Walking the Perfect Square (29 page)

“Last chance,” I said, bending over Klack. “Were you two in an accident or what?”

Roscoe put his left hand on an imaginary Bible, raised his right hand and lied. I stuck the .38 against Klack’s temple, pulled back the hammer and ran my finger flirtatiously along the trigger. Klack got stiff with fear. His moaning came to an abrupt halt. I
looked Roscoe straight in the eyes. He kept mum. I pulled the trigger. Click.

“That was just for practice,” I joked. “But the next chamber’s live. There’s a hollow point on deck with your name on it. Hey, Klack, how fucking stupid are you? Didn’t you notice your two friends over there were willing to let me put a cap in your brain? You gonna keep protecting them?”

“Fuck them and fuck you!” he yelped.

I pulled the hammer back again and moved the barrel of the gun. “Tough shit. Maybe I’ll save you the trouble of having it reset and just shoot it off.”

“Okay, okay,” Klack pleaded, “enough already.”

“Shut your mouth!” Maloney seethed.

“It was him, Maloney. He gave us both an extra week’s paid vacation and three grand to split.”

I wasn’t sure who should have been more insulted: me for costing so little or Roscoe and Klack for coming so cheaply.

“Whose idea was it to torch my car?”

“Phil worked the Bomb Squad when he was a cop,” Klack volunteered as I pulled the gun away from his bloodied nose. “He said fire makes more of a statement than slashed tires or a broken windshield.”

“All right, get up. Roscoe, help your buddy and get the fuck outta here.”

Roscoe had a suspicious nature: “That’s all?”

“Just watch your back,” I said. “You don’t have to work the Bomb Squad to know how to make things go boom. And your protector over here, Mr. Maloney, he’s got enemies with more juice than him. I wouldn’t be counting on him in the future to cover your asses. Now go!”

When they’d gone, I holstered my gun and sat down across from Maloney.

“How’d you find them?” he wanted to know.

“You’ll love this,” I laughed sardonically. “Katy got a partial tag number the night they worked me over in the city and I got Rico to run the plate. Did Roscoe tell you it was Katy that cracked him over the melon with my cane?”

He let that slide. “But how did you connect Roscoe’s car to me? There must have been hundreds of cars with similar tag numbers.”

“I figured it was you to begin with, so I knew where to look. And the way Roscoe operated, I thought he might be an ex-cop. When he torched my car, he called it in straight to the precinct and
the firehouse, not 911. He knew if he called 911, there would’ve been a record of his voice. And when he pulled his gun on me—”

“He pulled his piece on you?”

“Yeah, with your daughter a foot or two away,” I educated him. “Oh, I guess he left out the part where he threatened to blow a hole in her, huh?”

Maloney turned redder than Klack’s bandages. “That stupid son of a—”

“You get what you pay for. So anyway, his gun was a .38 Special. He just smelled like a cop to me. I took a list of names to the PBA office and got a hit on Roscoe. It was a little too much of a coincidence for me that he happened to live three blocks away from you. I didn’t know Klack’s name until this morning.”

“It’s the second time you impressed me.”

The first time, I knew, was the night I’d gotten to the Gowanus Canal and had a look at the floater before him. That wasn’t my doing, though: I’d been tipped off about the floater.

“The people who were using me to take you down wanted me there,” I admitted, “just like they wanted me to get a hold of your personnel files. I was like a dog thinking I was taking my master out for a walk. And I was such an obedient dog, they didn’t even have to use a leash. I got curious and asked for your files on my own.”

“Instead of finding me out, don’t you suppose you should have used your energies to find the boy? That’s what you were to be paid for, wasn’t it?”

“Speaking of that . . .” I leaned down, retrieved the plastic garbage bag that had sat on the floor unnoticed and tossed it on his desk.

“What’s this?”

“A gift. Open it up.”

As he pulled Patrick’s blue parka out of the bag, Maloney’s face was torn in half by a startling display of fear and relief. Joy was nowhere to be found, not even in the folds around his eyes nor in the creases at the corners of his mouth. When I blinked my eyes, the emotionality was gone. His face again was cold and blank.

“They sell these by the truckload.” He thrust the coat at me.

“Who you trying to convince? You know that’s his.”

