Damn me! Damn my thoughts for drifting back to Charlie and Celia! What about Charlie Furman’s failures as a husband and father? “The wife, she went rotten. The kid went Christian.” What about the taller man in the snapshot from a happy day at Coney Island back in the summer of ’54?
“… So now, as you know, I am living over the shop. Over my very own little theatre. Only we do real plays there, written by real playwrights. My apartment upstairs is smaller than my old office uptown, and I draw less than ten percent of what I used to make.”
I said, “Made, not earned.”
“That’s right.”
“And I suppose you would tell me that you have never been happier.”
“Are you accusing me of having a mind that’s easy to read?”
I laughed. Then I kissed her again.
And then we just ate our supper and ordered sweet-potato pie and coffee for dessert. Then Ruby asked, in all innocence, “What’s it like being a cop?”
Which is the perfect question to ask a cop when you want to be entertained because there are things that happen in the life of a cop that nobody who writes books and movies about cops could ever dream up.
For instance, there was the perfectly usual morning a few years ago when I stopped in at my usual neighborhood spoon and ordered my usual eggs over easy with sausages and rye toast and black coffee. And when I had finished the mess, I left the usual dollar tip. Thus fortified with usualness, I hit the street. And then the street hit me, in a manner of speaking.
“Outta my way, bub!”
This was shrieked at me by an agitated heavy-hipped curly-haired crone in a straw bonnet and pink dress with cabbage roses all over it. She looked like the wallpaper in the parlor of the Hell’s Kitchen apartment where I grew up, which is not so far from my Hell’s Kitchen apartment today.
Anyway, the crone backed up her words with a right straight-arm to my Adam’s apple, which just about decked me. So I stepped out of harm’s way to see what her rush was all about.
What she was trying to do, it appeared, was catch up with a skinny punk sauntering down the street with the handbag he had recently snatched off her shoulder. The crone was making plenty of good squawk, but nobody on the street besides me seemed to care about it, which did not make it much of a sporting proposition. The poor old thing with the mean right had too many years on her and too much ballast. Well down the street now, the punk turned around and laughed at us both.
I went over and asked her what was up. She had stopped, and was catching her breath. “Honest t’God,” she said, “would you look at that little snot down there? He swiped my purse and my rent money inside of it and my keys and my last bottle of Kaopectate. And it ain’t nothing but a joke to him. He’s thinking he’ll get clean away with it. He’s prob’ly one of them crack junkies. Where’s a goddamn cop when you need one?”
I did not have the chance right then to introduce myself professionally because just then the punk started coming back toward us. I suppose he was a crackhead; dopers do very crazy things, like right away returning to the scene of a crime.
“Now’s my chance!” the old lady said.
She waited until he was about a half-block away, then she did something as amazing and exciting and dead-on gorgeous as anything I have seen speeding off Phil Niekro’s knuckles back when he was on the mound up at Yankee Stadium in the bottom of the ninth with two away and Niekro has got only one pitch on a full count to shut out a Red Sox designated hitter in order to hang onto the Yanks’ one run lead.
Only the crone did not use a baseball.
Instead, she plucked a glass eye from the left side of her head, went into something approximating a windup, and burned one-quarter pound of blue iris crystal straight on down the street, scoring a bull’s-eye dead square on the laughing punk’s nose. Which then burst into red like it was an exploding paint can. The punk was not laughing when he went down.
“C’mon, bub! Give a helpless old lady a hand, why don’t you?”
Adrenalin got the helpless old lady to the punk about the same time I got there myself to make a nice, sweet collar on aggravated robbery. I was reaching into my back pocket for the bracelets when the crone took a joyful hop into the air and pounced on the punk’s chest, just like I have seen wrestlers do on television. “I’ll sit here on the crumb-bum while you go call up the cops, okay?”
