Walking the Perfect Square

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Take a guess what that was all about,” Rico said as the bus vanished in the distance.

  “I don’t know, a church outing?”

  “Those people are volunteers,” he explained. “Every day at this time a busload of people go down to the city and search for the kid. At ten at night, the bus brings ’em back. How do you think all them posters got put up? And the coffee guy gets paid out of a fund that’s been established in Patrick Maloney’s name.”

  “Not for nothing, Rico, but Francis Maloney isn’t exactly the type of guy to inspire this kind of loyalty from me. What’s he, connected?”

  “In a way,” Rico winked. “He’s sanitation commissioner for the county. You don’t get that kinda job unless you’re wired into the political machine. And, baby, let me tell you, our boy Francis is wired in. That’s how come he can snap his fingers and get you that liquor license. It’s like the job, everybody owes Maloney favors. Shit, Moe, this guy’s even got a hook in New York City Hall.”

  “Get outta here,” I scoffed.

  “Listen to me. Francis Maloney’s the best fuckin’ fund-raiser the county machine has. A part of every county worker’s paycheck finds its way into the party’s coffers. Every purveyor that does business with the county manages to get family members to contribute. There’s not a Democratic politico in this county that doesn’t owe a part of his office to that coldhearted little donkey prick. Believe me, Moe, he’s got the juice to deliver on his promises.”

  “Who’s his hook in the City?” I wanted to know.

  “Joe Donohue, the mayor’s top advisor on police affairs. He and Maloney was on the job together.”

  “Maloney was on the job?”

  “For a few years,” Rico said, “but he got jammed up and they showed him the back door.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “In pre-Knapp Commission days, who knows?” Rico frowned. “Anyway, Maloney’s not loose-lipped on the subject. We’re not exactly kissin’ cousins, ya know.”

  We rode back to Molly’s in relative silence. I didn’t thank him. I don’t think he expected me to, really. We hugged and made vague promises about next month’s dinner. As I approached my car he called out to me. He said that he would square things with Maloney if I didn’t want to get involved. I told him we’d see, that I’d dip my toes in the water and let him know. He shrugged his shoulders the way he always did when he got an answer he didn’t like. That was okay. I didn’t much like the answer either.

  January 30th, 1978

  TRIBECA’S STREETS HAD that old New York feel, paved as they were in potholes and cobblestones and old factory buildings. TriBeCa real estate was hot. There was enough available loft space in the old factories to take up the runoff from SoHo. First the artists and dancers and galleries would come, then the limousine bohemians.

  Pooty’s was a corner bar on Hudson Street. It had floor tiles like a tenement bathroom and grout as black as my mechanic’s fingernails. Cracked and splitting, neither the wooden booths nor once majestic bar had seen a dust rag or coat of lacquer since the Rosenbergs took one in the face for their team. Pooty’s was the kind of place where people were encouraged to gouge their initials into the tables with keys. Old poets went there to die. It wasn’t typically the kind of place a cop would know about, but I knew Pooty’s.

  Pooty’s had two things going for it: the best jukebox in the city and Beck’s Dark on tap. A date, an actress named Susie, took me there after the movies once. I think she got off on the idea of me being a cop, but when I showed up at her apartment door out of uniform it sort of ruined her fun. At Pooty’s, surrounded by a contingent of her wannabe friends, Susie kept trying to engage me in cop talk. Oh come on, show us your gun. Can I touch it? How do dead bodies really smell? You know, that sort of thing. I wasn’t into being on display and I was more interested in the jukebox, anyway. I think Susie went home with a photo-realist painter disguised as a busboy.

  Although I hadn’t been there in months, nothing but the bartender had changed. Somehow, I had trouble reconciling a bunch of student government nerds from a commuter college out on Long Island with Pooty’s. Pooty’s, of all the thousands of bars in the five boroughs and on the Island, seemed to be as unlikely a place for a college fund-raiser as I could imagine. The bartender, Jack, a handsome but jaundice-skinned playwright from Ohio, agreed.

  “Those losers stuck out around here like Malcolm X at an Emerson, Lake and Palmer concert. Man, they were so unhip,” he said, drawing my Beck’s, “they almost had style.”

