“I am in such agony, all I see is Picasso’s wild blurry head chasing around in circles with Freud’s head behind him, from the picture up on the wall. And I can’t tell which one of them is yelling at me, ‘You ignorant shrink! Open your eyeballs and see!’”
I said, “And that’s the last you saw of him?”
“Yeah. He knocked me down, then a couple of the security goons came in here and jacketed him. We doped him out for a couple of days. I didn’t make an issue of it. I mean, what could I do anyway? We’d been carrying this guy off the record for decades, right? He wasn’t cooperating, and we kept taking him back. What do you expect?
“Besides,” Reiser added, “the day we let him go, he dropped by my office and told me I was fired as his doctor. How do you like that?”
Reiser opened the manila folder again. He removed an item and handed it to me—a white business-size envelope, the cheap kind that comes from Lamston’s in hundred-count boxes. It had been mailed to Dr. Ronald Reiser, in care of Bellevue. But there was no return address. The postmark was Brooklyn. The cancelled stamp was a flag issue, pasted upside-down in the upper right corner of the envelope.
“That thing,” Reiser explained, “came about one week after he coldcocked me. Just get a load of what’s inside of it.”
I pulled out a Polaroid photograph, about four inches square. The image was overexposed and muddy, as Polaroids sometimes are. I made out the picture of a large building, neither an apartment house nor a shop, but something else—full of colors, mostly reds and yellows. And a small building in the foreground, a sort of shed with a sign on it that read: TICKETS.
Around the edges of the photo were neatly printed letters, all in black ballpoint capitals: BEHOLD, MY MASTERPIECE—LOVE & KISSES, PICASSO.
“What is it?”
Reiser said, “In the trade, they call it a dark maze. You’ll find it out in Coney Island.”
CHAPTER SIX
There is always the singular moment when I know for certain that I am about to be wedded to a case, for better or for worse, until death do us part. Walking out of Dr. Ronald Reiser’s office in the Zoo wing of Bellevue was that grim moment.
Feeling the way I did, I figured it in the best interests of family harmony to make a straightforward, diplomatic call to Detective Logue at Central Homicide. Better he should hear it from me now, instead of from Inspector Neglio later.
“Listen, go right ahead and be my guest,” Logue said after I spent a couple of minutes telling him about the wedding. “Like I told you before—what am I going to do with overtime?”
That settled, I asked, “Any progress yet?”
“There’s Celia’s rap. Which is a good place to start if you got the time and interest, which I see you got. Hold on, I got notes here someplace.” Logue shuffled papers on his desk. “Okay, it turns out the G really did a number on the lady, back during one of those times that happen once in a while when everybody down in Washington’s got a hard-on for the mob, right?”
“And Celia Furman was in the wrong place at the time?”
“Right. She was what’s known as a “big whale” in the casinos, meaning she was good for a fifty-grand credit line anywhere’s in Vegas, and in the European and Caribbean joints, too. Also she was a lady who made a habit of being a real pal to the right kinds of useful men …”
“Of which some were connected?”
“Right again,” Logue said. “It’s how she got started making her pile. Useful guys backed her when she started taking over sawdust houses in Detroit and gradually worked her way up to running a string of class joints all the way around the lakeshore from Detroit to Cleveland. Good square houses, so they say; always dice the specialty.”
“But the government doesn’t care about any of that.” “Naw, they’re after some of Celia’s boyfriends. Since Celia’s very probably a key to lots of things these characters do not wish to confide to Uncle. Well, you heard this drill before, Hockaday.”
“So they leaned hard on Celia.”
“Right. And for the best kind of leaning there is, they sent the IRS around. They know she can’t stand up to no unrelenting income-tax audit.”
“Then they haul her into Federal Tax Court?”
“Not before they cleaned her out, but good. One by one, they shut down her string of houses, leaving her no more gold mine to stake for the serious money on the big whale circuit. Which is the only way she’s got of making good on everything she never forked over on her Form 1040s from all those earnings she shouldn’t have earned. This is kind of screwy, but remember we’re talking government here.”
