Walking the Perfect Square (34 page)

I shook my head no. “It’s what Katy wants.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’ve got to stop reading those tea leaves, Sister.” I wagged my finger. “I don’t think the Holy Father would approve.”

“Don’t carry such regret to your grave with you, Moe,” she counseled, resting her hand on my forearm. “Unlike Mr. Bryson, you can do something about what’s happened.”

“Like what?”

“Make a gesture,” she said, removing her hand. “Think about it. You’ll know when it’s right.”

Even after her car pulled out of Aaron’s driveway, I watched until she disappeared around a corner.

 

BOTH KATY AND I took Sarah up to school. Ann Arbor’s a lovely city and Sarah seemed to fall under its spell almost immediately. I arranged to come back up for the Wolverine’s home game against Indiana. Sarah and I loved watching football together. When I was sure she was set, I headed home. Katy stayed on just to make doubly sure.

I let a few weeks pass before asking Katy to dinner. Walking through the front door of what used to be my house, I handed my wife a package.

“What’s this?” she asked suspiciously.

“A gesture.”

“No, Moe, what’s in the box?”

“A poem,” I said, “that you asked to read a very long time ago. I was always too embarrassed to show you.”

“Andrea . . . Andrea Cotter.”

When I applauded, Katy shaped her thin lips into a smile I hadn’t seen since . . . well, for a very long time. She opened the package and began to read the poem, but her eyes were drawn to what remained in the box. It was the Chinese character with the red rose running through it.

“Patrick did that for Jack. They both had it tattooed on their forearms.”

She started to cry, but held herself together well enough to ask: “What does it mean?”

“The character means forever. The red rose is a symbol that love is part of the fabric of eternity.”

I prayed very hard at that moment for it to be true.

 

Even while I was teaching myself to write detective fiction with my Dylan Klein series—
Life Goes Sleeping, Little Easter,
and
They Don’t Play Stickball in Milwaukee
—I was working on two other novels featuring NYPD Detective Moe Einstein. Neither was published and neither has seen the light of day for many many years. The first was my obligatory serial killer novel. The other featured many plot and thematic aspects that would later re-emerge in
Redemption Street.
I mention these two unpublished works because they help to make the point that some novels—
The James Deans
, for instance—are born whole, while others are the product of evolution and confluence.
Walking the Perfect Square
was most definitely a product of the latter.

Although I hadn’t looked at or thought much about these two unpublished works for years, I could never quite get the Moe Einstein character out of my head. He was, in his original incarnation, a little too clever and proficient at his job, and he was too much of a loner, too much a derivation of Phil Marlowe. And that last name! It was way too obvious and smart-alecky. But Moe Einstein had an essential goodness, a loyalty to family and friends and, most especially, to the truth, that made him vulnerable to all kinds of hurt and opened him up to all sorts of possibilities. It was this aspect of Moe’s personality that stuck with me. Something else stuck.

Whereas Einstein had to go, Moe seemed just right. It summed up the kind of character that appealed to me as both writer and reader. It was a comfortable, friendly, working class name that harkened back to my parents’ generation. But Moe, as short for Moses, was quite different. Moses was anything but unthreatening—Let my people go or else—and had all sorts of useful implications for an author interested in exploring the meaning of what it was to be a Jew in the United States during the last two decades of the twentieth century. It is no accident that his siblings are named Aaron and Miriam. The old fashioned nature of the name Moe actually helped shape the character, especially his obsession with the past. I’m afraid I chose Prager for less romantic reasons. I liked the sound and rhythm of it and thought its sharpness cut well against the softness of Moe.

The proper first vehicle for the character of Moe Prager also developed over the course of many years. I’ve always been a
newspaper reader and would occasionally run across a story about a college student, usually male, who had come into Manhattan for a night of partying or clubbing only to disappear and never to be seen or heard from again. Even before I turned to a life of crime fiction, I would find myself creating myriad scenarios for these lost young men; the lives they had led before coming to Manhattan and what had actually happened to them. Some, I imagined, had met terribly violent ends. But a very few, I just knew in my bones, had used their alleged disappearances as a means of escape.

