Dark Maze

theatre.”
    Artists, they’re mostly nuts.
    Ruby laughed. “Well, I got on stage my very first year here, how about that? This was a theatre down on Bond
    Street, in a cellar. In my first role, I played a cannibal in an unfunny comedy about Amway distributors who open new sales territories in the African bush.”
    “In my time I have been trapped into witnessing plays like that,” I told her.
    And I thought, If Celia had sat at the Ebb Tide all day making telephone calls, she was obviously waiting for someone to come meet her; she could make calls from anywhere. Did her familiar killer finally stop by, knowing the bar would be crowded at five o’clock? Was it Picasso—! Charlie Furman—who stopped by? But wouldn’t Angelo^ have noticed him?
    Ruby laughed again. “So when the offers for bigger and; better parts did not rain down upon me, I did some more plays like the one at Bond Street. Which, as you know, does! not pay the rent. And which, if you keep up this glorious art,; will make you poor, which happened.”
    “And then?”
    “Then I decided I didn’t like poor. So, through a friend of mine, I wound up with a job on Madison Avenue with a pretty good agency that thought it was hip to advance me up the executive ladder—me being female and black, but not too black to their minds.”
    “You’re speaking here of minds that are easily read?” She smiled at me. “And so for more years than I want to confess, Detective Hockaday, I was your regulation advertising hotshot. I wore all the correct female business suits and I spent many hours lunching at Table 89 in the Pool Room at the Four Seasons so that every other advertising hotshot in town could get a load of me in my executive splendor.”
    “Well, you made money at least.”
    “I made loads. I won’t say ‘earned.’ Enough money so I could buy a place up on East Seventy-fourth off Fifth Avenue, with a big wrap-around terrace overlooking Central
    Park. I would hire a piano player for parties on summer nights and he’d play Gershwin and Porter, and I would try to believe I loved my career and that I was successful in New York and that all the people drinking my liquor were my dear, close friends.
    “But I didn’t and I wasn’t and they weren’t. I didn’t have anything truly important..
    Princess Pamela joined us. She carried big plates full of smothered chicken in her ample arms, and smaller plates laden with Creole potato salad and combread and string beans. She set these down on our table, then drew up a chair for herself without asking and settled her two hundred pounds in it. She poked the red-blonde wig on her head and called to the bartender, “Darlin’, give us a Bud over here.” Then she indulged in the house custom of free advice and counsel to her customers, based on her eavesdropping.
    “Let me tell you what’s important, my darlin’s,” Princess said. “You got to know crap from Christmas. Let’s say you get invited to a lawn party someplace nice out in the country. Now, you can play croquet—or you can head for the card table in the shade where there’s some good sun tea and a hot game of whist. Crap from Christmas.”
    The bartender brought Princess her can of Budweiser. She popped the tab and drank, looking carefully at me. Then she said, “Hock, I ain’t seen you come by with a decent-lookin’ woman in I-don’t-know-when. Now here you are and you ain’t but half-listenin’ to Pretty. What’s troublin’ your mind, darlin’?”
    I told Princess—and Ruby—about Celia’s death. And also a little bit about Picasso. And about Logue, and how I knew he had a crowded desk at Central Homicide and that he would put Celia’s file over toward the edge in hopes it might fall into the wastepaper basket. And I apologized for being distracted, especially since it was my first day of a well-deserved furlough and all.
    When I finished, Princess turned and said to Ruby, “Pretty, if you want this man then you got to come ’round to understandin’ he is a poor fool who can’t help but bein’ this all-day cop in a twenty-four-hour town. No more than he can help bein’ the only cop who knows how every life’s maybe not valuable, but how every life’s a big deal. My friend Hock—well, he ain’t a easy man, Pretty.”
    Princess stood up. “Y’all be good,” she said. Then she belched daintily and moved her ministry along to the next table.
    Ruby said, “I like her, Hock. She talks like Hemingway said a