Walking the Perfect Square

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Why you checking this lead out?” I asked. “You must get a hundred calls a day from head cases who swear they saw the Maloney kid with Elvis.”

  “Before Elvis died last year,” Sully said, “all the wack jobs used to say they spotted so-and-so with JFK.”

  “But why—”

  “Sica mentioned a dark blue winter coat,” he talked over me. “That’s what the kid was wearing. We never released that detail to nobody so we could weed out the cranks.”

  Enzo Sica came to the door in a sleeveless T-shirt, striped pajama bottoms and slippers. He was seventy if a day and bald as a lightbulb. Though hunched, he had the powerful build of a man who’d done a lot of heavy lifting in his time. When Mr. Sica reached for thick glasses in order to inspect Detective Sullivan’s shield, our hearts sank.

  “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” Enzo reassured us. “Deeza glasses only for da close-up looking. From acrossa da street, I’m-a see like an owl.”

  We were not reassured. Mr. Sica led us into a pleasant living room with old but clean furniture and a beautiful tin ceiling. His citizenship certificate was framed and hung over the sofa. The walls were covered with family pictures and pictures of Sica standing next to several stone structures.

  “Atsa my wife, Stella. Sheeza dead three years now.” He crossed himself. “Deez are my kids an-a da grandchildren.” He caught my eyes gazing at a black-and-white shot of an intricate garden wall. “Im-a build dat,” he thumped his chest proudly. “I’m a stone-a mason my whole life, from da time I step off da boat in-a 1925. Look here . . .”

  He gave us a brief pictorial tour of the projects he’d worked on, offered us some grappa and started smoking a cigar that looked like brown rope and smelled like shit.

  “If you saw him yesterday,” Sully was curious, “why wait to call us till today?”

  Mr. Sica said he didn’t know who Patrick Maloney was yesterday. Not until late last night, when he was returning home from dinner in Manhattan with an old friend, did he see the poster.

  “In da train-a station, I’m-a look at dis picture on da pole. I say to myself, heeza look familiar. I tink about it overnight an-a dis morning, I call you.”

  I confirmed to Sully that I hadn’t seen any of the posters on this side of the river. He shook his head in agreement. Sully asked why this young man, of all the people Mr. Sica must have seen at the shopping center, stuck in his head. The young man, Mr. Sica said, acted very nervous.

  “He had in heeza hand some shopping-a bags. Dey swingin’ back an-a forth. Heeza head, its-a look everywhere. Quick. Quick. You know, like somebody eez after him?” Sica pantomimed, his head darting from side to side.

  The young man had worn a stocking cap, so Enzo couldn’t say anything about the length of his hair. He might or might not have worn an earring; glare from the sun and the snow made it difficult to tell. And since his arms were covered by an overcoat, it was impossible to know about a tattoo. Sully laid out several snapshots on Enzo Sica’s coffee table and asked the old stone mason to pick out any that resembled the young man. The thick glasses back on, he chose three pictures. One was the ubiquitous prom pose. One was the student government picnic photo. One, I would learn, was of a convicted child molester about Patrick’s age who looked only slightly more like Patrick Maloney than Abe Lincoln.

  Next, Sully spread out some advertisements from the Sunday papers. All the models wore winter coats. Along with the ads, the detective pulled out a color chart. He asked Mr. Sica to match the coat and color that came closest to what the nervous guy had worn. With gentle shakes of his head, Sully indicated to me that the old man was pretty close on style—a hooded parka—and several shades off on the color blue.

  After a few more questions about time and location, Sully motioned that it was time to leave.

  “You said the nervous guy was holding some bags,” I broke my silence.

  “Shopping bags like-a from da department stores.”

  “Can you remember, was there writing on the bags, like the name of a certain store?”

  He closed his eyes tightly, trying to recall. “Spate. Spate. (Wait. Wait.) Writing-a . . . Si! Yes! There was-a writing, but . . .” He held his hands up in surrender. “I can no remember.”

  Sully thanked him again, left his direct number in case the old man remembered anything else and informed Sica he was in line for a reward if his information led to the discovery of Patrick’s whereabouts.

  “No! No money!” he grew agitated. “No money!”

