Missing

by Jonathan Valin

  “The man’s dead, you know,” I said, voicing my disgust.

  Cavanaugh looked insulted, as if no one else but him had the right to die. “No, he did not talk about killing himself,” he said coldly. “That does not mean that I am mistaken about the reason for his despair.”

  He crossed his bony hand in his lap and stared at me with his thousand-mile eyes.

  “You can go now,” he said. “I’m tired of this conversation.”

  ******

  I went back down the drive to where I’d parked the Pinto, got in, and sat there for a time, thinking about Del Cavanaugh, his cattiness, his bitterness, his misery. The image of his illness was horrible and depressing. It had depressed me, and I didn’t know or like him. For Greenleaf it had probably been an ordeal. He feared the disease that Cavanaugh was dying from, according to Cindy Dorn. Whether that fear in combination with what it had done to his ex-lover was enough to untrack him, I didn’t know. I was certain that Cavanaugh was capable of playing upon that fear and the guilt that it inspired—and probably had. Cavanaugh’s own interpretation of Greenleaf’s motives didn’t impress me. He had blamed the suicide on Greenleaf’s choice of lifestyle, which was tantamount to blaming it on his decision to forsake Cavanaugh and live as a straight with Cindy Dorn. It was a savage, self-serving judgment, especially considering the fate that Cavanaugh’s own lifestyle had brought him to. Moreover, if it was as simple as that—if Greenleaf had killed himself because he was a homosexual trying to be something that he wasn’t—then I didn’t see any difference between Cavanaugh’s reasoning and that of the cops: just another fag suicide.

  At least, I’d confirmed the fact that Greenleaf had paid the man a visit for the first time in years, possibly on the same day he had dropped out of his ordinary routine into the limbo that led to the Washington Hotel. Since the visit with Del Cavanaugh had followed hard upon the company Greenleaf had had the previous night, it was reasonable to suspect that whomever he’d sat on his porch drinking with, late Wednesday night, was the mutual friend that Cavanaugh said had told him about Del’s illness. Which pretty much left me where I’d started. Looking for the man who drank Scotch.

  I didn’t have the stomach to go back into that garden and ask Cavanaugh for a name, so I started up the car and headed downtown, to where I should have gone in the first place, Ira Sullivan’s law offices in the Dixie Terminal.

  9

  IRA SULLIVAN’S office was on the tenth floor of the Dixie, on the south side of the building, facing the river. Through the large fan-topped windows in the anteroom, I could see the stadium and, beyond it, coal barges cutting downriver in a swath of foam. The anteroom was antiseptic white. White carpet, furniture. The only color in the place came from the view through the window and the few delicate watercolors posted on the walls.

  Sullivan’s secretary, a goggle-eyed woman with blotchy skin and a taffy pull of bright red hair, asked my name, buzzed Sullivan, then spent the next few minutes chatting me up while we waited for Sullivan to come out of his office.

  “He’s been in a funk all week,” she told me, pecking desultorily at a computer console. “A good friend of his died, and he took it very hard.”

  “That’s why I’ve come to talk to him.”

  “You knew Mr. Greenleaf?” the woman said, arching an eyebrow with surprise, as if, to be honest, I didn’t look the type.

  “I didn’t know him. I’m working for a friend of his, Cindy Dorn.”

  Removing a pair of headphones from her ears and draping them like a choker around her neck, the woman leaned conspiratorially across her desk. “Mr. Sullivan really saved Mr. Greenleaf’s bacon a few years ago. He had big problems. Big,” the woman said, dividing her hands for emphasis.

  “I heard he was charged with solicitation.”

  “You didn’t hear the half of it. They were ready to throw away the key until Mr. Sullivan stepped in.” The woman cocked an elbow on her desk and rested her chin on it, gesturing with her free hand just as if we were cutting recipes across the kitchen table. “You know I’m not a bleeding heart. But I will tell you for a fact that it is a crying shame the way the police department and the district attorney’s office harass certain people.”

  As she said this, Ira Sullivan popped his swart face around the corner, making the woman jump. “What’re you gossiping about, Cherie?”

