Dark Maze

half-empty, or half-full?”
    I gave him the quarter I held, and a five-dollar bill besides. “Sorry, old man. I’ve got nothing I can tell you but God bless.”
    Then I climbed into the back of a yellow cab and rode through the thundery light. The cheap flashing of Times Square shone outside my spattered window. For a few moments in the private darkness of a taxi, I mourned old lost men.

    Ruby was asleep in my bed.
    Out in the parlor, she had set out a plate for me: a doughnut, two aspirins and a glass of warming milk. There was also a spray of daisies in a glass of water.
    I took a towel from the bathroom and dried my head and face from the rain while I sat in the green chair. I dialed information and asked for the number of the Seashore Hotel.
    After nine rings, a voice from Brooklyn rasped, “Sea-shoa.”
    “Charlie Furman’s room, please.”
    “Who?”
    “Picasso.”
    “What’s this, some kind of a gag?”
    “No—don’t hang up.”
    There was a pause. “Who the hell is this calling anyways?”
    “Detective Neil Hockaday, New York Police. I’m looking for a guest there by the name of Charles Furman, alias Picasso.”
    “If you mean that old carny painter, you’re way too late, mister. He ain’t been here for all of a year.”
    That was about what I expected.
    The voice from Brooklyn added, “We had to put him out after he wouldn’t pay his rent no more.”
    “Do you know where he went?”
    “You kidding? People here don’t leave no forwarding addresses. Besides which, we looked all over Coney for the bastard since he burnt up his room before he went. I like to burnt him up if I ever catch him!”
    “All right, thanks anyway,” I said. I decided for the time being to keep the surveillance detail on the Seashore.
    That final bit of the day’s business completed, I undressed and climbed into bed with Ruby. Which seemed as right and natural as if my nights had been thus complete for many years. She awoke, only just slightly startled by the new surroundings; she nestled against me and said thickly, “I’m glad you’re finally home, Hock. Let’s hear all about it tomorrow.”
    So warm she was beside me, making her soft slumbering sounds. I touched her bare shoulder and it occurred to me that even Picasso had once in his life known such goodness, and that maybe I was merely a luckier man than he. I draped an arm over Ruby’s slender waist and lay restless for an hour, waiting for my cop dreams to come. The visions of the day’s blood faded, and I felt myself drifting finally into the safe harbor of sleep in my own house.
    Then I fell.
    And that night, Picasso and the beggar man and a card in a hatband creeped my dreams.

    We occupied the last booth of the window side of the spoon across the way, Pete Pitsikoulis’ All-Night Eats & World’s Best Coffee. Pete himself was in the kitchen cooking our breakfast.
    Wanda the waitress had brought black coffee for me, which truthfully was not the world’s best, and herbal tea for Ruby, along with ice water and good, fresh country-style orange juice for two—the kind of honest orange juice that has been muscled clean out of America’s countryside by the Tropicana cartel. Spread across our formica-top table were the late morning finals of the Post and Daily News. I had not bothered picking up Newsday or the Times, which in their different ways are practically out-of-town papers. There was also the notebook I had finally remembered to begin.
    We sipped, and read for a while. I, the Daily News and Ruby the Post.
    When Ruby finished, she said, “Now, isn’t this very instructive for me? An actor will sit up at Sardi’s after the big show waiting for reviews of the play, whereas a cop hangs out in a Greek coffee shop to study how tabloids play the big murder case.”
    I suggested, “It’s theatre all the same, isn’t it? A good reporter knows that New York crime has what it takes to charm an audience: comedy, drama and tragedy—all without rehearsals.”
    “And the play’s the thing?”
    “Sure, so long as the terrible story up on the stage has no real effect on the storyteller.”
    “How cynical,” Ruby said.
    “Not at all. It’s the way the newspaper business has of encouraging exceptional reporters to quit scribbling facts and eventually move on to the truth of fiction.”
    We traded papers.
    The Daily News account of New York City’s latest multiple murder spree had been suitably punchy and mostly accurate, so far as it went. But