Logue shrugged and so Angelo gave me the answer. “Gaming, that’s all, Hock. She started out in Detroit, as a cigarette girl in the sawdust houses. Remember them?”
I remembered. Back before a lot of people in my own neighborhood lost their jobs to the onslaught of legal gambling in the OTB parlors, and the state lotteries, and down in Atlantic City, there were colorful places all up and down the West Side where you could have drinks and a little music and shoot craps at the same time. Or play some tonk, or twenty-one. Some joints came equipped with wire rooms for playing the horses, or the national sports betting line. Every place had runners for the incidentals the clientele needed, like tip sheets for the races at Aqueduct or takeout Chinese or a fresh deck of cards. I remember all that because as a kid new to long pants, I myself was sometimes employed as a runner.
Now Angelo looked down at the body in the green dress with the good legs sticking out. “It’s hard for me to figure Celia ever doing anything so bad to somebody that she had to wind up this way. Now I see I didn’t know her so well as I thought.”
“How well do we ever know anybody?” I said.
“That’s very true.”
Then Logue said, “I’ll tell you what I make of all this. I think we have got here a case of somebody being out of circulation so long she was off-balance about her prospects for longevity. Now, ain’t that evident—and ain’t you seen it play that way before, Detective Hockaday?”
“You mean so off-balance that she forgot how you’re never out of the rackets, even when you’re not in the action?” I said, thinking out loud. “Maybe.”
“Maybe nothing, that’s it,” Logue said. “Whatever she done and whoever she done it to, it all goes way back into something too murky for any of us to see. So that’s why I don’t get too excited about this being no more than a routine mop-up, even though it was a lady who got it.”
From Logue’s point of view, I could see that. Even so, I told him, “Celia told me how she once had tax trouble, and how it wrecked her life. There should be something in the way of leads there.”
“Maybe,” Logue said. “So I might get a few lines, so what?”
I asked Angelo again if he had seen her talking to anyone in particular. He shook his head and told me what he had already told Logue. “Honest, Hock. I’m so busy with this bad crowd that comes in nowadays, I just didn’t pay her any attention since about five.”
Logue stepped away from us, to speak to the police photographer who had just arrived. I told Angelo he should stop sweating so much. Then I joined Logue.
The photographer stepped over and around the corpse in order to take pictures from every possible angle of what to him was just another lump. I heard somebody from the back dining room say, “Oh, ish!”
I looked at Celia’s face, white from the loss of blood and now whiter still in the strobe light. The corners of her lips were turned up slightly, as if she had been sneering at somebody she knew well enough to despise. I saw that her hair was short and black and cut like women cut their hair back in the ’20s, like Louise Brooks in her bob. I had not noticed her hair before; she had been wearing a hat with a feather, but now it was nowhere around.
A spurt of blood escaped from one of her nostrils. I have seen enough of this sort of thing through the years to know that a tiny bullet was lodged in bone somewhere in Celia’s neck or head, and that her dead body was hemorrhaging. Soon every visible orifice would be leaking. The photographer knew this, too, which is why he was being quick about his role in the mop-up.
“From the look of her,” I said to Logue, “I think the lady received unpleasant news.”
“That’s putting it mild,” he said.
“I would also say that poor Celia Furman somehow half expected what happened was going to happen.”
Logue agreed. “Yeah, well, she don’t look shocked like most stiffs do. So how do you figure it played?”
“I think she took some kind of bait to get set up like she was. That might come from being off-balance, like you said; in the rackets, you have to be figuring what awful thing can be done to you that is even worse than some awful thing you’re doing—or have done—to somebody else.”
“Makes sense.”
“Sense, I don’t know.”
I wanted a drink very badly right then. But I thought about meeting Ruby for dinner in a few hours and so instead I asked Angelo for a seltzer with lime.
Then I asked Logue if he or the forensics officers had come across the shell casing to the bullet that was still somewhere inside Celia. He said no. “So what kind of piece did the shooter use, do you think?”