  He slammed the door behind us, hard.

  When we got to street level I was anxious to hear what Sullivan thought: “So . . .”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think he’s a nut job or nothin’, but those fuckin’ Coke-bottle glasses, geez! He was close on the coat, but everybody wears those parkas.”

  “Outta the three pictures he pulled, two were of Patrick,” I argued.

  That’s when Detective Sullivan explained that the third photo was of a child molester who didn’t resemble Maloney except in age. “What the fuck, I guess I gotta give the old wop the benefit of the doubt. I think he really saw the kid.”

  “Me too.”

  “Shit, with your endorsement I guess I’ll sleep better tonight.”

  “Fuck you, Sully.”

  “I’m gonna call this in,” he said. “Wanna come back to the city with me?”

  “That’s okay. I got some stuff at home to catch up on. Thanks for the heads up.”

  “You know, Prager, that was a good question you asked in there. About the shopping bag, I mean.”

  He was right, of course. It was a good question, an elemental one. My guess is, he’d been waiting for me to ask and would’ve eventually asked himself if I hadn’t obliged. Was he just stroking my ego, I wondered? Easier to yank my chain that way. I figured if I was going to get used, I wanted something in return. I waited for him to walk a couple of steps.

  “Sully,” I called to him.

  “Yeah.”

  “You got a hook in Personnel or IA?”

  He walked back toward me. “Why?”

  “I want a look at Francis Maloney’s old personnel file.” He wanted to know why and I told him I was just curious. Nothing more complicated than that. Sully pissed and moaned about how difficult it was to get files, especially old, inactive ones. It was unethical, he reminded me, but not in those words. He could get jammed up for even trying.

  “You were on the job. You know how it is.”

  Indeed I did. Everything he said was true. “Hey, I understand. I just thought I’d ask.”

  Agreeing that Mr. Sica’s tip might net us Patrick in a few days and that we could then forget the Maloneys ever existed, Sully and I left it there. I watched him disappear around the corner before heading back to my car. Sitting in my front seat, I was suddenly exhausted. It struck me that I’d been working on the assumption Patrick Maloney was dead. Admitting it to myself only now, I was overcome by decidedly mixed feelings. A garbage truck blared its horn at me to move. There was no way for the driver to know how relieved I was at the distraction of his horn.

  Sully had warned me not to tell the family about Mr. Sica, but when I got home I called Katy Maloney’s Manhattan number. Chances were she wasn’t back from her parents’ home, anyway. I got one of those stupid answering machines. I left an awkwardly worded message about the day’s events and asked her to call me back. After hanging up, I realized I hadn’t left my number. I called back. I hated talking to machines.

  February 7th, 1978

  PAGE 4 OF the Daily News, Patrick Maloney gets a reprise on his fifteen minutes of fame. Pieces of the original stories detailing his disappearance had been cannibalized for the update. It was all there but a mention of Enzo Sica. Witness’s name withheld by request, the article said. Two pictures accompanied the story. One featured my favorite Missing Persons detective holding up a replica of the parka Patrick was wearing the night he vanished and, if Enzo Sica was to be believed, the parka Patrick Mi
chael Maloney was still wearing. The other picture, however, was a surprise. Prom Patrick had at last been replaced by picnic Patrick: short hair, earring and all.

  Unfortunately, I doubted the picture would be much help. Newsprint reproductions are grainy at best, but because this one had been cropped and enlarged so severely, it was cloudy and indistinct like those silly snapshots of Bigfoot. I was encouraged that the Maloneys were willing to open up. Armed with a little hope, they were finally putting on the full court press. I wondered how many busloads of volunteers would be hitting the streets of Hoboken.

  With the media coverage and the search back in high gear, I figured I could take the weekend off. It was time to shift my focus from Patrick to his sister. Still too early to call her; I put down the paper and decided to exercise my knee on the boardwalk. Though it was impossible to see the sun directly from my apartment, its light seemed particularly bright today. I don’t know if that was a vestige of my school days. Sunlight always seemed brighter on Saturday mornings, the winter air less bitter. I made it as far as the lobby.

  “Hey, you gimpy prick! Yeah, you with the flat Jewish ass!” a welcome voice called from behind me.

