Missing

by Jonathan Valin

  “Tell me what?”

  “It’s something I saw, about three weeks ago. Right after an assembly at school. You know, one of those ‘for-your-own-good’ things that everybody’s got to attend. There was a lecture and a play, dramatizing the danger of drugs and AIDS. Anyway, after it was over I stuck around the auditorium to wait for Gloria to pick me up. I was standing outside the lobby when I heard some loud voices coming from inside the door. Everybody else had left. At least, I thought they had. Anyway, I went inside to look. It was pretty dark—they’d shut off the lights. But down by the stage I saw Greenie talking to a blond guy with a mustache. I’d never seen the other guy before. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, except that the blond guy looked upset. I started to feel embarrassed about spying on them, so I went back out to the lobby.

  “After a while Greenie came out by himself. He had his head down and his face was . . . I mean, he looked sick. When he saw me, I asked him if he was okay. He smiled and said sure, he was okay. He didn’t know I’d seen him with the other guy, the blond one. We talked a little about the summer session and about me going to Harvard. I said I’d write him a postcard when I got settled in at Cambridge, and then he made this funny face and told me not to do that. I mean, it was a strange look. He said just to drop by the school and say hello to him when I got into town at the Christmas break. He said he was proud of me and that he was sure I would do well.”

  “He didn’t say anything else?” I asked. “About the man he’d been talking to?”

  Lee Marks shook his head. “No. He just walked off, out to the parking lot. I don’t know why, but I had the funniest damn feeling that I wasn’t going to see him again. Just . . . something about the way his voice sounded when he told me he was proud of me and that I would do well. Like he was saying good-bye.”

  “Did you see him again?”

  The boy laughed. “Yeah. The very next day in class. He acted like nothing had happened. Lectured about The House of Seven Gables. I tried to talk to him after class. But he didn’t stick around like he usually did. The day after that, I guess that was Thursday, he didn’t come in. I never did see him again. None of us did. Until the funeral parlor.”

  He dropped his head.

  By then, his girlfriend had gotten close enough to spit at. When she saw the boy drop his head, she rushed over to the bench and sat down beside him, reaching out for his hand and glaring at me like I was a dirty bastard. Love in bloom. Hell, I knew the feeling.

  “This is Gloria,” Lee Marks said, blushing.

  “Hello, Gloria,” I said.

  “Hi,” she said in a clipped voice. Like time was money.

  “How good a look did you get at his blond man?” I asked Lee Marks.

  “I was pretty far away, Mr. Stoner.”

  “If I showed you a photograph, do you think you might recognize him?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe.”

  “How ‘bout coming out to the parking lot and taking a look.”

  “You have like a mug book or something?” he said with surprise.

  “I have a photo.”

  The kid glanced at his girlfriend. “Sure, why not?”

  We went back up the corridor—Lee, Gloria, and I—up the stairs where the band played on, up to the top level and out into the lot. After the air-conditioned shade of the mall, the sunlight was almost blinding, the heat ferocious. It took me a while to find my car—to the amusement of the two kids.

  “My mother had to call the cops once,” Gloria admitted, as we wandered through row after row of gleaming chrome.

  We finally came to the one that wasn’t gleaming, my rusty Pinto. Lee had already seen my hulk, but Gloria’s jaw dropped.

  “Is that an American car?”

  The Marks boy laughed. I unlocked the passenger side door and pulled out Mason Greenleaf’s jacket. I found the photograph of Paul Grandin, Jr., unclipped it from the arrest report, and showed it to Lee. He stared at it for a moment, holding a hand above his eyes to cut the glare.

  “The man I saw was older than this. In his twenties. And his mustache was a lot darker.”

  “The picture was taken six years ago.”

  He looked at it again. “I can’t be sure. But, yeah, I guess it could be this guy.”

  He handed the photo back to me.

  “Who is he?” he asked.

  I gave him the short version. “Someone Mason used to know. You never saw this man at the school before?”

  Lee shook his head. “I thought maybe he was one of the preschool parents. Only I’d never seen him at any other assembly.”

