Book Read Free

Missing

Page 21

by Jonathan Valin


  31

  I GOT to Arnold’s bar a little past eight, found a booth in the back, and ordered a Scotch. It was a rainy weekday night, and I was almost alone in the tap room. Just me and a college-aged couple having their dinner.

  Around eight-thirty, Ron Sabato came into the bar. He looked right and left, spotted me, and came over to the booth, slipping into the seat across from mine. He studied my face for a time, straightening the shirt cuffs beneath his sport jacket.

  “You wearing a wire, Stoner?”

  I shook my head.

  “Open your shirt.”

  I unbuttoned my shirt, enough so that he could see there was nothing taped to my chest.

  “Roll up your sleeves.”

  “I’m not wired, Ron.”

  A waitress came up, and he switched on a smile.

  “Double Chiv, straight up, honey.”

  She went off to get his drink. Sabato looked back at me as I rebuttoned the shirt.

  “It’s on me,” he said, pointing to my drink.

  The girl brought him back his double. He pulled some bills out of his wallet and waved his hand across the table. “Take out for both,” he said. “Run a tab with the change.”

  “That’s generous of you, Ron.”

  He slicked his gray hair down, running his hands back from the corner of his hatchet face. “Yeah, well, I’m a generous guy.” He cribbed the drink in his hands and stared into the shot glass. “This shit is going to kill me. I like it too much. You know?”

  I nodded. “I’ve got the same thirst.”

  “That night we’re talking about, for instance. Too much hooch. You stop thinking, reacting.” He breathed out heavily through his nostrils, picking the shot glass up and taking a sip. “The stuff you see.”

  He took a long swallow, almost emptying it, then lowered the glass on the table and ran his right forefinger around its rim.

  “Let me put you a hypothetical. Just—two cops talking shop in a bar. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s say you and your partner catch the night watch up on the Hill. You ever work night on the Hill?”

  “No.”

  “Well, let me tell you, right away you’re not crazy about the duty, ‘cause of the queers and the hassle.” He dug into his coat pocket and pulled out a wrinkled pack of Raleighs, shaking one out onto the table. Stowing the pack, he picked up the cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. “A lot of these guys have the virus nowadays, but they don’t tell you they have it. You bust them, and they start to holler: Why me? Why me? You try to cuff them, and they go nuts because they’ve been down most of their lives and they’ve got nothing left to lose. I mean, they can throw screaming, clawing fits you wouldn’t believe. Just lay a hand on them, and they spit at you, bite you, get blood on you. Try to give you their fucking life history. I mean, it happens all the time.”

  He plucked a book of matches from the ashtray, opened it, and struck a match, lighting the cigarette in a cloud of acrid smoke and tossing the matchbook back on the table. “So you and your partner are on a lousy shift,” he said, wincing at the smoke. “It’s late, toward the end of a long night. You’re cruising St. Greg, and your partner spots a queer he busted for soliciting—years back. The kid’s talking to another queer in an alley off a bar. There’s some money showing. You figure drugs and pull over to roust them. The kid sees you, and right away he runs—I mean, he bolts like he’s holding. He ducks into the side door of the bar, and when you run him down in the john, he’s flushing shit down the toilet. Now you know he’s a guilty son of a bitch. But you don’t have a case, because he flushed the shit down the toilet. So what do you do?”

  He held the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, scribbling the air with it like it was a piece of chalk. “You can’t let him walk—not after you’ve seen him flush the shit away. And you can’t rightly hold him for possession. So you bust him for whatever—for peddling his ass, which with this kid is a pretty sure bet. You go to cuff him, and the kid gets hysterical. I mean, like he’s lost his parents at the fair. You try to talk to him. But he won’t hold still and he won’t listen. In a minute or so, there’s going to be trouble from other fags in the bar. What’re you supposed to do? Your partner, who maybe isn’t as patient as you are, gets tired of this shit and gives the kid a hard shot in the belly—just to freeze him up so you can slip the cuffs on. You don’t know it, but this kid is sick and the shot makes him throw up all over the fucking place. He bites his tongue. He pisses on himself. I mean, we got blood and shit all over us. And with this shit, you’re not so sure it’s gonna wash out—you know what I’m saying?

