“You’re kidding.” She came out of the kitchen nook with a skillet in her hand.
“We know where he was, now, over that weekend. Traveling around.”
The fact was, I could now account for all of his time from the Thursday meeting with Mulhane and Del Cavanaugh to the Monday rendezvous at Stacie’s bar.
Cindy stared at me in bewilderment. “Why was he doing that?”
“Maybe he was looking for Grandin.”
“But I thought you said Paul was in Cincinnati that weekend, staying with various friends.”
“Perhaps Mason didn’t know that.”
She shook her head. “If Mason had wanted to find Paul, he could have. I mean, he did, didn’t he? On Monday night?”
“Then I don’t understand this. I mean, did he have special friends in these places? Friends he might have wanted to say goodbye to?”
She turned away, going back inside the kitchen. I’d upset her by implying that Greenleaf might have been planning to kill himself for days. After a moment I heard her say, “No. He didn’t know anyone that well in any of those places.”
I stared at the MasterCard charge slips. Indianapolis, Lexington, Columbus. The only things they had in common were that they were within a few hours’ driving distance of each other, and they were major cities. He’d spent a day in each one. And whether or not he’d been looking for Grandin, he’d been looking for something he couldn’t find in Cincinnati—something he couldn’t confide to Cindy or Sullivan or any of his friends.
I didn’t bring the subject up again. The way things had gone that morning, I didn’t want to upset her any further.
We had breakfast at the trestle table. It was the first time I had breakfast there since I’d moved in. I think it was odder for me than it was for her.
“You’ll have to get used to it,” she said, smiling, “if you plan for me to keep coming over.”
“I’ll make the adjustment.”
“I don’t want to make you change too fast, Harry. You can take a few days off. Think about it. Get used to waking up to somebody in your bed.”
“You know, when I got in last night,” I said, “it was goddamn wonderful to find you in my bed.”
She looked pleased. “Yeah?”
“I never liked being alone all that much, Cindy. The kind of work I do, the hours I keep—I got used to it. Of course, there’s a lot of company in a fifth of Scotch.”
She lowered her eyes. “I don’t care if you drink.”
“You might if you saw me drunk. I’ve been drinking pretty steadily since I got back from Viet Nam.”
She didn’t say anything.
“There are things you see, things you do . . .”
“I don’t need to know,” she said softly.
“Maybe you don’t. But they’ve gotten in the way of my relationships in the past.”
The phone rang suddenly, making her jump. I went into the living room and picked up the receiver. It was Nancy Grandin.
“Why did you tell my father about Paul?” she said with such anguish in her voice that I felt ashamed.
“Nancy, I had to. I have to talk to Paul.”
“Dad’s just crazy with thinking about it. He’s so upset. I don’t know what to do.” She sobbed. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Meet me and let me explain. Then decide.”
“You said you were going to go to the police.”
“Not if I can talk to him first.”
“I don’t believe you. Everyone’s against him, and he’s got such terrible problems.”
“I’m going to come to your house.”
“No!” she cried. “Not here. I don’t know what Dad would do if he saw you here.”
“Then where?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Calm down,” I said. “I just want to talk to him. I won’t go to the police if I can talk to him. There’s a Frisch’s in Kenwood—near your house. You know what I’m talking about?”
“Yes.”
I glanced at my watch. “I’ll meet you there in the parking lot in half an hour. You let me explain. I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do.”
I said it. But it wasn’t true. We both knew it.
26
BEFORE LEAVING the house, I told Cindy I’d call her when I had the chance. “I’ll probably go back to Finneytown,” she said, as if the novelty of being in my house had worn off quickly. It didn’t surprise me, as I had brought all the troubles she’d been trying to escape, and some new ones, home with me.
We kissed good-bye at the door.
“I didn’t mean to cut you off before,” she said, resting her head on my chest. “About your work.”
“It’s not for you,” I said.
“You ought to be able to talk about it—to somebody.”
“Maybe when we know each other better.”
“You’ll be careful, right?” she said, putting her hand on my cheek. “Because this is still scaring me. This kid’s scaring me. People seem to die around him.”
She wasn’t wrong about that.
******
Because of the rain, it took me a little over a half an hour to drive out 71 to Kenwood Road. I wasn’t sure Nancy Grandin was going to be there when I pulled into the restaurant parking lot, but she was there, sitting in the gold Mercedes, chewing on her knuckles and looking red-eyed and miserable. I parked beside her car and got out, walking over to her window.
“Let’s go inside. I’ll buy you coffee.”
“I don’t drink coffee,” she said. “I’m just seventeen.”
“Then I’ll buy you a Coke.”
She opened the car door and got out into the rain. She was dressed jauntily in jeans and a pearl silk blouse. But all frightened kids look alike. And she was terrified. I took her inside, back to a vinyl booth looking out through a picture window on the rainy lot. A waitress in taffeta brought her a Coke and me a coffee. Nancy Grandin stared at the drink as if it were poisoned.
“God, if Dad knew I was here.”
“He still loves your brother, doesn’t he?”
“Of course he does,” she said, her eyes flashing.
