Dark Maze

for the tapes and booklets so you can wind up a millionaire and you don’t have to spend your nights in front of a TV set worrying about the bills you can’t pay.” I laughed at my joke. Neglio and the shiny suit did not.
    “Let’s just say that here we have in our hands a class-A psycho on his warpath. Plus we have got ourselves a brand-new mayor, right? And you know how brand-new mayors
    99
    are.
    “No, how are they, Inspector?”
    “Still full of themselves and their campaign slogans. Just for one thing, they’re still believing all that tough-talking crap on the subject of crime in the streets.”
    “Our new mayor, he’s against crime?”
    This won a tight smile from Neglio, and: “Come, come, Detective Hockaday. We must all do our bit in trying to take these people in high office seriously. Next you’ll be telling me you don’t vote.”
    “Most of us got the message a long time ago. Which is why we would never spoil a perfectly good election day by going out to the polls.”
    “How old are you now, Hock?”
    “Somewhere in the middle.”
    “And looking every day of it, too.”
    “I don’t mind,” I lied.
    “No, not now you don’t. But then, you’re not the thrifty type. So you’d better listen: my advice to a man of your age and ability who is stuck at the rank where you have been stuck for so many years is that one day you ought to get
    smart—”
    I interrupted, with the truth this time. “I don’t mind being stuck.”
    Neglio was exasperated. “One day, you maybe should warm up to the people who can do you some good in the end.”
    “That sounds painful.”
    He told me to shut up.
    Which I gratefully did since I get irritable when Neglio’s conversation veers toward his confidentialities with people in high office. I do not like hearing him on the topic of how he leans on such people, no more than he might enjoy learning how I sometimes lean on my lowly snitches. To my way of thinking, shutting up sometimes is a good thing; this is how cops from two different worlds may live in friendship and relative respect.
    Neglio handed back the Polaroid and I put it away in my jacket. He switched off the limousine lamp. The young cop up front switched on the radio to all-news WINS and, among other current events of note, we heard the latest on the “Bellevue Slasher,” who murdered a prominent shrink right on the rooftop of the city’s best-known hospital. We also heard a tandem item on the “Happy Hour Shooter,” who the other day had snuffed an obscure lady barfly on an unfashionable block of Ninth Avenue.
    The public intelligence was not much beyond clever taglines and an echo-chamber hype of the plain and lurid facts of the cases, each labeled as bold and chilling and, of course, senseless. But there was no real connection made between the two homicides; not yet, anyway. In a day or two at most, the important people would get edgy, and they would lean on those for whom they had done so much good.
    We passed the old West Side piers in the lower Village where transvestite pross go to entice middle-aged sports out in their station wagons looking for a good time. We passed the Holland Tunnel approaches where teenagers from Jersey come cruising for roxie and China white. We passed the joints along Twelfth Avenue, nameless save for white X’s painted on dingy doors, where the bored and the depraved come in search of one another.
    It was a few blocks past the ghostly pale night-lights of the glass-walled Javits Convention Center when Neglio finally broke our suffocating silence.
    “All I am saying,” he said, cupping his mouth confiden tiality with a hand, “is that under the political circumstances it would not hurt either of us if a brand-new mayor, you know, sort of had a hand in this investigation. Follow me?”
    I looked at Neglio’s well-cut tuxedo. “Go back to your party. Tell the mayor I’ll be chasing this killer as fast as I can.”
    “There’s a drift here, Hock. But you don’t seem to be catching it.”
    Oh, but I caught it indeed. Political circumstances. I thought then of Davy Mogaill and how heavily he walked these days; how he missed Nugent’s so badly, how I was still free to drink at that dear old dive. And so I did not care to leap into Neglio’s drift.
    Neglio sighed, impatient with me. “You know I would bang all the right drums for you, Hock. You know that! How does a post at headquarters strike you, at the rank of detective-sergeant? Your own