Walking the Perfect Square (7 page)

“The same,” Sully confirmed. “Don’t look much like that poster the rest of New York City is lookin’ at, does he?”

Staring carefully now, I recognized Maloney, but his hair had been buzzed to boot camp length. There looked to be a silver cross earring dangling from his left ear and a tattoo—I couldn’t make it out—on his right forearm. His moustache was gone and he seemed thinner than the poster picture would have led me to believe. That charming smile was still there, yet there was something odd about the set of his eyes. It was as if his mouth were in the moment, but his focus was set on something no one else in the picture could see. I wouldn’t say it was a glassy, drugged stare. It may have been. I don’t know. If the photo wasn’t sharp enough to let me make out his tattoo, it was silly of me to try to interpret his expression.

“When was this taken?” I demanded.

“September ’77 at a student government picnic in Eisenhower Park on the Island.”

“Before or after the poster pic—”

“After,” he said, finishing his beer, “by a few years. That poster picture’s from his high school prom.”

I took my scotch down in a gulp and flagged the waitress for another round. “So—”

“That’s right,” Sully anticipated me. “There’s a million fuckin’ wanted posters up around this city and not one of ’em looks like the kid we’re lookin’ for. Now you’re gonna ask me why. And I’m gonna tell ya, I don’t know.”

“How’d you get this?” I asked, waving the photo at him.

“Anonymous. Found it lying on my desk one day last week. No prints. No ransom note. No call. I figured it was finally a lead, ya know, a little crack in the ice, somethin’. So we bring the
parents in, quietly. We don’t wanna get their hopes up or nothin’. So I show the picture to the old man and he goes fuckin’ apeshit on me: Where’d I get the picture? I better not use it. I should do my work and find the boy. I’m a lazy ass like the rest a the mutts in Missing Persons. He’ll have my badge. Ya know, pleasant stuff like that there.”

“So?”

“So,” Sully smiled, clinking his fresh bottle to my glass, “fuck him. He brought the case to us. I’m gonna work a case my way, right?”

“Right.”

“Wrong.” He shook his head. “Dead wrong. I get called into the captain’s office and get told to not use the picture, to not bother the parents and to check with him before making any decisions on the case.”

“The brass?”

“Who else? My captain don’t talk to me unless he has to. I guess someone told him he had to.”

“Ask Isaac Newton, shit runs in only one direction and it ain’t uphill.”

“Tell me about it. So the father’s got a hook, huh?” he asked.

“Joe Donohue.”

“The mayor’s—”

“That’s him.”

“Francis Maloney, that little shanty cocksucker.” Sully was incredulous. “You wouldn’t figure him to have that much juice.”

“I agree, but he does.”

I finished my scotch, he his chicken and beer. We didn’t say much, both of us waiting for the other to ask the two big questions: If the Maloneys had gone to the trouble of busing volunteers in and out of the city, hiring outside investigators and calling in favors from powerful allies, why had they knowingly distributed a poster of their son which was so clearly out of date? And when the poster photo was discovered to be inaccurate, why had they fought so hard to keep an updated picture out of our hands?

My third scotch did the trick. “Why?”

“There’s a lot a whys. There’s a lot a answers. Take your pick. But I’m no dummy,” he leaned over the table and whispered. “The kid split. The father knows that. It’s a big charade for the wife’s benefit.”

Too big a charade, I thought, though you could make a good case for Detective Sullivan’s opinion. They say Einstein was so
brilliant because he could reduce complex phenomena to elegantly simple formulas. I saw a special on channel 13. But family dynamics ain’t thermodynamics and Sully wasn’t Einstein. There had to be more to this than a charade for the wife, there just had to be.

I didn’t argue the point.

 

THE FLATLANDS SECTION of Brooklyn was not the stuff of picture postcards for the folks back home in Kenosha. If, on the other hand, you were on a pilgrimage to junkyard nirvana, this was the place. Flatlands was where the men who boosted other people’s cars brought those cars to be harvested for spare parts or for subsequent shipment overseas. Hence the neighborhood was irresistible to cops, particularly the ones who populated the Auto Crimes Task Force.

