Walking the Perfect Square

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  The south part of the campus was actually quite attractive, very Ivy League. But like most schools that had expanded to meet the Baby Boomer explosion, Hofstra had suffered the indignities of late ’60s and ’70s architecture: nearly windowless concrete boxes that looked better suited to protecting German machine-gun nests along the Normandy coast. Patrick Maloney’s suite was located on the side of the campus where the Jets maintained their facilities, in one of four white dormitory buildings that dwarfed every other structure as far as the eye could see. Very tasteful. I think maybe at night they put a crossbar between the towers so the Jets’ kicker could practice field goals in the dark.

  I thought I could have talked my way past the security guard at the lobby desk, but showed him my badge instead. Unlike most square-badgers, this guard was highly unimpressed. He shook his head no at my advance towards the elevator.

  “NYPD issuing canes these days?” he wondered. “Must be new since I got off the job.”

  “Special issue for the gimp squad. We chase the ambulance chasers,” I said. “How long you off?”

  “Five years in April. Haven’t looked back a day since I put in my papers.”

  Yeah, right. He hated the uniform so much he was willing to go back in the bag to guard coeds and potheads for four bucks an hour. I didn’t feel like arguing the point, so I turned the discussion to Patrick Maloney. Maybe I could use his cop’s instincts to my advantage. Apparently, this wasn’t a very original idea.

  “You’re the first guy to show up in weeks. First month, we had every off-duty cop on the planet running in and outta here. I was givin’ out numbers like the deli counter at Waldbaums. I was gettin’ interviewed every ten minutes.”

  “How about one more time?”

  Surprisingly, he said he remembered Maloney. The old cop said Maloney stuck out from the other students because he was always really polite and impeccably dressed.

  “Always had a good morning or good evening for me. Called me sir. My own kids don’t call me sir,” the security guard lamented. “And the creases in his pants were so sharp you could cut paper with ’em. The rest of the kids around here dress like bums and the best I get out of ’em is a grunt. It’s the uniform. They got no respect for the uniform. Draft card burnin’ mother . . . If I had my way, I’d—”

  I cut him off before he got started critiquing President Carter’s neutron bomb policy. In a way, the old cop’s rantings served as a reminder. You had only to scratch the surface just a little to hit raw nerve. Sure, we were doing the bump through the decade with OPEC and the Symbionese Liberation Army to distract us, but we weren’t so far removed from the Tet Offensive or Selma or Dallas that we had forgotten. There were scabs forming on the wounds, but there was still fresh blood beneath the scabs. I’d keep that in mind.

  As I rode the elevator up to the eighth floor, I thought about what the security guard had said about Patrick. I wasn’t certain, however, how much credence to assign his statements. Maybe he was saying what he thought I wanted to hear. Cops are as guilty of that as anyone else. Maybe the Maloneys had gotten to him and given him some incentive to spout the family line. Or it might not have been anything so sinister. Over time, he might have woven what he’d read in the papers and heard about the Maloney boy into his memory so that he could no longer distinguish between what had actually occurred and what had been suggested. Still, I could not dismiss what he had said. It rang true, especially about the creases in Patrick’s pants. It was too obscure a detail for someone to fabricate. And I couldn’t help remembering the military creases in the elder Maloney’s clothing when we’d met at Molly’s.

  While the hallway didn’t exactly reek of marijuana, its earthy sweet perfume hung in the air like a happy ghost. Put out to pasture, I could finally admit to loving that smell. I ran a finger along the wall. It was sticky with resin. The desperate kids, I thought, could probably lick the walls and catch a buzz.

  I found Patrick’s old room, Led Zeppelin blasting on the other side of the door. The bass line ignored the door, massaging my feet through the soles of my shoes. The smell of pot was more intense here than in the rest of the hall. I gave the door a good rap to no avail. Given the volume of Robert Plant’s falsetto, I could understand why. I knocked again, harder. No response. I gave my foot a try. No luck, I was batting 0 for 3. Finally, I tried the door. It was unlocked and since no one would invite me, I let myself in.