  “How was he dressed?”

  “Casual. Sport coat, shirt, jeans. He kept wiping his nose with the back of his hand, like he had a cold.”

  I smiled at the kid. “You’d make a good detective.”

  “He’s going to be a doctor,” the girl said, chasing that idea with a broom.

  I stuck the photo back in the jacket. “You’ve been a big help, Lee.”

  “When you find out why he killed himself, then I’ll know I’ve helped.”

  I told him I’d tell him when I found out.

  As Lee Marks and Gloria wandered off, back to the playground of the mall, I got in the car and stared at Mason Greenleaf’s jacket. I hadn’t even bothered to bring it inside Cindy’s house the night before. Now it seemed like a good idea to look at the whole file.

  It was too hot to sit in the car, so I drove out of the lot to a chili parlor on the other side of Montgomery. I found a table in the back of the restaurant, ordered a coffee, and read through the strange case of Mason Greenleaf and Paul Grandin, Jr.

  The complainant in the arrest had been the boy’s father, Paul Grandin, Sr. He had an address on Madeira Road in Indian Hill. On the afternoon of September 3, 1988, Grandin Senior found five letters written by Mason Greenleaf to his son, hidden in his son’s desk at the home of his ex-wife in Clifton. There was no explanation of why the father had been looking through his son’s things—or ransacking his ex-wife’s house. According to Grandin’s complaint, Greenleaf had solicited sex from his son in three of the letters and had referred to a previous instance of consensual sex in two others. Armed with the letters, Grandin Senior had gone to the school where Greenleaf was teaching on the morning of September 4, 1988, hauled him out of the classroom, and assaulted him right there in front of the kids. The police were called, at which time Grandin Senior made his charges against Mason. Mason countercharged him with assault. According to the IOs at the scene, Mason took a pretty good beating.

  Greenleaf’s half of the case was then referred to the vice squad. Two detectives, a man named Art Stiehl and my new pal Ron Sabato, were assigned to the investigation. Various interviews were held at the school itself, with other students and teachers. Grandin’s mother was interviewed, and so was Grandin himself at his mother’s home. Although Ira Sullivan had said that Grandin never cooperated with the cops, the IO report indicated that, on the initial interview, Paul had “expressed guilt” about his relationship with Greenleaf without explicitly confirming a sexual liaison. Whatever Paul Grandin, Jr., had said was enough, in combination with the letters themselves, to send the case to a grand jury. Which, in this town, with this kind of charge, meant an automatic indictment.

  Stapled inside the back of the jacket was a frontal mug shot of Greenleaf, taken on the day of his arrest, on the day that Paul Grandin, Sr., had worked him over. I hadn’t paid attention to it when I’d first skimmed the jacket. This time, I did. Behind the bruises—and he was badly banged up—Mason Greenleaf looked like a man who had been condemned to death.

  I closed the jacket on his haunted face. There was a phone stand by the restaurant door. I went over to it and called Dick Lock at CPD Criminalistics.

  “I need another LEADS search,” I said. “Paul Grandin, Jr.”

  I gave him Grandin’s last known address, at his mother’s home on Rue de la Paix in Clifton.

  “What’re we looking for, Harry?” Dick
asked.

  “Anything. Misdemeanor, felony, warrant. And a current address, if you can get one.”

  “I can cross-check with the state BMV for that.”

  “Call me at my office when you have the results. I’ll be in after five.”

  After hanging up on Dick, I paid my chit and walked back out to the car. Paul Grandin, Sr., lived a couple of miles from where I was standing. Even though it was half-past two on a weekday afternoon, I decided to pay him a visit on the off chance that he was home. If he wasn’t, I would leave him a card with a note to call me.

  19

  THERE WAS a gold Mercedes 450 sitting in the carriage circle in front of Paul Grandin, Sr.’s, Indian Hill home. I could see it gleaming through the hedgerow in front of his estate as I turned off Madeira Road into his driveway. Then I saw the house. A huge brick Georgian with a stern Tory look to it, red-cheeked and disapproving.

