“What in the hell am I doing?” Jackson Pollack asked himself, giving the once over to the rising road, driving up too fast toward the top of it for what was on the other side. He couldn’t dope it out. He was driving like a crazy man, like what all the couch doctors he had ever gone to always told him he wasn’t.

   Not crazy, not exactly, just comparatively crazy like his paintings.

   One of them once said, “You’re just in search of a nervous breakdown.” He didn’t tell that shrink about 1938. It didn’t matter. He knew he was raw on the inside. That’s why the work on the floor worked. He wasn’t a nutcase because he saw psychiatrists. But in the last five minutes he had twice caught himself steering the car straight at the soft shoulder.

   Maybe he was nuts, but he was on the ball behind the wheel. He was the next-best driver in Springs, next to Harry Cullum, who told him he was second best on a late afternoon one day in mid-winter when the two of them were having beers at Jungle Pete’s. 

   “You’ll have the last laugh, just wait and see, Jack,” Harry said, clapping him on the back. “Maybe not on the road, but you’ll get ‘er done, son.”

   Jackson Pollock’s convertible didn’t have seat belts. Harry, the best driver in town, had outfitted his family car with lap belts. He told everyone it was for his wife’s sake. “In stock car racing we never used seat belts if there wasn’t a roll bar, suicide if you do,” he said. “Family life is different, different kind of suicide, need a belt.”

   The gal in the middle of the front seat, between Ruth and him, was screaming. “Stop the car, let me out, let me out!” He wasn’t going to stop the car, he knew that, but he had a bad feeling. It was a clear, starry night, splashed no moon dark, hot and muggy. The road felt spongy. He felt queer, not himself, not yours truly.

   It was August 11, 1956. The car was an Oldsmobile Rocket 88. It was a big open-air carriage. 

   He got his first convertible, a Cadillac, when his action paintings started to get some action, after Life Magazine put him on the cover almost exactly seven years ago. He was wearing denim pants and a denim jacket in the photograph. The jacket was dirty and spattered. It was his high-octane light-of-day look at me now ma year of success. They said he was the new phenomenon of American art. 

   “He looks like some guy who works at a service station pumping gas,” said Willem de Kooning.

   When 1950 got good and done, the next month Art News published a list of the best exhibitions of the year. The top three shows belonged to him. It wasn’t bad for somebody who never graduated from high school.

   Even though he purposely used to throw his car keys in the bushes when he was getting drunk at parties, he smashed the Caddy into a tree. He got off light, only a citation and no broken bones. The car didn’t get off so lucky.

   Action painting, he thought, and snorted, spraying spit on the steering wheel. What the hell did that mean? There wasn’t any action, just headlines. What critics didn’t know wasn’t worth a pot to piss in.  “If people would just look at my paintings, I don’t think they would have any trouble enjoying them. It’s like looking at a bed of flowers, you don’t tear your hair out over what it means.” He had meant it when he said it. He’d say it again.

   Who needs a critic to find out what art is, or isn’t? Most of the critics these days, if they saw him walking on water, crossing the Hudson River at Canal Street, would scribble something about him not being able to swim. All they wanted was to see you drown. The only time he met Man Ray, at the Cedar Tavern when the born-again Frenchman was on his way back to Paris, he told Jackson, over a boatload of drinks, that he hated critics.

   Franz Kline laughed across the table. “Manny, tell us what you really think.”

   “All critics should be assassinated,” Man Ray said.

   Lee called his work all over painting because he got it all over the flat canvases nailed down on the floor, the hard floor itself, and his boots and jeans and hands. Bugs and bits of litter and blackened shag from his cigarettes fell into the paint.

   “Is Jackson Pollock the greatest living painter in the United States?” is what Life Magazine asked, blowing the balloon up, with a picture of him slouching against a wall with a smoke dangling from his mouth, and a couple of pictures of his paintings. He looked good, like he didn’t have a care in the world, didn’t give a damn, like he had the world by the balls. Now it was different. He hadn’t made a painting in more than a year. The ballgame was over.

   He was washed up. He didn’t have anything to say anymore. He was almost sure of it. There wasn’t a place for him at the art world table anymore.

   “She started to scream,” said Clement Greenberg. “He took it out on this pathetic girl by going even faster. Then he lost control on the curve. The screaming is what did the killing, finally.”

   What was her name? He chewed it over in his mind, tossing a glance sideways at her. He couldn’t remember. They were on the Fireplace Road in East Hampton, not far from his home. It couldn’t be more than a mile. Not much of a home anymore, though. Lee was in Paris with her friends. She said she was coming back, but he had his doubts. He wanted her back, but it had all gone wrong.

   Hell-bent in his Olds with two broads in the car and his wife in Europe wasn’t going to get it done, wasn’t going to get it all back. He had to get back on track. Maybe the last analyst he’d seen was right, maybe there was something gumming up the works. He was going to try a fresh approach, the shrink said. He called it hypnotherapy.

   He was one of the new downtown brain doctors. “It’s not hypnosis, at least not how most people think of it,” Dr. Sam Baird said. “We’re not going to try to alter or correct your behavior. We’ll try to seed some new ideas, sure, but we’ll talk those out before we go ahead.”

   Jack told Lee he was going to get his head clear this time. “He isn’t full of old-time shit,” he said about the new man.

   Whenever his neighbors saw his car fast and sloppy staggering down the road they laughed and said it was like his paintings. Most of them still thought he was nuts, even though they didn’t say so anymore to his face, not now that he was in galleries and museums. When he was a nobody, they looked down on him like he was a nobody.

   “I could see right away he wasn’t from here,” said Frank Dayton. “I asked a fellow later who he was. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that’s just a loony artist.’”

   “To some people he was a bum, just someone to laugh at,” said Sid Miller. “They didn’t think much of his work. They didn’t think he was doing anything.” Ed Cook said the same. “Folks said he painted with a broom. Near everybody made jokes about his paintings, never thought they’d amount to anything.”

   “To hell with them,” he said to Ruth, her elbow laying careless on the shelf of the door. She was a looker, that’s for sure, the juice he needed to get him going again. He had gone dead inside. He knew he had. She was the kind of gal who could crank him up. What’s-her-name in the back seat kept screaming.

   “What?” asked Ruth, loud, twisting towards him.

   “To hell with them,” he muttered to himself. “What do they know?”

   “Slow down just a bit Jack, the car’s a little out of control, take it easy,” she said.

   The joke was on them. When he was painting, straddling a canvas, it was when he was most in control. It was when he didn’t have any doubts about himself or what he was doing. He knew exactly what he was doing. He told anybody interested in listening to him, I can control the idea, the flow of paint. There is no accident in the end, not by my hand.

   “He picked up can and paint brush and started to move around the canvas,” said Hans Namuth. “It was as if he suddenly realized the painting was not finished, His movements, slow at first, gradually became faster and more dance like as he flung black, white and rust-colored paint onto the canvas. He completely forgot that Lee and I were there. Finally, he said, ‘This is it.’”

   “I work from the inside out,” he told Hans. “That’s when I’m in the painting, in the middle of life, but outside of it at the same time. I can see the whole picture.” Someone told him his pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, more like a sneer, but it was fine by him. It was a fine compliment. Only the twisted lips didn’t know it.

   He was good driving his Rocket 88, too, even when he was drunk as could be, which was what he was now. “He came in for his eye-opener, a double, about 10:30 before train time, that day.” said Al Cavagnaro. “Start your day the way he did sometimes, you’d be in the same fix he was. If you said he was half bagged up, you’d be about right.”

   Doc Klein said it was OK for him to drink and drive. Jack liked that. He knew trees never hit cars except in self-defense. “But stay on the road,” said Doc Klein, a big man laughing his big laugh.

   “Goddamn right, I always stay on the road,” said Jackson Pollack. “Except when I’m pulling into Al’s or Pete’s, then I get off the road. I have to. Anyway, there’s no trees in those parking lots.” If there had been they wouldn’t have lasted long.

   “It was continual, almost nightly drunken large parties,” said Patsy Southgate. “Everyone was totally drunk all the time and driving around in cars.”

   He wasn’t driving right. He was driving wrong. The screaming broad grabbing his right arm was right. He lived it up driving. But tonight, instead of fluid with the steering wheel, like he was with free-flowing paint out of a can, he was being clumsy, as though he was at cross-purposes, herky-jerky. The precise gestures he used to stream paint from a stick when he was working were usually the same when he drove his car. Tonight, they were too big around, whiplash gestures, like they had a life of their own.

   “He had to be moving fast, 85 to 90, anyway,” said Harry Cullum. “There was a crown where the town tar road begins at the beginning of the left curve. Jeez, I almost lost my car a couple of times there when I was a kid, but finally you smarten up and ride that crown, the one they fixed after Pollock got killed.”

   It was after the fact, like an empty bottle of beer thrown out a car window at a stop sign that wasn’t there. “Jackson’s death is he died of drink and the Town of East Hampton Highway Department,” said Wayne Barker.

   It was close to three years ago, the first week of November, when he stormed over the crown of the road like a firecracker. He came back from the city on a Friday, on the train. It snowed all morning, and it was still snowing at the end of the day when he found his car in the lot, brushing a mound of snow off the front window with his hands, rubbing the cold out of them on the car’s dashboard heating vent. When he finally got on the road to Springs, he was one of only a handful of cars. The storm was blowing off the ocean. The car trembled whenever the road flattened out and he was sideways to the coast.

   “I crawled up there, I could barely see, and stopped when I saw the pile of snow,” he told Lee later at home, the windows in their sash frames rattling in the wind gusts. “There was a snowdrift, five feet, six feet high, down the other side blocking the way. I backed up a little, to where my rear tires could get a grip on a stretch of clear road and hit the gas as hard as I could. I went as fast as I could, hit the snow head on, everything went white, everything disappeared, no color, just white. By the time I came out the other side the Olds was barely moving, just crawling.”

   They laughed about it all night, over dinner, and later in bed again, curling close together under a pile of blankets.

   The gal beside him was still screaming. How long could she keep it up? She was driving him round the bend. He was driving wrong, all wrong. There was a reason. He knew it, but he also thought, how could there be a reason? What was it?  He could feel it. Where was it? He knew it was right there, right at the front of his brain. It was like the images behind the abstractions in his paintings, right there. But when he tried to think of why he was driving wrong his brain hurt like a next day hangover, before he could get his hands on some hair of the dog.

   He had a hangover all the time now, more than five years-worth of hangovers, but it wasn’t from gin. It was from having rocketed to fame, putting everything he had into it, until he didn’t have anymore, and he quit pouring liquid paint cold turkey. It was all over. After that he couldn’t make a painting that anybody wanted. When he finished his black paintings, he couldn’t give them away. Even his fame couldn’t prime the pump. Nobody thought they were any good. He knew they weren’t any good.

   “An artist is a person who has invented an artist,” Harold Rosenberg burst out one night near the tail end of a long night of poker and drinking.

   Rosie always thinks he is right, Jackson thought. He got it wrong on the train, though, the day we were riding into the city together. When I said the canvas was an arena, I meant it like it was a living thing, not a dead thing. I didn’t mean slugging it out in the ring. He thought I meant it literally, even though both of us were sober at the time, and the next thing I knew I was an action painter. At least he got it right at the card game. Not like Hoffman. He was like all the others.

   When Lee brought her teacher, Hans Hoffman, over to meet Jackson, he saw the sour look on the great man’s face right away. Hans was a neat freak, everything in its place, clean as a whistle and orderly. His own studio was a mess. There wasn’t a sign of a still life or a life model anywhere.

   “You do not work from nature,” said Hans. “You work by heart, not from nature. This is no good, you will repeat yourself.”

   “I am nature,” Jackson said.

   There wasn’t a drop of direction left in the sky or anywhere on the other side of his windshield. It surprised him when he got to the curve at the dip, where the concrete stopped and the town’s blacktop started, and he suddenly veered off the road, aiming for the trees. What was he thinking, he thought. The car skidded in the sand. He let it slide, its big front-end dead set on the big oak tree to their left.

   Going into a skid in the dirt off the road didn’t surprise him. Besides, he was going too fast. He was going fast, that’s all. It didn’t mean anything. The girl next to him stopped screaming. She got small and slowed down. She was squeezing her handbag in her hands with all her might. His hands felt dry and relaxed on the steering wheel. He didn’t squeeze the steering wheel even when he smashed into the tree head-on.

   The Oldsmobile broke every bone in its chassis when it hit the one-hundred-year-old tree. Jackson Pollack was catapulted over the windshield and into the woods. The front end flipped over, tossing Ruth to the side. When the car landed upside down, crushing the frame of the windshield, the gal with the handbag in her hands suddenly stopped gripping it. The car horn blared, stuck in place. Gasoline poured out of the punctured gas tank. The taillights blinked on and off and on and off.

   “I’m going to become one of my paintings,” Jackson Pollock realized in mid-air, midway to the future, rocketing his way to forever. “I’m going to splatter all over. I’m going to be in nature, be nature, once and for all.” 

   He hit the oak tree hard. When he careened backwards, he landed with a mortal thud, even though it was soft ground. There was a barely jutting out of the ground bump of rock mottled with luminous moss that had waited a lifetime for him.

   His neck hit the rock like a falling star. Gravity had been the heaven-sent hand that gave life to the paint and flotsam that dripped splashed flowed down onto his canvasses. It was now the hand that dealt him a death blow. He broke his neck.