  I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I kept my confusion to myself. He volunteered that he had worked the night of Patrick Maloney’s disappearance. He was just there to help in case any of the guest bartenders had trouble mixing up a sloe gin fizz or Tom Collins. But it had gone pretty smoothly, he said, mostly beers and white wine spritzers. He uttered the words with such disdain, it was difficult for me not to smack him with my cane. I asked him if he knew how the fund-raiser came to be held at Pooty’s.

  “Ask the boss,” Jack shrugged, pointing to a door at the end of the bar. “Go on, I’ll call down.”

  The office was the size of a double-wide coffin. A rotund little man sat at a metal desk, smoking a cigarette and punching numbers on an adding machine.

  “Yeah,” he said without looking up.

  I showed him the replica of my badge I had made before leaving the job. He looked at it and shook his head.

  “So what, I got one of them, too.” He took it out to show me. “You here about Maloney’s kid?”

  I said that I was. He told me his name was Pete Parson, offered me his right hand and a seat. I took him up on both offers. He too had been hurt on the job, a broken shoulder: “I got between a pissed off husband, his wife and a Louisville Slugger.”

  He said he had lost count of how many cops, ex-cops, private investigators and volunteers he had spoken to since the night the kid vanished. Because I seemed like a good guy, he confided, he’d go over it with me again and he’d let me waste the bartender’s time. It was just like they said in the paper; no one saw or heard anything unusual. I said I thought it was pretty unusual for a cop to own a place like Pooty’s and for a place like Pooty’s to host a fund-raiser.

  “I’m the boss,” he answered, “not the owner. I’ve got like a ten percent stake in the place. The majority owners are two ex-hippies from my old neighborhood. They thought bringing in an ex-cop would help smooth out some of the bumps in the road, if you know what I mean.”

  I knew exactly what he meant. Responding to bar fights ranked just below cats stuck in trees and just above complaints of off-key opera singing on the NYPD’s list of priorities. If an ex-cop put in the call, however, that priority jumped up several notches. Having an armed cop to cash out and make bank deposits was good business. It also discouraged potentially sticky-fingered employees from sharing the profits. And when greedy city inspectors, carters and connected purveyors came sniffing around, there was a built-in discount for cops.

  “Since that fucking Maloney kid disappeared,” Parson was agitated, “there have been a lot of bumps and I can’t smooth any of ’em. I got an appointment with the fuckin’ state tax auditors next month and the Liquor Licensing Board is breathing down our necks. I wish I never let him book the damned thing here.”

  “Him?” I let it hang for a second.

  “Him, Patrick fucking Maloney. He booked the party. He came in, offered me a fifteen-hundred-buck guarantee for a Monday night in early December and I jumped at it. This ain’t Cleveland. We don’t get a big Monday Night Football crowd in here. The only staff I had to pay for was—”

  “—Jack.” I pointed up. “He told me. But why’d Patrick Maloney pick Pooty’s?”

  “Who the fuck knows? And no, before you ask, none of the employees remembers seeing him in here before that night. He wasn’t a regular as far as I can tell. Right now, I wish he’d picked any other bar but this one.”

  I was properly sympathetic and said I hoped
things went well with the state. He wasn’t optimistic nor, in my silence, was I. Francis Maloney had obviously spoken to some of his friends and was punishing Pooty’s for his son’s vanishing act. I had no difficulty believing that in the absence of a truly responsible culprit, the elder Maloney would lash out at the most convenient target.

  Upstairs again, I had a brief conversation with jaundiced Jack. I asked him the same questions every other investigator had asked him, questions he answered with the practiced boredom of a churchgoer saying amen. He did guiltily confess to one thing I found interesting, if not exactly useful. Jack said he couldn’t remember anyone being at Pooty’s that night who looked like the picture of the Maloney kid. I didn’t stay to argue the point. There was no shortage of witnesses to Patrick’s presence that night. While apparently not the type of guy to claim he had seen a vision of Jesus in the bathroom mirror, Jack did strike me as the sort of fellow who liked the occasional vein load.