  The kid seated in front of the stereo had his back to me. As loud as the music was, I was surprised his ears weren’t bleeding. I guessed he was further distracted by the skull-headed bong he was busily sucking on. Before approaching him, I stopped to admire the art. No silly blacklight posters here. Each wall had been painted with meticulous reproductions of popular album covers. To my left was the prism on black of Dark Side of the Moon. To my right was the grasshopper of Steely Dan’s Katy Lied. Behind me, Aqualung gave me dirty looks. Aaron always thought it immature of me to keep up with rock music. Maybe. Then again, Aaron thought Woodstock signaled the coming apocalypse.

  I didn’t even bother trying to announce my arrival and simply tapped the kid on the shoulder. That gave him a start. He spilled some bong juice on his jeans and the grass in the bowl on the floor.

  “Hey, man!” he screamed. “What the—”

  Deciding to cut past the bullshit, I showed him my badge.

  “Oh man, oh man,” he lamented. “I’m fucked now. My parents’ll—”

  “Calm down. Take it slow. This isn’t a bust,” I said. “Lower the stereo. I only wanna talk.”

  Dutifully, he turned down the volume. I thought he was going to kiss my ring. That was good. I hoped it would make him want to cooperate.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mitch,” he squeaked, “but everybody calls me Doobie.”

  What a surprise. I scanned the list of Patrick’s suite mates. No Mitch. No Doobie. I read the names aloud and asked Doobie if any of them were around.

  “They’re outta here, dude,” he said, the tension going out of his voice. “After that weird Maloney guy did the Houdini thing, those guys trucked over to other dorms. I guess they were getting hassled too much.”

  I wondered why everyone, including the ex-cop downstairs, had neglected to tell me Patrick’s roomies had scattered. While I fumed quietly, my eyes drifted back to the album cover walls. Doobie noticed my admiration.

  “Pretty cool, huh?”

  “Your work?” I wondered.

  “No way, man,” he laughed. “I have a hard time with stick figures. They were here when we moved in. There’s a Moody Blues in the bathroom. Too bad he didn’t do any Zep or Zappa.”

  “Yeah, too bad. Do you know which one of the roommates did—”

  “Houdini, man. Patrick. Look, he initialed them in the corner.”

  Doobie was right. PMM appeared in the lower left-hand corner of each mural. It wasn’t exactly the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but I was impressed. The detail was amazing.

  “You looking for him?” Doobie asked.

  “Me and everyone else. You called him weird before. Why?”

  “I didn’t mean nothing mean by it,” Doobie said defensively. “I used to live down the hall and we didn’t really talk or anything more than a hello. You know? But he was just weird. I don’t know.”

  “Try.”

  “He was . . . I mean, he was kinda . . . You ever see that movie with David Bowie in it?”

  “The Man Who Fell to Earth?”

  “That’s it! You know for a cop, you’re—”

  “Thanks, but let’s get back to the movies.”

  “Right. Sorry, dude. So, yeah. You know how Bowie was like an alien. Patrick, he was kinda like that. He didn’t fit in. He lived on the hall, but he was apart from us.”

  I was losing patience with the Doobster and praying he wasn’t pre-med. “Can you give me an example?”

  He pointed over my shoulder at the snarling Aqualung. “He painted all of these, right. But from what t
he guys told me, Patrick never listened to this music. Well, no . . . they told me he pretty much hated head music. He would split or lock himself in his room whenever the tunes came on. They said he painted the walls to like kiss their ass. It was like a trade, you know?”

  “A trade for what?”

  Dobbie thought about that: “For putting up with him, I guess. If they went out to a bar or to an Islanders’ game, they’d include him.”

  “If he didn’t fit in here, why didn’t he just switch roommates?”

  “I guess he was like tired of doing that, man. Bobby told me—”

  “Robert Klingman?” I asked. The mental image of Klingman’s mother teaching herself the hustle popped into my head.

  “Yeah, Robert Klingman. He said that Patrick had changed roommates every term since freshman year. See, that’s what I mean, he was just a weird dude, dude. He also smiled too much, you know?”

