Dark Maze

by Thomas Adcock

  And was that not the very thing I would begin to discover that day in Coney Island?

  They think they’re closing in on me, hey? So let them think I’m just another dumb maniac. I tried to tell them, didn’t I? Didn’t I go turn my old sick soul inside out so everybody could see me die?

  Didn’t I?

  Damn straight I did.

  But they don’t want to see!

  Okay, so I’ll show them some more. Knife, gun—those I already done. Something a little more interesting for next time, hey?

  Sure, and why not? Variety is the spice of death.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Naturally, I was very anxious to see Johnny Halo and Big Stuff again at the Neptune Bar. Which I would—eventually.

  Right now, though, they were the last I had to consult. First things first. That meant a long day of leg work, talking to lots of other characters out in Coney Island; that way, maybe I could get an angle on riddle number one in my notebook: Why had Halo and the dwarf denied knowing Picasso?

  “You had a hunch those two were lying the other day, didn’t you?” Ruby asked me.

  “Of course I did.”

  After all, we had gone to Coney Island for the express purpose of seeing Picasso’s “masterpiece” at the Fire and Brimstone, which the once-living, breathing Dr. Ronald Reiser had urged me to behold when he handed over the disturbing Polaroid mailed to him by an equally disturbing ex-patient. On top of that, Benny from the Horny Poodle told me that Picasso kept a room at the Seashore Hotel. That was easily confirmed by the desk clerk who, during our telephone conversation, let drop the arresting item about Picasso torching said room in response to his being dispossessed.

  To say the least, Picasso was a known quantity on the boardwalk at Coney Island. Especially to somebody like Johnny Halo, who proudly hailed himself as so Coney he knew from Archie Leach on stilts and Abie Relis falling out a window of the Half-Moon Hotel accidentally on purpose; to Big Stuff, too (“… him and the woman, they as’t about Fire and Brimstone”).

  And, there was that very first thread to Picasso’s Coney island fabric: an old black-and-white snapshot in Celia’s handbag, the picture of a bathing beauty with her two attentive escorts, one of them wearing glasses with whiskers on his chin and a beret on his head; the writing in fountain-pen ink—Coney I., summer ’54.

  I tapped my shirt pocket. Inside was the old snapshot. And Ruby and I were on our way to the boardwalk again.

  “You knew right off that Halo and the little fellow were lying, so how come you didn’t call them on it?” Ruby asked.

  “Because that serves no purpose,” I said with great patience. “Whenever I am given bald lies—what my Uncle Liam on the other side would call ‘a fine load of codswallop’—I am thankful for the gift.”

  “The gift?”

  “Eight times out of ten, a liar presents me with a helpful shortcut. Here’s how it works being a cop: Most of the time, I spend my days stumbling around and around for what I’m supposed to be after. You’ve got no idea how tiring this is. But when somebody kindly lies to me, there’s my breather. A lie allows me to slow down, get off the track and just look, because it’s likely there’s something useful behind a lie.”

  There was a bright dawning in Ruby’s face. She said, ‘And when people tell the truth …”

  “The truth is the long way around,” I said, finishing her thought. “I’m a detective; the truth doesn’t hold the same value for me as it does for other people, not that I’m knocking it. Lies, though—now, that’s my bread and butter.”

  “Well then,” Ruby said, “we’re professional cousins.”

  I was now the naif. “We are?”

  “Certainly. You’re the detective, so you look for useful lies. I’m the actor. I get up on a stage full of wooden scenery, I wear costumes instead of just plain clothes, and I deliver made-up lines that ring true only when I’ve rehearsed the playwright’s script.” Ruby smiled. “So, you see? I give the audience the gift of lies.”

  “In your case, that’s art.” And as soon as this had escaped my lips, there was Neglio at my ear: “You’re an artist among cops …”

  We had been riding the F train and now we sat for several minutes without speaking, listening to the subway sounds and to our separate thoughts. The train pulled into East Broadway station, doors opened and closed; people got off and people got on, as if walking in their sleep. We rolled on through the tunnel beneath the East River, Brooklyn-bound; lights clicked off and the car went momentarily black and when it grew bright again the passengers had not moved, their heads still drooping and lolling above their newspapers and open books.