  I turned to see a bronze-faced Rico Tripoli holding a box of Cuccio’s pastries.

  “Tough work, those extradition assignments in Florida, huh? I guess you squeezed in a few minutes by the pool.”

  “The beach!” He shook his head in disapproval. “You know I hate pools.”

  “That’s right, Sicilians are just strong Arab swimmers who lost their way.”

  Rico smiled broadly, showing off his white teeth. “Fuck you!”

  “Don’t get mad at me. You’re the one named Tripoli, remember?”

  Back in my apartment, Rico freshened his coffee with some Dewar’s. When he tried to add scotch to mine, I put my hand over the cup. I told him I couldn’t, that I had a date. I played coy when he asked if it was anyone he knew. Surprisingly, he let it go at that.

  “Be that way,” he said, pouring even more alcohol into his mug.

  “Cut it out, asshole!” I warned him. “I had a pleasant talk with your wife the other day. All she needs is for you to come home drunk from my house.”

  He wasn’t going home, he said. He had a good twelve-hour stretch of reports to do back at the task force office. No cop likes paperwork, but I’d never known Rico to soften the blow with alcohol. It worried me a little. We chatted about his big case and the wiseguy he’d picked up in the Sunshine State, Cheech “the Stick” Russo.

  “They don’t call him the Stick cause he’s skinny,” Rico winked. “If he hurt his knee like you, he wouldn’t have to buy a cane. Fuckin’ guy keeps the head warm in his sock. Big dick and a bigger mouth; he was gonna get wacked and ran. Amazin’ how talkative they get when it’s their ass is gonna get chopped up and thrown in the Fountain Avenue dump.”

  I agreed. When I saw that he was finished, I started to tell him about where I’d gotten with Patrick Maloney. But just as Rico had stopped me from my stroll on the boardwalk, he stopped me now.

  “That’s what I’m here about,” he said, pulling an envelope out of his coat pocket. “This is for you.”

  Inside the envelope were ten crisp hundred-dollar bills, a phone number and someone’s name scrawled out on a sheet of stationery from Francis Maloney’s office.

  “Who’s Brian Kupf?” I asked.

  “When you and Aaron apply for your liquor license, give him a call. He’ll take good care a ya. The little donkey said the thousand should cover the work you’ve done.”

  “What, no roses? No thank-you card?” I feigned disappointment. “I don’t get it. I—They haven’t found the kid yet. Isn’t the father getting a little ahead of himself?”

  “What can I tell ya?” Rico shrugged. “I guess he figures now that he got a good lead, he can focus his forces. Makes sense to me.”

  “If the lead is good.”

  “I heard you thought it was,” he countered. So, Rico’d been talking to Sully. “Until now, Maloney’s had people lookin’ all over the fuckin’ map.”

  “Even if it was really Patrick the witness saw, the kid could be a million miles away by now.”

  “Maybe, but it’s two months already and he’s still close.” Rico was right, of course. “So anyways, even Francis Maloney doesn’t have unlimited funds. He’s trimmin’ the payroll a little. I’m sure you’re not the only guy gettin’ shown the door.”

  “I guess.”

  “Hey, for what, a week’s work, you pocketed a grand and a fast track on the liquor license. Be happy! Take the fuckin’ bread and run.” Rico looked at his watch. “Shit, it’s late. I gotta split.”

  He sucked down his fortified coffee, shook my hand and headed for the door. He mentioned something about getting together for a night out. It was all pretty vague, perfunctory. In spite of the friendly, deprecating banter, I sensed a distance between Rico and me I couldn’t conveniently attribute to his wife’s prejudices. Even as he slipped out the door I felt him slipping away. The sun no longer seemed especially bright.

  “I’M SORRY I didn’t get back to you,” she said breathlessly. “I just got back from—”

  “—Hoboken.”

  “Putting up posters and asking around. We had like a hundred and fifty volunteers. Everybody was rushing. After all the discouragement, this news . . . Listen, Moe,” Katy’s tone grew suddenly serious, “was this witness—I mean, do you believe him? Do you think he really saw Patrick?”