“I’d bet on a .25 automatic with blowback action,” Logue said. “Notice how you don’t see no burns on her neck there, just the clean hole. An automatic’s quiet, too, and in a crowd it ain’t no trick to squeeze one off with nobody the wiser until they see somebody fall down on their face …”
“Which, in a bar, happens.”
“Happens, yeah.” Logue yawned and looked at his watch again.
Logue and I stood there silently, watching the forensics team pick up bar napkins with tweezers and dust things with sticky black powder and rummage through Celia’s pocket-book. Angelo rinsed out glasses behind the bar.
The paramedics arrived and wrapped Celia head to toe in canvas, which happened also to be green. Then they took her away to the morgue in an ambulance, but they did not bother with the flashing light or the siren.
Logue asked Angelo for change of a dollar. He muttered, “I got to call up the wife.”
I asked the forensics cop now finished with Celia’s pocketbook if he had come across anything interesting. He recited the usual list of a lady’s gear, which is considerable. Then he showed me what he was about to slip into a plastic evidence bag—an old, curling, black-and-white snapshot, about two inches by three.
The details were hard to make out because of all the rips and creases in the photo paper, but there was no doubt about the main subject—a young, beautiful, high-spirited girl in a bathing suit, Celia on a boardwalk, in a frozen moment of her carefree past. Behind her was a Ferris wheel, and people walking by in shorts and straw hats. Along one crinkled margin of the snapshot was some writing in blue fountain-pen ink: Coney I., summer ’54.
The bathing beauty stood on the boardwalk between two men, each with an arm clasped around her slender waist. One of them was Celia’s height, or slightly taller. The other was shorter by at least two inches, and thickset.
I noticed the shorter man’s bearded chin. And his glasses, and his beret.
Logue had finished talking to his wife and was standing beside me again, telling me how he was going to call it a day and how he did not see much percentage in the usual business of closing and sealing the scene himself. And that if I thought of anything useful to the cause, then maybe I ought to ring him at Central Homicide, “… for what it’s worth.”
For what it was worth, I decided to sleep on my thoughts at least one night. At the same time, I told myself again, You can let all this wormy stuff go now …
But of course, I could not. I asked Logue, “Did anybody find a green hat with a feather, a hat Celia’s size?”
“Hat? She wore a hat?”
I said yes. Logue said no, nobody found a hat.
I said, “Maybe I’ll drop by to see you sometime in the next day or two.”
Logue yawned and left.
Then I asked Angelo about the painting.
“That I got back in the early ’60s, sometime when you were up studying at City College, Hock. Now I don’t think I want it hanging here anymore.”
“Because it’s her in the picture—Celia?”
“It’s her, please God.”
Angelo turned to the back bar and picked up a bottle of Johnnie Walker red. He offered me a jar on the house, which I reluctantly declined in the interest of my dinner plans. He poured one for himself, though, and stared sadly at the thick amber. In the back room, where Celia threw craps once-upon-a-time, the uniforms we
re nearly finished with the happy hour types. I heard one of them complain, “But, Officer—this is, like, so inconvenient!” Angelo tipped his glass, spilling a few drops of Scotch out of respect for his circle of absent friends, now increased by one.
He put back the whiskey, then raised the empty glass to toast the painting of Celia and himself. I asked who the artist was.
“That would be Celia’s long-lost husband, Charlie Furman.”
“If Charlie had come in here today,” I asked, “would Celia have recognized him? Would you?”
“Charlie Furman, in here?” Angelo shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Did you know him, too?”
“Well, I met him a few times if that’s what you mean. I only talked to him about what he wanted in the way of a drink, though.”
“But, here at the bar, that’s where you met him?”
“Yeah, a long time back when he would sometimes come by with Celia. She’d go in the back and shoot craps and he’d sit up here drinking and watching the scenery. Man, the guy was quite the watcher.”
“Why do you call him Celia’s ‘long-lost’ husband?”
