Walking the Perfect Square (3 page)

That summer was also the summer of Son of Sam. Not before, not since, have I seen the city quite so panicked. Even the looting that came in the wake of the blackout felt like a day at the shore compared to the grip of the .44-Caliber Killer. As night fell the whole of the city would hold its breath, exhaling only at the warmth of the morning sun on our cheeks. But serial killing was a nascent industry then and its purveyors didn’t seem to grow on trees the way they do now.

My last shift on the job, I was working crowd control when they brought Sam in. If you look hard at the old news footage, you can see me standing just over Detective Ed Zigo’s right shoulder and Berkowitz’s left. Honestly, I was just as surprised as everyone else that this chubby postal worker with the wiry hair and goofy smile was Son of Sam. To me, he looked like a cross between an overgrown bar mitzvah boy and a Macy’s Thanksgiving float. Christ, maybe Jack the Ripper looked like Humpty Dumpty.

With all that went on that year it’s understandable, even excusable, that few New Yorkers would recall the disappearance of
Patrick M. Maloney. We were a tired city; the city that never sleeps needed rest. The local rags and electronic media ran with it for about a week, but by Christmas Eve, Patrick Maloney had been consigned to the name-sounds-familiar-didn’t-he-win-the-Heisman-Trophy? bin in most people’s minds. If he had been a little boy like Etan Patz or a teenage girl, maybe the press would have milked it a little while longer.

Looking back, I’m not certain I had heard of Patrick Maloney’s disappearance before being brought into the matter. That’s one of the slippery slopes of piecing history back together. Sometimes I’m sure I must’ve read about it in the papers or heard of it on the tube. Surely I must have seen one of the thousands of posters his parents put up around the five boroughs. In my life I have seen millions of flyers posted on every blank space New York City has to offer. Yet for all the wives of the Sultan of Brunei, I don’t think I can describe a single one.

I just don’t know. I was far too busy feeling sorry for myself after my second knee operation in three months to be certain of much of what happened that December. Back then, arthroscopes and MRIs weren’t standard operating procedure. The docs cut me up pretty good. All of a sudden I had great empathy for the sliced lox my parents ate on Sunday mornings. When people ask why I had to leave the job, I tell them I had a severe case of knee-monia. It gets a laugh. The answer I give as to how I hurt the knee is inversely proportionate to the amount of alcohol I’ve consumed. Sober, I tell them I was hit by a flaming arrow shot by some schizophrenic junkie from a housing project roof in Queens. Two drinks, I tell them I injured the knee catching a baby thrown from a burning building by its frantic mother. Shitfaced, I tell the truth; I slipped on a piece of carbon paper in the squad room. That’s me, Moe Prager, nobody’s hero.

So anyway, the department handed me my limping papers—during the financial crisis, every job cut brought the city a little further away from the brink of fiscal collapse—and sent me packing. I had mixed feelings about it. I was good at the job, but never loved it, not the way the Irish guys did. It wasn’t in my blood. Jews are funny that way. We have almost religious respect for the law, but tend to view the enforcers of it with great suspicion. I had taken the police exam on a drunken dare and when I received my letter for the academy, I decided it was time to stop knocking around the city university system just to maintain my draft deferment.

One year I was protesting the war, the next I was throwing protesters into paddy wagons. Though I don’t suppose many would admit it, I think cops ranked a close third behind POWs and kids with high lottery numbers as the group most happy to see the war come to an end. Those “P-ride I-ntegrity G-uts” bumper stickers on our cars were horribly ineffective Band-Aids. No one enjoyed being called a pig.

For a few years prior to my fall, my big brother Aaron and I had begun pooling our resources. It was always his dream to own a family business, a wine store somewhere in the city. It wasn’t my dream necessarily, but I hadn’t done badly hitching my cart to other people’s dreams. Besides, Aaron was really sharp with money. We always joked that he could plant a nickel in the soil and grow five bucks. He was also driven by Dad’s past failure.

