Missing

by Jonathan Valin

  14

  IT WAS past ten by the time we pulled up in front of Mason Greenleaf’s condo. After what had begun in the car, I’d expected Cindy to react badly when she saw the place. But if she felt any guilt, she held it in. At least, at first she did.

  We parked on Celestial and walked through the salty white patches of street light over to the Chinese red door. Cindy opened it with a key she had taken from her purse. The breath of that burning summer breathed out of the dead house. The smell of heat and dead plants and Mason Greenleaf. Cindy turned away.

  “I don’t know if I can go in,” she said, leaning heavily against the jamb.

  “Then let me do it.”

  I went through the door into the dark, burning living room. Navigating by memory I found the spiral staircase leading to the second floor, and a wall switch that shot a focused spot directly down the staircase. I climbed up through the light to the bedroom. His enameled desk was on the right. I went over to it and flipped on a lamp. I already knew where the bank books were. I’d seen them in the desk drawer the first time I’d searched the room—a leather-bound check register and a savings book mixed in with his school papers. I took them from the drawer and laid them on the desktop, then sat down in his chair and started to go through them.

  The savings book was current through the week of July 10, the week he had disappeared. Even though I knew the man came from money, the balance staggered me. It was in the high six figures. Every month a deposit of three grand had been made to the account—probably his paycheck from Nine Mile. Every three months there was a much larger deposit of ten thousand dollars, possibly from a trust fund or another savings account. The withdrawals were just as consistent—weekly transfers of from five hundred to a thousand dollars.

  The check register showed me where the savings transfers had gone. He had kept a constant balance of three or four thousand dollars in the checking account. All expenditures were neatly laid out in a fine hand. The week before he disappeared, he’d spent his usual amounts on groceries, credit cards, phone bill, CG&E, tickets to the summer opera, Playhouse-in-the-Park, and Riverbend. On Tuesday, July 12, two days before he’d dropped out of sight, he’d made his last entry: a check made out to cash in the amount of a thousand dollars. It was a fairly large sum, but there were several other such checks scattered throughout the previous months. As far as I could see, there was nothing in his records to indicate that he was being blackmailed or that he was planning any kind of major change.

  As I was flipping back through the checkbook, examining earlier months, Cindy Dorn came up the stairs.

  “They’re still delivering his mail,” she said shakily. “I’ve got to call the post office and tell them to stop.”

  She went over to the bed, sat down, and put her face in her hands. I went over and sat down next to her, putting my arm around her shoulder.

  “I’m okay,” she said, sounding not at all okay. “Did you find anything?”

  “No. Nothing. Just an ordinary week with one slightly larger than usual check made to cash on Tuesday. No other entries.”

  “We were supposed to go to the opera on Friday. Werther.” She laughed dully. “Appropriate, huh?”

  “I don’t know much about it.”

  Cindy smiled. “I didn’t either. It was Mason’s passion, opera and theater.”

  “Yeah, I saw. Riverbend, the Playhouse. He kept you busy.”

  “He was fun. He knew a lot about a lot of things.”

  “And he was rich,” I said, feeling overmatched.

  “That didn’t matter. I was never into rich. Neither was he. I mean, it was nice to go all those places, but I just went to be with him. I’m kind of a homebody, really.” She glanced at me nervously. “Jesus, let’s get out of here. I’m beginning to feel uncomfortable again—and guilty.”

  “Okay.” I helped her up.

  “Do you think we’re ever going to know what happened to him, Harry?” she said as we walked over to the stair.

  “You want the truth?”

  “Always.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Cindy sighed. “Then maybe it’s time to stop.”

  ******

  The police impoundment lot was located on Gest Street, near Dalton. To get there, I had to circle back down through town onto the Ninth Street overpass, through the west side industrial flat. As soon as we got off the hill, Cindy relaxed.

  “It was just being there,” she said, trying to explain her nerves. “Seeing the letters, knowing he would never read them.”