“Then he wants what’s best for him.”
“He doesn’t understand Paul. No one does.”
She sounded exactly like her mother. Only, when her mother said the same words, they had a hollow, self-serving sound. I didn’t have a doubt that Nancy Grandin meant them from the bottom of her heart.
“Mason Greenleaf tried to help him.”
“Sure,” she said with a snort. “Because he was guilty for what he did to him.”
“Did Paul tell you that?”
“No. He’s brainwashed. That man cast a spell on him.”
I had the feeling it was the other way around, but I didn’t want to argue with her.
“Paul loved him,” she said grudgingly. “He doesn’t realize how his life was ruined by him.”
“How did he ruin his life, Nancy?”
“I can’t tell you. But he did.”
It was a little late in the day to be keeping Paul Grandin’s homosexuality secret. But I could understand her reluctance to talk about it. And I didn’t want to force her into a betrayal that would scare her off completely.
“He tried to help Paul,” she conceded. “But it was too little, too late.”
“Does Paul know that Mason is dead?”
The girl sucked in her breath. “He tried to kill himself when he read about it. It made the newspapers up there, too.”
“You mean in Columbus.”
“Oh, fuck,” she said, angry at herself for giving it away.
“Look, I already know he’s in Columbus.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because a friend of Mason’s went to look for him there.”
The girl put a stubbornly blank look on her face. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Nancy, you do know what I’m talking about.
Your brother was in a bar with Mason on the night he died, along with another man. They had an argument, and after that argument, Mason killed himself.”
“You’re wrong. Paul doesn’t know anything about it.”
“Then let me talk to him.”
“He can’t see people.”
“Why not?”
“Because he can’t.” She glanced out the window and threw a hand to her mouth. “Oh, my God.”
I looked through the plate glass and saw another Mercedes pull into the lot. Paul Grandin, Sr., was behind the wheel. He searched for Nancy’s car and, when he spotted it, skidded to a stop.
“You gotta go,” she said hysterically. “If he sees you here, he’ll do something crazy. Please.”
“You tell me how to get in touch with your brother, and I’ll go.”
“Please,” she said desperately. “I’ll call you. I promise.”
She brushed around the side of the table and ran up the aisle toward the door. I watched through the window as she ran out into the lot. When he spotted her, her father got out of his car. She went up to him, and he grabbed her by the arms, shaking her. I could see him talking angrily to her and glancing, right and left, looking for me.
Maybe she told him I’d left. Maybe she told him some other story. But after some more shaking and violent talk, he calmed down. I could almost see the flow of power reverse itself, as if it was draining out of him and into her. She kept talking to him, gently, reassuringly. It came to me that Nancy Grandin was the real emotional center of that family. After a while she led her father over to his car. She kissed him on the cheek as he got in. Then she got into her car.
Grandin drove out of the lot. Nancy stared after him through the windshield, then glanced quickly through the plate-glass window at me. I threw a couple of dollars down on the table and got up as she started the Mercedes. I made it to the front window in time to see her turn onto the expressway, heading north—away from her Indian Hill home.
27
I DIDN’T know whether Nancy Grandin eventually planned to call me or not. But I couldn’t take the chance that she would try to warn her brother off before I’d talked to him. From the letter he’d written to Greenleaf, it didn’t look as if he had ready access to a phone. Which meant that he would have to call her on some sort of prearranged schedule—or she would have to drive to him.
That, and the fact that she was a frightened child, was what I was counting on. She was no fool, but between me and her father, she’d been terrified enough to bolt to her brother in Columbus. Columbus was the general direction she’d been headed when she left the restaurant. And it was the direction I headed as soon as I got the Pinto started, following her onto north 71.
I wasn’t sure I had her until I got to Wilmington—a good twenty minutes beyond Kenwood. Up until then, I was wondering how far I was willing to push it before going back. Nancy Grandin could have turned off at any number of exits without me knowing it. But as it happened, she hadn’t turned off. I topped a rise and spotted her gold Mercedes in the distance—still running due north, running scared. After that, it was just a question of hanging back and waiting for her to get to wherever it was she was running to.
An hour and a half went by, full of flooded cornfields and solitary trees standing like gibbets in the hazy distance. A few miles south of Columbus, she turned off the expressway onto a state road. I almost missed the exit in the monotony of rain and flat, dripping fields. I managed to edge over to the ramp just as she turned west, crossing an overpass above me and heading into a short commercial strip. Golden arches and Pizza Huts and the usual skeletal plazas of gas stations and convenience stores. I lost her for a moment, then caught her again where the little stretch of Quonsets died off over a hump of railroad tracks into a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood: large frame houses, trim yards, an inviting look of prosperity even in the pouring rain. About a mile in front of me, I saw her turn left into a driveway. There was a sign posted on the side of the road where she turned off. I couldn’t see it clearly until I was almost on top of it: EAST VIEW NURSING HOME.
When I got to the sign, I turned onto the short drive, following it down to a low brick building with a canopied entrance. I saw Nancy’s Mercedes parked in a slot near the door. I found an empty slot of my own and parked.
