The Consummata

Something was going down.

And the doctor was reading me. His hands stayed on the tabletop.

For several seconds his eyes watched mine, but they were encompassing every feature of my face. Then Dr. Thomas Brice broke the ice. It didn’t tinkle like a dropped champagne glass—it crashed like a piece from a glacier. “Long time ago, you were in love with a woman named Bettie...”

A pair of tiny muscles twitched alongside my spine. It wasn’t a new sensation at all. Twice before I had felt those insidious little squirms and both times I had been shot at right afterward.

He was saying, “She was abducted and stuffed into a van but an alert had gone out minutes before and a police car was in pursuit. The chase led to the bridge over the Hudson River where the driver lost control, went through the guardrails and over the fencing and fell a hundred and thirty feet into the water.”

My hand was on the .45 now. My thumb flipped off the leather snap fastener and eased the hammer back. If this was a pathetic jokester he was about to die at this last punch line.

Softly, I said, “There was an immediate search party on the site. They located the wreckage. The driver was dead. There was no other body recovered.”

The doctor’s expression never changed, the eyes behind the lenses unblinking. He let a moment pass and told me, “Correct, Captain, no other body.”

Something seemed to jab into my heart. I waited, my forefinger curling around the trigger.

He added, “The next morning, right after dawn, one of the dogs in the cages at a veterinary clinic began whimpering strangely. It awakened the doctor—”

“A doctor named Brice?”

“Yes. But not this Brice—my late father. I was around, but not a vet yet. May I continue?”

I nodded.

“Anyway, my father got up to see what the trouble was. The animal was fine, but it was whimpering toward the rear lawn that bordered on the Hudson River. My father didn’t quite know what was going on, but went with that dog’s sensitivity and walked out the back.”

Somehow, Dr. Brice read my expression. He knew that if there was a downside to his story, he was never going to finish it....

“There was a young girl there. Alive.”

Alive!

“One arm was gripped fiercely around an inflated inner tube.”

He must have seen my arm move. Somehow he knew there was no tense finger around the hammer of a deadly .45 automatic any longer.

“The night before, we had heard about the altercation in the city, and we both knew at once that this girl was the one who had been abducted. The late news mentioned that it was a Mob snatch, as they called it, because sources within the NYPD indicated she had information that could seriously damage a major Mafia group.”

“So you didn’t report it,” I stated.

“Fortunately not,” he answered quickly. “My father checked with one of his friends on the local police force, who told him that the heat was on like never before and whatever that girl had could break up crime outfits from the city to Las Vegas.”

“But nothing ever happened,” I said. Something had rasped my voice. It sounded low and scratchy.

“Wouldn’t have mattered,” Brice told me.

“Why not?”

He let a few seconds pass before he said, “Because the girl...and she was a girl, twenty, twenty-one...had no memory at all of anything that had happened before the car crash.”

And it was my turn to take a deep breath. “Nothing.”

Dr. Brice shook his head.

I felt like vomiting. “Damn!”

“And that’s not the only thing,” he added.

“Oh?”

The eyes narrowed behind the lenses. “More than her memory was gone, Captain—she was blind. A terrible blow to her head had rendered her totally sightless. She would never be able to identify anybody...or be able to remember her past.”

“So she was no threat to the Mob....”

“Come on, Captain. You know different. Until an identifiable body turned up, those people would never stop looking.”

“That was more than twenty years ago,” I reminded him.

Brice nodded slowly, his eyes on mine.

Before he could say anything, I let the words out slowly. “Where is she?”

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.

He 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.”