   He lay there juiceless like a fallen tree branch, cracked in the head, shoeless, arms and legs haphazard.

   When Stan Riddman walked up from under the Flatiron Building it wasn’t dark, not a new night, not yet. The sky was hazy lemon and blue.  It was the first day of the second week of fall, but felt more like the middle of summer, except for the shorter autumn days. He wore a short sleeve shirt and linen trousers. The thin wallet in his back pocket was flush with more fives and tens than it was with one-spots. 

   He gave his wallet a friendly pat. The seven-card stud he had played in the basement next to the furnace room had been good to him. I can buy the kid some new clothes, get up front on the office rent, and score tickets for the Series, he thought.

   The Socialist Labor Party used to have offices in the Flatiron Building, but not down in the underground. He wondered if they would have banned gambling, making it out like it was exploitive, if they had ever come to power. You took your chances at poker, but it was only exploitive if you had no skill at it. You deserved to be taken if you played dreamland cards. He walked down 22^nd Street to Lexington Avenue, turned right, walked through Gramercy Park to Irving Place, and looked for a phone booth

   The Yankees were in, and the Indians were out, that was for sure. The Redlegs were running on an outside track, but the Braves were neck and neck with the Dodgers. Sal the Barber had no-hit the Phils earlier in the week at Ebbets Field and the Cardinals were going hard at the Braves out in the boondocks. It was all going to come down to the weekend as to whether there was going to be a subway series, the same as last year, or not.

    Last year it went seven games, and the oddball thing was the Yankees won three at Ebbets Field and the Dodgers won their four at Yankee Stadium. Neither team won on their home field. Nobody won that bet. Nobody took the backside odds on the seventh game, win or go home, either, especially since Jackie Robinson wasn’t penciled in to play the deciding nine.

   Nobody but Stan and Ezra, and anybody else who flipped a coin.

   Who would have thought the Cuban would be the difference-maker when he took over right field in the sixth inning? Stan was in the upper deck with his sometime partner, Ezra Aronson. The Yankee dugout was on the first base side, so most of the Bum fans were on the third base side. A client who was a Yankees fan, after Stan had gotten him the black and white’s he needed to get his divorce done, gave a sudden pair of passes to him, so they were on the wrong side.

   “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Ezra said, sitting in a sea of Bronx Bomber fans.

   When Yogi Berra hit an opposite field sure double, Ezra sprang out of his seat, like everyone else, but the lightning-fast Sandy Amoros caught it coming out of nowhere. He fired a pill to Pee Wee Reese, who relayed it to Gil Hodges, who doubled up the retreating Gil McDougald off first, ending the last threat Stengel’s Squad made that afternoon. 

   Casey Stengel managed the Yankees. Back in his day, when he still had legs, he had been a good but streaky ballplayer. Good glove, fair bat, fast feet. “I was erratic,” he said. “Some days I was amazing, some days I wasn’t.” When he wasn’t, he played it for laughs, catching fly balls behind his back. One afternoon he doffed his cap to the crowd and a sparrow flew out of it. Another day, playing the outfield, he hid in a drainage hole and popped out of it just in time to snag a fly ball.

   When he stood leaning over the top rail of the dugout, he looked like a cross of the scowling Jimmy Durante and Santa Claus in pinstripes. He managed the Braves and Dodgers for nine years and chalked up nine straight losing seasons. But after the Bombers hired him in 1948, the only year he hadn’t taken them to the World Series was 1954.

   Stan and Ezra were the only men in their section who hadn’t fallen back into their seats, stunned, after Sandy Amoros snagged Yogi Berra’s liner. Stan had to pull Ezra down so there wouldn’t be any hard feelings. As it was, Ezra was so excited there were hard feelings, and Stan had to drag him away to a beer stand.

   “This beer is bitter,” Ezra scowled, looking down at the bottle of Ballantine in his hand. Ballantine Beer was on the Yankee Stadium scoreboard, its three-ring sign shining bright, flashing “Purity, Body, Flavor.” Whenever a Yankee hit a homer, Mel Allen, the broadcaster, hollered, “There’s a drive, hit deep, that ball is go-ing, go-ing, gonnne! How about that?! It’s a Ballantine Blast!” 

   The Brooklyn Dodgers, Ezra’s home borough baseball team, played at Ebbets Field. Their scoreboard boasted a Schaefer Beer sign, with the ‘h’ and the ‘e’ lighting up whenever there was a hit or an error. Below the Schaefer Beer sign was an Abe Stark advertisement. 

   “Hit Sign Win Suit”.

   “That’s some super beer, that Schaeffer’s,” said Ezra, polishing off his bottle of Ballantine and spitting. 

   Stan Riddman didn’t have a home borough, even though he favored the Bums. He had an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, up from Times Square and down from the Central Park Zoo. He wasn’t from New York or New York City. He was from Chicago, although he wasn’t from there, either. He had been born in Chicago, but when his mother died two years later, in 1922, his father moved the family, himself a new Polish wife two boys two girls two dogs and all their belongings a year later to a small house behind St. Stanislaus Church in Cleveland, Ohio, in the Warszawa neighborhood south of the steel mills, where his father worked the rest of his life.

   Stan wasn’t working on anything he thought would bring him free Series passes this year. As long as I put most of this away, he thought to himself, walking down Irving Place, thinking of the jackpot in his pocket, I can blow some of it tonight, and still have enough for ballgames and more card games.

   Dottie was at Marie’s for the weekend. That happened about as often as the Series. It wasn’t too early or too late, and if Vicki hasn’t taken any work home, and is at home, and picks up the phone, maybe she could meet him for dinner.

   He found the phone booth he’d been looking for and called her. It rang once almost twice before Vicki answered. That’s a good sign, he thought.

   “Hello.”

   “Hey, Vee, it’s Stan.”

   “Stan, my man,” she laughed.

   “How’s Stuy Town tonight?” he asked.

   “Hot, quiet, lonely,” she said.

  “How about meeting me at Luchow’s for dinner?” he asked. “I’m buying.”

   “Stan, I love you for the dear German or Polack or whatever you are, but the food at Luchow’s is not so good, even if you can ever get though that insanely long menu of theirs.” 

   “That’s what I’m here for,” he said. “Only a dog-eared investigator like me will look into everything the kitchen’s got to offer.”

   “All right, but the other thing is, since they seat more than a thousand people, how am I going to find you? And if I do, with that strolling oompah band of theirs, if we do bump into each other and maybe get a table in that goulash and Wiener schnitzel palace, we’ll only be able to make ourselves heard some of the time and not the rest of the time.”

   “We can always take our coffee and their pancakes with lingonberry over to the square after dinner and chew the fat, it’ll be quiet there,” he said.

   “Chew the fat? What it is I like about you, sometimes I just don’t know.”

   “I’ll take that for a yes.”

   “Yes, give me a few minutes to change into something fun,” she said gaily. “I hope there’s no goose fest or beer festival going on.”

   “Meet me at the far end of Frank’s bar, he’ll find a low-pitched spot in the back for us. Frank says the new herring salad is out of this world.”

   “Don’t push your luck, Stan, don’t push your luck,” she said.

   Luchow’s was a three-story six-bay building with stone window surrounds, pilasters, and a balustrated parapet on top, while below a red awning led to the front door. The restaurant was near Union Square. It looked like the 19^th century, or an even earlier century, heavy Teutonic, North German. A titanic painting of potato gatherers covered most of a wall in one of the seven dining rooms. Another of the rooms was lined with animal heads, their offspring being eaten at the tables below them, while another room was a temple of colorful beer steins. 

   There was a beer garden in the back.

   “Welcome back to the Citadel of Pilsner,” said Frank. He gestured Stan to the side.  “Did anybody tell you Hugo died?”

  “No, I hadn’t heard, although I heard he wasn’t feeling well,” said Stan. Hugo Schemke had been a waiter at Luchow’s for 50 years. He often said he wasn’t afraid of death. He had firmly no ifs ands or buts believed in reincarnation.

   “Did he say he was coming back?”

   “He did say that, but I haven’t seen him yet,” said Frank. 

   “How’s Ernst doing?” asked Stan. Ernst Seute was the floor manager, a short stout man both friendly and cold-hearted. He had been at Luchow’s a long time, too, since World War One.

   “He took a couple days off,” said Frank. “Remember that parade back in April over in Queens, they’ve got some kind of committee now, he’s over there with them trying to make it an annual thing here in Little Germany, calling it the Steuben Parade.”

    “You going to be carrying the cornflower flag?’

   “Not me, Stan, not me.” Frank was from Czechoslovakia. “I’m an American now.”

   Frank led Vicki and Stan to a small round table at the far end of the bar. He brought them glass mugs of Wurzburger Beer and a plate of sardines. Vicki ordered noodle soup and salad. “Hold the herring,” she commanded. Stan asked for a broiled steak sirloin with roasted potatoes and horseradish sauce on the side.

   “I saw Barney the other day,” she said, cocking her head. “He told me you’ve made progress.”

  “I didn’t think there was anything to it the first day I saw him, that day you brought him over to the office,” said Stan. “I didn’t think there was much to it all that first week the top of the month. But then there was all that action, and Bettina finally got it worked out, that it was the shrink. So, I know who did the thing to get Pollack to drive himself into that tree. I know how they did it. What I don’t know is why they did it.”

   “Do you know who they are?’

   “No, I don’t, even though one of the two, a psychotic by the name of Ratso Moretti, who roughed up Ezra, is being held at the 17^th. He doesn’t seem to know much, but what he does know says a lot. The shrink is going to tell me all about it. He doesn’t know about the talk we’re going to have, yet, but that doesn’t matter.”

   “You don’t think Jackson Pollack had anything to do with it?”

   “He was the wrong man, that’s all, if you look at it from his point of view. Bettina and I think he was a test run. We think they’re up to something bigger. It’s hard to figure. We can’t see the pay-off in it. You know Betty, though. She’ll piece it together.”

   After dinner they looked at the dessert menu, but it was only a peek. Vicki shook her head no.

   “How about coffee at my place?” asked Stan. “We can stop and get pastry at that Puerto Rican shop on the corner, sit up on the roof.” It was a clear sky night.

   “I can’t pass up that pass,” said Vicki.

   They hailed a Checker Cab. 

   “Take us up 5^th to 59^th, the corner of the park,” said Stan.

   The cabbie dropped them off at the Grand Army Plaza and they walked into the park, following the path below the pond towards the Central Park Driveway and Columbus Circle. He liked her loose breezy walk. They didn’t notice the two greasers, as they strolled on a quiet wooded path south of Center Drive, until the two of them were in front of them, blocking their way.

   One was taller and older, the other younger and thinner, their oiled hair combed back. Both of the dagos were wearing high tops, jeans, and white t-shirts, one of them dirtier than the other. The younger boy, he might have been fifteen, had a half-dozen inflamed pencil-thick pencil-long scratches down one side of his face and more of them on his forehead. Small capital SS’s topped with a halo drawn in red ink adorned the left sleeve of his t-shirt. The older dirtier dago had LAMF tattooed on his neck above the collar line to below his right ear.

   Stan knew what it meant. It meant ‘Like a Mother Fucker.’  He kept his attention on LAMF.

   “Hey, mister, got a double we can have for the subway, so we can make it back home,” he asked, smiling, his teeth big and white as Chiclets.

   They were part of the Seven Saints, thieves whose favorite easy pickings was holding back the door of a subway car just before it was ready to leave the station, one of them grabbing and running off with a passenger’s pocketbook, while the other released the door so the woman would be shut tight in the train.

   “Where’s home?” asked Stan, stepping forward a half step, nudging Vicki behind him with his left hand on her left hip. 

   “You writing a book, or what?”

   Stan asked again, looking straight at the older boy.

   “East Harlem, where you think?”

   “Why do you need twenty dollars? The fare’s only some cents.”

   “The extra is for in case we get lost.” 

   “It’d be best if you got lost starting now. “

   “I mean to get my twenty, and maybe more,” he said, smiling smirking mean, reaching into his back pocket.

   Stan took a fast step forward, his right foot coming down on the forefoot of the boy’s sneaker, grabbing his left wrist as it came out of the back pocket a flash of steel, and broke his nose with a short hard jab using his right elbow. Stepping away he let him fall backward and turned toward the younger boy, flipping the switchblade its business side face front.

   “Go,” he said. “Go right now.”

   The boy hesitated, looked down at the other Seven Saint on the ground, splattered with blood, and ran away like a squid on roller skates.

   Stan let the switchblade fall to the ground and broke the blade off the knife, stepping on it with his heel and pulling until it cracked at the hinge, and threw it at the older boy getting up. It hit him in the chest and bounced away. 

   “The next time I see you,” he spluttered, on his feet, choking, his mouth half-full of blood.

   “The next time I see you, you fill your hand with a knife, I’ll break your face again,” said Stan. 

   He took a step up to the boy and spoke softly to him. “Actually, it won’t matter what you do, nosebleed, what you’re doing, who you’re with, where you are. The minute I see you is when I’ll stack you up. Make sure you never see me again, make sure I never see you.”

   He took Vicki by the arm, shoved the teenager to the side, and they walked away.

   “You didn’t have to do that,” said Vicki. “You won plenty of hands. You might have tossed them a dollar-or-two.”

