Dark Maze

midst of what I am doing by my father’s image. I am more and more struck by the notion that my job is only rehearsal for a greater detective case, namely the mystery of my hollow place. As a detective and a drinker, I am also lately asking myself: Do I go about solving the mysteries of others for their sake, or do I see their mysteries as clues to my own story?
    Just before taking up with Ruby Flagg, I had been thinking seriously and soberly about booking an appointment with a doctor. By which I mean a shrink. But not the department psychiatrist, for I have my vanities; I did not want to risk that sort of thing getting around, which it does.
    I wanted somebody on the outside; somebody like Dr. Reiser would have been ideal.
    But then my thought broke. For suddenly, there was Ruby’s voice at my back.
    “I see you’re missing something, Hock.” She seemed very irritated.
    “What?” I spun around.
    “Was the play really all that bad?”
    “No, that’s not it.”
    “All right, so the play didn’t stink. So you were overcome by a sudden, terrible thirst, is that it?”
    “Ruby, I’m awful sorry.”
    She said angrily, “There are people upstairs waiting for me, Hock. Waiting for us!”
    “I said I was sorry. It’s the case, Ruby. Can you understand? And, it’s my father.”
    Forgiveness softened her face. She placed a hand on my forehead, as if checking for fever.
    “Can you remember what you said at breakfast?” I asked. “What, about your father?”
    “Yes.”
    “Not exactly. Can you?”
    “Yes, I can.”
    I pulled out my notebook and found the page where I had jotted down a list of impressions and dissonant things people had said, things I would try to organize into some possible meaning. Later, maybe as I slept.
    “Your exact words: i’m sorry, Hock, but shame on your Mother. Your father should never have been allowed to die that way, with nobody to give you his memory.’ ”
    Ruby said, “You wrote that down?”

    They say, "You’re a great artist!”
    Can you beat it? Fat lot of good that does me.
    They say, “What you paint, it’s the truth!”
    Ho, ho, ain’t that the truth?
    Damn straight, so far as it goes.
    But actually, they ain’t got a clue how truly great I am. They think I don’t know exactly what I’m doing.
    Ho, ho, but I do!
    It’s what the holy goddamn bible says I got to do, "Be sure your sin will find you out.”

EIGHTEEN

    I woke up in Ruby’s place at the crack of noon.
    The bed I was in was one of those big regal numbers, the kind that go with country inns in New England—high off the floor and full of pillows and chintz covers, with four tall mahogany posters and curtains that drew closed by day. it was a bed straight out of a photo layout in one of those magazines for people who live in Manhattan studio apartments, people lacking space but not style.
    Ruby walked by, on her way to the terrace with coffee and newspapers. She said, “Aren’t you going to open it up, Hock?”
    She meant the rectangular box on the bed next to me. It was wrapped in gift paper and ribbons, with a card attached that said it was for me.
    Inside was a terrycloth robe from Saks. It was blue with handsome pinstripes of purple and red.
    “I told the clerk blue because my guy’s a cop,” Ruby said. She sounded almost like a high-school girl, her voice young and weightless. “Do you like it?”
    “What, are you kidding? I love it!”
    I got up from the bed and put my arms through the sleeves and wrapped the robe around me and knotted the belt loosely. Then I followed Ruby to the terrace. There was a table set with cups and saucers and fruit and rolls. Ruby poured us coffee from the pot she had brought from the kitchen. We sat down, looking out toward the Brooklyn Bridge with the sun straight overhead, glinting off the silvery gray towers spanning the water.
    This was the first day of the new spring when the breeze did not chill the skin. The clouds were high and milky, a sign of clear weather for the next several days. Seagulls streaked lazily through webs of steel cable up on the bridge decks. Tugboats went about their slow, quiet business of shoving barges and tankers up and down the river. And there sat I, a soundly slept prince of New York in his royal blue robe that smelled of newness, steam blowing off my coffee cup in the open air and Ruby Flagg beside me, a slice of orange touched to her tongue.
    “Thanks, for everything,” I said to Ruby. “Really, thanks.”
    I must