Walking the Perfect Square Read Online Free PDF

least,” he smoothed the wide lapel of his suit jacket, “I get to work plainclothes.”

    I raised my eyebrows. “You got a peculiar definition of plain clothes.”
    Rico laughed. “I know. I’m wearin’ so much polyester I’m afraid to light a friggin’ match.”
    Baldy cleared his throat.
    “Sorry. This,” Rico said, gesturing to the seated man, “is—”
    “—Francis Maloney,” I completed the thought, offering my right hand.
    Maloney took it and tried squeezing the life out of it before giving it back. He had a ruddy, freckled complexion, an unsmiling mouth and blue eyes like cracked ice.
    “You’re Prager,” Maloney scoffed in a voice as cold as his eyes. “So you’ve guessed my name. Pardon me if I don’t applaud.”
    He wasn’t impressed by my powers of deduction. He wasn’t the type to be impressed by much. Maybe, I thought, if I pulled a silver dollar from behind his ear . . .
    “I can read a paper and put two and two together,” I said, finally sitting down. “Is there a reason I should be trying to impress you?”
    Rico ordered me a coffee, a Molly’s meatloaf platter and attempted to strike up some diplomatic chitchat. Francis Maloney wasn’t having any, his thick impatient fingers tapping out a message for Rico to get on with it.
    “The Maloneys want your help,” Rico said.
    “How can I help?” I wondered, staring at Maloney’s clothes. Maybe it was the neat creases in his impeccably ironed work shirt, I don’t know. Whatever it was, it seemed to me he wore his clothes like a uniform.
    “Angela . . . that’s Mrs. Maloney,” Rico said, “she heard about you finding the kid that time in -”
    “Christ!” I threw up my hands, “is that what this is about?”
    Marina Conseco was the seven-year-old daughter of a divorced city fireman. On Easter Sunday 1972, her father took Marina and his four other children to Coney Island. When the father returned from buying hot dogs at Nathan’s Famous to where he had left his kids, he saw that Marina, the youngest, was gone. Three days later, she was still gone.
    Coney Island was a very dangerous place for a seven-year-old girl. Beside the potential human predators, there was the ocean, a filthy canal, abandoned buildings, dilapidated rides, a bus depot and a confluence of subway lines. And if she had been used to satisfy someone’s twisted obsession, there were miles of dark
boardwalk and elevated highway under which the body of a little girl could be buried in amongst piles of bald tires and broken glass.
    By the fourth day, the cops and off-duty firemen who’d volunteered to search, had pretty much stopped calling Marina’s name. The hope of finding Marina alive had silently mutated into a determination to find her corpse. After my shift that fourth day, I went out with a crew of two firemen from a ladder company in the Bronx. As we rode down Mermaid Avenue toward Sea Gate, I found my eyes drifting upward. Probably because I was so tired, my eyes were rolling up in my head.
    I slammed on the brakes and jumped out of the car. When the two firemen followed me out of the car and saw what I was pointing at, they shook their heads in agreement. I wondered how many of those old wooden, rooftop water tanks there were in Coney Island. We agreed to count; one rooftop at a time.
    We found Marina Conseco at the bottom of the fifth tank in half a foot of dirty water, alive! Her skull was fractured, as were her right arm and left ankle. She was in shock and suffering from hypothermia. She had been molested for two days and thrown into the tank to die. But as her family had said, Marina was a willful girl, and wasn’t about to cooperate with her attacker’s plans.
    Finding that little girl was the only outstanding thing I ever did on the job. At another time, in another place, I might’ve gotten my shield for saving her. I wouldn’t have wanted to make detective on the back of Marina Conseco’s misery and on the strength of a lucky guess. The