Dark Maze

cancellation of
    one . .
    He took the pad from his pocket and flipped through yellow pages. “One... Celia Furman, according to papers in her bag. Now also, according to the proprietor of the crime scene who knows her from bygone days, I am told that the late Ms. Furman was once-upon-a-time connected.”
    “Connected how?” I asked.
    Logue shrugged and so Angelo gave me the answer. “Gaming, that’s all, Hock. She started out in Detroit, as a cigarette girl in the sawdust houses. Remember them?”
    I remembered. Back before a lot of people in my own neighborhood lost their jobs to the onslaught of legal gambling in the OTB parlors, and the state lotteries, and down in Atlantic City, there were colorful places all up and down the West Side where you could have drinks and a little music and shoot craps at the same time. Or play some tonk, or twenty-one. Some joints came equipped with wire rooms for playing the horses, or the national sports betting line. Every place had runners for the incidentals the clientele needed, like tip sheets for the races at Aqueduct or takeout Chinese or a fresh deck of cards. I remember all that because as a kid new to long pants, I myself was sometimes employed as a runner.
    Now Angelo looked down at the body in the green dress with the good legs sticking out. “It’s hard for me to figure Celia ever doing anything so bad to somebody that she had to wind up this way. Now I see I didn’t know her so well as I thought.”
    “How well do we ever know anybody?” I said.
    “That’s very true.”
    Then Logue said, “I’ll tell you what I make of all this. I think we have got here a case of somebody being out of circulation so long she was off-balance about her prospects for longevity. Now, ain’t that evident—and ain’t you seen it play that way before, Detective Hockaday?”
    “You mean so off-balance that she forgot how you’re never out of the rackets, even when you’re not in the action?” I said, thinking out loud. “Maybe.”
    “Maybe nothing, that’s it,” Logue said. “Whatever she done and whoever she done it to, it all goes way back into something too murky for any of us to see. So that’s why I don’t get too excited about this being no more than a routine mop-up, even though it was a lady who got it.”
    From Logue’s point of view, I could see that. Even so, I told him, “Celia told me how she once had tax trouble, and how it wrecked her life. There should be something in the way of leads there.”
    “Maybe,” Logue said. “So I might get a few lines, so what?”
    I asked Angelo again if he had seen her talking to anyone in particular. He shook his head and told me what he had already told Logue. “Honest, Hock. I’m so busy with this bad crowd that comes in nowadays, I just didn’t pay her any attention since about five.”
    Logue stepped away from us, to speak to the police photographer who had just arrived. I told Angelo he should stop sweating so much. Then I joined Logue.
    The photographer stepped over and around the corpse in order to take pictures from every possible angle of what to him was just another lump. I heard somebody from the back dining room say, “Oh, ish!”
    I looked at Celia’s face, white from the loss of blood and now whiter still in the strobe light. The corners of her lips
    were turned up slightly, as if she had been sneering at somebody she knew well enough to despise. I saw that her hair was short and black and cut like women cut their hair back in the ’20s, like Louise Brooks in her bob. I had not noticed her hair before; she had been wearing a hat with a feather, but now it was nowhere around.
    A spurt of blood escaped from one of her nostrils. I have seen enough of this sort of thing through the years to know that a tiny bullet was lodged in bone somewhere in Celia’s neck or head, and that her dead body was hemorrhaging. Soon every visible orifice would be leaking. The photographer knew this, too, which is why he was being quick about his role in the mop-up.
    “From the look of her,” I said to Logue, “I think the lady received unpleasant news.”
    “That’s putting it mild,” he said.
    “I would also say that poor Celia Furman somehow half expected what happened was going to happen.”
    Logue agreed. “Yeah, well, she don’t look shocked like most stiffs do. So how do you figure it played?”
    “I think she took some kind of bait to get set up like she was. That might come from being off-balance,