Life is no movie. Just ask my brother-in-law Ronnie. I hadn’t dreamed, not so as I could remember.
“Earth to Moe. Earth to Moe,” Rico prodded.
“I’m here.”
“So what d’ya want?”
“Can you get me the name of the Missing Persons detective?”
“Mike Sullivan,” Rico answered almost immediately.
“I bet they call him Sully.”
“What can I tell ya? You know what they say about the Irish: great drinkers, great thinkers, great writers, great fighters.”
“And bad nicknames,” I laughed. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”
I hadn’t dreamed, but I can’t say that Miriam hadn’t gotten under my skin.
January 31st, 1978
IN-HOUSE DUMPS are part of the natural evolution of any large bureaucracy. It’s one of the means by which those bureaucracies protect themselves from external scrutiny. It is safer to eat your mistakes than to admit them. And naturally, as the beast grows, so do its dumping grounds. The NYPD was no different. Most of the 30,000 or so men and women of the NYPD chomp at the bit to do a good job. They, at least at the beginning, want to collar every skell, squash every mutt they can lay their hands on. Not all, though.
There are some that start lazy. To them, it’s fifty-two paychecks a year, health coverage and a good pension. They’re the types that start counting backwards from twenty years the minute they get on the job. There are the cops that get ground down by the job and the inept and the psychos. Some cops end up with modified duty assignments, better known as the rubber gun squad. They get to keep their badges, but they don’t get to play with their .38s anymore. Some find their way to file rooms, storehouses and desks.
Some, though, find their niches in bureaus and squads where they do “regular” police work, but where their impact is minimized. Everybody knew, or claimed to know, that the rats in Internal Affairs were lazy, yellow cops, cops who were afraid of the street, who didn’t like making cases. I wouldn’t know. My less-than-stellar career had kept me out of their cross hairs. There were probably some good cops in IA, but the nature of the work made them easy targets. Another reputed dumping ground was Missing Persons. I mean, what do you really do in Missing Persons, right? Think about it.
“You Sully?” I asked, limping over to his desk.
“What d’ya want, Ahab?”
“Hey, that’s good. You guys in Missing Persons must get a lot of time to read the classics. ‘The white whale tasks me,’”I did my best Gregory Peck.
“Rico warned me you’d be a wiseass.”
I could feel myself blush slightly. “He called, huh?”
“I wouldn’t talk to you otherwise,” he said. “I’m so fuckin’ sick of this song and dance I could puke. I musta briefed fifty guys on this file already. It’s a waste a my time.”
I let that slide. From the size of his gut, I figured it was a safe bet he used the time he didn’t waste educating people about Patrick Maloney, reinforcing stereotypes of cops and donut shops. He gave me a well-rehearsed and not very enlightening rundown on the case before handing me the file and pointing me to an unoccupied desk.
The file contained the same sort of valueless information I already had, only more of it and in greater detail. There was nothing to indicate Patrick had vanished of his own free will nor was there anything to indicate he was a victim of foul play. Dutifully, I took down the names, addresses and phone numbers of all the people who’d given statements to the cops. The file did contain an incident report. As to departmental procedure, it wasn’t strictly kosher to fill out an incident report when someone no longer technically a minor went missing. But there were times when you might fill one out just to get a distraught parent off your back. Though nearly two months had passed since the disappearance, I couldn’t picture Francis Maloney as ever having been distraught. However, given his charming personality and his connections in city hall, the presence of an incident report made perfect sense.
I brought the file back to Sully, thanked him. He shook my hand for too long, as if his mind were somewhere else. When I reclaimed possession of my extremity, it seemed to snap the detective out of his trance.
“Listen,” he said, referring to his watch and checking to see if anyone else might be listening, “why don’t you meet me for lunch around the corner at the Blarney Stone in about two hours?”
Normally I would have suspected him of trying to sponge a free lunch off me in return for his cooperation. Not that his cooperation appeared to be worth a damn, but I got the sense he was interested in more than the size of my expense account. No, he had something to discuss and it wasn’t the religious symbolism in Moby Dick.
“Okay,” I agreed. “Two hours.”
I RAN MY index finger along the board of black buttons. There was at least one moron per dwelling who’d buzz you in without asking. That, in combination with the propensity of Manhattanites to order out, could almost guarantee you entree into any doorman-less building in the city. Apparently, someone was very anxious for his or her crispy duck with black bean sauce or this particular building had more than the usual quota of morons. I could hear the vestibule buzzer still ringing as I got into the elevator.
Robert Klingman was one of Patrick Maloney’s suite mates. Klingman hadn’t even been at Pooty’s on December 7th, but he was the only student to both talk with the cops and list a Manhattan address. As I stood outside apartment 5C not knowing whether anyone would answer my knock, it occurred to me I might have called first. I did, however, have some time to kill before meeting Sully and since no one seemed remotely enthusiastic about rehashing their involvement with the case, I thought the element of surprise might work in my favor.
