Dark Maze

he used to live there?”
    I asked myself why a liar like Johnny Halo would need to know. Having no good and immediate answer, I decided for the moment to keep him and Benny at the Horny Poodle strictly separate sources. So I lied, naturally.
    “Medical records,” I said. “Picasso’s address was in the files at Bellevue, in his doctor’s office. The doctor who was murdered.”
    “Oh, yeah,” he said, seemingly satisfied.
    “Exactly what kind of hell did Picasso raise here at the Neptune?”
    “None, really,” Halo said. “He’d be in your occasional shoving match, something like that, but he never pulled none of that wild-man act like he done in so many other places.”
    I asked Halo why.
    “I guess we understood each other,” he said. And then his watery eyes warmed and saddened, until they turned the color of an old frayed blue collar. “We had lots of talks, him and me. I always knew he was crazy, and I always knew some day he’d go off his nut, but I’m telling you, the guy had a way of seeing things real straight and he talked straight, too. There ain’t been a day gone by when I don’t miss the old loon.”
    I stopped Halo. “Did you ever hear him threaten to kill somebody specific?”
    “No, not in so many words. Picasso’d maybe pop some barfly in his puss and there’d be some blood, or else it was the other way around; but that’d be the end of it, so far as I ever seen around here. I ain’t saying Picasso wouldn’t of whacked somebody if he had the chance, I’m only telling you I never personally seen him boil up to that kind of a heat.”
    I said, “He burned down a room over at the hotel, so we know the guy can boil.”
    “Yeah, well, I ain’t defending that or nothing else violent he might of done according to the newspaper,” Halo said. He nodded toward Ruby. “I am only trying to explain how Picasso has unfortunately got one of these pathetic artist’s souls, like she as’t me to.”
    Ruby said, “And you’re doing a fine job of it, Johnny.” Johnny said, “In my book, the man was a great artist and it don’t matter he was nutso.”
    He stopped then. He said he suddenly needed another Dewar’s for one thing. For another, two likewise needy regulars I recognized from my earlier visit came in from the boardwalk—a pair of matted survivors with nowhere else to spend a weekday afternoon besides the Neptune.
    Halo drew them drafts of beer and I heard him say the drinks were courtesy of the house. “Much obliged, Johnny, much obliged,” they said.
    Ruby stared at her drink. I stared at mine, too, and tried to think of something to say. But the pictures in my mind thickened my tongue.
    I saw Picasso’s terrible masterpiece, his Fire and Brimstone tableau of suffering and drowning and waste.
    “Ruby,” I said, taking her arm urgently, “let’s go ride that carousel.“
    “What, now you mean?” She was puzzled by my haste. “Don’t you have more questions here?”
    I had many. Too many for now.
    I looked down the bar and caught Halo’s attention, which was not difficult since he was keeping half an eye on us. I waved him over.
    He walked back to us like a cop walks when he enters a strange room for the first time, body and eyes wary. He said, “So what more can I tell you’s about old Picasso?”
    “Since you don’t know where he is, nothing that’s going to help the cause right now,” I said.
    Then I pulled out the snapshot and put it down on the bar for Halo to see.
    “I would like you to tell me who these people are, Johnny. And it’s only fair I should remind you about how it’s a shame and a sin to tell a lie.”
    He reached into his shirt pocket for a pair of those half-frame glasses that sell for around twelve bucks at pharmacy counters. He slipped them over his ears and glared at me over the tops of the magnifying lenses as he picked up the picture. He put his thumb on Celia’s thighs.
    Halo had turned cocky now. “I will do my best to do my duty and be a good citizen, okay?”
    “It’s good we can depend on public-spirited New Yorkers like you,” I said.
    Halo mumbled and looked down at the snapshot. He turned it a bit and read the blue fountain-pen lettering along one of the crinkled edges: Coney I. , summer, ’54.
    “I see here this is a very old pitcher,” he said. “Where’d you get it anyways?”
    Again I asked myself, Why would Johnny Halo need to know this?
    “Let’s go, Johnny,” Ruby told him. “Just give with the