Walking the Perfect Square (15 page)

“That’s good. Did you confess your sins to God and accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your savior?”

“Sully? Christ, I’m sorry,” I answered without thinking. “I thought you were somebody else.”

“No kiddin’.”

“What’s up?” I wondered.

“We got somebody says he saw him yesterday.”

I didn’t have to ask who Sully was talking about. “Where?”

He didn’t answer. “I’m goin’ to interview him now. Wanna keep me company?”

“What do you think?”

“There are some ground rules,” he warned.

“Always the fine print. Go ahead.”

“The family can’t know, not until I check this guy out. All I fuckin’ need is aggravation from the father if this is a false alarm. If he checks out, I tell the family. Also, I talk, you listen. You’re there as a courtesy. Don’t abuse the courtesy, understand?”

I agreed to his terms. If I didn’t want to get shut out of the process, what choice did I have? I took down the address and directions, checked my watch and told him to give me forty minutes. He said I had thirty.

Hoboken was a long tee shot across the Hudson from Manhattan and known to the rest of the world as the place of Francis Albert Sinatra’s birth. Frank Sinatra notwithstanding, I’d never been to Hoboken. For the first few minutes out the Jersey end of the Holland Tunnel, the area looked about right for Henry’s Hog to open a franchise. But once in Hoboken proper, things improved. Narrow streets lined with red brick and brownstone buildings, old-fashioned candy shops and ethnic delis gave Hoboken the feel of old Brooklyn or the Bronx before Robert Moses cut its heart out.

Finding 326B 9th Street was considerably easier than finding parking. I drove past the building. Sully was out front, pacing, checking his watch. A block away, I managed to squeeze into a space that exposed my right front fender to peril in the event anything wider than a Volkswagen should try and pass.

On the ride over and now as I walked to meet Sully, I puzzled over why the detective continued to favor me with special treatment. Of all the people involved in this case, Sully had shown me the picture of the new-look Patrick Maloney. Okay, so maybe he owed Rico a favor and by sharing the picture with me, Sully figures he covered that marker. Then Sully clues me on the Gowanus Canal floater. I’m willing to believe Sully thought he owed me one for buying him lunch at the Blarney Stone. But why let me in on this? I didn’t see what he owed me anymore,
especially since I hadn’t bothered to share any information with him.

My dad used to like to say: I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid. Intentionally or not, Sully was bearding for someone, someone who wanted to use me. But for what? I remembered the bikers playing poker and Francis Maloney’s reference about playing the low cards when they were all you had left. It was weird, like Sully and me and all the other investigators on the case were sitting around the same poker table, but Sully kept showing me most of the cards in his hand. It was the cards I couldn’t see that worried me. My dad never said anything about looking a gift horse in the mouth, but I thought it anyway as Sully sneered at me impatiently. I shook his hand hello.

“You’re late,” he chided.

“I’m sorry. You didn’t have to wait.”

He winked. “Ah, fuck you. Come on.”

We were going to talk to Mr. Enzo Sica. Mr. Sica had called Detective Sullivan’s bureau that morning, claiming to have seen Patrick Maloney the previous day at a local shopping center.

“Why you checking this lead out?” I asked. “You must get a hundred calls a day from head cases who swear they saw the Maloney kid with Elvis.”

“Before Elvis died last year,” Sully said, “all the wack jobs used to say they spotted so-and-so with JFK.”

“But why—”

“Sica mentioned a dark blue winter coat,” he talked over me. “That’s what the kid was wearing. We never released that detail to nobody so we could weed out the cranks.”

Enzo Sica came to the door in a sleeveless T-shirt, striped pajama bottoms and slippers. He was seventy if a day and bald as a lightbulb. Though hunched, he had the powerful build of a man who’d done a lot of heavy lifting in his time. When Mr. Sica reached for thick glasses in order to inspect Detective Sullivan’s shield, our hearts sank.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” Enzo reassured us. “Deeza glasses only for da close-up looking. From acrossa da street, I’m-a see like an owl.”

We were not reassured. Mr. Sica led us into a pleasant living room with old but clean furniture and a beautiful tin ceiling. His citizenship certificate was framed and hung over the sofa. The walls were covered with family pictures and pictures of Sica standing next to several stone structures.

