Dark Maze

revolver, as big and as ugly as the Charter Arms I own and every bit as capable of blowing a hole in a man’s chest the size of a baseball.
    Benny stroked the heavy gun lovingly with his free hand. He smiled and said, “Next time you see your friend Picasso, tell him me and my friend are ready and waiting for him.”

    A man who has got my powers of observation, he naturally learns faster than the ordinary sucker. That’s a fact of life. Ain’t I right?
    Damn straight I am.
    Your peasant, he’s got that dumb flat face of his until he’s about fifty freaking years old. This is because it takes the sucker half a century to wise up to the fact that the rules of the game are crooked, which is way too late.
    So you would think the guy who learns fast like me would stand a much better chance at getting his share, right?
    Wrong, sucker!
    God is a goddamn ironist. He gave the powers of observation to broken-down artists and other kinds of odd socks of the world, then he went and put blinders on everybody else so they could just stupidly concentrate on making themselves happy ever after.
    You ask me, it’s screwy. But since it’s all God’s fault they say it’s divine.
    Well, okay.
    I learned a long time ago I should just bide my time. And I learned how lessons have a way of sneaking up on everybody.
    And here’s one of the biggest lessons I ever learned: no good deed goes unpunished....

THIRTEEN

    I found a pay phone out on the street that was not broken and rang up Central Homicide. It was ten past one and Mogaill had gone home. The desk sergeant referred me to a detective on the overnight shift who was working up the preliminaries on the murder scene at Bellevue.
    “This is Neil Hockaday. I’m catching on the Reiser homicide.”
    “Yeah, I heard. I just typed your name. I’m Hooper. The captain says for me to leave this stuff with Logue for you.“
    “Thanks. I want you to do something else for me, Hooper.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Call up the Coney Island station house in Brooklyn and have them arrange a stake on the Seashore Hotel, on Surf Avenue. All entrances and exits covered, okay? Better watch the roof, too.” I finished with a description of Picasso and what he had been wearing in the park. “The name is Charlie Furman, also known as Picasso.”
    Hooper whistled. “Yeah, Picasso—that’s the guy all over
    the radio news. I hear he clipped two tonight—the doc at Bellevue and a bodega owner on the West Side. Making it a total of three so far, counting the barfly the other day.”
    So it was out and connected, I thought. “Tell Brooklyn I don’t think our boy’s going to be there, but I want a round-the-clock watch until I say otherwise. It’s the best we can do so far with a location fix. Anybody in Brooklyn has a problem with this, tell them to check it out with Inspector Neglio.”
    “Okay,” Hooper said. “That’s it?”
    “Give Brooklyn my home telephone.” I gave the number to Hooper. “I want to be called right away if he shows. I think I can prevent a lot of damage if I’m there for the takedown.”
    And then because I was so tired and, truth to tell, so fuzzy from two murders and four drinks, I flagged a taxi and rode the few blocks home to Forty-third and Tenth. But not before being accosted by an ancient mariner shaking his cup on Broadway; Times Square would not relinquish me so easily that night.
    He was tall and gaunt, with a face that had clearly been handsome in better times; a face that looked like the one in the frame on the dresser in my bedroom, my father’s confident soldier face. The clothes he wore—two checkered shirts, a greasy bush jacket, corduroy trousers frayed at the cuffs, shoes with the heels broken off—were lifeless, as if they had been stripped off dead men. His hair was brown and matted and his eyes were green, one of them rheumy.
    “Young sir,” he said as I stepped away from the pay phone, “you see my predicament.” He shook a paper coffee cup at me and coins clunked inside.
    I reached in my pocket for a quarter.
    “Oh, it’s not your money I want,” he said.
    “What do you want?”
    “I’d like your opinion.”
    “On what?”
    There was a crack of lightning and the air was soon heavy and moist. Then the first drops of a fine spring rain fell.
    “You see before you a beggar man,” he said, rainwater streaking his lined and yellowing face. “Please, young sir, look into my cup and tell me, do you see the beggar’s cup