Walking the Perfect Square

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Okay, Rico, I understand, that’s not your territory. But what about us? Why’d you do it to me? Couldn’t you find somebody else’s chain to yank?”

  “I didn’t so much do it to you as I did it for me. I don’t see where you come out so bad in this deal.”

  “You don’t, huh?”

  “No,” he raised his voice defensively. “You got at least a grand and the contact at the State Liquor Authority. For what, a few weeks of playin’ detective? Where’s the downside to that?”

  “You used me. There’s a big downside to that.”

  “Grow up, Moe. People use people all the time.”

  “Even if that’s so,” I said, “why me? I thought we were close.”

  “Not close enough for me to partner up with you and your brother in the liquor store. My money isn’t good enough for you two.”

  “I explained that twenty times already, Rico. It has nothing to do with you. It has to do with my dad going bankrupt and Aaron’s plans. So you used me because you wanted to hurt me somehow, is that it?”

  “Maybe that’s part of it,” he admitted. “But there was other things. There wasn’t alotta time, so it wasn’t like I could go research the perfect candidate. I knew you were gettin’ antsy and would wanna get outta the house after sittin’ on your ass. And I knew if I could get you curious, you’d go for it. You’ve always been a nosy bastard.”

  “There’s more you aren’t saying.”

  He slapped the table: “See what I mean? You always wanna know every fuckin’ thing. No answer’s ever good enough for you, is it? All right, I’ll tell you. I figured you was smart enough to follow where we led you and not experienced enough at detective work to fuck things up.”

  “You figured wrong.”

  “No, it was Sully, that fat moron. I told him not to be so obvious, that you’d get curious about the wrong stuff, but . . . Hey, it worked out better than I coulda hoped for. The little shanty prick is out and no one got dragged through the mud.”

  “What about finding Patrick?” I asked disapprovingly. “Or don’t you give a shit about him? What the fuck was he, just a convenient excuse? You gonna think everything turned out better than you could have hoped if he washes up on Manhattan Beach?”

  “That’s not what I meant. You know me better than that.”

  “No I don’t. I don’t know you at all anymore. Can you really want the shield that bad?”

  “You bet your ass I want it,” he hissed. “And I need the pay.”

  I was incredulous. “What happened to all the bread you inherited? You know, the money you were going to use to come in with me and Aaron? You told me you could’ve walked away from the job, moved down to Florida and—”

  “My divorce settlement happened to it. I got to keep the house, two pair of underwear and my fly swatter. She even got my Rangers season ticket. She cleaned me out. I guess I deserved it. And Rose, she’s great, but she pushes me. She was never married before, so she don’t understand things. She coulda married any uniformed jerk, she tells me. A cop’s nothing without a shield. I know it’s her old man talkin’. And every week the house needs a new this and a bigger that. What the fuck could I do?”

  The veal was served before I could answer. It might as well have been a live calf for all the interest I took in it. At least Rico tried to eat his. The waiter panicked over our lack of appetite. People had sent veal back for being under or overcooked, but no one, apparently, had rejected it on purely aesthetic grounds. I enjoyed his temporary despair. Before he ran screaming to the chef, I called the waiter over and asked him to wrap mine up. I wasn’t feeling well. Report of my illness cheered him right up. As the waiter removed my plate, I noticed Rico’s eyes widening and focusing on something over my left shoulder. Rico made to stand up.

  “That’s all right, don’t get up,” a relaxed male voice called from behind me. Then a strong hand clapped me on the shoulder. “This must be Moe Prager.”

  I turned, looking up at a handsome man in his mid-fifties. His silver hair was swept back and perfectly coifed. He had sparkly blue eyes, a pleasantly crooked mouth full of capped, white teeth and pointed jaw. He was dressed in a charcoal grey wool suit, a maroon silk, square-knotted tie with matching pocket hanky and light pink shirt. The hand on my shoulder had once lived a rough life but was now manicured. Its cuticle-less fingernails were clipped in perfect symmetry and reflected the candlelight like a freshly waxed car. On the ring finger was a gold Claddagh ring atop a plain wedding band.

