Dark Maze

Inspector. I am only going by the book here...“
    “Covering your ass, you mean.”
    “Being cautious.”
    Neglio sat down and sighed. “I am only trying to give you good advice, Hock. You don’t have to answer every call. Understand?”
    “I appreciate that, and I understand.”
    “You’re entitled to your furlough.”
    “Don’t I know it.”
    “But, instead...”
    “Inspector, you know where the job’s going to be going under Logue.”
    “I know, I know,” Neglio admitted. “Logue’s on the precipice of pension, so he’s strictly nine-to-five until he’s settled down in Florida somewheres. You go telling anybody I said that about him and I’ll call you a goddamn liar, okay? But, yeah, I see your point.”
    “Thanks. The book says when I have some compelling reason for poaching on a cop’s job, I should tell the boss. So I’m telling you, so you can make a record of it in case I need it. Off the record, well, it’s personal reasons.”
    “Oh for Christ’s sake, Hock! That’s blowing rule number one. You don’t make this business personal; it’s hard enough dealing with strangers.”
    I said nothing since he was right.
    “When are you going to learn? All we happen to be is cops; we didn’t make the world, and we aren’t responsible for anybody else making the world.”
    I tried to think of some answer, but could not. Once more, Neglio found what I did not know—even about myself. I shook my head sadly again, recognizing how this game was getting easier and easier for my boss to play.
    Impatient with the silence, Neglio added, “All right, so I give you this, Hock: it’s not Logue’s kind of a story, it’s got you written all over it.”
    He motioned me to get the hell out of his office and leave him alone. But before I got out the door, he stopped me with, “I maybe can see how you take this personal, even if you don’t see yourself. Know what I mean?”
    I answered with a meek, “No.”
    “I know from all the times over all the years when I have sprung for drinks late at night, when you’re all on about growing up alone with your mother, God bless her soul. That and how your old man was lost in the war, and how you never knew him, and how your mother never talked of him—and the mysteries of it all. You’re a real sucker for a certain kind of a story, Hock. That’s what I mean.”
    “What kind of story?”
    “Most cops—myself included, I suppose—would be perfectly satisfied to collar a guy who, one fine day after twenty-five years of marriage, takes a cleaver to his missus and makes a bloody mess of her all over the kitchen floor. Case closed.
    “But not you, Hock. You, you Irish snoop—you want to trespass into the mystery of it all.”
    “What mystery?”
    “The mystery of how a guy loved a woman so much twenty-five years ago that he married her; then how one day he hated her so bad that he diced her. You’re the kind of trespassing cop who wants to know the story of what happened during those twenty-five years.
    “Now, if you want to say that makes you a good cop, Hock, I will agree with you. But when I say that trespassing brings a lot of trouble, too—well, I would like it if you could try seeing how I’m right.”
    I only touched the doorknob and said, “So this is, what, your blessing?”
    Neglio sighed. “Yeah, go on, Hock. If it comes to it, I’ll square things with Logue.”
    “Thanks, sir.”
    “Don’t thank me. And don’t forget two things.“
    “What?”
    “One, there’s lots of questions in the world that are best left unanswered. And two, you’re on your own damn clock on this.”

    Two hours later, I was riding the Lexington Avenue local from the City Hall Station up to East Thirty-third Street. Then I walked to First Avenue where, behind black-iron gates sits a hulking cluster of dirty, red-brick buildings known collectively as Bellevue Hospital Center. This was the only place that might have something in the way of a record on Charlie Furman, a/k/a Picasso.
    While still downtown I had checked some of the usual places where I can sometimes get a start on tracking down a man—the State Unemployment Compensation Bureau, the Human Resources Administration where a marginal artist might have filed for welfare, the Social Security Office at Federal Plaza. All I learned from this was that Charlie Furman’s life was completely off the books. Not surprisingly, telephone information was no help to me, and neither was the guy a voter.
    I