Walking the Perfect Square

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Then I’m confused. I guess I can understand everything up to a point. But if what you’re saying is true, then why the disappearing act? He must know what he’s putting his family through. Does he know how many people from his home town bus into the city every goddamned day chasing his ghost around?”

  “He knows, Moe.”

  “Then why all this?”

  Jack said: “You’re asking the wrong man.”

  “But you won’t let me talk to—”

  “Not Patrick.”

  “Who then?”

  “His father. Go talk to his father,” Jack sneered venomously. “Maybe he can clear up your confusion.”

  I explained to Jack that I knew a little bit more about Francis Maloney Sr. than he might’ve expected and that I had my own reasons to want to rip his head off. “But so far, Jack, you haven’t given me reason enough to not pass Go and collect my two hundred dollars. Over the years, I put cuffs on a lot of people I had sympathy for.”

  Jack clamped his hand over my wrist. “Do this one thing for me. Go see that bastard and if you can’t understand what drove Patrick to this, come and get him. He won’t run. I swear on my life, he won’t.”

  “I’d like to help you, but—”

  “Friday.” Jack let go of my wrist, shot out of his chair and leaned his head against the bedroom door. “Give us till Friday.”

  “What happens on Friday?”

  “We’ve talked about it for weeks. Even if you hadn’t found us out, we couldn’t go on like this much longer. Even in a community that treasures it privacy, you can’t keep a secret in perpetuity. It’s time to end this madness. Come Friday evening, Patrick’ll walk right down the front steps and take a cab to wherever you wish.”

  I was skeptical. “To Missing Persons?”

  Jack did not hesitate: “If that’s what you want, I’ll deliver him personally.”

  “What I want is for him to come with me now and get this over with.”

  “Please, Moe, give us a few more days to get ready. Coming out under the best of circumstances is difficult enough, but he’ll have a lot more baggage to deal with than even you’re aware of. Please, we’ve come this far. What’s another few days?”

  Fragile. Handle with care. Dr. Friar’s metaphor about antique china popped into my head. “I must be out of my fucking mind.”

  Jack embraced me, tears welling in the corners of his eyes. He kissed my cheek.

  “Easy, easy!” I panicked slightly, pushing him away. But seeming to understand my discomfort, he smiled at me sympathetically. “I didn’t agree to anything yet. I need to know this is what Patrick wants,” I said, pointing at the door.

  “Oh, he does. He—”

  “Not good enough. Patrick,” I talked loudly at the raised panel door, ignoring Jack completely, “I need to hear you say you agree to this. Regardless of what happens between now and Friday, I want you to give me your word you’ll show up at Katy’s loft by 8:00 A.M. Saturday. No bullshit. No excuses. No nothing. Do I have your word?”

  His answer came quickly: “Yes.”

  “Okay,” I turned back to Jack. “Gimme his coat.”

  Jack looked confused. “What do you want his coat for?”

  “Insurance. Anyway, from this point on, you don’t get to ask questions. I’ll keep my part of the bargain. Your secrets are safe until 8:00 Saturday morning. Now just get me the blue parka.”

  Dutifully, Jack collected Patrick’s coat from another room and handed it to me.

  “Have you got a pen and paper?” I asked.

  “Have I got a pen and paper? I’m a writer, what do you think?”

  I wrote down my name, address and phone number twice and ripped two business card-sized pieces off the sheet of lined paper Jack had supplied. “You take one and make sure he gets one. I don’t want any surprises. Anything, anything at all comes up before he gets to Katy’s, I wanna know about it first. Understand?”

  “Understood.”

  To cover all bases, I asked: “Do you have Katy’s number, just in case?”

  “I have it.”

  “All right then,” I said, wadding Patrick’s blue parka into a ball. “Saturday, not a second late.”

  Jack walked me down to the street, promising again and again they’d keep their part of the deal. He confessed to being happy this would all soon be over. The pressure was getting to him and he hadn’t been able to write a shopping list, let alone dialogue, since December. I told him if he thanked me again, I’d shoot him on the spot and haul his boyfriend out by his ears.

