I knocked. There was no answer. I kicked the door, and it fell open stiffly.
At least a dozen cats were in the big room beyond the door—backs arched, yellow-green eyes wide, fangs bared, throats hissing and growling.
Then, something cold and hard poked at my neck.
And a ragged whisper: “Hang onto your rosary beads and say good bye!”
I shot my hands up into the air. The flashlight fell to the floor, rolled around and settled against a stack of newspapers shaped like a chair.
I recognized the voice, of course. From the taffy stand on Stillwell Avenue, from the Carny Club. From the times she had said in parting, “God bless.” I could see her puffy pink face and her hair the color of scrambled eggs, and her eyes done up like a pair of chocolate cupcakes.
“You don’t want to shoot,” I said. “Who would tell the world of your father’s great works?”
“My father?”
“May I turn around now, Evie?”
She said, “So, you know?”
“I’m turning around now,” I said, moving slowly. She withdrew the gun at my neck, but kept it pointed at my chest. I said to her, “I’ve got some bad news for you.”
“You must be crazy. I’m standing here with a gun on you.”
“Oh, but you won’t shoot,” I said. “Not me. Your father wants me to know; he picked me to know, didn’t he?”
Evie lowered the gun, the second one I had faced in the last thirty minutes. I quickly said a silent prayer of thanks.
Evie said, “What bad news?”
“Big Stuff is dead.”
She put a hand over her heart and her eyes welled up with tears.
I told her what had happened at the Horny Poodle, and I said I understood the Coney Island reasons behind all else that had happened. And it was the beginning of the truth I was speaking now.
“You tell me the reasons, Evie,” I said. “Tell me you understand, too.”
She said simply, “The paintings needed to come true.
Everybody’s going to know him now. They can’t forget about him now.”
“That’s right,” I said. “And now it’s over, Evie.”
“Yes.”
“Are you glad?”
“Yes. I’ll see the face of God now.”
“Will you first hand me that gun?”
She turned it over to me and said, “See how nice I do what you say? I’m not some maniac like they say in the papers.” and I offered up my second silent prayer, this one to the atron saint of the mentally impaired.
I asked, “Is your father here somewhere?”
She looked up. “He’s in his studio, praying.”
“Why is he praying, Evie?”
“He’s praying for the Lord my soul to take. You see, I told him what I done …”
“He had no idea, did he?”
“Papa painted his pictures. I made them come true.”
I took a pair of NYPD bracelets out from a pocket and aid, “You probably know, I have to arrest you now.”
“Yes,” Evie said. And then there was a dream in her voice. They knoweth not what they do, O Father …”
I cuffed Evie’s plump hands behind her. Then I stepped ver to where the flashlight had fallen, picked it up and hined it on her.
“I’m going to read you your rights, Evie. Listen carefully ow, okay?”
She nodded. I found my Miranda warning card in my vallet and put light on it and read her. After I had finished, I caused. “You made the pictures come true, is that right?” I sked finally.
“First, I killed her.”
“Celia, your mother?”
“Yes. She was a harlot from Hades.”
“And then you killed Dr. Reiser?”
“I made Papa’s picture come true.”
“And Benito Reyes at the bodega?”
“I made Papa’s picture come true.”
“And then Johnny Halo?”
“Big Stuff helped me. He hated Johnny bad.”
“Why?”
“He was jealous of Johnny and me.”
“Jealous?”
“I was trying to save Johnny Halo’s soul is all, trying to get him to give his life to God, like I give my life to God …”
“And so you’d sometimes go up to Halo’s room at the Seashore, to try saving him?”
“That’s right. Big Stuff, he took it all wrong.”
“And Big Stuff was in love with you, wasn’t he?”
Evie laughed at me. “Don’t be so surprised. Maybe I ain’t your type, Hockaday. It don’t mean nobody else can love me.
“No, of course not.”