“All part of the drill,” I said. “So, next they offered her the testimony deal?”
“I guess they tried. They hauled her in front of grand juries all over the country. Detroit, Chicago, L.A., New Orleans, Boston, here in New York. You name the town, Celia’s been in its grand jury room.”
“Did she talk?”
“My friend who is telling me this,” Logue said, “he doesn’t think so.”
“Who’s your friend?”
“Oh, this guy my own age. We came up through the ranks together in the department, then one year he gets sense enough to go work for the feds. He’s doing records now at Justice, down in D.C., in an office with his own telephone and a parking space and an air conditioner in the window that’s got a view of the Lincoln Memorial. …
“Anyway, my friend says to me, ‘Your subject spent lots of time in front of grand juries that never delivered up indictments that meant much, so by that I would conclude that the lady was no canary.’”
Logue added to this, with his sincerest disgust, “For what honor that was worth.”
I asked what he meant.
“Here was this class-A lady, the way I see it,” he answered. “She never ratted out nobody, but everybody she ever knew in the business assumed she must’ve spilled something once every so often just to break the monotony of flying from one grand jury to the other. So they went and cut her off! Jesus, it was pathetic when you think about it. The only dice left to her was on Monopoly boards.
“Just to tell you how heartbreaking it was, Hock, my friend says the last thing on his records about Celia Furman is that she was so broke some assistant D.A. took pity on her and helped her file for Social Security. What a freaking shame, hey?”
“That it is, my friend,” I said. “She was death before she got dead for real.”
I was anxious to get off the telephone with Logue, anxious to speak to Inspector Neglio about putting out an APB on Charlie Furman a/k/a Picasso, anxious to put money on the street in hopes one or two of my snitches could sell me a lead to his whereabouts, and anxious to get home, where Ruby Flagg was waiting.
Then I remembered about the phone logs.
“Before she was shot,” I said to Logue, “Celia made several calls from the booth at the Ebb Tide, remember? You were going to get the phone logs. Anything interesting show up?”
“Oh that, yeah.” I heard Logue shuffle papers some more. “Okay, lots of these entries on the log we can probably discount pretty quick once we check them all out. We got calls to a neighborhood bookie, for instance; I know the number myself, see? Then we got two calls to this street pay phone that we know is a drug line. Also we have some calls to guys’ apartments where Celia probably don’t figure, and some calls to this answering service that’s probably for pross …”
“Give it to me efficient, Logue. Are you showing anything that relates at all to Celia Furman?”
“Well, I don’t know how in hell it would relate, but there’s nine calls to the same number in the logs. So I figure, maybe that’s her calls, on account of they were so long-winded she had to put in extra coins.”
I heard papers shuffled again. Then Logue said, “The nine calls, they list to a public phone at another bar, a joint called the Neptune, out in Brooklyn.”
“Brooklyn,” I said flatly. “As in Coney Island.”
“Yeah…. Hey, what do you know?”
“I know I’m taking a trip out to Coney Island, for the first time since I was a kid.”
Off and on through the day, I had certain thrilling ideas about being back at my place with Ruby. She said she would wait, did she not? I did not want to spoil these thoughts by calling up my place even once to see if she was still there. This is the pathology of a man who has been cut off at the knees once in his life, which is a lot like being divorced.
Back when I was married, I would miss my wife Judy during the day—and sometimes at night—and I would call home and she was usually not there. And when I came to find out some of the reasons she was never there, I stopped calling home altogether.
You would think that a man as bright as I enjoy believing I am would know the difference between one woman and another, especially when the women are as highly contrasting as Judy and Ruby. But no. Along with all those thrilling angles I had considered during the course of the day, there was a sour note: the lasting memory of being sandbagged by wounded vanity.
So I had not telephoned.
And now I was sliding the key into the lock, opening the door, taking the chance, again.
