Missing

by Jonathan Valin

  But he didn’t say it with much hope in his voice. Turning away, Fred Davis closed the door on me—and my questions.

  I walked back across Ida, up the grass hill to the Playhouse. I went into the building through the main entrance and found a pretty blond usher stacking programs in a ticket booth. I asked her where I could find Steve Meisel. She smiled at me as if I was a little lost boy.

  “Through that corridor,” she said, pointing to her right. “The last office on the left.”

  I followed her directions to Meisel’s office, down a hall filled with framed posters of past Playhouse productions lit softly by a skylight. The door to Meisel’s suite was half open. Through it I could see a tall, gangly man with a lumpy face sitting at a desk, reading a script. He had a pair of half-frame glasses on the tip of his nose, with a chain lavaliere attached to either earpiece. I knocked lightly.

  “I’m busy just now,” the man said, without looking up.

  “I’ll only take a minute or two,” I said, edging into the room.

  Meisel turned toward me, the pages of script drooping in his hand.

  “My name is Stoner,” I said before he could get started. “I’m looking for an employee of yours, Paul Grandin.”

  He was primed to get angry—I could see it in his face. But at the mention of Grandin’s name, the anger seemed to evaporate. Reaching up, he lifted the reading glasses from his nose and let them drop on their chain at his chest. He put the script down, too, delicately on the crowded desktop.

  “Are you with the police?” he asked.

  “I’m a private investigator.”

  “What has he done, now?” the man said in a dead voice—sounding like Grandin’s father, like Tim Bristol, like Freddy Davis.

  “I just need to talk to him. A friend of his committed suicide, and I need to talk to him.”

  Meisel shook his head. “I can’t help you. I let Paul go about two and a half weeks ago.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “All sorts of reasons. He seldom showed up for work, for one thing. He was in a production we had staged for the schools—a little piece of propaganda about AIDS and drugs. It wasn’t a stretch, but it was a steady paycheck for a very small amount of work. Sometime late this spring, Paul decided that even that was too much of a demand on his time. Once or twice a week he’d make the performance. The rest of the time, we had to have his understudy fill in. Paul claimed he’d been sick with the flu, but he was never too sick to make the scenes in the bars—or to steal whatever wasn’t nailed down around the set. Frankly, he’d caused so much trouble over the past two or three years that I should have fired him a long time ago.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  The man smiled ruefully. “Paul has a way of making you feel responsible for his problems, even though you know rationally that you’re not. It’s the kind of wounded helplessness that children have, when they’re hurt or bewildered. You feel the need to help them, even if they’ve brought the trouble on themselves. It was Paul’s peculiar charm. And I guess I was a sucker for it.”

  Mason Greenleaf had fallen for the Grandin charm, too. Only in Greenleaf’s case there was a mixed history of guilt and obligation behind it that had apparently made Paul Grandin’s appeal undeniable.

  “Can you tell me why you asked me if I was a cop when I first came in?”

  “That’s not something I’m at liberty to discuss,” the man said uneasily.

  “Did it have something to do with why you fired him?”

  “Not really. It had to do with Paul alone, and a comeuppance that he had been courting for too long. For most of his life.”

  “Did this happen recently, this thing with the law?”

  “I told you, I can’t discuss it. And I won’t.” The man picked up the script and placed his reading glasses back on his nose.

  “You don’t have any idea where Paul is living now, do you?”

  Meisel shook his head. ‘‘I haven’t seen him since I let him go. And don’t expect to see him again. Unless I go to his funeral. Which I probably would do. What Paul is isn’t all Paul’s fault. He had some encouragement along the way.”

  As I walked back out of the office I wondered whether, wittingly or not, Mason Greenleaf had been part of that encouragement.

  ******

  It was almost seven when I got back to the office. There was a message from Cindy, asking me to call. Before phoning her, I dialed Dick Lock at CPD Criminalistics. I wanted to know exactly what the trouble was that Steve Meisel had been hinting at. It didn’t take long to find out.

