Missing (14 page)

"Mason’s bad dreams," she said, as if
they were a familiar subject.

"He’d had them before?"

"When he was stressed out at school, during
exams or the opening week of classes. Bad dreams about me, Del,
Sully, Ralph Cable. Cable was often in them."

"Do you know why?"

"I guess because he associated Cable with
school. He was Mason’s college roommate. They had a rocky
relationship that ended when Cable went to Viet Nam. Unfortunately,
he got killed over there. His death seemed to haunt Mason. He always
thought Cable had volunteered to prove a point about his manhood
after Mason threw him out. Anyway, Mason felt partly responsible for
what happened. The bad feeling between them when they parted was
something he could never go back and undo."

He’d dreamed about friends who had failed him,
friends whom he had failed, friends with whom he wished to make
amends. Dreams he’d had before, when he was under stress on the
job. Only he hadn’t been under any stress at work—at least, none
that I could discover. No trouble with the cops, either. And in spite
of what I’d said to Cindy, I wasn’t really convinced that Del
Cavanaugh and a fear of AIDS had triggered Mason’s depression—not
after talking to Mulhane. I didn’t know what had driven him to kill
himself. And as I told Cindy, I wasn’t sure that I ever would. But
it was moot now that she had decided to call it quits. It was a
healthy step away from bad memories, I thought, for both of us:
Greenleaf and Lessing.

I turned onto Gest Street. Up ahead I could see the
fenced impoundment lot. A tin-roofed plank shack by the front gate
served as a watch post. I pulled through the gate and parked by the
door of the shack.

"Do you have keys and registration?" I
asked.

Cindy nodded. "Mason gave me a spare set of
keys. I took the registration with me that day—when we went to the
hotel."

I got out on my side, Cindy on hers. Together we
walked through the white glare of the spotlights, up a short stair to
the open door of the guard house. Inside a lanky cop with a SWAT cap
on his head was sitting behind a battered desk, working a crossword
puzzle and
listening to a Reds game on a
table radio.

"Can I do for you?" he said listlessly.

Cindy handed him the registration. "It’s my
friend’s car," she said.

The cop swiveled around and pulled a clipboard from a
nail on the wall, turning back to us as he ran a finger down the
impoundment sheet. "We’ve had it for a while. Hauled it in a
week ago last Wednesday from Stacie’s parking lot. Got a
twenty-five-dollar towing charge and twenty-five dollars a day
storage." Looking up at Cindy, he said, "Tell your friend
there are cheaper ways to park."

He glanced pointedly at me, as if he thought I was
the unnamed friend.

While Cindy wrote out a check for the impoundment
fee, I went out into the yard to look for the Saab. The cop had it
located near the northwest corner of the lot. The spotlights didn’t
cover all of the grounds, so it took me a while to find it—parked
on the Dalton Street side, in a dark, weedy patch of gravel. Like the
other vehicles, it had the license number and date of impoundment
soaped on its back window. Like the other vehicles, it was covered
with days of inner city dust and grime.

I dug a rag out of a heap of tires and junk parts
stashed by the fence and wiped off the front windshield. I was
working on the back window, when Cindy came up.

"You want to drive it back to your place?"

She shuddered. "I’d rather you did. Just
seeing it, abandoned like this . . ."

"Okay. You follow me in the Pinto."

Cindy dug through her purse for the spare keys and
handed them to me. I unlocked the driver’s side door and hopped in,
handing her my keys.

"If you have any trouble with the Pinto, flash
your lights."

"What kind of trouble?" she said
suspiciously.

"It’s got its quirks," I said with a
laugh.

Looking like she didn’t think it was very funny,
Cindy walked off, making her way through the jumble of abandoned
cars. After four days in the sun, the interior of the Saab stank
strongly of overheated vinyl and leather and something like rot. I
opened the windows to air it out, then got in and turned on the
ignition. On the third try, it turned over with a gargle and spit of
exhaust. I backed it out of the parking spot and weaved my way to the
front gate. Cindy was sitting there in the Pinto, ready to go.

"I’ll catch the expressway on Ezzard Charles,"
I called to her. "That okay?"

She nodded.

I coasted out of the lot with Cindy right behind me.
I stayed on Western up past the Terminal, cutting under the
expressway to the entrance ramp at Liberty.

It wasn’t until I got on I-75 that I began to
notice the other smell, the one I’d thought was dry rot. I might
not have noticed it at all, if I hadn’t rolled up the windows to
cut the wind noise. But in there with the heat and leather and July
smog was something else—faint, familiar, and disquieting. The
too-sweet smell of decaying blood. I almost jerked the car off the
road, but we were halfway to Finneytown by then. I rolled down the
window again to let some air in and glanced nervously around the
interior of the car. I didn’t see any blood on the leather seats or
dash. It was too dark to get a good look at the floor. I had to live
with the stink for the ten more minutes it took to get to the yellow
brick house.

As soon as I pulled in the driveway, I flipped on the
interior lights of the Saab and began searching the car. I was
halfway into the backseat when Cindy pulled up behind me. The sudden
flash of the Pinto’s headlights through the Saab’s rear window
lit up the interior, and that was when I saw it. Dried brown streaks
of blood down the back of the driver’s side seat, on the backseat
itself, and a dried pool on the backseat carpeting with a froth of
fungus growing around it like a bad spot on bread. There wasn’t a
great deal of blood—as much as might come from a broken nose and
split lip. If the car hadn’t been locked in the merciless heat for
four or live days, it probably wouldn’t have grown so rank.

