen hundreds by a remote ancestor and just right for a small bar with eight bottles of assorted liquors. They were all full. Only the Canadian Club bottle had been opened. I stared at it for a few seconds, dipped a few ice cubes out of the miniature icemaker Bettie had given me, stirred in some CC and ginger and sat back to watch the pretty girl on the weather channel.
There were other faces when the commercials came on, and more faces when the news program started, but none were the face I was looking for. It was there, hidden someplace in the back of my mind. It was a face that I could recognize from then, but this was now and I’d have to add twenty-some years to it.
I sipped at the drink, finally finished it, turned the light out and went into the bedroom. Tomorrow I’d have to start thinking like a cop again.
It had been one hell of a long day, longest since I walked away from the Job. But with Bettie back among the living, and back in my life, I was ready for more.
Chapter Two
It took another two days for the cop thing to really kick back in again. The walk that started out in the damp mist of an early morning wound through areas I was hardly aware of. Four times people remembered me and said hello with a small wave and I waved back and answered them, wondering who they were. None were very young. I had been away from this neighborhood for a long time.
The street sign didn’t alert me. It was the store on the corner. It used to be a great deli where the salami was for real and the hard rolls fresh out of a bakery across town.
Now it was a small saloon with its own peculiar stink and a pair of cheap alcoholics waiting impatiently outside, squatting on small garbage containers. Unless they kicked the door in they were going to have to sweat out another four hours before the place opened. Legally, that is.
And suddenly there I was. Without conscious direction, my feet had taken me there, right down the sidewalk until I was standing outside the building that Bettie and I had lived in and I felt an unnatural coldness walk its way up my spine and I licked the dryness from my lips and breathed deeply for half a minute.
I had been walking in a fog. Time hadn’t seemed to pass at all. It had been two hours since I left my place and I had hardly any memory of what streets I had crossed to get here. Nothing came back to me at all until I was outside the old apartment building where Bettie had been torn away and jammed into the back of a light truck.
It had been parked right beside the spot where I was standing. I hadn’t been home that night, and I always wondered who knew I was on duty, because normally I was on days and had been filling in. The guys had come down the stairs carrying the rolled up rug with Bettie nearly smothering inside. They slid the old rug into the vehicle, slammed the doors shut and pulled away from the curb with the wheels screaming on the pavement.
The memory of it was almost as if I had seen it. Too many times the ugly scenario played out in my mind, but there was a hole there and emptiness is hard to define. The emotions of death and gruesome loneliness made it nearly impossible to penetrate that seeming vacuum.
But those emotions had suddenly evaporated and the big why suddenly appeared and hammered at my mind.
It was an abduction they had planned. Murder wasn’t the objective. Bettie had something they had to have. It was something nobody else could give them. It had such importance that a mid-evening kidnapping had been executed regardless of the risk, but an insidious coincidence had raised its head and death came out of it.
Death for the abductors. They died.
Bettie was still alive!
Squirreled away in a folder in my apartment were all the details of the events of that night and Photostat copies of the official inquiries and the notes on lined pad sheets investigating detectives had made. The information was limited since Bettie had no connections at all with anything or anybody (with the exception of her cop boyfriend, yours truly) that would demand the terrible thing that happened to her.
The abductors’ remains had been found, one body in the wreckage of the truck, the other a floater that turned up near West Point a couple of days later. Both had rap sheets filled up with petty offenses and a pair of entries that got them a few years of prison time, but the offenses were not related. Neither one had a driver’s license or a credit card and according to persons who had known them, both were heavy drinkers, but there was no mention of drug use. One patrolman, who said he knew them both, reported that they’d do anything for a buck.
My notes were extremely sparse. I was officially listed as Bettie’s fiancé and had no knowledge of her affairs at work at all. I had listed her occupation as the head of “Computer Input” for a company known as Credentials. Their main occupation was to verify the statements and background of persons seeking employment in reliable companies. A handwritten addendum stated that Credentials was in good standing with the local bank they used and the business outlets they dealt with.
I scowled at the information and shook my head. Twenty years ago that word “computer” might have raised a red flag. But now? Hell, the kids in grade school were using them. I’d even had to learn to use the damn things myself before retirement kicked in.
There was a pamphlet at the bottom of the pages I held. Bettie’s office
group had held a party on the twentieth anniversary of Credentials being in business. I pulled out the phone book and looked the company up to see if they still were operating.
They were.
In the Yellow Pages too, and their address hadn’t changed, either.
Bettie’s picture was in the pamphlet. She was the prettiest one there. It was nothing formal, a semi-posed color snapshot and she was wearing a daringly cut outfit that was the sign of the times back then. Two of her lady friends flanked her, their smiles flashing into the camera lens. Kneeling nearby was the paunchy figure of her section boss and off to the side of the picture were three young kids, one in a short-sleeved shirt and a vest, another sporting flashy suspenders and the third apparently lying on the floor fixing something. From what little showed of his face in the photo, he didn’t look happy at all.
There was nothing for me to see in the photo. It was over twenty-some years and whoever had been there then had probably moved on. I muttered “Maybe” to myself. Like Yogi Berra said, “The game ain’t over until it’s over.”
At least Credentials was a starting point. I tucked the pamphlet into my pocket, made a cup of coffee and got back on the street again. The rain had stopped. The clouds were still up there, but the pavement was drying off.
After a five-minute wait at the corner, a cab came by and gave me a ride to where Bettie had once worked. There were no sad feelings this time. Now I had Bettie alive and back in my life. In another day I’d see her. The airline ticket had been reserved and tonight I’d pack my bag.
At the office building I took the elevator up to the fourth floor and when the secretary asked who I wanted to see, I said, “Mr. Ray Burnwald. Is he still with the company?”
“Oh, yes,” she told me. “And what is your name?”
“Jack Stang.”
“You haven’t been here before, have you?”
I grinned. “About twenty years ago.”
She said, “Oh,” like I was an old customer and buzzed the boss’ office. When she hung up she pointed to a door and nodded for me to go on in.
Mr. Burnwald didn’t look like the picture he had taken with the other employees. Age had touched him with a rough brush. Most of his hair had disappeared. His smooth face now drowned under the wrinkles of the years and the sport of hearty eating had given him a belt size in the fifties.
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