   “I know,” said Stan. “But they were working themselves up to be dangerous and that had to stop. The sooner the better.”

   “They were just kids.”

   “You saw the scratches on the face of the kid who ran away.”

   “Of course, the whole side of his face was gruesome.”

   “The Seven Saints have an initiation to get into the club,” Stan said. “They find a stray cat and tie him to a telephone pole, about head high, and leave the cat’s four feet free. The kid getting initiated has his hands tied behind his back and he gets to become a Seven Saint if he can kill the cat, using his head as a club.”

   “Oh, my God!” Vicki gasped, stopping dead in her tracks. “How do you even know that?”

   “I make it my business to know, so I don’t get taken by surprise.” Stan paused, then said, “I don’t give a damn about them. I care about you, Dottie, Ezra, Betty, the crew, and what we do. I care about getting it done and getting paid. I like playing cards, throw in dinner, a dance, a drink with you, and I’m jake. I don’t need anymore.”

   They passed the USS Maine Monument.

   “I don’t want greaser punks in my face.”

   They walked out of the park under a quarter moon, crossing Columbus Circle and strolling down Ninth Avenue. At West 56^th Street they turned towards the river, stopping in front of a four-floor walk-up with a twin set of fire escapes bolted to the front of the flat face of the brick building.

   “Anyway, maybe it will do those punks some good,” said Stan, fitting his key into the door lock. “Not everyone is as nice as I am. Someday somebody will go ballistic on them.”

   “Ballistic?” she asked.

   “Like a rocket, a missile that goes haywire.”

   “I wish we had a rocket to take us upstairs” she said, as they took the stairs up to the fourth floor. “We forgot our pastry.”

   “Another time,” he said.

   At the door of the apartment Stan fitted his key into the lock, opened the door, reached for the light switch, and let Vicki go around him as he did. In the shadow at the back of the front room there was a low menacing growl and a sudden movement. It was Mr. Moto. 

   He was no great sinner, but he wasn’t a saint either. He thought saints were more honored after their deaths than during their lifetimes. He was still alive and kicking and had his own code of honor. If he ever got his claws into the Seven Saints, there was going to be hell to pay for their sins. He crossed the room fast. He lunged at Vicki’s lead leg as she stepped across the threshold.

   “Hey, watch out for my stockings,” she cried out. Vicki was wearing Dancing Daters. “I’ll smack you right on your pink nose if you make them run.”

   Mr. Moto skidded to a sudden stop a whisker from her leg. “That’s better,” said Vicki, bending down to rub his head. The big cat arched his back and purred.

   Tony de Marco had a pounding headache. It started the minute he stood up from an unsound sleep, and it bothered him through breakfast. It bothered him walking to the newsstand to get his copy of the Daily Mirror. It bothered him as he rode the train to Ebbets Field.

   He couldn’t shake it off. His head shaking even slightly made it worse. It felt like his brain had gotten too big for his head, like it was swollen. He closed his eyes. He tried to read the tabloid, but he couldn’t concentrate. He closed his eyes again. Five minutes later he was getting some shuteye, lulled to sleep by the rocking of the train.

   He woke up when his stop was called. He felt a little better. He knew he wouldn’t miss his station when he dozed off, which is why he could doze off. He never missed it, even though his hearing was bad. It was like his brain screened out the talk of the passengers but was primed to hear the voice of the PA system.

   “Goddamn that Robert Moses,” he cursed, getting off the train, crossing Bedford Avenue, seeing the ballpark come into sight. 

   Everybody knew somebody was going to have to blow up the Moses limo before the Dodgers ever got a new stadium. Ebbets Field was the smallest park in the National League. The seats were bad. The toilets were bad. There was practically no parking anywhere. Even sold-out games didn’t help, although they helped. The Atlantic Yards was where the team wanted to go. But Moses wanted them to move to a city-owned stadium in Queens. Robert Moses was the city’s all-powerful mover and shaker. If anybody could make it happen, he could make it happen.

   That wasn’t going to happen. “We’re the Brooklyn Dodgers, not the Queens Dodgers,” the boss said. No one wanted to be a Queen Bum.

   Walter O’Malley was determined to get a bigger ballpark somewhere else. He’d been planning it for ten years. They were already playing seven or eight of their home games at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City. They’d played the first one there almost two weeks ago, edging the Phillies by a run. The stink of relocating was in the air. O’Malley was going to face Moses down. There was no doubt about it.

   The big man was going to move the team, that was for almost sure, maybe move out of Brooklyn, maybe even move to the west coast, even though there wasn’t a team anywhere west of Kansas City. It would be like moving to the moon.

   “Jeez, Jersey City, already!” and Tony spat on the sidewalk.

   King Hanky-Panky of Jersey City was gone, he wasn’t the mayor anymore, but his gang was still running things, and he was still living like a millionaire. Anybody who said anything about it to him was told he was a rotten commie. Then he was thrown out of town.

   The drive to the ballpark was terrible. There were no shoulders on the Pulaski Skyway over the Hackensack and Passaic rivers and the breakdown lane was in the middle of the bridge. Everybody called it the suicide lane. They were finally building a concrete median this summer to put a stop to the head-on accidents. Once you got over the bridge it smelled like soap and perfume, especially the closer downwind you got to the Colgate Plant on Hudson Street.

   It was the first day of May. It was sunny, in the low 50s, the sky far away. By the time they got to work on the field it might hit 60. The team was in Cincy playing the Redlegs. The grounds crew had the rest of the week and more to get the home field in tip-top shape. After that it was rule the roost games the rest of the month.

   Tony de Marco walked past the ballpark, crossed Flatbush Avenue, and walked into Prospect Park. He had a half-hour to kill. When he got to the shoreline opposite Duck Island, he found a bench and sat down, looking out over the water. He pulled a pack of cigarettes and a Ronson lighter from his jacket pocket. His headache wasn’t any worse. It was probably a little better. He hoped so.

   “L & M filters are just what the doctor ordered!” is what the ads said. Maybe a smoke would make him feel better. He leaned back and lit up, watching ducks and a line of ducklings, all waddling into the water. One of the mallards stayed on the shore, sideways, keeping that side of his eyes on him.

   There was a wall of six and seven-foot-tall butterfly bushes flanking and to the back of his bench. In the summer, once it got hot and the red lilac-like flowers bloomed, the bushes attracted butterflies and hummingbirds. Now that the ducks were back, he would have to remember to bring a bag of stale bread to the park.

   Tony sometimes ate lunch in Prospect Park when the team was on the road. When they were at home there was too much work to do. He was on the gang that rolled the tarpaulin out when rainstorms loomed, like everyone else, and he had his assigned work, but he didn’t do any mowing. The head groundskeeper made sure the grass was cut everyday if the team was in town. He might cut the infield grass shorter than usual if a bunt happy team was on the schedule. When Jackie Robinson had been faster than just about anybody the grass was kept long and the dirt in front of home plate watered down for him. 

   The Colored Comet’s first ever hit for the Dodgers had been a bunt single.

   One of Tony’s jobs was laying the foul lines, the coaching boxes, and batting boxes. Jackie Robinson stole home plate two and three times a year. Tony made sure the chalk line from third base to home was straight as an arrow.

   He took a drag and felt better. He would have to tell the doc about his headaches. He had been able to help him with his bad dreams without shock treatments or talking about combat fatigue and the rest of the psycho crap. He knew most of the VA shrinks yakked it up about hostility and neurosis aroused by war. They didn’t know anything about winter in Korea that never stopped and mud frozen solid. They didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. They didn’t know how goddamned horrible it was.

   He was lucky to have found Doc Baird, although when he thought about it, it was more like Doc Baird had found him. He couldn’t remember exactly how it happened. Besides the ear doctor in Japan, who told him he had lost some of his hearing, Doc Baird was the only doctor he had talked to the past three years who made sure to face his good ear when they were talking.

   “They didn’t have earplugs or nothing for us,” Tony told the doctor.

   “They’d say, you just have to live with it. Put paper or cotton in your ears. They didn’t care about us. I had to go to a MASH hospital one time. There was something wrong with me. I thought it might have been pneumonia. That night they brought in a bunch of guys who’d been in a firefight, crying and hollering, all mangled up. I couldn’t stand it. I left and hitchhiked back to my outfit.”

   The ducklings swam in a broken line behind the drab-feathered mother duck, who was putting up a racket to keep her brood together and safe. He had once seen a turtle rise up and gobble down a duckling. It was gone just like that.

   “When did you serve in Korea?” asked Doctor Baird.

   “I was there from the start, at Inchon. I got drafted in 1949, right after I turned 21, when the new law said everybody over 18 had to register. I didn’t have any luck. Only ten thousand guys got drafted that whole year and I was one of them. I didn’t want to go. My doctor wrote them a letter saying I had a bad back and you can’t use him. My boss wrote a letter saying we can’t spare him, we need him for the work team, but they didn’t listen to nothing.”

   “You didn’t want to join up?”

   “No, but when my number was finally up, I went down to the draft board. There was a big Marine there. He got us all lined up. He’d hit a guy in the chest. Marine! A couple more guys, he would hit another one in the chest. Marine! When he got to me, he looked me up and down, and went to the next guy. He didn’t want me. I weighed under 140 pounds then. They pushed me into the Army for two years and sent me to Fort Dix. We had a newspaper there, the Stars and Stripes. It said, ‘Fort Dix Turns Out Killers’. They called us killers. I didn’t know what it was all about. I wasn’t mad at anybody. I wasn’t a killer.”

   The ducks dipped their heads underwater as they swam, scooping up plants and insects. The drake on the shoreline walked off looking for land bugs. Waddling away he twisted his head around and grunted, then whistled at Tony. He didn’t hear the whistle, just like he barely heard birdsongs, if they went into his bad ear.

   “You lost most of your hearing in the one ear while you were in the artillery?”

   “A lot in the one ear, yeah. I wasn’t supposed to be in that racket, but that’s what happened,” said Tony. 

   “Most of the guys I trained with went to Europe. Three squads of us got sent to Korea. I had to fly to Seattle, wait thirty days, and then they put us on a ship across the Pacific, which took another twenty days. When we landed in Yokohama, we said, maybe we’ll just stay in Japan, but the next thing I knew I was landing at Inchon in a barge. That whole town was blown to bits.

   “I was trained for the infantry, but after we landed, they said, we have enough infantry guys, we need guys in the artillery. They sent me to the 37^th Field Artillery Battalion, the Second Division. They gave us a patch for our sleeve with a star and an Indian on it. We used to say, ‘Second to None!’ Right away they put me on a gun section, and we got orders for a fire mission. We had twelve guns, 105’s, loud, just boom, boom, boom. When it was over and guys were talking, I only saw lips moving. I couldn’t hear a damn thing for a half hour, right off the bat, the first time. I wasn’t used to that kind of noise.”

   “How did you get captured?” asked Doctor Baird.

   “What happened, after about four months, after Inchon, they said, you’ve got infantry training, right, we’re going to make you a forward observer, so I had go back to the infantry. My job was to tell our guys where to shoot the stuff. If there were ten thousand gooks in the open, we’d say, shoot the stuff that explodes in the air. It would rain down on those guys, the shrapnel getting them. Other times it was quick shells, the kind that explode the instant they hit the ground, or delays, the kind that stick in the ground and blow up later.”

   “You were fighting the North Koreans?”

   “No, we were fighting the Chinese, tough, small, always blowing bugles, padded up in quilt coats. They knew how to stay warm, not like us, with the summer outfits MacArthur sent us. They were good with mortars. If a round landed in front of you, and right away another landed behind you, we always said, get the hell out of the middle. There wasn’t anything but hills in Korea. We would lob over the hills when the infantry was going up one side to take it. We tried to shoot over them, down on the gooks, but sometimes it would land on our own guys.”

   It was friendly fire gone unfriendly.

   “That’s what happened to me and my buddy. We got caught up in some wire. You always had to watch for incoming rounds. As long as you heard a whistle, you’re OK. The one that gets you, you never hear it. He got killed, and I got all cut up. I couldn’t get off the wire. I still have scars on my arms. The Chinese picked me up. They had me for about three weeks, it was bad, and I got sick, something in my stomach, and when there was a prisoner exchange, they sent me back. I got flown to Japan and was in a hospital for a month, but I made it.”

   Tony stubbed the L & M out under his heel. He tucked his lighter away. It was time to go to work. He thought about the Greek kid. It was the kind of thing that happened when you were doing the killing while the other guy was trying to kill you.

   “There was one Greek kid I knew, he was a baseball player, but he got a leg blown off. They gave him an artificial leg. He didn’t tell anybody about it and tried to come back. He was still trying to make it in the minors after I got home, but, of course, he never made it.”

   The home plate entrance to Ebbets Field was an 80-foot rotunda made of Italian marble. Tony went around the back, to a door behind the bleachers in center field. He checked in with the watchman.

   “When I got healthy, they said, you can go home unless you want to re-up. We’ll give you $300.00 if you do that. We made $90.00 a month and they paid us $45.00 extra whenever we were in combat. But they didn’t want to pay me for the couple of months I still had left on my two years, so I said, no way.”

   “You went home after you got better?” asked Doctor Baird.

   “Yeah, I came home to Brooklyn, got my old job back, except my old job was turned into cleaning up in the aisles, but I worked my way back up. I’m doing maintenance work, better pay.”