I sensed I was being watched and held my badge up to the peephole. Then, just like in the movies, I listened to rattling chains, unclicking locks and the sound of the “push-in” bar being repositioned. As the door pulled back, I introduced myself to a handsome woman of fifty. Klingman’s mother was a bottle blonde with mischievous green eyes and too much make-up. By the time I stepped onto her avocado shag carpet, Pearl Klingman had told me she was divorced from Robert’s father and invited me to her next est seminar. Bobby K., as she called him, wasn’t home.
There was a huge sheet of paper laid over a big chunk of the green flooring. Printed on the white paper was a tangle of numbered footprints and directional arrows. In the background a man’s smarmy voice spoke over some dreadful KC and the Sunshine Band song.
“Do you hustle?” she flirted, then noticed my cane. “No, I suppose not.”
“Another time.”
She popped the 8-track out of the stereo and got us some coffee. She never asked me what an on-duty cop was doing with a cane. I returned her kindness by not volunteering that I was no longer a cop, on duty or otherwise. As we sipped our coffee, she gave me a brief history of the twentieth century as it related to her.
“So you kept your husband’s last name,” I said, leading her to where I wanted the conversation to go.
“I hate my ex, but believe me, I hate my maiden name more. Pearl Klingman doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, if you know what I mean, but it beats the pants out of Pearl Feigenbaum.” I was forced to agree. “My Bobby and his last name were the only good things that bastard ex-husband of mine ever gave me.”
She had supplied me with a perfect segue for my questions about her son’s missing suite mate. Much to my dismay, a perfect segue was no guarantor of fruitful answers. Bobby never spoke much about Patrick, she said. She thought most of her son’s other suite mates had been over to her house for dinner, but couldn’t remember if Patrick had attended. She was sorry she couldn’t be more helpful, promising to give my phone number to her son when he called.
“The world’s not a fair place,” Pearl uttered with unexpected seriousness as she showed me to the door. “We lie to our kids and ourselves about level playing fields and justice. But it’s all just bullshit. We’re all just pre
tense and bullshit. We would be better off if we could just accept it and move on.”
Against my better judgment, I wondered what had led her to such a cynical view of the world.
“Do you think it’s cynical?” she sounded surprised. “It just is what it is. You don’t get it, do you?”
“I guess not.”
Once again, she offered to take me to an est seminar. It would help me get it, she said. I left it at that, thanked her, shook her hand. Moving toward the elevator, I was once again treated to a muffled serenade by KC and the Sunshine Band. est, disco and shag rugs—it almost made me pine for Freddy and the Dreamers.
SULLY WASN’T AS easy to find as I thought he’d be. He had selected a corner two-top in the darkest nook of the Blarney Stone. He was working over a bottle of Bud and a roasted half chicken when I hobbled to the table. The peas and carrots on his plate were so devoid of color, I thought they might’ve been steamed in chlorine bleach. The poor chicken didn’t look much better. I wasn’t that hungry anyway. I had the waitress bring me a scotch.
Once Sully and I got done nodding hello, he slid a color photo across the table to me. It was a group shot; four men and two women, all about twenty, all wearing the blue and yellow of Hofstra’s Flying Dutchmen. None of the faces looked immediately familiar. I guessed they were friends of Maloney’s.
“Yeah, so . . .”
“Second guy from the left,” Sully said, showing me a mouthful of chicken.
“Holy shit!” I blurted out at the precise moment the waitress brought my drink.
“Hey, I brought your drink as fast as I—”
“No, no, no. I’m sorry, it’s not that,” I apologized, tipping her more than the cost of the drink.
Sully smiled. “Same reaction I had first time I saw it.”
“That’s Patrick Maloney?”
“The same,” Sully confirmed. “Don’t look much like that poster the rest of New York City is lookin’ at, does he?”
Staring carefully now, I recognized Maloney, but his hair had been buzzed to boot camp length. There looked to be a silver cross earring dangling from his left ear and a tattoo—I couldn’t make it out—on his right forearm. His moustache was gone and he seemed thinner than the poster picture would have led me to believe. That charming smile was still there, yet there was something odd about the set of his eyes. It was as if his mouth were in the moment, but his focus was set on something no one else in the picture could see. I wouldn’t say it was a glassy, drugged stare. It may have been. I don’t know. If the photo wasn’t sharp enough to let me make out his tattoo, it was silly of me to try to interpret his expression.
“When was this taken?” I demanded.
“September ’77 at a student government picnic in Eisenhower Park on the Island.”
“Before or after the poster pic—”
“After,” he said, finishing his beer, “by a few years. That poster picture’s from his high school prom.”
I took my scotch down in a gulp and flagged the waitress for another round. “So—”
“That’s right,” Sully anticipated me. “There’s a million fuckin’ wanted posters up around this city and not one of ’em looks like the kid we’re lookin’ for. Now you’re gonna ask me why. And I’m gonna tell ya, I don’t know.”
“How’d you get this?” I asked, waving the photo at him.
“Anonymous. Found it lying on my desk one day last week. No prints. No ransom note. No call. I figured it was finally a lead, ya know, a little crack in the ice, somethin’. So we bring the parents in, quietly. We don’t wanna get their hopes up or nothin’. So I show the picture to the old man and he goes fuckin’ apeshit on me: Where’d I get the picture? I better not use it. I should do my work and find the boy. I’m a lazy ass like the rest a the mutts in Missing Persons. He’ll have my badge. Ya know, pleasant stuff like that there.”