She had recovered her purse and was bashing it into the squashed punk’s face. The glass eye rolled off the curb into a grating and disappeared into a sticky dark bog of tired-out chewing gum, cigarette butts, spittle and latex mementos of curbside revels. “Hell!” she crowed. “The insurance’s paid up and I been wanting a new one anyways.”
Ruby had been laughing steadily since “C’mon, bub, give a helpless old lady a hand …”
She said, “If that’s not an Irishman’s fable, I’ve never heard one.”
“Irish I am,” I answered. “I would steal from you, but I would never lie.”
“Tell me why you became a cop, Irish.”
“I can never say for sure. But I like to imagine that a cop, if he’s good, is somebody who wants to make some sense of the world.”
“Oh, then it’s true what they say about Detective Neil Hockaday; you’re not an easy man.”
“What is an easy man?”
“He’s somebody who wouldn’t think twice about trying to make sense of things because he already knows that if the world made any sense at all, it would be the men riding sidesaddle.”
I laughed for what seemed a long time, and it felt good. “Can there be any Irish in Ruby Flagg?”
“It could happen,” she said.
Ruby fixed me with her chocolate eyes. Then she folded her hands again, long fingers with clear, polished nails touched the tiny cleft in her chin.
I thought about the champagne on ice at home.
And I almost forgot about Charlie and Celia, almost.
This is happening so soon. Sooner than I ever expected!
Oh, but it was a good one, hey? And brother, did she have it coming—the rotten! Didn’t she, didn’t she?
I got to get ready!
My paints, my canvasses … my camera.
Where in holy hell’d she put them?
Holy hell! That’s rich, ain’t it?
Oh God, I wished I seen it for myself.
Ho, ho, what a sight that must of been. Ain’t that right? Damn straight!
The rotten…!
Well, there you are. She went and got herself blind-sided late in the game, boy. That’s it. Can you beat it?
D’you suppose she ever once figured the sweet irony? I mean, after a lifetime of craps—and mostly on the house side of the table—the dice went and turned against her. Hah!
She had her streak, sure. I give her that.
But every streak comes to an end. This I have observed many times.
And nobody beats the odds. Not even those that make them.
CHAPTER FIVE
Either I am the world’s most dedicated cop, or I am the world’s most ungrateful fool. These I figured to be my choices on the morning I woke up with company for a change, yet with a head running almost entirely to thoughts of collaring Charlie Furman, the desperate Picasso.
There beside me in my ordinarily lonesome bed was the still-slumbering Ruby Flagg, her smooth bare shoulders rising and falling as she breathed. I touched her warm skin and felt sorry for her, and for all the other unfortunate women who have to go falling for New York cops.
I had first laid eyes on Ruby Flagg at that party in Soho. That night, I experienced a minor philosophical miracle; it hit me all of a sudden how it was the human race had managed to survive itself. Because—as cynical as I can get about life in general and women in particular, given a marriage that so far as it ran was a triumph of habit over hate—I was just plain knocked loopy by the sight of her. Ruby Flagg and her kind and pretty face, her soft, slim shape, those devastating legs, those eyes.
That was one nig
ht two weeks ago in a crowded room, leading to last night in my small apartment and the elemental time we made of it. Just the two of us.
Back at the restaurant, during the last bites of sweet-potato pie, she had said to me, “The way you’re looking at me, buster, you’d better mean it.”
I said I meant it. She said she wanted to see where I lived.
Then there was I, sitting in my green-fringed chair from the Salvation Army that looks as if it might have been cast out of some long-ago whorehouse parlor, and her on the couch by the window slipping off her shoes, she said, “Tell me the story of your life, Hock.”
I said, “It’s long and mostly untrue.”
“I’ll learn it, by-and-by.”
And then we drank the Perrier-Jouēt, all of it. I played a treasured LP on the stereo, ballads by the late Leslie Hutchinson, including my favorite rendition of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” Also I entertained Ruby with a confession of my detective work since the Soho affair; how I had nosed around about her dopey escort and discovered he was a theatrical casting agent who wore a gold locket around his neck that contained a tiny heart-shaped photograph of somebody named Vito; how I reasoned, therefore, that it would not be wasting my time and energies to ring up the lady for a date.