And there was Ruby Flagg, sitting on my couch under the window, one leg curled up beneath her hips, a book open in her lap and a teapot and cup on the side table along with a glass full of flowers she must have bought at the Korean greengrocer on the corner. She wore spectacles I had never seen, spectacles that betrayed her as very nearsighted. She yanked them off.
“I don’t like you seeing me in these,” she said. “They make me look funny, like a bug.”
I said, lamely, “You’re still here.”
“Like I said—I mean it, buster.”
Outside, it started raining the sort of soft rain that comes late in the afternoon on April days, the sort of rain that takes away all the shrillness of the city. I could hear foghorns out on the Hudson River, and cops on horseback down in the street.
“When you say, ‘I mean it’, you mean? …”
“Both of us have been around the block. And we both have probably been run over a few times. We are both slightly past the prime of youth. Do you know what I’m saying?”
I said I was not at all sure, even though maybe I was.
“I’m saying you and I are at the age when we should take it easy, but we should take it.”
Then Ruby got up off the couch and walked to me and put her arms up around my neck and pulled my head down to hers and kissed me on the lips. Afterwards, she said, “Now this is what I call throwing my whole self at you, buster. For better or for worse. How about paying me some attention?”
“Maybe we could go for drinks and talk, then go to dinner someplace nice,” I said.
“We’re having dinner someplace nice,” Ruby said. “Right here. Drinks, too.”
She sat me down and poured from the bottle of Johnnie Walker on the sideboard. One for me, then one for herself, mixed with water. Then she read my mind.
“You took that murder case, didn’t you?”
I said yes. And I told her all about my talk with Neglio, my futile checks on Charlie Furman, my talk with Dr. Reiser and the call to Logue.
And one other thing. Which was my developing hunch that Charlie Furman, if he killed his wife, had only just begun.
“Have you ever been to Coney Island?” I asked.
“No. But I’ll bet it can wait until tomorrow.”
That settled, I gave Ruby my fullest attention for the balance of an evening’s long, slow dance.
Morning was bright-skied and cool.
We made an early start of it, with eggs and bagels down at the spoon I see out my window—Pete Pitsikoulis’ All-Night Eats & World’s Best Coffee. Then a brisk walk over to the F train at Sixth Avenue and Forty-second. We both mostly dozed during the long trip out to the farthest reaches of Brooklyn.
A curly-headed young woman was opening up the first shop you encounter when emerging from the Stillwell Avenue station of the IND subway—the Philips Salt Water Taffee and Ka-Ra-Me-La stand. Before the day was out, even though it was April and school was still in session, she would sell a few hundred pounds of licorice whips, pistachios, gumdrops, chocolate turtles with cashews, nonpareils, peanut-butter fudge, and cheese popcorn. Coney Islanders do not cut svelte figures on the beach.
Across Stillwell Avenue was another familiar stand, where starting about mid-June there would be sweet corn for sale. The stand was empty now, but in my mind there was the smell of dozens and dozens of bright yellow ears of cooked corn, soaked in sugar and dripping with melted butter. I could hear summertime sounds—big-bellied men with thick arms and straw hats and red noses full of broken veins hawking their games of skill and their confections and all the newest kitchen gadgets; a million small boys chasing after a million small girls; my mother’s leather thongs making slapping sounds on the boardwalk as we walked hand in hand, surveying the beach for the best spot to pitch our blanket and umbrella for the day.
I turned to where there once was a busy newsstand, where people would buy things to read on the beach, back before transistor radios, back when people still read. The news-stand was gone.
I said to Ruby, “They used to sell the Brooklyn Eagle right about here. And the Daily Mirror. And all those movie magazines, and Boy’s Life and the comics and Popular Detective. That was all about a hundred years ago.”
Ruby looked as if she felt sorry for me. Sorry for all the things lost from the present and sorry that anything remaining from the past was so badly worn.
I looked up into the windows of the Seashore Hotel across from the subway station. When I was a kid, I had not seen old fellows sitting in those windows in their undershirts staring dumbly at television sets. Now I did.