I took a couple of seconds to think. “So you and Big Stuff took down Johnny Halo and put him on that cross, at the church?”
“We had to. Johnny wouldn’t come home to God. Besides, Big Stuff found out he was nothing but a liar. And there was Papa’s painting I had to make come true.”
“How did you get into the church?”
“I got a key since I’m one of the big shots in the congregation.”
“The Reverend Miracle?”
“Billy-Boy didn’t have nothing to do with it, if that’s what you’re asking. Big Stuff and me, we did it to Halo one night on that dark block where the Horny Poodle is, then we carted him to the church, where he should of gone in the first place like I told him.”
“And of course, you really needed Big Stuff’s help when it came to doing Moe Stein,” I said.
“I couldn’t very well go into that Horny Poodle place myself,” Evie said. “I’m a Christian and a lady, I don’t go into evil places full of harlots.”
“You had a real problem on your hands.”
“Yeah, but when I showed Papa’s drawing of Moe Stein to Big Stuff he figured a plan. He goes to the club a few times and he seen his old pal from Coney, Delilah. He talks her into the big gag of picking him from the audience. She don’t even know what’s happening, Hockaday.”
“I see.”
Evie said, “But I guess it’s like you say—all over now.” “Yes.”
“I’m going to see the face of God.”
“Let’s go see your father first.”
“Okay.”
I followed Evie out the door and back to the staircase. She said, “It’s all the way up to the top.”
We climbed to the tenth floor. I steadied Evie by holding onto her arm since her hands were cuffed behind her. We walked past the row of hollow spaces where elevators used to be, then to a north room with a door. We could hear Picasso’s voice on the other side.
“He’s in there,” Evie said. She started backing away from me.
“Stay here,” I told her.
But she kept on walking, backward toward one of the tall hollow spaces.
I ran to her and reached to grab her in the dark, but felt nothing except a whoosh of air as Evie fell back into the hollow space, then down ten floors to her death. She made no sounds in her descent, only a thud at the end of her fall that echoed heavily upward through the dark maze of a deserted slaughterhouse.
My heart raced and I felt faint. I put my hand up against a wall and rested.
Then I went to Picasso’s door and pushed it open.
There were candles burning everywhere—on the sills of the big windows, on the floor, on top of stacks of rubbish, on easels holding murder tableaux yet to come true: Wendell Prescott with a knife in his heart, Benny’s severed kidney-bean head sitting on a bar.
On the far wall was a large canvas, about six-feet square. And there stood Picasso in front of it, a cassette tape recorder in his left hand and a .22-caliber revolver in his painting hand.
“I figured you’d find your way,” Picasso said.
“Are you ready to come with me?” I asked him.
He said to an imaginary friend, “He says am I ready, can you beat it? Ho, ho, am I ready!”
Then to me, “She says if I paint it it’s going to come true.”
“I know. Evie told me all abo
ut it.”
“So you two met. She’s really nutso, ain’t she?”
“Yes.”
“The poor kid. I ain’t nowhere near as nutso as poor Evie.”
“No.”
“She got things way out of hand, Hock. So I had to lay low here.”
“I see. But I’m here and it’s all over now.”
He said to somebody who was not there, “Can you beat it, this one he says, ‘It’s all over now’!”
Then to me Picasso said, “The sins of the father are visited on the son, Hock. Ain’t you never heard that one? Or maybe you never had a sinful father.”
“I had a father,” I said. “I never knew him.”
“If he was anything like me, you’re better off.”
Then Picasso turned and pressed the left side of his head against the big blank canvas on the wall. He raised the revolver in his right hand, put the barrel into his ear and popped off three shots.
The cassette recorder fell from his hand and clattered across the floor toward me. His body slumped, then slid down the canvas. His head oozed blood.
A few inches below the top edge of the canvas were the three tiny bullet holes. And an explosion of wet red and gray that streaked downward, dripping to the floor where the artist lay.