“Celia and Charlie, they had lots of problems. First, Celia’s line is not conducive to long marriages; second, Charlie was an artist and artists are mostly nuts. He drifted off someplace and when he went Celia also cleared out the paintings the guy never sold, which in my case is what you see hanging over the bar.”
“There’s a street character here in the neighborhood who calls himself Picasso,” I said. There was no recognition in Angelo’s face. “Know him?”
Angelo thought and said, “No.”
I told myself, You’ve gone as far as you can … call up Logue tomorrow and tell him what you know; it’s his case, and besides, you’re on furlough!
I started to leave. The happy hour crowd was given its liberty; the front bar started filling up.
Angelo said, “Funny, isn’t it?”
“How do you mean?”
“Funny how she wore green in the painting and how she wore green today.”
“The lady liked green?”
“She almost always wore green. She said it was her lucky color.”
CHAPTER FOUR
There sat I, at a small table in a warm room, looking into the candlelit face of Ruby Flagg with her chocolate eyes and almond skin and black, black hair and her full lips touched with maroon and her smooth slim neck flowing from the top of a white lace blouse. She raised a slender hand to her neck, pinched the edge of her blouse and fluttered the fabric to cool herself. And damn me! Damn me with my thoughts all crowded by images of Picasso and his crazed threats … and Celia and the unsurprised way her face had greeted death.
Ruby was talking. I had asked her to tell me more about herself, since this was only our second date, if we counted the night we met at a party in Soho and she had come with a foolish man who was indifferent to our spending most of the evening together in a far corner of the loft. I asked her to tell me about setting off for New York from her hometown, which was New Orleans; I asked her if she believed in the Emerald City. And my thoughts were crowded as she answered.
“… Oh, I knew it was going to be rough and tough,” she was saying. “And I had no end of relations back home who had never been outside Louisiana in their lives, but who knew all about New York City anyhow and how it was no place for me; how I’d come dragging my sorrowful tail back down South soon enough, hopefully in one piece.”
There was a five-piece band in Princess Pamela’s Little Kitchen, which is a lot of music for a place with only an eight-foot bar and a dozen tables for dinner. But this did not overpower our conversation. The musicians were five old fellows with five old instruments and no one had much wind. The band played a soft set of Bix Beiderbecke tunes—“Fidgety Feet,” “Flock o’ Blues,” and “Prince of Wails” among them. Behind the band was a curtained doorway, behind which would be the Princess herself, tending the fried chicken you can smell all over the Lower East Side.
But neither the music nor Ruby’s pretty face and voice nor the aroma from Princess Pamela’s stove drove away my thoughts of Celia and Charlie Furman and the many questions their lives had raised all of a sudden. What had Picasso meant by saying to me, “I been watching you for months in case you didn’t know”? What had he meant by saying, “I will take you into my confidence”? And why had he steered me to the Ebb Tide, where his painting hung in obscurity, where life had imitated art, until it died?
“… I remember being scared by all the sweet, loving lies the family told me about New York,” Ruby was saying. “But I was so much more frightened by the thought of staying home and marrying young and growing old fast, and having to make up lies of my own to keep young people from leaving me.
“Besides, I wasn’t right in the head. I wanted to go into the theatre.”
Artists, they’re mostly nuts.
Ruby laughed. “Well, I got on stage my very first year here, how about that? This was a theatre down on Bond Street, in a cellar. In my first role, I played a cannibal in an unfunny comedy about Amway distributors who open new sales territories in the African bush.”
“In my time I have been trapped into witnessing plays like that,” I told her.
And I thought, If Celia had sat at the Ebb Tide all day making telephone calls, she was obviously waiting for someone to come meet her, she could make calls from anywhere. Did her familiar killer finally stop by, knowing the bar would be crowded at five o’clock? Was it Picasso—Charlie Furman—who stopped by? But wouldn’t Angelo have noticed him?
