Missing (11 page)

"There wasn’t anything troubling him here at
school, was there?" I asked, already knowing what he was going
to say. What everyone had said.

"I don’t think there was," Snodgrass
said. "I mean, I can’t know what he didn’t tell me, but he
wasn’t complaining about the job, if that’s what you mean."

"Was anyone complaining about him?"

Snodgrass raised his head sharply as if he caught my
drift—and didn’t much like it. "You’re make a reference to
his problems with the Cincinnati School Board?"

"I’m just looking for a reason why he killed
himself"

"Do you know what happened six years ago?"
he said, leaning forward across the desk.

"I’ve heard several different versions."

"Well, let me tell you the one that I know,"
he said pointedly, as if he felt obliged to dispel the rumors and
false impressions. Given the fact that he’d hired Greenleaf after
the incident, I could understand his sense of accountability. "I
heard this from Mason himself when I interviewed him for this job.
And I had it confirmed by a mutual friend, a supervisor in the public
school system."

Snodgrass made a church out of his fingers and stared
red-faced over the steeple. "Mason had a student named Paul
Grandin, a senior interested in theater arts. Paul was a troubled kid
from a split family. His father was a nasty, brutal man who had
physically abused Paul from an early age. His mother was an
overweening alcoholic who couldn’t say no to her husband or to Paul
himself. The kid grew up hating both of them and despising himself.
He had no confidence, no sense of purpose, and a conflicted sexual
identity. As an adolescent, Mason had many of the same problems, so
he strongly identified with Paul and treated him the way he wished
he’d been treated at that age—with compassion and intelligence.
He found the boy a psychotherapist to help him work through his
neuroses; he got him a part-time job at the Playhouse-in-the-Park; he
encouraged him to become involved in extracurricular activities at
school. Naturally the boy was very grateful and very fond of Mason,
as Mason was of him. There was never anything more than a bond of
affection between them."

"I was told about some letters?"

"If Mason made any mistake, it was writing those
notes to Paul," Snodgrass conceded, sinking behind his tented
hands. "Paul had graduated that June and gone off to a theater
arts camp in Wisconsin before his freshman year at college. Mason
wrote the letters to him while Paul was at camp—just as anyone
would write to a friend who was away. Paul brought the letters back
home with him when he returned to town. Somehow Paul’s father found
them.

"If a heterosexual had written such a letter to
a friend, no one would have thought twice about it. But as you
undoubtedly know, Mason was bisexual and, at that time, involved with
a man. Apparently someone told the father that Mason was bi, and the
father blew up. The police really put Mason through the wringer, you
know. If his lawyer hadn’t secured a restraining order, I think
they would have hounded him to death. Even at that, if he hadn’t
found Cindy, I’m not sure he would have survived."

Given the upshot, I didn’t have much confidence
that his relationship with Cindy had been the answer to his problems,
either—or that Mason Greenleaf had ever allowed anyone to know what
that answer might have been.

Thanking the man for his time, I got up from the
chair.

"I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help, Mr.
Stoner," Tom Snodgrass said. "I hate to say it, but I’d
feel less troubled and confused if Mason had been killed by accident
or even murdered."

It was a little shocking to hear it put like that.
But as I walked back out to the lot, I realized it was just another
way of saying that, like everyone else I’d talked to that
blistering July day, he really didn’t understand why his friend had
taken his life.
 

12

FEELING discouraged at having struck out with the
cops and at Nine Mile, I drove back to the office to check for
messages from Sullivan or Sabato. Neither man had called, leaving me
pretty much where I’d been that morning—without a lead or much
hope of finding one. Even if I got lucky and found Mason’s
Scotch-drinking friend or the young blond man he’d gotten drunk
with in the bar, I had the feeling I wasn’t going to get to the
bottom of the suicide. Greenleaf ’s silence had simply been too
complete. In spite of his open relationship with Cindy Dorn, it
looked to me as if it had been that way for years—hidden in the
folds of his cheerfulness and despair, a core of silence that had
never changed. I could nibble around its edges for months, wasting my
time and Cindy’s hopes, and come up with little more than the
simple, self-evident formula that Sullivan, Cavanaugh, and Jack
McCain had proposed that morning—that he’d killed himself because
he was unhappy with his life. Because I liked her and wanted to help
her, I’d been trying to see the thing from Cindy’s point of view.
But I had the feeling there would come a time when even she would
have to accept her lover’s silence as final.

Around five-thirty, I grabbed a bite to eat at a
Chinese restaurant on Sixth Street, then walked uptown to the
Parkade. I picked up the Pinto and headed east on the Parkway through
the ruins of Over-the-Rhine to Dr. Terry Mulhane’s office in
Corryville. The late afternoon sun had laid its hand on everything in
the north-side slum, firing the red-brick tenements ash white and
driving the men and women who lived in them out of their airless
rooms and onto the cement stoops. On the sidewalks their kids jeered
and jostled, the older ones slap-fighting and darting out into
traffic to touch base with the big boys in the BMWs with the
black-out windows and the boom boxes going inside like fireworks.

I followed Reading Road out of the slum, north to
Taft and then down to Auburn. Terry Mulhane’s office was a block
beyond the McMillan intersection—a made-over mansion house with
French windows and gray Robin Hood trim. It was only a mile from
Over-the-Rhine, but it was a different world.

I parked in a lot at the back of the building and
walked through the sunlight, around to the front door. Inside, a lone
receptionist sat behind a dry-wall divider with a rectangular opening
in its center that framed her like a landscape. There was a good deal
of New Age artwork on the walls, dolphins and sunsets and kids
looking coy. I guess it was supposed to be soothing, but it made my
skin crawl.

Even though the door had chimed when I opened it, it
took the receptionist a moment to raise her head and ask what I
wanted. It could have been that she was tired—she certainly looked
tired—but, given the decor, her lack of haste may have been a
deliberate mood-setter too.

