Dark Maze

by Thomas Adcock

  He laughed at this. One of his joyless barks it was. “Yah, that’s rich!” he said. “The circus!”

  “Did you ever get to paint what you wanted to paint? I mean, did you ever paint seriously?”

  He said to Nobody, “Ho, ho, did I paint or did I paint? Was I serious or was I serious? And, how come did I paint what I painted?”

  To me, he said, “Serious paintings? Them I got loads of hanging around town. Here and there, like me; not so anybody should notice, also like me. Which is how come it’s such a big goddamn joke they call me Picasso, hey?”

  He added, “Matter of fact, friendly, guess where I got one painting hanging as we speak?”

  “Where?”

  “In a bar where you yourself hang out regular …”

  The bus groaned to a stop in front of us, killing my last chance to ask Picasso exactly how long he had been watching me. And exactly why.

  Picasso stepped aboard.

  Then—just before the pleated doors closed behind him, before he walked to the rear of the bus and sat down, and laughed and laughed at me through the broad back window as I stood there on Tenth Avenue staring at him like a dopey cop—he said:

  “Yah—and since you’re interested—maybe you want to know that I am very sick to death of all the how comes of my busted-up life. Which is how come I am working a plan, a plan to kill what’s been responsible for making me fall so far and spectacular as you seen I have fell …”

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the city that I sometimes love and sometimes hate, I have been assaulted many scores of times by fists, bottles, sticks, metal pipes and miscellaneous blunt objects. I have also been spat on, stoned and shot at (by bullets in all such cases, save for the time I chased through Central Park in unsuccessful pursuit of a perpetrator with a bow and quiver of arrows). And then, of course, there are the unsolicited homicidal sentiments from the likes of “Picasso.”

  Such events come with the territory of Manhattan, whether or not you are a cop. Which, of course, I am.

  I am Detective Neil Hockaday and I carry the gold shield of the New York Police Department, which has assigned me to a special squad known as the SCUM Patrol, which very fittingly stands for Street Crimes Unit, Manhattan.

  To most, I am just plain Hock. And mostly I am out doing my job in the streets every day, dressed like a plain ordinary vagrant so that you would not likely have reason or desire to look my way.

  But if you did, you might reasonably believe that you see in me a man sadder but wiser for all the times he has dealt with life’s ruder angels. At least that is how I see myself; at least, I try to keep in mind the only clear fact of life in the kind of place I live: New York, where everybody mutinies and nobody deserts.

  The clear fact is that my city is an incubator for crazies. Every day of every year there are maybe a thousand budding crazies who hit town. All of them are dead sure they have found the Emerald City, and that very soon they will swing on stars. One or two of them will be right, or lucky. And by such crazy odds, we know that New York is not Kansas.

  I know, I know.

  And I know the others—the ones who discover that travel is not necessarily broadening, and that New York offers few tender embraces for its immigrants.

  Some of these will return home to make of that what they can. Some settle into lives in New York that are remarkably similar to life in Kansas.

  Some get mean. Their lives grow as rough and cracked as plowed cement. Then finally they become the dark, unseen essence of the Emerald City—falling men finding their shelter in crazy shadows—and the bailiwick of the SCUM Patrol.

  There is precious little we can do to protect ourselves against the perils of falling men. Is that not so?

  And all I am is one mere cop, born into the world where I live and work. Like all others here, I am sometimes persuaded that life in New York is a constant struggle to die of natural causes.

  So there stood I on that April day, staring dumbly at the wire-frame spectacles and the red-gray goatee and the bouncing beret in the back window of a disappearing bus. I told myself, Okay, so remember this, pal: you’re at liberty, you’re not obliged to get involved. Besides which, nothing happened.

  Is that not so?

  Now I no longer wished to think. Tomorrow would be soon enough for that. Now I wanted a drink.

