Missing

by Jonathan Valin

  I walked over to the staircase and up to Stacie’s front door. The closer I got, the louder the noise grew—a typical bar racket of voices, glassware, and music. Through the front door, another flight of stairs led up to the bar proper. The place was crowded with men, most of them dressed in ordinary summer wear. A scattered few sported the cliché motorcycle leather jackets, caps, and chains, still dressing up like Brando in The Wild Ones. But they were the exceptions. Most of the men had the tame, buttoned-down look of United American bookkeepers. Middle-class professionals, looking for privacy and safe company in the age of AIDS.

  I found a table to myself near one of the side windows. While a waiter in a white shirt with a garter on each sleeve brought me a beer, I looked around. The bar occupied two stories, with the second floor torn out and made into a landing that surrounded the first. Upstairs a rock band was going like a storm siren. Downstairs the room pulsed with talk. To my left, a long, mirrored bar with a chrome rail and chrome-edged stools ran halfway down the room. The liquor bottles lined up behind it were lit softly from panels below. Outside of a few baby spots, it was the brightest light in the place. It occurred to me that Greenleaf and his friends would have to have been making quite a ruckus to stand out in that dim, noisy room. Either that, or someone who knew him or his friends had been keeping an eye on them.

  The waiter came back with the beer. Polishing the table with a washrag, he set the bottle and glass down in front of me. He was a thin, pale, black-haired kid in his early twenties, with heavy-lidded eyes and a scraggly mustache that had been filled in with mascara to make him look grown up.

  “Two bucks.” He had to shout to make himself heard.

  I handed him a five. “Keep it.”

  He nodded. “You’re new to Stacie’s, aren’t you?”

  “You know all the customers by sight?”

  “Pretty much. Most of ‘em. You just get into town?”

  “This month. I was looking for a friend.”

  “Aren’t we all?” the kid said, smiling.

  “The guy’s name is Mason Greenleaf. You know him?”

  The waiter thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know the name. What’s he look like?”

  I described Mason to him.

  “Still doesn’t ring a bell,” he said. “You should talk to Maxie, the bartender.” He nodded toward the long, dim bar. “He’s been here forever. If anyone could tell you, it’s him.” The kid slapped his washcloth over his shoulder. “You can’t find your friend, maybe you’d like to have a drink with me. I’m off at two-thirty.”

  He walked into the crowd, glancing at me heavy-eyed over his shoulder, like it was WWII and we were saying good-bye at the railroad station. As soon as he was out of sight, I downed my beer, then went over to the bar. As I sat down on a stool, the bartender came over to get my order. He was a huge, fat man with a curly red beard and red hair cut in a crew on top and tied in a short pigtail in back. He wore a gold earring in his right ear and a bib apron with a picture of Paul Prudhomme on it.

  “What can I get you?” he said.

  “I’ll take a Cutty, straight up.”

  Turning to the bar, he grabbed a bottle with a chrome snout and flipped an ounce of booze into a shot glass. “There you go,” he said, setting it down in front of me like a chess piece.

  I decided to cut to the chase with this one—the small talk with the waiter had been too depressing. Pulling a couple of twenties out of my wallet, I slid them across the bar.

  The guy laughed. “Where’ve you been drinking? State prison?”

  “It’s for some information.”

  “There are magazines, you know?” he said, still grinning. “Classified ads. Cost you a lot less than this.” A doubt crossed his face, killing the smile on its way down from his eyes. “Unless, of course, you’re a cop.” He tugged thoughtfully at his gold earring. “Are you a cop?”

  “When’s the last time a cop gave you forty bucks to answer a few questions?”

  The guy smiled again weakly, showing a mouth of mossy teeth, grayed like a baby’s teeth with mother’s milk. “You’ve got a point.” He laid his fat forearms on the bar, stroking the two twenties with his right hand like he was petting the cat. “All right. So what do you want to know?”

