Missing

by Jonathan Valin

  “All right, Cindy.”

  I pulled onto Telford and circled around to Ludlow, then down the hill to the expressway. It took me about twenty minutes to get her home, back to the yellow-brick birdhouse on Blue Jay Drive.

  4

  A COUPLE of days went by, days and nights of fierce mid-July heat. I thought about phoning Cindy Dorn to see if Greenleaf had checked back in but thought better of it. She’d settled on a scenario she could live with until he returned, and there was no point in reminding her that that scenario was founded on speculation and an empty bottle of Scotch.

  So I didn’t call her. And then on a blistering Tuesday morning she called me. I knew at once that something had gone badly wrong. I could hear it in her voice—a trill of terror.

  “Harry,” she said, “could you come over to Mason’s house? Right away?”

  “What’s the trouble, Cindy?”

  “Some police are here. They found—” Her voice broke, and she began to sob.

  There was a confusion of noises on the other end of the line, then a man came on, speaking in the mechanical accent of a beat cop.

  “Are you a relative of Ms. Dorn’s?”

  “I’m a friend. What’s the problem, officer?”

  The cop didn’t say anything for a second. “We found a body. A guy . . .” I could hear him leafing through papers on a clipboard. “Mason Greenleaf.”

  “Where?” I said, feeling bad for poor Cindy Dorn.

  “The Washington Hotel, down there on Main.”

  The Washington Hotel was a run-down, by-the-day residential hotel, one step above a flophouse. I couldn’t imagine how Mason Greenleaf had ended up dead in such a godforsaken spot.

  “Put the lady on the line,” I said to the cop.

  Cindy came back on, crying. “Harry, he’s dead. Mason is dead. They want me to—” Gagging, she swallowed hard. “They want me to identify the body.”

  “I’m on my way,” I told her. “It’ll take me about ten minutes. Just hang on until I get there.”

  “I’ll try,” she said.

  ******

  It took me closer to fifteen minutes to get the car out of the Parkade, climb Gilbert Avenue, and curl around the Park Road to Celestial Street. On the way I kept thinking about the Lessing case. Ira Lessing was a homosexual who had been beaten to death by two teenage male prostitutes. His case was the reason why I’d avoided homosexual clients. His case was also the reason why I no longer routinely carried a gun. What I’d done to Lessing’s killer one rainy summer morning five years past—done in cold blood and then covered up like a common criminal—had left an indelible mark.

  By the time I pulled up in front of Mason Greenleaf’s condo, the TV people had arrived for a midday sound bite. A WLW camera crew was setting up on the sunlit sidewalk to the right of the Greenleaf house. Several cops watched them work from the shade of the condo’s front stoop. A group of street kids—like the ones Cindy and I had seen on Saturday evening—sailed noisily up and down the pavement, flitting and darting around the TV truck like jays.

  I walked up to the front door, and one of the cops lounging in the shade held up a meaty hand.

  “Hold on, fella. Nobody’s allowed inside.”

  “My name is Stoner,” I told him. “I’m a friend of Ms. Dorn’s.”

  “Just a minute.”

  The cop went through the doorway into the house and came out again a few moments later, grinning.

  “Fucking unbelievable,” he said, as if he were responding to something outrageous inside the house. “You can go in,” he said to me.

  A couple of other patrolmen were standing inside the door, laughing. One of them elbowed the other as I walked past them, and the second one stopped laughing immediately.

  Cindy Dorn was sitting on the blue couch. A CPD homicide detective sat across from her. I knew him to say hello. His name was McCain.

  “Oh, God, I’m glad to see you,” Cindy said.

  Reaching up, she clutched my hand tightly in hers. Her eyes were red from crying, her voice hoarse from it.

  “Hello, Stoner,” McCain said, nodding at me.

  “Jack.”

  It was hot in the living room with the morning sun pouring through the huge glass windows. McCain’s flaccid, brick-red face was coated with sweat. I could feel sweat popping out on my forehead, too.

  “You think you can make the identification now, Ms. Dorn?” McCain said.

