“Some I’d like to forget,” I told him.
“You’re not a customer.”
“Right.”
“You’ve been here before.” It was a statement, not a query.
“Right,” I said again.
“Cop,” he said. It was a flat statement.
“Retired now,” I said.
“It was when our poor Bettie was killed, wasn’t it?”
“Sharp, Mr. Burnwald. You’re a natural for this computer stuff.”
“I know,” he agreed. “What can I do for you?”
“Put that computer in your head to work. How much do you remember about Bettie before she was killed?”
Burnwald leaned forward on his desk, cradling his stomach on its edge. “I was only a section head then and had been Bettie’s super for about six months.”
“Any problems?” I asked.
“None. She was a very able person. We used to say she could even think like a computer.”
“Computers think?”
“With the high-tech advancements, so one would certainly suspect.”
“But not twenty years ago?”
“Well, they were on their way. Improvements were coming daily. New kids right out of college... and some even younger than that... were introducing developments that had unbelievable potential.”
I nodded, thought a moment, then asked him, “Looking at it now, how does that ‘potential’ stand?”
He knew what I was thinking and his wrinkled face broke into a wry smile. “For its time, it seemed incredible. There are few words to express what it’s like now. Only a genius can understand the workings of a computer today. And as for today’s potential, it takes another computer to arrange any conversation at all.”
“Bettie was smart,” I remarked, “but below genius level.”
“How would you know?”
“Because she was in love with me,” I stated quietly. “Machines don’t have love affairs.”
“Not yet,” he smiled. “Maybe someday.”
“How would they enjoy it?”
“They’d think of something.” He folded his hands together and leaned back in his chair. “And, unlike machines, geniuses can and do have love affairs... but I would agree — Bettie was bright, very bright, but hardly a genius. Neither am I, for that matter.... What was it you really wanted, Mr. Stang?”
I didn’t hesitate. “Describe Bettie’s job to me.”
This time he had to squint his face up and reach far back through the years and the improvements in computer product to recall the details of daily operations.
When he felt reasonably certain he had the scene in mind, he said, “In those days there were a lot of glitches. Nasty individuals would insert a virus into a system and wipe out computer operations for many hours. The anti-virus programs of today weren’t even on the horizon. Also, there were a lot of normal breakdowns that could shut off power for major cities, causing near-catastrophic situations.”
I bobbed my head and said, “I remember those days pretty well.”
“Bettie was on a team of computer operators who investigated those events.”
“This place had a team?”
Burnwald shook his head. “Not this place. Bettie was the only such expert here. The rest of the ‘team’ was scattered across the face of the United States. They were all in instant contact and had access to government processors that would give them any information they wanted.”
Bettie had never mentioned any of this to me. I thought for a moment, then finally said, “Could that group break into government secrets?”
“I’m sure the federal people have their programs well-protected. But it wouldn’t have been impossible for an expert like Bettie. Still...” He paused, put his folded hands under his chin and asked, “You’re not accusing her of what they used to call... un-American activities.”
I shook my head and let him see me smile gently. “I knew her pretty well, Mr. Burnwald. We were going to get married.”
“Yes,” he answered gravely, “and now she’s dead.”
I didn’t bother to correct him.
“Is there anything specific you’d like, Mr. Stang?”
“A detailed rundown of her activities while she was here. Is that possible?”
“No trouble at all. I’ll put one of our operators on it and she can retrieve it all within an hour. Can have it delivered to you this evening. Will that do?”
“You know,” I told him, “guys like you could put cops out of work, couldn’t you?”
“Certainly,” he agreed.
“Only... who will shoot the bad guys then?”
“I’ll check with our mainframe computer on that,” he answered deadpan.
When I put my card in his hand, he studied it carefully before he remarked, “Ah, yes, now I remember you... Captain Stang. Or rather, your exploits. They called you the Shooter, didn’t they, the media? ‘A frightening figure to the mob,’ or words to that effect?”
I shrugged and said, “That was a long time ago.”
After a few seconds of silence during which Burnwald studied my face carefully, he said, “That time’s back again, isn’t it?”
My teeth were showing through the grin I gave him. I didn’t have to give him an answer.
He knew what it was.
I didn’t look for a cab this time. The sidewalks were great for thinking, like being in a lecture hall of a fine university. Knowledge and experience were all around you; there was traction and skidding, good and evil. All of it. In bunches. It was a great classroom of power waiting to be used.
Or misused.
I kept stepping off curbs and up onto curbs. Without realizing it again, I was walking a tortuous route to a place I knew well, letting my feet find it without giving them any conscious direction.
Finally, there it was, a street about to die. A pair of big demolition units were parked fifty feet from the corner and four men in business suits, all carrying clipboards, were pointing out various areas and noting things down on their pads.
Outside Charlie Wing’s building a small van was being loaded with his few possessions.
I stopped and said, “How’s it going, pal?”
“Ah, Captain Jack,” he smiled. His face was old and wrinkled, but he had the youngest smile you ever saw. “All goes good. Soon will be in China, Captain Jack. You ever be in China?”
