Dark Maze

by Thomas Adcock

  The drummer shoved the chair to a table at the side of the stage and stopped. Then he picked up Sealo’s torso and set it on the tabletop. Short, fìnlike limbs poked out from shirtsleeves and through small holes cut from the pockets of trousers that were pinned in the shape of a diaper.

  Sealo used his dexterous lips to shove his cigarette over into the corner of his mouth. He looked over the audience and coughed.

  Then he dropped his head forward and spat out his cigarette. It landed on the stage floor, and the barker picked it up. Sealo stuck out his agile lips and used them to reach into his shirt pocket for another cigarette and a wooden kitchen match.

  He maneuvered the cigarette over to the left side of his mouth, the match to his right. Then with his tongue, he pushed the match upward and struck the tip against one of his upper teeth. The match flared.

  Sealo’s tongue worked the match flame close to the end of the half-swallowed cigarette. The cigarette took and Sealo dropped the match, then returned the cigarette to the center of his lips, fully extended. He took several long drags and the audience applauded wildly.

  Ruby and I applauded politely. Sealo was about to do an encore when I felt somebody tap my shoulder.

  I turned sharply. So did Ruby.

  A baby-faced man about four feet high said to me, “You come out to Coney Island again to enjoy the day with your girly, buddy?”

  It was just about the same way he said it the other day when he also wore a white jumpsuit and white sailor cap. He also carried the same newspaper bag, slung over one of his misshapen shoulders.

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” I said.

  Big Stuff passed some handbills to the people sitting near us:

  HOW SWEET IT WAS!

  WE CAN BRING IT ALL BACK!

  LEGALIZE CASINOS!

  IT’S OUR BOARDWALK!

  LET’S GET INVOLVED!

  “I see you’re still spreading the good word,” Ruby said.

  Big Stuff eyed her suspiciously. “Yeah, that’s right. I see you’re still hanging around with your cop friend.”

  “Right,” she said. “I enjoy my friends. I like talking about my friends. Do you like talking about your friends?”

  Big Stuff ignored her. He looked at me and said, “I seen you’re in the Post today.”

  “It was a long article and I was mentioned near the end,” I said, “Most of the rest was about a guy you never heard of—Charlie Furman, better known as Picasso. Like the artist. Of course, my man’s an artist, too. He painted Fire and Brimstone, which you have heard of, and the posters outside of this place. Quite a fellow. I talked to him once, you know.”

  This surprised Big Stuff. “You did?”

  “Oh sure. And to his wife, Celia, poor thing.”

  “Yeah, poor thing.” It did not seem to surprise Big Stuff that Charlie and Celia were connected by marriage.

  “I’d give anything to talk to him again,” I said.

  Big Stuff thought for a second and said, “Well, what if I said I maybe did know one or two things about the guy?” “I’d say we should talk about that.”

  “Talk’s cheap.”

  “In this case, not necessarily.”

  Big Stuff caught on quick.

  I kept a poker face. I wanted Big Stuff to beg me for it, which I have found to be sound policy when I am dealing with a would-be informer who is unknown to me; a little begging instills in the snitch the need to please.

  “So maybe we got a little something for each other?” Big Stuff said.

  “That’s not going to cut it. I want a lot, for which I’ll pay a lot.”

  I pulled out my wallet and opened it so Big Stuff could see all the currency I was going to charge back to the city. I took out a fifty and offered it to him.

  Big Stuff licked his lips. But he would not take the money, not yet.

  “You say you talked to him?” he said.

  “Picasso, you mean. Yes.”

  “What did you think of him?”

  “Picasso ought to hear my answer himself. Tell him I think it would be too bad if all anybody ever said about him was, ‘He came and he went and who cares?’ Tell him I care.” Big Stuff took a pencil out from under his sailor cap and a handbill from his bag. He wrote down an address on the back of the handbill.

  “Let’s see that fifty bucks again,” he said.

  I gave him the fifty and he gave me the handbill.

