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 wild 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.