  I thought of coming home last night, of milk and cookies left out for me. Imagine—milk and cookies. I thought of Ruby in my bed, and me with my troubled dreams.

  I thought about revealing lies and artless truth. And the hidden work of uneventful days. About Picasso, and murder.

  Ruby’s thoughts were far more immediate.

  “Would you mind telling me, by the way, exactly why are we traveling by subway all the way out to Coney Island?” she asked. “The police department can’t spare a car for the guy in charge of catching the Manhattan maniac who’s selling so many papers today?”

  It had not occurred to me to sign out for a car, actually, and until Ruby asked, the reason behind this failure lay deep and unspoken in my Manhattan soul (my Uncle Liam would call such a person as me a “city hike”).

  And so, I offered my confession to Ruby: “I don’t know the way by car.”

  She laughed in my face. But the way she did it made me her willing clown.

  “Just look at my man. He’ll have a dinner of chicken and cornbread at Princess Pamela’s, or else that chili mess I noticed last night all over the stove. He has breakfast every day with Pete and Wanda. He lives in a Hell’s Kitchen dump, he gets around by subway—when he gets around—and the way he dresses is never going to get him in the GQ lagues. He doesn’t put on too much of a front for a girl, does he? Are you thoroughly incorruptible, Detective Hockaday?”

  What she said about my clothes struck a deadened nerve. I was wearing a pair of nice soft tan corduroys I found for five dollars one day at the Salvation Army, a two-dollar green jersey from the same haberdashery, a perfectly good navy blue windbreaker I found on a park bench and a pair of Reebok tennis sneakers bought at full retail.

  “I wouldn’t know any better,” I said, “if that’s what you mean.”

  “Yes, I think so. Don’t change.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s too late for me.”

  She laughed again, caramel lips taut over rows of perfect white teeth. “When I was coming up in New Orleans,” she said, “all the boys at my school ever talked about was driving around in big cars someday.”

  “I don’t like to drive,” I said. “It only gets me out of town.”

  “Where you don’t belong?”

  “That, and where I never understand the layout.”

  “How so? Aren’t there plenty of cops commuting into the city every day?”

  “Sadly so, the department is turning into a regular suburban occupation force,” I said. “We’ve now got thousands of young cops living out on the Island, in their cheesy cop towns—Massapequa and Bethpage, places like that.”

  “You’ve seen these awful places?”

  “I have, and it’s just what I mean by strange layouts. People living in neighborhoods where some developer came in and ripped down most of the trees, then named streets after them.”

  “Even so, I’ll bet everybody in those neighborhoods will swear they live where they live for the pleasure of seeing nature right in their own backyards.”

  “Well, nature is also a crowded street. I am saying hello to dear Mother Nature every day myself, and from the things she has said back to me over the years, I am beginning to suspect she’s not a fine lady.”

  We were nearing the end of the line.

  The train moved slowly along elevated tra
cks, over Brooklyn slums filled with sagging windows and sooty life down on the streets. It was raining now, the kind of gray rain that falls on funerals. Soon the sweep of the Atlantic would come into view beyond the tarred rooftops. I touched the pocket of my windbreaker, to be sure again; there was my wallet, where I carried the snapshot of Celia Furman and her beaux from one sunny day in the carefree year of 1954.

  Ruby slid closer to me on the vinyl subway seat. I felt the heat of her leg against mine.

  She put a hand on my arm and asked, “Hock, do you promise you won’t change?”

  By the secret code of irony in which women so often speak of and to their men, I understood this question to actually mean that Ruby Flagg had decided right then and there—on the F train to Coney Island—that she wanted both of us hanged, until death us do part. And now she stared at me, searching my face as I thought carefully of how to answer.

  “I do,” I said.

  We walked along the fenced vacancy that once had been Steeplechase Park, where once there was a graceful glass and cast-iron dome that contained a world of wonders a boy naturally believed would live forever.

  We walked some more, past the last remaining wall of Steeplechase. The rain had softened now to little more than mist.