  “A week ago last Thursday, three men came into your bar. Early in the evening. One of them was gray-haired, middle-aged, drank a lot of Scotch. The second was young, blond, had a mustache. The third one had dark hair, fair skin, blue eyes, lean face, late thirties. The gray-haired guy and the dark-haired one got into an argument—”

  The guy started nodding his head. “Sure. Helluva argument. Shouting, finger-pointing. I thought the gray-haired one was going to get physical. He was one angry drunk.”

  “This place is pretty noisy,” I said, glancing over my shoulder. “How come you happened to notice? Had these men caused some trouble before?”

  The bartender thought about it for a moment. “Look, you know and I know that the one guy is dead, right? I mean, the cops were here about this, a week or so ago.”

  “Yeah, he’s dead. He killed himself.”

  “So what’s your interest? You’re like . . . what? A relative? A reporter? A friend?”

  “I’m a friend of a friend who wants to know why he did it.”

  The man sighed. “I wish I could help. I knew a fella killed himself not too long ago. It’s a hard thing to take.”

  “You’re saying you didn’t recognize any of these guys?”

  “No, I didn’t. They just made a lot of noise. Knocked over a chair. I think maybe somebody complained. That’s why I kept an eye out.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know if that’s worth forty.”

  He pressed the money under his right palm, as if that cat he’d been petting were struggling to get loose. “Look, I can ask around for you. Maybe somebody else recognized them. Only thing is, it was early on a slow night. I don’t think there were a whole lot of other people around. What I’m trying to say is, I wouldn’t hold your breath. Your friend, either.”

  “After the three of them had the argument, the dark-haired one left?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Just stormed out. All pissed off.”

  “How drunk would you say he was?”

  The man looked puzzled, like I’d thrown him a curve. “How drunk?”

  “I mean, was he falling-down drunk?”

  “I don’t remember him being drunk at all,” the bartender said uncertainly. “It was the other one—the guy with the gray hair—who got loaded.”

  “You’re telling me the one who left wasn’t drunk?”

  “I dunno. Could be I’m not remembering it right. Maybe he was kind of loaded.”

  But he looked and sounded exactly like someone who had said something he shouldn’t have said, although I’d be goddamned if I knew why he’d be holding anything back.

  “The guy who left—he left alone?”

  “Yeah. The other two stayed in the bar for another hour or so.”

  “Did they have any more arguments? Say anything you remember?”

  “Naw.” He shook his head. “They just drank a few more drinks and . . . I dunno where they went.”

  “Was there any commotion in the lot that night? A fight, maybe?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing I heard or saw.”

  I dug through my wallet and pulled out a plain business card with my name and phone number on it. “What’s your name?” I said to him.

  “Max Carlson.”

  “You think over what we talked about, Max. You search your memory. Ask around. Something new comes to you, you come up with a name for the other two men, you call me. If it pans out, there’s a reward in it. Couple thousand bucks.”

  “Couple thousand?” the guy said, his eyes getting big.

  After examining the man’s bankbook, I figured Mason’s estate could afford it. “Yeah.”

  The bartender studied the card, then tucked it in his apron pocket. “I’ll think ab
out it,” he said. “What about the forty?”

  “Earnest money,” I said, turning for the door.

  16

  I WAS sure that Max Carlson would do all that he could to find the names of the two men who’d been drinking with Mason Greenleaf on the night he died. The two thousand dollars were weighing on him like a pang of conscience. I could see it in his eyes, a wonderful change of heart.

  Max had made me curious about Mason Greenleaf’s sobriety, or lack of it. When I’d first asked him, he had said Greenleaf wasn’t particularly drunk. The second time, he’d acted like he’d been caught in a lie. If Greenleaf hadn’t loaded up at Stacie’s, it could change things slightly. To end up with a blood alcohol content of one-point-four, Mason would have had to put away a good deal of booze in that hotel room—or in the half hour between the bar and the hotel. It was an odd thing to do—to get drunk after leaving a bar. Unless what had happened in Stacie’s—or in Stacie’s lot—had upset him so much that he couldn’t stand to think, or be Mason Greenleaf, one more minute.

