Walking the Perfect Square

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  I agreed she would. I wondered if she’d ever been interviewed by the police or other investigators. She had, a few times, but they asked pretty superficial questions. And when they discovered that she and Patrick had broken up six or seven months prior to his disappearance, they politely excused themselves. Had she told any of them about the abortion? She hadn’t.

  “Why tell me?”

  “It was time,” she said.

  I let that hang a moment before asking: “Did Patrick know you were going to therapy?”

  “Absolutely, I was proud of it. I told everyone but my mom and dad.”

  “Did he ever, I don’t know, talk about it?” I struggled. “What was his reaction?”

  “It’s funny you should ask,” she smiled. “He was schizo about it, sort of paranoid but really really curious.”

  Nancy didn’t know if Patrick had sought help himself. He had certainly never discussed it. She didn’t know if it would help, but she gave me the name of the therapist she had seen at school. I thanked her. She repeated her wish that I find Patrick and offered to help in any way she could. I gave her my phone number and told her to call if she could think of anything she thought was important. If she just wanted to chat, I said that was all right, too. On the way to the front door, Nancy told me she’d be going back to school next September, but not Hofstra. Stanford or UCLA, she thought. She liked California.

  “I picked Hofstra because it was close to home, safe. It felt good to have my parents around. You know, so they could protect me or rescue me. One more myth shot to hell, huh?”

  As she walked me to the door, I asked: “The last time you saw Patrick, what color was his hair and did he have an earring or a tattoo?”

  She stared at me as if I just landed from Mars, but fought back her curiosity and told me his hair was black, neatly cut and parted down the middle like a real disco lizard. No, he didn’t have any tattoos and only she had worn earrings.

  “When you read about Patrick’s disappearance, were you surprised?”

  “No,” she said after a second’s hesitation and closed the door.

  It was dark when I pulled out of the driveway back onto 107. The big houses were harder to see from the road, some were completely cloaked in the fallen night. I thought not so much about Patrick Maloney as Nancy. She had reminded me of something that working stiffs like me tend to forget. Money is a great insulator. Let’s face it, Nancy Lustig was never going to worry about food stamps or the price of gas. And sometimes money can soften the blow when you fall, but it can’t stop you from falling. The pain she felt was as real as it gets and I doubt the size of her bond portfolio was much of a tonic.

  I found a bar not so much because I needed a scotch, but because I needed a place to escape. On a more practical note, I needed a place with a Yellow Pages and phone. I had to find a room for the night. A return trip to Hofstra was first on tomorrow’s itinerary and I didn’t feel like driving back to Brooklyn.

  Oddly, as the incongruous images of Patrick Maloney walking the perfect square and of his assaulting Nancy Lustig jockeyed for position in my consciousness, I became keenly aware of the taste of my scotch. I suppose I needed it more than I was willing to admit.

  February 4th, 1978

  SLEEP HAD COME in fits and starts. If I bothered adding my Zzzs together, they would likely add up to only three hours, tops. Maybe it was the strange bed. I can’t say. What I can say is that I was in an unexpectedly sour mood.

  As I sat eating my eggs at the diner across from the motel, I scribbled facts and a timeline on a napkin. From what Nancy had told me, I knew she had met Patrick at a party in September ’76. They had dated until April or May. At some point, she had started therapy and become dissatisfied with their relationship. They began sleeping together and sometime in March, I estimated, they had gone to Caligula’s. In April, Nancy discovered she was pregnant and Patrick warmed to her considerably. By May, he had proposed and attacked her. By the end of May, she had moved home and terminated the pregnancy. He called her the day of the abortion and after that had no further contact.

  After the abortion but before September of ’77, Patrick had transformed his look—getting a tattoo, an earring and cropping his hair. At some time, either during or after Nancy and Patrick’s relationship, Doobie had stumbled upon Patrick’s strange rituals. I should have thought to ask when, exactly. Patrick Maloney was artistically gifted, fastidious, unable to keep roommates, aloof and rigid, potentially violent. On the other hand, he craved acceptance, was willing to go to considerable lengths to be included in social plans.