“Bullshit!” he blustered. “How do I know you’ve not been a part of the scheme to take me down from the get-go? This is just meant to shake me, get me off my game.”

Wrong though he was, he had a point.

“I was told you were the reason Patrick split,” I paraphrased Jack’s words to me. “What could have happened between the two of you? What could you have said?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he responded. “Take your prop and get the fuck outta my office.”

I closed my eyes so I could see. I shut my ears so I could listen.

“When you pulled his coat out of the bag, you seemed scared and relieved, but not happy. That confused me for a second,” I explained. “I can understand the relief. What father wouldn’t feel relief? But why scared and why not happy?”

“Get out!”

“Patrick told you, didn’t he?”

“Told me,” he scoffed. “Told me what?”

I ignored him. “Almost everything makes sense then: Why you refer to him as the boy. Why you used a dated picture on the poster. The son you loved, the boy you really wanted to find, didn’t exist anymore.”

“For the last time, get—”

“You thought he was dead, didn’t you? Or was that wishful thinking? Would have been neater that way. Better a dead son than a breathing queer, huh?”

For a man his age, Maloney jumped over the desk with great agility. Good thing for me I expected it and slid, if somewhat clumsily, out of the way. Using my good leg, I kicked him a shot in the kidney. That took the starch out of him. He curled up, choking in pain and gasping for breath.

“So he told you,” I shouted at Maloney. “Do you have any idea the balls it took for him to come to you first? I like your son only slightly more than I like you. But it took courage to go to you. What I wanna know is, what did you say to him? What spooked him?”

In a surreal transformation, Francis Maloney’s gasps turned to laughter. I don’t mean giggles or cynical, sneering stage laughter. I mean belly-holding, side-splitting, choking laughter. When the laughter died down, he sat up.

“The Internal Affairs report,” he said, rubbing his left kidney. “What horrible crime did it say I perpetrated on the good people of New York City?”

“That you assaulted several patrons outside a night club without provocation,” I summarized.

“I thought Jews were supposed to be smart.”

“We’re supposed to be rich, too. That’s why I drive a Plymouth Fury.”

“Do you suppose in the year 1964,” he wondered, “before anyone had heard of the Knapp Commission or installed a civilian review board, that roughing up a few drunks would have been enough to get a man thrown off the job?”

“Not really,” I said. “Even now, a cop’d probably only get suspended for a while, lose some time.”

“Okay then. Even if I were to admit, which I do, that all charges alleged in the IA report are true, do you think I’d fight so hard to not have the report leaked? What harm could it do me? Conversely, if it was the report itself that was so damning, do you suppose my detractors would have gone through the hijinks they did to have it leaked through a man like yourself? Is that not right?”

“Good questions.”

“And did you take notice, Mr. Rocket J. Scientist, that none of these allegedly assaulted patrons chose to press formal charges against me nor did any of them file a civil suit?”

“I did.”

“Why do you suppose that is?”

“I don’t know, but what’s this got to do with—”

“Think, man. Think!”

“Okay,” I threw up my hands. “Let’s say they were black or Puerto Ricans, back then—”

“That’s better, but wrong. In ’64 they passed that godforsaken Civil Rights Act. Word was passed down that we had to tap-dance around the niggers and learn a word or two of Spanish for the spics. Come on, boyo, you’re on the right track.”

“Oh my God!”

“Well,” Maloney shrugged, “it was you who mentioned fags in the first place, wasn’t it?”

“Why didn’t the IA report say—”

“The IA report didn’t say a lot of things. Did it not seem strange to you that all the men giving statements were referred to by number, not by name and that the location of the incident was never specified? It was 1964, Prager! A cop could bash queers all he liked. What were they gonna do, report it to the papers? In those days, a homo would lose his job if his cock-sucking became public knowledge. For the most part, they took all we could give ’em.”

“If all that’s true, then why’d you lose your badge?”

“I was a few years on the job and just off duty. I’m in a bar having a few to unwind when a husky-throated broad comes and takes the stool next to mine.” His icy eyes sparkled as his spoke. “She was fine-looking in her print dress and smelled like a million bucks. We get to talking about the job and she says she’s a fool for cops and would I like to go outside with her for a few minutes. Around back of the bar, she started working on me before I could count to three. When she’s had her fill, she stands up and tells me it’s my turn. But when I reach for her box, there’s a—”

“She was a transvestite.”