  “I do. Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “How,” I was curious, “did you know I spoke to the witness?”

  “You have to ask?”

  I guess I didn’t, not really. “Your dad.”

  “I think he knew before the detective called him. He’s got friends, you know . . .”

  “I know.”

  “Isn’t it great news, about my brother?” she wanted my encouragement.

  “Except for one thing,” I said. “I’m out of a job.”

  There was loud silence on the other end of the phone. Then: “What? My dad fired you?”

  I explained that “fired” wasn’t quite the right word. “Look, he didn’t exactly hire me in the first place. It was more of a trade type of thing; a favor for a favor. When I came on board, your family was grasping at straws. What harm could taking a flyer on me do? I’d gotten lucky once a long time ago. Maybe I’d get lucky again. As it turned out, you didn’t need my luck. Hey, at least I got to meet you.”

  But she wasn’t having any. “It’s not right. I got a bad feeling about this.”

  “Don’t turn superstitious on me,” I said, remembering Dr. Friar. “It was a business decision.”

  More silence. “Can I hire you?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t turn deaf on me. You heard me. Will you work for me?”

  It was an intriguing idea. Truth be known, I wasn’t happy about getting my walking papers at this stage of things. I knew too much to walk away fat and happy now. My curiosity hadn’t waned. Quite the opposite. I played for time: “Can we talk about it later?”

  She relaxed: “We better or I’ll have to kick your ass.”

  “Tough Catholic girls make me nuts. Think you can fit into your old plaid skir—”

  “Watch it or I’ll kick you in the knee. Eight o’clock okay with you?”

  “I’m afraid to say no. It’s fine. Where do—”

  “Pooty’s,” she said, no hesitation in her voice.

  I seconded the nomination without debate.

  I GOT THERE purposefully early. Pooty’s was nearly empty, the jukebox quiet. Grimy as ever, you could almost hear the mold spores growing. Jaundiced Jack, the Shakespeare of single malts, was behind the bar chatting up some skinny peroxide girl. Maybe he was asking her to come back to his garret later so they could compare needle marks.

  “Pete downstairs?”

  He screwed up his face like he was getting ready to challenge me. Then
, the dull bulb of recognition flickered. With supreme effort he smiled and tilted his head toward the staircase. Just as on my previous visit, Pete Parson was busy working an adding machine. I rapped on the wall outside the office. Turning, he recognized me right off. He didn’t smile.

  “I didn’t expect a kiss,” I said, “but—”

  “Sorry.” He offered me his hand.

  “State Liquor Authority still busting your shoes?”

  “With regularity,” he said, holding up several pink memo sheets. “These are all messages from their investigators wanting a piece a my time.”

  “Here,” I handed him another sheet of paper.

  “What’s this?”

  “Give that guy a call,” I said, pointing to Brian Kupf’s name. “Tell him you’re a friend of mine and that Maloney says to get off your back. Try not to push him. I may need his help myself someday soon.”

  “Why you doin’—”

  “I don’t know if it’ll work, but try it. Did you hear, the cops found somebody says he saw the kid in Hoboken two days ago?”

  “No shit!” he smiled. “Credible witness?”

  “I think so.”

  “Hey, thanks for this.” Parson held up the paper I’d given him. “Can I do anything for you?”

  “I’m meeting a date here in a few minutes and—”

  “I’ll call Jack upstairs and take care of it. Everything’s on the arm tonight. If either you or your date sees the bottom of your glass, you let me know. I’ll fire that conceited prick bartender so fast it’ll make his geeky little head spin. He’s good but he annoys the shit outta me.”

  “Thanks, Pete.”

  “Here,” he flipped me a roll of quarters. “That should keep the jukebox busy a while. And do me a favor, there’s this song Jack just hates. That Bruce Springsteen song. I don’t know. It’s got a sax in it. Something about tramps.”

  “ ‘Born to Run?’”I said.

  “That’s it.” He stood and clapped me on the back: “You got it. Play that song a few times. It makes Jack crazy. What’s he say, playing that song makes the bourgeois twerps from Jersey feel cool? Asshole’s from fuckin’ Dayton, Ohio, and he’s bad-mouthing Jersey? Play that song, play it a lot.”