  I didn’t know. All I could tell from what Doobie had shared was that Patrick Maloney was desperate to fit in. As a Jewish cop, I could empathize. I’d been willing to take a lot of shit in order to be accepted by my peers. I kept pressing Doobie for other examples of Patrick’s eccentricities, but he just shrugged his shoulders a lot and said he was getting munched out. Yet, I got the sense he was hiding something from me. I put on the full-court press, reminding him of the badge in my pocket and that a relatively small quantity of his preferred smoke could get him a free room in Attica courtesy of the Rockefeller drug laws. He acted hurt. I wasn’t playing fair. I’d promised him there’d be no bust. There wouldn’t be, I said, if he would just stop holding back.

  Doobie threw his hands up in surrender. “Okay, dude, you win. But like word got around campus to not . . . you know. I mean what if the guy’s dead or something. It’s not right for me to—”

  I told him I understood, but that there was no proof Patrick was dead. Maybe, I said, what he had to tell me, no matter what it was, could help me find Patrick.

  “One night I came over to borrow a Yes album from Bobby Klingman.” Doobie’s tone was suddenly very serious. “I just let myself in. It was cool, the front door was always open. No one was in Bobby’s room, but I heard someone else in the suite. I figured I’d smoke a j with whoever it was. And then I like see that Patrick’s door is open a crack, so I look in. I was gonna say something, but it was just like weird man, weird.”

  “What?”

  “Patrick was in his underwear and he was walking backwards in like a perfect square. He kept doing it over and over and the whole time he’s like looking over his shoulder to make sure his feet are landing in the same spots on the floor. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t wanna embarrass the guy, you know. And shit, I was pretty stoned and I was getting into it. So when he gets done walking the squares, he gets dressed.”

  “So,” I shrugged, “he gets dressed.”

  “But not like I get dressed. He starts counting backward from twenty out loud, sorta whispering to himself like, and takes all the shit folded on the bed and gets it on before he’s at zero. Then he starts counting again, but forward this time, and gets undressed. Folds everything back up and does it again. What I notice is he does the right side first; right sock, right pants leg, right sleeve. When he takes the stuff off, it’s like backwards. Everything from the left. It was spooky, man, and I didn’t feel right about watching anymore. So I start tiptoeing out and Bobby like comes in the front door and drops a book on the floor.”

  “Patrick saw you, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” Doobie bowed his head. “Our eyes like met. I felt shitty, man. I never said anything about it, not even when all the cops came around.”

  I held my right hand out and shook Doobie’s. I thanked him and told him I respected him for keeping Patrick’s rituals secret. Before I left, I suggested he start locking the suite door. You never know, I said, who might be watching or who might let himself in.

  Originally, I’d meant to track down as many of Patrick’s roommates as I could find, but suddenly that strategy had lost its appeal. Doobie’s cannabis-hazed recollections had turned my scheme on its ear, for he had breathed life into Patrick Maloney. I could no longer treat Patrick as an abstraction, a poster, a means to my brother’s ends. Patrick was human to me now, a man with pain and quirks and secrets. Doobie had done more to motivate me than all the carrots and sticks Francis Maloney could muster. I was going to find Patrick, me, no one else, no matter how long it would take.

  As I left the dorm I could hear the ex-cop/security guard call after me. For his lack of candor about Patrick’s roommates, I rewarded him with my ignorance. There was a philosopher once who said something like, to be is to be perceived. I hoped the security guard would reach the very same conclusion.

  OUTSIDE AND WALKING toward the student center, I figured I had two options: I could find the student government offices or try to locate the health services building. Since I was certain Patrick had been a member of the student council, but hadn’t a clue as to whether Patrick had sought help for his . . . I don’t know, his rituals, I guess I’d call them, I opted for the sure thing.

  The door to the student government offices was wide open. Here, too, I was greeted by music. Joni Mitchell, this time, and not so loud that I was in danger of permanent hearing loss. I smiled sadly. It had never before occurred to me that the older one gets, the less one’s life is accompanied by music. I remembered my parents’ house and how music was confined to an hour of show tunes on Sunday mornings. Even for me, news radio had begun replacing music as the soundtrack of my life.