Rico was surprised to see me. Surprised, not necessarily pleased. Apparently, there was a very active Mafia chop shop down the street. Didn’t I know better, he wondered, than to tap on his surveillance van’s back door? I told him that three scotches and getting jerked around by my best buddy tended to make me stupid. He excused himself, telling the other three cops in the van he’d be back before anything was likely to come down.

The Arch Diner sat at the corners of Ralph and Flatlands Avenue and was as good a place to get coffee as any other. Rico laughed, saying the wiseguys who ran the chop shops down the road frequently got their coffees at the Arch Diner. I wasn’t laughing. Nor did I find it amusing when he described how the snot had frozen onto his moustache earlier in the day.

“I had lunch with Sully,” I said. “He showed me a picture.”

“Yeah, and so what happened?”

“It was of Patrick Maloney.”

Rico’s expression soured. “That’s what you dragged me off a stakeout to tell me?”

“The picture didn’t look like the one on the poster.”

“Jesus Christ, Moe! Who looks like their picture? You take a look at your departmental ID lately? You probably look like Wolfman Jack.”

“So you really didn’t know?”

“Know what?” He was losing patience.

I explained about the dated picture and the new picture and how the Maloneys had refused to release a more recent photo. I
also said I found it pretty suspicious that Rico had somehow neglected to mention anything about this to me.

“It’s news to me,” he said as he held his hand to his heart. “You think I know what this kid really looks like? I think I met him once, at my wedding. You were at the wedding, do you remember what he looks like?”

“I guess I see your point.”

“It’s not like the Maloneys are my wife’s closest relatives. It was the father that reached out to
me
. The last time we were over their house, when I told Angela about you and the little girl, was the first time we were over there.”

I apologized to Rico. He understood. Walking back to the diner parking lot, carrying coffees for the other cops, Rico reminded me of something.

“Remember what the Homicide guys used to joke about? Sometimes when they’d catch a case and the stiff would be like a thirty-year-old, ten-buck-a-trick hooker with a smack habit and a sheet as long as the double yellow lines down Ocean Parkway and they’d go and notify the mother, do you remember what the mother said every time?”

“But she was such a nice girl.”

“Exactly my point, Moe. The Maloneys wouldn’t be the first parents to not wanna see their kid the way the rest of the world did.”

He dropped me back at my car, his words still ringing in my ears. In the ten years I’d known him, it was the wisest thing he’d said to me. What, I couldn’t help wondering, did the Maloneys not want to see?

THIS TIME I was dreaming when the phone rang. About what, I couldn’t say. When I opened my eyes, it was gone.

“Yeah,” I mumbled, staring half blind at the red 3:20 A.M. on the clock radio.

“It’s Sully . . . Detective Sulli—”

“I know,” I yawned. “I’m a little slow on the uptake after three. What is it?”

“We’ve got a floater. Sounds like it could be the Maloney kid. Emergency Services is fishin’ him out as we speak.”

“Where?”

“Gowanus Canal, by the Cirillo Brothers’ oil tanks.”

“I know the place,” I said. “You can see it from the expressway.”

“That’s it. Listen, if you hurry you should be able to get there before they cart him away.”

I already had my pants half on as he spoke the words. I wasn’t certain to what end. I wasn’t family, so I couldn’t make a positive ID. I wasn’t a licensed investigator and, even if I were, I had nothing in writing to prove I was connected to the case.

“Hey Sully,” I wondered, “why call me?”

His answer was less than cosmic: “You bought me lunch, didn’t ya? None of the other pricks sprung for so much as a freakin’ cup a coffee.”

He hung up. I wasn’t sure I bought his explanation. Come to think of it, I hadn’t exactly believed Sully’s story about the kid’s picture. Anonymously left on his desk, my ass! If I knew Rico, he’d probably promised Sully a share in the wine shop. Before Rico was through, Aaron and I would have more partners than Bialystock
and Bloom. If you don’t understand the reference, try and catch
The Producers
on the Million Dollar Movie some night.

