Dark Maze

two weeks ago in a crowded room, leading to last night in my small apartment and the elemental time we made of it. Just the two of us.
    Back at the restaurant, during the last bites of sweet-potato pie, she had said to me, “The way you’re looking at me, buster, you’d better mean it.”
    I said I meant it. She said she wanted to see where I lived. Then there was I, sitting in my green-fringed chair from the Salvation Army that looks as if it might have been cast out of some long-ago whorehouse parlor, and her on the couch by the window slipping off her shoes, she said, “Tell me the story of your life, Hock.”
    I said, “It’s long and mostly untrue.”
    “I’ll learn it, by-and-by.”
    And then we drank the Perrier-Jouet, all of it. I played a treasured LP on the stereo, ballads by the late Leslie Hutchinson, including my favorite rendition of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” Also I entertained Ruby with a confession of my detective work since the Soho affair, how I had nosed around about her dopey escort and discovered he was a theatrical casting agent who wore a gold locket around his neck that contained a tiny heart-shaped photograph of somebody named Vito; how I reasoned, therefore, that it would not be wasting my time and energies to ring up the lady for a date.
    She laughed at me and said, “You’re a dope, Hock. But you’re my kind of dope.”
    Now there was I, my finger tracing Ruby’s smooth shoulder, about to be a real dope.
    Quietly as I could, I rose from the bed and showered and dressed and made coffee. And one telephone call.
    Then Ruby, wrapped alluringly in my shirt and standing in front of me as I hung up the telephone, asked, “Who was that?”
    “A man I have to go see.”
    “About a job.” The way she said it, she knew.
    “Yes.”
    “Okay, but remember, buster—I’m waiting for you.”

    “How do you think I got here where I am, Hock?” This was Inspector Tomassino Neglio’s first reaction to my account of meeting Picasso; being called to view the remains of his wife the same day he had issued murder threats; my concerns that Celia Furman’s untimely death would not likely make it to the top of Logue’s agenda. A very rotten thing of me to be doing, talking this way behind another cop’s back. “How do you think I got here where I am?"
    I would want to think carefully about an answer. My boss is fond of elliptic questions. Straight responses under such conversational circumstances can easily put me in the position of being idiot nephew to his world-wise uncle. This is the natural result of two different kinds of cops seated on opposite sides of a desk over which something of a delicate nature is under discussion. A regular cop like me in chinos and a baseball jacket tends to ask blunt questions to find out what a person knows; a man of the bureau, like Neglio—a cop with suits tailor-made in Chinatown, a cop who rarely carries his piece anymore—tends to ask loaded questions in order to find out what a person does not know. Any New York detective who fails to see the difference is about as effective as a tap dancer on carpet.
    “You slept with somebody, sir?” I have found by experience that cracking wise is often the best course with Neglio. He generally ignores me, which was the case that morning.
    “I came to recognize the danger of this here little item, Hock.” Neglio pointed to the telephone on his desk. He saw the idiot glint in my eyes, smiled a satisfied smile and explained patiently, “Every time this thing rings, it’s trouble.”
    Neglio stood up from his desk. He locked his manicured fingers behind his back, turned and stepped to the window. His view from an upper floor of One Police Plaza was New
    York Harbor—Ellis and Governors Islands, the Statue of Liberty, the ferry boats gliding out to gray Staten Island— and I thought to myself how it was sort of pathetic that a man with such a great view and such great suits up here in this great office was afraid of his telephone. I shook my head sadly, as he could not see me. Then I recognized that by this action, secret though it was, I had betrayed a reasonably good cop, man of the bureau or not.
    He turned and stared at me hard. “I got smart and learned to be cautious, Hock. About everything. Even cautious about answering the phone. Which you can now see is smart of me, since I took your call this morning and look where it’s got us.”
    “There’s no trouble as I see it,