  Leaving Pooty’s, I felt much as I did after my college statistics classes; more confused on the way out than on the way in. But that was less Jack’s and Pete Parson’s fault than mine. My first step was a misstep. I could see that now. I was a bloodhound with no nose for blood. My forensics training was rudimentary at best. I wasn’t going to find a magic carpet fiber or blood splatter. There was nothing at Pooty’s for me to find that any of the other investigators, most far more experienced than myself, wouldn’t have already stumbled upon. Maybe that’s why they hadn’t gotten anywhere. Sometimes, I thought, experience gets in the way. Even if I was wrong, it sounded good.

  I found myself staring at a Patrick Maloney poster pasted to the mailbox next to my car. “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?” the bold block letters wanted to know. It struck me that I hadn’t, not really. I remembered a slide of a Magritte painting from my Introduction to Art History class—I guess I had college on my mind that day. It’s funny what you think about. Anyway, the painting was of a tobacco pipe and the artist called it Ceci n’est pas une pipe. In English I’m pretty sure that translates into “This is not a pipe.” The point is, it wasn’t a pipe. It was a painting of a pipe. And the poster I was looking at wasn’t Patrick Maloney. I guess that’s what hit me.

  I didn’t know squat about Patrick M. Maloney other than he was an unremarkable student at Hofstra University. In spite of his ubiquitous posters, I wasn’t certain I’d recognize him unless I tripped over him and then only if he were wearing a black tuxedo and that charming smile. Enlightened self-interest aside, I wasn’t even sure why I was looking for him. Marina Conseco was one thing; an innocent little girl lost in one of Brooklyn’s many doorways to hell. But what was Patrick Maloney to me? Nothing more than a grainy photostat. Christ, I knew more about his father than I knew about him.

  As I sat in my car, I thought about Francis Maloney, about how he had offered no insights into his son. I remembered the day before at Molly’s, how something about the elder Maloney’s manner had caught my attention, but I’d never gotten a handle on it. Only now I realized it was his abject coolness, a sort of angry detachment. Francis Maloney had never once referred to Patrick as his son. It was “the boy,” not “my boy.” The grief wasn’t his, but his wife’s. The word love had been remarkable by its absence.

  My surgical knee was throbbing a warning of coming snow as I pulled into traffic. A yellow cab cut me off, nearly taking my right fender as a memento. The cabby and I took a moment to exchange middle fingers. He rolled down his window and inquired as to my mental well-being: “Are you fucking crazy, or what?” I showed him my badge. He was much more impressed by it than Pete Parson had been and moved on. But long after I had crossed back over the Brooklyn Bridge, the cabby’s question rang in my head.

  MY KNEE WAS more accurate than the goddamned weatherman. It was snowing again, heavily.

  I had drifted in and out of sleep several times since taking a pain pill. Now I was up, sipping a cup of coffee, watching snow fall against the black of night. Normally, I wouldn’t have fought so hard to try and keep awake, but I had put a call in to Rico and wanted to be somewhat coherent when he called back.

  I can’t say what it was exactly that made me change my mind. My visit to Pooty’s had been a cold slap in the face. It helped me see how out of my depth I would be. And having heard about Pete Parson’s travails with the state tax people and liquor authority, I wasn’t sure I was willing to risk Aaron’s dream on Francis Maloney’s good graces. We would get our wine shop one day, with or without the help of that arbitrary little bastard. One thing I was certain of: the more I thought about Francis Maloney the less I wanted to know about his son. As a Jew I had a sort of genetic X-ray vision for tragedy, and tragedy was all I could see coming. We would all of us be better off, I thought, if Patrick Maloney stayed only a grainy photostat to me. The phone rang.

  “Rico!” I shouted into the phone.

  “Moses?” Only my sister Miriam called me Moses. “I need . . . I need to talk,” she sobbed.

  “What’s the matter, kid? You all right? Is it Ronnie?”

  “Will you please shut up?” That was better. “I’m fine. I’m just a little low, is all.”

  “You missing Mom and Dad? This weather always makes me—”

  “Are you expecting a call?”

  “It can wait. So . . .”

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” she whispered.

