Walking the Perfect Square (33 page)

To keep me from going completely out of my mind, I filed for and received my private investigator’s license from New York State in 1979. I work cases now and again, missing persons mostly.

On October 9th, 1978 at 10:50 P.M., a seven-pound, six-ounce girl was born to Cindy and Aaron. With Katy’s blessing and eternal thanks, they named their daughter Laurel Patricia Prager. We were asked to be her godparents. I think it took us less than a second to take on the responsibility.

Sarah F. J. Prager was born to us on August 6th, 1980. She used to hate the F. J. part of her name until Grandma Angela
showed her all of Francis Jr.’s shiny medals and pretty ribbons. Katy’s mom gave Sarah Francis Jr.’s wings. To this day, she displays them proudly in her room. When she first got them, she used to tell everyone she was going to be a pilot like her Uncle Francis in heaven.

“Yeah,” Katy joked, “Sarah Flying Jew Prager.”

Unfortunately, Sarah hates flying. She loves painting. Her cousin Laurel, much to the dismay of Cindy and Aaron, is in the Air Force Academy in Colorado. Names, I guess, are nice tributes, but what do they mean, really?

Miriam and Ronnie now live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He teaches at the medical school and oversees the trauma center. His time at Kings County in the emergency room turned out to be a godsend. Ronnie came to appreciate that the people who show up in the ER are the neediest, poorest, most neglected among us. He always wanted his medical training to have some significance beyond a Mercedes and a big house in Sands Point. He sleeps well at night.

Miriam got her degree in occupational therapy and works with developmentally handicapped children. She and Ronnie have a girl of their own, Hope. She’s having her bat mitzvah this year. Everyone says she kind of looks like me. I guess she does, but I always claim not to see it. They’ve also adopted a boy, Jimmy, of Apache heritage. And now they’re thinking of adopting a girl from China.

“It’s your fault,” Miriam tells Katy and me. “If you hadn’t gotten married at the UN, we would have had a very conventional family.”

We proudly take the blame.

Rico got his shield and actually made that big case he was working. The guys running the stolen car ring had also taken on work as the latest embodiment of Murder, Incorporated. They became the hired enforcers for the New York mob. That arrangement didn’t last very long as too many internal conflicts of interest arose and the crew developed a taste for blood even when none was called for. They started killing people just to stay in shape. The crew liked to grind up its victims in industrial meat-processing machines. Several books were written about the case:
Chop Shop
by Van Mason and
Bump Off and Grind
by Steve Horner were the two best. Rico’s picture is in both books.

But after that case, Rico hit a wall. He started drinking heavily and was caught by Internal Affairs running protection for a
Columbian cocaine ring. If Joe Donohue hadn’t been killed in a small plane crash in upstate New York during a fund-raising swing, he might have been able to intercede on Rico’s behalf. As it was, Rico only had to serve five of a possible fifteen-year sentence in Batavia. Five years, for an ex-cop, however, is a very long and lonely sentence. They isolate ex-cops to protect them from the rest of the prison population. His wife left him, of course. About five years ago, he came to me begging for a loan. I gave him the two thousand bucks he asked for, though I knew I would never see a dime of it paid back. I would have given him more, but he still hadn’t learned about undervaluation. He died last year while on a waiting list for a liver transplant.

Let me warn you. In case you were going to take what happened to Rico and Joe Donohue as a sign of cosmic justice, don’t bother. Good old Sully, the biggest stooge of us all, retired as Chief of Detectives. So much for balance and karma, huh?

Conrad Beaman underwent a religious conversion of sorts. He went from being a card-carrying liberal firebrand to a leading black conservative. He’s the darling of the religious right and supports just about every fringe policy he would have scoffed at in his former incarnation. He hosts a weekly talk radio show and is rumored to want to run for office. One thing hasn’t changed: he’s still a fixture on Sunday morning shows.

Pooty’s was sold and closed its doors in 1991. The space it once occupied is now an art gallery and the apartments above it are currently a steal at $1.5 million per. It’s just as well Pooty’s closed. I could not bring myself to go there very frequently. Eventually, Katy and I stopped going altogether. Pete Parson moved down to Florida and works for the Coral Gables PD as an administrator. For some time, he tried to get Aaron and me to open up a store down there. Now I get a holiday card from him every year.