  As I walked out to the lot, I decided to stop at the Washington before calling it a day. Drunk or sober, if Greenleaf had come to harm in Stacie’s parking lot—and the bloodstains in the Saab indicated that he had—he would have been wearing the bruises when he checked into the hotel. Nobody at the scene had mentioned bruises, not the cops or the desk clerk. But by this point no kind of mistake or oversight would have surprised me, the investigation had been so slipshod.

  The Washington was only a couple blocks north and west of the bar, easy walking distance even if you were drunk and a little banged up. As I climbed Fifth Street to Elm, I glanced back down at Stacie’s, trying to imagine what Mason Greenleaf had been thinking on the night he died. He reportedly left the bar at eleven-thirty, then either fell down or was knocked down in the lot after having words in the bar. Hurt, he’d crawled into the backseat of the Saab. Maybe he’d even passed out. In any event, it was possible that he’d been in the car for the half hour that had elapsed between his leaving Stacie’s and checking into the Washington.

  It had been a particularly bad week for Greenleaf. The dreams about old betrayals that wouldn’t let him sleep, the visits to Dr. Mulhane and to Cavanaugh, and then four days of silence and the rocky night at a bar that he shouldn’t have been in, with two men he shouldn’t have been with. When he got his head together, he didn’t drive home from the parking lot, even though home was only a mile or so away. Instead he got back out of the car and climbed the hill that I just climbed—heading for oblivion.

  It was close to one o’clock, about the same time of night that Greenleaf had checked into the Washington. Looking across town from where I was standing, at Fifth and Elm, I could see the string of streetlights stretching west—and little else. Uptown or downtown, there was nothing to catch the eye. No bars, no restaurants, no shops open late on a weekday night. Nothing but the Washington Hotel two blocks north, with its crummy little arcade announcing ROOMS BY THE DAY OR THE WEEK in flickering neon. It was either there—or back down the hill to the noisy bar beneath the overpass and his angry friend.

  I walked up to the Washington, in and out of the soft-edged patches of streetlight and darkness, crossing over to the west side of Elm at Sixth. I could hear the neon frazzle of the hotel sign from a block away. Beneath the arcade, rows of bulbs cut a broad circle out of the night. The hotel door was ajar, propped open with a rubber stopper. I eased through it down a short wainscoted hall decorated with postcard photographs of the city framed in dusty glassless frames. A television was going in the common room at the far end of the hall, lighting the dim lobby with a flicker like firelight. I could see a couple of nodding old men and one pretty young black woman dressed in shorts and halter—in out of the heat, on a night with no trade—sitting on the couches and chairs, staring mindlessly at the TV.

  The stout middle-aged man drowsing behind the desk was the same guy who had ushered Cindy and me up to Mason Greenleaf’s room. He was still wearing the Reds cap he’d had on the week before, brim pulled down over his forehead to shade his eyes against the bare bulb hanging above his meshed-in cage. He stirred from the chair as I came up to the desk, squaring the hat up with one hand and rubbing the sleep out of his jaws with the other.

  “Sorry, buddy. Got no rooms left,” he said, barely conscious. “Welfare took ‘em all. Won’t have anything available for several weeks.”

  He yawned, patting his open mouth like a tom-tom. He didn’t remember me.

  “Human Services uses you for temporary shelter?” I asked.

  The clerk nodded. “We never know when they’re gonna call.” He sat back down hard on the metal chair, propping his elbows on the counter and his head on his hands. “This used to be a nice hotel, you know that?” he said to nobody in particular, to himself. “We had a bar and a restaurant. Good food.” He sighed. “Every once in a while I actually rent a room.”

  He looked up at me again, struggling to keep his eyes open. “Did I tell you we ain’t got no vacancies?”

  “I don’t want a room. I want some information.”

  “You’re a cop?” he said without surprise, as if cops were no strangers to the Washington Hotel.

  “No. I’m a private investigator looking into the death of the man who killed himself in your hotel.”

  “Oh, yeah. The guy on the fifth floor.”

  I got out my wallet and took out another couple of twenties, placing them on the hardwood counter. The man stared at them suspiciously, as if they were pictures of money.

  “What do you need to know?”

