Dark Maze

he went and who cares?’ Tell him I care.” Big Stuff took a pencil out from under his sailor cap and a handbill from his bag. He wrote down an address on the back of the handbill.
    “Let’s see that fifty bucks again,” he said.
    I gave him the fifty and he gave me the handbill.
    “You come by there at seven,” he said. “There ain’t any name on the door. But when somebody answers, say you’re looking for the Caray Club. I’ll be waiting.”
    “I’ll be there,” I said.
    Big Stuff left us. He crossed in front of the stage on his stumpy legs, shifted his newspaper bag to his other shoulder and then walked out the door, back to the boardwalk and the gray rain.
    Waldo took his place on stage.
    He held up a mouse by its tail—a quivering, red-eyed white mouse who did not look to be a willing trouper.
    The drummer in the shadows went into a roll.
    And Waldo brought down the house.
    There was no question Waldo swallowed the mouse. We saw it go down, we heard the mouse complain, then we saw its damp and frenzied reentry.

FIFTEEN

    F or the next few hours, Ruby and I hiked up and down the boardwalk. The storm had rolled safely by and the sun was making a comeback, but the air was still wet. Rainbow arcs shimmered around stone seawalls down on the rain-streaked beach. As the day progressed, the boardwalk filled with neighborhood people. Young couples speaking Spanish or Russian pushed baby strollers; widow ladies still bundled in winter woolens gathering on benches in the sun to gossip and smoke; teenagers returning home from school.
    I asked concessionaires and anybody else who looked local if they knew Charlie Furman, a/k/a/ Picasso. Everybody looked at me like I was a cop. Mainly, I learned that in Coney Island a question from an outsider is usually answered with another question: usually, “So who wants to know?”
    When I did manage to get actual answers, they only confirmed what I already knew or could easily deduce: Picasso was an itinerant carny painter with a murky past, at best. He left Coney about a year ago when times went so bad
    he was put out of his room at the Seashore. He was an elusive, troublesome, quarrelsome sort who had no friends anybody could recall, save an imaginary sidekick he was forever chattering to. He was a brooder who had some intelligent observations to make if you cared to listen between the screeds, and he probably took his art too seriously.
    The locals knew far less about Picasso than I did, and they knew him as a far simpler quantity. At least from Logue I knew some of Picasso’s complexities: I knew he had served his country in war and that he had ringing in his ears as the result of action he saw; I knew about his five failed years in Detroit after the war, I knew that his wife, Celia, had known trouble with the IRS.
    But what of it?
    I showed around the snapshot, too. Nobody could identify anyone in it but Picasso himself.
    For all the information I was unearthing, I told Ruby, I might as well have relied on some leg cops from Central Homicide to canvass the boardwalk. The reason I was doing my own routine nosing around, I told her, was because what few things I might absorb from this trip to Coney Island were bound to be more useful than the turgid facts accumulating for me back in Manhattan, thanks to Logue and Mogaill and company: the forensics reports, the weapons checks, the rap sheet backgrounds.
    So here was I in the thick of it, the place I had claimed as rightly mine. Neil Hockaday on the case, the cop who had nobly sacrificed his own furlough and become the specially appointed hope of fear-plagued New York City, birthplace of the killing spree. Here was I, getting nowhere slow.
    “In a word, I’m discouraged,” I complained to Ruby, who was not sympathetically moved.
    “My feet are pooped,” she declared.
    Ruby treated for vinegar-soaked French fries in paper cones, a can of Molson for me and Barq’s vanilla cream soda for herself. We sat on a bench facing the sea and watched the ocean churn up the sand.
    “Not so long ago, I was a skinny sunburnt kid out there on that beach,” I said. “The priests would bring us choirboys out here for a day of fresh salt air, and we’d always have a contest to see who could snatch the brightest shells that washed up on shore.”
    “Did you win?” Ruby asked.
    “If there was ever a day I won, I don’t remember it now. I was a hopeless case. The shells would come flying up to shore in the breakers and I