I'm annoyed by his sneaky tactic of cutting out any culpabil-ity in this mess, keeping it all in the passive, and then backing up the conversation, which is of course what I myself would do with a customer whose job we'd maybe messed up. But despite recognizing this I don't call Patterson on it, mostly because I understand that Pop's run is not Patterson's fault exactly (if at all), and that he's had to drag his flabby ass out of the lounger and tape the rest of whatever jackass-glorifying TV show he wasn't closely watching. I even almost feel sorry for him because his is just the dicey situation our litigious scapegoating civilization tends to put you in, when you've been installed at the big controls just long enough to absorb the most serious trouble, while bearing no real power at all.
Still, some chump's got to represent, and be punching bag for the rest, and so I say, to get the discussion snapped back on terms of my liking, "Look, Patterson. You had better start doing more than some good informing, or you're going to have a major action on your hands. My attorney's Richard Coniglio, senior partner at Whitehead Bates, who has constant wood for this kind of thing."
This seems to freeze up Patterson, like he's actually heard of the firm, for he breaks into a wide why-me smile and clears his throat and kind of hitches himself up, balls to gut, like some pitcher down 3–0 in the count.
"There's room for calm here," Patterson says, collecting himself. "Our experience leads us to believe that your father is likely fine, if what he's done is just wander off."
"Your experience? How often does this happen?"
"Almost monthly, Mr. Battle. Ivy Acres is not a holding facility, a prison. Sometimes people forget that fact. We consider our community members to be adults, and as adults they're free to move about, come and go on the shopping shuttle, take outings with friends and relatives, really do as they please. We're talking, of course, about our members housed in the main part of the facility, and not those in Transitions, who aren't as independent or mobile."
"I thought you had a pass system."
"We do. But it's only so we know where members are and how long they'll be out. When people don't come back we wait twenty-four hours and almost always they were at a niece's house and stayed over after dinner, or they just lost track of the time and missed the last shuttle and checked into a hotel. It has been very rare during the time I've been here that there have been issues."
"I think you should tell us about those," Paul says. "Just so we're aware."
"That's privileged information, I'm afraid."
"Well, everyone tells me I'm a privileged guy," I say, without the scantest levity or irony.
This doesn't intimidate Patterson, certainly, but I can tell he is beginning to plot out the best course for himself, trying to cal-culate whether he ought to toe the company line and say nothing more or maybe turn a little state's evidence right here and now, see if he can't ride the fine middle course and slip through this thing without any serious damage. I'm wondering, too, whether this might be one of those moments that I as an American of obvious Southern Italian descent might take advantage of (given the cultural bigotry/celebration concerning certain of our neighborhood associations), and suggest to Patterson that he'd do well to tell us whatever we want to know, lest the firm of Whack, Rig & Pinch arrange a special late-night deposition for him, dockside or alleyside or maybe right in the garage of his Cold Spring Harbor colonial, when he's just about to roll out the garbage container to the street. I really shouldn't, in deference to Pop, who can't stand any such talk, despite and perhaps because of the well-known fact that the Battaglia brothers got their start paving and walling the properties of certain connected guys at their second-home mansions in Brookville and Lake Success, but I warn Patterson he'd better start plain "wising up," and "stop being such a punk." Patterson now clears his throat again and says, "Unfortunately the two people involved clearly intended to leave the campus. They took specific measures."
"Like what?"
Patterson ahems. "One of them ground up three bottles of sleeping pills and mixed them into a milkshake at a diner, where he was found dead in the men's room. The other was a woman who took our shuttle to the mall and shopped for most of the day. But instead of returning on the bus she somehow made her way up to the roof and jumped off the top of Saks."
"Christ.."
"Besides those instances, Mr. Battle, we've had only success.
Now, you wanted to know what we're doing about finding your father. The police have been notified, of course, and we've also hired two private investigators, who are out searching for Mr.
Battle right now The lead investigator called me as I drove in, and so far they can confirm a sighting of an older man of his description."
"Where?"
"At the Walt Whitman Mall. In fact this very morning. A security guard apparently escorted him out, as he wasn't appropriately dressed."
"Escorted him out where?"
"Just out. I asked this, too, but the guard didn't note where the man went."
"Did he say what the man was wearing?"
"I believe it was trousers and a pajama top."
"Fucking great. That was Pop."
Paul says, "At least he was fine as of this morning, which means he got through last night on his own."
"It's a whole other night tonight," I say, thinking how good
it is that Jack is driving up and down the Nassau-Suffolk border scouring every park and playground and strip mall for his grandfather. As I've noted, the thing about Jack is that he has never been in the least lazy in his life; I can't remember an instance when I asked him to clean the gutters or shovel the driveway or set the dinner table and had him groan or shuffle his feet or do anything but get on the job, the same as if I'd suggested that we throw a football around, or maybe go to Shea Stadium, which we did only once, when a customer of mine gave me a couple of playoff tickets in 1973 (Jack was thrilled because he got Rusty Staub's autograph). Jack's trouble has been of course that he tends to respond not wisely but too well, like a cricket that jumps whenever you touch him; it doesn't matter that he might be perched on the edge of some chasm. This is not my way of intimating once again that I think Jack isn't the bright-est bulb on the tree, because even if that were true it doesn't matter in the least. Let's face it, for most of us in this more-than-okay postbellum Western life, smarts really don't count for a tenth as much as placement and birth, the particular tra-jectory of one's parturition, and if there's a genuine flaw to Jack's character it's no secret he gets too focused and purposeful for anybody's good, and especially his own, for it would never occur to him to lift the hatch and just bail out before the groundrush stops everything dead.
"Maybe Jack will find him," Paul says, as usual reading my mind. "I'll call and let him know about Pop being sighted at the mall."
He doesn't know Jack's cell number (nor do I), so he takes my phone outside the building to speed-dial him while I reacquire Patterson, who appears a bit sodden all of a sudden, like he's just come off a chartered fishing boat on a chilly, mist-spritzed day, like he'd pretty much give anything to get back home and pull on his flannel pajamas and crawl into bed. And though in fact I have zero interest in suing anybody ever, and can't think of what else to have him do save piss away his time keeping me company while I fret about Pop in my backslidingly diffuse and scattered manner, I say, anyway, "You're going to make this come out right, Patterson, or I swear once my attorney gets busy you'll be lucky to run the nut-and-candy cart at Roosevelt Field."
To this Patterson is mum, his lower lip pressed up tight against his half-exposed top teeth, so that he looks like a big bald, worried rodent, and I'm ready for whatever sweet load of sunshine he's going to try to blow up my ass, thank you very much. But presently Paul appears in the doorway, and then Jack, bearing what looks like a pile of dirty laundry in his arms, laundry with sneakered feet. I realize he is carrying Pop, wrapped up in a soiled — and very smelly — bedsheet.