I made good time. As I worked my way up toward the filthy water of the Gowanus Canal, it occurred to me that I’d never seen a floater, not in the true sense of the word. Sure, when I worked Coney Island we had a few drownings, but no bodies that had been in the water for any extended length of time. From what I’d heard, the water could do terrible things to a body. Old-timers always had stories about how bloated and grotesque floaters could be. If the body had any tight belts or jewelry on when it went into the water, its features could be terribly distorted.

“Think of it like this here,” a retired cop from Emergency Services once told me at a Christmas party. “You take a full balloon, draw a face on it, then twist a rubber band real tight around where the neck would be. With that fuckin’ blue-white skin, I can tell ya, it ain’t pretty.”

The same guy also told me about a floater that had been pushed from one precinct to another almost three quarters of the way around the island of Manhattan. He said they only pulled it out of the water when the brass caught wind of cops betting on how long it would take the floater to complete its circumnavigation. I wasn’t sure I believed that story, but I had been a member of the NYPD long enough not to simply dismiss it out of hand.

I got through most of the cops without flashing tin. As I moved closer to the water’s edge, however, it would take more than just acting like I belonged to gain access to the body. I found the detective in charge, explained about my knee-monia and how I was working for the Maloneys. He was unimpressed, but didn’t figure I could do any harm by looking. The body’d been in the water awhile, he said, and there were no obvious signs of foul play. He didn’t have a strong opinion one way or the other as to whether the body was Patrick Maloney.

“Male Caucasian, deceased, swollen,” was how he put it. “Is it Maloney? You tell me.”

As we approached the body bag, I felt light-headed, almost nauseous. It wasn’t that I’d become unexpectedly squeamish. If anything, I was buzzed. Suddenly, I was being torn in several opposing directions. Part of me realized I missed the job more than I let on. At the core, I was deeply disappointed that I, unlike Rico, would never get the chance to earn my gold shield. That being there in the raw cold, my nose filled with the stink of No. 2 heating oil, was as close as I was likely to get to a real crime scene ever
again. On the other hand, I was a little bit disgusted by that very same rush of excitement and the jealousy I felt for Rico.

The detective gestured for the technicians to unzip the body bag. As they began to open the bag, the tug of conflicting emotions intensified. If it was the Maloney boy, the Maloneys could start getting used to life without their Patrick and I could get my life back, whatever that meant. If my few days on the case had given me perspective on anything, it was that I was woefully ill-prepared for the time ahead of me. I had come to see the wine shop, even if Aaron and I could scrape the money together, as his dream, alone. Oh, I would never back out on him. I just couldn’t picture myself sitting behind a counter all day discussing the relative merits of Merlot versus Beaujolais.

But as much as I wanted the body to be Maloney’s, there was double the desire that it not be his. I suppose I could fabricate some plausible rationalization as to why I had my fingers crossed that it not be him. The truth was, I had gotten curious. What was it that made Francis Maloney tick? What was it that the Maloneys couldn’t bear to have the rest of the world see about their son? What had happened to Patrick M. Maloney and why? If the body there was the kid’s, some of those questions might get answered, but not by me. As wholly nonsensical as it was, I wasn’t ready to share the fate of Patrick Maloney with the cops or the coroner.

“It’s not him,” I heard myself say in a confident voice that did not belie my relief.

“How can ya tell?” the detective was doubtful. “You can barely tell he’s human, so how the—”

“No tattoo on his right forearm.”

The detective pulled a sheet out of his pocket, using his finger as a pointer to help scan it thoroughly. He shoved the form at me: “Doesn’t say anything about identifying marks, nothing about a tattoo.”

“Hey,” I held my hands up, “I’ve got no official standing. Take it up with the family.”

He didn’t like that and the look on his face told me I’d worn out my welcome. I thanked him, turned, walked away. Halfway back to my car, I spotted Francis Maloney coming my way through the maze of cops. I grabbed him by the arm to stop him. Like the detective’s face, Maloney’s was a billboard.

First, he didn’t quite recognize me. His icy little eyes seemed to bark: “Who the fuck are you? And get your paw off me.” Then, when the light of recognition clicked on, his bottom lip jutted out,
his head tilting and bowing ever so slightly as if to say: “Now you’ve impressed me, you sheeny bastard. How’d you find out before me?”