  Inside, a long-legged girl in cowboy boots and white painter’s pants danced with the file cabinet. She had square shoulders, a waterfall of curly brown hair and a profile that featured impossibly high cheekbones. I stood for a few seconds, watching her lipsynching the tense elation of newfound love. Then, recalling Doobie’s guilty voyeurism, I knocked my knuckles against the door: “Hello!”

  She turned right around, smiling, not a hint of embarrassment showing on her pale, strangely Victorian face. Her name was Maria. She didn’t look like a Maria, she said. We agreed that I looked more Italian than she. Most everybody did. Eventually she got around to asking me what I wanted. Patrick Maloney’s name chased the smile off her face and ruined her appetite for Joni Mitchell.

  Yes, she knew him. No, she didn’t like him. He did his work on the council, but he had no enthusiasm for it. He was a phony, a user.

  I told her I’d gotten a very different impression of him.

  “Sure you have,” Maria said, “but . . .” She stopped herself, her pale skin turning bright red.

  I pressed her. “But what?”

  “I’m just sick of the bullshit,” she hissed, anger contorting her face. “All that stuff in the paper is . . .”

  “Did you date him?”

  “Date him? No. He would never have asked me and I wouldn’t have gone.”

  “Why?” I wondered.

  “Why what? Why wouldn’t he have asked or why wouldn’t I have gone?”

  “You pick.”

  “He wouldn’t have asked because I was too pretty,” she said without a hint of self-consciousness.

  “And if he asked . . .”

  “I thought he was creepy even before . . .” Again, she stopped herself. “He was just odd, that’s all.”

  “Before what? Look, Maria,” I said, showing her my badge, “I’m not this kid’s press agent. I want to find him, not nominate him for sainthood. If he’s a schmuck, he’s a schmuck. It’s not for me to judge. If you’ve got something nasty to say, say it.”

  “It’s not my story to tell.” She walked away from the file cabinet over to a desk and wrote something down on a sheet of pink memo paper. “Here,” she said, “go talk to her.”

  I took the paper. “I apologize, Maria. I didn’t mean to upset you. I think you knocked me off balance. No one ever said I looked Italian before.”

  She smiled at that a little, just a little. As I walked back dow
n the hall I listened for Joni Mitchell’s voice, but it never came.

  The address Maria had given me was off campus, way off campus. Again I thought about finding student health services. Only now I was on shakier ground than when I’d left Doobie’s. And even if I could have found some shrink or social worker to answer my questions, I wouldn’t have known what questions to pose. Apparently, Patrick Maloney was not only human, but a complex one at that. We humans do have that unfortunate tendency. Poster pictures were easier on the soul, not many tics or quirks, no enemies to deal with.

  THOUGH SOUTH OF Glen Cove, Brookville was still, I think, considered part of Long Island’s Gold Coast. While it was no longer the exclusive playground of the obscenely wealthy, the zoning board wasn’t exactly busy approving variances for trailer parks. I don’t suppose you would designate any of the houses spread out along Route 107 as mansions, per se. I mean they were big, bigger than most of the houses in Brooklyn, but you couldn’t hangar anything more substantial than a Boeing 737 even in the largest of the bunch.

  Nancy Lustig’s house, if it was her house—her name and this address were on the memo paper Maria gave me—was a stunning red brick colonial that sat at the end of a beautifully cobbled driveway. Set against the snow-covered grounds, the place looked like a scene out of a Christmas beer commercial. I parked the car alongside a red Porsche, probably the gardener’s car.

  As I hobbled up the front steps, I could make out a pair of eyes behind the leaded glass panel in the front doors. They marked my progress, which, given my lack of skill with a cane and the slickness of the granite, must have been more entertaining to watch than the clown car at the circus.

  The door swung open. A squatty girl dressed in the best L. L. Bean had to offer, ran to take me by the elbow and help me to the landing.