  “Anyway, the aggravation puts your partner in a real bad mood about this kid. I mean, he’s going to put him away. Period. End of case.”

  “So a few weeks go by,” he said, dashing the cigarette into the ashtray and gesturing with his other hand to the waitress. “The kid makes bond. A trial date is set. You’ve talked to the DA and it’s going to be a cakewalk. Then out of the blue you get a call from one of the kid’s friends.”

  The waitress came up again, and Sabato ordered another double. “How ‘bout you?” he said to me.

  I nodded. “I’ll take another.”

  She went back to the bar to fill our orders.

  “Anyway, the kid’s friend asks you to meet him for a drink. Talk about the kid’s case. You really don’t want to bother, you know? But you look into it out of routine, and it turns out this friend has a record of his own—short eyes, you know? Plus, it’s this very kid he queered the time he was busted. Kind of got the boy started on the road to ruin. And now the kid’s got the virus and a world of trouble, and it doesn’t sit so well with your partner that the friend didn’t do time. That he wriggled out of it. It doesn’t sit well at all. It never did.”

  The girl came back with the drinks and set them on the table, picking up the empties.

  Sabato swallowed half of his booze before she’d turned to go.

  “All right,” he said, cribbing the glass again. “So you go to meet with this guy, wanting him to fuck up, half praying for it. And what does the guy do? He tries to shmooze you—like you’re a fag, like you don’t know the score: the kid is really all right, he’s had a tough time, he’s sick with the virus, couldn’t we turn our backs just once? On and on, like this. Like he’s this great humanitarian, and you’re just a couple of pieces of shit who need a lecture on decency from a child molester. I mean, this is the same guy who queered the kid in the first place.

  “You think it’s funny because this guy doesn’t really seem to know how out of line this is. But your partner doesn’t think it’s funny. He’s a hard-nosed Catholic with a real strong sense of right and wrong—and an attitude about fags, especially fags who molest children—and he is definitely not amused. Plus, the way the guy is acting, you can’t help thinking maybe he has something to hide in the way of a sex thing or a drug thing with the kid you busted—like maybe he’s afraid that the kid’s going to blow the whistle on him again, like he did the first time around. Anyway, after a few too many drinks, your partner goes ballistic.”

  Sabato picked up the glass and downed the other half of his drink. “Ballistic,” he said again, putting the glass down. “He tells the poor son of a bitch that he’s going to bust him for attempted bribery, for solicitation, for every goddamn thing he can think of. He’s gonna make him into a public spectacle, drag him into the papers and on TV, then put his ass away for the five to ten years he should have done in the first place. On the top of this, your partner, who’s way past thinking clearly at this point, tells the poor bastard that he’s going to drag the kid in again, too—because he thinks the kid’s hiding something now, something about the guy himself. So he’s going to get the bail rescinded and put the kid in the justice center until he tells him exactly what it is this guy is afraid he’s going to tell us.

  “Now the guy is like, beside himself. Can’t believe he’s brought this shit down on his own head and
on his pal’s head, just by trying to be a good guy. He’s sort of dazed and gets up to leave, like he’s in a dream, like he’s hoping it’ll all go away. And I’m thinking that maybe we should let it pass. But my partner doesn’t see it that way. He follows the guy out into the lot. Fuck if I know what he does or says, but when he comes back, he’s still pissed. Still talking about busting the guy’s ass. You try to calm him down, talk him out of it. But he’s serious. He really doesn’t like this guy—from way back, from the first bust, which he squirmed out of. He’s talking about getting a warrant for the son of a bitch and busting him where he lives—at the school where he teaches, in front of all the little kiddies. Bad shit.”

  He sighed a long sigh and gestured with his hand, as if that was the end of it.

  “Did you get the warrant?” I asked.

  Sabato ducked his head, tired of the make-believe, of the sound of his own voice. “Art didn’t mention it the next day.”