“Atsa my wife, Stella. Sheeza dead three years now.” He crossed himself. “Deez are my kids an-a da grandchildren.” He caught my eyes gazing at a black-and-white shot of an intricate garden wall. “Im-a build dat,” he thumped his chest proudly. “I’m a stone-a mason my whole life, from da time I step off da boat in-a 1925. Look here . . .”

He gave us a brief pictorial tour of the projects he’d worked on, offered us some grappa and started smoking a cigar that looked like brown rope and smelled like shit.

“If you saw him yesterday,” Sully was curious, “why wait to call us till today?”

Mr. Sica said he didn’t know who Patrick Maloney was yesterday. Not until late last night, when he was returning home from dinner in Manhattan with an old friend, did he see the poster.

“In da train-a station, I’m-a look at dis picture on da pole. I say to myself, heeza look familiar. I tink about it overnight an-a dis morning, I call you.”

I confirmed to Sully that I hadn’t seen any of the posters on this side of the river. He shook his head in agreement. Sully asked why this young man, of all the people Mr. Sica must have seen at the shopping center, stuck in his head. The young man, Mr. Sica said, acted very nervous.

“He had in heeza hand some shopping-a bags. Dey swingin’ back an-a forth. Heeza head, its-a look everywhere. Quick. Quick. You know, like somebody eez after him?” Sica pantomimed, his head darting from side to side.

The young man had worn a stocking cap, so Enzo couldn’t say anything about the length of his hair. He might or might not have worn an earring; glare from the sun and the snow made it difficult to tell. And since his arms were covered by an overcoat, it was impossible to know about a tattoo. Sully laid out several snapshots on Enzo Sica’s coffee table and asked the old stone mason to pick out any that resembled the young man. The thick glasses back on, he chose three pictures. One was the ubiquitous prom pose. One was the student government picnic photo. One, I would learn, was of a convicted child molester about Patrick’s age who looked only slightly more like Patrick Maloney than Abe Lincoln.

Next, Sully spread out some advertisements from the Sunday papers. All the models wore winter coats. Along with the ads, the detective pulled out a color chart. He asked Mr. Sica to match the coat and color that came closest to what the nervous guy had worn. With gentle shakes of his head, Sully indicated to me that the old
man was pretty close on style—a hooded parka—and several shades off on the color blue.

After a few more questions about time and location, Sully motioned that it was time to leave.

“You said the nervous guy was holding some bags,” I broke my silence.

“Shopping bags like-a from da department stores.”

“Can you remember, was there writing on the bags, like the name of a certain store?”

He closed his eyes tightly, trying to recall. “
Spate
.
Spate
. (Wait. Wait.) Writing-a . . . Si! Yes! There was-a writing, but . . .” He held his hands up in surrender. “I can no remember.”

Sully thanked him again, left his direct number in case the old man remembered anything else and informed Sica he was in line for a reward if his information led to the discovery of Patrick’s whereabouts.

“No! No money!” he grew agitated. “No money!”

He slammed the door behind us, hard.

When we got to street level I was anxious to hear what Sullivan thought: “So . . .”

“I don’t know. I don’t think he’s a nut job or nothin’, but those fuckin’ Coke-bottle glasses, geez! He was close on the coat, but everybody wears those parkas.”

“Outta the three pictures he pulled, two were of Patrick,” I argued.

That’s when Detective Sullivan explained that the third photo was of a child molester who didn’t resemble Maloney except in age. “What the fuck, I guess I gotta give the old wop the benefit of the doubt. I think he really saw the kid.”

“Me too.”

“Shit, with your endorsement I guess I’ll sleep better tonight.”

“Fuck you, Sully.”

“I’m gonna call this in,” he said. “Wanna come back to the city with me?”

“That’s okay. I got some stuff at home to catch up on. Thanks for the heads up.”

“You know, Prager, that was a good question you asked in there. About the shopping bag, I mean.”

He was right, of course. It was a good question, an elemental one. My guess is, he’d been waiting for me to ask and would’ve eventually asked himself if I hadn’t obliged. Was he just stroking my ego, I wondered? Easier to yank my chain that way. I figured
if I was going to get used, I wanted something in return. I waited for him to walk a couple of steps.