  Flushing pink, the woman replaced the dictation headphones on her ears and began typing a mile a minute.

  Sullivan clucked his tongue ruefully. “You’re a shameless washerwoman, you know that?”

  The secretary pretended not to hear him.

  I’d forgotten how tall and ungainly the man was. Even in a blue pinstripe he looked weird and wroth, with his downturned mouth and upturned hair and electrified eyes.

  “Mr. Stoner, let’s go on back to my office,” he said to me. Turning to the secretary, he added: “See if you can manage to hold my calls and your tongue till I buzz you.”

  The woman nodded without looking up from her computer screen.

  “Look, I want you to understand something,” Sullivan said, once we got out of Cherie’s earshot. “If I’d had any idea that Mason’s disappearance would turn out so tragically—well, there’s not a thing I wouldn’t have done to help him. Not a thing. I want Cindy to know that, too. I tried to tell her at the funeral, but I don’t know if she took my meaning. We were all plenty distraught. After what that man went through, to end up like he did, where he did.”

  He shook his head sadly.

  Sullivan’s office was at the end of the hall, a large posh room, painted white like the reception area and accented with modern canvases framed in brass. The one that took up the wall above his liver-shaped desk was an O’Keeffe flower. Unlike most law offices there were no bookshelves filled with case law. Just the big canvases and, of course, the spectacular view through the picture window.

  Sullivan waited a moment—to let the luxe room work on me—before sitting down behind his desk. “I don’t do much court work anymore,” he said, in case I’d missed the point. “Just corporate stuff and a few favors for my friends.”

  I sat down across from him on an overstuffed chair that gave beneath me like a down pillow. “I understand that you represented Mason Greenleaf at one time.”

  Sullivan cocked his head and stared. “Before we get into this, I’d like to know what your interest is in this tragedy.”

  “Cindy’s dissatisfied with the police investigation of Mason’s death. She feels they’ve done a cursory job.”

  Sullivan laughed. “Our police department doing a cursory job? Now, how is that possible? It isn’t as if Mason was a nigger.” He leaned back in his chair. “What would you say he was, Mr. Stoner?”

  He wanted me to use the word fag. Since he figured I was thinking it, he wanted me to say it.

  “Mason’s bisexuality probably was a factor in the investigation,” I admitted.

  “How could that be in this great land of ours?” Sullivan said sarcastically. “The home of the brave?”

  I wasn’t in the mood for a civics lesson from Ira Sullivan. “We can weep about the state of society all day if you want to. Or we can try to figure out why Mason Greenleaf killed himself.”

  “You don’t think there’s a connection, huh?” Sullivan said with a snort of disgust.

  “I’m sure there is. But there are also specific reasons for what happened. The man disappeared for five days for no apparent reason, and then, drunk and injured, ended his life in a rat trap hotel room. It was a miserable finish.”

  Sullivan looked away, out the blue window. He didn’t say anything for quite a time, and when he finally spoke, his voice was heavy with emotion. “A man can take comfort in knowing who he is, Mr. Stoner—even if he is despised for it. Mason was not blessed with such understanding. He walked a line that no one can walk for long. People try, of course. Lock themselves in unhappy marriages or pointless relationships. But sooner or later what you are comes back to haunt
you.”

  “You’re saying he wasn’t happy with Cindy Dorn?”

  “No,” he said, still staring out the window. “I’m saying he wasn’t happy.”

  Given what had happened in the Washington Hotel, there was no disputing his point, although I had the sure feeling that, like Del Cavanaugh, Ira Sullivan was one of those men who wasn’t content unless everyone else in the world came down with it, too. If he had it in his power, he would sow doubt like a plague.

  “You asked me before, if I’d ever represented him as a lawyer,” Sullivan went on. “The answer is yes. Six years ago when he was arrested.”

  “For soliciting.”

  “That was the charge,” the man said, looking back at me. “The actual crime, if you want to call it that, was somewhat more complex. Mason took a personal interest in one of his students. And the boy, who was eighteen years old at the time, returned his affection. In spite of the fact that there was no physical contact between them at any time, the boy’s father brought charges of solicitation and indecent carriage.”

