Dark Maze

by Thomas Adcock

  Damn straight.

  I know that sounds buggy. Well, all right. I’m a crazy freaking bedbug and I ain’t never claimed otherwise. That’s how come I seen all them headshrinkers for so long, okay?

  But, hey, no more of that!

  You think I ever got a ounce of sympathy from that crowd? Even when I told them about her? Even when I showed how you can’t count on the Holy goddamn Bible no more? Haw!

  This one shrinker, though … he listened to me hard. Hard like a cop listens. This one, he was sneaky like that.

  He thinks he’s so funny. This one, he thinks laughing’s going to do me good. Once he says to me, “Life’s a zoo inside of a jungle.”

  How about that? Well, that I got to laugh at.

  But laughing, what good’s that going to do for us crazy freaking bedbugs?

  That’s what I’m telling you about shrinkers: they ought to know better and they say they know better. But they don’t. Not even when it comes to laughs.

  Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry, and they really start laughing.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Freddy had to be sick.

  I asked him if he could wait until I had the chance to take him back downstairs. But instead of answering he covered up his mouth with both hands and ballooned his cheeks and flapped his elbows and hopped up and down, which made all the keys on his belt jangle.

  I told him to please go toss it over by the steam generators and vents on the opposite end of the roof. Otherwise, he would seriously contaminate the crime scene where Dr. Reiser reposed, gut side down among his prize tomato vines, with a foot-long butcher knife sunk nearly all the way into his back along the middle seam of his blood-streaked lab coat.

  Strictly by the book, a cop who happens on a murdered corpse is supposed to right away call out a forensics squad and enough uniforms to rope off the general vicinity and discourage a crowd of lawyers and gawkers from gathering; then Central Homicide, which is supposed to contact the D.A.’s office, which in turn is supposed to ring up the Medical Examiner at the morgue, which in the borough of Manhattan is next door to Bellevue Hospital. But in this case, I did not see the need of standing on ceremony. I wanted a few minutes alone in the moonlight with the remains of Ronald Reiser before the rest of the world learned that somebody could bluff his way into Bellevue fairly easily and kill a psychiatrist if he wanted. Besides, I could not in very good conscience go downstairs and put in my calls while Freddy stayed up on the roof woozing and heaving and jangling.

  Poor Freddy. All the way up the stairs from the Zoo to the rooftop he kept apologizing for the oversight in his search for Reiser. I knew what he was thinking: This floor’s crawlin’ with loons …

  The atmosphere on the roof did nothing to help Freddy’s sweat glands. It was still and black up there, the way Ruby once told me it gets down in Louisiana just before a hurricane blows up from the Gulf of Mexico; the air felt wet and dead. We walked the three hundred or so feet from the door to Reiser’s garden, where his big wooden planters were arranged six in a circle with a seventh one at the center. The sound of our feet moving over the close-packed gravel was muffled by the roaring hum of air-conditioning pumps and incinerator chimneys.

  Then we noticed the pigeons.

  Maybe thirty to forty pigeons were clustered around a single tub in the garden, the middle one. They were pecking furiously at something, silent but for the rustling of wings. Another step closer and we were hit by the sharp, sickening odor of blood, urine and feces. Which was when Freddy took ill.

  As Freddy loped off, I shooed away the scavenging pigeons. Then I stepped into an inky shaft of light wafting from the fluorescent stairwell of an adjacent building and fished out the Polaroid that Picasso had mailed from a jacket pocket. I squinted and studied the photograph in this poor light. The painting in the photo showed Reiser from the rear, flopped over the edge of one of his planter tubs with the knife sticking up about where his belt loops would be. Then I stepped back to Reiser’s body, to compare compositions.

  The knife as it actually appeared in Reiser was considerably higher up the back than in Picasso’s painting. In the painting, the blade would have been piercing through Reiser’s kidneys en route to his lower abdomen. In real death, however, one or both of Reiser’s lungs had been sliced open, judging from the knife’s final position, and by the huge pool of blood beneath his head. Where Reiser’s face lay smashed in the planter tub, the soil glistened. A knife-ripped lung quickly fills with blood, which then gushes up through the windpipe and pours out of the body through the mouth and nostrils; almost always, the victim of a back-stabbing such as Reiser’s gags to death on his own blood before the lung ceases its respiratory function.

