Dark Maze

in and out of Benito’s, they was like just shapes to me.”
    “Did you see anything unusual?”
    “No, man.” Then Luis smiled. “Except when you come up in that fine black car. That I seen. And then Carolena she starts screaming and everything.”
    The lady upstairs made another appearance on the fire escape. She looked down at me looking up at her, then she looked at Luis. And then she shrieked and ran back inside her apartment.
    “Who’s that?” I asked Luis.
    “My mother, man. I live up there, right over Benito and Carolena’s store. My mother, she don’t speak no English.“
    “Your friends, and your mother—could you ask them who went into the bodega tonight? I need a list of names, as best as I can get. And information on anybody who looked like they don’t belong around here. You know what I mean?”
    “Sure,” Luis said, nodding. “I can ask.”
    I had every confidence that Luis would ask the right questions, and every confidence that any answers would not be particularly helpful. When a killer has an easy job of it—easy in, easy out—the cop’s job is harder at least by half. Nobody notices the easygoing killer; he is invisible, like the public-toilet attendant back in Germany.
    “Luis, do you know the old guy in the beret?”
    “Like, do I know his name?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, I know Benito used to call him Picasso, like the artist Picasso, you know? Benito, he liked the old guy, he tried to help him. But me, I never talked to him.”
    “So, this Picasso, he never gave Benito any trouble?“
    “No, there wasn’t no trouble. I never heard of trouble.“
    “How long had Picasso been painting the windows?”
    Luis thought. “I guess about a year. He just showed up, you know? He wasn’t no skell, but he wasn’t right in the head neither.”
    About a year, I thought. Right about the time I myself moved back to Hell’s Kitchen, the neighborhood of my youth.
    I asked, “Did Picasso ever talk to you?”
    “Well, I used to come downstairs and he’d be painting his chickens and cows and shit on the window. And he’d start saying something. I thought he was talking to me, but then I seen he’s a guy who jabbers to himself, like he thinks there’s somebody right next to him.”
    There was probably nothing more that Luis or anybody else on the scene could tell me so I thanked Luis for his help and said I would look him up in a day or so. He got a little shirty about the anticlimax.
    “Say, what, you got nothing more for me, man?” he asked indignantly. “Helpful types like me, we ought to get rewarded, you know?”
    I looked over in the direction of the barricaded television crews. A boisterous and jostling crowd that I noticed had been swelled by the arrival of newspaper writers and photographers. At front and center of the press mob, I recognized Bill Slattery from the New York Post, and I figured if I ever got to sleep that night I would dream about streamer headlines and cards in hat-bands.
    “You know, Luis, you’re right,” I said. “You really deserve something. Something even better than money.“
    “What?”
    “Your very own fifteen minutes of fame, Luis.”
    Then I clamped a hold on his shoulder and said, “Come on,” yanking him along with me toward the milling press corps. The kleigs fired up and bathed us in mazda light. Trench coats with microphones and notebooks lunged at us. Slattery hollered, “How about a statement!” and then everybody else started yapping for the same until they all looked and sounded like so many hungry, croaking seals at the zoo. So I fed them Luis.
    “This young man has your story,” I said to the press, holding up my hands for a little order and quiet. I said to Luis, “Just tell them what you told me. Here’s your reward, kid, you’re going to be on TV.”
    Then Luis nervously stood there in the television lights in front of all his friends from the neighborhood and told what he knew of the murder in the shop below his own apartment. As I walked away, I could hear the zoom lenses whirring to get their close-ups for tomorrow’s news thrills.
    And I also heard Dr. Reiser’s voice: . . Picasso, my pixilated friend, what makes you the loon you are is that you’re the worst kind of artist there is, the kind that gets ignored. ”
    Picasso would be ignored no longer. In the morning, he would be the tabloid toast of the town.

TWELVE

    Back in the bodega, the widow Carolena had been successfully removed from the body of her