  “Yeah, I ran a LEADS on the kid,” Dick said, after I asked him whether he’d pulled Paul Grandin’s rap sheet. “Turns out he’s a right nasty little customer. The computer came back on line a couple hours ago and spat out a list of priors. Two solicitations and three possession busts in six years.”

  “Possession of what?”

  “Grass and cocaine. On the grass, he got off with a couple of speeding tickets. The coke, he got probated. The first solicitation was dropped. The second one is currently pending. He’s got a prelim next month.”

  “How come the first charge was dropped?”

  “He was eighteen when it happened, so maybe his age was a factor. Also he comes from a political family. His dad’s a bigwig Republican, Paul Grandin, Sr. Ran for council once, about ten years ago.”

  “The first solicitation bust,” I asked. “When was that?”

  “August 31, 1988. In Mount Storm Park. The kid brushed up against the wrong guy in a public john—an undercover cop from Vice.”

  Paul Grandin, Sr., had assaulted Greenleaf on September 4, just a few days after Grandin, Jr.’s, arrest for soliciting a cop. The father’s fury made better sense against the background of the son’s solicitation bust. It also explained why he had torn through his wife’s apartment and his son’s effects. He was looking for a reason—for something or someone he could blame for his son’s disgrace. He’d found those letters and found his man in Mason Greenleaf. Whether his suspicions about Greenleaf were justified was still an open question. But I doubted that the father would have needed much incentive to leap to conclusions about him—or to hold fast to those conclusions, even in the face of his son’s subsequent misbehavior. It was a lot easier than blaming himself.

  “This second bust,” I said to Dick. “When did it occur?”

  “About a month ago. June 29. In Mount Adams. The kid was in a bar and cruised the wrong guy again—an undercover cop out of Vice. He was in the clink overnight and is currently free on bond.”

  Clearly that was the trouble that Steve Meisel had refused to talk about. And it was big trouble for Paul Grandin, Jr. It was probably what he’d been discussing with Mason Greenleaf on the afternoon that Lee Marks had seen them in the Nine Mile auditorium—at least the timing was close to right. It must have shaken Greenleaf to the core. Paul Grandin coming to him with a solicitation charge hanging over his head could only have brought back terrible memories. Some of the worst memories of Mason Greenleaf’s life. It made much better sense of that week he’d spent before he disappeared, his restlessness, his bad dreams. And the fact that he’d ended up in that bar with Grandin on the night of his suicide suggested that Paul had somehow succeeded in making his problems Mason’s problems again. I wondered if perhaps Greenleaf had posted bond for him—made himself legally responsible for the kid.

  “You don’t have any indication of who went bail, do you?” I asked.

  “Just a second,” Dick said.

  He came back on a moment later. “His mother. Sarah Grandin.”

  “Is she still on Rue de la Paix?”

  “Check.”

  After I finished with Dick Lock, I returned Cindy’s call. Given the unremitting ugliness of the last few hours, it was a pleasure to hear her voice.

  “I was just checking in,” she said, “to see how you were.”

  “Better, now that I’m talking to you,” I said.

  I started to tell he
r about Paul Grandin, then decided against it. I didn’t really know what part he’d played in Greenleaf’s suicide—just that he’d played a part. Until I knew the details, I didn’t want her to have to face another betrayal from another lover.

  “You’ll be coming here tonight?” she asked hopefully.

  “I’ll try. I still haven’t talked to Ira Sullivan.”

  “Look, if you don’t want to spend the night, I’ll understand,” she said, trying out her candor again—or pretending to. “This thing’s happened pretty fast between us, and maybe you need some time to think it through.”

  “I told you how I felt this morning.”

  “You didn’t have to say that, you know. I don’t need to be reassured all the time.”

  “For chrissake.”

  She laughed. “Actually, I do need to be reassured all the time. Seriously, if it gets too late, you go ahead and crash at your place.”

  “Why don’t you just come to my apartment? Make things simple?”

  “Come, like for the night?”

  “For as long as you want. Go home, come back. Like you did with Mason.”

