We heard a voice from somewhere.
“Enjoying the sun and the salt air with your girly there, are you, buddy?”
I had to look down to see where the words were coming from. And there stood a dwarf, a baby-faced man about fifty and four feet high at the highest. He had a cigarette in his mouth and wore a white jumpsuit and white sailor cap and he had a newspaper carrier’s canvas bag slung over one shoulder.
He laid the bag down and said, “So, you two live around here?”
“No,” Ruby answered for us both. “We’re just out for the day, looking over memories.”
The dwarf sniffed. “Memories ain’t what they used to be.”
Then he reached into his bag and pulled out two handbills. He gave one to me and one to Ruby. They read:
HOW SWEET IT WAS!
WE CAN BRING IT ALL BACK!
LEGALIZE CASINOS!
IT’S OUR BOARDWALK!
LET’S GET INVOLVED!
Running beneath the exclamatories was small type that spelled out: Concerned Citizens for Coney Island, followed by a Manhattan postal box and a Manhattan telephone number.
When I had finished reading, I looked at the dwarf and started to say something. But he interrupted with, “Pass the good word, okay, buddy?”
“What’s the good word?” I asked.
“Gambling,” he said.
“I see.”
I had for years heard of one ad hoc group after another formed to lobby the legislature up in Albany for a local-option gambling bill, on the order of what they did over in New Jersey to bring about the dubious salvation of Atlantic City. One by one, the efforts sputtered out in New York, largely due to oppositionists trotting out the abused citizens of Atlantic City for their sorry testimonies.
“So, you’re from around here?” Ruby asked the dwarf.
“Sure as hell I am, good-looking.”
“Can you tell us where the Fire and Brimstone is? The spook house?”
“Well, of course I can,” he said. “I worked every attraction in this place one time or the other. But hell, what’s a nice couple of folks like you want with a place like that on a nice bright day like it is?”
Ruby smiled. “Just tell us, darling. Okay?”
The dwarf shrugged. “You go around to the right there, past the Tilt-a-Whirl,” he said. “Then cut yourself another right, go down the lane and you’ll find your dark maze right over by the Unicef Pavilion. You can’t miss it.”
We thanked him and he said, “You know, that attraction’s all closed up nowadays.”
I folded the handbill and put it in my back pocket. Then Ruby and I took a right, and another right to the lane just past the Tilt-a-Whirl.
The dwarf was right. We could not miss it.
Ruby covered her mouth with both hands and said, “Oh, Hock. Oh, my God.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Well, sure I sent it. Said I would, didn’t I? Don’t I always do like I say? Damn straight I do.
Sent it the day before yesterday, so he’s either got it, or he gets it today. Ho, ho, will he get it!
Ought to get his attention real good. boy. Ought to scare him damn good, too. Haw! Scare him so bad he’ll wet his pants. Yeah—and try ignoring that!
When murder is a lifetime in the creation, the killer is more fatally wounded than his victim. The dearly despatched may—or may not—be mourned before he is forgotten. But the survivor left holding the smoking gun or blooded knife or throat-warmed rope has already suffered a long delirium of rage and sorrow. Now he knows only the additional regret that nothing, really, has been settled after all.
Was this, after all, why Celia Furman’s dead face registered no surprise?
The finer, nastier meanings behind so much of the business of homicide are not found in the mere facts of a newspaper story or a detective’s report. Journalists are no more qualified to trouble themselves with the mess of the whole and lengthy truth of life and death than are their readers. And it pains me to say that while cops may be a suspicious lot, precious few are cursed with strong curiosity. Which is why there is poetry and theatre and literature—and painting—to help us consider the unthinkable, if we must.
Which I could hardly fail to consider on that Coney Island morning, standing beside poor, pretty, horrified Ruby; the two of us there, face-to-face with Picasso’s self-proclaimed masterpiece—the great obscure work of an artist with a cancer on his heart.
And was his masterpiece, after all, the mark of a wounded killer?
