I asked Halo why.
“I guess we understood each other,” he said. And then his watery eyes warmed and saddened, until they turned the color of an old frayed blue collar. “We had lots of talks, him and me. I always knew he was crazy, and I always knew some day he’d go off his nut, but I’m telling you, the guy had a way of seeing things real straight and he talked straight, too. There ain’t been a day gone by when I don’t miss the old loon.”
I stopped Halo. “Did you ever hear him threaten to kill somebody specific?”
“No, not in so many words. Picasso’d maybe pop some barfly in his puss and there’d be some blood, or else it was the other way around; but that’d be the end of it, so far as I ever seen around here. I ain’t saying Picasso wouldn’t of whacked somebody if he had the chance, I’m only telling you I never personally seen him boil up to that kind of a heat.”
I said, “He burned down a room over at the hotel, so we know the guy can boil.”
“Yeah, well, I ain’t defending that or nothing else violent he might of done according to the newspaper,” Halo said. He nodded toward Ruby. “I am only trying to explain how Picasso has unfortunately got one of these pathetic artist’s souls, like she as’t me to.”
Ruby said, “And you’re doing a fine job of it, Johnny.”
. Johnny said, “In my book, the man was a great artist and it don’t matter he was nutso.”
He stopped then. He said he suddenly needed another Dewar’s for one thing. For another, two likewise needy regulars I recognized from my earlier visit came in from the boardwalk—a pair of matted survivors with nowhere else to spend a weekday afternoon besides the Neptune.
Halo drew them drafts of beer and I heard him say the drinks were courtesy of the house. “Much obliged, Johnny, much obliged,” they said.
Ruby stared at her drink. I stared at mine, too, and tried to think of something to say. But the pictures in my mind thickened my tongue.
I saw Picasso’s terrible masterpiece, his Fire and Brimstone tableau of suffering and drowning and waste.
“Ruby,” I said, taking her arm urgently, “let’s go ride that carousel.”
“What, now you mean?” She was puzzled by my haste. “Don’t you have more questions here?”
I had many. Too many for now.
I looked down the bar and caught Halo’s attention, which was not difficult since he was keeping half an eye on us. I waved him over.
He walked back to us like a cop walks when he enters a strange room for the first time, body and eyes wary. He said, “So what more can I tell you’s about old Picasso?”
“Since you don’t know where he is, nothing that’s going to help the cause right now,” I said.
Then I pulled out the snapshot and put it down on the bar for Halo to see.
“I would like you to tell me who these people are, Johnny. And it’s only fair I should remind you about how it’s a shame and a sin to tell a lie.”
He reached into his shirt pocket for a pair of those half-frame glasses that sell for around twelve bucks at pharmacy counters. He slipped them over his ears and glared at me over the tops of the magnifying lenses as he picked up the picture. He put his thumb on Celia’s thighs.
Halo had turned cocky now. “I will do my best to do my duty and be a good citizen, okay?”
“It’s good we can depend on public-spirited New Yorkers like you,” I said.
Halo mumbled and looked down at the snapshot. He turned it a bit and read the blue fountain-pen lettering along one of the crinkled edges: Coney I., summer, ‘54.
“I see here this is a very old pitcher,” he said. “Where’d you get it anyways?”
Again I asked myself, Why would Johnny Halo need to know this?
“Let’s go, Johnny,” Ruby told him. “Just give with the names of the happy trio there.”
“Well, there’s Picasso, of course,” he said, fingering the image of Charlie Furman. “I guess he must of been born with that goofy beret. This other guy here and the broad in the Esther Williams tank suit—well, you sure got me in the dark on them two.”
Halo looked up. He wore an expression intended to be as innocent as a bare-bottomed child, which fit badly on a guy with Halo’s creases and yellow-brown teeth. He tried giving back the snapshot but I was not up to taking.
Ruby was not buying his face, either. She turned to me and tossed a cue: “Detective Hockaday, if you please?”