  She thought it over for a moment. “Yeah. I’d like that. Being here alone, with the card tables and the tea rings and the bad memories has been exhausting. It would be nice to be somewhere new for a while. To be with you. Meet your things.”

  “You’ll find them everywhere,” I said. “You’ll also find a key under the welcome mat.”

  “That’s not very detectivelike.”

  “I’m not always very detectivelike. Make yourself at home. I’ll call if I’m going to be late.”

  “Harry,” Cindy Dorn said, “you don’t have to do this, you know? I’ve been living with somebody for three years, but this is a big change for you.”

  “I want to do it,” I told her. “I want a change.”

  22

  I WENT down to Wah Mee’s on Sixth Street and had some supper without my usual double Scotch chaser. I had a single Scotch instead.

  There were some things about myself I couldn’t change as quickly as I had a roommate. Some things Cindy Dorn would have to accept. Or so I told myself. But I did feel a little like I had suddenly developed an eye over my shoulder. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. I hadn’t felt like anybody’d been watching for years. Who wants to watch somebody drink?

  It was close to eight when I stepped back out onto Sixth. I walked west up to the Parkade, through the powdery twilight with its mix of late sun and early streetlamp. The temperature had dropped to a velvety touch with a breezy promise of rain in the air. I figured I’d stop at Sullivan’s brownstone and check the office again for messages, before going home. It had been a long time since I’d thought pleasantly about going home. It was where I went when I couldn’t go anywhere else. Last call of the day.

  I got the car out of the garage and headed north up the Parkway—all the way to Ludlow. Dark was falling in earnest, as I coaxed the Pinto up the steep hill to the gaslight district and circled around Telford to Sullivan’s building. I parked in the ivory pale of a fluted gas lamp and walked up to the front door of the bundled-up apartment house. There was no one in the dim lobby. Just in case, I went over to the brass mailboxes and looked up Marlene Bateman, Sullivan’s nanny. She was in apartment 21, two doors down from Ira.

  I climbed the marble stairs to the second floor and walked down the hall to Sullivan’s door without hearing a peep. Not the cricketing of television sets, or the dull drum of stereos, or even the rattle of bolts being shot in answer to my footsteps. The hallway was as still as a still life. It was a good place for a man like Sullivan to hide out.

  Given what Cherie the Secretary had said about him, I figured that Ira was as unlikely to answer his door as he was to answer his phone, so I rapped hard. When no one responded, I sidled two doors down and knocked again. A black-haired woman with dark eyes and a high-cheeked, vaguely Indian-looking face answered my knock. She was wearing a robe cinched tightly at her waist.

  “Can I help you?”

  I told her who I was and who had sent me—like I was trying to get into the back room of a pool hall. She smiled as if she were used to fielding calls for Ira Sullivan.

  “I haven’t seen Sully since last night,” she said. “He went out around ten-thirty, just as I was coming in from the movies. I waved at him in the parking lot, but I don’t think he saw me.”

  “Was he alone?”

  The woman laughed. “Nooo. He had a man with him. Gray hair, rather distinguished. I must admit, I thought he was a little too distinguished for Sully.”

  Clearly she found her friend’s company amusing, although if she knew anything about the Greenleaf case, she wouldn’t have. I didn’t know how Ira Sullivan had found him, but the man sounded like the older guy from Stacie’s bar. I was almost certain that the younger blond had been Paul Grandin himself. If Sullivan made the same connection, it could explain why he had thought there was something odd about Greenleaf’s last night on earth.

  “They drove off together,” the woman went on. “I assume Sully must’ve come back late and gone out again early, because his car was gone this morning.”

  The woman gave me a searching look. “You’re being so mysterious, Mr. Stoner. Is something wrong?”

  “I don’t think so. I just need to talk to Ira.”

  I dug into my wallet and pulled out a card.

  “If Sullivan comes back later tonight, would you mind phoning me? It’s rather important.”

  “If it’s not too late, I’ll tell him to call you,” the woman said.

