Dark Maze

Nobody gets rubbed out in a clam bar in Little Italy over this kind of a swindle, right? Hah! Instead, the president of the United States of America and all his flunkies in the Congress sucker the taxpayers out of money to cover up what Henry did!”
    The train slowed. Soon we would be at Essex Street.
    “I got to get off, lady,” I said.
    She popped another wafer and chewed furiously. Then white foam started trickling out from her lips.
    “What’s the matter with you? What is that stuff, lady?”
    “Alka-Seltzer,” she said. “I chew it up when I’m on the trains and you see what happens. People see me like this, they stay away from me.”
    The train stopped.
    “Good night, lady.”
    “So long, sucker.” Some of the foam flew out of her mouth. “Have a buttercup day.”
    I walked up the stairs from the subway platform and out to the corner of Essex and Delancey Streets where I flagged a taxi cruising east on Delancey. I gave the driver Ruby’s address and we were off.
    My bad luck, the cabby was the chatty type.
    I asked him please, for the love of God, to give me a break.

    Ruby’s theatre is called the Downtown Playhouse. It is located on the third floor of a two-hundred-year-old skinny brick federal-style building on South Street, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge.
    There is a decent bar and grill at the street level, Vem’s, and a barber shop on the second floor. Ruby lives in a studio at the back of the fourth floor, which is the top of the building; she has a large terrace that looks toward the graceful old iron suspension bridge spanning the East River. Most of the rest of the top floor is given over to a reception room for theatre functions, and Ruby’s office.
    My clever girl friend owns the deed to the whole works.
    All her savings and everything she could borrow while she was still making her brisk Madison Avenue salary got her the place. The day she closed on the deal was the same day she blew off the uptown life, causing most of her friends and colleagues to pass the word that Ruby Flagg was ungrateful and unhinged.
    “Actually,” Ruby told me that first night we met, “I’m only one of those.”
    I naturally wondered, “Which one?”
    “That, sir, I leave to you.”
    Then she asked impulsively, “So, let me find out about you. Are you the kind of man who knows the difference between a smart person and a genius?“
    “I only know that nobody’s ever called me either one of those.”
    Ruby laughed. It was the first time I had made her laugh and so I decided to remember that, no matter what might happen with us.
    “My friends and colleagues used to say I’d started out a regulation smart person, but that I reached the genius ranks in record time,” Ruby said. “They taught me that a smart person knows what smart people want and a genius knows what stupid people want.”
    “Could that be why the advertising business is so full of geniuses?”
    She laughed again and put a hand on my arm and said, “Why, Mr. Hockaday, we’re two of a kind, aren’t we?”
    I agreed. And Ruby and I have been together ever since.
    But tonight was the night we would become an item, as Walter Winchell used to put it in the Mirror. Tonight I would learn that the big answers to my life—as a man, as a cop—would begin to come by way of Ruby Flagg.

    It was a quarter-past ten when I finally made it to the Downtown Playhouse. Which turned out to be just in time to catch the start of the second of two one-acts that Ruby was auditioning for potential backers.
    She was happy and relieved to see me. But also rushed and nervous and preoccupied, with only a minute or two for me before the program began.
    I asked her about the crowd of eight up front, four suits and their wives. Ruby’s spare, brick-walled theatre far from the precincts of expense-account dining was not the sort of place I expected to see suits and wing tips.
    “They’re friends from the old life,” Ruby explained. “Reasonably good guys, still doing the dance but looking for ways to spend money like the angels would. Which I’m hoping means me and this little old theatre.”
    “I thought you never saw genuises anymore.”
    “What do you think, I’m unhinged?”
    “Break a leg, Ruby.”
    “Thanks, sweet. I’m going to scoot away now. The wine and cheese act is upstairs, right after this; I want to clear everybody out early, though, and then you can stay at my place for a change.”
    “I don’t mind if I do. The