  “It’s bound to happen. You loved him. You still do.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But I honestly don’t know if I can forgive him. We never lied to each other, Mason and I—that was the basis of our relationship, that was why he was so dear to me. The other men I’ve known—the ones that I loved—I was always the one who was up front, laying myself open like a fool and getting burned for it. With Mason there was a mutual trust. That’s the thing that’s so hurtful. I did trust him.”

  It probably wasn’t in my own interest, but I said it anyway. “Nobody who I talked to today thought that he didn’t love you.”

  “Then why did he kill himself?”

  “It didn’t have to do with you, Cindy. It had to do with him. He had a lot of fears, a lot of conflicts. Seeing Cavanaugh dying of AIDS, maybe, triggered a panic. He’d been to the doctor that week already on Thursday, complaining about fatigue, insomnia, bad dreams.”

  “Mason’s bad dreams,” she said, as if they were a familiar subject.

  “He’d had them before?”

  “When he was stressed out at school, during exams or the opening week of classes. Bad dreams about me, Del, Sully, Ralph Cable. Cable was often in them.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “I guess because he associated Cable with school. He was Mason’s college roommate. They had a rocky relationship that ended when Cable went to Viet Nam. Unfortunately, he got killed over there. His death seemed to haunt Mason. He always thought Cable had volunteered to prove a point about his manhood after Mason threw him out. Anyway, Mason felt partly responsible for what happened. The bad feeling between them when they parted was something he could never go back and undo.”

  He’d dreamed about friends who had failed him, friends whom he had failed, friends with whom he wished to make amends. Dreams he’d had before, when he was under stress on the job. Only he hadn’t been under any stress at work—at least, none that I could discover. No trouble with the cops, either. And in spite of what I’d said to Cindy, I wasn’t really convinced that Del Cavanaugh and a fear of AIDS had triggered Mason’s depression—not after talking to Mulhane. I didn’t know what had driven him to kill himself. And as I told Cindy, I wasn’t sure that I ever would. But it was moot now that she had decided to call it quits. It was a healthy step away from bad memories, I thought, for both of us: Greenleaf and Lessing.

  I turned onto Gest Street. Up ahead I could see the fenced impoundment lot. A tin-roofed plank shack by the front gate served as a watch post. I pulled through the gate and parked by the door of the shack.

  “Do you have keys and registration?” I asked.

  Cindy nodded. “Mason gave me a spare set of keys. I took the registration with me that day—when we went to the hotel.”

  I got out on my side, Cindy on hers. Together we walked through the white glare of the spotlights, up a short stair to the open door of the guard house. Inside a lanky cop with a SWAT cap on his head was sitting behind a battered desk, working a crossword puzzle and listening to a Reds game on a table radio.

  “Can I do for you?” he said listlessly.

  Cindy handed him the registration. “It’s my friend’s car,” she said.

  The cop swiveled around and pulled a clipboard from a nail on the wall, turning back to us as he ran a finger down the impoundment sheet. “We’ve had it for a while. Hauled it in a week ago last Wednesday from Stacie’s parking lot. Got a twenty-five-dollar towing charge and t
wenty-five dollars a day storage.” Looking up at Cindy, he said, “Tell your friend there are cheaper ways to park.”

  He glanced pointedly at me, as if he thought I was the unnamed friend.

  While Cindy wrote out a check for the impoundment fee, I went out into the yard to look for the Saab. The cop had it located near the northwest corner of the lot. The spotlights didn’t cover all of the grounds, so it took me a while to find it—parked on the Dalton Street side, in a dark, weedy patch of gravel. Like the other vehicles, it had the license number and date of impoundment soaped on its back window. Like the other vehicles, it was covered with days of inner city dust and grime.

  I dug a rag out of a heap of tires and junk parts stashed by the fence and wiped off the front windshield. I was working on the back window, when Cindy came up.

  “You want to drive it back to your place?”

  She shuddered. “I’d rather you did. Just seeing it, abandoned like this . . .”

  “Okay. You follow me in the Pinto.”

  Cindy dug through her purse for the spare keys and handed them to me. I unlocked the driver’s side door and hopped in, handing her my keys.

