Dark Maze

echo from someplace .... “A cop, he’ll listen to anybody. ”
    Celia said, “One rainy day there’s this little man at my door. He’s wearing cheap corduroy and he’s carrying a portable adding machine and says he’s from the IRS. I ring up my lawyer. For all the money he’s making off me, my lawyer says I have no choice about seeing the little man— who doesn’t look so scary, but who it turns out is a guy who eats his young.”
    “Well,” I said, “it’s their nature.”
    “You’re telling me!” There was a sad catch in Celia’s voice. She turned from me and looked straight ahead at the mirror on the other side of the bar.
    I asked Angelo for another red and ale. He brought this, and also set down a fresh cup of milk for Celia and took away what had been there. Celia only ignored him. She stubbed out her Chesterfield, lit up another, and continued to stare at her reflected image.
    And then I looked at her face in the mirror, too. And saw the tears and how her makeup was melting down her cheeks, how her face began to resemble a cake caught outdoors in the rain.
    Celia searched through her pocketbook, found a cosmetics case and became intensely busy with it. Nobody said anything. The only noise now was Angelo clinking his glasses and, way back in the rear dining room, waiters setting up tables. 1
    And then the Ebb Tide started filling with the first wave of the luncheon trade. Some neighborhood sorts passed through the bar on their way to the dining room—the guy who runs my delicatessen, along with somebody who was not his wife; my dry cleaner; a couple of the barbers from the shop across the way called Three Aces.
    I looked up at Picasso’s painting again, remembering how ' I wanted to ask about it. But Angelo was now occupied with some customers down at the far end of the bar and Celia was daubing at her eyes, so I got off my barstool and walked over to Angelo and said, “I’ll be back later.”
    “Okay,” Angelo said. “Only do yourself a favor and come after seven, you know? We get the bad crowd from five until about then.”
    “What bad crowd?” a
    “The type who during the day market software and leverage buyouts and who want to be twelve-year-olds at night.”
    So I told Angelo I would skip happy hour. And I said to the feather in Celia’s hat, “Maybe I’ll see you around again, and I’m sorry for your troubles....” 8
    “Yeah, later,” she said. But she did not look up.
    On my walk home from the Ebb Tide, I did a couple of errands. I picked up shirts from my Chinese laundry, because there are some occasions in my life when I wear something with starch and a necktie. I also picked up a fresh copy of the Times since I left one back in the park. And I also wrote out a check to my liquor store for some Perrier-Jouët in the flowered bottle since I do not carry around a lot of cash in neighborhoods like mine and since I wanted something nice on ice, in hopes of my dinner date that evening with Ruby Flagg extending on to dessert and so forth at my place.
    When I got home, I listened to jazz on WBGO-FM while I did some things around the place to see if it might make a difference in appearance, which mostly it did not. I ate a sandwich. This and the housework made me drowsy and so I stretched out on the couch under the parlor window and fell asleep with a dustrag in my hand.
    For quite a while, I was gone. I woke once to use the toilet and then I dozed some more on the couch, convinced that my energies would be more productively spent on beauty sleep than in any further efforts to tidy up my poor old apartment.
    Then somewhere around five o’clock, when the twelve-year-olds would be flocking into the Ebb Tide, there was a lot of noise outside from all the Jersey-bound motorists honking themselves silly on their way to the Lincoln Tbnnel.
    Then the telephone call, and Angelo’s summons.
    That was about half-past five.
    I ran all the way to the Ebb Tide, six blocks from my place on West Forty-third Street and Tenth Avenue (as in Slaughter on...“.).

THREE

    When I saw Celia lying there with a bullet in her neck, I was sadly unsurprised. And from the expression on her face, I would guess that Celia felt about the same the last time she felt anything.
    She was a lanky crumple of green against the scuffed oak floor. There was yellow chalk outlining her body and a dime-size blot of red at her throat. Her slim dead legs were encased in the kind of hosiery women used to wear, with