Dark Maze

bothering you about this one unless there was something behind it, which maybe there is.”
    Again, no reaction.
    “In the park, Picasso is telling me... well, he and his imaginary friend are telling me...”
    “Oh that,” Reiser said. “Yes, I’ve seen his alter-ego routine.”
    I continued. “Picasso tells me he’s called Picasso because he’s a painter. When I ask him if he’s got anything serious in the way of work I could see, he tells me one of his paintings is hanging right in a bar in the neighborhood where I happen to do my drinking.”
    “A painting?” And now Reiser’s eyebrows arched, so high that his face looked like the letter M.
    “So,” I said, “I go to the bar and there it is—something I never much noticed, a picture of a lady in green sitting at the bar talking to the bartender. There is nothing special about the painting. Well, I am no art expert, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing this thing mounted up at the Met, you know?
    “However, there is something special right below Picasso’s painting. It’s another lady in green. I mean, a lady in the flesh, wearing green and sitting at the bar talking to my friend Angelo, the owner. It’s a real-life pose out of the painting up on the wall.”
    Reiser said, “Oh, God.” He said this quietly, almost as if he knew what might be coming.
    “The lady ID’s as one Celia Furman. I chat with her for a while, long enough to know that she, too, has got some hard-luck story in her. But I leave before I get much of it.
    Then later that same day, I am called back to the bar by Angelo, on account of how Celia Furman has been murdered.”
    Reiser said, “Oh, God,” again. And his face conveyed that same kind of unsurprised mood that I saw in Celia’s dead face.
    I said, “I found an old snapshot in Celia’s pocketbook that was interesting—a picture of Celia and two guys. One looks like a young Picasso, right down to the whiskers and beret. The three of them are strolling along the boardwalk, a long time ago, out in Brooklyn—Coney Island.”
    The eyebrows went up again, then back down. Then, without expression, “Oh, God—Astroland.”
    I continued. “It seems Celia stopped in at the bar yesterday to visit her old pal, Angelo, who she has not seen in a very long time. From Angelo I get that Celia used to be a very big-shot gambler once married to a small-time painter who was such a nut job she had to put him away somewhere. Charlie was the husband’s name.”
    “I see how you naturally connected Picasso to Charlie Furman,” Reiser said.
    “Naturally.”
    “So, Picasso killed his wife in the bar and somehow got away?”
    “That I don’t know, Doc. Celia was shot with a small-caliber pistol at close range in a crowded bar, and nobody saw anything. Which for once is the truth. And Angelo says he definitely would have remembered seeing Charlie Furman in the place—which he did not.”
    “So naturally, you want Picasso for questioning.“
    “Naturally.”
    Reiser’s sunburned face did not look so sunburned anymore. He said, “He wants to be questioned, Hock. He wants to be found, but he sure isn’t going to make it easy for you.“
    “What do you know, Doc? Help me.”
    Reiser put down his cigar like it was suddenly making him sick. Weakly, he said, “I mentioned how we had our pleasant moments, Picasso and me?”
    “You did.”
    “Well, we also had a major falling-out. That was the last day I saw the man, which as I said before was six or seven months back.”
    “And...?”
    “And that’s when I presented him with my grand theory, which did not got over so well....
    “You see, we always had this same exasperating talk about art whenever he’d come here. Which would be following one of his episodes.”
    “By which you mean the hollering sessions?”
    “Right. Always the same pattern. The cops would find him standing outside a gallery yelling at the top of his lungs, ‘Philistines!’ Over and over, to the point where he was scaring off customers. So, of course, I asked him why he was doing that.
    “He said, ‘Because they’re a bunch of numbnuts in there, why else d’you think they’re selling them lousy pictures by them no-talent painters?’ To which I would say, ‘You could do better?’ Then he would say, ‘I done plenty better!’ ”
    I said, “I’m no medical expert, but that doesn’t sound like any sort of a path to progress.”
    “Not directly, it isn’t. But at least it got us onto the