Ruby laughed again. “So when the offers for bigger and better parts did not rain down upon me, I did some more plays like the one at Bond Street. Which, as you know, does not pay the rent. And which, if you keep up this glorious art, will make you poor, which happened.”
“And then?”
“Then I decided I didn’t like poor. So, through a friend of mine, I wound up with a job on Madison Avenue with a pretty good agency that thought it was hip to advance me up the executive ladder—me being female and black, but not too black to their minds.”
“You’re speaking here of minds that are easily read?”
She smiled at me. “And so for more years than I want to confess, Detective Hockaday, I was your regulation advertising hotshot. I wore all the correct female business suits and I spent many hours lunching at Table 89 in the Pool Room at the Four Seasons so that every other advertising hotshot in town could get a load of me in my executive splendor.”
“Well, you made money at least.”
“I made loads. I won’t say ‘earned.’ Enough money so I could buy a place up on East Seventy-fourth off Fifth Avenue, with a big wrap-around terrace overlooking Central Park. I would hire a piano player for parties on summer nights and he’d play Gershwin and Porter, and I would try to believe I loved my career and that I was successful in New York and that all the people drinking my liquor were my dear, close friends.
“But I didn’t and I wasn’t and they weren’t. I didn’t have anything truly important …”
Princess Pamela joined us. She carried big plates full of smothered chicken in her ample arms, and smaller plates laden with Creole potato salad and cornbread and string beans. She set these down on our table, then drew up a chair for herself without asking and settled her two hundred pounds in it. She poked the red-blonde wig on her head and called to the bartender, “Darlin’, give us a Bud over here.” Then she indulged in the house custom of free advice and counsel to her customers, based on her eavesdropping.
“Let me tell you what’s important, my darlin’s,” Princess said. “You got to know crap from Christmas. Let’s say you get invited to a lawn party someplace nice out in the country. Now, you can play croquet—or you can head for the card table in the shade where there’s some good sun tea and a hot game of whist. Crap from Christmas.”
The bartender brought Princess her can of Budweiser. She popped the tab and drank, looking ca
refully at me. Then she said, “Hock, I ain’t seen you come by with a decent-lookin’ woman in I-don’t-know-when. Now here you are and you ain’t but half-listenin’ to Pretty. What’s troublin’ your mind, darlin’?”
I told Princess—and Ruby—about Celia’s death. And also a little bit about Picasso. And about Logue, and how I knew he had a crowded desk at Central Homicide and that he would put Celia’s file over toward the edge in hopes it might fall into the wastcpaper basket. And I apologized for being distracted, especially since it was my first day of a well-deserved furlough and all.
When I finished, Princess turned and said to Ruby, “Pretty, if you want this man then you got to come’round to understandin’ he is a poor fool who can’t help but bein’ this all-day cop in a twenty-four-hour town. No more than he can help bein’ the only cop who knows how every life’s maybe not valuable, but how every life’s a big deal. My friend Hock—well, he ain’t a easy man, Pretty.”
Princess stood up. “Y’all be good,” she said. Then she belched daintily and moved her ministry along to the next table.
Ruby said, “I like her, Hock. She talks like Hemingway said a writer ought to write. Which is know everything there is to know about your subject, then toss it all out except for the essentials. Hemingway called it resonance. Princess would call it soul.”
Then Ruby folded her hands and tucked them under her chin and leaned forward. I leaned forward, too, and kissed her. And the Little Kitchen band played “Old Devil Moon,” and I believe that was the exact moment when I knew that Ruby Flagg and I were slow-dancing together.
“You haven’t told me yet if you believe in the Emerald City,” I said.
“No, but I believe in the Yellow Brick Road,” Ruby said.
“Along which, the advertising dodge was, what, a pit stop?”
“You might say. The trick was to get back on the road after the stop.”
“And how did you do that?”
“One day, I just got up from my big desk in my corner office with the view of the East River clear down to the Williamsburg Bridge. I walked out and never returned. Not even for my final paycheck …”
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