As early as 1995, I had a pretty firm notion of who Moe Prager might be and I had the basic idea for a plot, but what I didn’t have was the chops. I hadn’t developed my craft to a point where I was confident that I could pull off a book like
Walking The Perfect Square.
And this is where my failure to get those two earlier, overly ambitious novels published served me well. I had been trying to shed the Dylan Klein books and move up to a bigger house almost from the day
Life Goes Sleeping
was published in 1991. In fact, the two unpublished novels bracketed my second Dylan Klein novel
Little Easter
. What my failures taught me was that ambition unmatched by skill is a recipe, if not for disaster, then trouble. So instead of fighting against the current, I wrote the third installment of the Dylan Klein series,
They Don’t Play Stickball in Milwaukee
. Although unconscious of it at the time, I was using
Stickball
as a testbed for things, both in terms of the writing itself and the emotional gravity of the story, that would later reappear in the Moe books. It should be no surprise then that central plot of
Stickball
revolves around a missing college student and it is no coincidence that the missing student is related to Dylan Klein.

What ultimately led to my writing
Walking the Perfect Square
, however, was an odd confluence of factors. Yes, there was another one of those stories in the papers of a college student gone missing in Manhattan. Prominent among the other factors were my two children, Kaitlin and Dylan, each for different reasons. My daughter was eight, nearly halfway between her birth and leaving for college. I often found myself reliving her birth and imagining her at eighteen going off to school. You will note that Moe is pondering this same thing about his daughter Sarah very early on in the novel. And it is this timeline, the echo and sway between future and past, that sets not only the tone of
Walking
, but its format as well. At around this time, my son was entering kindergarten and I became friendly with Jim, a dad of one of
Dylan’s classmates. Jim was a retired NYPD sergeant who had been, as fate would have it, forced to leave the job because of a knee injury. He had slipped on a piece of paper left on the squad room floor. Once I heard how Jim had been injured, Moe took fuller form.

I realized one of the problems I had with the bulk of detective fiction was that too many of the protagonists tended to follow the fifty-plus-year-old template way too closely for my taste. Marlowe, Spade, Scudder, and Spenser didn’t need any freshening up at my hands. So I made a conscious choice to move away from the haunted, Christian, white guy, alcoholic, gun-crazed, fist-happy loner, with or without sidekick. Moe, I decided, would be a faithful family man, a stable man with stable people in his life. He’d have a wife and a kid, a car payment and a mortgage. He’d have a steady source of income, own a successful business that had nothing to do with police work. He’d have been a cop, but not a detective. He’d have been hurt on the job, but not in the line of duty. He would be haunted, but not by something he did on the job. No dead innocents, no stray bullets, no dirty deals in his past. The thing that would haunt Moe, that would threaten all he held dear would be not an act of commission, but of omission. I also wanted Moe to grow, to change, to age with the series. I have never much cared for the conceit of the static, ageless detective whose new case comes right on the heels of his last.

As I wrote Moe on the pages of
Walking the Perfect Square
, I realized that his voice was very intimate, certainly more intimate than I had anticipated. It was almost as if you could hear his internal voice. On the page, Moe Prager
né
Einstein, for all the years he evolved in my head, was more than I had dared hope for. For Moe, it seemed, simply having the reader understand what he was going through wasn’t good enough. He wanted you to feel what he was feeling when he was feeling it. He wanted to live beyond the page. Believe me, I was very surprised by how strongly he asserted himself, but that is the magic of writing. Writers are surprised by their own creations quite a bit more often than you might expect. Somehow, Moe has managed to survive five books in the series. Now it is up to you to determine whether or not his life is worth pursuing beyond the pages of
Walking the Perfect Square.

 

Reed Farrel Coleman was Brooklyn born and raised. He is the former Executive Vice President of Mystery Writers of America. His third Moe Prager novel,
The James Deans
, won the Shamus, Barry and Anthony Awards for Best Paperback Original. The book was further nominated for the Edgar, Macavity, and Gumshoe Awards. The fourth Moe book,
Soul Patch
, was nominated for the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Novel. He was the editor of the short story anthology
Hardboiled Brooklyn
and his short stories and essays appear in
Wall Street Noir
,
Damn Near Dead
and several other publications. Reed lives with his family on New York’s Long Island. Visit him online at
www.reedcoleman.com
.

Walking the Perfect Square
Originally published in 2001 by The Permanent Press.

 

This edition, Busted Flush Press, 2008

This edition copyright © Reed Farrel Coleman, 2008
Foreword copyright © Megan Abbott, 2008
Afterword copyright © Reed Farrel Coleman, 2008

 

 

“Nobody Hurts You” written by Graham Parker. Copyright © 1979 Ellisclan Ltd (PRS). Administered by Bug Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

 

This a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

 

eISBN : 978-1-935-41512-1

First Busted Flush Press paperback printing, June 2008

Third printing, August 2010

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