Dark Maze

by Thomas Adcock

  He finally said, “Well, I don’t see why not. Moe’s in his dressing room, probably schtupping old Delilah before he has to get up on stage with his act. You remember Moe’s mentalist act?”

  “I remember.”

  Benny called Candi over and gave her a key on a big ring and informed her that I was an “all-right guy,” and that she should escort me to Moe’s dressing room and tell him so. Candi crooked a finger at me and said, “Okay, you, c’mon. It’s this way.”

  I followed her as she scuffed around the bar, then past banquettes with moony clydes making time with bored topless B-girls drinking phony champagne in the flattering low light, then past candle-topped tables circling the stage and filling up with customers since it was now nearing show time, then finally to a door behind the back staircase. The door had a gold star painted on it, and there were blue circus letters that spelled out, THE GREAT MORRIS—MENTALIST EXTRAORDINARY.

  Candi slipped the key into the lock and opened the door to a narrow front waiting area where there was nobody waiting. Mismatched chairs and end tables with ashtrays lined knotty-pine walls decorated with yellowing posters of a tuxedo-clad Great Morris in his salad days. The young Morris had dazzling white teeth and brilliantined hair and was posed waving a wand over rabbits leaping out of his magician’s top hat. And below his picture were the particulars of long-ago gigs in clubs and carnival midways all over Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

  “Hey, Moe, you got a visitor out here!” Candi hollered this in the general direction of beads hanging in an open passage to the actual dressing room. Delilah stepped out from behind the beads. I do not think I would have recognized her except for the vintage chestless bathing suit and her two big, rigid silicone breasts, which she covered up with her arms when she saw me through her thick black horn-rimmed spectacles. Candi asked her, “Is Moe back in there with you, honey?”

  Delilah standing there in the harsh fluorescence of a bare ceiling light looked every bit a woman on the verge of collecting her Social Security. She was only halfway caked and powdered and lipsticked for the show, revealing a face and throat full of lacy wrinkles, and her thin white hair was matted down under a nylon mesh cap; the puffy blond coif I remembered from a few nights ago was no doubt taking five on a wigstand until its stage call.

  “He’s taking a catnap,” Delilah said. Then she pointed my way and asked Candi, “Who’s that?”

  But before Candi could answer, there was Moe Stein’s gravelly voice from behind the beads: “What’s going on out there?” Then the sound of his shuffling feet, then Moe Stein in mules and boxer shorts and a sleeveless undershirt with different colored food stains standing next to Delilah and looking me up and down. Then he said to Candi, “You going to introduce me to this here visitor in the nice suit, or what?”

  Candi said, “Benny says I should bring you this guy here from Vegas, he says he’s an all-right guy.”

  “Oh he is, is he?” Moe gave Delilah a light pinch on her rump and said to her and Candi both, “How about you’s two ladies getting lost out of here for a while?”

  Delilah went back through the beads and made some rummaging sounds, then emerged wearing sunglasses and a man’s fedora and a long coat. Then she and Candi left me with The Great Morris in his underwear, which highlighted the sagging physique of a man in his early sixties: pot belly, skinny-bird legs with liver-spotted knees and bony, rounded shoulders.

  The Great Morris said in a friendly way, “You, come on inside and let’s have a talk.” He turned and swept the beads open with one hand and motioned me through with the other.

  His inner room was about twice the size of the waiting area. The walls were cinder block—painted creamy white—but the room seemed warm with its green and beige rug and softly lit floor lamps. At one end there were twin dressing tables with tiny light bulbs arcing over mirrors, a nearby sink and a clothes rack that held a top hat and a tuxedo and some women’s things on hangers. The other end of the room held a couple of cozy-looking easy chairs and an old velvet sofa with tassels and fringe. There was a small refrigerator and a table that held liquor and glasses, cigars and cigarettes and ashtrays, a black rotary telephone and newspapers from the last several days. I sat down in one of the chairs and Moe Stein settled into a corner of the sofa, lifted up his bird legs and stretched them out.

