Dark Maze

by Thomas Adcock

  I changed the subject by looking up at Charlie Furman’s painting of his late wife Celia chatting with Angelo. I was surprised to see it still hanging up behind the bar. Angelo followed my gaze with his own as he turned and poured out my drink.

  “Me, I would have thought that picture was bad luck,” I said. “But I notice it hasn’t scared off any business at all.” “Every night we got a full house since the murder,” Angelo said. “The ones who were here that night, they come back the very next night. And the next. And they brought more of their friends with them. I don’t know if I can take it much more.”

  “You can’t take what, success? Stop complaining. The Ebb Tide’s a hit.”

  “With this kind of bad crowd, sure. But you know how come?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “They’re packing my place because there was a splashy murder of a lady that made all the papers and the TV. So now they all got something to talk about besides real estate and what other joints they go to.”

  My stomach rumbled.

  “You say something?”

  “I said I haven’t eaten anything since this morning.” I looked at my watch. Ruby was late. Which was good. I had begun suspecting her of perfection. “How about getting me a table, Angelo.”

  “Stay up front here with me, so I can see the missus. You can take the table over there by the phone booth.” Angelo signaled a busboy. “There’s two guys there now waiting to pay their check.”

  “I’m really hungry, I want to order before she even gets here.”

  “What’ll it be? I’ll tell the kitchen myself.”

  “The hamburger platter.”

  “I’ll have them toss on lots of extra stuff.”

  I finished my drink and thanked Angelo for the treat. Then when the table was clear, I sat down by the phone booth.

  Which was when Ruby arrived.

  I can say with confidence that every man in the place agreed with me at that moment: Ruby Flagg knows how to make an entrance. She was dressed all in black. Black dancer’s slippers, black tights, black skirt, black blouse that dipped nicely in front, even a black raincoat. She stopped just inside the door, took off a pair of Ray-Bans, and smiled when she spotted me.

  Ruby crossed through the bar, looking at nobody but me. She sat down and stretched her arms over the table and I touched her fingertips. I said, “Mind if I say wow?”

  “You’d better,” Ruby said. “I just showed all your pals in here that you have got your sorry self a sweetie.”

  “You think anybody’s looking?”

  “Take a look at that one.”

  Ruby pointed to Angelo standing behind the bar with his mouth open. When he saw me, Angelo made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and said, “You get one of these, Hock.” We could hear him perfectly well since everybody at the bar had pretty much stopped talking to look at my sweetie and sorry old me.

  “That’s Angelo Cifelli, the best bartender in New York City,” I told Ruby. “He owns the place. Also, he’s something of a mother-man tonight.”

  “A what?”

  “He thinks I ought to get married.”

  “Oh, then he’s seen your apartment?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Bachelors live like bears with furniture.”

  A waiter stopped by our table. Ruby ordered a salade Niçoise and a glass of red wine. I impressed her by ordering a seltzer.

  “But right now, Hock, you don’t look like a bear at all,” Ruby said. “What’s with the suit? I thought you said it was casual tonight.”

  “Casual for you. I’ve got someplace to go later.”

  “I thought as much. The Johnny Halo murder is all over the news already. Did you know?”

  “I thought as much.”

  “Which is why I’m trying to get your mind off the case. You should have two or three minutes of every day when you don’t think of dead bodies and paintings and psycho artists who send out Polaroids of their latest works. That would be healthy.”

  “Healthy is when you eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like and do what you’d rather not.”

  “Very funny, Hock.” But Ruby only sighed. She opened her purse and took out the picture that Picasso had sent to her at the theatre and gave it to me. “By the way, where are you going later?”

  “That’s what I need to talk about.”

  The waiter returned with the wine and the seltzer and Ruby’s miniature meal. And also the hamburger platter I had ordered earlier. This featured red-skin potatoes in sour cream and chives, three nice big shiny herrings, a hard-boiled egg, a dab of grilled mushrooms, two kosher pickles and a steaming medium-rare burger on an open kaiser roll.