  The spiffy Irishman held his right hand out to me: “Joe Donohue. Perhaps you’ve heard the name.”

  Joe Donohue was a legend. A highly decorated cop who’d been wounded twice in the line of duty, he’d risen through the ranks of the NYPD faster than any man before or since. After retirement, he made a small fortune in the private sector and had recently reappeared on the public stage as the mayor’s chief consultant on police affairs. Rumor was Donohue was angling for a run at the office itself. But most recently, I’d heard his name coming out of Rico’s mouth. Joe Donohue was supposed to be Francis Maloney’s hook in City Hall. I shook the legend’s hand.

  “Prego, Alphonso, tre espressos,” Donohue addressed the waiter by his first name, holding out a crisp twenty-dollar bill. “Then you give us some privacy, okay?”

  Alphonso made a show of trying to refuse the money, but took it in the end. Donohue’s little passion play with the tip money wasn’t lost on me. Pay attention, Prager, it was meant to say. They always take the easy money in the end.

  “So,” he said after the espressos and bottle of anisette were served, “it seems we underestimated you. It’s rare that I underestimate a man.”

  “Is this where I’m supposed to kiss the ring?” I wondered.

  “A smart man with a smart mouth. Rico didn’t tell me you had balls on you, too.”

  “He didn’t know. I just grew ’em. It’s like that stuff on TV. You rub it on, add water and there they are! Chia Balls, I think it’s called.”

  Rico was too nervous to laugh. Donohue laughed a little, then got stony-faced.

  “Now that you’ve showed me what a tough guy you are, can we get down to business?” It wasn’t really a question. “You’re pissed off because you were used. You’ll get over it. What impressed me was that you caught on and instead of whining about it, turned the situation to your advantage. Poor old Francis is out of it, but without the bloodshed. I’ve been trying to get Francis to retire from his fund-raising duties for a year. How’d you get that stubborn—”

  “First you answer some questions, okay?”

  Rico looked about ready to chew through his bottom lip. God, Donohue must have had Rico by the short hairs. I felt like reminding him this wasn’t the pope I was talking to, just an ambitious ex-cop.

  “You’ve already earned the answers,” Donohue said.

  “I thought you and Francis Maloney were tight. Why muddy him up?”

  “We were tight,” Donohue did not hesitate. “Friends since grade school. A loyal man, Francis, and a hell of a money machine. I think every soul who’s gotten a job in Dutchess County since Francis arrived has generously tithed a portion of his or her salary to the party. Those nickels and dimes add up. And he’s surprisingly shrewd for an unsubtle fellow. He knows how to do and use favors. You don’t think all those volunteers who’ve come looking for Patrick did it out of warm, gooey affection, do you?”

  “But . . .”

  Donohue frowned: “Thing is, he’s become a political liability.”

  “Just because he hates blacks, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Orientals and—”

  “Yes, Mr. Prager, I see you’ve been on the receiving end of Francis’s charms. I guess he was always a bit of a bastard,” Donohue admitted, “but after Francis Jr.’s tragic death, he got worse. Up until recently, Francis’s indelicacies wouldn’t have mattered. The money he raised was everything. It’s the lifeblood of a political party. Times, however, have changed and a candidate needs the support of
all the people. You can’t afford to alienate whole groups of people because you don’t like the way they dress or the god they pray to.”

  I applauded lightly. “Nice speech, it’ll wow ’em at the convention.”

  “Thank you. I like the sound of it myself. Anyway, Francis doesn’t see things that way. When I asked him to step aside, let’s say he didn’t much like the idea. In fact, he was looking to be rewarded with a commissioner’s appointment for his years of loyal service.”

  “Imagine that,” I said with all the sarcasm I could muster. “The nerve of him.”

  “Don’t be too harsh on me,” Donohue pleaded. “It’s not as if I handed him a gold watch and showed him the door. Francis was offered several incentives to leave gracefully, but you can ask only so many times. He forced my hand.”