"My name is Stoner," I told her. "I’m
here to talk to Dr. Mulhane."

She nodded indifferently and waved to the empty
waiting area, littered at day’s end with magazines. I sat in a
padded chair, staring at the dolphins and wondering what Mason
Greenleaf’s New Age medicine man was going to look like. After a
time a tall bearded gent with the suffering, doleful face of a feast
day saint came out a door beside the reception desk and scanned the
room. He wore a white hospital jacket over Dockers and a checked
shirt.

"Are you Stoner?" he said, sounding more
the martyr than the saint.

"I’m Stoner."

"Terry Mulhane," he said, nodding hello.
"I’ll give you a few minutes. Then I’m going to go home, eat
supper, and collapse. Okay?"

"A few minutes is all I need."

I followed him through the door into a complex of
examination rooms. Mulhane pointed to a doorway and I walked through
into a paneled office. To my surprise there was nothing New Age about
it, just the usual diplomas on the walls, the picture of the wife and
kids, a couple of bookshelves for show. There was a couch to one side
of the room and a desk the size of a double-oven stove on the other.
I took the couch.

"I don’t mean to sound like an asshole,"
Mulhane said, settling behind the desk, "but I’ve been going
since six-thirty this morning, and I’m beat."

"Like I said, it’ll just take a few minutes."

Swiveling in his chair the man cupped his hands
behind his head and stared at me with curiosity.

"When’s the last time you saw a doctor, Mr.
Stoner?"

"I don’t believe in doctors."

He smiled. "Well, I’d advise you to change
your religion. You look like you could use a physical."

"I’ve been up for a while, too."

"Chasing Mason’s ghost," Mulhane said
with melancholy

"Have you had any luck?"

"Not much. None at all, really."

Leaning forward in the chair, the man dropped his
hands and folded them in front of him on the desktop. "The best
I can come up with is that he simply broke down emotionally. I didn’t
see it coming. I should have, but I didn’t."

Mulhane sat there for a long moment, looking somber.
I didn’t for a moment doubt the sincerity of his remorse, but his
guilt wasn’t going to get me anywhere. Nor was the talk about
sudden, inexplicable breakdowns. I’d been hearing it all day.

"He may have been upset by a visit to his
ex-lover, Del Cavanaugh," I said, trying to turn him to
specifics.

Mulhane looked up at me and sighed. "I’m sure
he was. He told me he was dreading it."

"Mason told you he’d gone to see Cavanaugh‘?"
I said with surprise.

"He told me he was planning to go."

"When was this?"

Mulhane shuffled through a folder on his desk. "A
week ago last Thursday. The last time I saw him. He stopped in that
morning to complain about the insomnia."

Presumably before he went to see Cavanaugh that same
Thursday afternoon. It wasn’t much of a chronology, but it was a
start.

"Did he tell you how he’d heard that Cavanaugh
was dying?"

"I think I may have told him myself when he came
to the oflice. Del is also a patient of mine."

It certainly blew hell out of my theory that the
Scotch-drinking stranger Greenleaf had met on the Wednesday night
before he disappeared had told him about Cavanaugh’s illness. And
it maybe blew hell out of the idea that Cavanaugh was part of the
reason for his despair. Whatever had been bothering Greenleaf had
clearly started before he’d seen his ex-lover, although I supposed
the news that he was dying and the subsequent visit to his home could
have accelerated his decline.

"If you’ve been talking to Del," Mulhane
went on, "you may have gotten a wrong impression about why Mason
went to see him. Del’s a bitter man just now. Actually, he’s been
a bitter man most of his life. And Mason breaking up with him was a
blow he never got over. Anyway, Mason didn’t go to him because he
was still holding a flame. He went out of  kindness and a sense
of obligation, to say good-bye to a friend."

"It will help Cindy to hear that," I said.
"She’s tormented by the fear that Mason betrayed her."

"It’s natural for her to feel that way, given
what Mason did. But I honestly believe that he was happy with her. In
fact, Mason once told me that the thing he was most afraid of was
losing Cindy. He had in his mind that whatever made him happy
wouldn’t last very long."

"Why?"

The doctor shook his head. "I guess when people
have been telling you that you’re undeserving of love for most of
your life, it begins to sink in."

The way he was putting it, it sounded like Mason
Greenleaf had been primed for suicide for a long time. Which made
Mulhane’s surprise that he’d gone through with it a bit
mystifying. "If he was this chronically depressed," I said,
"why wasn’t he in therapy or on medication?"

"Mr. Stoner," Mulhane said, "Mason
wasn’t clinically depressed. He functioned quite effectively given
the load he had to bear, and he did so with unusual grace and good
humor. The fears he had were reality-based. Certainly he had every
reason to be terrified of AIDS, especially given what has happened to
Del. He had reason to fear the loss of love—his past was checkered
with broken relationships. It bothers me that people, even many
professionals, automatically assume a pathogenesis because someone is
occasionally and reasonably unhappy. Mason Greenleaf was not without
considerable resources."

It was the first time he’d sounded like a guru. But
it was an enlightened kind of guruism, based on close, affectionate
observation of his patient. Clearly Mulhane was the kind of doctor
who treated the "whole" person. And just as clearly,
Greenleaf had been his friend. Which must have made his suicide
especially painful.

"Something must’ve happened during that week
after I saw him," he said, as if he’d been reading my mind,
"some awful blow. I have to believe that whatever it was hit him
where he was weakest, where he was most afraid."

"That he would lose Cindy," I said,
completing the thought.

"That’s my best guess."

It was a new theory and, on the surface, not a
particularly persuasive one, given the fact that Cindy Dorn hadn’t
even hinted at a possible breakup.