She laughed at me and said, “You’re a dope, Hock. But you’re my kind of dope.”
Now there was I, my finger tracing Ruby’s smooth shoulder, about to be a real dope.
Quietly as I could, I rose from the bed and showered and dressed and made coffee. And one telephone call.
Then Ruby, wrapped alluringly in my shirt and standing in front of me as I hung up the telephone, asked, “Who was that?”
“A man I have to go see.”
“About a job.” The way she said it, she knew.
“Yes.”
“Okay, but remember, buster—I’m waiting for you.”
“How do you think I got here where I am, Hock?” This was Inspector Tomassino Neglio’s first reaction to my account of meeting Picasso; being called to view the remains of his wife the same day he had issued murder threats; my concerns that Celia Furman’s untimely death would not likely make it to the top of Logue’s agenda. A very rotten thing of me to be doing, talking this way behind another cop’s back. “How do you think I got here where I am?”
I would want to think carefully about an answer. My boss is fond of elliptic questions. Straight responses under such conversational circumstances can easily put me in the position of being idiot nephew to his world-wise uncle. This is the natural result of two different kinds of cops seated on opposite sides of a desk over which something of a delicate nature is under discussion. A regular cop like me in chinos and a baseball jacket tends to ask blunt questions to find out what a person knows; a man of the bureau, like Neglio—a cop with suits tailor-made in Chinatown, a cop who rarely carries his piece anymore—tends to ask loaded questions in order to find out what a person does not know. Any New York detective who fails to see the difference is about as effective as a tap dancer on carpet.
“You slept with somebody, sir?” I have found by experience that cracking wise is often the best course with Neglio. He generally ignores me, which was the case that morning.
“I came to recognize the danger of this here little item, Hock.” Neglio pointed to the telephone on his desk. He saw the idiot glint in my eyes, smiled a satisfied smile and explained patiently, “Every time this thing rings, it’s trouble.”
Neglio stood up from his desk. He locked his manicured fingers behind his back, turned and stepped to the window. His view from an upper floor of One Police Plaza was New York Harbor—Ellis and Governors Islands, the Statue of Liberty, the ferry boats gliding out to gray Staten Island—and I thought to myself how it was sort of pathetic that a man with such a great view and such great suits up here in this great office was afraid of his telephone. I shook my head sadly, as he could not see me. Then I recognized that by this action, secret though it was, I had betrayed a reasonably good cop, man of the bureau or not.
He turned and stared at me hard. “I got smart and learned to be cautious, Hock. About everything. Even cautious about answering the phone. Which you can now see is smart of me, since I took your call this morning and look where it’s got us.”
“There’s no trouble as I see it, Inspector. I am only going by the book here …”
“Covering your ass, you mean.”
“Being cautious.”
Neglio sat down and sighed. “I am only trying to give you good advice, Hock. You don’t have to answer every call. Understand?”
“I appreciate that, and I understand.”
“You’re entitled to your furlough.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“But, instead …”
“Inspector, you know where the job’s going to be going under Logue.”
“I know, I know,” Neglio admitted. “Logue’s on the precipice of pension, so he’s strictly nine-to-five until he’s settled down in Florida somewheres. You go telling anybody I said that about him and I’ll call you a goddamn liar, okay? But, yeah, I see your point.”
“Thanks. The book says when I have some compelling reason for poaching on a cop’s job, I should tell the boss. So I’m telling you, so you can make a record of it in case I need it. Off the record, well, it’s personal reasons.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake, Hock! That’s blowing rule number one. You don’t make this business personal; it’s hard enough dealing with strangers.”
I said nothing since he was right.
“When are you going to learn? All we happen to be is cops; we didn’t make the world, and we aren’t responsible for anybody else making the world.”