  A good amount of timbered ground spread out behind and around the house, enough square acreage to convince me that Paul Grandin, Sr., was top United American Soap management or big money law. Way out in the green distance, shimmering like a mirage, a boy was riding a lawn tractor. I watched him loop around a stand of cherry trees, trailing a jet of cuttings behind him that sparkled in the sunlight like the plume of a speedboat.

  The front door was oak and brass with a scalloped window above it set with ruby glass. I lifted the knocker and let it fall. I waited a moment, and when no one answered, I dug a business card out of my wallet, penciled a message to call me on its back, and stuck it in the mailbox. As I turned to the car, I heard a girl shriek with laughter. Her voice startled me enough to make me whirl around. Someone else, a man, shouted, “Goddamn lucky!” And I realized the voices were coming from behind the house.

  A cut-stone path led from the door around the north side of the mansion. I followed it to a concrete landing, where a canopied stairway began its descent to a fenced tennis court in a dell below the house. I listened to the flap of the canvas awning above the stairs and the distant sound of the tennis match and, figuring the worst the Grandins could do was call a cop, started down.

  As I got closer to the court, I could hear the two voices more clearly, along with the pock of a tennis ball and the squeak of shoes on a clay surface. The girl was riding the man mercilessly for losing point after point. From the bile in his voice, he didn’t much like it. As I got to the bottom of the stair, the girl spotted me. She was a very pretty kid, maybe seventeen or eighteen, dressed in blinding white. Ball in hand, she lowered her racket and stared as if I were a unicorn.

  “Serve the goddamn thing,” the man called out to her angrily.

  He couldn’t see me because of a tarp that was strung along his half of the fence, blocking his view of the staircase. But when I got down to ground level, he saw me.

  “What the hell!” he shouted.

  Stalking across the court, he came straight at me. He was a tall man with thin gray hair and a broad, tan, pugnacious face. He wore his hair in a comb-over that he held in place against the breeze with his left hand. He swung the tennis racket menacingly in his right.

  “This is private goddamn property,” he said at the top of his lungs, as he came up close.

  “There wasn’t any sign posted,” I said.

  “The hell there isn’t. Right at the top of the stairs, below the azaleas.”

  “I must have missed it.”

  The man lashed at his comb-over as if he was planting a tent stake. “All right, you’re here. Now what it is you want?”

  “I was looking for Paul Grandin.”

  He slowly lowered his hand from his head and stared at me through sun-streaked eyes. “You’re talking to him. Grandin Senior.”

  “My name is Stoner, Mr. Grandin. I’m a private investigator. I wanted to ask you a few questions about your son, Paul Junior.”

  “Christ almighty,” he said, wincing as if I’d stabbed him with a knife. “I took an ad out in the Enquirer three years ago, making it clear that I am no longer responsible for Paul’s debts. What more do I have to say? His problems are his to solve. I’ve done all I can.”

  “This has nothing to do with debts. I’m working for a woman named Cindy Dorn.”

  “What did he steal from her?” Grandin asked bitterly.

  It was obvious that Paul Grandin, Jr., had meant nothing but trouble for the man for quite a long time.

  The girl had started over toward us. As she came close, I could see that she had the same tan, broad-featured face as Grandin Senior, only what looked pugnacious on him looked like free-spirits in her.

  “Who is it, Dad?” she asked.

  “A private detective, asking about your brother,” he said miserably.

  “I need to get in touch with him,” I said to the girl.

  “Why?”

  I thought about trying to dodge the question, but there was no way around the truth without making the interview more painful than it already was. “Mason Greenleaf killed himself about a week ago. Your brother may have been one of the last people who talked to him before he died.”

  I knew as soon as I said it, there was going to be trouble. Grandin’s face flushed red to the roots of his thin gray hair. Alarmed, his daughter reached a hand out to him.

  “Jesus wept,” the man said in a voice shaking with rage. “You dare to drag that scum who poisoned my son’s life into my house! I ought to kill you!”