  I walked back past Bear’s place to where I’d parked my rented Fury. The clubhouse was the garage area and loading dock of an old Westside warehouse. Motorcycles were lined up outside, parked in token defiance within a loading zone. But there were no signs of life among the big Harleys. I stopped to listen closely. No sounds came to me from behind the corrugated steel garage doors or the black steel door Bear had stood at so nervously an hour before. Clubhouse, I thought, was a stupid description of this place. Clubhouses are for little boys, playing games in secret. . . . Then again, maybe clubhouse was a perfect description.

  February 15th, 1978 (after Jack’s)

  KATY WAS STILL battling her hangover with sleep when I got back to the loft. Now along with my single malt sweat, I smelled of Jack’s nervous cigarettes. I showered again. As the soapy water washed the stale scent of smoke, sour highland heather and peat, into the sewers of the city, I prayed for Katy to wake up. I wanted the simple pleasure of her pale, lightly downed skin against mine. But I wanted more than anything to tell Katy her brother was alive. The promises I’d given to Patrick and Jack were already weighing me down. All Katy needed do was kiss me softly and whisper the words, “Where have you been?” and I would have given Patrick up on the spot.

  “Come on, Katy, please wake up,” I mouthed.

  I guess God couldn’t hear my prayers for the running water. Katy was stone asleep when I crawled in next to her.

  I woke up to the opening music and narration of Wide World of Sports: “The thrill of victory. The agony of defeat . . .”

  “There’s nothing wrong with de feet,” I shouted back to the TV. “It’s my head that hurts.”

  “What?” Katy called from the common area of the loft. “You want something to eat?”

  Following the sound of the TV, I found Kosta, Misty and Katy sharing the bottle of Veuve Cliquot champagne I’d bought them as a gift.

  “Shit, you guys don’t waste any time, do you?”

  “It’s an old Greek tradition,” Kosta said, pouring me a glass. “Champagne and Wide World of Sports. It’s the Olympics thing, it’s in our blood.”

  “Champagne, huh?” I was suspicious. “Not ouzo or retsina?”

  Actually, it was the only alcohol in the house and they were trying the hair of the dog remedy. I drank my glassful and joined them around the TV. Katy came and sat close to me on the sofa.

  “You okay?” she whispered.

  “About the same as everybody else, I guess.”

  Of course that was a lie. Maybe the biggest one I ever told. Here I was watching the tube, pretending the world was the same as it was yesterday and would be tomorrow, while at the same time withholding information that could rescue Katy and her family from months of anguish. And at what expense, really? Jack and Patrick’s anger! I could live with that. I’d lived with worse. But they’d been shrewd. This was about honor now, my honor. It didn’t used to mean so much to me. I wondered what had changed to make it so.

  We settled in to watch an odd sport from Ireland, hurling or curling or some such thing. It was played on what looked like an American football field, goal posts included, by men carrying broken hockey sticks hitting a rock. It seemed to require blind courage and a hard skull. There were plenty of collisions, a lot of blood and several fights.

  “Gotta love the Irish,” I laughed, suddenly missing the job very much. “Gotta love ’em.”

  No one was very hungry,
so we skipped dinner. For lack of a better idea, Katy and I opened the box of gifts Pete Parson had given us. The first thing we pulled out of the box was a bottle of Calvados, that inglorious butane substitute from France. Katy and I rolled our eyes. Why had we told him we liked the stuff? It’s always the polite lies that come back to haunt you. Next, Katy opened an envelope which contained two tickets for A Chorus Line on Broadway.

  “Orchestra,” Katy exclaimed, clapping her hands with joy, “first row, center.”

  Misty jumped gracefully onto the coffee table: “Tits and ass,” she sang, featuring both.

  You didn’t have to be drunk as my brother-in-law had been to notice Misty’s good looks. There was a second envelope. “From the Partners” was printed neatly across the front.

  Inside was a note of thanks. The partners had also arranged for a pre-theater dinner at 21 and post-theater entertainment at the Rainbow Room.

  “That’s awfully generous,” Kosta noted. “You’d think you’d raised them from the dead.” The smile ran away from Katy’s face. Kosta had struck a little too close to home. “God, Katy, I’m sorry,” he was quick to apologize.