I walked through the rain down the drive to the canopied entranceway. There was a reception counter inside the door, manned by a nurse. Hallways with numbered doors on them led away from the nurses’ station to the right and left. The place looked spruce and clean on the surface, but the hallway smelled of incontinence, old age, and death.
“Can I help you?” the nurse said.
I didn’t know how Paul Grandin had disguised himself, as an employee or a patient. I tried employee first, thinking it made the best sense. “I’m looking for a friend who works here—Paul Grandin, Jr.”
The nurse gave me an odd look. “Paul doesn’t work here. He’s a patient.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I haven’t seen him in a while, and when I found out he was at East View, I just assumed, because of his age, he was an employee.”
The woman made a concerned face. “You obviously haven’t seen Paul in a while, have you?”
I told her what she expected to hear. “No.”
“Then you better prepare yourself for a bit of a shock. “He’s . . . not well.”
Her look and her tone of voice left no doubt that his condition was serious. I began to have a very unsettled feeling about Paul Grandin, Jr., And Mason Greenleaf.
“What room?” I asked.
“Down the hall to your right. Number one twelve. I believe his sister is with him just now. I saw her come in a few moments ago.”
I went down the hall, past doors opening on empty rooms. Men and women sitting in wheelchairs, staring vacantly at televisions, at the rainy windows. Room 112 was around a corner, a little way down another long dreary corridor. I could hear the girl talking as I got closer to the door. She was talking about me.
“He said he’d go to the police.”
“What difference does it make?” a man said in a listless tenor voice. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I came to the door and looked in. The sister was sitting with her back to me. The young man sprawled on the bed in front of her was wearing a blue hospital gown. His handsome face was drawn and heavily circled under the eyes. He saw me in the doorway and smiled.
“You’re the one, aren’t you?” he said.
The girl whirled around in the chair. When she saw me, she flushed. Leaping to her feet, she whirled and came at me as if she wanted to claw my face.
“Nancy, stop,” the boy said to her.
“You tricked me!” she said to me between her teeth. “You have no right! No right! Goddamn you!”
“Nancy,” her brother said again in a calm voice. “Leave us alone. I want to talk to him.”
She turned her head, glancing at her brother, then pushed past me, her head averted, out into the hall.
“Come closer,” Paul Grandin, Jr., said. “I can’t wear my contacts anymore, so I don’t see worth a damn.”
I went over by the bed.
“You’re the detective, aren’t you?”
I nodded.
He pointed to the chair his sister had been sitting in. His wrists were bandaged with gauze and tape. When he saw me staring at them, he smiled, showing yellow teeth. “When I heard about Mason, I went a little . . . crazy.”
“When did you hear about him?” I asked, sitting down on the chair.
Up close, he looked considerably worse than he had from the doorway. Haggard, sallow, sweaty, as if he were wasting with fever.
“A few days ago. I saw something in a newspaper.” The kid took a deep, labored breath. “He shouldn’t have done it.”
“What?”
“Tried to help me. I didn’t think he was going to. I didn’t think anyone was. But he knew I was sick from last year—when we first came up here to
have the bloodwork done.”
“Last year?”
The boy nodded. “I hadn’t been well for a while. I was getting a lot of colds. I half knew that it was the beginning of—what it is. I just wanted to let the thing run its course. But he made me come with him up to Presbyterian Memorial. So Tim wouldn’t find out, so they wouldn’t know at work. So I wouldn’t lose my friends and the job.”
“This would have been last summer?” I said, thinking about that first time that Mason Greenleaf had dropped out of Cindy’s life. He’d said he’d gone home.
“Yeah, I guess. Summer or fall. After I found out, I moved out of Timmy’s house. I couldn’t keep being with him. After that I couldn’t . . . be with anybody. So I bummed around from place to place. Freddy. That prick Rodner.”
“You have HIV?” I said, saying what was obvious from one look at him.
“I got full-blown AIDS is what I got, mister.” Paul Grandin, Jr., turned his head away, toward the gray window. Through it, you could see the backyard of a neighboring house, with a white swing-set dripping rain. “Can’t keep it secret anymore.”
It was why he’d left Tim Bristol, why he’d missed so much work. Why he’d ended up getting fired by Steve Meisel, who thought he’d been goldbricking.
“Toward the end there, it was more trouble to fake being well than it was worth. I had to make a lot of excuses to a lot of people. It was lonely—not being able to make contact. It was almost a relief to get busted.”
“Do the cops know that you have AIDS?”
“They know what they know—that I was a previous offender. The guy who busted me, he was the same one from before.” The kid laughed. “Like I’m stupid enough to hit on the same cop twice.”
I stared at the boy. “Are you saying you were set up?”
“I’m saying it doesn’t make a difference anymore.” He moved around in the bed, propping himself on the pillow as he stared out at the swings and the scattering of flowers and shrubs. “It’s a gray day. It makes me think of the past.”
Even though his life had led him to that hospital bed, even though he’d betrayed just about everyone he’d ever known, I started to feel sorry for Paul Grandin, Jr. He was just too young to be looking back.
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