Dark Maze

sour-smelling and with Chastity the red-wigged pross smoking a cigarette and sprawled in the only chair, the same skirt hiked up over her nylon-encased thighs. Two things, though, were markedly different: Jerry, the night clerk, had been spelled by a beagle-faced old fellow drinking beer from a can and today Chastity sported something new and intriguing—a lady’s green felt hat, with a broken feather on the side.
    Chastity turned as I walked in, the feather shaking with the motion of her head. She stood up and opened her arms wide and said, “Well if it ain’t my favorite cop, Officer Hockaday. Here I was, like to die of boredom and you walk in to save the day. Long time no see, baby!”
    The old fellow in the clerk’s cage dribbled beer and said sleepily, “Cops. What?”
    I could not take my eyes off Chastity’s hat. She seemed completely innocent in the wearing of it, unaware of its former owner.
    She felt me staring at her head, of course, and said, “You like the chapeau, honey buns?”
    “Yeah, Chastity, I do,” I said. “It goes real good with your auburn hair. Real pretty.”
    I took a twenty from my pocket and gave it to her and said, “Come on, let’s talk upstairs.”
    “Sugar, you just made my day.”
    We walked to the clerk’s cage and the beagle said to me, “It’s seven bucks an hour, pal, three-hour minimum, plus a dollar for the towel deposit. Chastity, she knows the room you should go to.”
    I took the search warrant from my pocket and showed it, along with my shield. I said, “How about just for today I’ll take the key to your presidential suite, free of charge, okay?” The old fellow took the warrant and held it up close to his face and sniffed at it after he read it. He curled a lip and gave it back to me, along with a room key, and said, “Well, I guess it’s no hair off’a my butt.”
    Then with Chastity hugging my arm, I headed for the staircase. We passed under the bullet-scarred sign— if you lived here, you’d be home now —and walked up four flights to Halo’s lair.
    A presidential suite it was not, certainly not in these modern times when presidents cost so much. Abraham Lincoln’s mud-chinked log cabin back on the Illinois prairie probably had more luxe than Johnny Halo’s digs—three tiny, hot, airless rooms covering half the top floor from front to back and connected by arches cut through flimsy plasterboard walls by somebody who had no business calling himself a carpenter.
    The window of the back room had a view of the blue-gray ocean, and around this window Halo had fashioned a parlor. Chastity said he had used all the lobby furnishings, with the exception of her chair. “I’m an institution down in that lobby,” she said, “which means I have earned reserved seating for my behind for all the times I sold it upstairs.” The front room had two skinny windows that looked out over Surf Avenue. There was a hot plate and a sink against one wall and a desk and chair against the other; the desk top was cluttered with papers and magazines and I started leafing through the mess.
    Nothing looked particularly important, or even mildly significant. Nothing anywhere in Halo’s seedy quarters looked important even to him, as if the man did all his living somewhere else. And it struck me for one unsteady moment that somebody looking through my own apartment back in Hell’s Kitchen might draw this same sad conclusion about me. I quickly consoled myself with the thought that my place at least had plenty of booze and books on hand, and an old photograph of a soldier.
    Chastity, meanwhile, had parked herself on the edge of Halo’s freshly made-up bed in the middle room. “Hockaday,” she called. “Come on in here, it’s time to play cops and robbers.”
    I opened up all the desk drawers. They were empty, save for one pencil stub, three ball-point pens and a family of startled cockroaches. I checked the tiny bathroom and found it was used as a clothes closet, with most of Halo’s wardrobe piled on the floor or slung over the shower rail.
    Then I stepped into the middle room. Chastity sat there on the bed unbuttoning herself. I checked the bathroom here, which turned out to be the one that Halo actually used. There were clean towels on a rack, a new cake of soap in a dish on the sink and not much evidence that Halo was a man who took lots of showers.
    I looked out the window of the middle room. Down in the alleyway I could see Patrolman Gotha’s hand