“That night at the bar with Mason. What happened?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Sully asked me about it last night.”
“Sullivan came up here?”
“Del told him where I was. I guess Mason told Del where he’d taken me. Sully wanted to know if I knew why Mason had gone to the bar on the night he died. I told him I didn’t know. I wasn’t there.”
I felt a chill run up my back. “You weren’t in the bar?”
“How could I be in the bar? I was here that whole day. Mason drove me up and checked me in the morning after Charley kicked me out. I thought Mace had given up on me, too. But do you know what?” The kid looked at me with shining eyes. “He spent that entire weekend trying to find someplace that would take me in. He was all over the place. Here, in Indianapolis, Lexington. You know when you got what I got—sometimes they don’t want to take you. Plus, he had to find someplace private—where the cops wouldn’t find me.
“He was the only one who looked after me. The others—” He laughed bitterly. “Oh, fuck, I deserved it. I deserve it all. I’ve done a lot of bad things. Caused a lot of people pain. People who loved me, tried to help me.”
“Mason, too?”
The kid shut his eyes. “Especially him.”
I got up from the chair. Not wanting to hear the details. Not much caring anymore.
“I haven’t been out of here since Mason checked me in, except to use the phone in the hall to call Nancy,” he said. “Last thing Mason said to me was that everything was going to be all right. That he’d call me in a couple of days. That’s what I told Sully.”
I didn’t tell him about Sullivan. He already had enough pain to look back on.
“So,” he said, folding his hands on his chest, “you gonna go to the cops, now?”
“No. You can stop worrying about them. I’ll see to it.”
He smiled his sickly yellow smile. “Why is it people always look after me? I’ve counted on it my whole life.”
“You counted on it too much, Paul,” I said. “You should’ve looked after yourself.”
He laughed feebly. “Why? When so many people were willing to do it for me?”
28
THE GIRL was waiting just outside the door, her back against the wall, her face in her hands. As I came out, she dropped her hands and stared at me uncertainly, through wet eyes.
“Are you going to help him? Like you said?”
“I’m going to try.”
She swallowed hard. “I’m sorry. I thought you came here to hurt him.”
“It’s my fault. I gave you that impression.”
She put a hand back to her mouth and chewed nervously on a knuckle. “I don’t know how Paul’s going to pay for this—now that that man is dead.”
“Have you talked to your father?”
She laughed forlornly.
“Talk to him,” I said. “This is different. Maybe he’ll listen.”
But I could tell from her look that she had no confidence that she could sway her father.
“If that man hadn’t killed himself,” Nancy Grandin said, “we’d be all right. I just don’t understand him. I don’t understand why he did it.” She looked over her shoulder at the door to her brother’s room. “I don’t understand why he did any of this. It’s so twisted, really. To get Paul started on this way of living. Then try to rescue him when it’s too late.”
“Your brother told you it was Mason who had seduced him?”
“He never talks about it.”
“Then maybe Greenleaf didn’t do it, Nancy. Maybe he just wanted to make amends for other things in his life.”
“But my father found those letters.”
“From what your mother said, they didn’t prove anything.”
She shook her head. “Someone did this to him. Someone he trusted.”
I didn’t say it to the girl, but whether it was Cavanaugh or Greenleaf or some stranger in the dark, the kid had mostly done it to himself.
******
I drove back to town through the rainy cornfields. A tattered mist hung smokily in the distance, trailing from the branches of trees and crawling above the fields. Occasionally it drifted wraithlike across the road. At night, in the same hot drenching rain, the fog had probably cost Ira Sullivan his life.
He’d come up to Columbus looking for what I’d been looking for: an explanation of what had happened to Mason in Stacie’s bar on the night that he died. But he’d known something that I hadn’t known—he’d known that Paul Grandin wasn’t at the bar with Mason. He’d known it because he’d already met one of the men who had actually been at Stacie’s that night. Marlene Bateman had seen them together in the parking lot. He’d only gone to Paul Grandin, Jr., to find out why Mason had met with the other men. It was something I intended to find out, too.
Around one-thirty I got back to town. I took 71 all the way in, getting off at Dana and cutting over to Rose Hill—to Del Cavanaugh’s stone fortress. I pulled up beyond the carriage circle, parked, and walked back to the front door pavilion. The garden to the side of the house, where Cavanaugh and I had sat and talked on Monday morning, was soaked with rain. I could hear it falling in the oak trees, see it dripping from the cast-iron patio furniture. In the rain the old stone house had a look of misery and abandonment.
I rang the bell and waited. After a time the mother answered. She scowled when she saw me.
“He’s sleeping. He can’t be disturbed.”
“Mother?” I heard him call out.
The woman’s face became vibrant with loathing. “I want you to go. I don’t want you bothering him. My God, how much time does he have left?”
“Mother?” Cavanaugh said again.
I saw him appear in the dark wainscoted hall behind her. He was using a walker. He came into the gray light, dragging himself forward with an effort that seemed to me to be exactly commensurate to his mother’s fierce determination to keep me out. It was what his life appeared to have come down to—a daily battle with his mother. For all I knew, that was what his life had always been like.
