Dark Maze

business.”
    “Oh, yeah, them government accountants keep very good tabs I can check out.”
    “That’s the idea,” I said. “Something to give us a hook. I didn’t find any hooks or much of anything else on her husband.”
    “You think I did?”
    “I was hoping.”
    Logue picked up a piece of paper on which he had earlier scratched some notes.
    “I wish I could say I found out a whole lot,” he said. “But, really, to judge him by the record, the life of Picasso don’t add up to much.”
    “It ain’t your fault you don’t know me. I ain't made much of a mark in this life. ”
    “Just tell me what you have.”
    Logue put on a pair of half-frame reading glasses and consulted his notes. “There’s a birth certificate from a small town in Kentucky called Payne, which figures. And then Pfc. Charles Bernard Furman got an honorable discharge from the Army in September of 1945. Sometime right after that, he winds up in Detroit.”
    Logue looked at me over the tops of his glasses and said, “Detroit is where I’m getting this stuff, by the way. There’s nothing on him here in New York.”
    “Yeah, I know.”
    “Anyhow,” Logue said, continuing, “the local V.A. hospital out in Detroit says Charlie had ringing in his ears and came in for treatment a few times, but they couldn’t do nothing to help him.”
    Logue read a little further. “Oh, and there’s papers at the welfare department that says once he needed help feeding his family, which was him and his pregnant wife, Celia.“
    “What about work?”
    “The guy never had a payroll job. Can you believe it? And Detroit being a boom town after the war and all? Anyhow, the welfare office out there says he used to sell little pictures he painted, at fairs and such. That’s all anybody knows about a job. Charlie was not a big provider.”
    „...As a husband and a papa, I was a lousy flop.”
    Logue dropped the notes from his hands and said, “So that gets us to Charlie Furman in the year 1950.”
    “And then?”
    “End of story.”
    “That’s it?”
    “Unless you know something I don’t know.”
    “No,” I said. Not about Charlie Furman’s life anyway. “Strange, ain’t it? I never ran across anybody who dropped clear off the page like this guy did. It’s like one year in the prime of his life, the record just stopped on Charlie Furman.”
    “Like he stopped living.”
    “That’s it, like he just stopped.”
    And at that moment, I did what I do every day. Which is to have a passing thought of a man I never met. He is a photograph in a picture frame on top of the dresser in my bedroom. I have had dreams about him all my life. But in the dreams, he never makes it out of that picture frame; in my dreams, the frame sometimes has two legs and soldier’s boots, and the photograph is marching through a battlefield. “I know a guy like that,” I said.
    “Who?”
    “My old man.”

TEN

    Logue yawned, loud and wet. “Fathers and sons, now there’s a long freaking story. I lay you ten to one, somebody’s already made an opera out of it.”
    I appreciated now my instinct to hold back on Logue. Maybe I was right; maybe he was one of those steak-and-potatoes detectives, best left unburdened by the idea of the big picture of a case. Give the man a specific investigative task—his own personal meat—and he becomes a competent bloodhound. So okay. Logue would handle the ancient history part of Celia Furman’s life. The rest of it was mine, including all surrealistic thoughts of pictures coming to life. “I think we’re finished here,” I said.
    Logue yawned again. “Great. Me, I’m for the sack and watching Johnny between my toes. How about yourself?” Logue had his own Buick parked outside and said he would not mind giving me a lift home.
    I looked at my watch.
    “It’s not so late,” I said. “I can still check out a couple of things.”
    “Like what?“
    “Two places where Charlie Furman had jobs—Í mean besides the artwork out in Coney Island, which can wait until tomorrow.”
    “And here I thought you had zip on him.”
    “I remember him telling me about these jobs he sometimes does. Chump jobs, nothing payroll.”
    “Oh, of course not. This guy he don’t put nothing down on paper but paint.”
    “Seems that way.”
    “What’re these little jobs of work anyways?”
    We got up to leave Central Homicide and as we walked the corridor I told Logue, “Picasso does windows for this bodega in my neighborhood. You