When punk turned into New Wave and the impending nuclear holocaust fizzled, Dirt Lounge went the way of Studio 54. I’d lost track of Nicky years ago. Then one day I was watching a special on VH1 about New York’s early punk scene and there’s Nicky being interviewed. He was still skinny, but he sported a rich tan and his hair was short and gray. He owns a few golf courses in South Carolina. I wonder if the clubhouses only have one bathroom.

Misty and Kosta got married, but to other people. After her cereal commercial, Misty moved out to L.A. She did a few more commercials, starred in sitcom pilots that failed to get picked up and worked in several cheesy movies. I’ve seen her twice on
Mystery Science Theater 3000
. She married a producer, divorced him and moved up to Napa Valley where she owns a gourmet shop. Kosta moved out from behind the sound board to manage New Wave bands. One of his bands, The Christheads, actually got a record deal. When they couldn’t come up with a name for their first album, Kosta dubbed it
Traveling Tuna Fish Salesmen
. I think they sold about seventeen copies and I’ve got two of them. It wasn’t all bad though: Kosta married the bass player. After his less-than-stellar foray into the world of music management, Kosta came to work for Aaron and me. He’s a sharp wine buyer. And though he’s never come out and said anything about it, I think he especially enjoys his buying trips to Napa Valley.

I don’t know nor do I care what happened to Philip Roscoe and Pete Klack. I don’t know what happened to Nancy Lustig, Maria, Doobie, Bear, Theresa She-ain’t-Hickey-no-more, Enzo Sica or Bobby Klingman’s mother, though I find myself wondering about them occasionally as I get older. The only one I’m sure about is Doobie. I just know he designs supercomputers. Henry’s Hog is still there in Dutchess and so is Tina Martell.

 

TYRONE BRYSON DIED on August 7th just before dawn. He was buried in a Connecticut cemetery, compliments of the Catholic Church. It turned out to be too complicated for me to reimburse the diocese directly or to take responsibility for the burial and services. Sister Margaret found out what the costs were and I donated an equal amount to the hospice. I was allowed to purchase the headstone.

FRANCIS MALONEY SR. died in his sleep on September 12th, 1997. Katy and Sarah suffered terribly. Although I didn’t exactly click my heels in celebration, I was glad the charade was finally done with. Over the years, the forced civility between us had begun to take its toll. My relief was short lived.

Included in Katy’s inheritance were the contents of a safe-deposit box. In amongst the bonds and jewelry was an envelope
addressed to Katy and me. In the envelope was a note, and a receipt for a package kept in cold storage. The note, in Maloney’s own hand, asked that we retrieve the package as soon as possible. “Probably my mom’s wedding dress,” Katy supposed. That sounded about right to me. Only it wasn’t.

Patrick’s blue parka, looking much like it did the day I rubbed it in Maloney’s face, was what was in the box. At first, it didn’t register with Katy. Her eyes seemed to say: “What’s this? There must be some mistake. Are you sure this is the right box?” Then the light of recognition snapped on. “Oh my God!”

She brushed her hand along the front of the coat and caressed it as if it was Patrick she found and not his coat. I said nothing. I was practiced at it. This time, however, my long silence would hang, not save, me. In the left pocket was another note, again in Francis Maloney’s hand:

“Your boyfriend gave this to me on February 17th, 1978. Ask him where he got it and why he swore me to secrecy. Did he never tell you he found Patrick?”

Just as Tyrone Bryson would later reach across time for me, Francis Maloney reached out from beyond the grave. Now in a dizzying rush, I understood his unnerving smile and questions about ghosts. He would have his revenge, a revenge in the making since the morning of February 17th, 1978. That day, the day I confronted him about Patrick, was the first time he asked me about ghosts. In the end, I’d underestimated my father-in-law’s cruelty and capacity to inflict pain.

