Dark Maze

one with the cupcake eyes was different; she inspected my gold shield closely, so closely she read off the name and badge number.
    “Detective Hockaday, 4321,” she said. “Okay, Hockaday, let’s see your guns.”
    “I don’t—”
    She interrupted with, “If you want in, you have to check the hardware. Nothing personal, just house rules.”
    “I’m looking for a dwarf named Big Stuff,” I said. “Tell him to come here.”
    “Let’s see the guns.”
    “I can get a warrant.”
    “You do that.” She started to close the door.
    “All right, all right,” I said. “I’ll take your drill. Let me in.”
    A man’s voice behind her said, “Go on. He can show us once he’s through the door.”
    The music started up again and I stepped into a foyer fashioned out of plywood walls. The man behind her turned out to be Waldo, the professional regurgitator. He was holding a drink that looked to be rum and coke.
    “I seen you earlier, out on the boardwalk,” Waldo said pleasantly. “You was with that very good-looking black lady. Where’d she go?”
    “She went home.”
    “Tough luck,” Waldo said. He pointed a thumb at cupcake eyes and said, “This here’s Evie. You got to show her what you’re carrying.”
    I opened my windbreaker and pulled the .38 out from the holster and emptied the magazine, then gave it to Evie after putting the bullets in my pants pocket. “Where are you going to check it?” I asked.
    There was a cabinet on one of the plywood walls and Evie opened up its padlock and put it on a shelf. She said, “You carrying anything else?”
    I had a .22 Beretta pistol strapped on my ankle and debated with myself over the pros and cons of an honest response. Noticing that the cabinet was full of sidearms, my decision tilted toward honesty. I unstrapped the Beretta and gave it to Evie. She put it up on the shelf with my .38, closed the cabinet and locked it.
    “Okay, come on in,” Waldo said.
    I followed Waldo and Evie through the foyer into a single large room full of chairs and low tables with dim lights on top, and drinks and ashtrays. I saw the boardwalk barker at one of the tables. He had his hand on the nice-looking knee of Sparkle the snake charmer and she was laughing. I did not see her python.
    The Benny Goodman tunes were coming from a big floor model Atwater-Kent radio like my mother used to have. This was next to a bar along the back wall, tended by the small dark man from the B&B Carousell; when I recognized him, he nodded at me the way he had when Ruby and I Passed him all those times going round and around.
    Four guys were playing cards at a large table in the comer. There were poker chips piled up in front of them and they all smoked cigars. A couple of women played mah-jongg in another corner table. Everybody else was scattered around drinking and talking.
    I felt something on my leg.
    “Welcome to the Carny Club.”
    The voice belonged to Big Stuff, who had come up behind me and pulled my pant leg. He had changed out of his white jumpsuit and now wore a blue blazer and a purple necktie. I noticed how everybody else was dressed for a nightclub and felt suddenly a little sloppy.
    “You have quite a way of sneaking up on a guy,” I said to Big Stuff, looking down at him.
    “I’m not walking around at your eye level,” he said. Then, “You’re a little late, but I guess prob’ly you had trouble finding us.”
    “All the street lamps are out,” I said.
    Waldo explained, “The crews that push all the crack around this neighborhood, they shoot them out. The city’s about given up trying to replace the lights.”
    “Say, you want a drink?” Big Stuff asked.
    I asked for a Johnnie Walker red in a big glass with a few ice cubes, and Evie went off to the bar to get it.
    “Come on over here and we’ll start talking,” said Big Stuff.
    Waldo and Big Stuff and I sat on three chairs out of four that were circled around a beat-up coffee table. The other chair was for Evie.
    “First I should tell you, Hockaday, that this here’s an unlicensed social club which I am going to assume you don’t care nothing about seeing as how you’re after bigger crimes,” Big Stuff said. “So, that’s right, ain’t it?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Okay, good. Now, you’re after Picasso, right?”
    “I want to talk to him.”
    “And you’re paying for information as to his whereabouts, right?”
    “Right.”
    “See, Waldo,” Big Stuff said, “I told you.”
    Evie handed