  That’s what I knew, what I believed I knew. There were huge gaps—like the first nineteen years of his life—that needed filling in. Shit, there were huge gaps in the information I did have. But I had only limited faith that knowing more would somehow magically lead me to a satisfactory answer or any answer at all as to Patrick’s whereabouts. It struck me I could learn everything there was to learn about Patrick Michael Maloney and get nowhere. There was no cosmic rule necessarily connecting Patrick’s disappearance to his past.

  A chunk of ice falls off a jet and crushes a woman putting groceries into her trunk. Does anybody hire detectives to check into her past? Does what she just purchased in Key Food have anything to do with what killed her? Of course not. But disappear or perish in some mysterious way and the details of your life come under intense scrutiny.

  Luck being beside the point, look at what I had uncovered in one day of meaningful investigation. Not only had I stumbled across things Patrick himself and, in all likelihood, the Maloneys wanted kept secret, but what about Nancy Lustig? Did Patrick’s disappearance give me license to peer into the messy corners of her life? Was everyone who’d had contact, either significant or casual, with Patrick Maloney suddenly fair game? I thought about how painful it would be for Aaron to reveal the details of our family life if I were the one to unexpectedly disappear. For the first time I had insight into why Francis Maloney had played things so close to the vest. It didn’t make me like him any better, but I guess I could see his point. He was doing damage control. If Patrick was lost forever, he didn’t want his family’s privacy to be a secondary victim. I respected that.

  I’d lost my appetite for eggs. Throwing a buck on the table, I stood to leave. I crumpled up my napkin and shoved it into my pants pocket. That was kind of silly. I don’t suppose the busboy or waitress spends much time deciphering notes the customers scribble on their napkins. Only in the movies do people read napkins or notes on the back of a matchbook. I thought about heading home, leaving everyone’s messy corners behind. It would be my last chance, I thought, to walk away.

  I didn’t, heading, instead, back to Hofstra.

  THERE WAS NO need for me to shoot my way in and, for once, my badge wasn’t required viewing. The receptionist listened attentively, taking me at my word. As everyone on campus was aware of Mr. Maloney’s disappearance, she said she’d be willing to help me in anyway she could. That spirit of cooperation took an immediate plunge when I asked to see Patrick Maloney’s records.

  “We have confidentiality rules here and I can’t tell ya a damned thing, but you already knew that,” she wagged her finger in smiling disapproval, “didn’t you?”

  I said I did, but my mom had always told me that if you don’t ask you don’t get. Since her mom believed in the same philosophy, the receptionist was willing to give me a second chance. I asked to see Dr. Friar, Nancy Lustig’s former therapist.

  “She won’t tell you anything either,” the receptionist warned, thumbing through a hefty appointment book.

  “Name, rank and serial number, huh? Call me thick-headed,” I winked, “but when I ask someone for a date, I like for them, not their mom, to tell me no.”

  Even as she picked up the phone to call in to Dr. Friar, the receptionist was pessimistic. Unless it was urgent, the staff was usually available by appointment only. I told her to mention I was an acquaintance of Nancy Lustig’s.

  �
��She’ll be right out.” The receptionist was impressed. “Have a seat.”

  I picked up a magazine and got through two questions of an interview with Alex Haley. Last year’s airing of the Roots miniseries, he thought, was a small step in raising the consciousness of white America. For any significant reconciliation between the races, white consciousness would have to be raised significantly higher. Smart man, that Alex Haley.

  “Hello, Mr. Prager, I’m Liz Friar. If you’ll come with me . . .”

  Dr. Friar was a woman about five foot six and of undetermined age. Somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five was my best bet. Parted in the middle, her straight, shoulder-length black hair bounced as she walked. There was some wispy gray amongst the black. Though she wore little makeup to highlight her smiling brown eyes or slyly crooked mouth, I’d say she was an attractive woman, if not quite pretty. She dressed in designer jeans, a loose sweater and sneakers.

  I followed Dr. Friar into a rather sparsely decorated room. No degrees adorned the walls, nor did any tranquil paintings of mountain streams.