  I had never studied it before, though it had been there all this time. Odd how I had scarcely even noticed the thing. Well, but maybe this was because it was so unassuming and predictable in a pub. But now with Picasso so inescapably on my mind, I studied what could only be his work. High on the wall behind the brass-railed mahogany bar at the front of Angelo’s Ebb Tide, there it had hung for so long: an oil painting of the owner himself, Angelo Cifelli, and a lone customer perched on a stool.

  The customer in the painting is a lady in a smart green dress. There is a coffee cup in a saucer, set down in front of her. She is wearing a hat, which is something women used to do. Her legs are interestingly crossed and she is talking to the barman’s wide round back. Which belongs to Angelo, in his black silk vest and his white shirt rolled at the sleeves and his fringe of black hair and the unmistakable profile of his great Roman nose. He is bent to the task of rinsing glasses in a sink full of hot water.

  Now, as I stepped into the Ebb Tide, muzzy from my recent unsettling encounter in the park, I studied not only the painting overhead but the almost identical real-life scene.

  A lady in a dark green dress drank coffee and chatted at Angelo as he rinsed glasses. She wore a hat with a feather. Sunlight floated in through Venetian blinds and shone kindly on her face. From where I stood at the door, she looked nearly young and beautiful and high-spirited; she seemed to be telling Angelo a story from a time when she was young and beautiful and high-spirited.

  She would have continued, but when Angelo spotted me he gave me a very big and noisy hello. The lady stopped talking, turned my way, and smiled.

  I sat down on a stool a few over from hers. I inspected her, of course—she and her twin in the painting. I had come to the Ebb Tide all decided on having only a Molson ale since it was not quite noon. But now that things were even more off-balance than they were before I arrived, I told Angelo with some embarrassment in my voice that I would like my regular. Which is a shot of Johnnie Walker red, followed by the Molson.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Angelo said. “You’ve had earlier starts at it than this.” He set me up and then, by way of friendly bartenderish introductions, he said to his only two customers, “Hock, Celia. Celia, Hock.”

  I started by telling Celia that I was sorry for interrupting her story. Angelo told her quickly, “You ought to know that Hock here is a cop, but he’s all right.”

  Celia did not say anything. The little feather on the side of her hat began shaking happily, then she tipped her head back aways and laughed. Her voice was scratchy from whiskey and cigarettes and at close range the light on her face no longer flattered. I noticed a fresh packet of Chesterfields tucked inside her pocketbook, which was unclasped and lying on the bar next to her cup and saucer. Also I noticed it was not coffee in the cup, it was milk.

  She said to Angelo, “Oh, don’t worry, baby. You know I’ve been out of circulation about a hundred years, way past the statute of limitations anyway.” Then she turned my way and said, “Look here, Officer Hock, I only dropped by to see my longtime pal Angelo. And so here we are just talking over the old days when I made a good dishonest living, and how what’s happened to me since is a crime.”

  I smiled and said nothing.

  She crossed her legs and smiled back and it was an easy thing to see how she had once been young and beautiful. She picked open her Chesterfields and Angelo lit her. She smoked while her hazel eyes combed through me. Her green dress was made out of something smooth and yielding, and so was her hat with the delicate feather. The ensemble did a fine job of softening Celia’s hardening edges.

  I asked if I could buy her another cup of milk
.

  She declined. Then by way of enlightening me, she said tonelessly, “Ulcers. About five o’clock, though, I usually pep it up with Scotch. As I have told my doctor, ulcers is a daytime sickness.”

  “Does the doctor buy that?”

  “He says to me, ‘Celia, if that’s the way you feel, then why not forget the milk altogether and just drink your booze from morning to night and blow up your guts and be done with it?”’

  Angelo said, “Maybe under certain circumstances that’s good medical advice. I mean, waiting around for some merciful god to do it to you natural is unfair as hell.”

  He returned to his glasses. I asked Celia, “You mentioned something about a crime?”

  “Oh, you want to hear about that, really?”

  “Sure,” I said. And I heard a funny echo from someplace.… “A cop, he’ll listen to anybody.”