  ******

  I hadn’t wanted to confront another Grandin so soon after the scene at the tennis court, but given his legal problems, it had occurred to me that Paul might stick closer to home. According to Tim Bristol, Mom had always been a port in a storm—and she had already gone bail for him. Luckily, the woman’s condo was only a few long blocks to the south of Telford, back down Ludlow in a little hairpin cul-de-sac pretentiously called Rue de la Paix. Rue de la Paix didn’t exist until up to ten years ago, when a contractor decided to build a posh highrise overlooking Cincinnati Technical College. I always assumed the fancy French name was meant to console people for the view—and the bite out of their wallet.

  I parked on the street in the too-sweet breath of a honeysuckle and walked up a short cement stair to the apartment house outer lobby. I found the woman’s name on a buzzer box and rang her number. After a moment she answered in a weary, vaguely boozy voice. It was a sound I knew too well. The sound of five or six straight shots on an empty stomach.

  “What is it?”

  “My name is Stoner, Mrs. Grandin. I’m looking for your son, Paul.”

  “Are you the police?” she said, as if that was the one and only natural response to his name.

  Since it sounded like that would get me in—and I had strong reason to believe the truth wouldn’t—I told her I was a cop.

  “This is about the bond I posted?” she said almost hopefully.

  I told her it was about the bond and she buzzed me in.

  The inner lobby was a far cry from Ira Sullivan’s old mahogany address. Plate glass and tessellated tile, overhead fluorescents, flock wallpaper, stainless fixtures—like something unfortunate and modern in a Jacques Tati film.

  Sarah Grandin lived on the twelfth floor, near the top of the highrise. The woman was waiting for me in the hall just outside the elevator doors. She had big, strawberry blond hair inflated in a bouffant around her small, nervous triangular face. Her hair was so large and her face so tiny, she looked like a child’s foot in an oversize shoe. She wore a red silk kimono over a gold silk camisole—and smelled like juniper and Chanel.

  “I thought this had all been taken care of by my lawyer,” she said, rocking a bit unsteadily. Her blue eyes were heavy with drink, and she kept blinking them open, alarmingly wide, as she struggled to focus.

  “There are some details,” I said, not liking the lie but stuck with it.
r />   “Well, c’mon.”

  She turned around, almost buckling at one knee, and walked ahead of me up a hall to a door that opened on a white-on-white living room, as fleecy as down lining.

  “Sit,” she said, pointing to a couch that framed a glass coffee table. There was a bottle of Gilbey’s sitting on the table—no glass or tumbler—and a pair of tufted mules and a book, Striptease, on the floor beneath it. The woman waggled over to the couch and dropped like a piano onto pavement.

  “That’s better, huh?” she said, encouraging herself. She blinked wide at me and asked, “What is it? You said the bond?”

  “Some questions. Routine questions.”

  She nodded as if I made sense.

  “When’s the last time you saw your son?”

  She stared at the gin, as if the answer was inside—like a note in a bottle.

  “A few weeks ago,” she said. “After he was arrested. He came . . . he needed some money. I gave him what I could.”

  “He’s not staying here with you now, then?”

  “Is he supposed to?” she said with a pained look, afraid she’d inadvertently given him away.

  “No. He just has to stay in the city.”

  Maybe out of a fear that she was going to say something else that damaged her boy’s chances, she made an effort to summon up sobriety. I watched her do it, blinking her eyes, stretching her mouth, straightening up on the couch.

  “Wha’d you say your name was?” she asked.

  “Stoner. Harry Stoner.” I had an old deputy’s badge that I saved for these occasions. I showed it to her, pocketed it without pride, and took out my notebook. “At the time your son was arrested, do you know where he was living?”

  “Here and there. He had several friends in Mount Adams. I don’t remember the names.” She extended one arm along the top of the sofa, in a ludicrous attempt to look more relaxed. “You know this whole thing was a terrible mistake. This thing in the bar. Paulie wasn’t . . . he was just joking.”

  “He was arrested for soliciting once before, Mrs. Grandin.”

  “That charge was dismissed,” she said immediately.