  “Yes, it is a bit minimal,” Dr. Friar said, reading my eyes if not my mind. “But I don’t think the students notice. My private practice office is more comfortable. If you would like to make an appointment to see me there, I—”

  “No, this is fine.”

  “You mentioned a Nancy Lustig to the receptionist. Is she a friend of yours?”

  “An acquaintance. She gave me your name.”

  Dr. Friar didn’t say anything to that. I hadn’t even gotten to Patrick Maloney and I was getting stonewalled.

  “I’m not really here to talk about Nancy, Dr. Friar. And I realize that if I were, you probably wouldn’t talk to me about her, would you?”

  “If she was my patient, no, I’m afraid I couldn’t possibly.”

  “If she was your patient, huh? Look, Dr. Friar, I’m not good at fencing, so let me lay it out for you.”

  “Please do.”

  I recounted my meeting with Maria and how she had pointed me in Nancy Lustig’s direction. Nancy, I explained, seemed like a nice girl who’d gotten caught in a bad situation, but my interest was strictly limited to Patrick Maloney. I wasn’t there to pry, but to try and gain some insight. In an attempt to earn the doctor’s trust, I fed her details of Nancy’s story that I could have learned only from Nancy directly. I mentioned the lines Dr. Friar and Nancy had rehearsed together to help Nancy confront Patrick about her dissatisfaction. That got me exactly nowhere. “I don’t know what it is I can do for you, Mr. Prager. Even if I were inclined to help—which I confess I am—I still am at a loss as to how. Unfortunately, my hands are tied.”

  I asked if she had treated Patrick Maloney or if she knew of anyone on staff who might have. She gave me the same answer. She was bound by professional ethics. I said I understood. I wasn’t happy about it, but I understood. And since I had no idea of how much time the doctor would give me, I had to come up with something pretty quickly.

  “Do you enjoy games, Dr. Friar?”

  Her eyes positively twinkled: “Secretly, Mr. Prager, I think all psychologists love games. Games are a useful metaphor for what we do. Our clients—or patients, if you prefer—live their lives or, for our purposes, play the game of life by certain rules. They seek our help when the game goes badly or becomes painful, unfulfilling or when they realize that continuing to play by the old rules produces diminishing or counterproductive returns. In a very real way, our task is to help our clients see that they, in fact, have the predominant hand in setting the rules. Using a host of techniques, we direct or nudge them toward a realignment in the ground rules. Often the rules simply need tweaking. Less frequently, they need a complete overhaul.”

  “And if you adjust the rules just right, the game’s played differently and produces more rewarding results.”

  “Of course,” she admitted, “it’s really not quite as straightforward as all that. Individual lives, like individual ballgames, have unique dynamics. And for people suffering from extreme disorders like schizophrenia . . .” she trailed off sadly. “Fortunately, the metaphor holds for most of the students we see here. But I’ve gone on too long. You see, I teach here and tend to slip into my professorial role without much prompting. You mentioned a game.”

  “It’s a lawyers’ game,” I said, “and since their rules and your rules about confidentiality aren’t so different, I think maybe it’ll be, okay for you to play. It’s a game of hypotheticals.”

  “Yes, Mr. Prager, I’m afraid I play that game at every kid’s birthday party and cocktail party I attend where the other guests aren’t psychologists. But in this instance I—”

  “Doc! Doc! Doc!” I put up my palms like a traffic cop. “Right up front, I’ll swear this has zero to do with Nancy Lustig. Zero! Not even indirectly. So please, just hear me out.”

  “Go on.”

  “For argument’s sake, let’s say I was walking down a hall and I peeked through a door that was slightly ajar. And through that crack in the door, I witnessed . . .”

  Without naming him, I described for her Patrick Maloney’s square-walking behavior and dressing rituals as Doobie had described them to me. Dr. Friar’s face remained neutral throughout, as she jotted down a note here and there. I further listed the impressions I had formed about Patrick’s rigidity, aloofness, inscrutablity and his seemingly paradoxical hunger for acceptance.

  “This is a hypothetical construct, of course,” she said when I’d finished, though her neutral expression had turned decidedly incredulous.