  “You come by there at seven,” he said. “There ain’t any name on the door. But when somebody answers, say you’re looking for the Carny Club. I’ll be waiting.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  Big Stuff left us. He crossed in front of the stage on his stumpy legs, shifted his newspaper bag to his other shoulder and then walked out the door, back to the boardwalk and the gray rain.

  Waldo took his place on stage.

  He held up a mouse by its tail—a quivering, red-eyed white mouse who did not look to be a willing trouper.

  The drummer in the shadows went into a roll.

  And Waldo brought down the house.

  There was no question Waldo swallowed the mouse. We saw it go down, we heard the mouse complain, then we saw its damp and frenzied reentry.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  For the next few hours, Ruby and I hiked up and down the boardwalk. The storm had rolled safely by and the sun was making a comeback, but the air was still wet. Rainbow arcs shimmered around stone seawalls down on the rain-streaked beach. As the day progressed, the boardwalk filled with neighborhood people. Young couples speaking Spanish or Russian pushed baby strollers; widow ladies still bundled in winter woolens gathering on benches in the sun to gossip and smoke; teenagers returning home from school.

  I asked concessionaires and anybody else who looked local if they knew Charlie Furman, a/k/a/ Picasso. Everybody looked at me like I was a cop. Mainly, I learned that in Coney Island a question from an outsider is usually answered with another question: usually, “So who wants to know?”

  When I did manage to get actual answers, they only confirmed what I already knew or could easily deduce: Picasso was an itinerant carny painter with a murky past, at best. He left Coney about a year ago when times went so bad he was put out of his room at the Seashore. He was an elusive, troublesome, quarrelsome sort who had no friends anybody could recall, save an imaginary sidekick he was forever chattering to. He was a brooder who had some intelligent observations to make if you cared to listen between the screeds, and he probably took his art too seriously.

  The locals knew far less about Picasso than I did, and they knew him as a far simpler quantity. At least from Logue I knew some of Picasso’s complexities: I knew he had served his country in war and that he had ringing in his ears as the result of action he saw; I knew about his five failed years in Detroit after the war; I knew that his wife, Celia, had known trouble with the IRS.

  But what of it?

  I showed around the snapshot, too. Nobody could identify anyone in it but Picasso himself.

  For all the information I was unearthing, I told Ruby, I might as well have relied on some leg cops from Central Homicide to canvass the boardwalk. The reason I was doing my own routine nosing around, I told her, was because what few things I might absorb from this trip to Coney Island were bound to be more useful than the turgid facts accumulating for me back in Manhattan, thanks to Logue and Mogaill and company: the forensics reports, the weapons checks, the rap sheet backgrounds.

  So here was I in the thick of it, the place I had claimed as rightly mine. Neil Hockaday on the case, the cop who had nobly sacrificed his own furlough and become the specially appointed hope of fear-plagued New York City, birthplace of the killing spree. Here was I, getting nowhere slow.

  “In a word, I’m discouraged,” I complained to Ruby, who was not sympathetically moved.

  “My feet are pooped,” she declared.

  Ruby treated for vinegar-soaked French fries in paper cones, a can of Molson for me and Barq’s vanilla crea
m soda for herself. We sat on a bench facing the sea and watched the ocean churn up the sand.

  “Not so long ago, I was a skinny sunburnt kid out there on that beach,” I said. “The priests would bring us choirboys out here for a day of fresh salt air, and we’d always have a contest to see who could snatch the brightest shells that washed up on shore.”

  “Did you win?” Ruby asked.

  “If there was ever a day I won, I don’t remember it now. I was a hopeless case. The shells would come flying up to shore in the breakers and I could see the bright ones dancing in the foam, but I never was much good at grabbing fast enough or holding on tight enough to save them from the undertow.”

  “Who is?” Ruby said.

  “Nobody, really. It’s a stacked contest. The ocean always beats you. When you do snatch a bright shell, the ocean has another that’s even brighter coming in on the next wave.”

  “It’s like Princess Pamela said, Hock—you’re no easy man.”

  “I wish I was.”

  “And I hope you’ll never be. I’ve known my share of easy men. I’ve forgotten all their names.”

