Chastity turned as I walked in, the feather shaking with the motion of her head. She stood up and opened her arms wide and said, “Well if it ain’t my favorite cop, Officer Hockaday. Here I was, like to die of boredom and you walk in to save the day. Long time no see, baby!”
The old fellow in the clerk’s cage dribbled beer and said sleepily, “Cops. What?”
I could not take my eyes off Chastity’s hat. She seemed completely innocent in the wearing of it, unaware of its former owner.
She felt me staring at her head, of course, and said, “You like the chapeau, honey buns?”
“Yeah, Chastity, I do,” I said. “It goes real good with your auburn hair. Real pretty.”
I took a twenty from my pocket and gave it to her and said, “Come on, let’s talk upstairs.”
“Sugar, you just made my day.”
We walked to the clerk’s cage and the beagle said to me, “It’s seven bucks an hour, pal, three-hour minimum, plus a dollar for the towel deposit. Chastity, she knows the room you should go to.”
I took the search warrant from my pocket and showed it, along with my shield. I said, “How about just for today I’ll take the key to your presidential suite, free of charge, okay?”
The old fellow took the warrant and held it up close to his face and sniffed at it after he read it. He curled a lip and gave it back to me, along with a room key, and said, “Well, I guess it’s no hair off’a my butt.”
Then with Chastity hugging my arm, I headed for the staircase. We passed under the bullet-scarred sign—IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME NOW—and walked up four flights to Halo’s lair.
A presidential suite it was not, certainly not in these modern times when presidents cost so much. Abraham Lincoln’s mud-chinked log cabin back on the Illinois prairie probably had more luxe than Johnny Halo’s digs—three tiny, hot, airless rooms covering half the top floor from front to back and connected by arches cut through flimsy plasterboard walls by somebody who had no business calling himself a carpenter.
The window of the back room had a view of the blue-gray ocean, and around this window Halo had fashioned a parlor. Chastity said he had used all the lobby furnishings, with the exception of her chair. “I’m an institution down in that lobby,” she said, “which means I have earned reserved seating for my behind for all the times I sold it upstairs.” The front room had two skinny windows that looked out over Surf Avenue. There was a hot plate and a sink against one wall and a desk and chair against the other; the desk top was cluttered with papers and magazines and I started leafing through the mess.
Nothing looked particularly important, or even mildly significant. Nothing anywhere in Halo’s seedy quarters looked important even to him, as if the man did all his living somewhere else. And it struck me for one unsteady moment that somebody looking through my own apartment back in Hell’s Kitchen might draw this same sad conclusion about me. I quickly consoled myself with the thought that my place at least had plenty of booze and books on hand, and an old photograph of a soldier.
Chastity, meanwhile, had parked herself on the edge of Halo’s freshly made-up bed in the middle room. “Hockaday,” she called. “Come on in here, it’s time to play cops and robbers.”
I opened up all the desk drawers. They were empty, save for one pencil stub, three ball-point pens and a family of startled cockroaches. I checked the tiny bathroom and found it was used as a clothes closet, with most of Halo’s wardrobe piled on the floor or slung over the shower rail.
Then I stepped into the middle room. Chastity sat there on the bed unbuttoning herself. I checked the bathroom here, which turned out to be the one that Halo actually used. There were clean towels on a rack, a new cake of soap in a dish on the sink and not much evidence that Halo was a man who took lots of showers.
I looked out the window of the middle room. Down in the alleyway I could see Patrolman Gotha’s hand sticking out from the squad car, tapping to the tempo of some Dexter Gordon riff against the chrome side-view mirror.
“Pay attention to me!” Chastity demanded.
I turned and looked again at Chastity perched on the old sagging bed, smiling. Despite the fact that she held in her hands a pair of pink and surprisingly comely bare breasts, my eyes were mainly fixed on the green hat. I said without much expression, “Where did you get that thing?”