Dr. Reiser had been shrewd to leave unspoken the shock and sickness he must have felt on seeing this work. He had recognized me as a rarely cursed cop, had he not? He had tipped me to the Fire and Brimstone, figuring I was the type who could not resist a visit to Brooklyn to see it for myself. Right he was.
Picasso had painted a mural the size of a small barn. His canvas was a two-storey, sectioned steel facade surrounding the dark, narrow doorway of Fire and Brimstone. There was a theme to the work, I discovered, as I viewed downward from the top right and left-hand sides of the ugly thing.
First, there was a satanic figure with a face like a tree stump and a great lashing split tongue who was feeding epsom salts in solution from a bottle to cringing nude men seated on overflowing toilet commodes. Below this, naked frightened women in chains drank from curling tubes connected to the commodes above. They, in turn, were seated on toilets that drained into a brown river clogged with gagging men, women and children and whole rafts of dead bodies.
Opposite the first satanic figure was another, this one playing a piano from sheet music whose title read, “Andante Shake & Hammer Blow Struck.” Rising from the top of the piano were two gnarled hands controlling chains that were shackled to the bleeding arms and legs of hugely pregnant women.
At the center of the carnage, seemingly presiding over it all, was a white-haired demon with four arms and four hands, steam billowing out from manhole-size nostrils. He used two hands to toss fireballs into the already flaming and defoliated scenery; with the other two, he twisted a thick, hairy tail that snaked down between long legs. A buxom she-devil was sprawled at his feet, stroking the pointed tip of his tail; lesser endowed she-devils crowded about her, sinking their impressive fangs into her bare back and buttocks.
Ruby, meanwhile, dug her fingers into my arm the way panicky types maul their seatmates on airplane takeoffs. “It’s the middle of a sunny morning and I’m standing next to an armed cop, and this thing I’m looking at is giving me the shaking creeps!”
From the nearby Unicef Pavilion came carillon music playing “It’s a Small World After All.”
I tried to be reassuring, but if I were Ruby I am not sure I would have bought the performance. “Well, that’s the whole idea,” I said. “Besides, I thought you liked being scared. This ought to be fun for you today.”
She took a breath. “No, it’s not. I guess it’s hitting me all of a sudden why we’re here, and how this is not your average Coney Island date. We’re out here looking at an artist’s so-called masterpiece because the other day he walked up to you in a park and talked about killing people, then he told you about a painting at a bar and you went to take a look at it and met his wife, then the next thing you know, she winds up with a bullet in her neck. And now this … this painting, this diseased thing!”
I swept my eyes over Picasso’s masterpiece again and this time it took me back to all the times I had been to Astroland as a kid and had seen just this kind of horrific carny artwork—well, maybe not this horrific—and how I was so strangely drawn to it; how everybody else was, too, the kids and grown-ups alike. But we never looked close, as I recall. A glimpse of someone else’s nightmare, and then a round of brave laughs—that was all we needed to slip into the proper spook-house mood. What reason had we to wonder about an artist’s mind?
Here and there in the immense mural, paint was chipped and dulled from the winter. Panels were missing. Then I noticed the little fenced compound off to the side of Fire and
Brimstone, where the weather-damaged panels were stacked and covered in gray-white primer paint, ready to be retouched for the upcoming summer season of thrills and chills. Two German shepherds guarded the art inside the fence, which was topped out in razor wire. A masterpiece deserved protection. Picasso must have been pleased.
Ruby was still jumpy. “I really do wonder what troubled old Charlie when he painted this one,” she said.
“So, you think there’s a message here?”
“If there is, I guess it’s that we’re poor dumb creatures feeding on the waste of our cruelties.”
I nodded.
Ruby’s eyes remained fixed on the mural. But soon she stepped away, to where she could see through the carnival booths and buildings out to the blue sea and the beach dotted with April’s early sunbathers. I walked over to her.
“We spend way too much time ignoring warnings that people like Charlie Furman are always giving us,” she said, “until it’s too late. I know that’s not very original, Hock.”
