Walking the Perfect Square (6 page)

“What things?”

Ronnie must have been zonked, because Miriam was crying so furiously now we barely needed the phone. I didn’t bother to repeat the question or try to calm her down.

“He was in the ER,” she choked out before the next wave of tears.

Uh-oh, the ER, that pretty much explained it. Uniformed cops get real familiar with the ER. Most of the time they’re hitting on nurses, but that’s less a function of pheromones than defense against the panic-in-the-butcher-shop atmosphere of the place. Working the ER was like operating inside a tornado, a tornado where blood and desperation squeeze out all the oxygen. Civilians always assume the worst part of the job is dealing with dead bodies. After a while, at least for me, the dead body thing wears off. You can distance yourself from a body, but I never got used to the ER.

There was a little baby boy, she said, the police had found naked in the snow. The snow was red with his blood. Because of the boy’s condition and the bad weather, the cops decided they couldn’t wait for an ambulance and rushed him to the ER. Ronnie and the other doctors tried to save the baby, but it was useless. There was no pulse. His skull and face were crushed, his spine severed and his arm bones splintered. One of his legs was broken and his abdomen was distended with blood. When the cops asked Ronnie to guess at what had caused all the damage, he said he thought someone had probably thrown the baby out a window. The cops left in a hurry, Ronnie didn’t understand. He thought there’d be a lot of paperwork.

I understood and I had a sick feeling I knew what was coming, but I let Miriam tell me anyway.

“About an hour later,” she was fighting back tears again, “the same two cops brought in a man with a broken jaw. A gift from the cops,” she said. “It was the baby’s father. He was a kid himself, Ronnie said. The cops told Ronnie the father had confessed to throwing the baby out the window. It cried too much. He just said it cried too damned much.” I opened my mouth to say something, but she cut me off. Her tone turned suddenly cold, angry: “When Ronnie was treating the father, he realized he recognized him. He asked one of the cops for the name. Ronnie had helped deliver the baby a few weeks ago.”

“What did Ronnie do?”

“What could he do?” Miriam’s voice was shaking again. “He helped set the man’s jaw. He’s not a cop. He’s not like you. He was still crying when he came home and locked himself in the bathroom. I can still smell the vomit. I’ve never seen him cry before. Do you cry anymore, Moses?”

My silence was answer enough. She couldn’t hold back any longer. In between breathless sobs, Miriam asked me a lot of questions about God and man I was in no position to answer. They were questions I’d heard asked a thousand times, questions smart cops stop asking themselves pretty early on in their careers. You learn soon enough that cruelty is the one thing in the universe to successfully defy the law of conservation. Cruelty is an unlimited resource. There were days on the job I wondered why it didn’t rain crying babies.

Miriam cried herself out. I don’t know that I said anything of value at all. I was barely awake by the time we hung up. And when the phone jarred me back to consciousness, I couldn’t say how long I’d been asleep.

“What?” I growled.

“Hey,” Rico said, “you called me. What’s up? My wife said you told her it was important.”

I hesitated. I knew the words I had meant to say, but they would not roll off my tongue. In a movie, the director would have cut back to me asleep in my chair, my head jerking side to side. My face blurs. I’m dreaming. Crying babies plummet through the night. I run feverishly, trying to catch each one as it falls. It’s snowing. The cement is slippery. At first, I save them, but more and more begin to fall. My feet lose traction. Some hit the pavement, their skulls and the concrete cracking. Soon the baby storm stops. The snow still falling, I kneel beside one of the little
corpses, turn it over and there, smiling up at me: Patrick M. Maloney. I race from corpse to corpse. They all have his face.

Life is no movie. Just ask my brother-in-law Ronnie. I hadn’t dreamed, not so as I could remember.

“Earth to Moe. Earth to Moe,” Rico prodded.

“I’m here.”

“So what d’ya want?”

“Can you get me the name of the Missing Persons detective?”

“Mike Sullivan,” Rico answered almost immediately.

“I bet they call him Sully.”

“What can I tell ya? You know what they say about the Irish: great drinkers, great thinkers, great writers, great fighters.”