Having managed supermarkets for many years, my dad finally invested in his own. The store went belly-up and my parents were forced to declare personal bankruptcy. The task of lying to creditors about my parents’ whereabouts most often fell on Aaron’s shoulders. Aaron never got over the embarrassment of covering up for Mom and Dad. At that moment, however, no one could have anticipated the manner in which that embarrassment would bind us to Patrick M. Maloney’s fate.

 

Hofstra University—Student Counseling Services

 

Treating Psychologist: Michael Blum, Ph.D.
Patient: Maloney, Patrick M. ID #077-65-0329
File #56-01-171
Transcription of session 11—November 18, 1976

 

PM: Good evening, Dr. Blum.

MB: Same to you, Patrick. You seem tense.

PM: I’m sorry.

MB: Sorry? What for?

PM: For not talking.

MB: Sometimes, silence is more eloquent than words. What were you just thinking about, when you were quiet, I mean?

PM: Nothing.

MB: Okay, fair enough. Last week, you mentioned you might like to write someday.

PM: I think about trying it sometimes.

MB: Good. Now, let’s do a little writing. Imagine yourself in my chair looking out at a character played by you. Your character isn’t talking. Write for me, tell me what he’s thinking, Patrick. What’s going through his head?

PM: He’s tense. He doesn’t know the rules.

MB: Are the rules important?

PM: Always.

MB: Always?

PM: How else would he know?

MB: Know what?

PM: How to be a good patient.

MB: Is being good important to him, your character?

PM: More important than anything. What could be more important than being good?

I GUESS MY romance with snow died when I wasn’t looking. Then, all romance is like that, isn’t it? I remember I was watching the snow out my apartment window, thinking what hell it was going to be to get around. Luckily I didn’t need crutches any longer, but walking with a cane isn’t easy. Try it sometime. The phone interrupted my cranky contemplation of the atmosphere.

“I found it!” Aaron, usually upbeat as a hunk of lead, gushed in my ear.

“Good. I knew it was you who lost it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That metal comb I lent you when I was twelve.”

“Will you shut up with that already?” he yelled as he did every time I mentioned that comb. “I never borrowed your damn—”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not in a good mood.”

“What’s the matter, your knee?”

“What else is new? So . . .”

“So,” he repeated. “So what?”

“Yutz! You’re the one that called me, remember?”

“Right. Listen, I think I’ve got the perfect store for us.”

“You’ve got my attention.”

He was almost right. The store was perfect. It was on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on Columbus Avenue a couple of blocks north of the Museum of Natural History. The area, Aaron had checked with several sources in the real estate industry, was being highly touted as the next hot spot in the city. The lease was cheap—for Manhattan—and assumable and covered gobs of room for expansion. The place was already a wine shop and the owner was willing to sell us the fixtures for next to nothing.

“Don’t you see?” Aaron barked at my silence. “We wouldn’t have to sink a big chunk of capital into construction right away. That does two things. First, it gives us more money to put toward the purchase of the business. Second, it buys us some time to develop a loyal customer base of our own while building on the one the current owner has.”

I ended my silence: “How much?”

He hemmed and hawed, cleared his throat a few times and then gave me the news. Like I said, the store was perfect. The two of us, on the other hand, were still several thousand dollars short of mercantile bliss.

“Are you sure Miriam won’t help us?” he asked about our younger sister.

“It’s not her,” I told him for the umpteenth time. “She would help.”

“I know. I know,” he confessed, “it’s Ronnie. Why’d she marry him anyway?”

“She loves him. He’s handsome. He’s sweet and he’s a doctor.”

“I mean besides that,” Aaron joked. “Listen, this guy’s willing to give us a few more weeks to come up with the money. Let me know if you think of something. Love ya.”

I thought of something: jumping out the window. But not enough snow had accumulated to soften the fall. Frustrating news heaped on chronic pain leads a man to entertain funny thoughts. One thing being off the job had allowed me to do was think. I hadn’t done much of it since college. No, I’m not saying cops are dumb or don’t think. What I am saying is that once you’ve learned the ropes, uniformed police work is a matter of routine, determination and reaction. Along with the joys of pain, I found I was rediscovering my long muted inner voice. The process of that rediscovery was interrupted by a second call.

