So I took the oblique route with Benny.
“Sort of slow tonight, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Yeah, well, your fleshpots ain’t quite what they used to be.”
“What is?”
“Ain’t that the sorry truth?”
I gazed past Benny through a haze of smoke and fixed on the magician up on stage. His assistant with the silicone shelf was tying a black blindfold over his face. There was a hinged wooden sign off to the side with the magician’s name painted in blue circus letters, but I could not make it out.
“My eyes don’t work like they used to, that’s for damn sure,” I said.
Benny tapped his horn-rims. “You and me both, pal. That’s how come I wear these bifocals. Couple of years back, it was just killing me to read and also the stuff in the distance was sort of fuzzy. So, I go to the eye doctor. He don’t even give me the chance to first read him the letters off the wall; he right away asks how old I am. I tell him. Then he smiles this big irritating smile and guess what he says?”
“I don’t like to guess.”
“He says, ‘I’ve been waiting for you!’”
I shook my head and put back half a red. I squinted and tried reading the wooden sign again, but my luck was no better. I looked at the magician and somehow he was familiar. I hoped when my time came, I did not have to draw Benny’s eye doctor.
“Who’s the magician?” I asked.
Benny groaned.
“My genius partner,” he said. “The Great Morris.”
“Your partner?”
“Sure. Me and the prestidigitator, we own this dive. But like I say, it ain’t what it used to be. I mean, look around. You think this raggedy old clip joint still has the draw to shell out for a floor show?”
“I guess not.”
“You guessed correct. Around here, we even sweat the juice it takes to keep running them neon boobs over the door. We gotta cut corners someplace, so I run the bar and my partner Moe Stein’s the entertainment, such as it is.”
“Who’s the charming assistant?”
“Oh, that’s a lovely old broad who used to strip here and some other places, too. Called herself Delilah in her prime. Maybe you won’t believe it, but next year she starts collecting on her Social Security.”
“Well, I don’t know … my eyes.” I squinted at Delilah and could just make out that her bathing suit, such as it was, was tight around the beam. I looked at Benny’s partner, too. Where had I seen this guy?
“Peeling’s not your big draw no more,” Benny was saying, “and it’s very labor intensive like the economists say. So we bad to fire everybody, except for Delilah. Hell, everybody who wants to watch puss all night sits at home these days with a six-pack in front of a goddamn VCR, you know?”
“Is he any good?” I asked. “The Great Morris, I mean.”
“As you can tell, he tries. He’s doing this mentalist act he done back when Hector was a pup. Somebody told him mentalist acts was all the thing with the Jap tourists like we got throwing money all over town nowadays. So, Moe trots out his old schtick. He even talks me into stocking saki and plum wine. But so far, no Japs. My genius partner.”
The Great Morris’ blindfold was now firmly in place. Delilah flounced herself out into the audience, which inspired some of her customers to sit up straight and pay attention. She picked on one lonesome clyde in the thin crowd and wiggled at him to make him laugh. Then she bent over and picked up a dollar bill from his table, then led him back up on stage and had him hold the dollar. Some of the other clydes clapped and whistled.
I watched intently.
Benny groaned again and said, “Here’s where he gets mental.”
The Great Morris raised a hand and set it dramatically against his forehead. There should have been a drum roll, but I suppose the cost of that was prohibitive. Clyde grinned at the audience while The Great Morris issued instructions, which I could not quite hear.
“What’s he going to do?” I asked Benny.
“He’s going to do a number so old it’s got arthritis,” Benny said. He pronounced it arthur-itis. “See the dollar bill the goof is holding?”
I said yes.
Benny stepped to the cash register and picked up something and returned to me. He was holding a red grease pencil.
“See this?” he asked. “The deal of this number is, you wind up making a shill out of some unsuspecting dork in the audience. And how do you do this? You take a dollar, any dollar, and before the show you give it to The Great Morris, and he memorizes the serial number. Then, you make two little red spots on corners of the bill with the pencil—one spot on a side and a little different from each other, so it ain’t too overly obvious. You get the drift?”
