Dark Maze

sticking out from the squad car, tapping to the tempo of some Dexter Gordon riff against the chrome side-view mirror.
    “Pay attention to me!” Chastity demanded.
    I turned and looked again at Chastity perched on the old sagging bed, smiling. Despite the fact that she held in her hands a pair of pink and surprisingly comely bare breasts, my eyes were mainly fixed on the green hat. I said without much expression, “Where did you get that thing?”
    She looked now to be either angry or on the verge of tears. Men have a hard time knowing which way a woman might go when they get that kind of look.
    “You’re talking about my hat?”
    “Yes.”
    “Here I pegged you for this nice straight kind of a john, a traditionalist, you know?” Chastity shook her head slowly back and forth and dropped her hands to her sides. Her breasts dropped, too, but not much. “So tell me, Officer Hockaday, what’s your brand? I heard of lots of different wankers in my time—shoe freaks, stocking freaks, panty freaks—but a hat freak?”
    “You really don’t know what this is, do you?”
    “Nope, you just stumped this old hooker.”
    I took another twenty from my wallet and tried to give it to Chastity, but she would not take it. I said, “I want to know about the hat because it’s police business. The last time I saw that hat, it belonged to a woman named Celia Furman who a couple of hours after I saw her in it got herself murdered.”
    Chastity took off the hat and threw it at me. Then she buttoned her blouse.
    “What the hell do I care, she’s only somebody in the newspapers to me.” She stood up and smoothed her wig. “Go ahead and keep my hat. Use it for evidence to fry poor old Picasso.”
    “Look, I came up here on a warrant to search Johnny Halo’s rooms because I think he’s part of my case and now suddenly he’s missing. So I come here to the hotel and the first thing I see is you in the lobby wearing a hat that’s missing off a dead lady.”
    “You saying I had something to do with that?”
    “No, I’m not. I want to know where you got the hat, though, and so I invited you up here with me so we could talk someplace in private. That’s it. Get it?”
    “Sure, Hockaday. I get it. Do you?”
    I did not, and it showed.
    “There’s an awful lot of men I’ve had to kiss in my time, but I still own my heart,” she said. “That means I’m not ready to be thrown away, see.”
    She took my hands and pulled me, made me look into her uptilted face. Maybe because I have been a cop so long I felt like laughing at her, maybe because I have not been a cop long enough I then felt ashamed.
    Chastity could see my thoughts. She looked down at the cracked floor between us. A tear fell, one of thousands to be shed that day in Coney Island.
    All I managed was, “I’m glad we’re friends, Chastity. I mean that.” She looked up and there was generosity in her damp eyes, even after hearing my inadequate words. In her time, she had come to know all of men’s inadequacies. Chastity broke away. She said, “That’s swell, we’re friends. But only so long as you keep handing out those tips, okay?”
    “You want to help me?”
    “I might.”
    This time she took the twenty.
    “Johnny Halo’s missing. Do you happen to know why, or where he is?”
    “I know a lot of things.”
    Chastity accepted another bill.
    “Let’s take a little look-see around this dump before I answer any of that,” she said. I followed Chastity into the back third of Halo’s suite, the parlor room with the window out to the sea. “Here’s where Mister Big Shot does his living, such as it is. Seek, and maybe ye shall find.”
    The bathroom was empty here, except for some dirty low-ball glasses in a sink full of greasy water and a wastepa-per basket that yielded nothing but an empty pint bottle of bourbon. Besides the lobby chairs, the furniture in the parlor consisted of a battered television set under the window and a round coffee table in front of a vinyl couch. The table was a jumble of newspapers, some yellowed with age; odds and ends that can wind up in a man’s pockets; mail, mostly overdue bills of the sort familiar to me; ashtrays, and a hotel phone. Several pairs of soiled socks lay under the couch, some of them hardened with age.
    One of the ashtrays had a crumpled book of matches in it. I picked this up because the matchbook cover had drawing on it, a drawing of a recently familiar sight in Times Square: double glass doors