I held Ruby’s hand as we crossed Surf Avenue and walked toward the rambling green-and-yellow Nathan’s Famous for coffee. I was relieved to see that Nathan’s was still pretty much the same: still open all day and night, every day of the year, with the fragrant steam of frankfurters and French-fried potatoes still pouring into the street and out toward the boardwalk from the cookstoves.
The long wooden open-air counters of Nathan’s were speckled with customers. We stood a few feet away from a man with tattoos on his arms busy with a big plate of oysters daubed with horseradish and hot sauce.
“Look at his oysters,” I said to Ruby. She looked at the tattooed man’s plate. “See how they’re all gray? Mother Nature made oysters pink, which is how I remember eating them when I was a kid. The oil industry went and made them gray.”
Ruby groaned. “We came all the way out here today so you could reminisce about the poor old pink oysters?”
“Okay, forget oysters,” I said. Then I filled her in about the photograph that Picasso had sent to Dr. Reiser at Bellevue, the picture of his “masterpiece.” And how Reiser had explained that Picasso had painted the outside illustrations of a boardwalk attraction, how that was what we had come all the way out to Coney Island to find.
“So exactly where will we find it?” Ruby asked.
“Somewhere in Astroland.”
“Astroland?”
“It’s what they call the amusement park here at Coney Island, like the midway at a carnival. We’re looking for a dark maze attraction here; that’s carnival lingo for a spook house. Ours is called Fire and Brimstone.”’
“Oh, good. They had a spook house at City Park in New Orleans, when I was a kid. God, I used to love it! Big and dark inside and full of twisty little hallways, with mirrors to confuse you and creepy noises and sudden drafts. Skeletons and witches would be jumping out from everyplace.”
Ruby clasped her elbows in her hands and rocked herself, remembering. “It scared me real good, every time.” Her eyes were wide, and as radiant as whitecaps out on the sunlit Atlantic.
“I wish we’d been kids together,” I said.
“You were one of those boys who just loved to get a girl all screaming and silly with a spider or a toad, weren’t you, Hock?”
“I might have tried that on you.”
“For you, I might have screamed.”
Back in the city this could have been a lovely moment that could have had us hurrying back to my place to draw the curtains. I hate Brooklyn.
We finished our coffee and rounded the back of Nathan’s to Bowery Avenue, which cuts through Astroland on the way to the boardwalk and the beach. We passed by the Eldorado Arcade, Sportland, Faber’s Fascination, the Silver Ski, and Treasure Island. And a few dozen booths where the red-nosed carnies challenged me to knock down milk bottles with beanbags, or toss rings around spindles or fire pellets at moving lines of tin ducks. “Hey, rubberneck! How’s about taking a chance to win a nice prize for tootsie? C’mon, show us you’re a big guy.”
By this enticement, I could only recollect those unpleasant times I have been plucked by Astroland sharpies hollering at me from booths, when I was a skinny young curly-headed Harp singing soprano in the boys’ choir at Holy Cross Church; times when these sharpies gave thanks to the heavenly saints as they saw me coming. Even today, now that I am a wised-up cop, I am sore about those times. So it was not difficult for me to blow off anybody calling me a rubberneck.
I just turned my back on them and I turned Ruby around, too. I pointed west from Bowery Avenue while the sharpies hollered at somebody else and I said to Ruby, “Over there is the king of roller coasters, the Thunderbolt. It’s that half-broken-down thing you can see is dead now. Which is a crime since Coney Island is where they invented the roller coaster.”
Ruby squeezed my arm. “Nobody should see it that way. There should be more respect for a king.”
And right then and there is when I should have told Ruby for the first time that I loved her. Maybe we would have forgotten all about the Fire and Brimstone and gone back to Manhattan—or at least gone down to the beach, where maybe I could have scooped up some wriggling thing from the sand or the sea and made Ruby scream. Maybe.
Dark Maze Page 6