  He stared at the empty glass on the table. “How the fuck did I know the son of a bitch was going to kill himself that night? I didn’t know.”

  “The fact is that he did, though,” I said. “Because of your partner.”

  “Look, I’m sorry it happened the way it happened. But the guy was wrong to come on to us like he did. Like we were for sale.”

  “The guy was a queer—isn’t that more like it?”

  Sabato sighed. “Maybe it was for Art. Maybe for me, too, a little.”

  I stared at him. “So what are you going to do about it?”

  “What would you like me to do about it? Fucking burn my partner? He got carried away. It happens.”

  “I’m not going to let this drop, Ron.”

  “You do what you’re going to do. But I’m telling you—Art is a fucking hard case. And he’s got lots of friends. You take him on, you’re going to get hurt.”

  “And you’re going to let it happen.”

  “I’m not going to lose my pension over Greenleaf, Stoner.”

  He got up from the table, standing up pretty straight considering he’d had two doubles in the space of a half an hour.

  “Shit happens,” he said, as if that covered it.

  Turning away, he walked out of the bar into the rain.

  ******

  I sat in the booth for about ten minutes, nursing my drink and thinking about Greenleaf, about the way that the various lines of his life had been gathered up and cut in that bar where he shouldn’t have been, with those two tough men he shouldn’t have been with.

  It was unlikely I could prove any of the terrible things that had happened to him—prove them to a grand jury’s satisfaction. Nobody had been in that parking lot with Stiehl and Greenleaf, nobody had witnessed the blow—probably with the butt of Stiehl’s gun. It would come down to the cops’ word against my circumstantial evidence. The best I could hope for was to prove that there had been a cover-up, but even that wouldn’t be easy to do if the cops stuck by their stories. Max Carlson wasn’t about to put his neck on the line for Mason Greenleaf. And neither was Larry Connors. They had too much to lose, nothing to gain. I could go to the papers, maybe make Stiehl and Sabato’s lives miserable for a few months, maybe even get them each a black mark on their records and in the public eye. But bringing them to justice—that wasn’t likely.

  So what was I going to do?

  A man had died—a screwed-up man who, haunted by guilt and AIDS, had tried to make amends for his real and imagined sins by trying to save one lost soul, whose corrupt life he felt, reasonably or unreasonably, responsible for. For years, he’d fed Paul Grandin, Jr., money and second chances. In the end he’d risked his own skin to save him. And when that risk had gone fearfully awry, he had made a desperate end in a desperate place—believing that he was going to lose his job, his friends, Cindy Dorn.

  Mason Greenleaf. RIP.

  Who knew whether he might not have made that same end sooner or later? People were dying around him daily. And in some peculiar toxic way, he blamed himself.

  So what was I going to do?

  I’d killed a man once, in cold blood, for torturing and terrorizing another man to death—a weak decent man, without any of the guts of Mason Greenleaf. I’d killed the thug who had killed Ira Lessing. And ever since then I’d carried the guilt around with me like Paul Grandin’s virus. I’d tried to drink it away. I’d tried to talk it away, in bars and in bed. I tried to block it out of my system. But the truth was still there, somewhere in the river where I’d left it to rot. What right did I have to pass judgment on Art Stiehl and Ron Sabato, two cops who’d had a bad night on a hard job?

  I signaled to the barmaid and ordered another Scotch. A double. With the rain plucking at the glazed window of Arnold’s bar, I kept drinking until I was good and drunk.

  32

  AROUND ONE-THIRTY I left the bar, found the Pinto, and weaved my way out to Finneytown—to Cindy’s house. As drunk as I was, I wasn’t even sure why I went. I just knew I didn’t want to go home. I parked cockeyed in her driveway and managed to stagger up to the door and bang on it. A light came on in the living room, and she opened up, dressed in that T-shirt, looking sleepy.

  “Good Lord,” she said, “what happened to you?”

  “Got drunk.”

  “I can see that. Come on in.”

  She guided me by the arm through the door and over to the couch.