  The heavy expulsion of bodily wastes told me that Reiser had been completely at ease before the surprise assault, that his back was undoubtedly turned on his killer and that he never knew what hit him. Consequently, his bladder and bowels never clenched tight, as they do when a man takes on his assailant face-to-face.

  By now, the odor was overwhelming me. And the handkerchief that I had bunched up to cover my nose and mouth no longer worked. There was not much more that I could learn by my preliminary examination.

  A garden trowel lay about ten feet from the tub that held Reiser’s lifeless body; it must have flown from his hand the first time he was struck. I touched the blood caked on Reiser’s lab coat; it was still somewhat tacky, but turning dusty the way blood does after exposure to the air for a few hours. The autopsy report would pinpoint the time of his death, but for right now I guessed that Reiser got it right about when the Bellevue medical staff was changing from day to evening shift and anybody might reasonably assume he had left for home. He probably got it when Ruby and I were eating a late luncheon of fish and chips at Angelo’s Ebb Tide.

  I was halfway across the roof toward Freddy when it struck me: in Picasso’s painting, Dr. Reiser was not wearing a lab coat. I made a mental note to write this down later.

  Freddy had nothing left inside him but coughs and whimpers. I held him by the shoulders. He looked at me gratefully as I steered him back downstairs.

  Central Homicide was having a slow night. It was closing in on ten o’clock and during the whole day I had turned up the only murder in all five boroughs of New York City. Early April is a relatively nonviolent time of the year in New York, but the city’s killing pace grows brisker as income-tax deadlines near and then we get up to a fine breakneck speed by August’s dog days. Right then, though, sullen detectives in bad suits and unflattering light were mostly idled. They typed up hated case-load status reports or otherwise chuffed through hated indoor tasks, or else they ate doughnuts and drank coffee.

  I myself had engaged in the latter activity for the past thirty-five minutes, practically ever since arriving from Bellevue. I had dutifully made my initial calls from the hospital. Then, when the rooftop party was in full attendance and I could gracefully slip away, I decided to have one of the uniforms run me downtown so I could have some official peace and quiet in order to put in two additional calls: one to Logue, out of respect and also to ask him where his file on Picasso might be, and one to Inspector Neglio.

  Neglio was the more difficult call.

  Naturally, I rang Logue first. I reached him easily enough at his home in the Bronx. Much to my surprise, he said, “I’m glad you called me, Hock. I’ll be right down there. Have the captain let you into my office, take a load off.”

  The night clerk in Neglio’s office read me the inspector’s evening itinerary and if I did not know better, I might have thought the guy was running for public office. Neglio was scheduled for a Knights of Columbus spaghetti banquet at half-past six out in Bay Ridge, then a mid-evening drop-by back in Manhattan at some Park Avenue soiree to benefit the poor and downtrodden, then he had to make some after-dinner remarks at a session of the New York Press Club. I finally reached him up at Gracie Mansion, where the mayor and his wife were tossing a party for the U.N. crowd.

 
“What is it, Hock?” he barked when a butler on the city payroll handed him the telephone. I was fairly sure I heard a woman nuzzling his neck and ear. “And it better be damn good!”

  “Have you heard any news broadcasts tonight?”

  Neglio sighed. “By that, you mean have I heard about the homicide at Bellevue?”

  “That news, yes.”

  “I knew I shouldn’t have answered the phone!” Neglio sighed again, and then some baby-doll voice in the background on his end said, “Oh, you’re no fun!” Then Neglio covered the telephone speaker with his hand and said to the baby doll, “Christ, I’m on the horn!”

  “Inspector?”

  “Okay, so I heard about that,” he said to me. “In fact, they were asking my reaction at the press club and I said I deplored the senseless violence.”

  Baby doll muttered “Oh, pooh!” and Neglio sighed again and said, “All right, what is this, your latest nut job in action again, what’s his name?”