“Mr. Stoner,” he said, breathing hard with the exertion, “do come in.”
“I don’t want him here,” the mother said, addressing Cavanaugh. “Haven’t you seen enough trouble?”
“Mr. Stoner is not here to start trouble, Mother. He’s here to settle a kind of bet, a little wager I made with him about why our mutual friend did away with himself.”
“Del, you are not responsible,” the mother said icily.
The man raised his arm as if he were going to strike her. “Get out of the light!” he shouted. “Get out of my way!”
She shrank back into the hall, glaring at him. “There will come a time, my boy, when you will need things from me. Keep that in mind.” She turned away and walked stiffly up the hall, directly up a wainscoted staircase—out of sight.
The man stared after her furiously. “She thinks I’m going to need her at the end,” he said, half to himself. “She is quite mistaken. I have remedies of my own for that eventuality. She’ll see.”
Just from the sound of his voice, it seemed to me that he’d deteriorated in the few short days since we’d first spoken. He turned his skeletal face back to me, smiling gruesomely. “Do come in,” he said, triumph burning like candles in his sunken eyes.
I followed him as he pulled himself down a hall, through an opening into a large living room with a stone mantel running half the length of the wall. The French windows on the other wall filled the huge space with diffuse, stormy light.
“This used to be a ballroom in my father’s day,” the man said with a touch of pride. “Many illustrious people played and danced in this room.”
He pulled himself over to a tall leather chair, studded with brass, and sank down into it with a sigh. The soft, flattering light coming through the far windows fleshed out the decay of his face. For just an instant I caught sight of him as he’d once been—young and arrogant and cruelly handsome
.
“Sit,” he said, gesturing to another high-backed chair across from him.
I sat down, smelling the old soaped leather and the dust.
“So,” he said, laying his hands one atop the other on his knee. “Was I right?”
“I suppose you were. But you didn’t tell me the whole story, Del.”
“What fun would that have been for a detective?” he said, grinning.
“Mason came back here again, didn’t he?”
“Yes, I concede he did.”
He wanted me to tease it out of him—just for the fun of watching me flail at the truth.
“He told you about another friend of yours, Paul Grandin, Jr.”
“Poor Paul,” the man said, without a drop of pity in his voice. “I understand he’s experiencing some health problems. I warned him this could happen. I tried to instruct him in taking proper precautions. But you know young people won’t listen.”
I felt a wave of disgust well up in me like nausea. “You seduced him, didn’t you, Del? Back when Mason was living with you?”
The man didn’t say anything.
“That was why Mason left you, wasn’t it? That’s why Mason felt responsible for the boy—and took the solicitation rap for him.”
“Mason’s feeling of responsibility had nothing to do with me,” the man said flatly. “He had his own cross to bear.”
“You mean Ralph Cable.”
“My, my. So many names from the past. Isn’t it odd how infectious the past is? Yours, mine, Mrs. Dorn’s. It all somehow becomes cross-pollinated and interwoven, so that we willy-nilly inherit parts of each other’s history—and live them out as if they were our own story.” The man stared at me with mild contempt. “Do you know what I would do, if I had it in my power? I would have the whole world wired to my heart. And when that heart stopped beating—why, the world itself would wink out.”
“You’re a piece of work, Del.”
“Thank you,” he said, grinning again.
“What did Mason tell you he was going to do, after he’d dropped Paul at that rest home?”
“Ira asked me that very same question, no more than a day ago. Do you know Ira Sullivan, Mason’s lawyer?”
“I know he’s dead.”
The man flinched with his whole body, as if he’d been jolted with electricity. “What do you mean, he’s dead?”
“He was killed on the interstate last night in a car wreck, coming back from Columbus—where you’d sent him, Del.”
Cavanaugh’s face trembled with an emotion so strong that he had to bite his own lip to keep from breaking down. I watched him battle his grief with a mixed feeling of pity and contempt. He’d literally willed himself to stop feeling anything for anyone but himself. But I’d taken him by surprise. With an effort that was almost as impressive as his march past Mom to the front door, he managed to keep from crying out.
“I did not know that,” he said, fighting the tremor in his voice. “I confess I am sorry to hear it. Ira was a . . . friend.”
“He died helping me try to solve this puzzle, Del.”
“Then you must feel quite terribly responsible.”
“I’ve had better days.”
He nodded, as if the high jinks were finally over, as if the news about Sullivan had momentarily blasted him back into the human race.
“Mason came here on Monday evening. He told me what he’d done with Paul. He told me he was going to meet with some people that night and try to settle things for Paul—and himself.”
“What did he mean by that?”
Cavanaugh took a deep breath. “I assumed he was going to talk with the district attorney. Ira had the same impression. Ira had talked to a friend who knew Mason’s problem, someone in the district attorney’s office, and there had been . . . various allegations had been made.”
“What allegations?”
“I honestly don’t know. I just know that he was going to try to resolve the problems that night. So that he and Paul could live out Paul’s final days in peace.”
“He said that?”
“In so many words.”