  Cindy nodded weakly.

  Looking relieved, McCain stood up and wiped his brow with his coat sleeve. Cindy stood up, too, using my arm as a brace. Outside one of the beat cops guided her over to a squad car parked at the curb. I hung back to ask McCain a few questions.

  “Who found the body?”

  “The hotel desk clerk. About an hour ago. He got complaints about the smell from other roomers on the floor.”

  “Greenleaf’s still in the hotel?”

  McCain nodded.

  “Have any idea how long he’d been dead?”

  “From the look of him, I’d guess ten, twelve hours. He isn’t a pretty sight, Harry. Not after half a day in this heat.”

  I glanced over at Cindy, who was staring at us, pasty-faced, through the back window of the cruiser. “Does she have to see it?”

  McCain shrugged. “Somebody does. Did you know him?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then I guess it’s gotta be the girl.” McCain wiped his brow with his coat again and squinted up into the blazing noonday sky. “Sometimes I hate this job.”

  We started across the sidewalk to the cruiser.

  “Do you have any idea what the cause of death was?”

  “There was a tin of pills on the dresser. A bottle of booze on the nightstand. My guess is suicide.”

  I got in the backseat of the cruiser beside Cindy. McCain got in front.

  “Let’s go,” he said to the patrolman behind the wheel.

  The cop took off down Celestial, then jogged right onto a walled stretch of Columbia Parkway. Cindy Dorn stared wide-eyed at the cagelike interior of the cruiser. It was her first time in the back of a cop car, and the first time is always a shock. Everything about it smacks of punishment and the raw work of detention. I’d made the trip she was taking more times than I cared to remember. But the one that stuck with me was Len Trumaine on the Lessing case. Cindy had the same blasted look on her face that Trumaine had had on his—the look of someone who has stepped right through the crust of the world.

  Cindy didn’t say a word as the cruiser blew down an exit ramp and headed straight into the lower east side. She was going to see a terrible thing, and she knew it. She was girding herself for it. There was very little I could do to make it any less terrible, except to be there with her.

  The cruiser bucked as we rounded Fourth Street, throwing Cindy against my shoulder. The jolt seemed to rock her out of her trance.

  “He’s going to look awful, isn’t he?” she said in a sick voice.

  I said, “What he looks like doesn’t matter to him. It happens after someone dies.”

  “I’ve seen this in movies. It feels like we’re in a movie. Only I can’t get up and leave.”

  “That’s a pretty fair description.”

  Cindy bent toward me, lowering her voice until it was just a bitter, heartbroken whisper. “They were laughing at him, Harry.”

  “Who was?”

  “Those cops. They were laughing at him because he was a homosexual.”

  “How did they know that?”

  She shook her head. “They knew.” She started to weep. “It’s like he didn’t matter because he was gay.”

  We were on Main Street by then. A block later, the cruiser jerked to a stop beneath the wrought-iron arcade of the Washington Hotel. There was an ambulance parked just ahead of us. The cops had set up sawhorses on either side of the hotel door to block off the pedestrian flow. A few lunchtime bystanders were stacked up on either side of the obstacles, wondering what all the fuss was about. Jack
McCain turned in the seat.

  “Can you do this now, Ms. Dorn?” he asked gently.

  Cindy raised her head from my chest. “I guess I have to, right?”

  “It may help us find out what happened.”

  Drawing herself up on the bench seat, Cindy nodded sharply. “Then I’m ready.”

  McCain opened the back doors of the cruiser, and we stepped out into the brilliant midday sun. Side by side we walked out of the sunlight into the darkness of the old hotel.

  A narrow wainscoted hallway led to the clerk’s desk—a booth on the left-hand wall. Beyond it the hall opened into the lobby proper, which in the Washington Hotel was little more than a dingy common room lined with secondhand chairs and benches. An old man in a stained shirt and yellow rayon slacks sat on one of the benches, resting his dazed-looking head in his hands. He had a red, heavily weathered face, with a band of paper white around his forehead, where a cap had shielded his head from the sun. In front of him a small portable TV, propped on an old mahogany table, flashed silent pictures. The place smelled of dust and mildew and old, tired men.