   After Tony changed into his work clothes in the cramped grounds crew locker room, he walked out to the field. They were raking the sand clay mix today, the infield, foul lines, and on-deck plot. His headache was gone. The ballpark was going to look good for the Giants next week.

   “Hey Tony, big night tonight with Phil?” asked one of the three men with rakes on their shoulders as he walked up to them with his own rake.

   “You bet,” he said. “It’s Bilko tonight. He gets it over on the con men who try to gyp one of his guys. Ike’s going to like this one”

   Dwight Eisenhower was a fan of “You’ll Never Get Rich.” Earlier in the season the King of Chutzpah had gotten a telegram from Ike’s press secretary. “The Old Man missed last night’s show,” it said. A print of the show was immediately shipped to the White House.

   “You must have seen it filmed.”

   “That would be a good bet. They made everybody roll around on the floor, except for Silver, dressed up in their uniforms because the uniforms came in looking too crisp, too starchy, for being in the motor pool. They looked scruffy enough when they were done.”

   The show was filmed live in Chelsea in a building that used to be the armory of the Ninth Mounted Cavalry. It was shot like a play and recorded to film. It was a comedy and Phil Silvers ad-libbed like a man lost in his own thoughts. Tony had been in the audience more than a dozen times. He always looked forward to Phil Silvers coming up with something off the top of his cue ball head.

   It was why Tony de Marco’s new nickname was Tony the Phil.

   Tony was a big fan of Master Sergeant Ernest Bilko, who was named after Chicago Cubs first baseman Steve Bilko. “Bingo to Bango to Bilko” was the way the Chicago radio play-by-play man called double plays executed by shortstop Ernie Banks, second baseman Gene Baker, and Steve Bilko.

   Tony never missed a show, unless the Dodgers were playing under the lights, when it was Fernandez to Robinson to Nelson.

   He wasn’t the only fan of the show among the crew, but he was the show’s biggest fan among them all. Sergeant Bilko was a pushy patsy whose get-rich-quick schemes almost always fell flat on their face. His tips for success and riches never panned out either, but nobody ever bad-mouthed him for trying. They loved him for trying.

   “They always lose, sure, but they don’t blame me, because to a gambler a bad tip is better than no tip at all,” said Phil Silvers.

   A short man wearing a plaid cap, a stogie stuck in his thick lips, standing on the far side of the pitcher’s mound in a pair of green knee-high rubber boots, waved a hand at Tony.

   “Tony, go out there and check the drainage in center,” said Max Ringolsby, the crew chief, pointing over the top of the second base bag. “Duke said something about the grass being damp out there, maybe the drain is clogged up.”

   The Duke of Flatbush was one of the team’s best outfielders, usually assigned to roam center field. The year before he was the National League’s MVP runner-up. Nobody wanted to see him go head over heels on a slick spot.

   Tony walked off the infield, into the outfield, to the middle of center field, and found the drain. He got down on his hands and knees. The ground was more waterlogged than it should have been. Drainpipes crossed the field and water flowed down a slight fall to a larger drainpipe that ran into the storm water system. The pipe was about four inches below the sand, clay, and gravel that was below the grass.

   Tony cut a block of sod from around the drain and dug down to the drain grate. It was stopped up with debris. He retrieved a screwdriver from the tool room and removed the cover. He put it on the ground beside him and started cleaning it. He had the feeling somebody was watching him. He looked around the field. Almost everyone was working at something. Nobody was watching him.

   But he could smell a rat when he saw one.

   He bent forward and looked into the drain. A dark-eyed brown rat leaned up and looked back at him. He might have been a foot-and-half stretched out. His teeth were long but gnawed down. Rats chewed on anything, cement, brick, and lead pipes. One of the guys fed scrambled eggs to the rats that loitered in their locker room. Tony wondered what he was doing up and about in the middle of the day. He didn’t wonder that the rat was in the sewer. They could tread water for days.

   The rats bred and lived and died and bred in Ebbets Field. They never left. Why would they leave? They had been there since the stadium was built in 1913, generation after generation, because there were always leftover hot dogs roasted peanuts soft pretzels and Cracker Jack beneath seats and around overflowing trash bins.

   “Boo,” said Tony the Phil.

   The brown rat blinked twitched and skittered back into the storm drain.

   Vicki Adams stood in the doorway, leaned forward, nudged Barnett Newman into the office, and said to Stan, “Here he is. I’ll be at MOMA until 11:30, then lunch at Eisenberg’s before I have to hit the typewriter. Join me there?”

   It was 10 o’clock the Monday morning.

   “See you at noon, doll face,” Stan Riddman said. He grinned wolfishly.

   “Watch the language, bub.” Vicki scowled. Stan threw her a sheepish look, apologizing with a two-finger salute. It was how the Polish Armed Services saluted. Stan picked it up during the war.

   Vicki waved goodbye and went out the door.

   Barnett Newman had thinning hair and a heavy mustache. He wore a polka-dotted bow tie with a monocle dangling from a neck strap down the front of his shirt. He was a heavy man who had not gone heavy. He had never met spoken looked a private eye in the eye in his life.

   He was born and bred in New York City, and was sure he would die in NYC, studied philosophy at City College of New York, and worked in his father’s clothing factory in the Bronx before it went bust after the stock market crash. He had been a small-time magazine publisher, ran for mayor in a whimsical write-in campaign in 1933, and finally gave up the bachelor life and got married in 1936.

   His wife went to work, and he joined the Art Students League. He kept at it. He made himself into a painter of strict abstraction. In 1950 he painted an 8 by 18-foot long picture in all-over red. He added four vertical bands of color and called them zips. No one knew what he was talking about. He spent hours days weeks explaining it. Barnett Newman enjoyed polemics more than most people.

   “It’s no different, really, from meeting another person,” he said about his oversize painting. No one knew what that meant, either.

   “Have a seat, Mr. Newman,” said Stan Rittman, standing up at his desk and motioning to one of the two armless wood banker’s chairs that floated around the office.

   “Call me Barney.”

   “All right, Barney.”

   The office of the Duluc Detective Agency wasn’t large. It wasn’t small, either. It had a separate side entrance as well as the front door. The side door went into another office they kept behind an unmarked front door. Stan’s desk faced and was not quite to the left of the front door. It backed on the windows looking down to 48th Street. Ezra shared Bettina’s desk on the rare occasion he had paperwork to work on or needed to prop his legs up on something. It was perpendicular to Stan’s desk on the right. There were two rows of filing cabinets, a freestanding coat rack, an umbrella stand, and a water cooler. In a small storage room were shelves of typewriter ribbon stationary invoices envelopes stamps pens and pencils. One shelf was for whiskey. A floor safe was tucked into a back corner. Stan and Ezra kept their cash and guns in the safe.

   “Vicki hasn’t told me much, other than she knows you through the magazine, and likes you, and you have a problem with how a friend of yours died.”

   “That’s right, Mr. Rittman. He was Jackson Pollack, who was my friend. There was a car crash. I don’t believe it happened the way the Hampton police say it happened. Lee is having a hard time believing he could have crashed. Jack could drive those roads blindfolded no matter how much he’d had to drink. He could drive them in his sleep.”

   “Call me Stan,” said Stan, thinking Barney Newman to be ten fifteen years older than himself and at least twenty years older than Bettina.

   “OK, Stan.”

   “Betty, can you sit in with us, maybe take a few notes?”

   “Sure,” said Bettina, stepping over with a steno pad, sitting down on the other loose chair next to Barney Newman.

   Ezra called her Big Head Bettina behind her back because she was smart and because her head was slightly larger than it should have been. He called her Betty to her face because she had punched him in the nose the one and only time he called her Big Head. She had grown her hair out recently in a high ponytail style with round bangs at the top of her forehead. When Stan threw an eye on her now, she looked like no worries.

   “You said Lee. Who is Lee?” asked Stan.

   “Lee Krasner was Jackson Pollack’s wife.”

   “Vicki said he died up on Long Island, some small town out there, is that right?”

   “Yes, that’s right.”

   “I’ve heard of him somewhere, probably the papers, some kind of famous artist, if I’ve got that right. What was he doing driving around in the middle of nowhere?”

   “He lived in Springs at the far end of the island and he was living it up with his girlfriend while his wife was in Paris.”

   “I see,” Stan said, thinking, this is more like it.

   Bettina looked up, paused, her pencil quiet in her hand, as neither Stan nor Barney said anything for a few seconds in the lag of Barney letting them soak it in. He didn’t know Stan and Betty had heard about cheating a hundred times before.

   “Why don’t we start at the beginning, tell me all about Jackson Pollack, and what it is you want me to look into,” Stan said.

   Most of the work Ezra and Betty and Stan did was insurance and marital work. None of their clients had ever been an artist, wed or single, insured or not insured, dead or alive.

   “I didn’t steal no inventory of my own,” said a small-time supplier of slabs of beef. “I am the Dolores, understand? I can’t stand my husband being unfaithful,” said a dark-haired sultry woman wearing a slash of red lipstick. “I’d rather see her dead than unfaithful,” said a burly middle-aged man wearing a diamond pinkie ring. “I hope to God you prove me wrong.” The Pinkie Man went up the river to Sing Sing after all was said and done in a faithless world.

   “Do you mind if I smoke?” asked Barney.

   “No, I don’t mind,” said Stan, and pushed a three-rest yellow glass ashtray towards him.

   Barnett Newman smoked one cigarette after another with girlish puffs and spoke in a nasally voice with a not quite scrubbed away New Yorkese accent. He didn’t drop r’s or add them where they weren’t wanted, or lengthen his o’s and w’s, but it was in the background if you cared to listen. He talked with his hands, his cigarette always in his right hand. He shifted forwards and backwards in his seat, riffling his sport coat out by the lapels, and folding himself back into the chair.

   “Where should I start?” he asked.

   “Start with Jackson Pollack,” said Stan.

   “He was one-of-a-kind, a new man, a new artist. He made himself out of nothing.

He made a new world out of nothing.”

   Nearly an hour-and-a-half later, Barnett Newman’s steps fading away in the hallway, a haze of not-yet-stale cigarette smoke lingering behind him, Stan turned to Bettina. “One of us is going to have to go up to Springs,” he said.

   “Ezra’s on that waterfront thing, and I don’t drive, remember, so it’s going to have to be you,” she said.

   “All right, but you find the girlfriend and talk to her, find out what happened, what she thinks or knows happened, especially that part about Pollack aiming for the tree.”

   A half-hour later Stan quick looked into Eisenberg’s. It was a few minutes before noon. He spotted Vicki on one of the red leather stools halfway down the long counter. Her purse was keeping the stool to her left reserved. She smiled when she saw him and waved him over

   “Do you need a menu?” one of the cooks behind the counter asked him when he was still halfway down to sitting on the vacant stool.

   “No, I’ll take the lox, eggs, easy on the breath, and don’t forget the cup of pickles.” 

   Vicki ordered smoked salmon on a boiled bagel with lettuce, tomato, and Thousand Island. She avoided the pastrami at Eisenberg’s. “Too fatty and too chewy at the same time,” is how she described it, looking down her nose.

   “What about the cream cheese and scallions?” he asked.

   “What about them?” she said.

   “Not much, not by your appetite. Have you ever wondered why they call it Thousand Island?”

   “It’s from Thousand Islands, New York, that’s why,” said Vicki. “Maybe fifty years ago, a fishing guide’s wife up there made it up for her husband’s fish dinners. The rest is history.”

   “Oh,” said Stan.

    “You couldn’t put the Thousand Islands thing together?”

   “No.”

   “You told me you graduated from detective school.”

   Stan looked up from his cup of coffee. 

   “I graduated from the school of hard knocks.”

   Vicki laughed, spitting bits of salmon.

    “How did it go with Barney?”

   “It’s a hell of a yarn,” he said. “I don’t know what to think about it. There might be something to it, who knows. Betty is going to look into something Barney told us, about the girlfriend. Maybe you can fill me in on who’s who.”

   “You’ve heard of abstract expressionism, I’ve mentioned it, that’s who they are, the painters, it’s all here in New York. Most of them live and work here or out on Long Island. Jackson was an action painter, the real deal.”

   “Wasn’t he the painter they called Jack the Dripper?”

   “That’s what Time magazine called him earlier in the year, which was all wrong because he wasn’t painting that way anymore, hadn’t been for a few years. He’s been on the quiet side overall the past two, three years.”

   “He’s on the hear a pin drop side now,” said Stan.

   “Another draw in the dark?” asked the counterman.

   “Thanks bud,” said Stan, sliding his coffee cup and saucer forward.

   “He was famous,” said Vicki, “Not everyone thought he was good, though. Some hated him and others loved him.”

   “If he’s good, I’m going blind and should get out of the business,” complained art dealer Kurt Valentin.

   “This is new,” exclaimed the painter Giorgio Morandi. “Vitality, energy, new!”

   “Was he good?”

   “It depends on who you ask. I liked his work. Some people said it was a complete mess without any method, while others said it was a whole new way of making art, visual energy like no one had ever seen. Life magazine wrote him up, said he might be the best, right around 1950.”

   “Most of Jackson Pollack’s paintings resemble nothing so much as a mop of tangled hair I have an irresistible urge to comb out,” an offended reporter for the New York World Telegram bellyached.