  “Picasso.”

  “Yeah, that one. We got an APB out on him, right? What’s going now, a serial number?”

  “No question about it. And you know how jumpy headquarters gets about serial murder.”

  “Not to mention that the second hit takes down a doctor, right in Bellevue Hospital.”

  “Sorry to upset your evening, Inspector.”

  “Well, not as sorry as the doctor, I guess. Dr. what’s-his-name.”

  “Reiser.”

  “Yeah, that doctor. Look, Hock, you got any kind of a line on this Picasso character?”

  “There’s not much to go on. I’ve got Logue on his way down here from the Bronx, and we’re going to look over the record, such as it is. I do know one thing …”

  “Which is what?”

  “I’m going to need you to smooth the way for me on this one. You’re good with the types likely to be getting in my way.”

  “Like the press, right? Yeah, I can see that coming.” “Also I can see City Hall wanting to get all over my case, along with the usual flock of free-lance justice seekers.”

  “I knew I shouldn’t have answered the phone.”

  So Neglio hung up.

  And that was when I started in on the doughnuts and coffee. The third coffee sent me to the men’s room, which is where I bumped into Davy Mogaill.

  I was standing at one of those big old-fashioned marble urinals enjoying my relief and a couple of graffiti just above eye-level: BE RIGHT BACK—GODOT and DYSLEXICS OF THE WORLD, UNTIE! Then in walked Davy Mogaill, whom I know from the very old days up in the Twenty-sixth Precinct in Morningside Heights. Mogaill was already a detective when I was a rookie, then he rose to a captaincy at Central Homicide.

  Mogaill unzipped at a urinal one over from mine, recognized me, smiled and said, “Is this where the dicks hang out?” He had himself a husky laugh, after which he asked, “What brings you to the murder beat, Hock?”

  I explained how I was doing an override on the Celia Furman case, a homicide in my own personal neighborhood, and how Logue was the detective of record. Mogaill rolled his head and sniffed, “Oh, yeah, that lovely one in the barroom—a nine-to-fiver.” I further told him that the guy we wanted for questioning in the Celia Furman case was now also implicated in the day’s sole murder. Which caused Mogaill to whistle admiringly. “Now that one,” he said, “is going to be grabbing them headlines big and black.”

  We zipped up at the same time and moved to the sinks to wash our hands.

  “I’m waiting for Logue now,” I said.

  “He’s coming in after hours? I’m impressed.”

  “He told me to make myself at home in his office.”

  “His office, is it? That’s a bit of a grand word for what he has. But come along with me.”

  Logue’s office turned out to be a corner of the file room that nobody else wanted because it had no window. Logue had arranged a dozen or so cabinets at right angles to the walls to form an enclosed space, inside of which he had a standard-issue green steel desk spilling over with papers and also a credenza spilling over with papers. There was a lamp on his desk and a Norelco electric coffee maker on a stand next to it. “Welcome,” Captain Mogaill said.

  I picked up a pile of manila folders off a side chair, stacked them on the floor and sat down.

  “How long’s it been since you and me had a jar together, Hock?” Mogaill asked.

  I thought back and said, “It had to have been at Nugent’s, uptown in the Thirty-fourth.”

  “Jaysus, that long ago?”

  “It was long ago, wasn’t it?”

  “I remember it being always so full of cops, along with writers and poets and such layabouts living there in Inwood on account of the cheap rents. And the juke—it was heavy on ‘Ireland United,’ and Bushmill’s or Paddy’s was a half-dollar the shot. Oh, I wonder what ever happened to the glorious place.”

  “I still go there sometimes.”

  Mogaill was amazed.

  I said, “I remember the first time we met at Nugent’s and I thought you were one of the house poets.”

  “I remember it, too. I was in my cups pretty good and thinking about the other side, trying to drive sweet memories away …”

  “And what you said was, ‘Ain’t it loveliness to be here in a grand dark pub in New York, so bless’t far removed from the bloody peat bogs and all them smelly farmers’ tweeds?’”