  But the damage had been done; Katy was on the verge of tears. I could have killed Kosta. Not because he had hurt Katy’s feelings; you can’t walk on eggshells too long without having one crack, but because he had unknowingly brought my dilemma to the fore. One sentence and I could wipe all of Katy’s tears away.

  She recovered quickly enough, gave Kosta a big hug and suggested we get out. We walked up to a coffee house on Bleecker Street and had espressos all around. Afterwards we strolled through Washington Square. The smell of marijuana was intense and not unwelcome. I’d smoked my share in college, baked hash brownies, the usual stuff. And there’d been an occasional party over the years at which I’d taken a hit or two, but I missed the aroma more than the smoke itself. The thing I liked most about grass was its effect on the people around me. I couldn’t remember a party where people were getting high that a fight broke out. On the other hand, I could scarcely recall a party at which alcohol was featured that a fight didn’t break out. Still, I wondered how many brain cells a kid like Doobie would have left if and when he graduated.

  “Man,” Kosta made exaggerated sniffing sounds, “you wanna cop a nickel bag?”

  Misty said nothing. I thought Katy was going to faint. She stared at me with a puzzled look in her eyes. I kept my mouth shut and excused myself. Katy followed.

  “We’ll meet you over there.” I pointed at an empty spot on the ledge of a fountain. Kosta waved his agreement. Katy wrapped my arm around her. We sat quietly enjoying the tenderness and proximity. But our private time lasted only thirty seconds. When Misty and Kosta found us, Kosta was looking pretty flustered.

  “I’m really sorry, Moe,” he begged my forgiveness. “I didn’t know. You’re a cop!”

  “I was a cop,” I clarified. “There’s a big difference.”

  Alas, the truth was out, I was not a traveling tuna fish salesman. Apparently Katy had previously shared this insight with Misty. Misty, however, had only just relayed this information to her boyfriend. As we walked back to the loft through the park, I used my new cane to point out several people smoking joints within thirty feet of uniformed officers.

  “It’s just not a big priority, pot smoking. Who knows when, but the cycle will change,” I said with great confidence. “In five, ten years maybe, they’ll probably arrest you for smoking cigarettes on the street.”

  Back in the loft we broke down and opened the Calvados. Kosta liked it okay. The rest of us experimented by mixing it with any non-toxic liquid we could find. Nothing helped, but we all got pretty giddy. Misty broke out her script from the cereal commercial and assigned us roles. Kosta was the father. Misty, the mom. Katy was the whiny teenage daughter—the part Misty was to play in the actual ad. Me? I was the obnoxious little brother. We ran through it a couple of times, then switched parts. In the end we gave out our own Oscars for who was best at which part. I won for my role as the little brother. A part, Misty averred, God put me on earth to play.

  Noting that almost anything tasted good in coffee, we brewed some up and finished off the apple brandy. It was true, almost anything tastes good in coffee. Calvados just happens to be one of the four things on the planet besides motor oil, Passover wine and sauerkraut juice that coffee can’t save.

  Pulling the bedding onto the floor of the loft, we shut the lights out and watched a movie only Katy had seen before. Touch of Evil was a ’50s black-and-white flick about a corrupt cop and a Mexican drug prosecutor set in a small Texas border town. Orson Welles directed it and played the drunken, candy bar-eating cop. You had to love Orson Welles. Either there was no budget for makeup or he simply willed himself to be more obese and sloppy than an unshaven whale. I take that back, there was a budget for makeup, but they spent it all trying to make Charleton Heston look Mexican. To me, Heston was an unconvincing Jew, but as a Jew he looked more like the chief rabbi of Israel than a Mexican. Instead he looked like a white basketball player who’d fallen into a vat of sunless tanning lotion. You know, the shit that turns your skin orange.

  Janet Leigh, looking a hundred times sexier than she did in Psycho, played Heston’s wife. She wasn’t supposed to be Mexican. Maybe in the original script she was, but they ran out of tanning butter. And in a casting decision almost as bizarre as Heston’s, Marlene Dietrich played a raven-haired, chili-cooking prostitute who had once been in love with Welles’s cop. Unlike Heston, Dietrich pulled it off. But I’d always been a little in love with Marlene Dietrich.