I tried to think of some answer, but could not. Once more, Neglio found what I did not know—even about myself. I shook my head sadly again, recognizing how this game was getting easier and easier for my boss to play.
Impatient with the silence, Neglio added, “All right, so I give you this, Hock: it’s not Logue’s kind of a story, it’s got you written all over it.”
He motioned me to get the hell out of his office and leave him alone. But before I got out the door, he stopped me with, “I maybe can see how you take this personal, even if you don’t see yourself. Know what I mean?”
I answered with a meek, “No.”
“I know from all the times over all the years when I have sprung for drinks late at night, when you’re all on about growing up alone with your mother, God bless her soul. That and how your old man was lost in the war, and how you never knew him, and how your mother never talked of him—and the mysteries of it all. You’re a real sucker for a certain kind of a story, Hock. That’s what I mean.”
“What kind of story?”
“Most cops—myself included, I suppose—would be perfectly satisfied to collar a guy who, one fine day after twenty-five years of marriage, takes a cleaver to his missus and makes a bloody mess of her all over the kitchen floor. Case closed.
“But not you, Hock. You, you Irish snoop—you want to trespass into the mystery of it all.”
“What mystery?”
“The mystery of how a guy loved a woman so much twenty-five years ago that he married her; then how one day he hated her so bad that he diced her. You’re the kind of trespassing cop who wants to know the story of what happened during those twenty-five years.
“Now, if you want to say that makes you a good cop, Hock, I will agree with you. But when I say that trespassing brings a lot of trouble, too—well, I would like it if you could try seeing how I’m right.”
I only touched the doorknob and said, “So this is, what, your blessing?”
Neglio sighed. “Yeah, go on, Hock. If it comes to it, I’ll square things with Logue.”
“Thanks, sir.”
“Don’t thank me. And don’t forget two things.”
“What?”
“One, there’s lots of questions in the world that are best left unanswered. And
two, you’re on your own damn clock on this.”
Two hours later, I was riding the Lexington Avenue local from the City Hall Station up to East Thirty-third Street. Then I walked to First Avenue where, behind black-iron gates sits a hulking cluster of dirty, red-brick buildings known collectively as Bellevue Hospital Center. This was the only place that might have something in the way of a record on Charlie Furman, a/k/a Picasso.
While still downtown I had checked some of the usual places where I can sometimes get a start on tracking down a man—the State Unemployment Compensation Bureau, the Human Resources Administration where a marginal artist might have filed for welfare, the Social Security Office at Federal Plaza. All I learned from this was that Charlie Furman’s life was completely off the books. Not surprisingly, telephone information was no help to me, and neither was the guy a voter.
I followed signs at the gate of the main entrance to Bellevue and found the psychiatric ward, where I remember Picasso telling me he had been an outpatient for quite a long while. There was a herd of patients in wheelchairs sitting at one end of the lobby in an area marked off by purple tape on the floor. They were full of Thorazine and there were straps across their laps to keep them from pitching out of their chairs.
I showed my gold shield to the duty nurse and said I wanted to speak to somebody who could help me with the medical file on Charlie Furman. And while she punched this name into a buzzing desk computer, I asked her for good measure if she had ever heard of a patient called Picasso.
“Oh, sure, the painter gentleman,” she said. “He used to come by pretty regular, a real cutey. But I don’t know, we ain’t seen him in I-don’t-know-when.”
This would be the first time I heard a nurse say “ain’t.” She stared at her computer screen, chewed gum and hiked up her undergarments. “I got nothing here showing on no Furman, Charlie. Or Charles, neither.”
“Well,” I asked her, “when Picasso used to come by, did he have any regular doctor?”
“Sure,” she said, giving her eyes a roll. “That’d be Dr. Reiser. Ronald Reiser. He’s up in the Zoo—and if you ask me, it’s rubbed off on him. Um, you know the Zoo?”
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