  He said, “So welcome to the Horny Poodle. What can we do for you, Mister … What’s your name, anyways?”

  “Hockaday.”

  “Mr. Hockaday.” He licked his lips like he could taste the name, then he gazed up at the ceiling as if in deep contemplation. “The name sounds sort of familiar. Ain’t I seen you someplace before?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “But the other night I caught your mentalist act. Funny, I thought you looked like somebody I’d seen a long time ago.”

  “Oh, is that right?” Stein put his feet on the floor, leaned forward to the table and poured himself two fingers of bourbon and splashed it with water. He asked me, “Drink?”

  I passed.

  Stein sipped his bourbon and said, “Well, Mr. Hockaday, it’s a small world, ain’t it? Maybe we got some of the same kind of friends out in Vegas—the active kind?”

  “Or maybe the kind who aren’t so active anymore.”

  Stein gave me a suspicious look now, like Benny had looked at me earlier. He said, “How come my genius partner sent you back here to me? You want my autograph or what?” He laughed a snorty laugh.

  “Maybe later.” I did not laugh, which made Stein uncomfortable. “I’m here tonight to catch your show upstairs, which I guess means you’re going to have to decide if you want to clear me for the action.”

  Stein was coy. “What’s this action you’re talking about.”

  “Well, for one thing, Celia Furman tells me you run a pretty square craps table.”

  The glass of bourbon slipped from Stein’s hand and landed in his lap, spilling all over the fly in his boxers. He stood up and brushed himself and pointed to the newspapers on the table and sputtered, “Hey! I know who in hell you are, you’re that cop they’re writing about!”

  I said calmly, “That’s correct.”

  “We got nothing going upstairs,” Stein said.

  “You’re operating a casino right in the middle of Times Square, which takes some real balls.”

  “Look …”

  “Cut it,” I said. “If I wanted, I could get a warrant in about ten minutes flat and close you down and bundle you and Benny off to Riker’s Island for the night. But maybe I want something else.”

  “What’s that?” Stein sat down. He poured himself more bourbon. I let him drink it down before answering him.

  Then I told him a couple of lies, which is kosher since the law only requires me to tell the truth when I am under oath in court. “I know all about your casino, from the late Johnny Halo. Even old Charlie Furman mentioned it once or twice, the crazy bastard.”

  He reacted to these names like they were stones being thrown at him. “Charlie! Oh God, Charlie!”

  And Stein now looked like something far more painful than a little bourbon and water had caught him in the crotch. His eyes darted around the room, like he was measuring off the distance between where he sat shaking and where he might go stick his head in case he had to heave. He said weakly, “I don’t understand …”

  I took out my wallet and showed him the snapshot from the happy, carefree summer of’54.

  Stein’s eyes filled with tears, and then the tears over-flowed. He did not bother wiping them away, and the tears ran down his chest over his undershirt and collected in splotches on top of his pot belly. I let him hold the old snapshot. He looked at it for several seconds before handing it back to me and asking, “Where’d you get that?”

  “Off the late Celia Furman.”

  “Celia … Oh God, my sweet, sweet Celia!”

  I poured another two fingers of bourbon and water and gave it to Stein and he look it back in one swallow. He waited unt
il he was calm again, or as calm as he would get that night. Then he said, “What do you want out of me, Hockaday?”

  “I want you to tell me a story.”

  “What makes you think I got a story to tell?”

  “Like I said, I think I can get a warrant in about ten minutes, and then you and Benny will be sleeping on steel cots up at Riker’s.”

  “That don’t faze me now.” Stein said this like he meant it, and I believed he certainly did.

  “No?” I decided to lie again, bald-faced and sideways or any other way that would rattle Moe Stein. “Then how about if I just walk out of here now and let Picasso come after you tonight like he’s already gone after Johnny Halo and your own sweet Celia?”

  Stein paled and said, “Picasso …” And that showed me he not only knew Charlie Furman, but that he knew Furman was also Picasso.

