Walking the Perfect Square (28 page)

“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.

“If he’s alive,” I concluded, “I’m confident we’ll find him.”

Only when there was a subtle shift away from Patrick himself and toward his upbringing, did the questions become more pointed: Did I think Patrick might simply have run away of his own volition? Had I heard any speculation from my police sources about that possibility? Was there anything about Patrick’s upbringing which might indicate Patrick was the type of person to drop out of sight? What did I know about the effect his brother’s death had had on Patrick? What did I know about Patrick’s mom? His sister? Wasn’t his father politically connected? Wasn’t his father a former member of the NYPD? Did I know why his father had left the job?

That was my cue to regurgitate the information about Francis Maloney Sr. I had so conveniently received in the mail. Unfortunately, I had to disappoint Mr. Beaman and the men who had guided him to me. He tried prompting me several times, but I claimed ignorance. Poor Mr. Beaman was going to have to find another horse’s ass. I wasn’t playing.

He thanked me politely and wondered if I’d be available to have a staff photographer take my picture later in the week. I said that would be fine. If nothing else, I figured he’d use the Marina Conseco story—without mentioning her by name, of course. Even I could see it would make good copy. But I hadn’t given him what he had hoped for. My sense was he didn’t know the specifics before he walked through my door. More likely, Beaman had been tipped off about me having dirt on a corrupt politico who was once a very naughty boy during his career as a New York cop. Throw in the aspect of the missing son and you’ve got a triple play, a Conrad Beaman kind of story. He must’ve been licking his chops on the ride over. Instead he’d be licking his wounds on the way home.

“You’re a smart man, Mr. Prager,” Beaman shook my hand.

“Oh, and why is that?”

“Because you figured out you were being used before I figured out I was. I’d still like to hear what you’ve got,” he said, trying one more time to massage the story out of me.

“No, Mr. Beaman. I’m not smart. I just have a conscience.”

CARS DRIFTED SLOWLY into the fenced parking lot outside the Sanitation and Highway Department garage. Stories-high piles of asphalt crumbles, road salt and sand peeked over the ledge of the garage’s flat roof like distant mountaintops. The air smelled of hot tar, though I could see from where I sat that none of the paving trucks had fired up their rolling furnaces. It was similar to how airports stink of spent kerosene even late at night, when runways go unused for hours at a time. I suppose it’s a scientific impossibility, but sometimes it just seems that, like a rug or silk tie, the atmosphere can be permanently stained.

I’d left Brooklyn hours ago under cover of darkness. Now as the sun was rising over the false asphalt mountaintops, the parking lot was nearly full. Both cars I’d been watching for were here. Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to get out of my car and do what I needed to do. I tried several times, never getting more than my leg out the door. But when the coffee truck pulled into the lot and I recognized the faces of two men in the crowd who gathered around it, I knew I would finish what other men had started. “It’s not who throws the first punch that counts,” my old partner, Danny Breen, liked to say. “But who’s standing after the last one.”

When the coffee truck had gone and all the men in their green thermal jackets and gloves had retreated back into the garage, I got moving. Starting toward the main entrance, I left my cane on the front seat. A man with a cane could not sell the lies I would have to sell. As I took the first few unsteady steps, my knee hurt like hell. I wasn’t sure if the pain was the result of walking unsupported for the first time in months or from the makeshift brace I’d rigged out of old Ace bandages and a wooden ruler.

“Bill Tate, State Insurance Investigation Bureau,” I introduced myself to the man at the assignment desk. His back was to me as he busily marked up a wall-sized road map of Dutchess County.

“Who? From where?” he said, turning around.

I let him catch a glimpse of my badge as I quickly closed the credentials case: “Tate, Bill Tate. State Insurance Investigation Bureau.”

“Yeah and so what?”

That was one lie out of the way. He wasn’t impressed, but he wasn’t questioning me either. I didn’t even know if there was such a thing as the State Insurance Investigation Bureau.

“You’ve got two gentlemen employed here who were recently involved in an accident,” I stated authoritatively, being purposefully vague, “a Mr. Philip Roscoe and a Mr. . . .”

I didn’t know the other man’s name, but I’d spotted him earlier at the coffee truck. His face covered in white tape and bandages, he was hard to miss. I scanned a sheet of paper I pulled from my jacket pocket, hoping I’d get his name momentarily.

“Pete Klack?” the desk man wondered.

“Broken nose?” I said, my eyes still focused on the paper.

“That’s him.”

“Good,” I looked up. “Have Roscoe and Klack meet me in Mr. Maloney’s office in about fifteen minutes. And do me a favor, don’t warn anybody off. Because if you do, your ass is gonna fry in hotter oil than either one of theirs.
Capisce
?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, point me towards a bathroom and to Maloney’s office.”

In the bathroom, I pulled a neatly folded garbage bag out of my pocket and stuffed the coat I’d been carrying inside. I didn’t want to show Maloney all my cards early in the game. In front of his office door, I showed Maloney more courtesy than he’d shown or was likely to ever show me. I knocked.

“Come.”

His expression didn’t change when he saw who it was. I hadn’t expected it would.

“I told you to contact me through Rico.”

“I don’t give a fuck what you told me,” I said in a strangely removed voice. “You’re in no position to tell me what to do and I don’t know what made you think you ever were.”

“Nice speech,” Maloney sneered, then looked back down at the paperwork on his desk. “Now get out of here. Next time make an appointment.”

I didn’t answer nor did I leave. I threw a plain brown envelope with no return address onto his desk. The force with which I tossed it scattered his papers everywhere.

“What’s this?” he asked in spite of himself.

“Take a look.”