I shook my head. “My war didn’t take me any farther than Vietnam.”
“You think things change for the better in China?”
“Ho ho ho,” I said.
“What’s that mean?”
“Keep your money in an American bank and your hands in your pockets.”
He saw what I meant and nodded vigorously. “You smart man, Captain. I’ll write you from China. You read Chinese?”
“I’ll have it translated,” I told him. “You be careful and stay out of trouble.”
“Sure, Captain. Too damn old to get into trouble.”
“Yeah?” We shook hands like the friends we were, then I let out a little chuckle and told Charlie Wing, “The heck you are.”
“Heck you are, too, Captain Jack.”
When the truck pulled away, I looked up and saw old Bessie O’Brian leaning forlornly on her window pillow waving at her departing neighbor, and when the truck turned at the corner and was out of sight, she wiped the tears from her eyes, then saw me and put her sentry face back on again.
“When are you going, Bessie?” I called out.
“I’m ordering my coffin today,” she snapped.
“Come on, Bessie.”
She let her eyes roam the street, then said, “My youngest daughter is coming to get me.”
“From where?”
“Elizabeth, New Jersey. It’s across the river in the country.” She paused for a couple of seconds and added, “I hate the country. Damn, I don’t even like Central Park.”
“Why not?”
“There’s animals there.”
“Nah.”
“The hell there ain’t. People feed ’em peanuts and stuff like that there.”
“Those are just squirrels, Bessie.”
“I don’t care what they are.”
“Elizabeth is a pretty big city now. You’ll enjoy it. Besides, you’ll only be an hour away from New York. You can see all the big buildings with no trouble.”
Her face drooped a little and she asked me, “Why do we all have to move, Captain Jack?”
“The street is dying, Bessie. We don’t move out, we die with it.”
“Be all right with me.” She gave me a wry expression, said, “Watch out who you shoot, Jack. For a dyin’ street, it’s getting tougher around here all the time.”
I nodded, blew her a kiss and walked toward the corner.
Bessie was wrong. There was no more toughness on the street now. The tough stuff had gone someplace when the street got sick. It left completely when the street threatened to heave a post-mortem sigh.
At the incoming of the one-way street they had already put up a NO THOROUGHFARE barricade. The other end was open. You could go out but you couldn’t come in. Somebody had issued a quick exit move for the old station house troops and two city trucks were loaded with antique desks, swivel chairs, straight backs and coat racks. Another had nothing but file cabinets stacked from the cab to the tailgate of a rack-sided tractor-trailer.
The police personnel were all on duty, so they were holding down the telephones inside and collecting their personal items until they went off to other assignments. Bessie O’Brian would probably wave all of them off before they came and got her. Then the street would be dead.
But not yet.
I had to be the last to leave and that wasn’t yet. The street would be dead, but somebody would have to bury it, and that was me.
Then the street would really be dead.
In my pocket the cell phone gave off a buzz and I switched it to TALK. Thomas Brice said hello and told me he’d pick me up in one hour for a trip to Staten Island. It was a trip I dreaded in one way, but had to make. I had to have every detail of that whole situation resolved in my head so there would be no errors. Twenty years of lost time could make for strange changes and I wanted nothing to hit me unexpectedly.
And Thomas Brice was right on time. We drove over the bridge and when I looked down I almost felt the sensation of falling that wild distance to the murky waters of the Hudson River. Traffic was thin at that hour and before long we were in that other, strange part of New York City that was like a different state to most Manhattanites.
The veterinary building was right on the edge of the Hudson itself, an old building from the eighteen hundreds, resurrected with concrete and brick and decorative wooden pillars, discreetly identified by a small sign over the main door and a pair of old oaken statues of a cat on one side and a husky on the other. Inside, behind the large glass windows, I could see a pair of white-robed attendants busy behind the main counter.
Brice said, “We’re here.”
I wanted to tell him tomorrow would be the here day, the day when the plane landed in Florida. Nothing else counted. This was only a preliminary show to get me up to speed.
A couple of times Brice glanced at me to see how I was taking it. I wasn’t sweating. There was no catch in my voice. I followed him into the building, met the two attendants, then went through a pair of swinging doors into a neat animal hospital. But that wasn’t what Thomas Brice wanted to show me.
The bedroom was in the very rear of the building and the second I entered it I knew it had been hers.
There was a smell to it that belonged to her and the accoutrements on the wall shelves and the dresser top were exactly the same as she’d had in her own room years ago. That kind of taste apparently didn’t have to be reacquired. I opened the closet door and again knew exactly who the garments hanging there had belonged to. Even the light fragrance hadn’t changed.
Brice closed the door and turned to me. “You’re sure now, aren’t you?”
“Nearly,” I told him.
On the bed was an old-fashioned photo album. Brice thumbed open the leather snap fastener and there in 5×7 color snapshots was my dark-haired, hazel-eyed Bettie. She was beautiful and unmarked and smiling a huge smile right at me. At nobody else, just at me. All I could say was a softly heard “Damn!”