But I didn’t believe him anymore—not when it came to Mason Greenleaf’s various loves. Cavanaugh’s hatred for Cindy Dorn was so intense that he would have said anything to obliterate her memory of Mason.
When I told him I didn’t believe him, the man stared at me contemptuously, as if I’d ceased to be a worthy adversary. He called out, “Mother! Show Mr. Stoner to the door,” as if he was calling a new opponent into the ring.
29
I WENT back to the office. As soon as I got upstairs, I searched my desk, looking for the little notepad on which I’d scratched the name and address of Ira Sullivan’s last interview—his old friend from the DA’s office. I found it under some loose papers: Connors.
I dialed the DA’s office and got a general secretary who directed my call to Connors’s secretary.
“I’m afraid he’s not in today,” she said, when I asked to speak to her boss. “A good friend of Larry’s was killed in an automobile accident, and he decided not to come in this morning. He’ll be back tomorrow, if you’d like to leave a message.” I told her there was no message.
******
The address that Cherie the Secretary had given me for Larry Connors was on Celestial, catercorner to Mason Greenleaf’s condo on the hill side of the street—a rustic A-frame aerie fronted by large cantilevered wooden porch.
I parked on the street and stepped out onto the sidewalk, staring up the hill at the house. The only way in was through a gated fence, up a long flight of stairs that pierced the porch and ended at Larry Connors’s front door. I went over to the gate, pressed the buzzer on an intercom, and waited.
A moment went by, and a man answered, “Who is it?”
“My name is Stoner, Mr. Connors. I’m a friend of Ira Sullivan’s. He was helping me with a case I’ve been working on—Mason Greenleaf’s suicide.”
“Oh, yes, the detective,” the man said and buzzed me through, as if I’d been expected.
I started climbing the stairs, glancing back halfway up at the row of houses on the opposite side of Celestial, colorless in the gray light. Beyond them, down the hill, I could see the rain falling in the river. By the time I got to the porch, I was breathing hard—it was that much of a climb. A middle-aged man was waiting for me at the door—tall, slim, with silver hair and a haggard, handsome face. He was dressed in a black turtleneck shirt and black pants—a kind of casual mourning. From the look of his eyes, he’d had a tough day.
He waved me through the door into a spacious white room with a cathedral ceiling and a second-story loft on its far wall, railed like a balcony. There wasn’t much furniture in the room, adding to the sense of blank space. The few pieces he had, dark leather sofas and chairs, were tightly grouped in the center of the room—as if they had been gathered there while the painters worked.
“You want a drink, Stoner?” Connors said.
I could hear from his voice that he’d been drinking most of the afternoon. Scotch, judging from his breath.
“I’m okay.”
He went over to a little bar below the loft and poured himself a Cutty in a tall glass, then carried it over to the sofa.
“I’ve been expecting you,” he said, with a look of resignation. “Once I heard about Ira, I expected you.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked him.
“Don’t be coy. I know he talked to you.”
“I never got a chance to talk to him, Mr. Connors. Not in detail.”
The look of resignation on Connors’s face changed abruptly. “He didn’t mention me to you?”
“No.”
“Then what brought you here?”
“Sullivan told me that he’d talked to a witness who had seen Mason before he died. You were the last person Ira talked to before he talked to me.”
The man laughed. “How absurdly simple.”
“There are other reasons I figured it
might be you.”
“Such as?”
“Such as you’re with the DA, and Paul Grandin has problems with the police.”
“What do you know about Paul Grandin’s arrest?”
“Just that he was busted for solicitation a few weeks ago in a Mount Adams bar.”
Connors took another pull of Scotch, chewing on it deliberately, as if he was considering what he was going to do about me. Before I’d told him the truth, he’d clearly assumed I had leverage on him—something Sullivan had confided to me that would compel him to cooperate. Without that leverage I had no way of forcing him to tell me what he knew. I had to hope that Sullivan’s unexpected death would weigh in my favor. Connors clearly cared enough about the man to have stayed home from work—and gotten drunk—after hearing about the accident.
After a time he leaned back in the chair with a heavy sigh.
“Look, I don’t have to say anything to you at all.”
“I know that.”
“But I promised Sully I’d . . . talk to you. Given what happened, I guess I ought to live up to the promise.”
“You know something about Paul Grandin’s arrest?”
“I know that there’s some question whether he was actually soliciting anyone when he was busted,” the man said, crossing his legs and resting the tumbler on his knee. “He claimed that he was being harassed by the police.”
“How harassed?”
The man sighed. “How cops usually harass homosexuals—by roughing them up. One of the officers recognized Grandin from a previous arrest. He started giving Grandin a hard time outside the bar. Grandin ran back inside to escape him and was collared in the john of the bar.”
“Who told you this?”
“Mason Greenleaf. I had a talk with him late one Wednesday night. At his house.” He nodded toward the window, at Celestial Street. “The Grandin boy had come to Mason, looking for help earlier that week. Mason called me on Tuesday, asking me to look into it. After I nosed around, we talked it over on his porch the following night. I told him the truth: There was no way to prove the kid’s story about the alleged harassment, not with the cop’s partner backing him up all the way.”
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