  “Lucky thing for you Patrick disappeared. He gave you a good opportunity to shove a stake through the heart of your old friend’s career. How do you treat your enemies, I wonder?”

  “Don’t be naive, Mr. Prager. Politics is politics. It’s like hockey with bigger sticks, more blood and no referees. You use the opportunities when they come wherever they come from. Francis knows the rules. He knew there was always a chance that unfortunate incident might resurface.”

  I clapped my hands together: “Now I understand your dilemma. You had to get rid of Maloney before he could damage you politically. He wouldn’t go gracefully, so you were going to drop a bomb on his career using his past indiscretions. But how could you set off the chain reaction without getting your own career incinerated in the blast? The answer’s simple: use an errand boy, someone who could never be traced back to you.

  “Normally reporters are fine conduits for leaking information as long as they get a story out of it. They protect their anonymous sources and you get whatever it is you want into the public’s consciousness. But you couldn’t risk regular channels this time, because all it would take would be one ambitious reporter willing to break his word and your political career’d be dead in the water. A hero cop, millionaire, political fair-haired boy is a bigger catch than some corrupt party toad doling out the patronage jobs upstate. So what if he sodomized a homosexual with his gun barrel twenty-something years ago? The fact that you knew about it and turned a blind eye to it as long as he filled the party coffers would be more newsworthy. Maloney would be a footnote, but you’d be the story.”

  “So when Patrick fortuitously disappears, you jump on the opportunity. You reach out to Rico and he starts working on Maloney to bring me on board. Then you have someone else, probably another ignorant errand boy like myself who could never be connected to you, whisper in Conrad Beaman’s ear that there’s more to this missing college guy’s story than meets the eye. I get curious about Maloney’s NYPD career. His personnel files magically appear in my lap. Beaman finds me. I hand the files to Beaman. Beaman digs some more and Maloney’s a dead duck. The party brass claims ignorance and express their disgust. And even if Maloney screams his head off that you knew about him all along, he has no way to prove it. Your hands seem perfectly clean.”

  “In a nutshell, yes, that’s about it,” he yawned.

  “It’s a lot to go through to get rid of one potential problem. Shooting the guy or planting drugs on him would have been easier. There’s fifty places your cockamamie plan could have gone wrong. It did go wrong! I figured out I was being played.”

  “In retrospect, I suppose you’re right. Working on the fly with limited talent can cause trouble, but you handled it so no one had to hang publicly. And that’s what I wanted to speak to you about. Frankly, I realize I don’t want the details of how or what you did to pull it off. Sometimes it is better not to know.”

  “I wasn’t going to tell you anyway. What’s between Maloney and me is my business. You were saying you wanted to speak to me . . .”

  “Yes,” he cleared his throat and nodded for Rico to leave.

  I grabbed Rico’s arm. “He stays. I want him to hear this.”

  “Fine. I’m sure Rico made it clear what I could do for you. You want back on the job with a shield in your pocket, I can do that for you.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Donohue. I may buy wholesale, but I sell retail. I won’t come as cheaply as my old buddy, Rico.”

  Donohue flashed his fancy dental work at me. “I would have been disappointed had you been that easy. The easy ones are trouble. I need a man like you who knows how to think on his feet and knows when to keep his mouth shut.” Staring directly at Rico, he said: “I already have Moe and Larry in my pocket. I think my career would be better served without adding Curly, don’t you?”

  “What if my price was a little payback?” I asked. “What if, to have me on board, I wanted you to make sure Rico not only doesn’t get his shield but loses his job and pension benefits? Could you do that?”

  Anger, panic and humiliation flashed across Rico’s face.

  “Of course I could,” Donohue seemed insulted. “But would I?”

  “Come on, Mr. Donohue, you were prepared to drag your childhood friend and political ally through the mud while his son might be lying dead in a ditch somewhere. Of course you would, if you thought I was important enough.”

  Joe Donohue did not speak immediately, taking a moment to process our conversation. Rico just sat there looking defeated.

