Dark Maze

inspector’s probably been telephoning my apartment every hour on the hour. I could live without that for a night.”
    “Thanks, Hock. You really know how to make a girl feel convenient.”
    I kissed her cheek. “Sorry, you know I don’t mean it that way. Go on, get your show on the road.”
    Ruby went up front to sit with the geniuses and I settled down by myself in the back row of the theatre, a small house of ninety-nine seats. Tonight there were maybe thirty people in the audience—the suits, their wives and a scattering of Ruby’s show-business friends.
    Up on stage was a bare-bones set and scene. Actors sat in folding chairs around an open casket, mourners at a wake. The coffin was tipped upward at the head so that we saw the actor inside, in the role of the deceased.
    The stage lights went up and the house lights dimmed. Then one of the actors in the folding chairs stood up and faced us. He crossed himself in the Catholic manner, and spoke:
    “The man in the coffin is named Arthur Colfax. We all used to call him The Mister. He was my father. The color of that necktie he’s wearing is the same shade of blue as The Mister’s eyes. Which, since they’re closed in death, I thought you would be interested to know.”
    The actor paused, then turned to the other mourners and pointed to a man. “Over there’s Mr. Lyle Grant.”
    The actor playing Grant rose from his folding chair and nodded at the audience. Then he sat down again.
    The opening monologue resumed:
    “Now, Mr. Grant did a fine job of making The Mister look good for his wake. I’d have to admit, my father had an evil look in life. He had a dirty black and gray fringe of hair on his head that was always wild with peaks, like his head was full of horns. And his lips stuck out and they usually turned down, like he was forever perched in a stadium seat shouting boo at the teams.
    “So Mr. Grant worked oil into his hair and smoothed down the horns, and now his hair’s nice and silvery. Kind of distinguished, don’t you think? And also Mr. Grant forced the lips back and pulled them straight. And besides that, Mr. Grant clipped away most of the stiff little black hairs that snaked out from my father’s nose and ears.
    “Like I say, The Mister looks real good tonight. Better than I’ve ever seen him look, truth to tell. I’d say downright well groomed.
    “But I can’t believe The Mister’s dead. What I mean to say is, I can’t trust the old man’s dead, and even though I can turn around right now and see for myself he’s gone, which ought to satisfy me that everything’s going to be all right now.... Well, I’m still afraid...”
    And then, to everybody’s complete astonishment—the actors playing the mourners and everybody in the audience practically jumped out of their skins—The Mister bolted upright in his coffin. His eyelids popped open, his bright blue eyes blazed. With his hands folded tightly over his chest, he said:
    “Oh yeah, I’m dead, all right! But you people out there, I suppose you’re the type who believe dead men tell no tales?
    “Hah! That’s nothing but an old movie line. It’s a crock, just like a thousand other lines you’ve heard all your lives about people who can’t speak up for themselves.”
    The Mister wiped his mouth, the way a drunk does.
    “I expect from now on that most everybody’s going to say nasty things about the kind of man I’ve been in life—things they never had the balls to say to my face.
    “Hah! There’s another crock for you: Never speak ill of the dead.”

    I had sneaked out of the third-floor theatre and down the stairs. Now I stood at the bar in Vern’s, with a double of Johnnie Walker red, believing that this might help me escape the overlapping waves—the undertow—of memory and coincidence that had dogged this day and every day since Picasso in the park.
    If nothing more, the Scotch helped soothe the still-prickly shock of seeing that actor upstairs bolt open his eyes and speak from the beyond; hammering back into my head the always-hovering image of my own soldier father. A father I never knew or saw, save in old photographs of made-up poses; he, too, had been a blue-eyed man, so my mother once told me in a rare and womanly reminiscence of the man she married.
    But never before tonight had I realized this: my father’s image in my mind was black and white; the color of the man was only now beginning to take shape.
    Often lately, this happens. I am stopped in the