Walking the Perfect Square

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Something popped up in the back of my mind, an idea, a random thought . . . I can’t tell you what, but it felt important. Something about music, maybe. Important or not, it was lost the minute Pete started talking again. He was going to come up to the bar and check on me, he said, and to see the look on Jack’s face when that song came on for the tenth time.

  “You okay?”

  “I think I was gonna say something,” I frowned, “but it’s gone.”

  “I hate when that happens,” Pete commiserated. “Feels like an itch you can’t scratch.”

  Upstairs, Jack was just getting off the phone with Pete when I sat down at the bar. He regarded me with all the enthusiasm of a coma victim. Apparently, gimpy ex-cops were just too uncool for words. He informed me that my money was no good at his bar; the evening’s tab was on the house. I played dumb. It was big of him, I said, throwing a twenty on the bar.

  “How about tip money?” I coaxed. “Go ahead, take it.”

  He hesitated like a starving dog sniffing poison meat. I could see the wheels turning behind his eyes, the fix already cooking in the spoon. Twenty bucks in the tip jar was a comfortable way to start the night, but what if Pete found out? Was it worth getting canned? He took it.

  I pointed to the beer pulls: “Becks Dark. Hey, got any ABBA on the jukebox?”

  He just rolled his eyes as I brought my pint over to the juke. I pumped about five bucks worth of quarters down the slot.

  110 There’s A Place

  Beatles

  135 Born to Run

  Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

  140 In the Mood

  Glenn Miller Orchestra

  155 My Old School

  Steely Dan

  135 Born to Run . . .

  “If I ask nicely, will you show me your gun?” Katy whispered in my ear as she snuck up behind me.

  “Depends how nicely you ask,” I said, not turning to face her. “What’ll you have? And don’t hold back. We’re drinking free tonight!”

  “Glenfiddich, straight up. Why, what’s the occasion?”

  Laughing, I said: “Your dad’s doing one of the owners a favor. I’ll explain later.” I handed her the roll of quarters. “Play whatever you’d like as long as you play 135 every few selections.”

  She looked at the box. “I didn’t figure you for the Springsteen type.”

  “He’s all right, but that’s not the point. I’ll explain that later, too.”

  She joined me at the bar as the early Fab Four faded out. We clinked glasses, exchanging nervous pleasantries, saying how happy we were to be there. She said she’d punched in about ten more selections, 135 accounting for two of the ten. I explained about the bartender and Pete Parson and worked my way back to how her father was doing Pete a favor.

  “Dad needed someone to blame,” she said.

  “I figured as much. That’s why I’m doing what I am. I like this place. I’d hate to see it go under because of misplaced vengeance. So, how’d it go today?”

  “It’s hard to say.”

  Just then, a drummer pounded his skins, a sax let out a low sustained growl, a glockenspiel tinkled and a twangy guitar hummed. Number 135 filled the air: “In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream . . .”

  “Oh, fuck!” Jack snarled. I almost spit out my beer. “Ooh, it’s the Boss,” he swooned. “Apocalypse on the fucking boardwalk. Did you play this?” Jack asked me.

  “What can I tell you?” I shrugged. “You don’t have any ABBA.”

  Katy nudged me. “I guess he really does hate this song.”

  “I have a funny feeling that by the end of the evening we’re not gonna be very fond of it ourselves.”

  Pooty’s wasn’t the type of place where folks made an entrance. People just sort of drifted in off the street. It was happening now, empty bar stools filling up around us. We watched the door, trying to guess what kind of jobs the most recent arrivals were out of.

  “Actress,” Katy elbowed me, as a lean, hollow-faced girl came in.

  “Dancer,” I argued. “Look at those legs.”

  When two young guys dressed in Rutgers sweatshirts walked through the door and headed straight for the jukebox, Katy and I looked immediately at Jack. He cursed under his breath and started singing: “ ‘Dancing queen, she’s so sweet, only seventeen . . .’ Maybe ABBA isn’t such a bad idea,” he smiled, refilling our glasses.