  Ruby spotted a mural on the low wall, recently put up by an outfit called the Coney Island Hysterical Society. There was the familiar logo of the Steeplechase man, with slick black ringlets on his forehead and a black moustache curled up over his full-face, toothy smile. And a drawing of the old glass and cast-iron dome. And the legend:

  Steeplechase Park …

  Come Back ...

  Come Back …

  We cut along the back end of Nathan’s Famous. A prostitute lazed in a doorway, lit a cigarette and sized me up as a no-sale. Bowery Avenue was steely wet. In the distance, toward the water, was the rubble of giant spokes from the wheel of an abandoned carnival ride; it lay in the sand looking like wreckage from a battle to the death with Godzilla.

  Then a sound came through the clammy air of the Bowery and cleansed it like sunlight, a sound I knew from so many years ago; so real a sound as my mother’s voice, as if it were really possible for a world to come back.

  “Where is it coming from?” Ruby asked.

  The softly booming sound, the clatter and whine and thump of a carousel. Bellows pushing air through rolls of perforated paper, brass pipes tooting, felt-covered wood mallets pounding out a dozen different tones. And with the music, the painted horses would be lifting and falling, lifting and falling...

  It was from another life, I thought. “It’s from the carousel over on Surf Avenue,” I said.

  “It’s a pretty sound,” Ruby said. “Maybe we can take a ride before we go back?”

  “I don’t know, maybe.”

  We moved on, past the lane to Picasso’s masterpiece, then up the stairs over the sand and onto the boardwalk, where I would spend the afternoon in and around the concession booths gathering information on the Furmans—Charlie and Celia, in the snapshot with the unidentified man. And, just maybe, some reason behind the lies of Johnny Halo and Big Stuff.

  Rain threatened again, this time a real storm. Black clouds formed low over the ocean and there were distant thunderclaps.

  A boardwalk barker took advantage of the turn in the weather: “Hurry, hurry, hurry! You’ll want to get in here quick; you’ll want to stay dry. The show’s almost over, folks, but I’ll tell you what—pay me half price now, and a new show begins in thirty minutes and you’re welcome to stay. Now, how can you do better than that? Hurry, hurry, hurry! We’ve got nature’s oddities on parade today! You’ll see them all, at half the price! You’ll see them high and dry. Hurry, hurry, hurry!”

  Ruby grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the barker. He stood on a riser outside a large rickety shed, flagged with huge canvas posters of sideshow performers. A small crowd was circled around him, mostly old gents with nothing to do anymore and teenage mothers from the nearby housing projects.

  “Look at the posters,” Ruby said.

  I looked, and saw what she meant. “It’s Picasso’s style,” I said.

  “Nature’s oddities, folks!” the barker cried. “Yes, we got them right here. We got them just the way you like them! And right now, so long as the rain holds off, you got them for Free! That’s right, free! Keep that money in your pants, Folks. This little show’s on me!”

  A skinny young woman draped provocatively in black ace stepped from behind a curtain at the barker’s side, then took her place below a canvas poster that bore only a vague resemblance. She had long black hair that cascaded down ìher back and past her waist, olive skin and black Arab eyes. She wore a speckled python wrapped twice around her shoulders, once across her bare belly. The cool sea breeze made the fine hairs on her arms rise. She held the serpent’s bony head in her hands, pointing its leathery eyes and its darting tongue at the crowd.

  “Now, ain’t she beauty-ful?” the barker said.

  The old gents returned a mumble.

  “Meet Sparkle the snake charmer, di-rect from Damascus, in faraway Syria!” The barker leered. “Don’t you men but there wish you had a nice big snake for beauty-ful Sparkle tonight?”

  The old gents had a throaty laugh. The teenage mothers watched, blank-faced, staring at Sparkle as if she were a goddess. I looked at the canvas poster of a dark-haired and ‘full-bodied woman, with snakes choking the life from her body; I saw an essential fear in the eyes of the painted poster lady.