“Indeed, you do get the picture.”

“You roughed him up, huh?”

“Oh, I did more than rough him up. Since my little boyfriend was so fond of policemen, I introduced him to the tools of the trade.” Maloney smiled cruelly. “You should’ve heard him scream when I rammed the barrel of my .38 up his ass. A few of the patrons did. I think the fairy thought I was gonna pull the trigger. He cried with relief when I yanked it out. That was a mistake. You see, my .38 was dirty now. Someone had to clean it.”

I felt queasy. “You didn’t . . .”

“But I did, keeping my finger on the trigger just to make sure he did a good job. It’s not as if he wasn’t familiar with the flavor, was it?”

“The report said there were—”

“—others involved,” he spoke over me. “There were. Like I said, people inside the bar had heard the screaming. Poor Kitty Genovese screamed her fucking head off and they ignored her. But this little cocksucker screams and they come running. Some took objection to the gun in his mouth. Two of ’em even had the . . . what’s the word you people use? Chu . . . Chu something.”

“
Chutzpah
.”

“That’s it! Two of them had the
chutzpah
to try and stop me. I used to carry a leather blackjack in those days. It was a little thing, but it hurt like a son of a bitch. Just ask the two queer-lovers who got in my way. I broke the one’s cheekbone and three fingers on the other one’s hand.

“I almost got away with it, too. I claimed I was forced to defend myself against citizens who were interfering with the arrest of a male prostitute. The citizens were understandably confused, I said, as I was out of uniform and the prostitute was made up as a woman. Had one of the patrons—the one with the smashed cheekbone, as I recall—not been the half-brother of a city
councilman, the whole thing would have been swept under the rug. As it turned out, the councilman’s brother liked sausage as well. Had he not, I could have lost more than my job.”

“I can see,” I said, “why you wouldn’t want a reporter like Conrad Beaman getting a hold of the IA report. He would have smelled coverup and started digging. He’d have buried you.”

“I fear he would have, yes. And do you know what the shame of it is?”

There was plenty of shame, I thought, to go around, but said: “You go ahead and tell me.”

“It was the best damn blow job I ever had.”

“You’re a sick bastard, Maloney.”

“That was the boy’s sentiments exactly when I told him what his father had done. Only for him, I didn’t gloss over any of the details. I offered him my gun to see if he wanted to try it on for size.”

“Your son comes to you in distress and you offer him your gun to . . . do what, to kill himself?” At that moment I was so filled with loathing and disgust I wanted to explode. How could Katy be this twisted man’s daughter?

“You know, he took the gun,” Maloney said, almost proudly. “But, alas, he was a faggot through and through. He started crying like a little girl.”

“Then this whole thing—the search parties, the posters—it was all an elaborate sham.”

“No,” he protested, “I was hoping we’d find a body for his mother’s sake. So, where is he and how much do you want?”

“You’re nuts! I wouldn’t tell you where he was for all the—”

“Well, how much then? I’m a man of my word.”

“You’re not any kind of man. You’re a cancer.”

“Don’t be so naive, Prager. The only kind of man worth knocking down is one who’s sitting higher than the rest. Name your price.”

“You want my price, okay.” I put my face right up to his. “Quit! Quit today, tonight. Walk away from your job and the party activities gracefully before it gets really ugly. You’re smart enough to know that your enemies won’t stop because they misread me. You were lucky this time. They didn’t know about Patrick being gay. They were just using his disappearance as an opening, hoping Beaman could dig up your skeletons. Next time they won’t be so clumsy and your son won’t be conveniently absent. They’ll take you down and everyone around you.”

“See, I knew you were a clever Jew. But why would you want to protect me?”

“Not you, asshole, your family. I don’t want Katy to know what’s happened here today, none of it! For some reason I will never understand, she loves you. I don’t think she needs the burden of knowing who and what you really are. I don’t want her to hurt anymore. As far as Patrick goes, he can speak for himself when he turns back up. He can tell who he wants what he wants. But nothing out of your mouth.”