Dark Maze

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 boardwalk 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.

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