Dark Maze

subject of art sometimes, the only thing personal that Picasso would ever discuss. Otherwise, it was all about his ‘observations’ or his reliably dim view of life, or that damn alter-ego routine.
    “But, Hock, you met him, you know what an intriguing bastard the guy is. You just want to solve the riddles of the guy, you know? Do you?”
    I did not answer right away, thinking back to what Neglio had told me, by way of warning me about myself. Eventually, though, I managed, “Yeah, I guess so.”
    “Sure, you know how it is, Hock. I mean, I’ve talked with cops before. You’re the first one I’ve met with a measurable attention span.”
    I shrugged.
    Reiser went on. “Anyway, there were two main things I could never get out of Picasso like you did—his real name, and a look at one of his paintings. So finally, one bright day it dawns on me what this guy’s pathology is. However, I am not bright enough to keep the revelation to myself; I have to go blabbing my grand theory to Picasso.
    “I told him on that last day of ours, ‘Picasso, my pixilated friend, what makes you the loon you are is that you’re the worst kind of artist there is, the kind that gets ignored.’ “To which Picasso says, ‘The way I see it, when a tree falls down in the forest and nobody’s around to hear it, you better believe it still makes a big noise! You’re calling that crazy, Doc, are you?’ ”
    Reiser laughed. It was an unfunny series of snorts, really, and no doubt inherited from Picasso. “Guess what he does next?” Reiser asks.
    I gave up.
    “Picasso says, ‘Okay, I had just about enough of this bug house!’ Then he stands up from the chair where you’re sitting now, and he coldcocks me. Knocks me clear off my chair, the wacko! Then I was down on the floor, rolling around with a dislocated jaw. And Picasso is standing over me with his eyes rolling and his fists waving and he’s hollering, ‘Philistine!’
    “I am in such agony, all I see is Picasso’s wild blurry head chasing around in circles with Freud’s head behind him, from the picture up on the wall. And I can’t tell which one of them is yelling at me, ‘You ignorant shrink! Open your eyeballs and see!’ ”
    I said, “And that’s the last you saw of him?”
    “Yeah. He knocked me down, then a couple of the security goons came in here and jacketed him. We doped him out for a couple of days. I didn’t make an issue of it. I
    mean, what could I do anyway? We’d been carrying this guy off the record for decades, right? He wasn’t cooperating, and I we kept taking him back. What do you expect?
    “Besides,” Reiser added, “the day we let him go, he dropped by my office and told me I was fired as his doctor. How do you like that?”
    Reiser opened the manila folder again. He removed an item and handed it to me—a white business-size envelope, the cheap kind that comes from Lamston’s in hundred-count boxes. It had been mailed to Dr. Ronald Reiser, in care of Bellevue. But there was no return address. The postmark was Brooklyn. The cancelled stamp was a flag issue, pasted upside-down in the upper right corner of the envelope.
    “That thing,” Reiser explained, “came about one week after he coldcocked me. Just get a load of what’s inside of it.”
    I pulled out a Polaroid photograph, about four inches , square. The image was overexposed and muddy, as Polaroids sometimes are. I made out the picture of a large building, neither an apartment house nor a shop, but something else—full of colors, mostly reds and yellows. And a small building in the foreground, a sort of shed with a sign on it that read: tickets.
    Around the edges of the photo were neatly printed letters, all in black ballpoint capitals: BEHOLD, MY MASTERPIECE—LOVE & KISSES, PICASSO.
    “What is it?”
    Reiser said, “In the trade, they call it a dark maze. You’ll find it out in Coney Island.”

SIX

    There is always the singular moment when I know for certain that I am about to be wedded to a case, for better or for worse, until death do us part. Walking out of Dr. Ronald Reiser’s office in the Zoo wing of Bellevue was that grim moment.
    Feeling the way I did, I figured it in the best interests of family harmony to make a straightforward, diplomatic call to Detective Logue at Central Homicide. Better he should hear it from me now, instead of from Inspector Neglio later.
    “Listen, go right ahead and be my guest,” Logue said after I spent a couple of minutes