Dark Maze

by Thomas Adcock

  “Yeah, they sure did.” I do not know why, but I left out my encounter with Johnny Halo and Big Stuff at the Neptune and the transparency of their lies when I asked them if they knew Charlie or Celia Furman. Neither did I tell Logue about the old black-and-white snapshot of Celia when she was young and beautiful and high-spirited, and walking the Coney Island boardwalk back in ’54 on the arms of two men.

  “So you’re out chasing a bugged artist, Hock. You’re going to need help. I don’t mind helping.”

  I was surprised. “You told me yourself this was strictly nine-to-five, Logue. Besides which, the word on you is that you’re putting in for pension any day now.”

  “Hey, you never changed your mind? And who says I’m strapping on the parachute anyways?”

  “What does it matter?”

  Logue pulled on his square chin. “The way it looks to me, retirement’s going to mean hanging around the house trying to survive the wife’s ideas on how we got to enrich our lives—like her freaking opera. I am therefore seeing retirement in a whole new light.”

  I am fond of honestly stated motives, and I could use extra legs. “All right, Logue. Here’s what I need: I want you to run down everything you can on Celia Furman, her life and her loves and all like that. It ought to be easier getting a profile on her than on Charlie.”

  Logue started making notes on a pad.

  “Remember back at the Ebb Tide the other day, you said you thought Celia was off-balance?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, off-balance from the gambling rackets, which is where Angelo says she came out of.”

  “There’s also the IRS business.”

  “Oh, yeah, them government accountants keep very good tabs I can check out.”

  “That’s the idea,” I said. “Something to give us a hook. I didn’t find any hooks or much of anything else on her husband.”

  “You think I did?”

  “I was hoping.”

  Logue picked up a piece of paper on which he had earlier scratched some notes.

  “I wish I could say I found out a whole lot,” he said. “But, really, to judge him by the record, the life of Picasso don’t add up to much.”

  “It ain’t your fault you don’t know me. I ain’t made much of a mark in this life.”

  “Just tell me what you have.”

  Logue put on a pair of half-frame reading glasses and consulted his notes. “There’s a birth certificate from a small town in Kentucky called Payne, which figures. And then Pfc. Charles Bernard Furman got an honorable discharge from the Army in September of 1945. Sometime right after that, he winds up in Detroit.”

  Logue looked at me over the tops of his glasses and said, “Detroit is where I’m getting this stuff, by the way. There’s nothing on him here in New York.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Anyhow,” Logue said, continuing, “the local V.A. hospital out in Detroit says Charlie had ringing in his ears and came in for treatment a few times, but they couldn’t do nothing to help him.”

  Logue read a little further. “Oh, and there’s papers at the welfare department that says once he needed help feeding his family, which was him and his pregnant wife, Celia.”

  “What about work?”

  “The guy never had a payroll job. Can you believe it? And Detroit being a boom town after the war and all? Anyhow, the welfare office out there says he used to sell little pictures he painted, at fairs and such. That’s all anybody knows about a job. Charlie was not a big provider.”

  “… As a husband and a papa, I was a lousy flop.”

  Logue dropped the notes from his hands and said, “So that gets us to Charlie Furman in the year 1950.”

  “And then?”

  “End of story.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Unless you know something I don’t know.”

  “No,” I said. Not about Charlie Furman’s life anyway.

  “Strange, ain’t it? I never ran across anybody who dropped clear off the page like this guy did. It’s like one year in the prime of his life, the record just stopped on Charlie Furman.”

  “Like he stopped living.”

  “That’s it, like he just stopped.”

  And at that moment, I did what I do every day. Which is to have a passing thought of a man I never met. He is a photograph in a picture frame on top of the dresser in my bedroom. I have had dreams about him all my life. But in the dreams, he never makes it out of that picture frame; in my dreams, the frame sometimes has two legs and soldier’s boots, and the photograph is marching through a battlefield.

