Dark Maze

as if my head was full of dents. “It’s because of our women’s intuition,” she explained. “You hate us because we always know where things are.”
    “I see.”
    “That’s what you all say.”
    Maybe so, I said to myself. “Let me ask you something now.”
    “Sure.”
    “Do you like the life?”
    “If you mean hooking, honey, it’s like sweet old Coney Island itself. I don’t like it and I don’t dislike it, I’m just used to it.”

    I hurried along to my appointment.
    Naturally, I wondered what lay ahead at the Carny Club. But I was not so preoccupied by this that I could not appreciate the richness of Chastity’s intriguing logic, Jerry’s minor revelations, Johnny Halo’s major evasions and Ruby’s inarguable conclusions about the chances of Picasso’s posterity if the artless fangs of the Prescott organization were to start chewing up Coney Island real estate.
    I was glad, finally, that I had trusted Ruby and myself to this long day’s leg work, that I had not sloughed it off to Logue or anybody else at Central Homicide. I was relieved that I had not wasted my time after all. In a word, I was no longer discouraged.
    Here I had reached that interesting and delicate point in a criminal investigation—the intuitive point—where a detective may rightly feel possessed of all the main elements of a solution, in the legal if not moral sense. All that was needed to be known was there. The facts may not have been fully visible, but they were available just below the surface.
    All that was needed now was time and opportunity to compute dozens of naked, fugitive facts. A good night’s sleep might do this detective’s trick. And I am a believer in dreams that forge sense from senselessness.
    But for one weakness, I was confident as I moved through dark wet streets toward the Carny Club. All my satisfaction in a day’s work well done was based merely on a man’s intuition.
    West Fifth Street , where I walked now, was once backstage to Coney Island.
    Here I remembered seeing machine shops and studios and hangars, and hearing their noises, day and night. Giant roller coasters were fabricated and assembled here on West Fifth. Carousel horses were carved from tree trunks by proud craftsmen who added conceits to their work such as a black cat coiled beneath a saddle. Great chains of light bulbs were strung together on this street, sketching a summer’s boardwalk night in electric flame, such as Í will never forget from my childhood.
    Here, flats were painted for Astroland attractions. Here was where Charlie Furman began to nurse his grudges. And rightly so.
    Now the street was devoid of light and sound. The buildings were black from fire or else abandoned, the dwelling places of squatters and vermin.
    In the lanes off West Fifth were clapboard tenements and low cramped row houses where hundreds of Brooklyn workers had once lived and raised families. Now they were warrens for classes of the unemployed who did not burden the government so long as the government did not burden them.
    I looked at the handbill that Big Stuff had given me, checked the West Fifth Street address he had written out on the back. Two more doors, then I was there.
    My spirits lifted again when I heard a bit of music floating out the door of a low, boarded-up shop. It was the unlikely sound of the Benny Goodman orchestra, swinging with “Mama, That Man Is Here Again” as I knocked and waited.
    Then the music died.
    “What is it?” a woman’s voice said from the other side of the door.
    “I’m looking for the Carny Club,” I said.
    “Who’s looking?”
    “The name is Neil Hockaday.”
    I heard feet shuffling, then excited voices. Then the door opened a crack.
    There appeared in the crack the heavyset face of a young woman vaguely familiar to me. She might have been thirty or thirty-two, thereabouts, but excess weight aged her. She had pink skin, a wide nose over a small mouth wet with red lipstick and a pile of curly hair the color of scrambled eggs. Her eyes were brown, embellished with so much liner and mascara it appeared she might have mashed two chocolate cupcakes in her face.
    She looked me up and down in a matter-of-fact way and asked, “You the cop?”
    I showed her my shield.
    Most people do not actually look closely at a police shield. They notice the shape of it, whether it is a star or not; they see the beveled outline of it; they see that it is either silver or gold, but never ask the difference. This