  Ruby looked at my platter and said, “You’re going to eat hat?”

  “What can I tell you? I’m not a salad man.”

  “You don’t know from health, but you know baseball,” he said. “Didn’t you ever hear of Satchel Paige’s first rule of mgevity?”

  My mouth was full of what I liked, so Ruby did not wait tr me to reply.

  “He said, ‘Avoid fried meats, which angry the blood.’”

  “I’ll try to remember that when I think something might e gaining on me.”

  Ruby sighed again. “Hock, what is it you need from me might?”

  “For right now tonight, I want to talk out the case the way see it playing. The lies and the motivations. And I’d like ou to help me think it through, inside-out.”

  “Okay, but I’m no cop.”

  “I don’t want a cop. I want a different kind of imaginaion.”

  “All right, where do we start?”

  “Well there’s four bodies …”

  “Unless, of course,” Ruby cut in, “there was news in your tailbox today.”

  “No, nothing like that. Bad news, though.”

  “What’s wrong, Hock?”

  “There was a letter this morning from Dún Laoghaire. My ncle is dying.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. When are you flying over?”

  “With this case?”

  “Then let’s get it solved quick,” Ruby said. “Four bodies, dl right, besides Picasso, what do Celia Furman, Dr. ‘.eiser, Benito Reyes and Johnny Halo have in common?” “All were significant to Picasso’s suffering,” I said. “But what’s important here are money and lies. The money part’s easy, it involves gambling. Celia was a gambler, and so was lalo.”

  Ruby said, “Then there’s the little matter of this Wendell Prescott and his grand designs for casino gambling in Coney Island, Picasso’s masterpiece be damned.” She paused, then added, “Of course, Johnny Halo said that would only happen over his dead body.”

  “Famous last words. I remember thinking that at the time,” I said. “Which is why I went out to Brooklyn today and paid a couple of very interesting visits.”

  I quickly filled Ruby in on my talks with Chastity at the Seashore Hotel and with Wendell Prescott at his real estate office. I also told her what Inspector Neglio had dug up on Halo. And I mentioned Chastity’s intriguing green hat, and the intriguing lie I found while snooping through Eileen Cream’s files.

  “What do you make of the lie?” Ruby asked.

  “It didn’t surprise me that Halo was fronting for Prescott on all those property acquisitions in Coney. I halfway figured that out when I didn’t find any deeds or title papers at Halo’s bar or at his suite at the Seashore. And then, bingo, there was everything at Prescott’s place filed under Johnny Halo Enterprises, which is owned by guess who.”

  “So Prescott just bought Halo’s name?” Ruby said.

  “Something like that. Prescott needed a real deep-dyed Coney type for his silent partner. Too many people out there had respect for Picasso’s work, which casinos threatened. But it was more than that. Too many people out there would hate to see what little is left of the whole carny culture get wiped out by Prescott and his dreams of boardwalk glitz.”

  “And so Johnny Halo became the perfect cover f
or Wendell Prescott, the cover of perfect irony,” Ruby said, smiling as she realized the ripeness of Halo’s lie.

  Picking up on her ironic thread, I said, “On the one hand, here’s the neighborhood loan shark everybody loves to hate; on the other hand, here’s this guy wearing his heart on his sleeve for poor old Coney Island.”

  “Reminds you of Nixon, doesn’t it?” Ruby said. “The voters hated Nixon’s cheating guts on instinct, but they loved it when he waved that flag.”

  “So the boardwalk locals believed Halo because they loved his flag-waving, because why would such a creep lie about loving his dear old Coney?” I said. “And property owners just hanging on by their fingernails to money-losers on Astroland—owners with nothing left but pride and a sense of tradition—they sell out to Johnny Halo Enterorises.”

  “Naturally believing that means Johnny Halo himself,” Ruby said, finishing my thought.

  “Sure. They know Halo’s a creep, but he happens to have noney and, as lousy as he is, he’s at least willing to be the keeper of the carny flame.”