   “Jackson is the greatest painter this country has produced,” acclaimed art critic Clement Greenberg.

   “Some people thought he was off his rocker and didn’t know what he was doing,” Vicki said.

   “When I am painting, I am not much aware of what is taking place,” explained Jackson Pollack. “It is only after that I see what I have done.”

   “What about his wife?” Stan asked.

   “They got married in the mid-40s, Lee Krasner, an artist, a good one, too, but it’s hard to say what school she works in,” said Vicki. “She’s been doing collages for years, as far as I know, not exactly groundbreaking.”

   “Lee devoted more time to taking care of Jackson than she did to her work,” Roger Wilcox reminisced. “He was difficult, but she believed in him.”

   Roger Wilcox’s wife, Lucia, whose own abstract paintings were spelled out with lively sweeps of color, was someone who from the late 1930s helped get the artist’s colony on the east end of Long Island going, from Alfonso Ossorio and Robert Motherwell to Jackson Pollack. She liked to cook and fed the hungry artists who stopped by her large kitchen that opened into her large studio. She believed in Abstract Expressionism.

   “Barney is a color field painter,” said Vicki. “He’s not as well-known as Mark Rothko, more of a minor key guy, but he talks it up, and he’s committed to what they’re all up to.”

   “What are they up to?” Stan asked.

   “Not any one thing. They’re mostly all trying to make it, make New York the capitol of the art world, take over from Paris, and when they do, they’ll be made men. They’re more than halfway there. Most of them, whether it’s abstract or not, most of them are doing something new. An Italian painter, Morandi, he said they dive into the water before they learn to swim. He meant it as a good thing. It’s American-style painting.”

   Before he left the Duluc Detective Agency, Barnett Newman asked Stan, “The name of your business doesn’t sound American, sounds French. Do you mind my asking why you’re not Ace or Ajax Detectives?”

   “No, I don’t mind,” said Stan. “I was in Paris the last year of the war. I was a military policeman, black armband, big yellow MP on my steel pot. After it was all over, I stayed. I liked the city, liked the food and drink, and I liked the girls. I ran out of money soon enough and started looking for work. I knew the language reasonably well. A friend of mine introduced me to someone who introduced me to Duluc Investigations.”

    Stan stubbed his butt out.

   “The office was on the ground floor right around the corner from the Louvre. Most of the work was swindle cases and missing persons. It was 1946, so there was a lot of swindling going on and a lot of folks gone footloose. I stayed for two years, learned a lot, but got homesick.”

   “What borough, where’s home?”

   “Cleveland.”

   “That’s not New York.”

   “No, but after I shipped back here, back from Europe, a buddy of mine put me up for a few weeks, catching up. One thing led to another and before I knew it, I was taking the police exam. I didn’t make it back to Ohio. I was in blue for almost three years, but I butted heads with some heads in the department. It wasn’t for me anymore, taking orders. When I set myself up as an independent, I called the old man back in Paris and asked him if I could use his name on my shingle. He said he was too far away to do anything about it.”

   “Will you take it up, find out what happened to Jackson?” asked Barnett Newman.

   “I’ll give it a few days and get back to you. We’ll check out the girl and the hometown and go from there. I’ll need something from you introducing me to the wife. Let her know I’m coming, if you can. I don’t want to waste my time or your money.” said Stan.

   “Are you going to be able to help them?” asked Vicki, reaching for her slice of apple pie.

   “He signed on the dotted line, gave us a deposit, but I’m not sure,” said Stan. “Betty is going to try and see the girlfriend who made it out alive and I’m going to drive up to Springs tomorrow, nose around, see if I can touch base with the widow, stop and see the local cherry tops, get my hands on what’s in the public record, anything they might be willing to tell me.”

   “You won’t take Barney for a ride, or anything like that.”

   “It sounds like it doesn’t amount to much and it’s probably going to end in nothing. We’ll keep it short, won’t pad it.”

   “What do you charge?” Barney had asked

   “We charge a flat fee for sweeps, backgrounds, interviews, things in that vein. Yours isn’t anything like that. Your work is going to be $10.00 a man hour, plus expenses. That means anything we have to pay out, buying somebody a beer, buying somebody’s talk, buying gas getting out to Springs, incidentals. We’ll check with you first about anything over twenty dollars.”

   “That sounds all right.”

   “How did Jackson Pollack end up in Springs?” asked Stan.

   “They were living here in the city, but Jackson got sick of it. He and Lee borrowed some money from their dealer, more from a local bank, and they moved there, and got married on the way, ten, eleven years ago,” said Barney. “They bought an old farmhouse, no bathroom, no central heating, a barn, five acres, a great view of the harbor, and a mortgage.”

   “It doesn’t sound like they got much for their money, except lots of land and a view.”

   “Jackson did his best work in Springs,” said Barney, “He loved it out there.”

   “He wasn’t born with a paintbrush in his hand,” Vicki said. “He was from Wyoming. The only thing they paint there are houses. He was a self-destructive man. I’ve heard it from more than one person.” 

   “I admire his work, a great painter and all that. But he was a difficult character, always drunk and wild, impossible to deal with” said Sidney Janis, after Jackson Pollack wasn’t difficult anymore

   “When he went on those drinking spells, we didn’t want to see him. We were afraid of him, of his anger,” said Lawrence Larkin.

   “One time, Jack got to driving his damn car so fast I was sure we were going to veer off the road. I thought he was out there to kill himself, kill us all,” said his brother, Frank Pollack.

   “He was driven, came from a hardscrabble family. He was ambitious but antisocial, too,” said Vicki. “He could be mean. He was mean, the way I hear it. He went on benders and got into lots of fights, especially at the Cedar Tavern. They all lived in the neighborhood and hung around there for the cheap drinks. He was banned for a while after he tore the bathroom door off its hinges and threw it across the room at another painter.”

   “Is that right, he threw a door at somebody. I thought most painters were mostly pansies.”

   “Where have you been? That has never been true. It’s a new day and age, anyway,” said Vicki. “The greatest artists have the biggest fights, even though sometimes it’s only with themselves.”

   Stan paid the bill, pocketing the receipt, and they stepped out of the no-frills luncheonette onto the sidewalk. Stan flagged down a hack, pecked Vicki on the cheek, and held the door of the car open as she slid into the back seat.

   “Where can I see some of Pollack’s paintings?” he asked when Vicki rolled down the window.

   “I would try the Sidney Janis Gallery.”

   “And the Cedar Tavern is down in Greenwich Village, right?” he asked as the cabbie shifted into gear.

   “Go to the Cedar afterwards., after you see the paintings. You’re such a numbskull about modern art, you’ll need a stiff pick-me-up after you see the all-overs, believe me,” she cackled unladylike, pleased with herself. Her hand wiggle waved out the window as the cab pulled away from the curb, merging into the midtown midday traffic.

   It was hot, humid, the city as far as the eye could see smelled bad, and the ceiling was dotted with dull clouds. The hot dog Ezra wolfed down for breakfast was giving him trouble. On top of that, the bunion topping his left big toe was throbbing in the new shoes he neglected to stretch beforehand. 

   It was a bad day to be having a bad day.

   But that’s what it was turning into. Now the other penny was dropping. Two pennies, one of them big and mean, the other one smaller and meaner. He was sure nobody was behind him to trip him up but running fast and far was going to be a problem with his goddamn bunion. He kept his hands at his sides, his right hand balled into a fist.

   “You can forget about that roll of pennies in your hand,” said the man next to Big Paulie 

   Luca Gravano was Big Paulie. He wasn’t tall big. He was big all around, a dark suit, dark tie, and white shirt. His face was pockmarked, and he wore thick black browline glasses. The lenses looked like they were smeared with a thin film of Vaseline. His brown eyes were slippery and unfocused.

   He stank of low-priced cologne.

   “They’re not Lincoln’s,” said Ezra. “They’re Jefferson’s.”

   He could use a lucky penny.

   “OK, let’s cut the crap,” said Big Paulie. “We ain’t going to get up to anything here, broad daylight, all these guys around, left and right.”  He waved a thick hand over his shoulder. “We just wanna know what it is you wanna know.”

   Ezra looked past the big man. On the finger pier side was a freighter. Hemp slings were easing swaying pallets off the boat. In the distance he could see the Statue of Liberty. On the dockside was a two-story brick building. A loose group of longshoremen was coming their way, baling hooks in their belts. They would be D & D if anything did get up. 

   “I don’t know nothing about it,” they would all say, deaf and dumb, after it was all over. But they could be the smoke screen Ezra needed to be on his way.

   “I’m trying to get a line on Tommy Dunn,” Ezra lied.

   “Never heard of him,” said Big Paulie’s man in shirtsleeves. 

   “Fair enough,” said Ezra.

   “You private?” asked Big Paulie.

   “Yeah,” said Ezra.

   “Who you work for?” the henchman asked. He had yellow fingernails and sharp front teeth. He wore a black felt pork pie hat.

   “Ace Detectives,” Ezra lied.

   “I’ve heard of them,” said the tough mean-looking man.

   “Best we don’t see you down here again,” said Big Paulie.

   “I take your meaning,” said Ezra. 

   He took a step back, smiling meekly, turning and walking away in stride with the group of longshoremen going his way. He hated shucking and jiving, but he knew enough to hedge his bets. The hoodlums ran the shaping-up, the loading, and the quickie strikes. They hired you for the day if you were willing to kick back part of your day’s pay. At the shape-up you let them know by putting a toothpick behind your ear or wearing a red scarf or whatever the hell it was they wanted to see.

   They controlled the cargo theft, the back-door money stevedores paid to keep the peace, and the shylocking from one end of Red Hook to the other end. They didn’t steal everything, although they tried. The unions were the hoodlums. The businessmen were the hoodlums. The pols were the hoodlums. The whole business was hoods.

   The Waterfront Commission hadn’t gotten much done since they got started, even though the State of New York and Congress of the United States were both in word and writing on board. It was taking some doing to make it into deeds.

   It was just two-some years ago on Christmas week when a new union butted heads with the ILA. Tony “Tough“ Anastasio flooded the streets with the faithful. It took more a thousand club-swinging City of New York policemen to break up the melee at the Port of New York. 

   In the end, gang rule stayed the rule on the docks.

   Ezra put the roll of nickels back in his pants pocket. He walked the length of the wire fence to the gate. Through the gate he turned his back on the Buttermilk Channel. He couldn’t settle down, a sinking feeling in his gut slowing him down. Red Hook was surrounded by water on three sides. A longshoreman smoking alone stared at him. He crossed the street into the neighborhood. The houses, six-story brown brick apartment buildings, were less than twenty years old, but they were already going suspicious and seedy.

   “I need a drink,” he thought.

   Most days Ezra ran on caffeine and nicotine. Most nights he ran on alcohol and nicotine. Even though it was only late morning, today wasn’t most days.

   He found a bar grill at the corner of Court Street and Hamilton Avenue. Sitting down at the bar he ordered a shot and a chaser. He looked up at the bartender. The man was wearing a bow tie. He looked like an old tossed-out mattress wearing a bow tie.

   “What have you got on tap?” asked Ezra.

   “Ballantine, Schlitz, Rheingold.”

   A couple of longshoremen sat on stools a couple of stools away. Squat bottles of beer squatted in front of them. Neither man had a glass.

   The TV on a shelf behind the bar was on, although the sound had been turned down to nothing. A beer commercial was running. It was a ticker tape parade through Times Square, but instead of war heroes or celebrities everybody in the parade was a bottle of Rheingold Extra Dry. 

   “No one knew what that was about,” said one of the longshoremen, pulling a pack of Luckies out of his shirt pocket.

   “I got no trouble,” said the other one. “I support my family. I got my four kids. It’s good work.”

   “Nothing changes,” said the Lucky Strike man lighting his cigarette. “You just live every day as if it’s your last.”

    “I’ll have a Rheingold,” said Ezra Aronson. “Cold as can be, no glass.”

   “I’ll have that one,” said Bettina, pointing to a fresh cheese Danish the spinning steel drum had just fed into the window. Pete Murphy deposited three nickels, turned the handle in the lower left corner of the window, and pulled out the plate. He bought a ham sandwich for himself. They poured two cups of steaming brewed coffee, paying a nickel each, and found seats in the cafeteria.

   The automat had recently installed photo booths in a row along a back wall. “The New Photographic Sensation! 4 Poses 25 cents! Ready in 2 Minutes!” A young woman wearing a polka-dotted swing dress stood combing her hair in front of one at the small square mirrors next to the entry curtain.

   Pete and Betty had finished playing three games of ping-pong at the pool parlor on 42^nd Street, working up an appetite. After two games it was one up. Pete won the hard-fought rubber game. After lunch he was going back to work across the street at the New York Public Library and Betty was going downtown to talk to Ruth Kligman, Jackson Pollock’s girlfriend, the young woman who survived the car crash in Springs the month before. 

   In the meantime, Pete had written up notes about her from clippings on her.

   “Ruth was the girlfriend and the other one, the girl who didn’t make it, her name was Edith Metzger,” said Pete, biting into his sandwich. “She was a hairdresser in the Bronx. It’s too bad, since she was only along for the ride, a young girl.”

   “You never want to be the innocent bystander,” said Bettina. 

   “It was a tough weekend all around up there in East Hampton and Southampton,” said Pete. “Ten people died in smash-ups.”

