Dark Maze

like you said; in the rackets, you have to be figuring what awful thing can be done to you that is even worse than some awful thing you’re doing—or have done—to somebody else.”
    “Makes sense.”
    “Sense, I don’t know.”
    I wanted a drink very badly right then. But I thought about meeting Ruby for dinner in a few hours and so instead I asked Angelo for a seltzer with lime.
    Then I asked Logue if he or the forensics officers had come across the shell casing to the bullet that was still somewhere inside Celia. He said no. “So what kind of piece did the shooter use, do you think?”
    “I’d bet on a .25 automatic with blowback action,” Logue said. “Notice how you don’t see no bums on her neck there, just the clean hole. An automatic’s quiet, too, and in a crowd it ain’t no trick to squeeze one off with nobody the wiser until they see somebody fall down on their face...“
    “Which, in a bar, happens.”
    “Happens, yeah.” Logue yawned and looked at his watch again.
    Logue and I stood there silently, watching the forensics team pick up bar napkins with tweezers and dust things with sticky black powder and rummage through Celia’s pocket-book. Angelo rinsed out glasses behind the bar.
    The paramedics arrived and wrapped Celia head to toe in canvas, which happened also to be green. Then they took her away to the morgue in an ambulance, but they did not bother with the flashing light or the siren.
    Logue asked Angelo for change of a dollar. He muttered, “I got to call up the wife.”
    I asked the forensics cop now finished with Celia’s pocketbook if he had come across anything interesting. He recited the usual list of a lady’s gear, which is considerable. Then he showed me what he was about to slip into a plastic evidence bag—an old, curling, black-and-white snapshot, about two inches by three.
    The details were hard to make out because of all the rips and creases in the photo paper, but there was no doubt about the main subject—a young, beautiful, high-spirited girl in a bathing suit, Celia on a boardwalk, in a frozen moment of her carefree past. Behind her was a Ferris wheel, and people walking by in shorts and straw hats. Along one crinkled margin of the snapshot was some writing in blue fountain-pen ink: Coney I. , summer '54.
    The bathing beauty stood on the boardwalk between two men, each with an arm clasped around her slender waist. One of them was Celia’s height, or slightly taller. The other was shorter by at least two inches, and thickset.
    I noticed the shorter man’s bearded chin. And his glasses, and his beret.

    Logue had finished talking to his wife and was standing beside me again, telling me how he was going to call it a day and how he did not see much percentage in the usual business of closing and sealing the scene himself. And that if I thought of anything useful to the cause, then maybe I ought to ring him at Central Homicide,...“ for what it’s worth.”
    For what it was worth, I decided to sleep on my thoughts at least one night. At the same time, I told myself again, You can let all this wormy stuff go now...
    But of course, I could not. I asked Logue, “Did anybody find a green hat with a feather, a hat Celia’s size?”
    “Hat? She wore a hat?”
    I said yes. Logue said no, nobody found a hat.
    I said, “Maybe I’ll drop by to see you sometime in the next day or two.”
    Logue yawned and left.
    Then I asked Angelo about the painting.
    “That I got back in the early ’60s, sometime when you were up studying at City College, Hock. Now I don’t think I want it hanging here anymore.”
    “Because it’s her in the picture—Celia?”
    “It’s her, please God.”
    Angelo turned to the back bar and picked up a bottle of Johnnie Walker red. He offered me a jar on the house, which I reluctantly declined in the interest of my dinner plans. He poured one for himself, though, and stared sadly at the thick amber. In the back room, where Celia threw craps once-upon-a-time, the uniforms were nearly finished with the happy hour types. I heard one of them complain, “But, Officer—this is, like, so inconvenient!” Angelo tipped his glass, spilling a few drops of Scotch out of respect for his circle of absent friends, now increased by one.
    He put back the whiskey, then raised the empty glass to toast the painting of Celia and himself. I asked who the artist was.
    “That would be Celia’s long-lost husband, Charlie Furman.”
    “If Charlie had come