I said, “Then you make sure the marked bill eventually winds up as change on somebody’s table and all Delilah has to do is look around until she finds the perfect volunteer.”
“And shazzam! The Great Morris, even though he’s blindfolded, can read off the serial numbers from the bill the schmuck on the stage is concentrating on with all his mind, such as it is.”
Up on the stage, this looked to be exactly what was happening. Every so often, the clydes would ooh or aah.
“He’ll toss a rib once in a while,” Benny said. “He’ll say something like, ‘Well the number I’m seeing seems to be upside-down, and I can’t tell whether it’s a six or a nine. Now really, sir, you’ve got to do your part! Concentrate, man! Don’t let Delilah get you all hot and bothered standing there wiggling her booty like she’s probably doing, and hey, get that number sixty-nine off your mind! I can see it, you know.’ That rib, it usually gets a yuk out of them.”
Sure enough, the clydes all laughed.
“See what I mean?” Benny said. “Why, sometimes he’ll even blow a number on purpose. Them sapheads, they see Moe make one boner and they’ll buy everything else he tosses at them.”
I put back the rest of the first red, then I took a long swallow on the first Molson. I asked Benny, “Any special reason why you’re giving away trade secrets to me?”
My great-aunt from Carnarsie clomped up to the bar just then and she slammed a tray down and said she needed two drafts of Rolling Rock. She curled a lip at me and said, “You still here, Lance?” I blew her a kiss. Benny got her the drafts, and she scuffed away on her platforms, which I noticed were made from some kind of a lizard.
“No special reason,” Benny finally answered me. “I’m just trying to somehow make it up to a nice customer like yourself for the way that goddamn old harpy rides you.”
“Thanks, but you don’t have to worry about me. My friend warned me all about her. But I came in anyhow.”
“Oh yeah? Who’s your friend?”
I moved in sideways on Benny. “Well, he works around here sometimes. Free-lance he says.”
Benny scratched the skin on his head. “If he works here, I’d know him. Who is he?”
“I guess you’d know him, all right, you being the owner and all. Only thing is, I just know him by his street name. Picasso, like the painter.”
Benny’s face and kidney-bean head darkened. He said, “Funny little guy? Wears whiskers and one of them French hats? That’s your friend?”
“Yeah.” I thought about singing soprano in the Holy Cross choir and blinked innocently.
“Pal, that guy is hinkier than Hallowe’en.”
“Aw, maybe he’s a little nutso, but …”
Benny interrupted. “Hey, the Ayatollah was a little nutso, too, wasn’t he? I’m telling you, I think your boyfriend’s dangerous.”
“What makes you say that? I mean, he works here, doesn’t he? You hired him—and he’s not my boyfriend.”
Benny started rubbing his scalp in a very aggravated way. I put some money on the bar and said he should have a drink on me, which he did—a Bushmill’s, neat. He said he was sorry about the boyfriend crack, that he never meant it the way it sounded.
He put back his whiskey. I started in on my secon
d red.
“If you’re a smart guy like I think maybe you are,” Benny said, wiping his lips, “you’ll take what I say as a friendly warn-off. This Picasso, he’s a time bomb. One day—BOOM! And down goes anybody fool enough to be caught near him.”
“There’s something I don’t understand,” I said. “If you think Picasso’s about to blow, how come you have him around here?”
Benny rapped the bar with his knuckles. “Knock on wood, he ain’t never coming back.”
“He isn’t working here?”
“It wasn’t like he was ever on the payroll or like that. We just had him passing out palm cards. You know, you probably seen our cards if you ever walked through Times Square in your life. Well, Picasso shows up at the door one day when we had a want ad running in the paper for palm-card men and at first he seemed okay,” Benny said. “He says he’s no bum or nothing, that he’s got his own room out in Brooklyn and all.”
“Coney Island?” I asked, innocence itself.
“That’s right, the Seashore Hotel. How’d you know?”
“He said something about how he used to paint for the carny attractions out there, at Astroland.”