  He raised the tennis racket like a club. I grabbed his arm before he could swing at me.

  “Don’t,” I said, staring into his trembling face.

  “Dad, please,” the girl said in a terrified voice. To me she said: “I think you better leave.”

  I let the man’s arm go and turned for the stairs. Grandin walked directly over to a phone, hung from a fence post. “I’m calling the cops, you son of a bitch.”

  I had so much adrenaline going, I didn’t much give a damn what he did—as long as he kept his distance from me. I was already to the top of the stairs when I heard footsteps behind me. I looked back and saw the girl.

  “Wait, please. He won’t call the police.”

  “Yeah? What makes you so sure?”

  “Look.”

  She pointed down to the court. Grandin was sitting on a white stool by the fence, his face in his hands. Even at that distance, I could tell from the movements of his back that he was weeping.

  All the anger drained out of me in an instant.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just doing my job.”

  “You didn’t know about Paul and . . . that man?”

  “I knew there had been some accusations made, several years ago.”

  “That man ruined my brother’s life and destroyed our family,” the girl said flatly. “You can’t expect us to care if he’s dead. We wished him dead.”

  “I only wanted to talk to Paul.”

  “Paul has nothing to do with him anymore. Not for years. It’s crazy to think differently. Who said he was talking to that man?”

  “Someone said he thought he’d seen them talking.”

  “Then he’s mistaken,” she said. “You should go. And please don’t come back. We don’t want to hear that man’s name again.”

  I went over to the car. The girl watched me as I got in.

  “Leave my brother alone,” she called out as I pulled away. “Leave my father alone.”

  I drove off with her voice ringing in my ears. In the space of a few minutes, I’d managed to alienate a young woman and reduce her father to tears of rage—just by mentioning Mason Greenleaf’s name.

  ******

  It had been my plan to stop at Rue de la Paix on my way to town and talk to Paul Grandin, Jr.’s, mother. But after the fiasco in Indian Hill, I decided that there had to be a better way to find the boy than through his family. In spite of all the things I’d heard to the contrary, it appeared to me that the Grandins—or at least the father and daughter—honestly believed that Mason Greenleaf had corrupted Paul. The
kind of hatred I’d seen in Grandin Senior’s face, the bitterness in his daughter’s voice weren’t equivocal testimony. Of course the daughter had been a child when the episode with Mason occurred, and her memories of it had undoubtedly been shaped by her father’s prejudices. Still, the depth of their anger was impressive—and unsettling.

  I stopped at the CPD building on my way to the office to pick up the coroner’s report from Ron Sabato. Sabato wasn’t in. Another cop named Atkins found what I wanted in a file on Ron’s desk.

  Since I was in the building, I stopped at Criminalistics and asked Dick Lock if he’d finished the LEADS search.

  “Computer’s been down most of the afternoon,” he said. “I did the BMV for you before it crashed.”

  He handed me a printout on Paul Grandin, Jr. According to his license application, the boy lived on Klotter Street in Over-the-Rhine. It was a far cry from Indian Hill, so far that it made me wonder if Dick had the right guy. But his age matched up correctly. So did color of hair.

  “This is current?” I asked.

  “Fairly. Renewed two and a half years ago. What’s the problem?”

  “The kid comes from money, is all.”

  “Well, it’s hard times now, Harry,” Lock said.

  20

  LOWER KLOTTER Street runs west off Ravine, on the northern edge of Over-the-Rhine. At one time it, too, had been a slum of crumbling brownstones like most of the north side, but throughout the eighties urban developers had moved in and begun to gentrify the uphill side of the street, the side with the city views. The downhill side, overlooking the burnt-out shell of McMicken, was still mostly Appalachian poor. It made for an odd mix, reflected in the parked cars on the street—half Mazdas and half junkers—and in the pedestrian traffic. As I drove up the block looking for Grandin’s address, I saw a middle-class woman in a business suit unlocking a stout iron gate that barred the door to her condo. Across the block a ten-year-old kid with a cigarette drooping from his pale, old man’s face led a muzzled German shepherd around by a rope.