  Somewhere in the middle of the night, Katy pulled herself close to me and we made silent, hungry love. The need for silence made it terribly intense. We were like a runaway engine unable to exhaust its fumes, finally exploding from the buildup of unvented heat. A few minutes later I noticed our silence had inspired Misty and Kosta.

  February 16th, 1978

  THE COUPLES TOOK turns in the shower. Breakfast, however, was a completely communal affair. I made pancakes. Kosta fried up peppers and eggs. Misty ran out to the bakery for fresh rolls and Katy, covering both halves of her immigrant heritage, cooked a potato frittata. It was wonderful, but I didn’t linger. Explaining the week ahead of me would have been difficult even if full disclosure was an option. Given the restrictions I was operating under, it would have been as laughable as the studio head explaining to Welles why Charleton Heston was going to be the best damned six-foot-four Mexican he ever saw. In the end I lied, telling Katy that Aaron and I had to scout possible locations for the wine shop.

  Before heading home, I told Misty to break a leg. Her shoot was tomorrow. I made sure Kosta knew I wasn’t going to sic the narcs on him and I promised Katy I’d call her every day. “Dinner Wednesday night okay with you?” I asked between kisses.

  “Tuesday?”

  “Maybe Tuesday,” I relented. “Listen, everything’s going to be fine. I feel it.”

  Walking to the car, I absentmindedly fished the pictures from Pooty’s out of my coat pocket. A picture of Jack playing emcee was on top of the pile. Without Katy around I felt less guilty about the deal I’d made with Jack and Patrick. In a way, they’d done me a great service by asking for more time. With Patrick’s reappearance set for Saturday morning, I could handle the rest of my agenda and not have to look over my shoulder.

  JUST AS SULLY had predicted, a reporter called. He asked if we could meet. I told him to come on over. Neatly, but casually dressed, Conrad Beaman was a dark-skinned black man of slender build. He was in his late twenties or early thirties and wore his hair in a mid-sized Afro. I recognized him from his frequent appearances on local Sunday talk shows.

  He laughed when I said I knew him from TV. “The token schwartze,” he said with a perfect accent, using the less-than-flattering Yiddish word for black. “The producers figure I’m a safe bet, like easy-to-chew food for people with dentures. Have you read my stuff in Gotham magazine?”

  I lied a
bout not having read his work. Every city cop knew Conrad Beaman’s writings. A bulldog and fierce defender of New York’s minority communities, only a fool would think of him as easy to chew. I was a little offended he thought me such a dope, but I had long-term goals that required I not challenge Beaman for underestimating me. Maybe he was just trying to bait me.

  In any case, many of Beaman’s investigations had led to significant and long overdue changes in the way the city was governed. He had, for instance, uncovered the shocking conditions at many publicly funded nursing homes. He had exposed building inspectors for approving substandard steel to be used in major skyscrapers. But Conrad Beaman was best known and roundly hated for his relentless attacks on the NYPD. His blistering indictments of the post-Knapp Commission department were legendary. Cops tend to take that sort of thing personally. Beaman’s “good deeds be damned” was the company line, even if some of what he wrote about was true.

  “Just think of me as your favorite easy-to-chew food,” he tried to reassure me as we sat down at the kitchen table.

  Beaman buzzed through cigarettes at a rate which made Bear and Jack look like rookie smokers. He tried to lull me into a sense of false security by first talking about me: Where had I grown up? How long was I on the job? How had I hurt my knee? How had I come to be involved in the case? He even pretended to take copious notes during my retelling of Marina Conseco’s nightmare. But it was all crap, a reporter’s trick. He knew all of this stuff before he ever walked in. Then we talked a little Mets baseball, some Knicks basketball. Then, when he was satisfied that I was half asleep, he started asking about Patrick.

  They were routine questions any high school reporter might have asked and I answered them as I’d been taught to answer questions in court. I didn’t expound or offer information that wasn’t asked for. I didn’t speculate or theorize. I gave ambiguous answers about things that hurt my position and was detailed about things that strengthened it. No, I said, I didn’t have any reason to believe Patrick was dead. At the same time, other than the alleged sighting in Hoboken, there was nothing to be very hopeful about.