Dark Maze

picture?”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s my boy.”
    And then I had to leave, ready or not.
    I walked over toward the Midtown North Precinct, which is luckily only a block from my apartment. Lucky because I was wobbly in the knees, exactly the way I had been one fateful May evening when the world was young and I had to pin a gardenia onto a spaghetti strap of Judy McKelvey’s prom dress. I wound up married to Judy McKelvey, but it was not a heaven-made match and we divorced. After all that, I was now merely a big wobbly cop suddenly hit by the warm fact that somebody was waiting for me at home again, and right in the middle of a case of murder, too. As a regular person, at least, I was making progress.

    The desk sergeant obliged my request for a driver by assigning me an auxiliary cop named Liz. Liz was like lots of other female auxiliary cops I have seen: hair done up in a ruthless bun, breasts weirdly flattened by her uniform, plenty of makeup, eager to the point of twitching. It could have been worse; the desk sergeant could have found me a Chuck.
    “Oh, Detective Hockaday!” Liz chirped. “I’ve heard about you.”
    “I didn’t know that.”
    “Well, I have. I’ve heard all about you!” She stared at me like I was some jock come to life off a baseball card. “Where’re we going tonight? Should I wear a vest?”
    “I guess vests are okay, so far as they go,” I said. “But nowadays, you know, the bad guys are mostly shooting headers at cops.”
    Eagerness faded from Liz’s lips. “I never actually realized that.”
    “Not too many people do. And there’s practically no way of protecting yourself against headers, especially now with the bad guys just shoving their semiautomatics right in your face and squeezing off a clip. You never know. But we might be safe for tonight. I only want a lift across town, all right?”
    “Oh. Right. I’ll bring a car around.”
    “That would be nice.”
    Liz did not care to chat with me anymore, which was the idea. So I enjoyed a nice conversation-free ride in her auxiliary patrol car over to the East Side. I used the quiet time to contemplate how somebody would have to conduct himself to elude Bellevue’s crack security staff if he got it into his head to kill his psychiatrist. Which, unless Ronald Reiser was at home in shorts watching television or something—in my haste and dread, I had not bothered to check out—was maybe what recently happened.
    But wait. The last time Picasso showed his face at Bellevue, he assaulted Reiser and they tossed the net over him. Why return now? Because he painted a murderscape? Because he sent me a Polaroid picture of this handiwork in the mail? Did I really expect I would, ipso facto, find death imitating art? Was this line of thinking nuts, or what?
    Or what. I had Liz drop me off three blocks from the Bellevue gate so I could walk in unannounced as a cop. Along the way, I bought a big spray of daisies from a florist shop.
    In the lobby of the psychiatric ward were a few of the same zoned-out patients in wheelchairs I had seen the other day. But instead of a duty nurse, there was a badly undernourished clerk manning an access control desk. He had one pair of hom-rimmed spectacles propped up on top of his bony head and he used another, smaller pair to pore over a crossword puzzle magazine.
    “Say is that the newest issue?” I asked him.
    He jumped and his top pair of glasses slid off. “Huh? Yup, bought it this morning.”
    “I do all the crosswords myself,” I said, which was partly a lie since I only do the puzzles in the Times and the Daily News but never on Sundays.
    “Y’do?”
    “Sure, sure. What’s Q-U-O-C-N-G-U, brother?”
    He slapped the thin blue-white skin of his forehead and said, “Wait a minute now... I know that one. Ah— quocngu... the Vietnamese alphabet!”
    I stuck out a hand. “Put her there, pal. You’re a real tack.” We shook. I tried not to pull off his arm. He waited for me to state my business. And waited. I have found by long experience in the police business that, if I keep my mouth shut when all about me the world is noisy and overly talkative, people I am dealing with become nervous and awkward, and that when they are in such a state it is not so difficult for me to persuade them to do what I want done. Lying also helps.
    “Ah, you’re here to what, visit somebody or something?” he finally asked. “Visiting hours don’t start ’til after they finish the feeding time, you