  I repeated my question about the day’s progress in Hoboken. The results, she answered, were decidedly mixed. Their goal for the day had been to find at least one, hopefully two other people who could place Patrick at or near the shopping center at approximately the same time Mr. Sica had reported seeing him there.

  “Right now,” she said, “our optimism is like a broken stool standing on one rickety leg.”

  “Enzo Sica.”

  “And,” Katy continued, “it’s leaning against a wall of blind hope. But if we could find other witnesses, our optimism would stand on more solid footing and we could move it off the wall.”

  They had found a few people who claimed to have seen Patrick, but when pressed none of the potential witnesses panned out. Some got the time all wrong. Some the place. The ones who got those details right, couldn’t swear they hadn’t confused their own memories with what they’d read in the papers. None remembered the shopping bags. Again, a detail omitted to help weed out the cranks and treasure hunters.

  It was the strong impression the nervous young man had left on Enzo Sica that helped convince Sully and me the old stone mason was being truthful. Today’s witnesses were not so impressed by who they had or thought they had seen. Katy didn’t think that made them liars, but . . .

  “It’s hard to tell after a while. You want so much to believe. My heart tells me to listen and my head tells me they’re all just full of shit.”

  “I know,” I said, but I didn’t.

  Glenn Miller came on. “Wanna dance?” we asked simultaneously.

  “Jinx,” she said. “You owe me a beer.”

  “Tonight that’s not a problem.”

  She hesitated. “Your knee?”

  “Let me worry about that.”

  We chugged what was in our glasses and moved out onto the tiles. To call what we did by any one name would have been a stretch. It was an amalgam of the Lindy, the tango and a half-assed polka. In spite of how we must’ve looked, we liked it. I liked holding her. She liked being held. I liked the way she touched me. My knee was blind to her charms. When we were done, we received a round of applause. New full glasses awaited our return. We toasted to Arthur Murray.

  “So, did you find a clerk or shopkeeper who might’ve helped Patrick that day?” I asked, returning to the subject of Hoboken.

  “One guy said he thought he remembered helping pick out a dress shirt for someone who fit my brother’s description. It was the right time and place.”

  I could hear doubt in her voice: “But . . .”

  “Shirt was the wrong size and way too businessy. Brooks Brothers-type shirt was what the guy said. The customer paid in cash and split.”

  I thought about asking something I’d been hesitating to ask. All along I believed the Maloneys must have assumed, as I had, that Patrick was dead. The only questions, then, were, was it an accident or foul play or suicide? And where was the body? Now that there was a chance he was alive, I wondered what the family thought. Did they think he was kidnapped? I doubted it. There’d never been any phone calls or glued newsprint notes with ransom demands. It wasn’t like he was Patty Hearst or anything. Did they think he had amnesia? Nah, only in soap operas. So, given the remaining options, they must have concluded Patrick had simply checked out of his old life. But why?

  “You’ve gone quiet all of a sudden,” Katy noted. “Don’t tell me you’re a sad drunk.”

  “No, it’s just that—”

  “So!” A jolly Pete Parson appeared. From the smell of him, I guessed he’d been doing a little private celebra
ting downstairs. “How we doin’? Jack treating you good?”

  Jack conveniently turned his back.

  “Great,” I said, relieved he had chosen now to visit.

  Pete cleared his throat: “Aren’t you goin’ to introduce me?”

  “Katy meet Pete. Pete meet Katy.” They shook hands, smiling goofily at one another.

  “Jack!” Pete shouted above Steely Dan. “The good stuff.”

  A dismayed Jack slapped a dusty bottle down in front of us. As he did so, the drums pounded, the sax wailed, the glockenspiel tinkled, the guitar twanged. Number 135 was up for its second at bat of the evening: “In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream . . .”

  There was murder in Jack’s eyes. Spotting it, Katy and I spun on our bar stools and pointed at the kids in the Rutgers shirts. “Fucking Jersey!” he hissed. “Why didn’t they bomb Ho-Ho-Kus and Newark instead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?”

  “Shut up and pour,” Pete ordered with great satisfaction.