I shined my flashlight on black letters that were painted along the bottom of the canvas. Dry black lettering applied days ago to spell out the title of Picasso’s last piece: SELF-PORTRAIT IN BRAINS.
EPILOGUE
They say when you come to New York you ought to bring your own body-outline chalk.
Also they say life’s messy but death don’t do nothing much to tidy it up.
That’s two jokes I am floating around Hell.
Which is where I am, Hock. Home-sweet-Hell.
It’s been nice chatting with you.
So long, suckers!
I switched off the tape recorder. It had taken me three full days to go through all that Picasso had left behind in his slaughterhouse studio, hours and hours of his general observations, his explanations, his Bible quotations.
This was the remaining quiet business of the case I had to wrap up. Meanwhile, Inspector Neglio and the mayor and the tabloids took care of the noisy business of claiming that New York was back to normal. Slattery’s assurances in the Post came under the heading: “Maniac Duo Dies in Horror Hole—Father-Daughter Reign of Terror Over!”
When I had finished with the tapes, I saw to it that Moe and Benny were taken off in manacles for arraignment on illegal gaming charges. And then I dropped by to visit Wendell Prescott, just to tell him I was onto his connection with the late Johnny Halo and that if he did not care to do me two simple favors I would have a talk with Slattery about the mafia figure he kept for company in his Coney Island real estate deals.
“What do you want out of me, Hock?”
“I want you to very carefully dismantle Picasso’s masterpiece at the Fire and Brimstone out in Coney, then I want you to truck it into Manhattan and put it all back together again, on display at the nicest Soho gallery you can find.”
“Are you as crazy as him?”
“No, but you are, Prescott, if you don’t take advantage of the tremendous price you could get for it, what with all the notoriety.”
“Well, when you put it like that—”
“I thought that part would be easy for you,” I said. “But there’s something else.”
“What?”
“There’s a prostitute who works at the Seashore Hotel in Coney, another one of your properties. You’ll find her in the lobby most times; her name is Chastity.”
“Oh boy!”
“I want you to set her up in Johnny Halo’s old rooms, rent free, for the rest of her life.”
“I’m not going to do that.”
“Should I call up Slattery now?”
“What’s her name again?”
After I was through with the remaining police business, it was time to settle some personal accounts. So I first dropped by a travel agency in the McGraw-Hill building on Forty-second Street to book a pair of round-trip tickets aboard Aer Lingus, JFK to Dublin.
Thomaa Adcook
And then Ruby met me for dinner that night at Angelo’s Ebb Tide.
“I want you to meet my Uncle Liam,” I said, handing Ruby one of the tickets.
“I’ll go with you, Hock,” she said. “But tell me there’s something else to it besides making the acquaintance of an old Irish gentleman.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t like it said that I live like a bear with furniture.”
She kissed me. “Maybe that’s a good enough answer for now.”
But then a great serious concern spread over Ruby’s face. She said, “I’d love to see where your people come from, where your father came from. Wouldn’t you, Hock?”
I did not answer her for a while. I heard my mother’s words, the only ones there in my hollow place. “Your papa went off in a mist, that’s all there is to it. It hurts too much to speak of him as if he was ever flesh and blood and bone to me.”
I only said to Ruby, “I think I would …”
She said, “That’s a funny answer.”
I said, “Isn’t it, though?”
Turn the page to continue reading from the Neil Hockaday Mysteries
CHAPTER 1
It was a good weekend, except for the dead priest.
It was the weekend when it struck me hard how the past never passes, no matter how we try to bulldoze memory. It was the weekend I finally decided to become a serious character in the story of my life. It was the weekend that began the greatest case of my career.
At first, I did not see greatness; nor even a case, for that matter. But others were alert to the significance of events at hand, and those yet to occur. Ruby, for one. For another, Captain Davy Mogaill, my rabbi. As the captain would put it, “What grander case may a detective crack than the mystery of his own makings?”