   Ruth Kligman and Jackson Pollack had only met earlier in the year before the accident.

   “How did they meet?” asked Bettina.

   “Audrey Flack hooked them up,” said Pete.

   “She wanted to meet important artists,” was how Audrey Flack put it. “I drew her a map of how to get to the Cedar Tavern. She asked me which one was the most important and I said Pollack. She went right to the bar and made a beeline for him.” 

   “Who’s Audrey Flack?” asked Betty.    

   “About the same age as Kligman, but an artist, not a hanger-on,” said Pete. “Cooper Union, BFA from Yale, the Institute of Fine Arts here in the city.”

   “I remember Pollack’s grin, his arm around her and the finger with the missing tip caressing her shoulder bare above the halter,” Audrey remembered. “I saw what he meant when he said loaded with extras.”

   Pete and Betty played ping-pong at the pool hall once or twice a week. Pete was an attacker, standing about three feet away from the table, going at the ball at the top of the bounce, aiming to end points quickly. Serve it smash it was his motto. Betty believed in outwit beats outhit. She was a close to the table defender, countering with under-spin blocks trying to force weak topspin returns then volleying with a well-placed drive or loop. 

   Baby got backspin was her motto.

   Pete led with more long serves than not, with different amounts of topspin backspin sidespin, looking for a counterattack on the third and fifth balls. On the flip side Bettina offered up under-spin and no-spin serves so the ball slowed down or skidded when hitting the table. 

   “If you want a soft serve, go to Dairy Queen,” complained Pete.

   Once in play she spun the ball more often than not. She wasn’t wet behind the ears. She played the long game.

   “Spin it to win it,” she said pointedly to Pete.

   “The Kligman was working at the Collector’s Gallery when she met Pollack on purpose,” said Pete. “She was new and single, had the Elizabeth Taylor look and feel. He was 44 and married. He was looking for some feeling.”

   “He looked tired out and sad,” said Ruth, looking back “His body seemed as though it couldn’t stand up on its own.” He was slump shouldered, bleary-eyed, wan.

   She told anyone who would listen that she brought his energy back up. Jackson Pollack fell head over heels for the 26-year-old in a red dress. He spent nights in New York City with her. She moved to Sag Harbor at the start of summer to be closer to him.

   “He felt good about her,” said Jim Brooks, the painter who moved into the Greenwich Village apartment Jackson Pollack and Lee Krasner moved out of when they moved to Springs. “You know, a pretty, voluptuous gal, thinking he was the greatest man on the word.”  

   “It looks like the girlfriend knew about the wife and the wife knew about the girlfriend,” said Pete. “The wife went to Europe in July, gave Pollack his marching orders, told him it was going to have to be her or the floozy, and he had until Labor Day to decide. He moved the floozy into their house on Fireplace Road the same afternoon the wife left.”

   “His dream was to have both, like a little boy,” said Patsy Southgate between scribbles in her journal.

   “Lee was dealing with a powder keg,” said Nick Carone, an artist friend of the Pollack’s.

   “I will never give Jackson a divorce,” said Lee. 

   “The car was flipped over, cans of Rheingold all over,” said Pete. “The young girl was pinned under the car, DOA. The girlfriend broke a leg and Pollack got rocketed into the woods. He was DOA, too.”

   “It sounds like a hell of a mess,” said Betty.

   After the accident Patsy Southgate visited Ruth. “She didn’t look much banged up to me,” she said. “In fact, she looked great.”

   The eager beaver Ruth, leaning back on a sofa, her bare legs propped up on an ottoman, in a friend’s living room in the East Village, related how what happened was going to happen, no matter what.

   “Edith started screaming, ‘Stop the car, let me out!’ but he put his foot all the way to the floor. He was speeding wildly,” she said.  She made it sound like he had meant to drive himself to death, as though the car crash was no accident, no speed limit to save you from your own fate.

   “It had to happen. Jackson was schizoid and he couldn’t be stopped. Edith was scared by the situation with him. She was a victim, but she always was. Jackson was a victim, too. He had to die,” Ruth said.

   “It was a mess,” said Pete, “but at the wake about a week later, out at their house there in Springs, a lot of people said afterwards it was the best party they had ever been to.”

   “The best chili I ever had in my life, really hot stuff,” said Franz Kline. 

   “What stays with me is that baked Virginia ham,” said Morton Feldman. “I never tasted such ham, never.”

   “I had too much to drink,” said Charles Pollack. “I remember dancing with a black girl.”

   Artists are always hungry, whether they are starving, or not.

    “We all had a good time,” said Clement Greenburg.

   “Thanks, Pete,” said Bettina. “How about Friday? You were good, but I can be better. You owe me a rematch.”

   “See you then,” he said. “Bring your lucky paddle. Let me know how it goes with the girlfriend. I’ll be all ears.”

   Betty whistled a cab up to go to the East Village to talk to Ruth Kligman, the siren who sank Jackson Pollack.

   The car was ready the minute Stan walked in. Smokey the garage man tossed the car keys to him. 

   “All gassed up,” he said.

   Stan got into the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition, and eased the 1955 Pontiac Star Chief into the flow of traffic for the drive out to the far end of Long Island. The engine hummed, 1954’s straight-eight replaced by a new V-8. The sedan was a light gray color, two ‘Silver Streaks’ running the length of the hood and showcase leather upholstery. Although neither he nor Ezra drove it overmuch, and might have been able to do without it, they both liked the car, and since in their line of work, they reasoned, some things happen somewhere else besides the city, they would be better off getting there in a Star Chief, instead of some heap of nuts and bolts, like a Ford.

   “Fix or repair daily,” is what Smokey said about Fords.

   He was concerned for the car whenever Ezra took it out for whatever reason. Stan was a careful driver, usually staying a few miles–or-so below the speed limit, always signaling, never trying to beat a light, but Ezra was not the nice guy at a dogfight behind the wheel. He hadn’t put a wrinkle in the Star Chief, yet, but it was only a matter of time. Riding in the car with Ezra was like bad weather no matter the weather.

   They kept the Pontiac garaged in Brooklyn to keep expenses down. He guided the car through East New York, through Queens, and on to Route 27, and was on his way the more than one hundred miles to East Hampton. From there the Fireplace Road would take him directly to Springs and whatever Jackson Pollack had left behind.

  He slipped past convertibles, panel vans, and station wagons full of wives and kids going to Howard Beach, Lido Beach, and Jones Beach. He kept his mind off his errand. The old man had always said not to overthink the work, especially at the beginning, when there wasn’t much to think about, anyway. 

   The drive took almost four hours. The road was a two-lane that went through every town on the way. He stopped in Patchogue to stretch his legs in the shadow of a billboard. Stan craned his neck to look up at it.

   ‘Patchogue: Biggest Shopping Center on Long Island.’

   There were at least six gas stations in Bridgehampton, a small potato farm town north of Sagaponack Pond. He pulled into the Sinclair, even though he was less than ten miles from East Hampton. A side lot was filled with tractors, sprayers, and harvesters waiting to be repaired.

   “Fill it up?” 

   “Yes.”

   Stan got out of the car while the attendant, dressed in a shirt and cap with the company’s logo, limped to the pump. A teenager ran up and cleaned off the windshield, checked the oil, and added air to one of the tires. There was a sign in the window.

   ‘Free All-Plastic Dinosaur Piggy Bank with Every Fill-up.’

   “Make it 5 gallons,” said Stan.

   “$1.25,” said the attendant.

   Stan pulled some singles from his wallet. While the attendant went into the station to make change, he looked at one of the Silver Certificates still in his wallet. Congress had passed and President Eisenhower signed a new law the month before. “In God We Trust” was now the motto of the United States and it was going to be on all paper money starting the next year. Stan didn’t follow the Red Scare or the Cold War in the papers, but he knew enough to understand why the USA had to be a God-fearing and the Commies had to be atheists. 

   A piece of paper stained by water oil dirt was taped to one of the gas pumps.

   ‘In god we trust. All others pay cash.’ 

   Stan wasn’t a religious man, but he thought printing God’s name on money might be sacrilegious. God didn’t care how much money you had in your wallet. What about what happened to the money lenders in the temple?

   East Hampton’s Main Street was lined with elm trees. He located the police station on Newtown Lane. They had their own gas pumps on the sidewalk outside the front door and two cells in the back. The post office was across the street. He drove past Bohack’s, the burg’s grocery store. There were no street numbers on many of the houses. There was one traffic light in the center of town. He stopped at it when it turned red.

   A loose group of Negro migrant workers sat on benches with bottles of Thunderbird in paper bags. It might have been their day off. Across the street the Candy Kitchen was full for lunch. There were no dark faces at the counter or at any table and there were no half-empty glasses of curb juice.

   He was going to have to stay the night, find somewhere for dinner and a bed.

   A woman was watering the lawn and a bed of flowers in front of a small white flat-roofed building. He pulled over. A sign said, ‘Ladies Village Improvement Society’.

   “Hello,” said Stan.

   “Hello,” said the woman, turning off the nozzle of her garden hose.

   “I wonder if you could tell me where I can find a motor inn?”

   “Montauk is where I would try,” she said. “They’ve built more than a half-dozen new ones up there in the past few years. It’s just fifteen-or-so miles up the road.”

   “Thanks,” he said, and added, “Do you mind my asking what the society does?”

   “Not at all,” she said, brightening. “We water all the flowers and gardens downtown, help keep the public order, not that I’m saying the police don’t care, and make sure all the stores are closed on Sundays. We do our best to make sure everyone is in proper dress whenever they’re out in public, too.”

   A busybody’s work is never done, thought Stan.  

   It wasn’t far from East Hampton to Springs, about four miles. He found Jackson Pollack’s two-story wood-shingled house on the Fireplace Road. It looked like an old farmhouse. There was a cherry tree next to the house, silver maples all around, and the long backyard sloping down to salt marshes. There was a small barn behind and to the side of the house. When Stan looked in through one of the windows, he saw a floor spattered with paint and footprints. The floor shelves workbenches were crowded with cans of paint and half-empty cans full of sticks brushes and turkey basters. Canvases were rolled up on top of a cabinet. A pile of sand was in one corner, a stepladder in another. 

   A clear-eyed expansive light poured in through a large high window. He walked back to the house and looked in through the living room window. There were paintings hanging on the walls, all of them filled with sprawling looping crazy colors. Jazz records littered the floor in front of a record player.

   There was no one in sight. He got into his Star Chief and drove to Montauk. There were no sidewalks in town. He parked at an angle. A horse was tied up to a telephone pole. He ate at Gosman’s Deck, a clam bar shack, and had clams, pasta with olive oil and chopped tomatoes, and a bottle of Falstaff. 

   He found a reasonably priced room at Uncle Tom’s Cabins.

   “There’s a nice beach down on Fort Pond,” said the woman in black capris and a red and white Roman shirt, a cigarette burning in the ashtray at her elbow, behind the counter.

   It was a five-minute walk. He took his time.

   Stan sat on the beach, his back against a pretzel log of driftwood, and watched the sun go down. He got to his feet before it got too dark to see, making his way back to the motor inn. He walked up the crushed clamshell driveway, guided by the light on the wall next to his room door that he had turned on before going to the beach.

   Barney Newman had said Jackson Pollack did his drinking at Jungle Pete’s. It wasn’t overly late. He could drive up there for another beer. He would get the lay of the land tomorrow, talk it up wherever Jackson Pollack had done his stomping and dying, drive back to the city, and compare snapshots with Betty the day later. He didn’t believe darkness could be understood by overwhelming it with a flood of light, although shining a light on it helped.

   Slow and steady out on Long Island. That was the way he was going to play it. No one hand, no matter how good, ever busted the bank. But, with a good flashlight, the potholes in a dark road could lead to the key of the brain-twister, if there was a brain-twister.

   “Is it the same as being in jail?” asked Dottie.

   “None of them have committed a crime, so it’s not the same, not exactly, even though they’re all behind bars,” said Otis.

   Dottie Riddman and Otis Arnold were at the Central Park Zoo. All the animals were behind bars. They were innocent, in their own way, but it didn’t matter to their keepers, no matter how well-meaning the keepers were. The lions might have bitten their heads off if they could, but they couldn’t.

   “I asked Ezra to take me before school started,” said Dottie. 

   “What am I, chopped liver?” asked Otis.

   “No, you’re Oats!” said Dottie, laughing gaily. “Do you know what he said?” 

   “No, what did he say?”

   “If the zoo wants you, let them come and get you.”

   “That wasn’t nice.”

   “I think he meant he was busy,” said Dottie. “He had to do something for dad.”

   Otis liked Dottie, even though he didn’t especially like children. They were needy, messy, and noisy. He didn’t dislike them, but he didn’t like them, either. Only Dottie. She was a tomboy as much as she was a 12-year-old girl. He liked that.

   Children were always being told by their parents to listen, but what they did more than listen, tending to only listen to the voice in their heads, was watch, sizing you up. When they weren’t watching, they were imitating whoever and whatever was in the neighborhood worth imitating. When they weren’t doing that, they were moving around all the time, getting lost and found, 

   Or they were wasting their time. He thought it was OK for children to waste some of their time, but only if there was something in the wasting. Otherwise, it was lost time.