“So?”
“So,” Sully smiled, clinking his fresh bottle to my glass, “fuck him. He brought the case to us. I’m gonna work a case my way, right?”
“Right.”
“Wrong.” He shook his head. “Dead wrong. I get called into the captain’s office and get told to not use the picture, to not bother the parents and to check with him before making any decisions on the case.”
“The brass?”
“Who else? My captain don’t talk to me unless he has to. I guess someone told him he had to.”
“Ask Isaac Newton, shit runs in only one direction and it ain’t uphill.”
“Tell me about it. So the father’s got a hook, huh?” he asked.
“Joe Donohue.”
“The mayor’s—”
“That’s him.”
“Francis Maloney, that little shanty cocksucker.” Sully was incredulous. “You wouldn’t figure him to have that much juice.”
“I agree, but he does.”
I finished my scotch, he his chicken and beer. We didn’t say much, both of us waiting for the other to ask the two big questions: If the Maloneys had gone to the trouble of busing volunteers in and out of the city, hiring outside investigators and calling in favors from powerful allies, why had they knowingly distributed a poster of their son which was so clearly out of date? And when the poster photo was discovered to be inaccurate, why had they fought so hard to keep an updated picture out of our hands?
My third scotch did the trick. “Why?”
“There’s a lot a whys. There’s a lot a answers. Take your pick. But I’m no dummy,” he leaned over the table and whispered. “The kid split. The father knows that. It’s a big charade for the wife’s benefit.”
Too big a charade, I thought, though you could make a good case for Detective Sullivan’s opinion. They say Einstein was so brilliant because he could reduce complex phenomena to elegantly simple formulas. I saw a special on channel 13. But family dynamics ain’t thermodynamics and Sully wasn’t Einstein. There had to be more to this than a charade for the wife, there just had to be.
I didn’t argue the point.
THE FLATLANDS SECTION of Brooklyn was not the stuff of picture postcards for the folks back home in Kenosha. If, on the other hand, you were on a pilgrimage to junkyard nirvana, this was the place. Flatlands was where the men who boosted other people’s cars brought those cars to be harvested for spare parts or for subsequent shipment overseas. Hence the neighborhood was irresistible to cops, particularly the ones who populated the Auto Crimes Task Force.
Rico was surprised to see me. Surprised, not necessarily pleased. Apparently, there was a very active Mafia chop shop down the street. Didn’t I know better, he wondered, than to tap on his surveillance van’s back door? I told him that three scotches and getting jerked around by my best buddy tended to make me stupid. He excused himself, telling the other three cops in the van he’d be back before anything was likely to come down.
The Arch Diner sat at the corners of Ralph and Flatlands Avenue and was as good a place to get coffee as any other. Rico laughed, saying the wiseguys who ran the chop shops down the road frequently got their coffees at the Arch Diner. I wasn’t laughing. Nor did I find it amusing when he described how the snot had frozen onto his moustache earlier in the day.
“I had lunch with Sully,” I said. “He showed me a picture.”
“Yeah, and so what happened?”
“It was of Patrick Maloney.”
Rico’s expression soured. “That’s what you dragged me off a stakeout to tell me?”
“The picture didn’t look like the one on the poster.”
“Jesus Christ, Moe! Who looks like their picture? You take a look at your departmental ID lately? You probably look like Wolfman Jack.”
“So you really didn’t know?”
“Know what?” He was losing patience.
I explained about the dated picture and the new picture and how the Maloneys had refused to release a more recent photo. I also said I found it pretty suspicious that Rico had somehow neglected to mention anything about this to me.
“It’s news to me,” he said as he held his hand to his heart. “You think I know what this kid really looks like? I think I met him once, at my wedding. You were at the wedding, do you remember what he looks like?”
“I guess I see your point.”
“It’s not like the Maloneys are my wife’s closest relatives. It was the father that reached out to me. The last time we were over their house, when I told Angela about you and the little girl, was the first time we were over there.”
I apologized to Rico. He understood. Walking back to the diner parking lot, carrying coffees for the other cops, Rico reminded me of something.
“Remember what the Homicide guys used to joke about? Sometimes when they’d catch a case and the stiff would be like a thirty-year-old, ten-buck-a-trick hooker with a smack habit and a sheet as long as the double yellow lines down Ocean Parkway and they’d go and notify the mother, do you remember what the mother said every time?”
“But she was such a nice girl.”
“Exactly my point, Moe. The Maloneys wouldn’t be the first parents to not wanna see their kid the way the rest of the world did.”
He dropped me back at my car, his words still ringing in my ears. In the ten years I’d known him, it was the wisest thing he’d said to me. What, I couldn’t help wondering, did the Maloneys not want to see?
February 1st, 1978 (early)
THIS TIME I was dreaming when the phone rang. About what, I couldn’t say. When I opened my eyes, it was gone.
“Yeah,” I mumbled, staring half blind at the red 3:20 A.M. on the clock radio.
Walking the Perfect Square Page 5
