Dark Maze

father? No information was volunteered. And now Liam was dying.
    I took my personal directory out of the drawer below the telephone stand and looked up Liam’s number in Ireland, dialed it direct and waited.
    Five rings later and there was a “Hallo” on the line.
    I asked, “Is this Patrick Snoody?”
    There were crackling sounds, then an echo of my question, then, “Yes, yes. Snoody here.”
    “I received your letter today,” I said. “This is Neil Hockaday, in America.”
    Snoody spoke excitedly over my echo and so I missed much of what he said, hearing only, “... resting now, musn’t be disturbed now.... Sorry.”
    “Can you give Uncle a message for me?”
    “Yes, yes.”
    I waited for Snoody’s echo to clear. “Tell him, I’ll try coming for a visit soon. Tell him I’ve got pressing business to clear, but that I’ll be there. Tell him to wait for me.“
    “Yes, yes—wait for you.”
    “Mr. Snoody, thank you for your letter. I’ll call when I’m able to come.”
    “Yes, yes. We’ll be waiting.”
    Then I rang off, with the guilt in my heart that is deserved by all ungrateful relations of the old and alone. I told myself I would really make the trip. Then I cursed Picasso. I could get on a plane right there and then if not for him.
    I dialed Central Homicide. Logue was out in the field, but Captain Mogaill was on hand. He said, “That’s quite a trumpet blowing your tune in the Post, I see.”
    “It only sounds that way now,” I said.
    “That’s possibly so. The press has a way of setting you up as a fair-haired boy today, expressly so they’ll have something pretty to knock about tomorrow, when it is hoped you’ll fall from the weight of your own swollen head.”
    “My thoughts exactly,” I said. Then I asked, “Has Logue come up with anything useful, do you know?”
    “He has, and he’s dying to tell you direct but since there’s no love lost between us, I don’t mind bursting his bubble.“
    “Tell me,” I said.
    “First, he says that Celia Furman had very serious troubles with the lads at the IRS.”
    “That I know.”
    “But did you know the extent of her trouble? Did you know that the feds even impounded the lady’s car, which is what she was sleeping in?”
    “I didn’t know that,” I said. “But it sounds like something the IRS would do.”
    “So Logue says by this that the lady was especially desperate for money, you see.”
    “Yes. Anything else?”
    “One more thing,” Mogaill said. “Logue himself was nosing it up and down Forty-second Street yesterday, asking after Picasso of every skell and con who’d talk to him, and every shopkeeper likewise. He took along four dicks for help, and between them they combed the Deuce close as an egg to his chicken.”
    “Did they find anything?”
    “Who knows what this means, Hock, but the owner of one of them perpetual going-out-of-business electronics joints for the tourists, he remembers dealing with a geeky little guy in a beret. This was only about a week ago.”
    “Dealing how?”
    “The shopkeeper, he says your boyo was in the market for a good tape recorder. Which he did buy, with cash. Plus plenty of batteries. The shopkeeper remembers this particular transaction because of what the guy in the beret keeps saying, mostly to himself.”
    “What was that?”
    “Picasso keeps saying, ‘I got to get down this autobiography of myself, ain’t that right?’ He keeps saying this to somebody like somebody’s standing beside him. Anyway, business is business and the shopkeeper takes the wacko’s money and off goes Picasso with his tape recorder.”
    I thanked Mogaill for the information and told him to tell Logue I would speak to him soon. I entered these items in my notebook, adding to the list of unrelated items to be sorted out as I slept.
    Then I rang up the Neptune Bar in Brooklyn.
    Johnny Halo was not on the job.
    “We ain’t even open today,” a janitor told me. “I come around this morning since it’s payday, but Johnny wasn’t here. So I let myself in and I been waiting ever since. I’m still waiting, and helping myself to a few drinks.”
    I rang the Seashore Hotel and asked for Halo’s room. “He ain’t up there,” the desk clerk said. “He never come back last night.”
    “Ring the room anyway,” I said.
    There was no answer.

    * * *

    They'll never get rid of the hate in my head.
    I’m the only bedbug who can do that, which I will in the sweet by-and-by.
    But I got miles to