   Dottie was 12 years-old – “No, I’m not, I’m almost thirteen!” – but she knew how to listen and talk and not size him up. She had fun going to the movies, the park, the zoo, but she didn’t play around at being playful. She wasted less time than most children. 

   Otis took the day off from Osner Business Machines to take Dottie to the zoo. Dottie took the day off from school. Otis had heard fifty thousand people tramped through the zoo on Saturdays and Sundays, so weekends were out. It had to be a weekday. School had just started, but it might be the last time Dottie could go to the zoo, and she convinced everyone it was worth playing hooky for. Stan wrote a note for her before he drove out to the far end of Long Island. 

   It wasn’t any stretch Otis getting the day off. He was the best repairman in the shop on the Upper West Side, two or three times faster than the other repairmen, and he got the stickiest jobs done with the least effort. It didn’t matter of it was keys or platens or carriages. It didn’t matter if it was a Royal, an Underwood, or a Smith-Corona.

   Besides, he didn’t absolutely need a full-scale paycheck every two weeks. He lived quietly, for the most part, and had a nest egg squirreled away. Nobody knew anything about it. Otis kept some things close to the bone. He worked part-time at the typewriter repair shop and part-time for the Duluc Detective Agency. His cash savings were the payoff for being a part-time off-the-record do-it-all big city gumshoe.

   Dottie and Otis ate breakfast together and he treated her to a cab ride to the Pond. They took a long walk around it, fed ducks with old lettuce Otis had torn into small pieces beforehand, and finally walked up East Drive to Park Road to the Central Park Zoo.

   The Central Park Zoo was sometimes called the Robert Moses Zoo, because Moses had redesigned and rebuilt it twenty years before, from a rough-and ready place to a picture-book place of limestone and brick buildings. It was on the small side, maybe seven acres, but it had tropic, temperate, and polar animals, bird and monkey houses, and a sea lion pool in the middle of it. Eight outsize granite eagles were two-by-two on the four corners of the pool. 

   Nobody had to guess what was inside the animal houses. Friezes were everyone’s guide. Rocky Mountain sheep on the antelope house, a gorilla chewing on a twig on the monkey house, and marching penguins on the bird house. Every house had a chimney, too, and on every chimney was an iron weathervane of the animal inside.

   The Arsenal, a hundred years old, had always been there and was still there. In its time it had been a weather bureau, a police precinct, and an art gallery. The front of the Arsenal faced Fifth Avenue. The turrets on the roof were offices for the parks department. In summer the office workers kept time for lunch hour by listening through their open back windows for the sea lions barking for their fish fillets.

   Dottie liked the bearcats, which weren’t bears or cats, but like dust mops with a long tail and a pointy face. She liked them because they smelled like popcorn. “When they pee, it soaks their feet and fuzzy tails,” a zookeeper told her. “That’s what smells like popcorn.”

   She wished her pee smelled like popcorn. 

   In the park near their apartment she had noticed, down on her hands and knees and her nose to the ground, that some of the ants smelled like lemon drops and the flat creepy crawlers smelled like cherry cola. She told her dad, but he didn’t pay attention behind his newspaper.

   Otis was the Duluc Detective Agency’s jack-of-all-trades. He was the master of some of them. He could pick most locks in a minute. He knew how to start and stop anybody’s car. He operated all the photographic equipment and sound recordings. He was even good at lifting prints, if he had to.

   He owned an Exakta and a new Leica. The Leica M3 was the finest 35 mm ever made, he reckoned. He had a Minox spy camera, which was handy when he was rifling mail. 

He used a letter remover that didn’t disturb the gummed seals. He would insert the pincer-like device into the unsealed gap at the top of the envelope, turn the handle of the remover to wind up the letter, extract it from the envelope, photograph it, and carefully repeat the process to return the letter. 

   He had picked up a button camera, too. A coat button hid a lens that screwed into a small camera. A cord ran into a pocket. When he was ready to take a photo, he put his hand in his pocket and pulled a lever, shooting the still onto 16mm subminiature film. 

   He used a Mohawk midget recorder to wiretap telephones and a Minifon portable wire recorder with long play cassettes, a watch microphone, and a shoulder harness, when he was working face-to-face. Otis had a face like Eleanor Roosevelt’s, making everyone think they had seen him somewhere before.

   Otis and Dottie had a late lunch at Kelly’s Restaurant. A bronze statue of a tigress, her jaws clamped on a dead peacock, her young sniffing at her feet, was front-and-center in front of the eatery. Dottie clambered on top of it, straddling the tigress like a horse.    

   “Ride ‘em, cowboy!” Otis whooped. 

   “I’m a cowgirl!” Dottie yelled.

   They sat outside on the terrace at a table beneath an umbrella. Otis was outnumbered ten to one by women and twenty to one by children. He had a broiled hamburger sandwich and stewed fruit. Dottie had a cold sliced ham sandwich and applesauce. Otis drank an A & W root beer and Dottie had an Orange Crush. He stretched his legs out and Dottie curled hers up underneath her.

   “What do you like best about the zoo?” asked Otis.

   “The smells,” said Dottie. 

   It smells like shit, he wanted to say. It’s a safe place to fart, that’s for sure. No matter how well the cage keepers did their jobs, animals urinated and defecated all day long. If human beings didn’t use bathrooms there would be one hell of a smell worldwide. Not only that animals did not bathe. Their body odor was everywhere downwind. You could smell the zoo a mile away.

   The zoo was hard on the flank of Fifth Avenue. What was it like every summer, on stagnant hot humid summer days, the nearby apartment windows open to catch a breeze, he wondered? Whatever breeze they caught, the wind was westerly, and Fifth Avenue was on the east side of the park.

   “That goo that comes out of the beaver butts, it smells like vanilla, and those toads in the mud, they smell like peanut butter, even though the smell makes me sneeze and my eyes burn,” said Dottie. 

   “What else do you like about the zoo?”

   “I like being in the park, the sunshine, and the animals, but I don’t like that they’re in cages.”

   “No, I don’t either,” said Otis. 

   “Why do they put them in cages?”

   “They do that to protect us. Lions and bears can be very dangerous.” 

   “Are they the most dangerous?”

   “No, people are the most dangerous. Animals only kill to eat or defend themselves. We kill animals to eat, too, like chickens and pigs, but we also kill elephants for their tusks, tigers for their teeth, and bears for their fur. Sometimes people kill animals for no reason.”

   “Lions and bears don’t live in cages at home, do they?”

   “No, they live in jungles and forests, which is too bad for them, because their cages are thousands of times smaller than where they used to live.” 

   There were two six-foot bronze statues on either side of the restaurant. One was Dancing Goat and the other one was Honey Bear. The goat was rearing up and ducks at his feet sprayed water out of their mouths. The bear was on its hind legs, twisting its neck and head to one side, and sticking his tongue out. There were bronze frogs spraying water at his feet.

   “Dad says some people belong in zoos.”

   “He means bad people, not zoos so much, but behind bars.”

   “Nobody puts people in zoos, do they?”

   “Not anymore, but they used to, they were the zoo, a hundred years ago. They were like traveling zoos, people from India and Africa.” 

   “What kind of people?”

   “Strange people, different people, rope dancers, camel herders, Zulu fighters. There were whole villages, primitive people on display.” 

   “They didn’t mind?” asked Dottie.

   “I don’t know,” said Otis. “I know I would mind.”

   They watched boys and girls glide by on bicycles. Mothers pushed strollers, slow, slower, talking to their friends. A mime wheeled past on a unicycle, pretending to have great difficulty staying upright.

   After lunch Otis and Dottie walked across the terrace to the sea lion pool. Dottie hopped on the bottom rail of the fence to get a better view. One of the sea lions was napping on top of a platform. Another one, across the gap from her, on the other side of the second, inner metal fence, was slip sliding on the wet ledge, barking at the sleeper. Other seals were sunbathing and three were chasing each other in the water. 

   “Let’s go see the real lions,” said Dottie.

   “OK, let’s go,” said Otis.

   The lion they saw spread out in his cage was seven feet long, or more.

   “Jesus!” said Otis. “He must be three hundred, four hundred pounds.” 

   How do tamers get into the ring with them, he wondered? I wouldn’t dare. It would be like trying to stare down a crazy gangster with dead eyes and a Thompson. 

   “What does it say?” asked Dottie, pointing to the label screwed to the wall. Otis read the label to her.

   “The Southeast African lion, also known as the Kalahari or Transvaal lion, is found in the southern parts of Africa. Groups of them called prides live in open woodlands, savannas, and grassy plains. They survive 10 years in the wild and up to 20 in captivity. Lions spend most of their time resting, napping and sleeping. They hunt at dawn and dusk.”

   “Do you know what lion means?” asked Dottie.

   “No, what does it mean?”

   “It means king. That’s why they’re king of the jungle.”

   “You’ve seen too many Tarzan movies,” said Otis.

   “No, it was in my book.”

   “What book was that?”

   “Tawny Scrawny Lion.”  

“It doesn’t sound like he was much of a king.”

   “You have to read the book.” 

   Otis and Dottie were less than eight feet away from the lion. The big cat was a male, straw and leaves stuck in his short, light-colored mane, his face like a sphinx. He had a long tail with a black tassel at the end of it. He flicked his tail. When Dottie walked to the other end of the cage, the lion followed her with his bloodshot orangey brown eyes, turning his big head. She walked halfway back to Otis and stopped. 

   Dottie looked up into the lion’s eyes. She was excited and scared. The lion opened his mouth, stuck out his tongue, and panted several times. She took a step back. She couldn’t look away.

   “Do you think he wants to eat me?” she asked.

   “Yes,” said Otis. 

   “Maybe we should go. Can we stop at the monkey house before we leave?”

   “Sure, Dots, let’s go,” said Otis, taking her hand.

   They left the Central Park Zoo twenty minutes later. Dottie looked back over her shoulder, walking out the gate of the zoo, at the clock at the top of the musical clock tower. There were dancing bears and elephants on ledges beneath the clock. Above the clock was a cast iron bell. It was a quarter to four. It would be four o’clock by the time they found a cab.

   On Long Island it was four o’clock when Stan Riddman looked at his watch. There was time enough to make it home with daylight to spare. He could have dinner, a cold beer, and if Dottie wasn’t staying over with Otis, no matter the confirmed bachelor he was, tuck her into bed. He slid into the Star Chief, started up the car, and started the drive back to the other end of Long Island.

   It was a quarter after four when a skinny East Hampton policeman slid into the phone booth a block away from the station and called the number on the slip of paper the one-hundred-dollar bill had been paper-clipped to.

   “Yeah.”

   “This is East Hampton. You wanted to know if anyone ever came up here snooping around after Jackson Pollock, right?” 

   “Yeah. What do you know?”

   “There was a guy here today, talked to the chief, some of Pollock’s neighbors, spent the day sticking his nose into things.”

   “Did you get a name?” 

   “He said his name was Stan Riddman, a private dick from the city.”

   “OK, forget this number, don’t call again.”

   The policeman crumpled the piece of paper in his hand, stepped out of the phone booth, and threw it down on the sidewalk. A woman walking past, a member of the Ladies Village Improvement Society, snapped a disapproving look at him.

   “Mind your own business,” said the skinny policeman, kicking the paper into the gutter.

   When he was gone the woman from the Improvement Society circled back, bent down, picked up the crumb of paper, and threw it into a trash can.

   “Disgusting man,” she groused, straightening herself up.

   Bumpy Williams had a dimpled receding off-center chin and brown eyes. They were a dead colorless brown. At the same time, they were dead set on the prize when he was on the job. He rarely missed what he meant to see and have.

   He was wearing a brown single-breasted jacket with brown pleated trousers, but his shoes were gaudy City Club two-lace two-tones. His face was what made him good at what he did. Most people couldn’t ever remember what he looked like, even though there was an ugly jagged scar on one side of his chin. Nobody wanted to get caught staring at his chin or the scar and nobody ever looked in the vicinity of his eyes, which when he was working had a cold flat gaze. 

   Some people couldn’t even say whether he was a white or black man, even though he was a Negro. They avoided him, hugging the gutter side of the sidewalk. It was Thursday, a week before the end of summer, and he could hear Doris Day singing ‘Whatever Will Be Will Be’ on a car radio easing down the street. “White people are always down in the damned dumps,” he thought. Little Richard had ‘Rip It Up’ and ‘Ready Teddy’ on the Billboard 100 chart. That was slippin’ and slidin’ music.

   He had a dog-eared rolled-up copy of All-Negro Comics in his back pocket. He had five dollars and change in his wallet in another back pocket, a 6-ounce stainless steel flask with a picture of a roller-skating chimp on it in his jacket pocket, and a Vest Pocket Colt .25 in a vest pocket. It was only good at close range, but it was better than nothing. 

   He stood still and looked across the curb at the four-story building on the other side of the street. Queen Stephanie’s man had said the snooper worked on the second floor. A sign on the building said Duluc Detective in green and white neon letters. The building was one back from the corner of West 48^th Street and 10^thAvenue.

   Bumpy looked into the parking lot behind him. “This is going to be easy,” he thought. He would put the glad hand on a car, park it in the lot where he could spy on the front door, keeping track of the comings and goings. A separate door on the side in plain sight led up to the private cop’s office. There was a cobbler’s shop on the ground floor and apartments on the top two floors. 

