Dark Maze

in here today,” I asked, “would Celia have recognized him? Would you?”
    “Charlie Furman, in here?” Angelo shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
    “Did you know him, too?”
    “Well, I met him a few times if that’s what you mean. I only talked to him about what he wanted in the way of a drink, though.”
    “But, here at the bar, that’s where you met him?“
    “Yeah, a long time back when he would sometimes come by with Celia. She’d go in the back and shoot craps and he’d sit up here drinking and watching the scenery. Man, the guy was quite the watcher.”
    “Why do you call him Celia’s ‘long-lost’ husband?“
    “Celia and Charlie, they had lots of problems. First, Celia’s line is not conducive to long marriages; second, Charlie was an artist and artists are mostly nuts. He drifted off someplace and when he went Celia also cleared out the paintings the guy never sold, which in my case is what you see hanging over the bar.”
    “There’s a street character here in the neighborhood who calls himself Picasso,” I said. There was no recognition in Angelo’s face. “Know him?”
    Angelo thought and said, “No.”
    I told myself, You’ve gone as far as you can... call up Logue tomorrow and tell him what you know; it’s his case, and besides, you’re on furlough!
    I started to leave. The happy hour crowd was given its liberty; the front bar started filling up.
    Angelo said, “Funny, isn’t it?”
    “How do you mean?”
    “Funny how she wore green in the painting and how she wore green today.”
    “The lady liked green?”
    “She almost always wore green. She said it was her lucky
    color.”

FOUR

    There sat I, at a small table in a warm room, looking into the candlelit face of Ruby Flagg with her chocolate eyes and almond skin and black, black hair and her fall lips touchée with maroon and her smooth slim neck flowing from the top of a white lace blouse. She raised a slender hand to her neck, pinched the edge of her blouse and fluttered the fabric to cool herself. And damn me! Damn me with my thoughts all crowded by images of Picasso and his crazed threats... and Celia and the unsurprised way her face had greeted death.
    Ruby was talking. I had asked her to tell me more about herself, since this was only our second date, if we counted the night we met at a party in Soho and she had come with a foolish man who was indifferent to our spending most of the evening together in a far corner of the loft. I asked her to tell me about setting off for New York from her hometown, which was New Orleans; I asked her if she believed in the Emerald City. And my thoughts were crowded as she answered.
    “…Oh, I knew it was going to be rough and tough,” she was saying. “And I had no end of relations back home who had never been outside Louisiana in their lives, but who knew all about New York City anyhow and how it was no place for me; how I’d come dragging my sorrowful tail back down South soon enough, hopefully in one piece.”
    There was a five-piece band in Princess Pamela’s Little Kitchen, which is a lot of music for a place with only an eight-foot bar and a dozen tables for dinner. But this did not overpower our conversation. The musicians were five old fellows with five old instruments and no one had much wind. The band played a soft set of Bix Beiderbecke tunes—“Fidgety Feet,“ “Flock o’ Blues,” and “Prince of Wails” among them. Behind the band was a curtained doorway, behind which would be the Princess herself, tending the fried chicken you can smell all over the Lower East Side.
    But neither the music nor Ruby’s pretty face and voice nor the aroma from Princess Pamela’s stove drove away my thoughts of Celia and Charlie Furman and the many questions their lives had raised all of a sudden. What had Picasso meant by saying to me, "I been watching you for months in case you didn’t know"? What had he meant by saying, “I will take you into my confidence ’’? And why had he steered me to the Ebb Tide, where his painting hung in obscurity, where life had imitated art, until it died?
    “... I remember being scared by all the sweet, loving lies the family told me about New York,” Ruby was saying. “But I was so much more frightened by the thought of staying home and marrying young and growing old fast, and having to make up lies of my own to keep young people from leaving me.
    “Besides, I wasn’t right in the head. I wanted to go into the