  “Of course.”

  “And with this information you’d like me to do what, Mr. Prager?”

  “Come on, Doc, give me a break,” I pleaded. “You want me to crawl over hot coals or what? You know what I’m trying to do here. There’s a missing kid out there somewhere. Maybe he’s dead or maybe he’s selling roses for the Moonies. I don’t know. Maybe I wouldn’t like him so much if I knew him and maybe I don’t like his family, but—” I cut myself off when I realized I was raising my voice. “I’m sorry.”

  “Not at all, Mr. Prager. He’s gotten under your skin, this hypothetical construct, hasn’t he?”

  “I guess he has, yes.”

  “There’s that unique dynamic I mentioned,” she said with a comforting smile. “It’s your good fortune I’m fresh out of hot coals and I’ve got a class to get to in another building. So, let’s see what I can reasonably say about your hypothetical construct.”

  “That’d be great. Besides, I left my asbestos suit at home.”

  “Your construct seems to be suffering from obsessive-compulsive neurosis. I could give you several hours course work on the subject, but,” she said, checking her watch, “we’ll see what we can do. There are two components of the disease: obsessive thoughts and compulsive behavior—the former often, though not categorically, leading to the latter. The obsessive thoughts are of an anxiety-provoking nature. The most common example is of the person who becomes obsessed with thoughts of germs and bacteria, of contamination. What did he touch? Who touched it before him? What diseases were they carrying? So, if you were obsessed with such thoughts and these thoughts began causing overwhelming anxiety, what might you do?”

  “Wash my hands,” I answered.

  “You might wash them a lot. The compulsive behavior, Mr. Prager, becomes a comforting response mechanism for the obsessive, anxiety-provoking thoughts.”

  “I can see that,” I admitted. “It almost seems logical. I’m hungry, I eat. I’m worried that my hands are dirty, I wash. But Pa—I mean, my construct’s behaviors don’t seem to have that sort of logical connection. What does walking backwards in a square or counting out loud to twenty while getting dressed have to do with anything?”

  “Good question. The short answer is, I don’t know, exactly,” she said, throwing up her hands. “The patient himself sometimes doesn’t know. You see, one of the aspects of obsessive-compulsive neurosis is expansion of behavior. Let’s say our hand was
her notices himself winking in the mirror as he washes his hands or catches himself thinking of a line from an old Abbott and Costello comedy routine. The winking or the silent repetition of the comedy routine can become secondary comfort mechanisms. They might replace or augment the hand washing. A year down the road, what began as simple hand washing alone might expand into a series of behaviors which would be difficult to trace back to the original behavior or antecedent anxiety. Another aspect of the syndrome is that the original anxiety, fear of contamination in my example, might itself be symbolic of a root anxiety that has nothing obvious to do with germs. Issues of self-esteem, marital discord, sexuality are only a few of the things which might cause the underlying anxiety.”

  “It’s sad,” I heard myself say.

  “Sometimes it can be profoundly sad and of all the things I treat, the most ironic. A system set up as a means to gain some measure of control in one’s life can, in some cases, lead to a paralytic loss of any control. You become a victim of your own devices. But,” she brightened, “it isn’t always so dire. We all suffer from this sort of thing to a lesser extent.”

  “Do we?”

  “Ever throw salt over your shoulder, Mr. Prager, or have a lucky shirt? Superstition, some might even say prayer, are more socially acceptable expressions of this sort of behavior. Ever have a relative who constantly checks the gas jets on the stove or obsesses over whether he or she locked the door or left the lights on?”

  “You knew my mom, huh?”

  I told her about a friend of mine who refuses to watch Mets games until the top of the third inning and then only from a recliner. Given the Mets’ record, she joked, maybe he should try the sofa.

  We talked for a few more minutes. She said that the intensity of my construct’s compulsive behavior might be related to the strength of his anxiety. She also warned that people who suffered from obsessive-compulsive neurosis could be skilled at hiding their symptoms from the world.

  “On the other hand,” Dr. Friar said, “if the symptoms become overwhelming, some will—”