  “I know a guy like that,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “My old man.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Logue yawned, loud and wet. “Fathers and sons, now there’s a long freaking story. I lay you ten to one, somebody’s already made an opera out of it.”

  I appreciated now my instinct to hold back on Logue. Maybe I was right; maybe he was one of those steak-and-potatoes detectives, best left unburdened by the idea of the big picture of a case. Give the man a specific investigative task—his own personal meat—and he becomes a competent bloodhound. So okay. Logue would handle the ancient history part of Celia Furman’s life. The rest of it was mine, including all surrealistic thoughts of pictures coming to life.

  “I think we’re finished here,” I said.

  Logue yawned again. “Great. Me, I’m for the sack and watching Johnny between my toes. How about yourself?”

  Logue had his own Buick parked outside and said he would not mind giving me a lift home.

  I looked at my watch.

  “It’s not so late,” I said. “I can still check out a couple of things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Two places where Charlie Furman had jobs—I mean besides the artwork out in Coney Island, which can wait until tomorrow.”

  “And here I thought you had zip on him.”

  “I remember him telling me about these jobs he sometimes does. Chump jobs, nothing payroll.”

  “Oh, of course not. This guy he don’t put nothing down on paper but paint.”

  “Seems that way.”

  “What’re these little jobs of work anyways?”

  We got up to leave Central Homicide and as we walked the corridor I told Logue, “Picasso does windows for this bodega in my neighborhood. You know, advertisements in calcimine paint on the window glass? Also he passes out palm cards for a strip joint in Times Square called the Horny Poodle.”

  “Well, hey, a guy’s got to eat,” Logue said, laughing. “So, where to first?”

  “I guess the bodega. You can leave me there and I’ll go on to the Horny Poodle. Hell’s Kitchen—Tenth Avenue and Forty-fifth.”

  We were out the front door and down the stoop and almost inside of Logue’s Buick when I heard my name called. I turned and saw Captain Mogaill’s sturdy silhouette in the door at the top of the stoop.

  “Yeah, you, Hockaday. Come on up here, I got something for you,” Mogaill yelled down to us at the curb.

  “Suppose I ought to wait?” Logue asked me.

  Mogaill answered before I could. “Logue, you can go on home.”

  “Okay, captain.” Logue shrugged, got into his car and drove off. I walked up the steps to Mogaill.

  “I got a message,” Mogaill said. Then he shook his hand like it was burning and added, “Here comes those big black headlines.”

  “What are you trying to say, Davy?”

  “I just got done talking to your boss and he’s on his way down here now—from Gracie Mansion, where he’s been having a little chat with the mayor.”

  “I’m supposed to hang tight for Inspector Neglio?”

  “Exactly so. And by the by, guess who also had a small word with me?”

  “I said, I don’t like to guess.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right. So there was I, having a talk with the inspector when himself the lord mayor comes on the blower. The mayor informs me that Central Homicide is now a
t your disposal in this Bellevue matter. It seems the inspector has sold you to Hizzonor as the department’s leading expert on footloose maniacs.”

  “I wonder if I should be flattered.”

  “Wonder as you will, Hock. Me, I’m wondering about packing it in right here and tonight. I could file the resignation form and in three short weeks be collecting half my captain’s pay for all the rest of my days, please God, right and regular, in the mail.”

  I commiserated, and honestly so. “I think about that myself.”

  “I am not so old I cannot take a proper order, you understand.”

  “No, I know …”

  “It’s the bloody arrogance, and the presumption, and the flamin’ politics!” Mogaill laced his fingers behind his neck and cracked his knuckles. This relaxed him some. “You’d best cut me off, or else I’ll be going on about these stinking politics.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I think the situation stinks, too.”

  “Thank you for that, Hock. Jaysus but I could use a drink! We should have that jar together this very night. But you’ve got your orders, haven’t you now? And I mine.”

  “Tonight, yes.”

  “Pity on us.”

  “Another time, Davy. And soon if you like. We’ll make it Nugent’s, for auld lang syne.”

  “Nugent’s—God, yes, that’s the place for us.”