“And bad nicknames,” I laughed. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”

I hadn’t dreamed, but I can’t say that Miriam hadn’t gotten under my skin.

IN-HOUSE DUMPS are part of the natural evolution of any large bureaucracy. It’s one of the means by which those bureaucracies protect themselves from external scrutiny. It is safer to eat your mistakes than to admit them. And naturally, as the beast grows, so do its dumping grounds. The NYPD was no different. Most of the 30,000 or so men and women of the NYPD chomp at the bit to do a good job. They, at least at the beginning, want to collar every skell, squash every mutt they can lay their hands on. Not all, though.

There are some that start lazy. To them, it’s fifty-two paychecks a year, health coverage and a good pension. They’re the types that start counting backwards from twenty years the minute they get on the job. There are the cops that get ground down by the job and the inept and the psychos. Some cops end up with modified duty assignments, better known as the rubber gun squad. They get to keep their badges, but they don’t get to play with their .38s anymore. Some find their way to file rooms, storehouses and desks.

Some, though, find their niches in bureaus and squads where they do “regular” police work, but where their impact is minimized. Everybody knew, or claimed to know, that the rats in Internal Affairs were lazy, yellow cops, cops who were afraid of the street, who didn’t like making cases. I wouldn’t know. My less-than-stellar career had kept me out of their cross hairs. There were probably some good cops in IA, but the nature of the work made them easy targets. Another reputed dumping ground was Missing Persons. I mean, what do you really do in Missing Persons, right? Think about it.

“You Sully?” I asked, limping over to his desk.

“What d’ya want, Ahab?”

“Hey, that’s good. You guys in Missing Persons must get a lot of time to read the classics. ‘The white whale tasks me,’”I did my best Gregory Peck.

“Rico warned me you’d be a wiseass.”

I could feel myself blush slightly. “He called, huh?”

“I wouldn’t talk to you otherwise,” he said. “I’m so fuckin’ sick of this song and dance I could puke. I musta briefed fifty guys on this file already. It’s a waste a my time.”

I let that slide. From the size of his gut, I figured it was a safe bet he used the time he didn’t waste educating people about Patrick Maloney, reinforcing stereotypes of cops and donut shops. He gave me a well-rehearsed and not very enlightening rundown on the case before handing me the file and pointing me to an unoccupied desk.

The file contained the same sort of valueless information I already had, only more of it and in greater detail. There was nothing to indicate Patrick had vanished of his own free will nor was there anything to indicate he was a victim of foul play. Dutifully, I took down the names, addresses and phone numbers of all the people who’d given statements to the cops. The file did contain an incident report. As to departmental procedure, it wasn’t strictly kosher to fill out an incident report when someone no longer technically a minor went missing. But there were times when you might fill one out just to get a distraught parent off your back. Though nearly two months had passed since the disappearance, I couldn’t picture Francis Maloney as ever having been distraught. However, given his charming personality and his connections in city hall, the presence of an incident report made perfect sense.

I brought the file back to Sully, thanked him. He shook my hand for too long, as if his mind were somewhere else. When I reclaimed possession of my extremity, it seemed to snap the detective out of his trance.

“Listen,” he said, referring to his watch and checking to see if anyone else might be listening, “why don’t you meet me for lunch around the corner at the Blarney Stone in about two hours?”

Normally I would have suspected him of trying to sponge a free lunch off me in return for his cooperation. Not that his cooperation appeared to be worth a damn, but I got the sense he was interested in more than the size of my expense account. No, he had
something to discuss and it wasn’t the religious symbolism in
Moby Dick
.

“Okay,” I agreed. “Two hours.”

 

I RAN MY index finger along the board of black buttons. There was at least one moron per dwelling who’d buzz you in without asking. That, in combination with the propensity of Manhattanites to order out, could almost guarantee you entree into any doorman-less building in the city. Apparently, someone was very anxious for his or her crispy duck with black bean sauce or this particular building had more than the usual quota of morons. I could hear the vestibule buzzer still ringing as I got into the elevator.