“Sully,” I called to him.

“Yeah.”

“You got a hook in Personnel or IA?”

He walked back toward me. “Why?”

“I want a look at Francis Maloney’s old personnel file.” He wanted to know why and I told him I was just curious. Nothing more complicated than that. Sully pissed and moaned about how difficult it was to get files, especially old, inactive ones. It was unethical, he reminded me, but not in those words. He could get jammed up for even trying.

“You were on the job. You know how it is.”

Indeed I did. Everything he said was true. “Hey, I understand. I just thought I’d ask.”

Agreeing that Mr. Sica’s tip might net us Patrick in a few days and that we could then forget the Maloneys ever existed, Sully and I left it there. I watched him disappear around the corner before heading back to my car. Sitting in my front seat, I was suddenly exhausted. It struck me that I’d been working on the assumption Patrick Maloney was dead. Admitting it to myself only now, I was overcome by decidedly mixed feelings. A garbage truck blared its horn at me to move. There was no way for the driver to know how relieved I was at the distraction of his horn.

Sully had warned me not to tell the family about Mr. Sica, but when I got home I called Katy Maloney’s Manhattan number. Chances were she wasn’t back from her parents’ home, anyway. I got one of those stupid answering machines. I left an awkwardly worded message about the day’s events and asked her to call me back. After hanging up, I realized I hadn’t left my number. I called back. I hated talking to machines.

PAGE 4 OF the
Daily News
, Patrick Maloney gets a reprise on his fifteen minutes of fame. Pieces of the original stories detailing his disappearance had been cannibalized for the update. It was all there but a mention of Enzo Sica. Witness’s name withheld by request, the article said. Two pictures accompanied the story. One featured my favorite Missing Persons detective holding up a replica of the parka Patrick was wearing the night he vanished and, if Enzo Sica was to be believed, the parka Patrick Michael Maloney was still wearing. The other picture, however, was a surprise. Prom Patrick had at last been replaced by picnic Patrick: short hair, earring and all.

Unfortunately, I doubted the picture would be much help. Newsprint reproductions are grainy at best, but because this one had been cropped and enlarged so severely, it was cloudy and indistinct like those silly snapshots of Bigfoot. I was encouraged that the Maloneys were willing to open up. Armed with a little hope, they were finally putting on the full court press. I wondered how many busloads of volunteers would be hitting the streets of Hoboken.

With the media coverage and the search back in high gear, I figured I could take the weekend off. It was time to shift my focus from Patrick to his sister. Still too early to call her; I put down the paper and decided to exercise my knee on the boardwalk. Though it was impossible to see the sun directly from my apartment, its light seemed particularly bright today. I don’t know if that was a vestige of my school days. Sunlight always seemed brighter on Saturday mornings, the winter air less bitter. I made it as far as the lobby.

“Hey, you gimpy prick! Yeah, you with the flat Jewish ass!” a welcome voice called from behind me.

I turned to see a bronze-faced Rico Tripoli holding a box of Cuccio’s pastries.

“Tough work, those extradition assignments in Florida, huh? I guess you squeezed in a few minutes by the pool.”

“The beach!” He shook his head in disapproval. “You know I hate pools.”

“That’s right, Sicilians are just strong Arab swimmers who lost their way.”

Rico smiled broadly, showing off his white teeth. “Fuck you!”

“Don’t get mad at me. You’re the one named Tripoli, remember?”

Back in my apartment, Rico freshened his coffee with some Dewar’s. When he tried to add scotch to mine, I put my hand over the cup. I told him I couldn’t, that I had a date. I played coy when he asked if it was anyone he knew. Surprisingly, he let it go at that.

“Be that way,” he said, pouring even more alcohol into his mug.

“Cut it out, asshole!” I warned him. “I had a pleasant talk with your wife the other day. All she needs is for you to come home drunk from my house.”

He wasn’t going home, he said. He had a good twelve-hour stretch of reports to do back at the task force office. No cop likes paperwork, but I’d never known Rico to soften the blow with alcohol. It worried me a little. We chatted about his big case and the wiseguy he’d picked up in the Sunshine State, Cheech “the Stick” Russo.