  Celia said, “One rainy day there’s this little man at my door. He’s wearing cheap corduroy and he’s carrying a portable adding machine and says he’s from the IRS. I ring up my lawyer. For all the money he’s making off me, my lawyer says I have no choice about seeing the little man—who doesn’t look so scary, but who it turns out is a guy who eats his young.”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s their nature.”

  “You’re telling me!” There was a sad catch in Celia’s voice. She turned from me and looked straight ahead at the mirror on the other side of the bar.

  I asked Angelo for another red and ale. He brought this, and also set down a fresh cup of milk for Celia and took away what had been there. Celia only ignored him. She stubbed out her Chesterfield, lit up another, and continued to stare at her reflected image.

  And then I looked at her face in the mirror, too. And saw the tears and how her makeup was melting down her cheeks, how her face began to resemble a cake caught outdoors in the rain.

  Celia searched through her pocketbook, found a cosmetics case and became intensely busy with it. Nobody said anything. The only noise now was Angelo clinking his glasses and, way back in the rear dining room, waiters setting up tables.

  And then the Ebb Tide started filling with the first wave of the luncheon trade. Some neighborhood sorts passed through the bar on their way to the dining room—the guy who runs my delicatessen, along with somebody who was not his wife; my dry cleaner; a couple of the barbers from the shop across the way called Three Aces.

  I looked up at Picasso’s painting again, remembering how I wanted to ask about it. But Angelo was now occupied with some customers down at the far end of the bar and Celia was daubing at her eyes, so I got off my barstool and walked over to Angelo and said, “I’ll be back later.”

  “Okay,” Angelo said. “Only do yourself a favor and come after seven, you know? We get the bad crowd from five until about then.”

  “What bad crowd?”

  “The type who during the day market software and leverage buyouts and who want to be twelve-year-olds at night.”

  So I told Angelo I would skip happy hour. And I said to the feather in Celia’s hat, “Maybe I’ll see you around again, and I’m sorry for your troubles.…”

  “Yeah, later,” she said. But she did not look up.

  On my walk home from the Ebb Tide, I did a couple of errands. I picked up shirts from my Chinese laundry, because there are some occasions in my life when I wear something with starch and a necktie. I also picked up a fresh copy of the Times since I left one back in the park. And I also wrote out a check to my liquor store for some Perrier-Jouēt in the flowered bottle since I do not carry around a lot no of cash in neighborhoods like mine and since I wanted something nice on ice, in hopes of my dinner date that evening with Ruby Flagg extending on to dessert and so forth at my place.

  When I got home, I listened to jazz on WBGO-FM while I did some things around the place to see if it might make a difference in appearance, which mostly it did not. I ate a sandwich. This and the housework made me drowsy and so I stretched out on the couch under the parlor window and fell asleep with a dustrag in my hand.

  For quite a while, I was gone. I woke once to use the toilet and then I dozed some more on the couch, convinced that my energies would be more productively spent on beauty sleep than in any further efforts to tidy up my poor old apartment.

  Then somewhere around five o’clock, when the twelve-year-olds would be flocking into the Ebb Tide, there was a lot of noise outside from all the Jersey-bound motorists honking themselves silly on their way to the Lincoln Tunnel.

  Then the telephone call, and Angelo’s summons.

  That was about half-past five.

  I ran all the way to the Ebb Tide, six blocks from my place on West Forty-third Street and Tenth Avenue (as in Slaughter on …).

  CHAPTER THREE

  When I saw Celia lying there with a bullet in her neck, I was sadly unsurprised. And from the expression on her face, I would guess that Celia felt about the same the last time she felt anything.

  She was a lanky crumple of green against the scuffed oak floor. There was yellow chalk outlining her body and a dime-size blot of red at her throat. Her slim dead legs were encased in the kind of hosiery women used to wear, with garters, and seams running up the backs.

  On the bar there was an ashtray with Chesterfield butts in it, next to Celia’s patent-leather pocketbook. And also her saucer and cup, which was maybe a quarter-way full of milk streaked with Scotch. A forensic cop was dusting things with fingerprint powder for whatever good it could do.