  “You read the newspapers,” I said to him. “Let’s not forget how Picasso went after the guy in the bodega over in Hell’s Kitchen, or the shrink at Bellevue. And here’s a news flash, Moe: I’ve ordered a police guard out for Wendell Prescott—you know, the big real estate developer who wants to bring your kind of casino action to Coney Island?”

  “Ain’t I got the right to police protection, too?”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Moe. First you help me like Prescott did, then I decide if I feel like helping you. Otherwise, I let the chips fall any old way. Which in your case, I would hate to imagine.”

  Stein began dribbling. His hands shook and he again dropped his drink, and I again had learned something useful: Moe Stein saw reason for Wendell Prescott to fear the wrath of Picasso.

  “You want me to fix you another one?” I asked.

  He ignored me and he ignored his wet lap. He managed to say, “What’s the story you want to hear?”

  I held up the snapshot and said, “Way back in 1954, here we see the three musketeers. And now today I see before me one of you going to pieces whenever I mention the names of the other two. I naturally ask myself, What’s wrong with this picture?”

  Stein recovered enough of his composure for a last stand at belligerence. “You sound like a cop who’s got all the answers, Hockaday. So what do you need with me?”

  “Let’s just say I’ve got suspicious questions. That’s not near as interesting as answers.”

  “Maybe you should answer me this: if I tell you a story, do I get police protection like Prescott got?”

  “Depending on the story, I’ll consider it.”

  Now Stein had nothing to lose and everything to gain. “Let me have that drink,” he said. I fixed it for him because he was still too shaky. He drank down half.

  “You hear the phone ringing in here?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I got telephones in all my rooms—this one, my apartment, and everywhere I go. None of them ring. Back in my prime, I was known to be good for taking ten grand on a number, personal. Now I can’t get a jingle out of all my phones. Guys used to call me up from all over the world for odds, or point spreads. Now, zip.

  “So get a load of me now and ask yourself, Ain’t I paid?” Stein started blubbering again and this time it was because of fear. “Look at me sitting here in this cheap hi ya sailor dump trying to jolly up the clydes with shows I done when I was a good-looking kid with teeth and a flat stomach back in the midwest. Ain’t I paid?”

  “Paid for what?” I asked.

  “You want a story, you have to listen to it the way I tell it,” Stein said.

  “Okay.”

  “I was working the Bob-Lo boat out of Belle Isle in Detroit this one year, right after the war. Sleight of hand stuff, close-ups and like that. This guy likes the way I’m doing the act and says he’d like to book me for a club he’s starting up on the East Side—which, believe me, beats working on a boat every night. So okay, I sign up.

  “Turns out, this club is a casino that does pretty good since the cops and the politicians are kept happy. The owner, he gets a big kick out of my act and me; I get a big kick of the gambling action. One thing leads to another and I’ve got this second career since I take to the croupier’s stick like a baby takes to a rattle. Also I work the craps tables, the card games and my personal favorite, the board of horserace results.

  “Pretty soon I’m the big-shot manager and I’m bringing in all kinds of new business and so I got to hire more help. So I got this kid brother who’s home from the war and he can’t hold down a job because of the ringing in his ears, and the Veterans Hospital can’t seem to do nothing about it and meanwhile he’s got a wife to feed …”

  Stein could see I was making connections. “Charlie Furman is your brother?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “I was born Morris Furman, I changed the name to Stein when … Well, that gets us ahead of things.”

  “Go on with your story,” I said.

  “I start by putting Charlie ‘on the fence,’ what we call it. This is where he’s hanging around certain blocks of East Jefferson Boulevard with a flashlight, waiting for the right kind of cars to come by so he can guide them into the driveway to the mansion where the owner has his casino. It’s easy work and the tips are great, but Charlie he can’t hack it.

  “Then I put him on a job stocking the bar and he can’t hack that. And eventually I have him washing dishes, and even that he don’t do right. The one thing he done right at the casino was one day he brings his wife in—”

  “That would be Celia,” I said.