I dragged out my card, squinted, and took it from the top: “You have the right to remain silent …”
Halo cut me off with a nice forthright lie for a refreshing change. “Aw, c’mon! Let’s wait just one freaking minute while I take another look at your old goddamn antique pitcher, okay? Can’t a guy change his freaking mind?”
“We haven’t got a whole minute to spare,” Ruby said. “The best we can offer is five seconds, starting now.”
Halo looked at the snapshot again, but it was half-hearted and really quite unnecessary. He said, in well under his allotted time, “Okay, so I notice the broad is Celia Furman, who I knew from gambling one hell of a long time ago, and which I don’t want to say nothing more on the subject on the grounds of it might tend to incriminate me.”
Ruby said, “That’s a boy, Johnny. Two more seconds to go! So, who’s the guy in the pretty picture? Tell us quick and we won’t put you up in a cell tonight with a big guy who wants to get married.”
Halo blanched. “C’mon, Hockaday, get her the hell off my neck, will you?”
“Time’s up,” I announced grimly.
Halo became so loud and agitated that he woke up the dozer at the far end of the bar, who was none too pleased about being disturbed. The survivors, on the other hand, were a perfect pair of lumps who did not want to get involved in anything that was not their business. They tipped their thinned beers and remained unfazed by all the noise their host was making.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Halo shouted. “I don’t know he other guy, the one who ain’t Picasso, okay? That’s the traight truth, so help me Christ!”
“For the love of God, how come a guy can’t have peace ind quiet around this dump?” the dozer hollered.
“Shut up, old man!”
“Go blow it out your hole!” the dozer snarled in return. After which, he lay his head back down on his rag pillow and esumed snoring.
I started writing in my notebook.
Halo said to me, “What’s that? What’re you writing down in there?”
“You’re way too curious, you know that, Johnny?” I said.
“Look, I don’t want no trouble, like I said. I’m telling you straight, I know Celia and I know Picasso. And I even know they was married once-upon-a-time and that she jugged him in the ha-ha house. See, that’s stuff that wasn’t in the newspaper.” Halo picked up a terrycloth bar towel and patted his wet forehead. “But Hockaday, honest to Christ, I lon’t know who the other guy in that pitcher is.”
“Johnny, my partner and I have come in here like nice people and we have asked you to do the right thing and we lave witnessed your various conniptions just because well-behaved cops want to ask you some things that connect to murder.”
I took a breath, made another note and said, “Now Johnny, I can’t pretend I understand your hesitancy. That’s why I am writing down my impressions of today, and also a note to remind me to kind of check out your references, you know?”
Halo slowly reached his hands down toward his pants pockets.
I dropped my Bic and opened up my windbreaker and beat him to the draw, so to speak.
“In here, I’ve got two things,” I said, wrapping my fingers around the trigger of my .38. “My service revolver and a pair of NYPD bracelets. I figure you’ve got one of two things in those pockets you’re trying to get into, Johnny.”
“Look, I …”
“It’s either money, or a gun,” I said. “I’ll make you two promises: if you pull a gun on me, you’re going to get real hurt; if you offer me money I’m putt
ing the bracelets on you and we go visit the rubber room at the Coney Island station house, and you get real hurt.”
Ruby said, “What’ll it be, Johnny?”
Halo raised up his hands.
“That’s right,” Ruby said. “Nice and slow.”
“Christ, I wasn’t going to do one freaking thing that’d make any trouble,” Halo said. His voice sounded leaky, as if he were losing all his air. He looked at Ruby. “C’mon, check out my pants.”
“No, thanks,” Ruby said.
“All right, Johnny,” I said. “Now I’m going to ask you some questions nice and easy, to which I want your fullest answers until I tell you to shut up. But since I can’t exactly trust you, and since my partner declines your offer to drop them for her, and since I’ve got no way of knowing who’s coming in here and when, I’m going to keep my piece handy like this.”
