Dark Maze

Then guess what happened?”
    “I don’t want to guess.”
    “Then I’ll tell you. They made me captain.”
    “And then?”
    “Then I even started forgetting the numbers. One day I realized that everybody was zero to me, and that so far as I’m concerned, zero isn’t a real number. So now you see what kind of a cop I have become, Hock—the guy in charge of homicide in a homicidal town, the guy in charge of all the zeroes.”
    “Which does not strike you as poetical?”
    “Not bloody particularly.”
    Mogaill turned heavily to leave. “For old days’ sake, we should have a jar together sometime.”
    “I wish you good luck, Davy.”
    “The same for yourself, Hock.”
    I returned to Logue’s tiny office and sat down to think, but I did not progress too far. Five minutes later, there was Logue seated at his desk opposite me and riffling through the clutter of paper and telling me the reason why he was so happy to be with me at Central Homicide instead of in his warm house in the Bronx. The reason was not poetical.
    “My wife, she’s got it in her bonnet that we got to improve ourselves by listening to opera on the radio when we sit down to eat dinner,” Logue said.
    “That’s rough.”
    “You’re telling me. I am trying to enjoy my pork chops and hot applesauce and scalloped potatoes and, my wife, she’s explaining to me how this unlucky gang of Ethiopian prisoners on a forced march in front of this Pharaoh; then about this babe called Aida, who is a slave girl but actually she’s the Ethiopians’ princess.... Oh, and it just goes on and on like that forever, Hock. And everybody’s singing in dago. Like the wife, she suddenly understands dago, right?”
    I pictured Ruby and me at a table with pork chops for dinner and opera on the radio. This picture did not look so bad to me, even though I do not understand Italian.
    “Well, I’m sorry for your troubles,” I said.
    “Thanks.” Logue finally came up with the papers he was looking for. “Okay, so what’s new with our boy Charlie Furman, Picasso?”
    I quickly filled in Logue about the murder of Dr. Reiser, and the relationship between Picasso and the psychiatrist. Also I showed Logue the Polaroid that Picasso had sent me.
    “Holy flying crap!” Logue said. “Old Charlie’s really branched out from knocking off his wife, hey?”
    “It looks that way.”
    “Anything else I should know, in case somebody asks me?”
    Since he asked, I told Logue how it all began for me, about the picture, the dark maze, Coney Island. I told Logue all this mostly so I could say it to myself all over again.
    “The Fire and Brimstone,” I said, “you would have to see to believe.”
    “I seen that Coney Island stuff before. I don’t know from art, but I know a bugged artist. They sure went and hired some beauts to paint up Coney, didn’t they?”
    “Yeah, they sure did.” I do not know why, but I left out my encounter with Johnny Halo and Big Stuff at the Neptune and the transparency of their lies when I asked them if they knew Charlie or Celia Furman. Neither did I tell Logue about the old black-and-white snapshot of Celia when she was young and beautiful and high-spirited, and walking the Coney Island boardwalk back in ’54 on the arms of two men.
    “So you’re out chasing a bugged artist, Hock. You’re going to need help. I don’t mind helping.”
    I was surprised. “You told me yourself this was strictly nine-to-five, Logue. Besides which, the word on you is that you’re putting in for pension any day now.”
    “Hey, you never changed your mind? And who says I’m strapping on the parachute anyways?”
    “What does it matter?”
    Logue pulled on his square chin. “The way it looks to me, retirement’s going to mean hanging around the house trying to survive the wife’s ideas on how we got to enrich our lives—like her freaking opera. I am therefore seeing retirement in a whole new light.”
    I am fond of honestly stated motives, and I could use extra legs. “All right, Logue. Here’s what I need: I want you to run down everything you can on Celia Furman, her life and her loves and all like that. It ought to be easier getting a profile on her than on Charlie.”
    Logue started making notes on a pad.
    “Remember back at the Ebb Tide the other day, you said you thought Celia was off-balance?” I asked him.
    “Yeah, off-balance from the gambling rackets, which is where Angelo says she came out of.”
    “There’s also the IRS