  “Told you I drank,” I said, settling heavily on the cushions.

  “Yes, you did.”

  She bent down and unlaced my shoes, pulling them off. She came up on the couch and started unbuttoning my shirt.

  “Sorry,” I said, smelling her hair, her smell, as she undressed me.

  “Why’d you get loaded?”

  “You really want to know?”

  She stopped fiddling with my shirt and sat back beside me on the couch, cocking her head on her hand and staring fondly into my face.

  “Sure I want to know.”

  “It’s not a nice story.”

  She passed her hand across my forehead, combing back my hair. “I want to hear it. No matter what it is.”

  “It’s about Mason. I know what happened.”

  She tensed up, pulling her hand back from my face. “What happened?”

  It dawned on me that that was why I’d gotten drunk. It was the only condition in which I could bring myself to tell Cindy the truth.

  I told her about Paul Grandin, Jr. About where Mason had been those last five days of his life, searching for a facility that would take the kid in.

  “Why didn’t he tell me?” she said, breaking down in tears.

  “He felt guilty about him,” I said. “He didn’t want you to think he’d been betraying you. Didn’t want to explain to his friends. Maybe he didn’t want to explain it to himself.”

  She threw her hands to her face and wept. I sat there beside her, stupid drunk, while she cried and cried.

  “What happened to Paul Grandin?” she said, when she finally calmed down.

  “He’s in a rest home in Columbus.”

  “Where Sully went?”

  I nodded. “He went to visit him.”

  “Why?”

  “He wanted to ask him some questions about the night Mason was in the bar.”

  “What happened at the bar, Harry?”

  I told her the truth—or most of it. The meeting with Stiehl and Sabato. The attempt to talk them out of pressing charges against Grandin. Stiehl’s fury and threats. I didn’t tell her about the beating in the parking lot—it was something she could live without knowing.

  “It was the cops?” she said when I’d finished. Not really grasping it, yet. Not ready to.

  “It was a lot of things, Cindy. The cops were just the last thing.”

  Her face went white. She bolted off the couch, up the half-stairs into the john. I heard her retching violently. The sound of the john flushing. It went on for a while.

  When she came back down, her T-shirt was soaked with sweat, her face we
t with it. She walked over to the couch and simply curled up beside me, hiding her head under my arms. I stroked her hair, her back.

  “I could go to the DA,” I said. “But it’s going to be hard for a prosecutor to make a case. And this thing with Grandin will certainly come out. A good defense attorney could make it ugly for that kid—and for Mason’s reputation, friends, family.”

  “What are they going to do about Grandin?” she said weakly.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Most of the drunken high had gone away by then, and I just felt heavy-headed and weary and sorry for the girl.

  “Have you talked to this one, this Stiehl?”

  “No. I figure he’ll come to me—after he talks to Sabato.”

  “Don’t do it,” she said sharply, lifting her head. “It’s over. I don’t want any more violence.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “No, we won’t see.” She laid her head on my legs, and wrapped her arms around me. “We won’t see. It’s over now. It’s already cost Sully’s life. I will not have it cost you any further part of yours. You’ve done enough.”

  “We’ll see,” I told her.

  ******

  I didn’t sleep well, partly because of the liquor, partly because of Greenleaf. I did a good deal of tossing and turning, enough to wake Cindy up once in the middle of the stormy night. She pulled me to her and held me until I fell back asleep.

  In the morning neither of us said very much, until I’d gotten dressed and was about to leave.

  “You’re not going to see that man, Harry,” she said as we stood at the door. “You’re working for me, and I’m telling you that the job is finished.”

  “What about Grandin?”

  “I’ve thought about it, and if he meant that much to Mason, I’ll talk to Mace’s brother and see if he’s willing to foot the bill for the rest home, like Mason was going to do.”

  “I doubt if he’ll go for that.”

  “I won’t give him a choice,” she said quickly. “I’ll make it clear to him that if he doesn’t provide the funds, I will go to the papers about Mason’s death. He’ll cave in—I guarantee you.”

 

‹ Prev