  “The charges were dropped?”

  “Not dropped, but substantially reduced. Mason was ordered into mandatory counseling. It would have been much worse if the police department had prevailed upon the boy to testify. But, of course, there was nothing to testify about. They had never been intimate. They had only been friends. The sole evidence in the case was some letters Mason had written, expressing his compassion for the young man, who was then having a hard time in his life. The father found them and assumed the worst. Mason’s real crime was showing bad judgment. In spite of a massive letter-writing campaign, which I helped organize, the Cincinnati School Board disciplined him. Which is why he ended up teaching at a private school. Although it is highly unlikely that he would have gotten that job had he not been a friend of the headmaster. His reputation was very close to ruined.”

  The way Sullivan explained it, the incident sounded a lot more damaging than the ugly contretemps that Cindy had dismissed as vicious, antigay prejudice.

  “Mason was living with Del Cavanaugh at this time?”

  Sullivan nodded. “Yes. Which was another thing that went against him. The fact that he was then living openly as a homosexual did not play well in court. Del’s own attitude didn’t help, either. He took the position that there would have been nothing wrong if Mace had been carrying on with the boy, who was no longer technically a minor. Unfortunately, he took the position publicly, in front of a TV crew.” Sullivan shook his head. “Del’s asinine like that. He had other problems, too. But he also had guts. And that’s always something to admire in this world. His relationship with Mason ended soon after the trial, and I always thought it was partly because Del felt that Mason hadn’t stuck up for himself more strongly. Frankly, a number of us felt that way, given the ridiculousness of the trumped-up charge. It was just another fag witchhunt, flimsier than most. But later on, it became obvious to me that Mason simply didn’t have it in him to defend himself.”

  “Why was that?” I asked.

  Sullivan locked his hands together on the desktop. “Who can say why? Each of us handles the burden of his identity in a different way. Mason’s way was to be kind and hope for the best.”

  “I talked to Del Cavanaugh this morning. Mason went to visit him during the week before he killed himself.”

  Sullivan chewed his lip. “Seeing Del in the shape he’s in would have been hard for Mason to take.”

  “I’m sure it rocked him,” I said grimly.

  “You know Mason had a phobia about AIDS?”

  “Cindy told me he was anxious about it.”

  “This went beyond anxious. When he was with Del, he had his blood tested every two or three weeks. Terry Mulhane was Mason’s internist. Maybe you should check with him to see if . . . there was some recent problem.”

  The thought had occurred to me. So had the consequences it might hold for Cindy Dorn—and possibly for me. Like everyone else in the world, I was wary of AIDS. I wasn’t phobic about it, as Mason Greenleaf had been. But after a decade of plague and propaganda, it was there now, in the back of my mind, this unsettling, invasive fear that changed everything.

  “Cindy says she practiced safe sex and their last blood tests were negative,” I said, trying not to sound defensive.

  But Sullivan wasn’t buying it. “That must be a great relief to you,” he said. “I would still check with Terry Mulhane. I would also talk to the staff at Nine Mile to see if things were going smoothly on his job.”

  “You have some reason to think that they weren’t?”

  “No. I just know that Mason took his work very seriously. When the school board finally decided to let him go, he was so despondent that he threatened to kill himself. Of course, he got over it.”

  “He didn’t make a habit of that, did he? Threatening suicide?”

  Sullivan shook his head no. “Mason wasn’t that unstable. You have to remember that the circumstances of his arrest were humiliating, and the police were still hounding him in spite of the fact that the charges had been reduced. Once they get your name, they can make life quite miserable for a gay man. For a while there they were dragging Mason into every lineup that involved a charge of solicitation or molestation. I actually had to secure an injunction to get them to lay off.”

  “You don’t know if he’d been harassed again recently, do you?” I said, thinking it would make a damn good motive for suicide.

  “If he was, he didn’t tell me. As his lawyer, I am sure that he would have come to me with such a problem.”