“Sure, that’s how come they call him Picasso. Some joke, hey?”
“Not the way you’re telling it,” I said. “But, go on. What did he do to you?”
“At first, nothing. He tells us about the painting dodge, and how it ain’t what it used to be out at Coney Island and how he needs some work, and also that he’s a little hungry and thirsty. Okay, I figure, the guy is obviously no lousy skell from the neighborhood around here so maybe he’s halfway dependable. So we feed him and give him a tryout.”
“How did that go?”
“Okay. We posted him right outside the joint and had him palming to the after-five bunch. That way we could watch him, see.”
“And?”
“He was kind of lazy, I’d say. But he didn’t go and toss the cards in the garbage like a lot of these guys do, so you could see the guy was at least honest. But also you could see the guy was definitely a head case by the way he was all the time jabbering with some imaginary friend, like a goofball little kid does.”
“I saw him do that, too!” I said, giving Benny the wide eyes.
“Yah, well then you know how it ain’t doing us no good when we pay a guy to palm, and he’s out there acting so schitzy all he does is scare away half the potential customers.”
“So you canned him?”
“Hey! If I’d of had it all my way, the little psycho and his French beanie would’ve been heaved out into the ambulance lane of Seventh Avenue at rush hour. But, oh no! My genius partner, he feels sorry for the old coot. Like he feels sorry for old Delilah and for that goddamn harpy. Honest to god, sometimes I don’t know whether I’m running a bar here or some kind of freaking house of charity.”
“I take it things got worse with Picasso?”
“Get this,” Benny said. “One day we get these new palm cards printed up. It’s my idea. I want to see if we can scare up some more daytime business from the suits, you know? Guess what the new cards say?”
“Just tell me, Benny.”
“Oh yeah, you don’t guess. The cards, they say ‘Sex for Lunch.’”
I laughed. “Not bad.”
“Yeah, well, I thought it was a pretty cute idea,” Benny said. “Moe thought it was a ripper, too. Anybody in his right mind’d think it’s funny. Guess who don’t think it’s funny?”
“No guess there.”
“Right. So, next thing we know after we give Picasso the new cards is there’s so much goddamn noise outside the door you’d of thought it was World War III. Moe and me, we go rushing out and there’s Picasso, screaming at everybody. He’s throwing all my new palm cards at people in the street and screaming, ‘Filth! Philistine filth!’ over and over. And he’s kicking and punching people, too, and some of them’s falling down on their keisters. He takes one look at Moe and me and he starts screaming ‘Whoremonger!’ over and over, then he pops us both pretty good. He knocks my upper plate out of my mouth and mashes my nose and clouts Moe so bad he can’t hear right for a whole week. And then the cops come running up and they drag him off to I-don’t-know-where, Bellevue, I guess.”
Benny caught his breath and poured himself another drink. I sipped at my second beer.
“The guy’s little,” Benny said, “but he’s piss-willy mean and a lot stronger than he looks. It took a half-dozen big cops to take him down that day.”
“When was that?”
Benny scratched his chin. “Just shy of a year ago.”
“Did he ever come back?”
Benny rapped the bar again. “Nope. I told the cop in charge we don’t want no trouble on account of him. I told him how we paid him off the books and all, and how I didn’t want him around except my bleeding-heart partner did and look where it got us. I gave the cop a twenty for his troubles, and he said, Well maybe we can just forget all about it. So that was that.”
But Benny added, “You know, though, afterwards he started creeping my dreams, you know? I’d see him sitting at the bar, eating the food we’d give him as a favor because of Moe and his goddamn charitable weakness. I’d see them eyes of his, crazy big eyes following me while he sat there munching. You ever take a good look at that bird, I mean close up?”
“Now that you mention it,” I said, “he does look a little hinky.”
“A little! Adolf Hitler was a little hinky, too.”
“I see what you mean.”