“The world is unoriginal, which is why we mostly ignore each other. Forget what you might have heard—there’s never been an age of reason. Life in the human race is pretty much spent in a dark maze, where we keep getting surprised by the same old things.”
“Where did you learn that pretty lesson?”
“The street.”
“Somebody should put it in a book.”
“That would only keep people off the streets.”
Ruby kissed me.
“Had enough?” she asked.
“Of this, yes,” I said. And as we made our way toward the pleasant ocean vista, I told Ruby how Picasso had asked of his invisible friend and myself, “Ho, ho, and how come I painted what I painted?”
It was not yet noon. But here again was a day when I wanted to start drinking early. Besides which, now that I had beheld Picasso’s masterpiece, was I not also at Coney Island for the purpose of visiting a certain boardwalk dive? The Neptune it was the place Celia Furman had spent the last afternoon of her life ringing up on the public telephone.
And as we walked, Ruby said, “You want to know what I sometimes think about New York, especially right now? If New York City was a movie, nobody under eighteen would be allowed in.”
The Neptune did not have its actual establishment name on the sign over the door. The sign just said BAR. Being that it was the only bar left on Coney Island’s boardwalk, which was crammed full of gin mills and beer gardens when I was a kid, I assumed that BAR meant Neptune.
A big rectangular place, it had a long bar with a railing along one wall. Tables and chairs were strewn around, all of them unoccupied when we walked in. The toilets were in the back, with one door marked Gents and the other Ladies and cardboard signs hung over the doorknobs that read No Changing—This Means You.
At the bar was an assortment of matted-down middle-aged men whose lives had in one way or another been twisted and pounded into fierce shapes of survival. The survivor nearest the door sat with a brown bottle of beer in a right hand nearly twice the size of the left; his buddy on the next stool had a crease in the side of his head where an ear should have been. Down aways from these two, beyond the long row of others nursing dollar drafts and unfiltered cigarettes, there was an old doll in a blonde Woolworth’s wig and a gash of maroon on her lips picking at a scab on her neck. Our friend the dwarf was in animated conversation with the bartender down at the far end.
Our entrance did nothing to disturb the essential somber peace of the place. People looked up, then they looked back into their amber glasses. We were none of their business. Ruby thought we should settle down near our short friend from Bowery Avenue.
“Hi ya there, buddy,” the dwarf said to me, breaking it off with the bartender. He winked at Ruby. The bartender’s face was flushed and full of twitching veins, like he had been arguing strenuously. The dwarf asked us sweetly, “You two been out spreading the good word like I as’t?”
I said, “Sure.”
The bartender snorted. Then he asked what we would like. Ruby said club soda and I said I liked the idea of a red and a Molson. Ruby did not approve, judging by the look she shot me, but at least she kept quiet about it.
When the bartender brought our drinks and set them down, he tipped his head toward the dwarf and said, “Don’t pay no attention to the little pisser. Big Stuff, we call him. He’s trying to rile them up around here with his casino crapola.”
Big Stuff protested, “It’s the casinos that’ll save our ass!”
The bartender waved a clenched fist at the dwarf and Big Stuff feinted. Then the bartender said to me, “There’s other ways of bringing Coney Island back to life.”
“Like hell!” Big Stuff hollered.
“Keep quiet, you nasty little shit,” the bartender warned him. He pointed at us. “These here are friendly folks who dropped by for a friendly drink, which means none of your goddamn politics. So zip it. Or go peddle your handbills someplace they’ll tolerate your crapola.”
A few survivors took lazy note of this contention, not that they were prepared to expend any energy taking sides. But most kept drinking, or staring at drinks. The old doll kept picking her scab.
The bartender stuck out his hand. “Haven’t seen you two in here before. My name’s Johnny, Johnny Halo. I own the joint.”
I shook his hand and then Ruby did. “I’m Neil Hockaday,” I said. “May I present Ruby Flagg?”
“Nice to have newcomers,” Halo said. He crossed his arms and waited for one of us to say something by way of explaining ourselves. But we kept our mouths shut, which foreed Halo to put it to us bluntly: “What’s your business but here today?”
