Dead Street

A funny little smile twisted her lush lips. “I remember, Jack, you used to say, ‘Cops hate coincidences.’ But it was a coincidence, Jack, a complete coincidence that that man Orbach chose Credentials to safeguard his data.”

“Do you remember what that data was, Bettie?”

“Just as you said — chapter and verse on the five New York crime families, with an emphasis on the branch he worked for. He pretended to be a writer, a journalist, this man... this Orbach. He claimed much of the material was speculative. And yet he left instructions for the files to go to specific parties in the event of his death by violence or otherwise suspicious circumstances.”

I moved my chair closer to hers and slipped an arm around her shoulder. “Do you remember, Bettie? Do you remember where the floppy discs are?”

“I do. Back in New York.”

They would be.

She was saying, “We’ll have to go there for them. I want to go, too, Jack. I don’t want you leaving me behind again — I don’t think I could stand it.”

“You’ll go. We’ll go.”

“As long... as long as we come back here. Because Sunset Lodge is our home.”

Kinder had been taking it all in. “Should we call ahead? To your pal Sgt. Ross, maybe? The phones are clean — I saw to it this place was swept for bugs just today.”

“No,” I said. “This doesn’t go anywhere past this table, okay, Darris? Nobody but Bettie, me and you need to know those discs still exist.”

I locked eyes with Darris, my expression telling him what my words couldn’t risk in front of Bettie: that if the bad guys knew those floppies were around, they’d be on us like fire ants at a picnic.

As I showed Kinder out, I told him to maintain the surveillance of the house, and he assured me he would.

The lights were mostly out — Bettie didn’t need them and I liked the atmosphere. Anyway, we’d left some lights on next door, in Bettie’s place, to continue the illusion that she still lived there. So when Bettie led me across into the living room, I bumped into an end table. The blind girl was already more used to my place than I was.

We wound up on the sofa and I sat with my arm around her as she curled up beside and against me. In a sport shirt and slacks, I had to shift a bit to get comfortable because t... .45 was still in its holster on my hip, and would stay there for the foreseeable future. Bettie was in white jeans and a pink short-sleeve sweater, the day a little chilly, at least for Florida. The wind off the water was rattling the windows and you could almost remember it was fall in faraway places that weren’t drenched in year-round sunshine.

“Where in New York?” I asked her absently. “The discs, I mean. Back at Dr. Brice’s place?”

She shook her head. “No. I left them with you.”

I stiffened. “You what?”

“The floppies were in my antique desk, the one my grandmother left me. In our apartment, Jack.”

She’d had no close living relatives, and as a kid of twenty-one hadn’t left a will; the handful of personal items had gone to me, by default.

I turned her toward me. Looked right at her and she gazed at me with the empty hazel eyes. “Bettie... that desk is here. It’s upstairs, in the bedroom....”

Now she straightened. “Is... is that the desk in your bedroom?”

The way she near-echoed me might have been funny in other circumstances. Of course Bettie had got to know the lay of the land or anyway of the furniture in my place. But blind and slowly coming out of memory loss, she had no reason to recognize by touch a desk she hadn’t seen in twenty years, even if it was an 18th-century family heirloom.

Still, she was first off the sofa. She went unerringly across the room to the open staircase against the far wall that led up to the master bedroom. I followed. Something about the movement woke Tacos, whose big head craned up to comment by way of a yip.

“Stay,” I told him, and he settled back down on his braided rug.

In seconds we were up the stairs, onto the landing and into the bedroom.

I threw the overhead light switch, which also started the gentle whirl of the ceiling fan. Like the entire house, the place was under-furnished — just Bettie’s old four-poster bed, a nightstand, a chest of drawers and the vintage desk, all among the small load the movers had brought down from the big city.

I moved my swivel chair out of her way, and cleared the bottles off the ornate desk that I’d used for years as a liquor cabinet. Then her fingers began their work.

And those fingers had a memory of their own, finding at once a decorative panel whose fancy carvings disguised a hidden drawer. She had to tug on the chunk of wooden filigree that was a hidden handle a couple of times before it gratingly gave, and screeched open.

Inside was an age-discolored manila envelope, folded over.