Dark Maze

Stuff was in love with you, wasn’t he?”
    Evie laughed at me. “Don’t be so surprised. Maybe I ain’t your type, Hockaday. It don’t mean nobody else can love me.”
    “No, of course not.”
    I took a couple of seconds to think. “So you and Big Stuff took down Johnny Halo and put him on that cross, at the church?”
    “We had to. Johnny wouldn’t come home to God. Besides, Big Stuff found out he was nothing but a liar. And there was Papa’s painting I had to make come true.”
    “How did you get into the church?”
    “I got a key since I’m one of the big shots in the congregation.”
    “The Reverend Miracle?”
    “Billy-Boy didn’t have nothing to do with it, if that’s what you’re asking. Big Stuff and me, we did it to Halo one night on that dark block where the Horny Poodle is, then we carted him to the church, where he should of gone in the first place like I told him.”
    “And of course, you really needed Big Stuff’s help when it came to doing Moe Stein,” I said.
    “I couldn’t very well go into that Horny Poodle place myself,” Evie said. “I’m a Christian and a lady, I don’t go into evil places full of harlots.”
    “You had a real problem on your hands.”
    “Yeah, but when I showed Papa’s drawing of Moe Stein to Big Stuff he figured a plan. He goes to the club a few times and he seen his old pal from Coney, Delilah. He talks her into the big gag of picking him from the audience. She don’t even know what’s happening, Hockaday.”
    “I see.”
    Evie said, “But I guess it’s like you say—all over now.“
    “Yes.”
    “I’m going to see the face of God.”
    “Let’s go see your father first.”
    “Okay.”
    I followed Evie out the door and back to the staircase. She said, “It’s all the way up to the top.”
    We climbed to the tenth floor. I steadied Evie by holding onto her arm since her hands were cuffed behind her. We walked past the row of hollow spaces where elevators used to be, then to a north room with a door. We could hear Picasso’s voice on the other side.
    “He’s in there,” Evie said. She started backing away from me.
    “Stay here,” I told her.
    But she kept on walking, backward toward one of the tall hollow spaces.
    I ran to her and reached to grab her in the dark, but felt nothing except a whoosh of air as Evie fell back into the hollow space, then down ten floors to her death. She made no sounds in her descent, only a thud at the end of her fall that echoed heavily upward through the dark maze of a deserted slaughterhouse.
    My heart raced and I felt faint. I put my hand up against a wall and rested.
    Then I went to Picasso’s door and pushed it open.
    There were candles burning everywhere—on the sills of the big windows, on the floor, on top of stacks of rubbish, on easels holding murder tableaux yet to come true: Wendell Prescott with a knife in his heart, Benny’s severed kidney-bean head sitting on a bar.
    On the far wall was a large canvas, about six-feet square. And there stood Picasso in front of it, a cassette tape recorder in his left hand and a .22-caliber revolver in his painting hand.
    “I figured you’d find your way,” Picasso said.
    “Are you ready to come with me?” I asked him.
    He said to an imaginary friend, “He says am I ready, can you beat it? Ho, ho, am I ready!”
    Then to me, “She says if I paint it it’s going to come true.“
    “I know. Evie told me all about it.”
    “So you two met. She’s really nutso, ain’t she?”
    “Yes.”
    “The poor kid. I ain’t nowhere near as nutso as poor Evie.”
    “No.”
    “She got things way out of hand, Hock. So I had to lay low here.”
    “I see. But I’m here and it’s all over now.”
    He said to somebody who was not there, “Can you beat it, this one he says, 'It’s all over now’!"
    Then to me Picasso said, “The sins of the father are visited on the son, Hock. Ain’t you never heard that one? Or maybe you never had a sinful father.”
    “I had a father,” I said. “I never knew him.”
    “If he was anything like me, you’re better off.”
    Then Picasso turned and pressed the left side of his head against the big blank canvas on the wall. He raised the revolver in his right hand, put the barrel into his ear and popped off three shots.
    The cassette recorder fell from his hand and clattered across the floor toward me. His body slumped, then slid down the canvas. His head oozed blood.
    A few inches below the top edge of the canvas