  “The man who killed himself,” I said. “What kind of shape was he in when he checked in that night?”

  “Drunk. Looking for a place to flop.”

  “I thought you didn’t have any rooms to rent?”

  He looked puzzled. “Must’ve had a few that night. Sometimes they open up when they find the niggers a place to stay permanent. Now that I think about it, the front room on the upper floor was open. We try to keep that open—just for emergencies.”

  “What kind of emergencies?”

  He shrugged. “Somebody you know gets kicked out by his old lady, that kind of thing. Of course, we can’t always do that. Depends on the Welfare.”

  “So the front room was open that night?” I said.

  “Yeah. Must’ve been. Top floor, front.”

  “You’re sure this guy was drunk?”

  The man laughed, showing a mouth full of gold and empty spaces. “That’s one thing I know about.”

  “Did he have a bottle with him?”

  “I didn’t see one if he did. Course he could have had it in his coat pocket. We did find one in the room, when we found him next day.” The clerk puckered his lips and fanned his face furiously, as if he was clearing the air. “Man, what a stench in that room.”

  I remembered. I had been there.

  “He came in by himself? On his own power?”

  “Yeah,” the clerk said, “I guess so. I didn’t actually see him come in. I was taking a crap.” He nodded to a door marked Private behind the desk. “When I come out, he was standing right where you are, bobbing and weaving like a featherweight. He dropped some money on my desk and says, ‘I’d like a room upstairs.’ I gave him the room.”

  He shrugged as if he didn’t see the mystery in it.

  “Did he look like he’d been beat up or taken a bad fall?”

  “I don’t remember that,” he said uncertainly.

  But by then, I was pretty sure that he really didn’t remember much at all. It had been late that Monday night. He’d been sick to his stomach and as sleepy as he was when I’d come in a few minutes before. Moreover the guy was conditioned not to look at anyone too closely. That was the etiquette of transient hotels like the Washington. Everyone’s business was his own. Hell, he hadn’t even remembered my face—and less than a week before, he’d ridden me upstairs to identify a dead man.

  I heard a john flush, and the door behin
d the desk opened. The old man I’d seen on Tuesday stepped out, his pants hanging open. When he saw me, he smiled a shameless, broken-toothed smile.

  “Jesus, put your pants on, Pat,” the clerk said, glancing back at him.

  “I’m trying,” the old man said, struggling gamely with his suspenders.

  I took out a business card and laid it on top of the money, pushing it all over to the clerk.

  “If anything else comes to you, call me.” I said it for the old man’s benefit, too, figuring he’d get the word out to everyone in the hotel.

  “Couldn’t take your money,” the clerk said, plucking the card off the twenties. “Not after what happened.”

  I nodded at him and pocketed the bills. The old man frowned as if his heart were breaking.

  “Harry Stoner,” the clerk said, reading off the card. “That’d be you?”

  “That’d be me.”

  “Well, I’m sorry about what happened. That man seemed like a nice man.”

  ******

  I walked back down to Stacie’s lot and picked up the Pinto. I was tired and hungry, and outside of the fact that the cops’ main witnesses weren’t terribly reliable, I hadn’t really learned anything new. Nothing I could make a lead out of. I’d just have to wait and see what fell out from Stacie’s and the Washington. As I was pulling out onto Fifth, a blue-and-white cruiser rolled by, making the usual inner city rounds. He was the first cop I’d seen in that neighborhood all night.

  I circled back around Broadway to Sixth Street, then uptown through the dead streets to the Riorley Building. Outside of the cop car on lower Fifth, the only sign of life was the flurry of traffic around King’s News, where the touts were double-parking to run in and pick up the fresh racing form. It was past two when I pulled up in front of the Riorley. I parked on the street and went upstairs to the office.

  The light on the answering machine was on, flashing the news that I had three messages. I flipped on the desk lamp, sat down, and played them back.

  The first call was from Ira Sullivan, asking me to phone him at his office the next day. “There could be something odd here,” he said in an odd-sounding voice. “I found an old friend who talked to Mason. I’d best wait before jumping to conclusions.” And that was it.