  “You’re a good one, Ruby.”

  “Yes, I am.” She finished her Barq’s and handed me the French fries she did not want anymore. Then she reminded me, “There’s lots more ground to cover, and time’s wasting. There are lies yet to hear, there’s the hotel to check, there’s Johnny Halo to pressure, and who knows what might turn up tonight when I’m out of your hair and you drop by this Carny Club place?”

  “When you’re where?”

  “Oh, I didn’t tell you? We’ve got something on at the theatre tonight. A staged reading of a new play, for the potential angels, you know?” Ruby looked at her wrist-watch. “I’ve got to be heading back pretty soon.”

  This was very surprising. I was getting so used to the two of us, on the case and otherwise. Ruby was smart and fast and when I am around somebody like her I naturally get a little faster and smarter myself.

  “Hock, you’ll come by the theatre tonight, won’t you?” she asked. “Everybody’ll be there late.”

  “I should come by for a lot of white wine and cheese and the sort of people who actually like that stuff?” I said, with more surliness than I meant. “I thought you were riding with me today.”

  “Gear down, boy. I’ve got a life, too. I’m just the girl friend here, remember?”

  There was no recovering from what I had stupidly said, but I did not want Ruby to leave me yet. “What about the Neptune? Do you still have time?”

  She looked at her wristwatch again. “Okay, Hock. But you have to promise me a ride on the carousel after.”

  Johnny Halo was thumbing through the Post and sipping a short glass of beer at the far end of the bar where his sole customer had lain his head on a damp rag and fallen fast asleep. Halo looked up as we walked in off the boardwalk; he did not seem appropriately pleased by the new business.

  “You two again?” he said. “Officer Frick and Officer Frack.”

  We took stools at the middle of the bar. Halo closed his newspaper and walked over to us without the slightest enthusiasm.

  Ruby said to him, “That’s Detective Frick and Frack.”

  Halo rolled his eyes. “What’ll it be this time?”

  I told him Molson, Ruby said club soda with a lime twist. Halo said, “Give me a freaking break with the twist bit, lady.” He poured us our drinks, minus Ruby’s lime, and set them down, obviously waiting for me to continue.

  I sipped my beer and ignored him.

  When the beer was half-gone, Halo lost it. He said to me, “You better not be on the job now, pal, or else maybe some concerned citizen might call up the department to report how there’s a cop in my bar who’s drinking on duty.”

  “Well, I guess you got me, Johnny. I am on duty.” I drained my glass. “Just like I was on duty the last time I drank here. You remember that, Johnny?”

  Halo’s expression was malevolent. He looked like he might bite. He said nothing.

  “Remember when you told me that big fat lie about how you never heard of a Coney Island character called Picasso? And how you never noticed your pay phone over on the wall was tied up with all kinds of calls from Celia Furman on the day she was killed?”

  “When a cop waltzes into here asking about customers of mine, the house policy is see no evil, hear no evil.”

  “Nothing personal,” I said. “But I am now going to have to place you under arrest.”

  “What the holy hell?”

  “The charge is impeding an officer in the course of a police investigation. Which under certain circumstances—like a murder investigation—is a felony in the State of New York.”

  I got up off my stool and unbuttoned my windbreaker and Halo caught an eyeful of shoulder holster. I took a small card from my shirt pocket since it happens I sometimes forget the lines the Supreme Court gave me. I decided maybe I did need bifocals like Benny suggested because now I was squinting at the close-up words as I read them: “You have the right to remain silent, anything you say may be used against …”

  Halo interrupted with a wounded, “Aw, come on! Give me a freaking break here!”

  Ruby calmly opened her purse. She took out a quarter and held in in her fingertips for Halo to take. She said, “The call’s on me, Johnny. Go ahead and ring up the department. Tell them Detective Neil Hockaday’s having a beer on duty.”

  “Hold the phone, lady. I wasn’t never going to really do that!” Halo pushed Ruby’s hand away. He was now leaking sweat like an open hydrant in August. “House policy’s see no evil, hear no evil, remember?”