Robert Klingman was one of Patrick Maloney’s suite mates. Klingman hadn’t even been at Pooty’s on December 7th, but he was the only student to both talk with the cops and list a Manhattan address. As I stood outside apartment 5C not knowing whether anyone would answer my knock, it occurred to me I might have called first. I did, however, have some time to kill before meeting Sully and since no one seemed remotely enthusiastic about rehashing their involvement with the case, I thought the element of surprise might work in my favor.

I sensed I was being watched and held my badge up to the peephole. Then, just like in the movies, I listened to rattling chains, unclicking locks and the sound of the “push-in” bar being repositioned. As the door pulled back, I introduced myself to a handsome woman of fifty. Klingman’s mother was a bottle blonde with mischievous green eyes and too much make-up. By the time I stepped onto her avocado shag carpet, Pearl Klingman had told me she was divorced from Robert’s father and invited me to her next est seminar. Bobby K., as she called him, wasn’t home.

There was a huge sheet of paper laid over a big chunk of the green flooring. Printed on the white paper was a tangle of numbered footprints and directional arrows. In the background a man’s smarmy voice spoke over some dreadful KC and the Sunshine Band song.

“Do you hustle?” she flirted, then noticed my cane. “No, I suppose not.”

“Another time.”

She popped the 8-track out of the stereo and got us some coffee. She never asked me what an on-duty cop was doing with a cane. I returned her kindness by not volunteering that I was no longer a
cop, on duty or otherwise. As we sipped our coffee, she gave me a brief history of the twentieth century as it related to her.

“So you kept your husband’s last name,” I said, leading her to where I wanted the conversation to go.

“I hate my ex, but believe me, I hate my maiden name more. Pearl Klingman doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, if you know what I mean, but it beats the pants out of Pearl Feigenbaum.” I was forced to agree. “My Bobby and his last name were the only good things that bastard ex-husband of mine ever gave me.”

She had supplied me with a perfect segue for my questions about her son’s missing suite mate. Much to my dismay, a perfect segue was no guarantor of fruitful answers. Bobby never spoke much about Patrick, she said. She thought most of her son’s other suite mates had been over to her house for dinner, but couldn’t remember if Patrick had attended. She was sorry she couldn’t be more helpful, promising to give my phone number to her son when he called.

“The world’s not a fair place,” Pearl uttered with unexpected seriousness as she showed me to the door. “We lie to our kids and ourselves about level playing fields and justice. But it’s all just bullshit. We’re all just pretense and bullshit. We would be better off if we could just accept it and move on.”

Against my better judgment, I wondered what had led her to such a cynical view of the world.

“Do you think it’s cynical?” she sounded surprised. “It just is what it is. You don’t get it, do you?”

“I guess not.”

Once again, she offered to take me to an est seminar. It would help me get it, she said. I left it at that, thanked her, shook her hand. Moving toward the elevator, I was once again treated to a muffled serenade by KC and the Sunshine Band. est, disco and shag rugs—it almost made me pine for Freddy and the Dreamers.

 

SULLY WASN’T AS easy to find as I thought he’d be. He had selected a corner two-top in the darkest nook of the Blarney Stone. He was working over a bottle of Bud and a roasted half chicken when I hobbled to the table. The peas and carrots on his plate were so devoid of color, I thought they might’ve been steamed in chlorine bleach. The poor chicken didn’t look much better. I wasn’t that hungry anyway. I had the waitress bring me a scotch.

Once Sully and I got done nodding hello, he slid a color photo across the table to me. It was a group shot; four men and two
women, all about twenty, all wearing the blue and yellow of Hofstra’s Flying Dutchmen. None of the faces looked immediately familiar. I guessed they were friends of Maloney’s.

“Yeah, so . . .”

“Second guy from the left,” Sully said, showing me a mouthful of chicken.

“Holy shit!” I blurted out at the precise moment the waitress brought my drink.

“Hey, I brought your drink as fast as I—”

“No, no, no. I’m sorry, it’s not that,” I apologized, tipping her more than the cost of the drink.

Sully smiled. “Same reaction I had first time I saw it.”

“
That’s
Patrick Maloney?”