She was still young, beautiful beyond belief, plainly dressed, but a total knockout. And yet a strange blankness possessed her features.
Brice was saying, “This was taken a month and a half after she was washed ashore.”
“But...”
Brice interrupted: “She was like a newly born baby here. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t understand, but she showed emotions. She took to my father right away, like a newborn kitten responding to its parent’s teaching.”
My voice was barely audible. “Animalistic?”
“No,” Brice reassured me. “Very human, but a fully grown, well-developed newborn child.”
“There were no memories?”
“None at all.”
I turned the pages of the album and watched Bettie develop, little by little, characteristics emerging step by step. I noticed the date on the photographs and saw that they were taken at regular intervals and understood that this was a medical case study by a competent researcher.
When I glanced up at Thomas Brice, he explained, “Going by what the police had released to the press, we knew that her life was in absolute jeopardy if this information ever got out. However, there were no relatives to contact, no inquiries made about her health and if my father hadn’t seen a small blurb in the old Sunday News about you being on the case, we would never have known whom to contact.”
“But you didn’t contact me!”
“No. And I can understand your resentment. But the young woman you knew didn’t exist. My father knew that exposing the woman she had been in any way would be enough to get her killed. We gave her a fresh start.”
“Damnit, I could have—”
“Captain, I didn’t make these decisions, my father did. And if you want to take it up with him, I’ll direct you to the appropriate cemetery.”
I said nothing.
“Contacting you someday was always a possibility. Dad did a lot of probing before he realized the truth and knew you two had planned marrying. He watched your career and came to know you were one of the honest ones.”
“There are plenty of honest ones—”
“No offense, Captain. After all these years, I didn’t know how you’d feel about your... your lost love. But I found that you were still single, even after retirement, and decided to follow my late father’s wishes, and contact you.”
After looking at the photos, it was hard to speak.
Brice asked, “Are you comfortable with all this?”
“Not completely,” I told him.
“It’s a lot to take in, I know.”
“That’s not it.”
“What is, then?”
“Somebody has got to pay for twenty lost years.”
“They may be dead.”
“I’ll kick over their tombstone,” I said.
There were papers to be signed and attested to by witnesses and a Notary Public, papers issued by the bank to be affixed with my name, and when it was all over I was the legal guardian of a woman I had promised to marry two decades ago. My heart was beating a reserved tattoo. I left all the legal papers in Dr. Brice’s office safe. Later I’d get a certified copy at my new address.
Damn, a new address? I hadn’t lived out of state since I was a kid, and couldn’t even wonder what it would be like. Then I’d have a picture of Bettie blossom in my mind and it didn’t matter at all anymore.
And the transformation would be simple. There would be no debts to pay off, very little to pack and move, no big friends to say so long to and a happy retirement from then on.
Who was I kidding?
Someplace there would be a hole in the program. Somethi
ng would crack, then it would split, and a sharp-nosed reporter would spot a story. Ex-Killer Cop Moves to Sun City! Or maybe, Top Gun of NYPD Takes on Retirement Home! There were tabloid newspapers that would eat that kind of thing up.
And then somebody would remember, and somebody would worry, and somebody would call in the shooter soldiers who carried modern artillery on their persons and have access to more sophisticated weaponry at their beck and call.
It didn’t matter how many would be killed in the shootout as long as the main target was acquired and silenced permanently. And the main target would be plural. Bettie, then me. Or me first if they wanted to quell the firepower.
It took me two days to get everything in order. A single man doesn’t get entangled in many things, so shipment was a snap. The moving company did it all. Two cartons, the disassembled four-poster bed, Bettie’s old desk, my swivel chair and a few odds and ends, and I was ready to go. At the last minute I cashed in my plane tickets, deciding to drive and have transportation at hand all the time. A one-day trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, then another day’s drive to Sunset Lodge.
The end would be the start of the beginning.
Chapter Three
The two-day drive was an easy one. Traffic was sparse between seasons and at the beginning of the second day I got up before five, had a light breakfast and was on the road long before six. Seven hours later I crossed the Florida state line and stayed on Interstate 95 until I hit the east-west highway that would take me to Sunset Lodge. Along the way, the road passed the site of another complex named Garrison Estates that was still partly under construction.
A series of neat billboards set well back off the macadam highway told its story. There were no renters. Each dwelling was occupant-owned, oceanside swimming and fishing areas very accessible, police and fire protection adequate and privacy guaranteed, starting with a monitored gate entry.
Money had gone into this development, the kind that older people who enjoyed peace and quiet and an early-to-bed and late-to-rise lifestyle would enjoy. Several luxury-model vehicles passed me by, well-attired elderly in the front seat. In two of them a woman was driving. If Sunset Lodge was anything like Garrison Estates, I could risk a sigh of satisfaction with the good doctor’s choice of residence for his adopted daughter, my Bettie.
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