  A stout, genial-looking man in his mid-fifties came out from behind the reception desk. He was wearing a T-shirt and khaki trousers and had a Reds cap on his head.

  “Are you going to want to be going back up there?” he said to McCain.

  “Yeah. One more trip.”

  “C’mon, then.”

  The clerk led us over to the open door of an elevator to the left of the reception desk.

  “Keep an eye on things, will ya, Pat?” he called back to the man on the bench. Without taking his eyes off the TV, the guy raised one hand to acknowledge that he’d gotten the message.

  “Christ, I don’t know about Pat,” the clerk said with a nervous laugh. “It’s like he’s wired to that damn box.”

  McCain and I stepped into the elevator. The fat clerk helped Cindy Dorn through the doors.

  “Are you a relative of the deceased, ma’am?” he said with surprising gentleness.

  “I was his friend.”

  “I’m very sorry,” the man said.

  He tipped his cap, smoothing down the thin gray hair underneath it before reseating it on his head.

  The clerk threw a switch, and the elevator lurched up with a sound of rattling chains.

  “What floor is he on?” Cindy said in a distant voice.

  “He’s on five, ma’am. All the way to the top. When he checked in last night, he asked if he could have a room on the top floor. I guess he wanted to look out at the view.”

  The fat man cleared his throat nervously.

  “He seemed like a nice man. Leastwise he was polite to me.”

  When we got to five, the clerk held the elevator door open with his right hand as we got off. “You wanta come back down, you press the bell.” He pointed to a painted-over buzzer on the jamb. “I’ll come up quick as I can.”

  He tipped his hat again to Cindy and released the door, disappearing behind it with a rattle of pulley chains.

  “It’s down here on the front right,” McCain said.

  Diffuse daylight was coming from a bank of windows at the end of the hall. Through the grimy glass you could see the east side of the city, crumbling away in a rubble of faded brick to the green base of Mount Adams. Atop the hill the brilliant white steeple of St. Gregory’s Church blazed in the sun.

  “You can see Mason’s house,” Cindy Dorn said heavily. “There on the hillside.”

  I squinted into the glare and could just make it out, a tiny drop of red on the green hillside.

  A CID man with a pair of magnifying goggles perched on his forehead came out the door of Greenleaf’s room.

  “We’re set,” he said to McCain. He glanced at Cindy. “You’ll want to wear a mask, ma’am.”

  He handed her a blue hospital mask. Cindy stared at it with a sick look of terror.

  “Let’s just do it,” I said.

  The CID guy stepped out of the doorway. “He’s on the bed at the back of the room. Take a look at his face, ma’am. Just a look.”

  The blue mask dangling loosely in her hand, Cindy stepped through the hotel room door. I went in behind her. The smell of death rose up like an animal and ran toward us in a blind rush that made the girl’s knees buckle. I grabbed her arms to steady her. He was lying on the mattress at the back of the grim little hotel room—something the color of a roach wing, swathed in white sheets. Somehow the girl made herself stare at it before collapsing against me with a sob.

  “It’s him,” she said, gagging.

  I lifted her to her feet and maneuvered her out of the room into the hall. McCain ducked his head with embarrassment.

  “Sorry, Ms. Dorn,” he said heavily. “Very sorry.”

  ******

  By the time we got back out to the car, the girl had gone into shock. I told the driver to take her to the emergency room at Jewish. McCain rode with us to the hospital. No one said a word on the ride.

  The emergency room was triaged, but McCain flashed his badge and they took the girl immediately, wheeling her in a chair into one of the curtained-off examination carrels. I didn’t know McCain particularly well, but the concern he was showing for Cindy Dorn was enough to make me like him.

  We sat in a waiting area, drinking vending machine coffee. All around us weary, sad-eyed people sprawled on hospital chairs and benches. Above them, on wall consoles, television sets murmured late-afternoon fare.

  “Do they let you smoke anymore?” McCain said, pulling a pack of Luckies from his shirt pocket.