For when Katy did as the note said and asked me those questions, what could I say? I could keep up the pretense and claim I didn’t know what her father was talking about. In short, deny, deny, deny. But that approach would wither under any sort of scrutiny. In the note, he’d called me Katy’s boyfriend. That meant he’d put the coat in storage even before the wedding. Checking the date would be simple enough. How could I convince Katy her father hated me so much that he’d planned to ruin me twenty years ago? To do that I’d have to tar the man she was still grieving for and it would fly in the face of the civility with which he’d treated me over the past two decades. Even if I thought there was a chance to successfully deny it, I wouldn’t have. Like I said, I was weary of the charade, of lying to Katy.

Yet telling Katy the truth would in many ways be worse, because the truth was much uglier and more complex. I would still have to tar the man she was grieving, only now the tar would
consist of more than some vague accusations about her father’s anti-Semitism. She would have to be told about Maloney’s vicious assault on the transvestite. She’d have to hear about Patrick’s homosexuality, about how her father’d offered Patrick his gun. There was no way around the fact that her father was behind my bruised ribs and burned-out car, nor was there any way of getting around my lying about it. But the two most damning things were that I had in fact found Patrick, cavalierly letting him slip away forever, and my silence.

And ultimately, what proof did I have of any of it? The IA report, which I’d discarded years ago, was a distorted pack of half-truths. Rico and Donohue were dead and somehow I didn’t think retired Chief of Detectives “Sully” Sullivan would come riding to my rescue. Either way I was fucked. That was Francis Maloney’s evil genius.

As I knew it would, my long silences is what did me in. I think Katy accepted as fact the rest of what I told her. She wasn’t blind. She understood her father had a capacity for cruelty beyond what he displayed to his family. Though she was surprised that Patrick was gay, she was willing to admit he was always good at disguising himself to the world. But what she found unforgivable were my lies. No one, not now, not ever, needed to protect her from anything. And how dare I have let her and her family continue to suffer when I knew where Patrick was? Who was I to play God with her family? Who indeed? Our marriage, she insisted, was a shell game, all sleight-of-hand and diversion. All I could say in my own defense was that nothing about Sarah was sleight-of-hand.

I moved into an apartment near the Columbus Avenue store a few weeks later.

 

THEY FOUND PATRICK’S body within fifteen minutes. It was right where Tyrone Bryson had remembered. During the exhumation, I studied the fancy tombstones in the nearby cemetery. Which one, I wondered, was Houdini’s? The medical examiner made positive identification through dental records. Elephant Eddie Barker was no longer available to be punished. He had died of AIDS in Attica in 1989.

Katy and I declared a cease fire for the funeral. Sister Margaret drove down from Connecticut and I paid for Jack’s sister to come in from Dayton. Aaron and Cindy were there. Ronnie, Miriam, Hope and Jimmy flew in from Albuquerque. Sarah, who was leaving for Ann Arbor the next day, seemed angry, as if she
blamed Patrick for what had happened to her parent’s marriage. Though Katy and I kept the details of the separation to ourselves, Sarah knew it had something to do with the circumstances surrounding Patrick’s disappearance. Someday, but not today, I remembered thinking, I’d have to remind her it was her Uncle Patrick’s disappearance which had brought her parents together in the first place.

After the cemetery, we held a little get-together for everyone at Aaron’s house in Dix Hills. Jack’s sister couldn’t stop thanking me for arranging her attendance. I explained it was the least I could do. “Let’s just say,” I told her, “it’s my way of apologizing to Jack for doubting his faith in Patrick.” She said she knew he would have forgiven me.

Sister Margaret was a hit with everyone but Katy. I think the nun’s presence made her very uncomfortable. I think the church, the graveside rites, all of it, reawakened in her things she assumed were gone forever. Just because she had long ago converted to Judaism didn’t mean it wiped away her upbringing. Back in church, I noticed her lips moving almost involuntarily in response to the priest’s prayers. Katy must have felt terribly conflicted, disoriented.

Before heading back to Hamden, Sister Margaret asked me to walk her to her car.

“Your daughter is beautiful,” she said.

“Come on, Sister,” I was skeptical, “you already told me that three times. What’s the real reason you lured me out here? I don’t think we have enough time to run into the city for some Ray’s pizza.”

“I can see,” she said, sadly, “that you and your wife are still apart.”

“Yeah.”

“Is that what you want?”