Dark Maze

waiting for me to say something. Freddy grinned back.
    I pulled Stanley’s cigarette out from my shirt pocket. “I wouldn’t want to stink up Ron’s office.”
    “Naw, I wouldn’t neither. People’re pretty snorty about that these days.” Freddy jangled the impressive batch of keys clamped to his belt. “You gotta come with me and I’ll take you down t’the staff smokers’ lounge.”
    As we walked down a corridor, I asked, “You keep the smoking lounge locked up, too?”
    “Hell, yes, Doc. We’re tighter’n a drum around here. Gotta be. In case you ain’t noticed, this floor’s crawlin’ with loons who’d kill you if they got half the chance.”
    “Nothing gets by you security guys, right, Freddy?“
    “Very little, my friend.”
    I stopped when I spotted the sign that read to roof. And I said to Freddy, “It’s such a nice night, maybe I should go up there to have my smoke.”
    “Sure, go on. That door’s open.”
    “It is?”
    Freddy sighed. “Yeah, Doc Reiser, he’s forever goin’ up there to his tomatoes and he can’t never remember to use the right key, so one day when he’s usin’ the wrong one he goes and breaks it off in the slot and t’make a long story short we hadda bust off the whole damn lock to make the door open up and shut normal and we ain’t fixed the situation yet.”
    “How long has the lock been broken on this door?”
    “I guess a month, thereabouts.”
    “A month and you can’t get a locksmith up here?”
    “Hey, Doc, this is New York. You get a maintenance man inside of a year, it’s a rush job.”
    “I see what you mean.” I put my hand on the broken lock. “Earlier tonight, I hear you were looking for Dr. Reiser. Did you look up on the roof?”
    Freddy’s face was quizzical, like he was an infant on the verge of soiling his diaper. “No, man. I didn’t think of that.“
    “Let’s go take a look now, Freddy.”

    Sure, I told her plenty of times. Plenty! Damn straight I did.
    I even told her what it says right there in the Holy goddamn I Bible, black on white, where it says, "I will betroth thee unto ' me forever; yea, I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness, I and in judgement, and in loving kindness, and in mercies. ” Women — haw! Oh, they really got their hooks into every goddamn thing there is, don’t they? Ain’t I telling the truth? Did you know there’s more women than anything else on Earth, except insects?
    Damn straight.
    I know that sounds buggy. Well, all right. I’m a crazy freaking bedbug and I ain ’t never claimed otherwise. That’s I how come I seen all them headshrinkers for so long, okay? But, hey, no more of that!
    You think I ever got a ounce of sympathy from that crowd? Even when I told them about her? Even when I showed how you can’t count on the Holy goddamn Bible no more? Haw!
    This one shrinker, though... he listened to me hard. Hard like a cop listens. This one, he was sneaky like that.
    He thinks he’s so funny. This one, he thinks laughing’s going to do me good. Once he says to me, "Life’s a zoo inside of a jungle. ”
    How about that? Well, that I got to laugh at.
    But laughing, what good’s that going to do for us crazy freaking bedbugs?
    That’s what I’m telling you about shrinkers: they ought to know better and they say they know better. But they don’t. Not even when it comes to laughs.
    Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry, and they really start laughing.
    ----

NINE

    Freddy had to be sick.
    I asked him if he could wait until I had the chance to take him back downstairs. But instead of answering he covered up his mouth with both hands and ballooned his cheeks and flapped his elbows and hopped up and down, which made all the keys on his belt jangle.
    I told him to please go toss it over by the steam generators and vents on the opposite end of the roof. Otherwise, he would seriously contaminate the crime scene where Dr. Reiser reposed, gut side down among his prize tomato vines, with a foot-long butcher knife sunk nearly all the way into his back along the middle seam of his blood-streaked lab coat.
    Strictly by the book, a cop who happens on a murdered corpse is supposed to right away call out a forensics squad and enough uniforms to rope off the general vicinity and discourage a crowd of lawyers and gawkers from gathering; then Central Homicide, which is supposed to contact the D.A.’s office, which in turn is supposed to ring up the Medical Examiner at the morgue, which in the