  It was Calvados, he said, French apple brandy. His great-grandfather was from Normandy, where the apples grew. It did taste of apples—more like butane, but a little like apples. When Pete headed back downstairs, he took the bottle with him.

  By the fourth playing of “Born to Run,” Katy suggested the time had come for us to take a walk and to get some food into our bellies.

  “Weren’t we supposed to eat first?” I wondered.

  “Too late. You like Ukrainian food?”

  “Pierogi is my middle name. East Village, right? Okay,” I said, “let’s see if we pick the same restaurant. We’ll walk.”

  “We’ll take a cab. You may not be feeling any pain now, but you might in the morning.”

  We agreed to take a cab across town, but to walk once we hit the Village. We said our fare-thee-wells to Jack. Jack, who was all right in the end. His venomous, running monologue was pretty damned funny and after Katy and I’d had a few, we found ourselves wanting him at our end of the bar. I hate when people do that, refuse to live down to expectations.

  As we approached the exit, an unfamiliar song was just starting to spin on the jukebox turntable. It was all simple chords and backbeat, but nasty somehow, kind of like a Dave Clark Five song dressed in black. I could feel that fleeting thought I’d had in Pete Parson’s office reemerging.

  “Who is this?” I heard myself asking no one in particular.

  “It’s the fucking Ramones, man,” a faceless voice shouted out of the crowd.

  Katy tugged my arm. “Come on.”

  I didn’t move. “Do you have a picture of Patrick? Not an old prom one, but—”

  “Will this do?” she asked, pulling something from the pocket of her coat.

  The Maloneys had printed new posters of Patrick based on the picnic photo Sully had shown me. It was better than the reproduction that had appeared in the papers, but not that much better. The accompanying description had been updated, too.

  “Great,” I said. “We can stop at a copy store by NYU on the way.”

  She shook her head. “Why, do you think Patrick’s hiding under the table in a Ukrainian restaurant?”

  “Maybe, but we’re not going to eat just yet.”

  “What are—”

  Now it was my turn to pull her by the arm: “There’s a cab. Let’s go.”

  ACTUALLY, IT HAD been more difficult finding an open copy center than I thought. There were any number of open pizza places for people to satisfy their marijuana munchies or thriving gift shops for tourists to purchase miniatures of the Statue of Liberty giving the finger, but God forbid your dissertation defense was coming up Monday and you had to make copies of your notes! For ten bucks the cab driver took us back to his garage and for five additional dollars the dispatcher made us twenty copies of the poster.

  “That was either the most expensive short cab ride I ever took,” I said, helping Katy out of the back seat, “or the most pricey photocopies ever made.”

  I’d been tempted to tell her my plan during our taxi safari through the streets of Greenwich Village, but I was afraid she’d shoot my idea down. If Katy could only see for herself, I thought, she might understand my inspiration.

  “Okay,” I said, after spotting someone who fit the bill coming our way, “close your eyes.”

  “The corner of East Ninth Street and Second Avenue is no place to play Blind Man’s—”

  I talked over her: “Humor me. Close your eyes. Eyes closed?”

  “They’re shut! They’re shut, for Christ sakes!”

  “Describe how Patrick looked the last time you saw him.”

  She did so, confessing she’d never really seen his tattoo. He wore the earring in front of the family despite their protestations, but none of them knew he even had the tattoo until the picnic picture surfaced. I had no trouble believing Patrick Maloney could keep a secret.

  “Ready?” I asked when she was done.

  “Ready.”

  I told her to open her eyes and spun her slowly about. “Look!”

  Heading right for us was a lanky boy in his early twenties. He wore ripped black jeans, a black leather jacket that had seen better days and sneakers. His pale, sunken cheeks were clean-shaven and his short, dyed hair was nearly yellow: more crayon than Clairol. There was a sizable steel safety pin dangling from his left earlobe. Under the amber streetlight, we could make out letters crudely tattooed across the knuckles of both his hands as he passed.

  “A punk,” she said, “so wha—” But she caught herself.

  “Do you see?”