This he suggested on a fine Saturday afternoon at Nugent’s bar. This piece of wisdom, among others. For my part, I told my rabbi about Ruby, and about the sorry reason we had for flying off to Dublin that Sunday night.
No doubt it was somewhere during this good long boozy conversation of ours when old Father Tim first figured he had it coming.
Back to Friday, when this all started:
It was past five o’clock on an April afternoon that happened to be my birthday, but I am not saying which one. Ruby telephoned to inform me as to how I would want to wear a nice suit and tie that night because of what she wanted, which was dinner at some East Side place with a style to which I am not accustomed. With Ruby, life now contains such announcements.
I said, “Well, I don’t know—”
Ruby cut in with, “It’s my treat.”
To which I quickly responded, “So where do we go and when do we eat?”
She gave me the pricey address of a restaurant I have seen mentioned more than once in charity ball photo captions published in the Times and said we should meet there at eight o’clock sharp. Which gave me two hours and forty-five minutes to wind it up for the day at the station house, grab an overdue shave and haircut on the way home, shower and sit around in my shorts for a while with a couple of fingers of Johnnie Walker red, find the claim check to my good suit down the block at the Korean dry cleaner’s, and have my shoes with the tassels shined. Then I would need a taxicab, preferably one with a driver who knew without my having to tell him how to get from my earthly place in Hell’s Kitchen over across town to the planet of Park Avenue. I was the first to arrive, none too sharply. This was at a quarter past eight.
The restaurant had one of those names that was somebody’s idea of terribly chic but which is my idea of just plain terrible. In English, I think the place would be called The Llama with the Ironic Wardrobe. I could see past the dimly lighted command post of the maître d’hôtel how the dining room was crowded up with somebody’s idea of the New York smart set: gray eminences holding court for faw
ning thirtysomething executives in Armani suits, former wives of former potentates, Republicans of color, indicted Wall Streeters, glossy ladies with long legs and short résumés, and a passel of middle-aged white guys wearing aviator bifocals, Bijan suits, and little ponytails.
“Oui, monsieur?” The maître d’ inspected me with sullen eyes, black as his dinner jacket. Then with a curl of the lip that must have taken him years of practice, he asked, “Puis-je vous aider?”
I was not impressed. It happens I know something about France, namely that it is a place where New Yorkers go in search of rudeness; short of traveling overseas, any French restaurant in Manhattan will do. Besides which, this guy’s accent had way too much of the Grand Concourse where the Champs-Élysées ought to be. And anyhow, I was feeling good and sleek in my charcoal wool worsteds and my rose necktie and my shoes smelling fresh and waxy. I may be the type who pays cash, but I am no peasant.
“I’m looking for a lady,” I said. I wanted to add, Knock off the act, Pierre, we both know you take your tips home to the Bronx. But I held this thought. Instead, I said, “Maybe she’s already here. I’ll just take a look myself.”
“Sir, I do not think so!” Pierre was flustered and shocked, the poor thing. He manfully placed himself between me and the archway into the dining room.
I said, “What—?”
He said, “I do not seat unescorted ladies.”
“How come? Is this a fag joint?”
Then Ruby’s voice from behind, with a laugh in it. “Oh, Hock—behave yourself.”
I turned to watch her walk toward me. Outside, from the taxicab, her driver was taking a last look, too. This was the sort of thing I was trying to get used to; Ruby is something to see, and I am not the only man in the city with eyes for the job. She was dressed that night in one of those little black beaded numbers that sparkle in all the right places. There was a bit of gauzy wool fluff nestled around her bare brown shoulders, rhinestones around the décolletage, maroon on her lips and tiny diamonds pinned in her ears.
Miss Ruby Flagg, the actress, knows how to wrap herself up for a good review. And that night of my birthday, she was nicely wrapped indeed. Pierre, on the other hand, was having no part of the festivities.
Appalled by me, he appealed to Ruby. “Mademoiselle—s’il vous plaît!”
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