  Ruby added, “And they figure sometimes in this world you have to deal with the devil—especially to keep the Prescott types from stealing your soul.”

  “And so that was Halo’s lie.”

  “That’s some convincing act,” Ruby said.

  “Not everybody bought it, remember.”

  “Well, no. Certainly not whoever killed him.”

  “And certainly not the other liar.”

  “The other?” Ruby stopped herself then and, judging by the earnest set to her face, she started thinking fast about all the crazy angles to the messy story I had been feeding her, one bite at a time. Finally she said, “You’re talking about the dwarf?”

  “What makes you think that?” But my expression told her she had guessed right.

  She said, “Because the irony fits, I guess. Why should Halo be taking the only pose in all this? Here’s Big Stuff the dwarf with his handbills, shilling for Wendell Prescott’s dreams of casino glitz and outdoing his little brother Daniel and all. So, you’re saying Big Stuff is a liar, too?”

  “It’s what I’m thinking,” I said. “What I’m saying is, there’s more than irony behind it.”

  “Like what more?”

  “One day, Big Stuff went down to Prescott’s place and asked lots of questions that Prescott didn’t want answered.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “While I was rattling Prescott, he let it slip between a few drinks,” I said. “I really didn’t think too much about it until just now.”

  Ruby waved for the waiter. She said, “Think about this: how hard would it have been for Big Stuff to find out exactly what you did about Halo being Prescott’s front man?”

  “Not especially hard, I imagine. Big Stuff is short on stature, but not brains.”

  “And something else,” Ruby said. “What’s the chance of Big Stuff being in touch with Picasso, despite what he says to the contrary?”

  “The chances are good. He’s a liar, after all.”

  “Sure he is. Then he’s also maybe the one guy in this whole cast of characters who could lead you straight to Picasso, wherever he is.”

  “Could be,” I said. “But then, there could be others in the cast who know …”

  The waiter arrived. He cleared away our dishes and made so much noise about it there was no sense to us talking. When he was through, Ruby ordered another wine and I another seltzer.

  “Chastity!” Ruby suddenly said. She looked up at the painting behind the bar—of Angelo in his white shirt and black vest, of Celia in green. “Chastity’s got Celia’s hat. She had to get it from the killer, or from Picasso. Or Chastity’s the killer!”

  “Nobody knows about the missing green hat, except the killer,” I said. “And the killer wouldn’t be wearing it. That would be nuts.”

  “And you think Chastity the whore is sane?”

  “I don’t know.” I thought about Chastity’s tight smile, the one that came to her when I had questioned her at the Seashore. “But I do think she knows or suspects lots more than she’s saying.”

  We were silent for a couple of long minutes, both trying hard to break through the haze of so many unsettled and incoherent facts. “You know,” Ruby said finally, “you’re back at square one. You’ve still got to find out where Picasso is squatting. That’s the meaning of this whole thing.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “I have this terrible feeling he’s right under your nose somewhere, right here in Hell’s Kitchen,” Ruby said. “I mean, didn’t Picasso tell you outright that he’d been following you around here for months?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well! Then he’s got to be here in the neighborhood.”

  “Of course he is. That’s easy. But take a look around here someday—look at the vacant tenements and warehouses, blocks and blocks of them. It’s not like it was when I was a kid here, that’s for sure. It’s all different, all empty. It would take months to search all the empty places in Hell’s Kitchen.”

  Months and maybe years to search the empty places of my youth in Hell’s Kitchen; months and years to search the hollow places in my life.

  “I see your problem. It’s like trying to find somebody from an old picture.”

  An old picture.

  Did I have my wallet? I reached into my suit coat, past my shoulder holster to the inside pocket. And there it was.

  I took it out. Inside was the black-and-white snapshot from a long-ago summer. There was Celia Furman when she was young and beautiful and high-spirited, on the board-walk at Coney Island with two young men; one of them her troubled husband Charlie, the other unknown.

  But now I knew.