  “For now then, Captain, sleep easy. I won’t be pushing it.”

  “No, you won’t. Not even you, my friend. The mayor and all of them be fooked. I’ll see to it there’s fair play!”

  “Right enough. I’ll only work through Logue for now, to keep the waves low.”

  “All right, then. I’ll be saying good night to you, and safe home.”

  He turned, leaving me to wait for Inspector Neglio.

  I watched the broad back of Davy Mogaill as he plodded through his fiefdom of zeroes, toward his hard-won command office, and his bottle.

  “Do you suppose this psycho actually expected to sell the painting?” Neglio stared at the Polaroid I had given him. “I mean, what in hell’s the chance of this kind of garbage ever hanging up over somebody’s sofa?”

  We were riding uptown in the back of Neglio’s armored black Chrysler sedan, a car from the headquarters brass fleet. Up front at the wheel there was a beefy young cop with oiled red hair packed into a shiny suit. A thin shaft of light from the rear seat limousine lamp poured over Neglio’s satin lapels. He looked even slimmer than usual in his tuxedo. I noticed a button missing on my shirt cuff. It had begun to rain.

  “He’s not making a living off his paintings,” I said. Neglio kept staring at the Polaroid. “But it’s no hobby either.” “Oh? No shit, Sherlock.” Neglio laughed at his joke. The shiny suit laughed, too. “But you know what I see in this?”

  “What?”

  “Opportunity.”

  “You sound like you’ve been watching those insomniac shows on cable where you send in for the tapes and booklets so you can wind up a millionaire and you don’t have to spend your nights in front of a TV set worrying about the bills you can’t pay.” I laughed at my joke. Neglio and the shiny suit did not.

  “Let’s just say that here we have in our hands a class-A psycho on his warpath. Plus we have got ourselves a brand-new mayor, right? And you know how brand-new mayors are.”

  “No, how are they, Inspector?”

  “Still full of themselves and their campaign slogans. Just for one thing, they’re still believing all that tough-talking crap on the subject of crime in the streets.”

  “Our new mayor, he’s against crime?”

  This won a tight smile from Neglio, and: “Come, come, Detective Hockaday. We must all do our bit in trying to take these people in high office seriously. Next you’ll be telling me you don’t vote.”

  “Most of us got the message a long time ago. Which is why we would never spoil a perfectly good election day by going out to the polls.”

  “How old are you now, Hock?”

  “Somewhere in the middle.”

  “And looking every day of it, too.”

  “I don’t mind,” I lied.

  “No, not now you don’t. But then, you’re not the thrifty type. So you’d better listen: my advice to a man of your age and ability who is stuck at the rank where you have been stuck for so many years is that one day you ought to get smart—”

  I interrupted, with the truth this time. “I don’t mind being stuck.”

  Neglio was exasperated. “One day, you maybe should warm up to the people who can do you some good in the end.”

  “That sounds painful.”

  He told me to shut up.

  Which I gratefully did since I get irritable when Neglio’s conversation veers toward his confidentialities with people in high office. I do not like hearing him on the topic of how he leans on such people, no more than he might enjoy learning how I sometimes lean on my lowly snitches. To my way of thinking, shutting up sometimes is a good thing; this is how cops from two different worlds may live in friendship and relative respect.

  Neglio handed back the Polaroid and I put it away in my jacket. He switched off the limousine lamp. The young cop up front switched on the radio to all-news WINS and, among other current events of note, we heard the latest on the “Bellevue Slasher,” who murdered a prominent shrink right on the rooftop of the city’s best-known hospital. We also heard a tandem item on the “Happy Hour Shooter,” who the other day had snuffed an obscure lady barfly on an unfashionable block of Ninth Avenue.

  The public intelligence was not much beyond clever taglines and an echo-chamber hype of the plain and lurid facts of the cases, each labeled as bold and chilling and, of course, senseless. But there was no real connection made between the two homicides; not yet, anyway. In a day or two at most, the important people would get edgy, and they would lean on those for whom they had done so much good.