  But this time he sounded defensive, which made me think I should follow up on it. The obvious fact that Greenleaf hadn’t confided in him prior to killing himself was bothering Sullivan, just as it was tormenting Cindy Dorn. It occurred to me that Mason Greenleaf hadn’t confided in any of the people one might have expected him to turn to—Cindy, Sullivan, or Del Cavanaugh. Outside of the vague malaise he’d voiced to the girl, he had gone to his grave silently, like a man with a secret. Which led me back to Stacie’s bar and the only two people I knew for a fact that Greenleaf had talked to before he committed suicide.

  “Mason was seen in a bar called Stacie’s on the night he died, in the company of two other men, a gray-haired older man who drank a good deal of Scotch and a younger blond man with a mustache. I thought at first that the Scotch-drinker was Del Cavanaugh, but now I’m not sure. You wouldn’t know any old friends of Mason’s that match those descriptions, would you?”

  Sullivan thought this over. “I can’t say, the descriptions are so vague. You understand I don’t want to put anyone in a difficult position without further checking.”

  “Meaning that you do know people who would fit the bill?”

  “Several,” Sullivan conceded. “I’ll make inquiries for you.”

  Under the circumstances it was the best I could have hoped for.

  “I appreciate the help,” I told him, getting up and holding out my hand.

  We shook like old pals.

  “I’ll call you after I’ve checked into it,” Sullivan said as I left the room.

  10

  THE CONVERSATION with Sullivan had gone well enough to give me hope that he would eventually help out, especially if he could see his way to naming names. And I had the feeling that in time he would. Like Cindy, he had been wounded by Greenleaf’s silence; and, like Cavanaugh, he was vain enough to take it personally.

  Sullivan had already helped me in one way: by making it clear that Mason Greenleaf’s life and death had had shapes of their own—independent of my bad memories of Ira Lessing’s tragic death, and my part in revenging it—and that at their heart was a secret that he hadn’t been able to impart to his lover or his ex-lover or his friends. Both Cavanaugh or Sullivan had guessed that that secret was his inability to come to terms with being gay, a fate that he had tried to escape and couldn’t. Where Cindy Dorn saw inexplicable betrayal, they saw self-delusion and a sad, inevitable self-reckoning. While their
version of Mason Greenleaf smacked heavily of their own biases, it did have the merit of fitting the few facts that I knew. Like it or not, I couldn’t get around the fact that Greenleaf had ended up in a gay bar with two gay men.

  As I rode the elevator back down to the Dixie Terminal lobby, I plotted a bit of strategy to take me through the rest of that afternoon, until it was late enough to catch the night help who had served Greenleaf and his friends at Stacie’s bar. I decided to begin at the beginning, with whatever had been bothering Greenleaf during the weeks before he disappeared. Besides his homosexuality, Sullivan had suggested three possible motives: a fear of contracting AIDS, a terror of harassment by the law, or a serious problem at work. I had already seen what AIDS could do, and it was fearsome indeed. But according to Cindy, Greenleaf did not himself have AIDS, unless of course he’d had his blood tested during the week before he dropped into limbo. Had he, in fact, been diagnosed with HIV, it would have been more than enough to start him in decline. It was the first thing I planned to check when I got back to the office. The other two possible motives, job- and cop-related trouble, could be handled by a couple of quick trips. I didn’t have much hope that any of it would pan out, especially since Cindy had already told me that Mason wasn’t having a problem at work, and neither Sullivan nor the cops themselves had said that he was having any current problems with the law. But without a solid lead, I had to start somewhere.

  When I got back to my office, I looked up Mason’s internist, Terry Mulhane, in the Yellow Pages. He had an office on Auburn Avenue in Corryville. I dialed his number and got a receptionist who put me on hold. A few moments later she came back on, full of apologies.

  “We’ve got some sort of flu bug going around, and the phone’s been ringing off the hook.”

  I told her who I was and asked her if it would be possible to talk to Mulhane about Mason Greenleaf.

  “I can ask,” she said dubiously, as if Greenleaf was a painful subject.