She looked now to be either angry or on the verge of tears. Men have a hard time knowing which way a woman might go when they get that kind of look.
“You’re talking about my hat?”
“Yes.”
“Here I pegged you for this nice straight kind of a john, a traditionalist, you know?” Chastity shook her head slowly back and forth and dropped her hands to her sides. Her breasts dropped, too, but not much. “So tell me, Officer Hockaday, what’s your brand? I heard of lots of different wankers in my time—shoe freaks, stocking freaks, panty freaks—but a hat freak?”
“You really don’t know what this is, do you?”
“Nope, you just stumped this old hooker.”
I took another twenty from my wallet and tried to give it to Chastity, but she would not take it. I said, “I want to know about the hat because it’s police business. The last time I saw that hat, it belonged to a woman named Celia Furman who a couple of hours after I saw her in it got herself murdered.”
Chastity took off the hat and threw it at me. Then she buttoned her blouse.
“What the hell do I care, she’s only somebody in the newspapers to me.” She stood up and smoothed her wig. “Go ahead and keep my hat. Use it for evidence to fry poor old Picasso.”
“Look, I came up here on a warrant to search Johnny Halo’s rooms because I think he’s part of my case and now suddenly he’s missing. So I come here to the hotel and the first thing I see is you in the lobby wearing a hat that’s missing off a dead lady.”
“You saying I had something to do with that?”
“No, I’m not. I want to know where you got the hat, though, and so I invited you up here with me so we could talk someplace in private. That’s it. Get it?”
“Sure, Hockaday. I get it. Do you?”
I did not, and it showed.
“There’s an awful lot of men I’ve had to kiss in my time, but I still own my heart,” she said. “That means I’m not ready to be thrown away, see.”
She took my hands and pulled me, made me look into her uptilted face. Maybe because I have been a cop so long I felt like laughing at her; maybe because I have not been a cop long enough I then felt ashamed.
Chastity could see my thoughts. She looked down at the cracked floor between us. A tear fell, one of thousands to be shed that day in Coney Island.
All I managed was, “I’m glad we’re friends, Chastity. I mean that.” She looked up and there was generosity in her damp eyes, even after hearing my inadequate words. In her time, she had come to know all of men’s inadequacies.
Chastity broke away. She said, “That’s swell, we’re friends. But only so long as you keep handing out those tips, okay?”
“You want to help me?”
“I might.”
This time she took the twenty.
“Johnny Halo’s missing. Do you happen to know why, or where he is?”
“I know a lot of things.”
Chastity accepted another bill.
“Let’s take a little look-see around this dump before I answer any of that,” she said. I followed Chastity into the back third of Halo’s suite, the parlor room with the window out to the sea. “Here’s where Mister Big Shot does his living, such as it is. Seek, and maybe ye shall find.”
The bathroom was empty here, except for some dirty low-ball glasses in a sink full of greasy water and a wastepaper basket that yielded nothing but an empty pint bottle of bourbon. Besides the lobby chairs, the furniture in the parlor consisted of a battered television set under the window and a round coffee table in front of a vinyl couch. The table was a jumble of newspapers, some yellowed with age; odds
and ends that can wind up in a man’s pockets; mail, mostly overdue bills of the sort familiar to me; ashtrays, and a hotel phone. Several pairs of soiled socks lay under the couch, some of them hardened with age.
One of the ashtrays had a crumpled book of matches in it. I picked this up because the matchbook cover had drawing on it, a drawing of a recently familiar sight in Times Square: double glass doors frosted with the images of leering white French poodles dressed in cutaway coats and top hats.
I put the matches in my shirt pocket.
“Well now, see how we’re getting somewhere?” Chastity said. There was a lot in her voice that told me the city’s money had been well invested. “Let’s seek some more, shall we?”