  “You have to go outside.”

  “Smokers are the new niggers, you know that?” He rammed the cigarettes back in his pocket as if he were stabbing himself in the heart. “The nineties are starting to depress me. The whole world depresses me.” McCain got to his feet. “I gotta have a nail.”

  I followed him through the exit door, out onto a cement concourse. The afternoon sun lit the pavement like sheet ice.

  “Christ, it’s hot,” McCain said, squinting into the glare as he screwed a cigarette into his mouth and touched its tip with a lighter. “When’s this weather gonna break, huh? It’s been like a hundred for a solid week.”

  “That was a nice thing you did back there for the girl.”

  McCain shook his head. “She showed a lot of guts, considering.”

  “When do you figure you’ll get criminalistics on Greenleaf?”

  “Day or two. There wasn’t much for them to do. Hell, you saw the hotel room. Now why would a guy like him end up in a place like that?”

  I remembered what Cindy Dorn had said about being able to see Greenleaf’s house from the top floor. “It’s close to the hill. You can see his condo from the window.”

  “If he was homesick, why didn’t he just go home? I mean, it’s just a mile or two away.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want to leave a mess.”

  “Fags,” McCain said listlessly. “They’re a different breed.”

  “How’d you guys know he was homosexual?”

  “How’d you think?”

  “He’s got a record?”

  McCain nodded. “Indecent carriage, soliciting. The usual.”

  “When was this?”

  “Six, seven years ago.”

  “Nothing more recent?”

  “No. He got probated to some shrink. Judging by the girl, maybe it helped. She seems like a nice kid.” He took a couple of drags, then stubbed the butt out on a concrete pillar. “I gotta get back downtown. Tell the girl I’ll be in touch soon as I know the details. If he’s got other family in the area, steer ‘em to me.”

  McCain started to walk away, then turned back. “How’d you get involved in this, anyway? You a friend of the woman’s?”

  I shook my head. “She called me last week when Greenleaf went missing.”

  “Yeah, she said he’d dropped out of sight for several days. Wonder where the hell he went?”

  McCain turned away and walked off toward the parking
lot, leaving the unanswered question frying in the July sun.

  5

  THE EXAMINING intern decided to keep Cindy Dorn in the hospital overnight. They’d already moved her to a fourth-floor room by the time I got back to the emergency room. I took an elevator up to four and followed a series of signs to the west wing. I found the girl propped up in bed with a bottle of saline plugged into her right arm. She had some color again and a sharper focus in her eyes, but she still didn’t look fully there. Part of her was still standing in that run-down hotel room staring in terror at the raw remains of Mason Greenleaf’s life and death.

  “I’m sorry,” she said as I came in. “I freaked out.” I could tell from the slur in her voice that they’d given her a tranquilizer of some kind.

  “You’ve got nothing to apologize for.” I sat down on a plastic chair by the hospital bed. Cindy Dorn held out her hand, and I took it in mine.

  “Is there anybody you want me to call? A friend? Your ex?” The woman smiled weakly. “No. I’ll be all right. Later tonight, I’ll talk to Mason’s family. Everything’ll get taken care of. It always does when somebody dies. I remember with my mother. It was like a piece of machinery I didn’t know I had switched on and . . . things happened.” She turned her face away toward the tall window at the far side of the room. “I wish I could shake the feeling that this is a movie. I wish I could go back to last Wednesday night and say something or do something that would change it. He ended up so alone.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  She closed her eyes and squeezed my hand tight. “I keep seeing his face—”

  “Don’t think about it, Cindy.”

  “How can I not? I loved him.” She started to sob. “I loved him, and if I’d taken better care of him, if I’d watched over him the way he watched over me, this terrible thing wouldn’t have happened.”

  Holding her hand, I leaned toward the bed. “What happened to Mason, it might as well have happened in a different solar system, on a different star, for all you or anyone else had to do with it.” I felt a blush creep up my neck, enough of a burn to make me lean back in the chair. “It just wasn’t in your control.”