“You don’t got to …”
“Zip it, Johnny. You make me very nervous if you speak when you’re not spoken to.”
Halo’s face went blank. He nodded slowly, a sick smile played on his dry lips.
“Much better,” I said. “Now, I want to know the nature of Celia Furman’s telephone calls on the day she was murdered.”
“Like I said, she’s a gambler,” Halo said.
“I’d heard that,” I said. “She was a big whale in her day.”
“Yeah, but times are—times were hard for her, and she couldn’t get the action for years on account of her being some kind of a federal snitch. But she was looking for action anyhow, all the time.”
“So she was calling you for action?”
“No, Hockaday, it wasn’t like that. I been out of it for years, not as long as Celia but for a long time. I only got the bar and real estate now, okay? Look—I don’t want to get into something where I’m exposing myself to any kind of trouble at all. You got to promise me: no trouble.”
“Johnny, I can tell you I’m not real interested in your sins with the dice or blackjack or whatever the hell,” I said. “You want absolution for that, go see a priest. Otherwise, listen to your better angels and also to me.”
Halo nodded yes.
“On the other hand, I will be all over your ass if I find out your sins had anything to do with murder.”
Halo shok his head no.
“Okay, then. Why was Celia Furman calling you up for action?”
“There’s all kinds of rumors about gambling coming to Coney Island. Well hell, Hock, you seen Big Stuff and his freaking handbills for that outfit wants to legalize casinos here.”
“I’ve seen the handbills. What’s back of them?”
“Ever hear of Wendell Prescott, the big real estate hog?” “I heard of a Daniel Prescott, the real estate hog.”
Halo said, “Wendell’s his brother, the Prescott you don’t hear about too much because The Dan—people call him that, The Dan—is also one of the biggest press hogs of all time.”
“I’m not getting it yet, Johnny.”
“Okay—you know The Dan’s casinos down in Atlantic City?”
“I read the papers,” I said. “One of his brand-new ones is going bankrupt, which makes The Dan look like the jackass he is, and so suddenly he got rid of his press agent?”
“That’s right. So brother Wendell—dig this, Wendell’s the older brother—figures now’s his chance to go for the glory that The Dan’s been hogging all these years.”
Ruby interrupted, “Wendell wants to one-up his brother by building casinos right in New York? Here, in Coney Island?”
Halo said, “Right on the money.”
“So Wendell Prescott’s doing what, the political groundwork now?” I said.
“Yeah,” Halo answered. “He’s got this cockamamie handbilling going on out here and meanwhile he’s greasing palms up in Albany so the politicians can change the law and we get casinos out here in little old broken-down Coney Island.”
“Has he got a chance?”
“Over my dead body!” Halo said.
“What have you got to say about it, and why would you want to say anything?”
“I got three personal reasons. First off, I was a gambler like I say. I wasn’t no big whale like Celia, but I sure done my share. I got out because I finally decided one day I didn’t want to be sick in the head no more from the gambling disease, which is stupid games of fantasy up against house odds which ain’t stupid at all. Not to mention I don’t want to have to go through the rest of my days watching my back and I really ain’t saying no more about that aspect of the gambling disease on account of no matter what you say, me definitely may tend to incriminate me if I talk.”
“All right, all right.”
“Okay. Second, I am deep-dyed Coney like I already told you. I love this place. Maybe it don’t look so good like it did in the old days, but it’s still a damn sight better off than the sinkhole they made out of freaking Atlantic City once Prescott and the other hogs took over the boardwalk down there.
“So I want to protect my turf. What’s more natural and patriotic than that I ask you?”
“Natural, patriotic,” I said.
“I got a little money here and I borrow some more there and I even got this here bar in hock to the bank. Anyway, I’m picking up parcels all up and down the boardwalk and I ain’t going to sell off to no Prescott creeps, and also I ain’t afraid of any hoods he might be connected up with since—well, that’ll be off the record also, okay?”