  I did not tell Ruby about the book of matches I had found in Johnny Halo’s room. Or about why I wanted to look the way I did. Or about the time last fall, when Rat saw Picasso walking Thirty-eighth Street with an unknown woman.

  There was no time for all that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  She scuffed up to me on her lizard-skin platform shoes and banged her tray down on the bar next to where I sat looking over the smoke-filled scene. I was busy noticing what I had failed to notice before: the staircase way off in the back of the place, back behind the now-empty stage. I thought as much.

  What she now noticed was my nice suit. And the fact of where I was looking with great interest. Apparently deciding this time that I was no clyde, she asked in her husky cigarette voice, “Feeling active tonight? Maybe I can help.” I smiled at her and looked at her bare chest, which made me feel cold. Then I reached into my suit coat for my wallet and took out a hundred dollars of the city’s hard-earned money and asked, “What’s your name, doll?”

  “Candi,” she said.

  “Candy’s nice.”

  “It’s with an i.”

  “Well I don’t think I’ll be needing to write you a love letter, doll.”

  She had not taken her eyes off the cash in my hand. She said, “So tell me what you do need.”

  “Friends of mine out in Vegas, they say it’s a good square room you’ve got upstairs here. They say I should ask around for Moe Stein when I’m in town and, like you say, feeling active.”

  She plucked the hundred from my fingers and said, “So maybe I could go find him for you.”

  “Good idea.”

  She scuffed down a few spaces along the brass rail to where the bartender with the kidney bean head was pouring a martini for some guy dressed in a lime-colored, doubleknit jacket and a flower-pattern shirt with a big collar. The Clyde in lime was chatting up one of Candi’s topless comrades, who looked like she had heard his story a few thousand times before.

  Candi tapped the bartender’s shoulder and pointed down my way. I heard her say, “Benny, the guy over there in the suit, he’s from Vegas and he’s asking after Moe and he sounds like he swims with the whales.”

  Benny put on his bifocals and looked over at me, and so I snapped off
a salute. This did not make him look any more pleased to be seeing me again, even if maybe I actually was a big swimmer.

  He wiped his hands with a towel and reached under the bar and picked up his .44 and tucked it into his belt. Then he came over to where I sat.

  “I remember you, you’re buddies with that psycho from Coney Island,” he said. “What’s with this I’m hearing you’re from out West?”

  “Everybody’s got to be from someplace,” I said.

  “Yeah, only you don’t look like somebody who ever even seen the other side of the freaking Hudson.”

  “Benny, you’re making me feel bad. I don’t like this suspicious mood you’re in.”

  “I don’t like reading this scary stuff I see in the papers about your boyfriend Picasso.”

  “Listen, you think all this bad publicity doesn’t make me nervous, too, not to mention chagrined?” I opened up my suit coat so that Benny could see the butt of my .38 sticking out from its holster. I will do this under certain circumstances and everybody has always assumed what I want them to assume, that I am anything but a cop.

  Benny patted the grip of the .44 sticking out from the top of his belt and said, “Well, you can’t never be too careful when you’re in the middle of one of these New York crime waves.”

  “That’s so true,” I said, closing my suit coat.

  Benny was now at ease with me. He said, “It’s the Johnnie Walker red for you, am I not wrong?”

  I laid out a hundred-dollar bill on the bar—more from the crime-wave fund—and kept my hand over it. I said, “You’re right.”

  “I never forgot a man’s drink yet.” Benny built me a double red, neat as I like it.

  “Neither do I; you’re a Bushmill’s man,” I said, pushing the hundred towards him. “Go ahead and have one for yourself.”

  “Thanks, I don’t mind.”

  He poured himself the Irish and said, “Candi tells me you want to see Moe. How come?”

  “I’m in the active mood.”

  Benny looked at me now without a trace of the old suspicion and I smiled at him pleasantly. Then he looked at his wristwatch. I looked past him, toward the staircase way in the back of the place where I now noticed some fellow suits were walking up and down, coming and going.