“Christ on a stick,” Big Stuff said. “Can’t you let the nice folks have their drinks in peace?”
“It’s all right,” I said. “Actually, I came by to use the telephone. You have one on the premises?”
“Right over by the men’s can,” Halo said.
I left Ruby for a minute and went to the telephone and confirmed the number as the one Logue had given me from the phone company logs. This was the Neptune, all right. I put in a call to Logue at Central Homicide and when he answered I cupped the receiver with my hand to ask if anybody had picked up Picasso yet on the APB. No such luck, he said.
Everybody watched me as I walked back to the bar. Everybody had made me. Halo, Big Stuff, the survivors—all of them.
I sat down next to Ruby, and she right away sensed my predicament and changed the focus neatly by asking Halo, “So how long have you been here in Coney Island?”
“I was born here, before Coney had a hospital. I never left here but once, which was the day they came and took me out of this sand and dressed me up in a uniform and sent me over to the sand in Africa with the 800 Regiment of the U.S. Army Engineers.”
“All that sand,” Ruby said. “It must have kept you from being homesick.”
“No way,” Halo said. “All the time I was gone, I couldn’t wait to get back to Coney. Because this here is God’s country …”
Big Stuff interrupted: “For which now He won’t do nothing!”
Halo glared at him.
Then he asked Ruby, “You want to know how Coney I am? I’m going to tell you. I remember when a guy named Archibald Leach wore a sandwich board and walked around Surf Avenue on stilts advertising the Steeplechase; then years later you would see in the movies that he’d changed that pansy name of his to Cary Grant. Okay?
“Also I seen Abie Relis when he got tossed out a window of the Half-Moon Hotel by the goons from Murder Incorporated when he was supposed to be stashed out here in Coney for police protection. Hah! That was hilarious.”
Halo glared at me.
“I seen the neighborhood change a lot,” he said. “And I changed lots. But the ocean, it ain’t changed. Out there, it’s still blue.”
A couple of reflective seconds passed and then I asked, “So you know just about everybody who ever came through Coney?”
Halo di
d not care much for this turn of the conversation, let alone the fact that I had entered it. He answered warily. “I guess so, just about. You’re a cop, ain’t that right?”
Picasso’s voice again. “Cop, ain’t you?”
I took the gold shield from my pocket and put it on the bar. “Detective Hockaday. You can call me Hock.”
“She a cop, too?” Halo asked, a hammy thumb directed at Ruby.
“No, she isn’t,” Ruby said. “I’m just along to learn about the street.”
Then Big Stuff got excited. He rose from his stumpy legs, which he had folded up beneath him on the barstool, and said to Halo, “Johnny, him and the woman, they as’t about Fire and Brimstone.”
“Shut up!” Halo snarled.
“Do you know a man named Charlie Furman who sometimes calls himself Picasso?” I asked him.
“Never heard of him.”
Big Stuff also shook his head. A bodyguard of lies was spread all over their faces.
I asked Halo, “How about Celia Furman?”
“Likewise,” Halo said.
“Nope,” Big Stuff said.
I decided the conversation needed stimulation. “Celia Furman was murdered two days ago, in the city. Before she got it, she made a lot of telephone calls—to that phone over there by the gents’.”
Halo’s eyes flickered disagreeably. He said, “Too bad about the lady.”
“According to telephone company logs,” I said, “she pretty much tied up your telephone over there for the afternoon. I think you’d notice that.”
“What day was it again?” Halo said.
“Two days ago. In the afternoon.”
“Oh, yeah, I remember now. That’s the day we got real, real busy in here.”
I looked down the bar. Everybody stared at drinks. This was none of their business. “So busy you never noticed all the phone calls?”
“Afraid not.”
This could have gone on for hours. Which only tells you how badly I handled it. I would have to come back once I figured out why Johnny Halo was lying, and once I remembered rule number one of being a detective: know most of the answers to most of your questions before you ask.
Dark Maze Page 7