“For now, all right,” I said. “But where does Celia come into all this?”
“Word’s out all over town that somebody fronting for Prescott’s trying to get the casinos started up out here early. You know, sort of to lay the groundwork for a convincing load of bullshit to lay on the politicians up in Albany that gambling’s good economics for a rag-tag old seaside slum and so why not do it legal and get the tax revenues.”
“And Celia was looking for this action?” I asked.
“Yeah, she was bugging me day and night, her and me being one-time acquaintances in the old rackets and being that she’s so out of it she don’t even know there’s no way I can steer to nothing since I am death on gambling, especially in this place I love and am going to protect.”
I thought about all the notes I would now have to make and my head started aching.
“There’s just one more question, Johnny,” I said. “You mentioned three personal reasons. You only told me two of them.”
“Well, third, I told you how I personally think Picasso is a great artist. You know what Prescott would do if he put up casinos here?”
Ruby turned to me and said, “Hock, don’t you see? They’d tear down Picasso’s masterpiece.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
She said she was scared to death.
“You sure fooled me,” I said.
“That’s because I’m a professional. It’s supposed to look easy when I put on an act.”
“It was more than easy for you, it was natural.”
“No,” she said. “I almost fell off my barstool when you went for your gun, and at that moment all I wanted in the whole world was just to duck into the ladies’ and throw up.”
“Well it’s all over. So what do you want now?”
“I want to get back to Manhattan, I want to sit down in my own place, I want to try and recover before the reading tonight.”
“But what about the carousel?”
“God, Hock, I don’t think so! How can you want to go do something … something fun and romantic at a time like this? Three people have been murdered.”
“I’m well aware of that.”
“You’re dealing with God-knows-what kind of deranged killer …”
She stopped and looked as if she might start crying. I put my arm around her shoulders, and we walked along Surf Avenue, toward the B&B Carousell (that is how carousel happens to be misspelled there, the fault of the original owner from way back when, and the wish of present management to respect a Coney Island tradition).
; The sky grew close and gray again. Rain started spotting our clothes just as we reached the B&B.
“Step right up here, Ruby. Pick any horse you want,” I said, holding Ruby’s hand and urging her up onto the idled circular platform full of wooden horses. “They’re all brave steeds and they’ll treat you well, and I’ll be right here with you.”
The carousel was empty. But the evocative sounds of the organ were there—bellows pushing air through rolls of perforated paper, brass pipes, felt-covered wood mallets—music from another life.
So real a sound as my mother’s voice….
The carousel operator, a small dark man about Picasso’s age with a toothy smile, stood by the organ. He waited patiently as we walked the plank floor of the carousel, looking over our exclusive selection.
Ruby finally made her choice: a huge calico stallion with a wide black saddle, hooves reared and nostrils flared and mane flying. She put her foot into the stirrup and I boosted her up onto his back.
“You picked the horse I favored when I was a kid and the B&B was always crowded,” I told her.
“I did? You’re kidding!”
“No, really.”
“Why this one?”
“Look here,” I said, pointing to the back of the saddle.
Ruby found the hidden carving, the skinny black cat with green eyes coiled behind the saddle. She was charmed.
“You’re feeling better now?” I asked.
“I am, but I don’t know why.”
“What does it matter?”
I mounted the palomino behind Ruby. The carousel operator called out, “All aboard?” I nodded to him, he smiled and clanked a bell and slowly we began to turn.
Protected from the rain, we moved with the sweep of handsome wood horses, hand-carved by great artisans long since dead and gone—and forgotten by most. Our horses galloped as if soldiers’ spurs were dug into their flanks, as if in battle against new marauders who had come to destroy Coney Island.
They galloped and galloped, round and around, carrying only Ruby and me. And turn after turn, there was the patient carousel operator and his smile. He nodded at me, turn after turn, as if he knew me.
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