Dark Maze

husband; a cop was holding her, smoothing her hair and saying, “Take it easy now,” as if he was stroking his own mother’s head at a funeral.
    Sergeant Walsh tapped my shoulder. “I seen you had your hands full out there with the press and all, so I went ahead and called out Central Homicide for you.”
    “Thanks,” I said. Then I went into the back room and out into the courtyard and through an adjoining tenement building to the side street.
    I found a telephone out of sight of the press conference and called Mogaill.
    “Jaysus, Hock,” he said, “but you’ve got yourself an industrious murderer, hey?”
    “Easy goes it this time.”
    “How so?”
    “No signs of resistance, and it’s a slow night. The killer walks in, whacks the victim with a shank, and walks out.”
    “Nobody sees nothing, am I right?”
    It was like the others, like Celia Furman and Dr. Reiser. Easy going. “There was nothing to see,” I said.
    “In other words, another zero for my vast files.”
    “Well, your guys will be wanting to ask their questions even so, and I’ve got mine, and maybe this time there’ll be answers that add up past zero.” I heard the sound of a bottle clinking glass on Mogaill’s end of the line. “I’ll check with Logue tomorrow to see what comes of the team report.“
    “If anything, hey?” Mogaill said. I rang off with him and crossed Tenth Avenue walking quickly, heading east toward Times Square and the Horny Poodle where I could buy myself a badly needed Scotch and maybe turn up a link in the chain of events that had embezzled my furlough.
    I glanced over my shoulder. Luis was still performing for the reporters and his friends.

    Times Square on a clement April midnight usually gives me a fair idea of the tone of summer to come. Early April is that time of year when an army of grifters, pross, dips, beggars, cons, muggers, pushers, lunatics and religionists begin to establish their territories in anticipation of summer’s high season at the crossroads of the world.
    I spend a lot of duty hours in Times Square during the summer, which if my mother were alive would fill her not with pride for the many crimes I prevent but with sorrow for the fact that I have not traveled far in life.
    When I was a kid growing up in Hell’s Kitchen with my mother because it was one place where our kind of Irish were welcome to live, the nearby streets of Times Square were genteel by today’s scabid standards. Yet still they were a forbidden world to the parochial likes of me, who wore his knickers and neckties to school every day and recited his catechism without needing the old nuns’ sweet-voiced threats of eternal damnation and who sang soprano in the Holy Cross boys’ choir during all three masses each Sunday morning. Naturally, I spent all free hours possible exactly where I would most greatly disappoint my mother.
    In those days, heaven was located at the corner of Forty-second and Eighth and it was contained in the fabulous walls of Hubert’s Museum and Flea Circus. With money I made shining shoes outside the library over on Fifth Avenue, I played Skee-Ball and pinball at Hubert’s, and shot war-surplus .22 rifles at wooden ducks in a gallery and marveled at the Great Waldo, who ate live mice. I felt sorry for the retired sports heroes reduced to talking to children for their dimes. And I wondered mightily at the knowledge that would one day be mine, when I was old enough to buy a ticket to the special show on the side stage, where I could learn with the sailors the hidden secrets of sex, right there at Hubert’s courtesy of the “French Academy of Medicine, Paris, France.”
    There were dance halls like the Varsity and the Satin Ballroom and the Tango Palace, where meek little guys in suits met would-be actresses and danced with them to the music of six-piece bands. The Tango was where Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford started out in New York.
    Mobsters hung out at the Royal Roost and Zanzibar’s and some, like my favorite, Frank Costello, still wore spats. Other customers came to gawk at the hoods. My friends and I used to watch them coming and going in their big cars.
    And there was Birdland, where Charlie Parker played until he died from too much heroin and not enough understanding. There were all-night movies, too, at the Forty-second Street houses where they had premiered, with the stars rolling up in their limousines in front of newsreel cameras.
    Somehow the lights were brighter, the