  The twelve-year-olds had been herded back into the dining room. From the way some of them were sprawled in the banquettes, they had either fainted or thought murder was the floor show. The others were squawking as to how this would ruin all their plans for the evening. Nevertheless, nobody was leaving for the time being and that included even the ones with their wristwatch alarms going off.

  Over near the phone booth in front was a bulky redheaded detective of my slight acquaintance—Logue, from Central Homicide. I could not think of his first name, nor he mine as it turned out. He wore a square, brown suit and a brown tie and he held a pad of yellow paper in his puffy hand. He was asking Angelo questions—until he noticed me and waved me over.

  Logue came straight to it: “The proprietor, here, he tells me some of the things I need to know. Also he says, you, Hockaday, were one of the last persons besides the killer who talked to the deceased …”

  I looked at Angelo. He was all right, except for his damp forehead and the fact that his skin had gone the color of Elmer’s glue.

  “He tells me you’re on furlough, Detective Hockaday. But since you’re living right in the neighborhood, I asked him to give you a call over. As a professional consideration. So, you want to tell me anything?”

  “Yeah, I want to. But I can’t. I knew the lady only a couple of minutes, long enough to see how there was a long story to her. But I never heard it.”

  Logue sucked his teeth. I asked him, “What can you tell me?”

  He put the yellow pad back in his pocket and shook his fleshy head sideways. We shook hands since we had not done that yet. And then he disagreed with me some.

  “Oh, I don’t think there’s so much to say about her, or about the way she checked out,” Logue said. “Except you don’t have to be no Einstein to see it was personal.”

  “You think so?”

  “Sure I do. For one thing, where’s the signs of any struggles?”

  There were none. It appeared that Celia had simply slid off her barstool after getting herself quietly shot in a five o’clock crowd. Any cop would reasonably surmise that the shooter had been well acquainted with the victim, since any good cop will read a dead face the same as he would a live one. Also, any cop would assume the shooter was a professional; the job was done up-close and personal, neatly executed with a small-bore pistol so as not to make too much noise. Then the shooter had simply walked away in the crowd and commotion of happy hour, leaving Celia to fall down like an axed tree.

  I asked Angelo,
“What was she doing here all through the afternoon? And who came to join her recently?”

  Angelo thought for a few seconds, wanting to be careful and correct. He finally answered, slowly, “Celia and I talked about the old days. When she was a player—a gambler. Years ago she used to come here sometimes when we had some penny-ante stuff in the back room. Dice, mostly. Dice was her favorite.

  “Small chat like that, Hock. She had lunch at the bar, the fish-and-chips special. I gave her a lot of change for phone calls …”

  “Calls from the booth in here?” I asked.

  “Yeah. She was on the phone a whole lot when she wasn’t sitting at the bar, right where you met her earlier. I honestly don’t remember anybody coming in here asking to see her. And I don’t remember noticing that she talked to anybody, except on the phone.

  “Hock, if I could help, I would.”

  I turned to Logue and asked him, “You already got that about the phone calls?

  Logue said he had, that he was on top of it; he had already put in the police request for the New York Telephone Company to conduct a computer search of its coin-op logs for all outgoing calls from the booth at the Ebb Tide, between the hours of noon and half-past five. Logue added with a shrug, “For what it’s worth.”

  I asked what he meant by that crack.

  “You know, Hock. This job’s just a nine-to-five, no overtime.”

  I wanted to say “Maybe to you, Logue.” But I said nothing.

  Logue said wearily, “From what I seen and have been told so far, all we got here is the well-done cancellation of one …”

  He took the pad from his pocket and flipped through yellow pages. “One … Celia Furman, according to papers in her bag. Now also, according to the proprietor of the crime scene who knows her from bygone days, I am told that the late Ms. Furman was once-upon-a-time connected.”

  “Connected how?” I asked.