I wanted to get out of there fast to call in a Brooklyn squad to roust Picasso from the Seashore Hotel in the unlikely event he was there; I wanted to tell Benny I was a cop. I wanted to have him take precautions in light of what happened to Celia Furman and Dr. Ronald Reiser and now Benito. But some instinct told me to keep quiet, at least for a while; a halfway competent cop, which is. what I enjoy thinking I am, learns to trust his instincts.
“But tell me this,” I said, “what’s going to happen if Picasso ever turns up here again?”
Benny smiled. No good could come of such a smile.
He leaned down under the bar. When he stood up again he held a .44 revolver, as big and as ugly as the Charter Arms I own and every bit as capable of blowing a hole in a man’s chest the size of a baseball.
Benny stroked the heavy gun lovingly with his free hand. He smiled and said, “Next time you see your friend Picasso, tell him me and my friend are ready and waiting for him.”
A man who has got my powers of observation, he naturally learns faster than the ordinary sucker. That’s a fact of life. Ain’t I right?
Damn straight I am.
Your peasant, he’s got that dumb flat face of his until he’s about fifty freaking years old. This is because it takes the sucker halfa century to wise up to the fact that the rules of the game are crooked, which is way too late.
So you would think the guy who learns fast like me would stand a much better chance at getting his share, right?
Wrong, sucker!
God is a goddamn ironist. He gave the powers of observation to broken-down artists and other kinds of odd socks of the world, then he went and put blinders on everybody else so they could just stupidly concentrate on making themselves happy ever after.
You ask me, it’s screwy. But since it’s all God’s fault they say it’s divine.
Well, okay.
I learned a long time ago I should just bide my time. And I learned how lessons have a way of sneaking up on everybody.
And here’s one of the biggest lessons I ever learned: no good deed goes unpunished….
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I found a pay phone out on the street that was not broken and rang up Central Homicide. It was ten past one and Mogaill had gone home. The desk sergeant referred me to a detective on the overnight shift who was working up the preliminaries on the murder scene at Bellevue.
“This is Neil Hockaday. I’m catching on the Reiser homicide.”
“Yeah, I heard. I just typed your name. I’m Hooper. The captain says for me to leave this stuff with Logue for you.” “Thanks. I want you to do something else for me, Hooper.”
“What’s that?”
“Call up the Coney Island station house in Brooklyn and have them arrange a stake on the Seashore Hotel, on Surf Avenue. All entrances and exits covered, okay? Better watch the roof, too.” I finished with a description of Picasso and what he had been wearing in the park. “The name is Charlie Furman, also known as Picasso.”
Hooper whistled. “Yeah, Picasso—that’s the guy all over the radio news. I hear he clipped two tonight—the doc at Bellevue and a bodega owner on the West Side. Making it a total of three so far, counting the barfly the other day.”
So it was out and connected, I thought. “Tell Brooklyn I don’t think our boy’s going to be there, but I want a round-the-clock watch until I say otherwise. It’s the best we can do so far with a location fix. Anybody in Brooklyn has a problem with this, tell them to check it out with Inspector Neglio.”
“Okay,” Hooper said. “That’s it?”
“Give Brooklyn my home telephone.” I gave the number to Hooper. “I want to be called right away if he shows. I think I can prevent a lot of damage if I’m there for the takedown.”
And then because I was so tired and, truth to tell, so fuzzy from two murders and four drinks, I flagged a taxi and rode the few blocks home to Forty-third and Tenth. But not before being accosted by an ancient mariner shaking his cup on Broadway; Times Square would not relinquish me so easily that night.
He was tall and gaunt, with a face that had clearly been handsome in better times; a face that looked like the one in the frame on the dresser in my bedroom, my father’s confident soldier face. The clothes he wore—two checkered shirts, a greasy bush jacket, corduroy trousers frayed at the cuffs, shoes with the heels broken off—were lifeless, as if they had been stripped off dead men. His hair was brown and matted and his eyes were green, one of them rheumy.
“Young sir,” he said as I stepped away from the pay phone, “you see my predicament.” He shook a paper coffee cup at me and coins clunked inside.
Dark Maze Page 13