  “If you have any trouble with the Pinto, flash your lights.”

  “What kind of trouble?” she said suspiciously.

  “It’s got its quirks,” I said with a laugh.

  Looking like she didn’t think it was very funny, Cindy walked off, making her way through the jumble of abandoned cars.

  After four days in the sun, the interior of the Saab stank strongly of overheated vinyl and leather and something like rot. I opened the windows to air it out, then got in and turned on the ignition. On the third try, it turned over with a gargle and spit of exhaust. I backed it out of the parking spot and weaved my way to the front gate. Cindy was sitting there in the Pinto, ready to go.

  “I’ll catch the expressway on Ezzard Charles,” I called to her. “That okay?”

  She nodded.

  I coasted out of the lot with Cindy right behind me. I stayed on Western up past the Terminal, cutting under the expressway to the entrance ramp at Liberty.

  It wasn’t until I got on I-75 that I began to notice the other smell, the one I’d thought was dry rot. I might not have noticed it at all, if I hadn’t rolled up the windows to cut the wind noise. But in there with the heat and leather and July smog was something else—faint, familiar, and disquieting. The too-sweet smell of decaying blood.

  I almost jerked the car off the road, but we were halfway to Finneytown by then. I rolled down the window again to let some air in and glanced nervously around the interior of the car. I didn’t see any blood on the leather seats or dash. It was too dark to get a good look at the floor. I had to live with the stink for the ten more minutes it took to get to the yellow brick house.

  As soon as I pulled in the driveway, I flipped on the interior lights of the Saab and began searching the car. I was halfway into the backseat when Cindy pulled up behind me. The sudden flash of the Pinto’s headlights through the Saab’s rear window lit up the interior, and that was when I saw it. Dried brown streaks of blood down the back of the driver’s side seat, on the backseat itself, and a dried pool on the backseat carpeting with a froth of fungus growing around it like a bad spot on bread. There wasn’t a great deal of blood—as much as might come from a broken nose and split lip. If the car hadn’t been locked in the merciless heat for four or five days, it probably wouldn’t have grown so rank.

  Cindy flipped the Pinto’s headlights off, and the Saab’s interior went dark again. I heard the Pinto door open and shut as I backed out of Mason’s car.

  “What is it, Harry?” Cindy said, coming up the driveway.

  “There are some bloodstains in the backseat,” I said, straightening up.

  “Blood,” she said, throwing a hand to her mouth.

  “Yeah.”

  “What should we—should we call the cops?”

  If there had been more of it, I wouldn’t have hesitated. But there wasn’t enough to prove homicidal mayhem. Nothing like the charnel of Ira Lessing’s front seat. All the bloodstains demonstrated was more sloth on the part of the IOs, Segal and Taylor, who had obviously had the car towed without checking it out. Greenleaf had had contusions on his face and body when the cops found him. It was entirely possible that he’d fallen down outside the bar—or gotten into a fight with his argumentative friends—and simply sat in the car for a time, drunk, dazed, and bleeding. It struck me that Stacie’s was where I had to go—to straighten out a good deal of Mason Greenleaf’s last few hours on earth. It also struck me that I should get a copy of the autopsy report for Terry Mulhane, to see what he made of those vague contusions that the cops and the coroner had dismissed as meaningless. Since I had to pick up the arrest report on the SCPA thing anyway, I decided to stop at CPD and get the coroner’s report, too, before heading on to the bar—and wherever else that took me.

  Cindy was still standing with her hand to her mouth, looking appalled. “What’re we going to do?” she said again.

  “I’ll talk to Jack McCain tonight,” I told her. “Tell him what we found. He’s probably not going to be overly impressed—I mean, Mason did have some bruises on him when he was found in the hotel. If he agrees to send an IO out, fine. If not—well, we can get a specialist of our own to do phenotyping if it comes to that. In the meantime, I’m going to make some inquiries at the bar where the car was parked. If Mason was involved in some violence, it looks like it would’ve happened there.”