   He could see an oversized gold register through the street window and a line of shoeshine chairs with brass pedestals. The repair shop was probably in the basement. The heels of his two-tones needed repairing, but he didn’t like the idea of leaving his shoes in Hell’s Kitchen.

   Bumpy took his shoes to Tony’s Shoe Repair in mid-town, in the garment district, off Seventh Avenue, even though there wasn’t a Tony anymore. The real Tony was the guy who opened the store in 1928 and sold it six years later to another guy named Gaetano. He kept Tony’s sign, so he became the second Tony, even though he wasn’t, and his son Dan became the third Tony.

   There were Poles, Greeks, and Irish in Hell’s Kitchen. The cops were all Irish. There were Italians and Puerto Ricans. Everybody talked a foreign language. There were drivers, factory men, and longshoremen. There was stickball and stoopball on the streets. There were too many kids on scooters. There were too many tough kids. They didn’t carry weapons though, no guns, no knives. They thought they were tough enough to fight natural, with their hands.

   He had gotten into a beef with one of them, not even a shaving age punk ass, hands like boxing gloves, fingers as thick as thumbs. He hit the boy on the head, and nothing happened, except the second finger on his own right hand got the worse of it. It was still bent, a year later.

   When Stan Riddman walked past Bumpy, espresso in hand and biscotti in a bag, and went in the side door, Bumpy went looking for a car to steal. By the time Stan and Bettina were sitting opposite one another at Stan’s desk, biscotti spread out on the torn open bag, espresso still hot, Stan’s notes and Bettina’s notebook at hand, Bumpy was back with somebody else’s car. 

   He would leave it behind when he left. It would be cleaner than when he stole it, too. He didn’t like spending all day in a dirty car, so he always tidied it up first thing.

   Stan swept crumbs off his desk into the palm of his hand and shook them into the trashcan next to his desk.

   “’He looked like an old dead tree lying in the brush,’ was what one of Pollack’s neighbors said,” he said. “The man helped the police search the woods with a flashlight. ‘There was a little blood run down from the forehead, no other damage except for the neck swollen like a balloon,’” Stan read from his notes. 

   “I talked to the undertaker up there who handled Pollack and the dead girl. He said Pollack died of a compound fracture of the skull and the girl died of a broken neck.”

   “What do the police think?” asked Bettina.

   “They think he had a hell of a lot to drink, they think he was a hell of an unhappy man, and they think it was a hell of an accident. I talked to an Earl Finch. He was the patrolman on the scene.”

   “I knew he was dead from the look of him,” said Police Officer Finch. “It was so dark up there I don’t think I even covered him up.”   

   “Jesus!” said Dr. William Abel when he was led to the broken-down body of Jackson Pollack hundreds of feet into the dark woods.

   The East Hampton police report showed Earl Finch radioed back to the station at 10:30 PM. It was less than twenty minutes after the accident. “Two dead at scene of accident.” One girl was crushed by the upside down Olds, the other girl fractured her pelvis, and Jackson Pollack died of a head injury, was how the report put it. 

    Jackson Pollack was wearing “a black velvet shirt, gray pants, a brown belt, blue shorts, brown socks, no shoes, no jewelry, and no ID.”  Officer Finch knew who it was without having to look at the face.

   “Who called in the accident?”

   “Three or four people. One of the neighbors said he heard the car barreling down the road and told his wife, ‘That fool isn’t going to make the curve.’ The others heard the car horn after the accident happened.” 

   “After, not before?”

   “Yeah, I guess the horn got stuck and started blowing and wouldn’t stop.” 

   “What bothered us was that horn blowing,” said a neighbor “We jumped in the car.” They drove to the crash. “There wasn’t anyone around, just this girl with her head toward that piled-in car and blood on her coming out of her scalp. We had to holler at her with the horn blaring.”

   “It sounds like a small town. What is Springs like?” asked Betty.

   “Small,” said Stan. “It’s sort of a thumb of land stuck out into a bay, so there’s water on three sides. There’s a lot of in the middle of nothing there. The locals call themselves Bonackers.”

   “I’m going to be a Bonacker same as you some day,” Jackson Pollack said one day, reaching for a beer at the Joe Loris bar in the East Hampton Hotel.

   “You only got to wait four hundred years,” said George Sid Miller.

   “Everybody says he drank phenomenal amounts of beer,” said Stan. “They say it had been going on for about four years. Before that he’d been good, although he seems to have always drunk plenty. One of his neighbors said if he hadn’t killed himself in that car, he would have killed himself with drink, sooner rather than later.”

   “How about the car? Did anybody check to see if it had been tampered with?”

   “No, it was turned over, busted, and a wrecker hauled it away. It wasn’t the first car he had driven into a tree, either, He had a Caddy, did it about five years earlier. I talked to a Jim Brooks, one of his friends, and a painter. He said, ‘I expected him to kill himself in an automobile, and I knew he wanted not to do it alone.’’’

   “So, he was suicidal?”

   “Not that anyone said, but some of them said he was self-destructive. They seemed to think there was a difference. One guy at Jungle Pete’s said Pollack was too much of a coward to kill himself.”

   “What is Jungle Pete’s?” asked Betty.

   “A bar diner restaurant social club, rough around the edges.”

   “He came to my restaurant every day for eggs and home fries, toast and coffee,” said Nina Federico at Jungle Pete’s. “He bought a second-hand bike and would come over evenings on the bike for beers. He didn’t always get home on the bike, though.”

   “There’s a couple who live right there,” said Stan. “Nina would give them the high sign and they would take him home. The beer is a nickel. I spent some of an evening there. The locals bring their kids in their pajamas, the kids fall asleep on the floor, and their parents dance and party all night.”

   “It sounds like a house party. What was their house like in Springs?”

   “There was a lot of paint in a studio, a converted barn, it looked like to me, but you wouldn’t know he was a famous artist by his house, even though he was famous enough that the New York Times ran the story of his death on page one.”

   “Did he have any problems in the neighborhood?”

   “He seems to have had a soft spot for kids and dogs. Somebody said he had a pet crow for a while. One lady said he was an innocent, childlike person, except when he was in a car. Everybody had seen him falling down drunk, more than once. I talked to a doctor neighbor of his who said Pollack would put away two, three cases of beer when he was on a bender.”

   “Jesus!” said Betty.

   “Found Jackson Pollack outside on the sidewalk lying down,” said the East Hampton police blotter more than once.

   “He could be mean, got into fights, broke his ankle just a few years ago fighting with some other artist, but I didn’t talk to anybody who disliked him, although not everybody liked him. There were more people than not who felt sorry for him.”

   “Did anything look funny about the crash?”

   “Not to anybody up there.” said Stan. “Not to me, either. They seemed surprised it happened but not surprised.”

   Bumpy Williams cracked open his All-Negro Comics and balanced it on the steering wheel. Ace Harlem was the private detective of the cover story and the bad guys were zoot-suited, jive-talking, back alley muggers. He was planning on re-reading both “Lion Man and Bubba” and “Sugarfoot,” all about the traveling musicians Sugarfoot and Snake Oil gone on the prowl for a farmer’s daughter.

   He had brought a double-decker sandwich and thermos of coffee with him. 

   He peeled back the parchment paper the sandwich was wrapped in and spread it out on his lap. He poured himself a cup of coffee and put the cup on top of the dashboard. 

   It was after two o’clock when he finished eating and tossing crumbs out of the car. “Remember – Crime Doesn’t Pay, Kids!” Ace Harlem said on the back cover of the comic book. Bumpy folded it and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

   “While you were re-discovering that Pollack drank like a fish and finding out what he was wearing when he died, I talked to the death-car girl,” said Betty. “Maybe everybody back home expected or didn’t expect something like that accident to happen, she says it wasn’t an accident. She says Jackson Pollack swerved off the road and accelerated into the oak tree he smashed into.”

   “She thinks he was committing suicide?”

   “No,” said Betty. “She calls it his death-day.”

   “What’s the difference?”

   “At the moment he died I believe his soul went into my body,” explained Ruth Kligman. “When I was convalescing in the hospital, he came and visited me. I’m like Cleopatra and he was like Marc Anthony. He was a very deep soul mate. The minute I met him I felt I had known him for years.”

   “He visited her?”

   “In spirit.”

   “You don’t believe any of that any more than I do, Betty.”

   “No,” she said. “But she was right there, and she believes he deliberately drove off the road.”

   “There were no skid marks, on or off the road, according to the police report,” Stan said. “The police sergeant I talked to estimates he was going sixty to seventy when he hit the tree.”

    The Oldsmobile fishtailed almost two hundred feet through underbrush before colliding with the guts of the forest, pivoting, going end over, a hubcap rolling away, empty cans of Rheingold spraying into the dark.

   “If we take it for granted it wasn’t an accident, and we take it for granted he wasn’t trying to commit suicide, what do we have?” asked Stan.

   “We have him driving into the tree on purpose, but not for any suicidal reason,” said Betty.

   “If that’s what we have, that’s crazy. Why would he do that?”

   “Maybe somebody brainwashed him into doing it.”

   Stan and Betty gave it some thought.

   “If that’s what we’ve got, then who would have done the brainwashing? Who had the means and opportunity to lead Jackson Pollack down that path? I can’t see it happening out there in Springs.”

   “Barney Newman told us he had been in and out of therapy for a long time,” said Betty. “We could start with his doctor. We know Pollack came into the city often, did business with his dealers, went drinking with his pals at the Cedar Tavern, ran around with his girlfriend. I would expect his doctor to be here in the city.”

   “All right, let’s find out who he was, try to get a line on him.”

   “Does that mean me?”

   “That’s why you make the big bucks,” said Stan.

   “When did that happen?” asked Betty.

   At the end of the day Bumpy Williams found a phone booth and called in his watching the detective’s day.

    “He didn’t do nothing all day. He’s got some girl, probably his office girl, and a Jew man came and went. Other than that, he was in the office all day and then went home. I didn’t see a wife, but he’s got a little girl. That’s it. I’m gonna head up to the barbershop, get a wig chop, maybe stop up at Joe Wells’ for some fried chicken and waffles.” 

   Wells’ Restaurant, sometimes an eatery, sometimes a nightclub, was on Seventh Avenue between 132^ndand 133^rd. Bumpy Williams was from South Carolina but had grown up and still lived on 132^nd Street. He lived on the top floor of a brownstone. Benta’s Funeral Home was on the first and parlor floors of the building. 

   “We like your looks,” they said when they rented the rooms to him after the war. “The crown is yours.” He had lived there ever since.

   Benta’s buried famous, infamous, and nobody no-how Negro’s. If you had plenty of dead presidents, you could order a gold, green, or red hearse, with a colored coffin to match. If you were low on folding money, George Benta made arrangements. Nobody was ever turned away.

   It wasn’t that the funeral director was over generous. Going up the stairs one day Bumpy heard George behind him. “Don’t forget to turn that hall light off when you turn in. My name is George Benta, not Thomas Edison.”

   George Benta wasn’t a stingy man. He was a frugal man. Bumpy had no problem with that.

   “Stop by the shop and we’ll pay you for the day. The Queen says best we pay you by the day. She says there’s something queer going on, so we’ll keep it close. We maybe will need you again the next couple of days.” 

   Queenie Johnson ran the numbers in Harlem, the uptown arm of Albert Anastasia’s Italian Hand. Bumpy knew if he was doing work for her, he was doing work for them. That’s where the money came from. 

   “The Mad Hatter says there’s no such thing as good money or bad money,” Queenie said one day when they were smoking after Bumpy had made a delivery to her runners and controllers. “There’s just money, is what Albert says.”

   Benta’s had buried Alain Locke, a big-time Negro, two years ago. W. E. B. Du Bois, Mrs. Paul Robeson, and Charles Johnson all came and paid their respects. Nobody could find a place to park. Nobody stayed over long. There wasn’t enough space to stand. The breathing air in the grieving chapel started to get run out

   Bumpy was standing at the front door with George Benta after it was all over, and the casket coach was pulling away. George was in his work clothes, a long coat, pinstripes, and gray gloves. His wife, Pearl, was accompanying the funeral procession. 

   “Do you know that little man kept sperm samples from all his man lovers in a small box? One of them tried to slip it into the coffin. I slapped his hand away. I wouldn’t touch that box, though, not on your life.” 

    Bumpy looked down the street, putting sperm out of his mind.

   “You pay me what you said, I’ll lean on a light pole every day of the week,” he said to Queenie’s man. “I’ll check with you in the morning. King Cole is supposed to be in town for that new TV show he’s doing, and word is he might be singing it up at the supper club tonight.”

   Bumpy hung up, stuck two fingers into his mouth, and whistled down a cab.

   “Harlem,” he said, getting in beside the driver. He knew it was like going to an afternoon matinee and sitting next to the only other person at the movies, but he liked riding shotgun.

   He was looking forward to seeing a show tonight.

   “When I perform it’s like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories,” King Cole always said before a show.

    It was five months since he had been attacked in Birmingham, Alabama, during a show, when half-a-dozen white men swarmed over the footlights and rushed him, grabbing his legs, wrenching his back, taking him down to the floor of the stage before the police were able to break up the melee. 

   “Alabama is no place for immoral nigger rock and roll music,” said Willie Hinson the next morning standing in front of the storefront office of the White Citizen’s Council.

   Bumpy had heard all about it. He had already killed one white man. He thought he might have to kill another one someday, if not for any reason, then on principle.