  “You know, Mr. Prager, Rico did warn me about you. Now I understand why. You have no intention of coming to work for me, do you? This last part of our conversation was meant to be—”

  “—instructional,” I completed the phrase. “Yeah, I thought Rico might find it interesting. When you sell yourself cheap, chances are you’ll get sold out even cheaper.”

  Donohue was not a man to waste time. He stood up and offered me his hand. I shook it just to move things along. “This has been enlightening,” he said. “I hope I can count on your vote.”

  I was noncommittal. “What’s to stop me from going to the press myself?”

  “You mean beside the fact that you have no proof?” He winked. “In any case, I was never here today. Just ask Rico or Alphonso. And perhaps the most compelling reason is, you’d have to smear Maloney, even if indirectly, in order to damage me. Isn’t that what you found so offensive about this in the first place? Have a good day, Mr. Prager.”

  Rico was shaken to the core. Sweating and pale, he kept shaping words in his mouth that wouldn’t come out. It was better that way. I didn’t feel like talking anymore. When I left, I made it a point not to take the doggy bag. Table scraps are table scraps no matter how you dress them up. I had a sneaking suspicion Rico now understood that all too well.

  PART OF ME really wanted to keep my promise to have dinner with Katy, but the last few days had taken a lot out of me. I went home and rested, hoping to recharge my batteries a little. It didn’t work out that way. It would still be several days, I realized, before I was likely to relax. So I called Katy at her office to beg off. She was disappointed, but not mortified. She had a project to work on and just recently she was having a difficult time focusing on work.

  “My concentration’s been a bit suspect lately,” she said.

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “I’ve met someone. I can’t seem to get him off my mind.”

  “Good-looking?”

  “He’s all right, if you like that type.”

  “What type is that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she purred. “You standing near a mirror?”

  “That handsome, huh? I don’t think I should let you out of my sight.”

  “I’d like that.”

  After we stroked each other’s egos a bit longer, she asked if I’d taken care of the business that was supposed to be occupying my time. I said I had. I lied and told her that her father hadn’t been behind my car getting torched or the beating on Greene Street. When Patrick showed up on her doorstep, there’d be enough fireworks to deal with. What was the point in complicating matters?

  “It was Theresa Hickey’s husband
. Don’t worry,” I assured her, “I handled it in my own way.”

  Katy didn’t pursue the issue. If I said it was handled, it was handled. That was my business.

  “Speaking of my dad,” she said, “he’s put in his papers. He’s stepping down from his job and from his fund-raising position. Did you know about his fund-raising? Anyway, he says he’s tired of the grind. Yesterday he just up and quit. It’s the first impulsive thing I think he’s ever done. Mom’s really happy about it.”

  “Me too. I’ll call you tomor—”

  “Oh,” she interrupted, “before I forget. Misty called a few hours ago and said that Jack from Pooty’s called for you at the loft, but didn’t leave a message. What do you suppose that’s about?”

  “I don’t know,” I swallowed hard. “Maybe there’s a gift he forgot to give us.”

  HE PICKED UP at the first ring: “Patrick! Patrick?”

  “It’s me, Jack, Moe.”

  “Get over here, please! Something’s wrong. I just know it.”

  He didn’t give me a chance to discuss the matter and I got the sense that ringing him up a second time wouldn’t have helped.

  The apartment stank of cigarettes and bourbon. Jack looked like shit: disheveled, unshaven, red-eyed. His hands shook terribly as he offered me a seat and a drink. I took both. If I had some bourbon, there’d be less for him. From all appearances, less for him was a very good idea.

  “He didn’t come home last night,” Jack ranted as he paced.

  “Fuck!” I slammed my fist into the table. “He split? I knew I shouldn’t—”

  “He didn’t run!” Jack was adamant. “He was better than he’d been in weeks and needed to get out. All he wanted to do was walk over to the pier for some air.”

  “Jack, you promised.”

  “He didn’t run! We were both gearing up for Saturday morning. Everything was fine.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ! You just let him walk out the door?”