  Sparkle’s python arched and hissed as she squeezed its neck. Then it slithered into a new position, revealing one of her lace-covered breasts. Sparkle blew kisses to the crowd, turned daintily on her scuffed high heels and returned inside to her snakes.

  And the barker said, “You want to see Sparkle shake her snakes, she’s all yours at just half the price—today only! Just one single dollar gets you in! A dollar gets you dry, folks. Rain’s coming!”

  Then a man stepped from behind the curtain and positioned himself below the poster of a big red-faced fellow with his hands planted on his knees, his mouth opened wide, and spewing out frightened mice. The man in front of us on the riser was not nearly so rotund as the image on the poster, but was indeed large, and his cheeks and nose were ruddy. He stood with his arms crossed over his wide chest, looking like he very much wanted a drink.

  “Say hello to Waldo, folks!” the barker cried. “Waldo, the professional regurgitator!”

  The crowd was not enthusiastic.

  “What’s that?” the barker said. “You say you’d like a little demonstration? All right, I promised a free show, and I’m a man of my word. Who’s got a small object they don’t mind getting a little gooey?”

  Ruby poked me in the ribs. “Go on, give him something, Hock.”

  “No!”

  The barker squawked, “Somebody out there got a silver dollar? Somebody got half of that?”

  Ruby opened her purse and went into her wallet. “I’ve got a quarter,” she called out.

  “Well, hand it on up, little lady, and for being a sport, I’m going to let you into the show completely free of charge!” the barker said.

  One of the teenage mothers said to a friend, “Shit, I wish’t I’da had a quarter.”

  Ruby’s quarter floated on hands up to the barker, who in turn gave it to Waldo, who promptly swallowed it. Then he leaned off the edge of the riser and opened his mouth so that people in the front of the crowd could be sure the coin had gone all the way down.

  “Satisfied?” the barker asked.

  Then Waldo stood back up. His face reddened and contorted. He stroked his heavy neck with both hands as the barker intoned, “It’s coming … it’s coming … it’s …”

  Waldo spat up Ruby’s quarter. It glistened in the palm of his hand.

  The crowd offered a modest cheer. Ruby called out, “He can keep it.”

  Waldo pocketed the quarter and nodded his head toward Ruby. Then he returned inside the shed.

>   “Now, folks—how’d you like to see Waldo do that little number with a live mouse?” the barker said.

  The old gents started clapping, and the little mothers came alive.

  And then the rain pelted the boardwalk, the thunder broke and the barker popped open an umbrella and motioned toward the shed’s door and turnstile and said, “One dollar, folks, and you’re high and dry and highly entertained. How about it?”

  Ruby and I hurried inside to escape the storm, as did twenty or so of the crowd. We sat in the lower tier of bleachers set up around a large, brightly lit stage. There was room enough for an audience of two hundred, but the bleachers held less than half of that, even with us newcomers.

  A huge blonde woman, easily three hundred pounds of femininity, was at stage center. She wore a gauzy, red ballerina’s outfit and was busy pulling a sword from her mouth. The crowd applauded listlessly.

  The barker bounded up on stage to pick up the pace. He used a microphone and wore a top hat.

  “Folks, let’s have a great big hand for the lovely Estelline, the hungriest little gal in all Coney Island!” His amplified voice was far louder than necessary.

  There was slightly more applause.

  “And now, a little something to tide her over until dinnertime. Mr. Drummer, if you please!”

  Seated at a drum at the rear of the stage, in the shadows, was a man about one-third the heft of Estelline. His sticks beat out an energetic snare roll. Estelline picked up a pair of thick swords and carefully lined up the blades as the drum roll continued. Then she tilted her big yellow head back and shoved the steel wad straight down her gullet.

  “How about that, folks? A double-decker sword sandwich!”

  The applause was now more to the barker’s liking. Estelline curtsied with the swords still rammed down her windpipe. The applause crested, Estelline removed the swords, and then took her bows and exit.

  Then the drummer got up and started pushing a wheelchair onto the stage. In the chair was what appeared to be one-half of a red-headed man smoking a cigarette. The barker announced, “Say hello to Sealo, the man with flippers instead of arms and legs!”