  “He got . . . beat up?”

  “Cindy, I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible, although the hotel clerk at the Washington didn’t say that he looked beat-up when he registered.”

  It occurred to me that that was another stop I should make—the Washington Hotel.

  “I don’t get it. Why didn’t the cops find this? I mean, this changes things, doesn’t it?”

  “We know why the cops didn’t find it,” I said with disgust, “and it doesn’t change the fact of his suicide. But it sure as hell might have a bearing on the sequence of events that led up to it. I just don’t know enough to say.”

  Cindy slapped her hand on the car. “I don’t want you to stop, Harry. I want you to keep going until you find out the truth of what happened to him. I owe that to Mason.”

  I didn’t want to get into the question of what she owed to him. But the truth was, the bloodstains did change things enough that I couldn’t honestly talk her out of continuing the investigation, even though it pulled us both back into the past.

  15

  I WENT straight downtown to the CPD and looked up Jack McCain in Homicide. I told him about the blood I’d found in the backseat of Greenleaf’s car. He stared at me blankly for a long moment, then snatched the phone up off his desk.

  “Larry,” he barked into the receiver, “I want a criminalistics team sent out to—” He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and glared at me. “What’s the house number?”

  I gave him Cindy’s address on Blue Jay Drive.

  He repeated the street number over the phone. “Talk to the woman. Cynthia Dorn. Get a blood sample out of the backseat of the Saab in her driveway and dust the whole damn car for prints. If Segal and Taylor are still on duty, get them to oversee it. If they’re at home, wake their asses up. The lazy sons-of-bitches should have done this job in the first place.”

  McCain hung up the phone with a bang. “Satisfied?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You should be,” he said, looking pissed off. “This doesn’t make a goddamn bit of sense. The guy killed himself. Whether or not he had a bloody nose in the backseat of that car, he still killed himself.”

  “It should have been done, Jack. You know it, and so do I.”

  “Yeah, it should’ve,” he conceded. “That’s why I’m sending those cocksuckers out there. But this doesn’t mean anything like I’m reopening the case. You understand that?”

  “I understand.”

  “You got
ta make her understand it, too, Stoner. Because this is it. No more from us. We’ll run your prints and your blood. What you do with the results is up to you.”

  ******

  I stopped at Vice to pick up Greenleaf’s jacket and put in a request for a copy of the coroner’s report through hatchet-faced Ron Sabato—I didn’t have the nerve to ask Jack McCain. The folder Ron gave me was going to take a while to parse: arresting officers’ reports, investigating officers’ report, witness interviews. The one thing that caught my eye as I thumbed through it on the way back to the car was a Polaroid snapshot of a blond kid with a pale, peroxided mustache. The IOs’ report identified the boy as Paul Grandin, Jr., of 243 Rue de la Paix in Clifton—the student that Mason Greenleaf was accused of soliciting in 1988. The photo was six years old, and I had no idea how six years might have changed Paul Grandin’s appearance. But if he still wore a mustache and hadn’t dyed his hair, he fit the description of the younger man who had been drinking with Mason Greenleaf in Stacie’s bar. Then again, so did the guy I passed on Elm Street, pushing a shopping cart full of empties to the recycling center.

  It was almost midnight when I pulled into Stacie’s lot on lower Fifth. The bar was located in a deserted dell beneath the I-71 distributor—a converted office building with an ornate Sullivanesque facade. To the west, up Fifth Street, the city ended in a rubble of red brick, like a fallen wall. To the east, a dark stretch of Broadway ran haywire through the pillars of the overhead distributor. There were no other buildings nearby.

  As I got out of the car, three men came out the door of the bar and down a short staircase to the parking lot. The one in the middle was so drunk, he had to be held up by his buddies on either side. I watched them walk toward the south end of the lot. Once they cleared the pale of the neon beer signs flashing in Stacie’s windows, I had to strain to see them—the lighting was that poor. With the noise coming from the bar and the overpass above it, it was difficult to hear, too. All in all, a good spot for a mugging.