He seemed to know what it was even before he got it out of the envelope. There was almost a wistful look in his eyes as he scanned his NYPD personnel file and the Internal Affairs report.

“So,” Francis Maloney Sr. said, as he held his bald head up to face me, “is it blackmail money you’ve come for?”

I ignored the question. “You know I shouldn’t’ve been able to get ahold of those files. It’d probably take a court order or special dispensation from the pope for me to look at my own files let alone yours. Somebody wanted me to have those.”

“How much?”

“How much what?” I asked, annoyed that Maloney didn’t seem to be on the same page.

“Oh, don’t play me for a stupid donkey, kike. People don’t get far underestimating me. It shows a proper lack of respect. I don’t like that much.”

“I don’t want your money, you cold-hearted son of a bitch bastard. For all I care, you can stick those files up your ass and light a bonfire. And I’ll tell you what I don’t like much. You. From the second I saw you there, sitting at Molly’s with that cup of coffee in your hands, I didn’t like you. And the more I know about you, the less I like.”

“Well, that just makes me want to kill myself,” he said sarcastically. “How much?”

“That again. For the last time, I don’t want your money.”

“Then tell me what you’re doing here and get out of my office. I’m a busy man.”

“What I want,” I said, “is for you to answer some questions. Then maybe I’ll go.”

“Maybe, he says! Okay, let’s have your questions.”

“How long before Rico told your wife about me finding the Conseco girl did he ask you to put me on the case?”

A light of recognition clicked on behind Maloney’s cold blue eyes. He now understood, as I did, that Rico had been working both sides of the fence. Rico, he explained, had been pestering him to use me for weeks. I was a good cop, Rico said, and recently retired. I could use the cash and I was bored to distraction. But Maloney didn’t see the point. Between volunteers and hires, he
had hundreds of people working the case within the first few days, most of them with more experience than me. I’d just be an extra wheel. Besides, he had no use for Jewish cops.

“We’re not reinvesting our retirement funds here, I told Rico,” Maloney delighted in recounting. “I haven’t met a Jew cop who was good for anything but filling out a neat complaint report. But then Rico, the stupid wop, had to go tell Angela about you and that girl. After my wife heard that, I had no choice.”

I asked: “When did you get the call?”

“What call would that be?” he played dumb.

“Come on, you know what call. The anonymous one that gave you a heads up I was nosing around about your time on the job and that Conrad Beaman was doing a story on Patrick.”

Dropping the pretense, Maloney said he’d received the call about a week after we met at Molly’s.

“When’d you decide to sic your boys on me?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sheeny,” Maloney feigned innocence and goaded me for distraction. “Have you been drinking? I thought Jews didn’t drink.”

I didn’t take the bait. My proof would come walking through the door in a minute or two. In the meantime, I rambled on about my confusion.

“I couldn’t figure out what was going on, exactly. Finally there’s some progress in the case and the next day you fire me. But Rico brings a thousand in cash and the name of the guy at the liquor authority. I guess you thought that was pretty smart. You didn’t want to piss me off, but you didn’t want to give me too much money. Too much money might make me suspicious. Then boom, you have my car torched. You have your boys rough me up. Was it that I was fucking your daughter?” It was my turn to goad him. “Nah, I said to myself, Maloney’s an anti-Semitic prick, but he couldn’t risk Katy finding out. That would drive her right into my arms. He couldn’t afford to lose her too.

“What then? Was it some of the things I was finding out about Patrick? So what if he knocked up two girls and they didn’t want the babies?” I walked past Maloney and stared out his office window at the parking lot. “That couldn’t be it, though, because I’m pretty sure no one else knew. Besides, you’re just the charming old-world type to take pride in your boy for getting girls pregnant, but managing to clean up the mess. So what was—”

“Look, sonny boy,” Maloney growled, “I don’t know what you’re going on about, but I think you’ve wasted enough of my—”

There was a knock on the door. I remained at the window, forcing myself not to turn around. Before Maloney could respond, the door pushed in. Having only the back of my head to work with, they didn’t recognize me. I couldn’t see his face, but I imagined Maloney’s eyes got as wide as saucers.

“Joey at the desk says there’s a guy from the State Insurance Bureau here to talk to us,” a monotone voice I’d heard twice before addressed his boss.

When I did turn around, there was a .38 in my hand. “Hello, gentlemen. Remember me?”

Philip Roscoe, the voice on the phone and the man over whose head Katy had broken my cane, was unexcited. Guns didn’t frighten him. The other man, Pete Klack, was more agitated and fidgeted nervously, staring back and forth from my gun hand to my face. My lucky punch hadn’t done a lot for his looks. Deep purple bruises crept out well beyond the edges of the bandages protecting his broken nose.

“You were saying something about me wasting your time,” I reminded Maloney.

Cool as could be, he said: “You’re in need of help, Prager. These men were involved in a one-truck accident along the Bainbridge Service Road last week. Would you like to see a copy of the hospital report?” He reached to open his desk drawer.

“No thanks. Keep your hands on top of the desk. Get behind the desk with your boss,” I ordered, motioning to Roscoe as I circled in the opposite direction. “Not you, Klack. You stay. So, is your boss right? You two were in a truck accident on the Bainbridge Service Road?”

“Yeah,” they harmonized, better than the Beach Boys.

I hit Klack square on the nose with the butt of my revolver. Just as on Greene Street, he collapsed into a pile of himself. The gauze covering his face turned a wet, angry shade of red. I repeated the question about the truck accident. Roscoe stuck to his lie. Understandably, Klack was too preoccupied to answer.

“You broke it again,” he moaned.