  “I think so,” Katy hesitated, unconvinced.

  “Think about it a minute,” I said. “If he just split, for whatever reason, this would be a perfect place to hide. With the way he looks now, he’d fit right in. Christ, he’d look like every third guy walking down Avenue A. With that stupid prom picture posted everywhere, no one would have spotted him. And let me tell you something, even before the punks moved in, the people down here weren’t disposed to helping the cops.”

  She hesitated: “I guess. But what would he live on? He hasn’t touched his bank accounts or used the emergency credit card Dad got for him.”

  “Maybe he’d planned on this for awhile and packed away some cash. You know that thing you said before about him hiding under a table?” I said, pointing at the door of the Ukrainian restaurant ten feet to our left. “He could be doing dishes or bussing tables. Maybe he’s sleeping on a different couch every night. Maybe he’s got a room in a cheap dive. I don’t know. You tell me. Did you ever stop to think that maybe he’s had help? A friend or a new girlfriend?”

  “New girlfriend?” she was startled.

  “Later,” I begged for time to continue making my case. “Anyway, there’s always a way to hustle up some money in this city. Panhandling comes to mind. Maybe he’s drawing tourist sketches in Washington Square for five bucks a pop.”

  Katy laughed joylessly: “That’d be ironic, wouldn’t it?”

  I thought it more likely he’d be selling nickel bags or fake hits of mescaline in Washington Square, but given his sister’s reaction to the mere idea of a new girlfriend, I thought it prudent to leave mention of drugs out of the equation.

  “So, if he’s fallen in around here with the punks and the artists,” I said, “I think we should pay a visit to the music and dance clubs. We’ll leave posters with the bouncers, rope men and bartenders. They might help.”

  Having gone through months of letdowns, Katy wouldn’t let herself be optimistic. “They won’t pay any attention.”

  “Remember what I said to you before at Pooty’s when you asked to see my gun? It depends how nicely you ask. It’s been my experience that club employees grasp the value of cash incentives and future reward as well as anyone.”

  Almost unconsciously, she reached under her coat into a pants pocket. “I’ve got about sixty bucks, subway fare and an American Express card.”

  I frowned. “I don’t think bouncers take American Ex
press.”

  “But this restaurant does,” she said, pointing at the blue and white American Express decal on the door. “My head’s spinning. I’ve gotta eat something.”

  I looked at my watch. It was late for dinner even by Manhattan standards, but very early in clubland. Rubbing my belly, I nodded my consent. As I opened the door for her, Katy stopped in her tracks. “What about Hoboken? Do you think it was really Patrick?”

  I let the door close, took hold of Katy’s shoulders and turned her to look down East 9th. “If Manhattan from here to the Hudson suddenly became invisible, what would you see west across the river?”

  “Jersey City?”

  “Don’t be such a vance,” I said, playfully rapping a knuckle on her head. “Besides Jersey City, what—”

  “Hoboken.”

  “A short subway ride or walk to the PATH train and from here you’d be across the river in fifteen minutes.”

  “Don’t be so proud of yourself,” she punched my arm. “And what’s a vance, anyway?”

  “It’s Yiddish for wiseass woman who wants to be kissed.”

  “You’re right,” she said, “I’m a vance.”

  With eyes shut, her lips no longer seemed thin to me.

  August 6th, 1998 (evening)

  SISTER MARGARET WAS right on. The pizza was incredible. The crust was crispy but pliable, the sauce sweet and the mozzarella fresh . . .

  “It’s not easy to impress a Brooklynite with pizza, but if I had a hat, I’d tip it.”

  The nun, a bit embarrassed, I think, by her pride, bowed her head. She regretted, she said, not being able to have a beer with me. Beer made the experience complete. But she would be on duty when she got back to the hospice.

  “Like a cop,” Sister Margaret shook her head, “no drinking on duty.”

  “Sister, don’t believe everything about cops you see on TV.”

  “Are you a policeman, Mr. Prager?”

  “Was, Sister. A long time ago.”

  “Is that how you came to be involved in the disappearance of Mr. Maloney?”