There was nothing interesting about the mail, or the newspapers. So I picked through Halo’s odds and ends while Chastity watched, bemused. I pored through old lottery tickets, OTB slips, laundry receipts, dimes and nickels and blackened pennies, empty twisted cigarette packs, loose sticks of brittled chewing gum. And then something interesting: a miniature bible with a pebbled black leatherette cover and red-tipped pages, about one-by-two inches.
“Well here’s a real surprise,” I said, picking up the bible. “Would you have figured Johnny Halo to be a religious man?”
Chastity had no comment. But she smiled when I opened the bible and found tiny letters stamped on the inside cover. My eyes strained as I read:
Crown of Thorns Holy Tabernacle
—A Refuge from Sin in Times Square—
—Friendly & Clean—
384 W. 41st St.
New York City
Nightly Vespers
Sunday Services 10 A.M.
“He’s not only a religious man; he’s a real thumper, I see.” I leafed through the miniature pages, something that Halo had never done from the feel of the stiff paper. I asked Chastity, “And what do you know about this?”
“Only what they say.”
“What do they say?”
“Oh, that old one about still waters running deep, that’s all.” And there was that tight smile of hers again, the one that said: this avenue of inquiry is temporarily closed.
“Have it your way,” I said.
Chastity gazed around the sparse parlor with the cheesy furniture, then out the window, and then toward the archways leading off to the other rooms. She said, “You know, Johnny’s finally got himself a halfway decent setup and here he don’t have a clue about making it look nice like a regular home. I should be sitting so pretty like this; I’d know what to do with the place.”
I allowed Chastity a few seconds of her House Beautiful dreams, then I brought her back around to business. “Maybe we could please pick up on my earlier questions?” I asked.
“Sure, let’s do. I couldn’t live with myself if I thought your tips were going for nothing, Hockaday.”
“Where’s Halo, and why is he missing?”
“I honestly don’t know. And I honestly don’t give a rat’s fanny.”
“You don’t like the guy?”
“It shows?”
“So what’s he done to you, Chastity?”
“I don’t remember you asking that earlier.”
“You only had a hundred forty bucks earlier,” I said, reaching for my wallet.
“Save it,” Chastity said. “Like I told you, I got a heart. Which means I realize the city’s not what you’d call flush right now. Besides which, you’d find out somewhere else anyways.”
“Find out what?”
“That everybody around here pretty much equally despises Johnny Halo for the simple fact that everybody’s usually into him for at least a yard. It’s not hard to hate a guy’s guts when you’re owing him money all the time.” “What kind of a scam does he run?”
“The straight six-for-five rip. Anything higher, he knows he’d never live to spend his profits.”
“You borrow five bucks, you pay back six at the end of the week?”
“That’s it. One hundred bucks is the minimum hook. So at six-for-five, that counts up to twenty percent worth of vigorish on the unpaid balance—a week.”
“Very sweet,” I said.
I decided to let this particular detail of Johnny Halo’s précis alone for a while.
“Just one more question,” I said. “Where did you get the hat?”
“There’s a private dive around here by the name of the Carny Club,” Chastity said. “Ever hear of it?”
I said I had.
“Last night I dropped by late. When I was finally going home, there was this nice green-feathered hat hanging on a peg in the foyer, just waiting to get pinched.”
“So you pinched.”
There was that tight smile again.
Down in the alley, Patrolman Gotha was tapping in time to “Sophisticated Lady.” He waved when he saw me come out the hotel door.
“Find out what you’re after?” he asked.
“Some, not all,” I said. “Do you have a crowbar in the trunk of this car?”
“Sure.”
“Good.” I crossed in front of the car and then got in on the passenger side. “Drive us up to the boardwalk. We’re going to open up the Neptune bar.”
“I can’t leave my post.”
“I’m the guy in charge of your post.”
“That’s true.” Gotha started the car, put it into gear and we turned west onto Surf Avenue, then south on a sand and blacktop drive that led to the boardwalk. “The warrant covers the Neptune, too?”
“Yes.”
“How come the place needs a forced entry?”