  “—Celia, that’s right. I see right away how little brother’s wife is the show-girl type, so I put her to work in the coat-check room. She then graduates to cigarette girl and I see her gliding around the place in her fishnet stockings under a little skirt and she’s wearing this low-cut top that shows off plenty of curves when she leans over with her tray, you know?”

  I said, “I guess you had to be there.”

  Stein said, “You should of seen her in them days, she’d make your heart stop.”

  “I’ve seen the type,” I said. “Young and beautiful and high-spirited. Very often they wind up coming between the best of friends. In your case, even brothers.”

  “You get the picture.”

  “So Charlie doesn’t work out, but Celia does,” I said. “And you and Celia naturally wind up spending more and more time together.”

  “Charlie’s off doing his painting, and also getting more and more churchy and nuts,” Stein said. “But Celia, she’s like me—taking to the gambling business like a baby takes to a rattle.”

  “So you naturally teach her everything you know.”

  “Naturally.”

  “And of course the day comes when Charlie is only getting in the way, so far as you see it,” I said. “Not to mention the fact that you’re pressing Celia to make up her mind between the two of you?”

  “You make it sound simple, Hockaday.”

  “It’s only simple when you say it.”

  “Yeah, nothing’s really simple when it takes so many hard years before it’s settled. And then you only think you got things settled.”

  “How do you think it settled for the three musketeers?”

  “Well, Celia chose me. Only, there were these complications.”

  “The kind that take nine months to start throwing everybody off balance?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Who was the father? No, let me guess. Nobody knows, right?”

  “You’re good, Hockaday.”

  “So what did you do with the baby, and the little matter of Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Furman?”

  “Celia and I, we had the club to run. We didn’t have no time for divorces and remarriage and that kind of stuff. And we definitely didn’t have no time for a baby.”

  “So you left baby with Charlie and took care of business.”

  “Yeah, and we took care of Charlie, too. I ain’t saying it was right or we were proud of what we done, Celia and me, but we tried to make the most of it. We even traveled around together, the t
hree of us, including to New York in’54, when we went out to Coney Island one day. Once Charlie saw that boardwalk, boy, he never wanted to leave.”

  “So he stayed?”

  “Pretty much. Celia and me, we started off on our own about then, building up a string of sawdust houses from Detroit through Toledo and Cleveland and on into Pennsylvania. Places where I knew a lot of people. Oh, do you know what a sawdust house is?”

  “I know.”

  “Celia was the one who really built the business. I concentrated on making new acquaintances, and then pretty soon we had regular casinos going. Which I then started running while Celia picked up on gambling herself”

  “And got so good at it she became a big whale.”

  “Like I say, you’re good.”

  I said, “And then there’s some more complications in your life—the kind that involve the IRS.”

  “You got the answers to those kind of complications, do you, Hockaday?”

  “Nobody does.”

  “Maybe you know the rest of the story anyhow.”

  “I know that the feds pressured Celia into grand jury testimony, and that nobody trusted her after that.”

  “That’s putting it mild,” Stein said. “Celia couldn’t scare up a monopoly game. She never snitched once on nobody and it would have been easy, but she didn’t. Out of professional honor, which is a laugh if you ask me. Anyhow, that’s when even me and Celia had our complications and it’s when I changed over to Stein, since Furman wasn’t such a hot name to have in the gambling business no more. I had to start lying real low and go back to the magic routines, you know?”

  “Until you found this place, of course,” I said.

  “Well, running one kind of a clip joint’s pretty much like running any other kind. Only if I had my choice between a straight-out casino like upstairs and a hi ya sailor joint like I got downstairs here, hell, I’d take the casino every time, on account of that way you don’t have so much female trouble.”

  Speaking of which, Delilah had now returned.

  “Thanks a bloody hell of a lot!” she sniffed. She looked at Moe, who was still shaking a little and whose undershirt was damp with his tears and she said, “Moe, you’re a goddamn mess! You ain’t even dressed up in the monkey suit, and we’re on in five minutes. What’s been going on in here anyways?”