Dark Maze

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.
    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