Dark Maze

secretary, maybe.”
    “It strikes me I’d be in line for more money. So what, I should hire a butler out of my pay raise?”
    “Don’t be a hard-ass. I’m trying to help you.”
    “I see. You’re trying to help me see my very big opportunity.”
    “That’s it!”
    “For which I have got to do exactly what?”
    “Use your imagination a little. That’s all I ask.”
    “At my age, maybe the imagination is not all that dependable anymore. Maybe you’ll have to spell this one for me,
    inspector.”
    Neglio was pimping and he knew it, and he knew that I knew it. We have tapped this bogus dance many a time before. Now came the part where I wanted to make him Sw eat because, as I say, I can be irritable. But Neglio kept cool. He adjusted the peaks of the nonfunctional white satin handkerchief poking out from the breast pocket of his jacket.
    “Think what a nice TV picture it would make if the mayor was actually right on the scene, right there when you bust your boy,” he said. “You know how gentle it usually goes down when you finally make the collar, especially when it’s some poor crazed sod of a serial killer.”
    I know that, generally speaking, a murder is more evil than the murderer. There is a famous story that detectives all over the world tell about a German killer named Joachim Kroll, who was thought to be evil incarnate since he had murdered and raped a dozen or so schoolgirls and carried off bits of their little bodies. He turned out to be a quite pleasant, quite absentminded character who could not remember most of his crimes. He worked as a public-toilet attendant. It was hardly necessary, but the German cops used a battering ram to get the drop on the evil one. The monster was in the kitchen of his modest flat, cooking his evening stew—the left hand of his latest victim, a pretty five year old with brown eyes and blonde braids, boiling it in chicken stock with some carrots and noodles. Kroll acknowledged that his taste was somewhat uncommon, but he honestly never knew that eating children for supper was illegal, let alone morally repugnant. He went along quietly with the cops, certain that after medical treatment, they would return him to his flat.
    “True enough, most killers are regular sweethearts when it comes to being arrested,” I said. “I know it, you know it, and the showboat candidates for mayor, they know. Or else somebody clues them in.
    “But the voters don’t know it, do they? They see the mayor on the nightly news clamping the bracelets and leg irons on some sorry psycho after all is said and done by some hard-working cop such as myself and, by God, the leader of our great metropolis is a fearless crime fighter! Now, would that be the nice picture you’re talking about?”
    “If it was good enough for LaGuardia, it’s good enough for this mayor,” Neglio said.
    “Fiorello never had TV around to make himself look atus cheap as the blow-drys in blue suits we’ve got now. Besides which, LaGuardia was a hero. We don’t have heroes today. We have celebrities, on television.”
    Our driver had pulled off the highway, and we were now cutting across West Thirty-sixth toward Tenth Avenue. About midway down the darkened block of squat, grimy tenements and loft buildings, I spotted a street snitch of mine who calls himself Rat. He was standing in the foggy yellow light of a doorway, pushing a needle into his arm. I would have to look up Rat sometime soon, maybe tomorrow; he might know something about Picasso.
    Neglio also spotted Rat, and the general decrepitude of the lower end of my neighborhood. Neglio can also be irritating when the unfortunate differences between us show. He passed a remark up to the driver: “Isn’t it lovely here in Hell’s Kitchen where the high-minded Detective Neil Hockaday lives?”
    The driver looked back at me in the rearview mirror. He gave me a nose laugh.
    I leaned forward and tapped his sharkskin shoulder and said, “Just be a good errand boy now and drop me at Forty-fifth and Tenth, near-left comer. And stop at a drugstore, get something for your nose.”
    “Hey,” he squawked to Neglio, “I don’t got to take that, do I?”
    I said, “Officer Flunky, he speaks!”
    Neglio told us both to shut up. And so I enjoyed nine blocks of peace and quiet.
    As we passed my apartment house at Forty-third, I saw that Ruby had put on the light by the window. I imagined her sitting on the couch with a book, her smooth brown legs curled up under