  Ruby sighed, turned to me and said, “Gee, I sure don’t like the way this concerned citizen goes all hot and cold on us. I think he’s way too slippery to fool with.”

  She turned to the very damp, pale Halo and said, “You know all about the murders, right, Johnny?”

  “I read in the paper where some people got killed,” he said weakly.

  Ruby said to me, “Notice how strange Johnny looks when he talks about people getting killed? Maybe you better read him again, Hock, from the top.”

  I shrugged and said to Halo, “You have the right to remain silent, anything you say may be used against you in a court of law …”

  And poor Johnny Halo looked at me, then at Ruby, then at me.

  “You have the right to have an attorney present during all questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney …”

  Halo made a sharp noise that reminded me of the mouse going down Waldo’s insides.

  “What’s that, Johnny?” Ruby asked.

  “I was trying to say …” Halo choked and went into a coughing spasm. He got himself some water, recovered, and said, “What do you’s want anyway?”

  Ruby answered, “Well, maybe we want to give you a break, Johnny. You think about it and we’ll talk it over, okay? Meantime, give us another round—a Molson for Detective Hockaday and another soda for me—this time with a lime twist and a nice big smile.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Halo smiled, but he had teeth like a tobacco-chewing baseball player, and so this was not a pleasant sight to behold.

  Ruby laid out a five-dollar bill on the bar. Halo pushed it back at her and said, “This one’ll be on the house.” “That’s real friendly of you,” Ruby said.

  Then Halo turned to get our drinks.

  I said to Ruby, “That was quite a performance.”

  “Of course. I’m good at what I do.”

  “I never doubted it for a minute. What do actors call that anyway, improv?”

  “Well, well, Detective Hockaday. So you know some stage lingo. Didn’t I tell you cops and actors are cousins?”

  “That you did.”

  “The good-cop, bad-cop routine, it’s the oldest improv in the business, isn’t it?”

  “And just now done to a classic turn.”

  “Admit it,” Ruby said. “I’m the best partner you’ll ever have.”

  “I would kiss you,
but I’m on duty.”

  Johnny Halo returned to us. He set down the fresh drinks, this time complete with lime. “Okay,” he said, “so I know Picasso.”

  I waited, but he was no more forthcoming than this.

  Ruby gave him a bit of the bad cop. “We’re going to need lots more spill than that, Johnny. And in a real big hurry.” “Nothing personal,” I added, “but we’re running out of time for informality. If you want formal, you’ll have to close up the bar and come along with us to Central Booking in Manhattan.”

  “Aw, I don’t want no trouble,” Halo said.

  The guy dozing down at the end of the bar belched in his sleep. His head popped up and he looked around, then he dropped back to his rag pillow.

  “Where’s Picasso?” I asked.

  “Hell if I know,” Halo said. “And right now, after what I read about him in the paper, I’d tell you! But I ain’t seen the chump in I don’t know, maybe a year or better.”

  “He was a customer here?”

  “Yeah, I said that. A good steady customer, too, when he was flush. Which in the better days around here in Coney he usually was. The guy was a great artist, I’ll give him that.”

  I told Halo there was no disputing taste.

  He said, “Yeah, that’s true. But here’s one thing nobody’d argue about: The big trouble with old Picasso is, whenever he ain’t painting the guy is hell on wheels.”

  “Like when he was evicted from the Seashore?”

  Halo looked at me with surprise and respect, and a trace of impudence that showed me his starch was coming back. ‘You’re good, Hockaday,” he said. “Real, real good. Where’d you hear he used to live there?”

  I asked myself why a liar like Johnny Halo would need to know. Having no good and immediate answer, I decided for he moment to keep him and Benny at the Horny Poodle strictly separate sources. So I lied, naturally.

  “Medical records,” I said. “Picasso’s address was in the files at Bellevue, in his doctor’s office. The doctor who was murdered.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, seemingly satisfied.

  “Exactly what kind of hell did Picasso raise here at the Neptune?”

  “None, really,” Halo said. “He’d be in your occasional shoving match, something like that, but he never pulled none of that wild-man act like he done in so many other places.”