  “Yes …” Mogaill’s eyes grew to their brightest blue. “And also I was thinking how Brendan put it on the topic of New York, and I stole his line: ‘I feel I’m a lonely flea what finally found his dog.’”

  “Naturally, I took you for a poet.”

  “You were a classy one that long-ago night, sending the barkeep over with the gift of whiskey and the thanks of a fellow admirer of the Borstal Boy. I saluted you then, and I salute you now, Hock. Even though you were so very wrong.”

  “About what?”

  “Wrong about us. It turns out you’re the poet.”

  “No, I’m a cop.”

  “That’s so, but I know about cops like you, and cops like me. Which is why I rose to captain and why you never shall, my friend. It means you’re the one cursed with being forever curious about what it is that people choose to hide from the world; it means you’re a trespasser.”

  He added, “Did you never hear it told, Detective Hockaday, of the poet’s natural right of trespass?”

  “I—”

  Mogaill interrupted. “See them manila folders on the floor, Hock? And all them folders on that credenza back of the desk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come here a moment.” I followed him out of Logue’s makeshift office to the wider space of the file room. Mogaill stepped to a long wall filled with steel shelves and he ran his hand along the bindings of big books that bulged with more manila folders, and perforated computer print-out sheets. He said, “And see all this here?”

  “Yes.”

  “This here’s an office full of names that belong to people who don’t talk too much because they’re dead. At first, I tried like hell to remember the names, even if they were only John Doe or Mary Roe.

  “But, Hock, they started gaining on me. And every year, I forgot more and more names. Then I went mostly by the numbers. Then guess what happened?”

  “I don’t want to guess.”

  “Then I’ll tell you. They made me captain.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I even started forgetting the numbers. One day I realized that everybody was zero to me, and that so far as I’m concerned, zero isn’t a real number. So now you see what kind of a cop I have become, Hock—the guy in charge of homicide in a homicidal town, the guy in charge of all the zeroes.”

  “Which does not strike you as poetical?”

  “Not bloody particularly.”

  Mogaill turned heavily to leave. “For old days’ sake, we should have a jar together sometime.”

  “I wish you good luck, Davy.”

  “The same for y
ourself, Hock.”

  I returned to Logue’s tiny office and sat down to think, but I did not progress too far. Five minutes later, there was Logue seated at his desk opposite me and riffling through the clutter of paper and telling me the reason why he was so happy to be with me at Central Homicide instead of in his warm house in the Bronx. The reason was not poetical.

  “My wife, she’s got it in her bonnet that we got to improve ourselves by listening to opera on the radio when we sit down to eat dinner,” Logue said.

  “That’s rough.”

  “You’re telling me. I am trying to enjoy my pork chops and hot applesauce and scalloped potatoes and, my wife, she’s explaining to me how this unlucky gang of Ethiopian prisoners on a forced march in front of this Pharaoh; then about this babe called Aïda, who is a slave girl but actually she’s the Ethiopians’ princess…. Oh, and it just goes on and on like that forever, Hock. And everybody’s singing in dago. Like the wife, she suddenly understands dago, right?”

  I pictured Ruby and me at a table with pork chops for dinner and opera on the radio. This picture did not look so bad to me, even though I do not understand Italian.

  “Well, I’m sorry for your troubles,” I said.

  “Thanks.” Logue finally came up with the papers he was looking for. “Okay, so what’s new with our boy Charlie Furman, Picasso?”

  I quickly filled in Logue about the murder of Dr. Reiser, and the relationship between Picasso and the psychiatrist. Also I showed Logue the Polaroid that Picasso had sent me.

  “Holy flying crap!” Logue said. “Old Charlie’s really branched out from knocking off his wife, hey?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “Anything else I should know, in case somebody asks me?”

  Since he asked, I told Logue how it all began for me, about the picture, the dark maze, Coney Island. I told Logue all this mostly so I could say it to myself all over again.

  “The Fire and Brimstone,” I said, “you would have to see to believe.”

  “I seen that Coney Island stuff before. I don’t know from art, but I know a bugged artist. They sure went and hired some beauts to paint up Coney, didn’t they?”