Walking the Perfect Square (11 page)

From that moment on, their relationship bore little or no resemblance to what had come before. Patrick was with her constantly, showering her with gifts. He wanted to meet her family and had finally discussed his own, if only tangentially or in passing. But now it was Nancy who became the silent partner.

“At first, I sort of enjoyed it. God, who knows, maybe if he had been more like that when we started . . . But it got creepy. It was almost as if he had planned, well maybe not planned, but hoped, for this all along. One night he came to my room and gave me this.” She turned the frame toward me. In it was a nude sketch of Nancy with a child at her breast. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? He made me look beautiful. I should have thrown it away, but I couldn’t.”

She had broken down when he unwrapped it for her. Later, however, he gave her another gift, a diamond ring. He asked her to marry him.

“You know what you said before when you thought Patrick had said all that stuff about being too young and not being ready?”

“I remember.”

“Okay, you were wrong. But what was weird was that he was too quick to accept things. He never voiced any concern or anxiety. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t get crazed at the thought of fatherhood. And here we were unmarried, still in college, different religions. But Patrick just snapped right into this father-to-be thing like he’d been waiting for it. You know what I mean?” she asked rhetorically. “I got the sense that it wasn’t me he loved or even the baby. It was like we were props to plug into this fantasy he had that included a wife, a baby and a split ranch.”

She confessed that she never entertained the thought of having the baby. She was too young. She wasn’t ready, even if Patrick was. And when she was prepared to discuss the abortion with Patrick, he proposed.

“What did you do?”

“Like my Dad says, I punted. What could I do?” she asked, back on the defensive. “I couldn’t tell him about the abortion, not then, and I couldn’t say yes. I told him I was flattered and that I’d have to think about it.”

“How’d he take that?”

She rubbed her hands together furiously, tilted her head to the floor and whispered: “He hurt me.” Then, as if wanting to prevent my judging him, she screamed, “He didn’t mean it! I . . . I mean, he . . .”

Calmly, I asked, “What did he do?”

“He grabbed my shoulders like this.” She stood and placed her hands on me. “And he shook me so hard he dislocated my left shoulder. The whole time he was yelling at me: ‘You can’t do this to me! You can’t do this to me!’ Two guys in the next room pulled him off me. But before he left, Patrick took the ring out of my hand and spit on me. He spit on me!” She welled up. “The two guys wanted to report Patrick to campus security, but I begged them not to. They looked relieved and took me to the infirmary.”

“But you didn’t say no to his proposal,” I wanted to confirm.

“No, I just said I’d have to think about it. I guess,” she said, “I’d been following the script perfectly up to then. It was like he couldn’t tolerate a rip in the fabric of his fantasy.”

The doctors, Nancy continued, reset her arm, gave her some pills for the pain and sent her home to her parents. She told them she had gotten clumsy and fallen down the stairs. I winced at that. As a cop I’d had a hundred women repeat that same lie. Spitting blood and broken teeth at my feet, they would stubbornly cling to their stories. Even as I pointed out to them that there were no stairs in their apartments down which to fall, they would repeat their lies like a prayer. The doctors hadn’t believed her either, but she refused to involve the police. It took weeks for the bruises Patrick’s fingers had left to fade.

“When my folks weren’t around, I’d pull my blouse down below my shoulders and stare in the mirror. I’d touch them. It was like he still had hold of me. Sometimes, I think I can still feel them or see them in the mirror,” she admitted.

She had left school and moved back home. Her parents were more gullible than the infirmary staff and accepted her story about the steps without question. Unfortunately, she had to compound the lie by saying she had been very drunk. Still, she said, it was all she could do to convince her father not to bring suit against the school.

As soon as the shoulder was better, Nancy had the abortion. Maria had taken her to the clinic. Though she hadn’t told her parents about the abortion, Nancy tried convincing herself through me that they would have understood.

“They know something’s wrong. My shoulder’s been completely healed for months and I haven’t gone back to campus since last May when I . . . when Patrick hurt me. Sometimes I wish they would just ask, you know?”

I told her it was moments like these that made me glad I wasn’t a parent. She said she had never seen Patrick again. He had called her the day of the abortion, crying into the phone. He hadn’t said anything, but she knew it was him. He had followed her. But that was the last of Patrick until she read the papers last December. Although she claimed to be glad to be rid of him, I got the sense there were things she desperately wanted to say to Patrick.

“He taught me a lot, but I guess he wasn’t trying.” She frowned. “I’ll never feel the same way about anything. The abortion did that, I think. In school, everything is an abstraction. It’s point, counterpoint. Now it’s hard for me to see things that way. All the battle lines get kind of blurry when the world is gray. But some good came of it. I think I know what’s important now.
The mirror’s no longer my enemy and I think I’ll recognize real love next time, if there is a next time.”

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.

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.