“So how’s the knee?” the gruffly affable voice of Rico Tripoli wanted to know.

Rico Tripoli was my oldest buddy from the department. We were in the same class at the academy, but didn’t know each other then. When we got posted to the Six-O in Coney Island after probation, Rico and I took to each other right away. Both of us Brooklyn boys without a hook—a friend or family member already on the job with some juice, someone who could get you a plum assignment or help you when you got jammed up—we sort of watched out for each other. We still did. Even after they split us up six years ago, we would meet for dinner every few weeks.

“The knee would be a lot better if I didn’t have to keep getting up to answer the god damned phone. How you doing?”

“I’m breathin’,” he said.

“How’s the Auto Crime Task Force working out?”

“I stepped in shit. We’re workin’ a career maker. A year from now,” Rico bragged, “I’ll be polishin’ my gold shield.”

“Get the fuck outta here. With the city’s budget, you could solve the Lindbergh kidnapping and the riddle of the Sphinx and they wouldn’t make you detective.”

“We’ll see.”

“Yeah, yeah. So listen, buddy, about dinner, I—”

“That’s not why I’m callin’,” he cut me off. “Besides, wife number two isn’t so thrilled with our little nights out.”

“Why not? You met her on one of our nights out,” I reminded him.

“That’s right,” he said, “when I was still married to wife number one.”

“I guess I see her point. So what’s up?”

“How short are you and that wop-hatin’ brother of yours in the cash department?”

“Come on, Rico,” I chided, “not this song and dance again.”

For going on three years, Rico had tried to buy into the partnership with Aaron and me. Even after the divorce settlement, he had the finances to do it. His maternal grandfather had willed him a bundle. In fact, if we took only a quarter of the cash Rico had offered, we could sign the lease tomorrow on Aaron’s perfect store. But in spite of all my arguments on Rico’s behalf, Aaron refused to let anyone from outside the family in on the deal.

“I know,” Rico said, “Aaron doesn’t hate all Italians, only me.”

“That’s not right. He hates everybody, but especially you. So why’d you bring up the—”

“Patrick M. Maloney.”

“Who the fuck is Patrick Maloney, another investor my brother’ll say no to?”

“Patrick
M.
Maloney,” he corrected.

“Jesus, Rico! Who the fuck is Patrick
M.
Ma—”

“What’s a matter, you don’t read the paper no more? You don’t watch TV?”

“Rico, you don’t stop this bullshit, I’ll shoot you before you get that gold shield.”

“He’s a college kid that disappeared in the city about six, seven weeks ago. Don’t you have eyes? His picture’s on every lamppost, traffic light pole and bulletin board in the city.”

“You’ll have to excuse me. These days I walk around with my eyes on my legs, trying to make sure I don’t trip over my cane and fall on my ass. Anyway, what’s this got to do with the store?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow over lunch at Molly’s. You know, that little place up by me.” He hesitated: “Say one, one-thirty.”

“You want me to drive all the way up—”

“It’ll be worth it. What else you got to do with that knee a yours? In the meantime, go to the library and read some old newspapers.
Ciao
!”

 

RICO WAS RIGHT about one thing. Patrick Maloney’s smiling countenance adorned the first lamppost I saw as I left my apartment building. And like a man with a new car becoming acutely aware of similar cars passing on the road, I began noticing Patrick Maloney’s face everywhere. Maybe, I thought, I
had
seen him before; when I was in the hospital, perhaps, on one of the news broadcasts. Given the amount of pain medication I had ingested during the month after my surgery, I probably could have convinced myself I had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary dancing the Latin Hustle with John Travolta.

Maloney was a good-looking kid with a Hollywood smile; all square white teeth, rich lips and charm. His skin was clear and clean-shaven but for a trim moustache. His thick hair carefully coifed, not too shaggy or short. It was dark. Complexion too, I’d guess. How dark I couldn’t say. The poster shot was grainy black and white. His clefted chin was squarely perfect, but his slightly crooked nose played off nicely against it. Dressed in a tuxedo as he was in the picture, he looked like a happy, handsome boy on the way to his brother’s wedding.