“Because the owner’s been missing since last night. That would be Johnny Halo. His place never opened up this morning.”
“Wait. I thought we were looking for this Picasso guy who used to live at the Seashore.”
“We’re looking for both of them now,” I said. “Pass the word along when we’re all done here, okay?”
“Sure I will.”
Gotha parked the car and took the crowbar out from the trunk and we headed up the boardwalk for the Neptune.
As I figured, the janitor had given up and left. And locked the door again.
Gotha put the crowbar to it and snapped it open. We walked in and turned on the lights and heard the sound of scurrying mouse feet.
I looked around for something in the way of an office and records. The nearest I came was a storeroom full of empty deposit bottles and a broom closet.
I checked behind the bar. Nothing.
My work here was through, at least for now.
I ought to give titles out of the holy goddamn bible for some of these paintings. How about that? Ain’t that just the thing for my reputation?
Damn straight.
Haw! Maybe I should apply for one of them grants! Hoo-boy, that’d be something, hey?
Let’s see. How about, “Ye lust and have not, ye kill and desire to have and cannot obtain”? Yeah, some of that New Testament crapola!
Or how about, “If a man know not how to rule his own house, how will he take care of the church of God?”
Now you’re talking!
Damn straight.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I was surprised it was only four o’clock. Time always seems so much longer in Coney Island than it does back in Manhattan; the tides and the rolling ocean sounds of Coney are never in a hurry.
There was no point now in my dropping by the Carny Club to nose around. Nobody would be there until at least seven. Besides, it might prove well to let a day lapse; nobody in that crowd was in a hurry to help me find Picasso, or Johnny Halo for that matter. I could make far better use of this afternoon working some other angle of the case. And dreaming up some sideways approach to all the questions popping in my mind about Celia Furman’s traveling green hat.
I left Patrolman Gotha and walked aimlessly through Astroland until I came on the Fire and Brimstone. And just as those few days ago when Ruby and I stood here together in shock before Picasso’s ruthless masterpiece, I again re
membered my many years’ indifference to the bloody cruel knowledge in Charlie Furman’s vision of the world.
A glimpse of someone else’s nightmare, and then a round of brave laughs. What reason had we to wonder about an artist’s mind?
I turned away and walked back through the lane to Bowery Street and up to Nathan’s Famous. For the next fifteen minutes I stood at the open-air counter on the Surf Avenue side, nursing a short beer. I bought another beer when the organ at the B&B Carousell just across the way started up with “By the Sea,” turning I watched the wooden horses lift and fall and also the small dark man who ran the organ pumps and the carousel motor.
He clanked a bell and waved in my direction. Even in the deep shade where he stood, I saw his smile. I waved back.
A red-and-yellow taxicab pulled up in front of the B&B and stopped at the curb, blocking my view. The driver got out and helped his passengers with the back door, a rare sight in New York nowadays. Sparkle the snake charmer stepped from the taxi, her long black hair rising in puffs with the street breeze. She and the taxi driver leaned together into the cab and brought out a wheelchair, then Sealo.
Sparkle paid the driver and then wheeled Sealo across the avenue. I watched as the two of them cut through the gaudy aisles of Astroland—just a pair of nature’s oddities, reporting for duty on the boardwalk at Coney Island.
I paid for my beer and crossed the avenue to the subway station.
It occurred to me that I should probably drop by Central Homicide on the chance that Logue had returned from the field with something useful, something that would help compute. If not, there was always the entertaining possibility that Captain Davy Mogaill would be in a mood to dragoon me off to a sentimental journey up Inwood way—to Nugent’s bar, where a lonely flea might find his dog.
Or, I could drop by the Horny Poodle to see if I might get a sideways answer from Benny at the bar on the matter of a customer called Johnny Halo. Or maybe I should take in vespers this day at the Crown of Thorns Holy Tabernacle. I could call up Ruby, to see if she was a game girl and willing to be my beard again in the cause of law and order.
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