Dark Maze

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 three 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