  We passed the old West Side piers in the lower Village where transvestite pross go to entice middle-aged sports out in their station wagons looking for a good time. We passed the Holland Tunnel approaches where teenagers from Jersey come cruising for roxie and China white. We passed the joints along Twelfth Avenue, nameless save for white X’s painted on dingy doors, where the bored and the depraved come in search of one another.

  It was a few blocks past the ghostly pale night-lights of the glass-walled Javits Convention Center when Neglio finally broke our suffocating silence.

  “All I am saying,” he said, cupping his mouth confidentially with a hand, “is that under the political circumstances it would not hurt either of us if a brand-new mayor, you know, sort of had a hand in this investigation. Follow me?”

  I looked at Neglio’s well-cut tuxedo. “Go back to your party. Tell the mayor I’ll be chasing this killer as fast as I can.”

  “There’s a drift here, Hock. But you don’t seem to be catching it.”

  Oh, but I caught it indeed. Political circumstances. I thought then of Davy Mogaill and how heavily he walked these days; how he missed Nugent’s so badly, how I was still free to drink at that dear old dive. And so I did not care to leap into Neglio’s drift.

  Neglio sighed, impatient with me. “You know I would bang all the right drums for you, Hock. You know that! How does a post at headquarters strike you, at the rank of detective-sergeant? Your own secretary, maybe.”

  “It strikes me I’d be in line for more money. So what, I should hire a butler out of my pay raise?”

  “Don’t be a hard-ass. I’m trying to help you.”

  “I see. You’re trying to help me see my very big opportunity.”

  “That’s it!”

  “For which I have got to do exactly what?”

  “Use your imagination a little. That’s all I ask.”

  “At my age, maybe the imagination is not all that dependable anymore. Maybe you’ll have to spell this one for me, Inspector.”

  Neglio was pimping and he knew it, and he knew that I knew it. We have
tapped this bogus dance many a time before. Now came the part where I wanted to make him sweat because, as I say, I can be irritable. But Neglio kept cool. He adjusted the peaks of the nonfunctional white satin handkerchief poking out from the breast pocket of his jacket.

  “Think what a nice TV picture it would make if the mayor was actually right on the scene, right there when you bust your boy,” he said. “You know how gentle it usually goes down when you finally make the collar, especially when it’s some poor crazed sod of a serial killer.”

  I know that, generally speaking, a murder is more evil than the murderer. There is a famous story that detectives all over the world tell about a German killer named Joachim Kroll, who was thought to be evil incarnate since he had murdered and raped a dozen or so schoolgirls and carried off bits of their little bodies. He turned out to be a quite pleasant, quite absentminded character who could not remember most of his crimes. He worked as a public-toilet attendant. It was hardly necessary, but the German cops used a battering ram to get the drop on the evil one. The monster was in the kitchen of his modest flat, cooking his evening stew—the left hand of his latest victim, a pretty five year old with brown eyes and blonde braids, boiling it in chicken stock with some carrots and noodles. Kroll acknowledged that his taste was somewhat uncommon, but he honestly never knew that eating children for supper was illegal, let alone morally repugnant. He went along quietly with the cops, certain that after medical treatment, they would return him to his flat.

  “True enough, most killers are regular sweethearts when it comes to being arrested,” I said. “I know it, you know it, and the showboat candidates for mayor, they know. Or else somebody clues them in.

  “But the voters don’t know it, do they? They see the mayor on the nightly news clamping the bracelets and leg irons on some sorry psycho after all is said and done by some hard-working cop such as myself and, by God, the leader of our great metropolis is a fearless crime fighter! Now, would that be the nice picture you’re talking about?”

  “If it was good enough for LaGuardia, it’s good enough for this mayor,” Neglio said.

  “Fiorello never had TV around to make himself look as cheap as the blow-drys in blue suits we’ve got now. Besides which, LaGuardia was a hero. We don’t have heroes today. We have celebrities, on television.”