  “Do what? And why are you—”

  “Ronnie’s sleeping. I don’t want to wake him up. He’s been at the hospital for thirty-six hours straight.”

  “Okay, that’s why you’re whispering,” I said. “But what’s it you can’t do?”

  “I don’t think I’m cut out to be a doctor’s wife. I can’t take it, Moses.”

  “The hours are killers, I know, but he’s almost done with his internship. You’re almost there, kiddo.”

  She started crying again. “It’s not the hours. They suck, but it’s not the hours. It’s just that sometimes when he comes home and tells me things . . .”

  “What things?”

  Ronnie must have been zonked, because Miriam was crying so furiously now we barely needed the phone. I didn’t bother to repeat the question or try to calm her down.

  “He was in the ER,” she choked out before the next wave of tears.

  Uh-oh, the ER, that pretty much explained it. Uniformed cops get real familiar with the ER. Most of the time they’re hitting on nurses, but that’s less a function of pheromones than defense against the panic-in-the-butcher-shop atmosphere of the place. Working the ER was like operating inside a tornado, a tornado where blood and desperation squeeze out all the oxygen. Civilians always assume the worst part of the job is dealing with dead bodies. After a while, at least for me, the dead body thing wears off. You can distance yourself from a body, but I never got used to the ER.

  There was a little baby boy, she said, the police had found naked in the snow. The snow was red with his blood. Because of the boy’s condition and the bad weather, the cops decided they couldn’t wait for an ambulance and rushed him to the ER. Ronnie and the other doctors tried to save the baby, but it was useless. There was no pulse. His skull and face were crushed, his spine severed and his arm bones splintered. One of his legs was broken and his abdomen was distended with blood. When the cops asked Ronnie to guess at what had caused all the damage, he said he thought someone had probably thrown the baby out a window. The cops left in a hurry, Ronnie didn’t understand. He thought there’d be a lot of paperwork.

  I understood and I had a sick feeling I knew what was coming, but I let Miriam tell me anyway.

  “About an hour later,” she was fighting back tears again, “the same two cops brought in a man with a broken jaw. A gift from the cops,” she said. “It was the baby’s father. He was a kid himself, Ronnie said. The cops told Ronnie the father had confessed to throwing the baby out the window. It cried too much. He just said it cried too damned much.” I opened my mouth to say something, but she cut me off. Her tone tur
ned suddenly cold, angry: “When Ronnie was treating the father, he realized he recognized him. He asked one of the cops for the name. Ronnie had helped deliver the baby a few weeks ago.”

  “What did Ronnie do?”

  “What could he do?” Miriam’s voice was shaking again. “He helped set the man’s jaw. He’s not a cop. He’s not like you. He was still crying when he came home and locked himself in the bathroom. I can still smell the vomit. I’ve never seen him cry before. Do you cry anymore, Moses?”

  My silence was answer enough. She couldn’t hold back any longer. In between breathless sobs, Miriam asked me a lot of questions about God and man I was in no position to answer. They were questions I’d heard asked a thousand times, questions smart cops stop asking themselves pretty early on in their careers. You learn soon enough that cruelty is the one thing in the universe to successfully defy the law of conservation. Cruelty is an unlimited resource. There were days on the job I wondered why it didn’t rain crying babies.

  Miriam cried herself out. I don’t know that I said anything of value at all. I was barely awake by the time we hung up. And when the phone jarred me back to consciousness, I couldn’t say how long I’d been asleep.

  “What?” I growled.

  “Hey,” Rico said, “you called me. What’s up? My wife said you told her it was important.”

  I hesitated. I knew the words I had meant to say, but they would not roll off my tongue. In a movie, the director would have cut back to me asleep in my chair, my head jerking side to side. My face blurs. I’m dreaming. Crying babies plummet through the night. I run feverishly, trying to catch each one as it falls. It’s snowing. The cement is slippery. At first, I save them, but more and more begin to fall. My feet lose traction. Some hit the pavement, their skulls and the concrete cracking. Soon the baby storm stops. The snow still falling, I kneel beside one of the little corpses, turn it over and there, smiling up at me: Patrick M. Maloney. I race from corpse to corpse. They all have his face.