Cindy flipped the Pinto’s headlights off, and the
Saab’s interior went dark again. I heard the Pinto door open and
shut as I backed out of Mason’s car.

"What is it, Harry?" Cindy said, coming up
the driveway.

"There are some bloodstains in the backseat,"
I said, straightening up.

"Blood," she said, throwing a hand to her
mouth.

"Yeah."

"What should we—should we call the cops?"

If there had been more of it, I wouldn’t have
hesitated. But there wasn’t enough to prove homicidal mayhem.
Nothing like the charnel of Ira Lessing’s front seat. All the
bloodstains demonstrated was more sloth on the part of the IOs, Segal
and Taylor, who had obviously had the car towed without checking it
out. Greenleaf had had contusions on his face and body when the cops
found him. It was entirely possible that he’d fallen down outside
the bar—or gotten into a fight with his argumentative friends—and
simply sat in the car for a time, drunk, dazed, and bleeding. It
struck me that Stacie’s was where I had to go—to straighten out a
good deal of Mason Greenleaf ’s last few hours on earth. It also
struck me that I should get a copy of the autopsy report for Terry
Mulhane, to see what he made of those vague contusions that the cops
and the coroner had dismissed as meaningless. Since I had to pick up
the arrest report on the SCPA thing anyway, I decided to stop at CPD
and get the coroner’s report, too, before heading on to the bar—and
wherever else that took me.

Cindy was still standing with her hand to her mouth,
looking appalled. "What’re we going to do?" she said
again.

"‘I’ll talk to Jack McCain tonight," I
told her. "Tell him what we found. He’s probably not going to
be overly impressed—I mean, Mason did have some bruises on him when
he was found in the hotel. If he agrees to send an IO out, fine. If
not—well, we can get a specialist of our own to do phenotyping if
it comes to that. In the meantime, I’m going to make some inquiries
at the bar where the car was parked. If Mason was involved in some
violence, it looks like it would’ve happened there."

"He got . . . beat up?"

"Cindy, I don’t know. I suppose it’s
possible, although the hotel clerk at the Washington didn’t say
that he looked beat-up when he registered?

It occurred to me that that was another stop I should
make—the Washington Hotel.

"I don’t get it. Why didn’t the cops find
this? I mean, this changes things, doesn’t it?"

"We know why the cops didn’t find it," I
said with disgust, "and it doesn’t change the fact of his
suicide. But it sure as hell might have a bearing on the sequence of
events that led up to it. I just don’t know enough to say."

Cindy slapped her hand on the car. "I don’t
want you to stop, Harry. I want you to keep going until you find out
the truth of what happened to him. I owe that to Mason."

I didn’t want to get into the question of what she
owed to him. But the truth was, the bloodstains did change things
enough that I couldn’t honestly talk her out of continuing the
investigation, even though it pulled us both back into the past.
 

15

I WENT straight downtown to the CPD and looked up
Jack McCain in Homicide. I told him about the blood I’d found in
the backseat of Greenleaf ’s car. He stared at me blankly for a
long moment, then snatched the phone up off his desk.

"Larry," he barked into the receiver, "I
want a criminalistics team sent out to—" He cupped his hand
over the mouthpiece and glared at me. "What’s the house
number?"

I gave him Cindy’s address on Blue Jay Drive.

He repeated the street number over the phone. "Talk
to the woman. Cynthia Dorn. Get a blood sample out of the backseat of
the Saab in her driveway and dust the whole damn car for prints. If
Segal and Taylor are still on duty, get them to oversee it. If
they’re at home, wake their asses up. The lazy sons-of-bitches
should have done this job in the first place."

McCain hung up the phone with a bang. "Satisfied?"

"Yeah."

"You should be," he said, looking pissed
off. "This doesn’t make a goddamn bit of sense. The guy killed
himself. Whether or not he had a bloody nose in the backseat of that
car, he still killed himself"

"It should have been done, Jack. You know it,
and so do I."

"Yeah, it should’ve," he conceded.
"That’s why I’m sending those cocksuckers out there. But
this doesn’t mean anything like I’m reopening the case. You
understand that?"

"I understand."

"You gotta make her understand it, too, Stoner.
Because this is it. No more from us. We’ll run your prints and your
blood. What you do with the results is up to you."

I stopped at Vice to pick up Greenleaf’s jacket and
put in a request for a copy of the coroner’s report through
hatchet-faced Ron Sabato—I didn’t have the nerve to ask Jack
McCain. The folder Ron gave me was going to take a while to parse:
arresting officers’ reports, investigating officers’ report,
witness interviews. The one thing that caught my eye as I thumbed
through it on the way back to the car was a Polaroid snapshot of a
blond kid with a pale, peroxided mustache. The IOs’ report
identified the boy as Paul Grandin, Jr., of 243 Rue de la Paix in
Clifton—the student that Mason Greenleaf was accused of soliciting
in 1988. The photo was six years old, and I had no idea how six years
might have changed Paul Grandin’s appearance. But if he still wore
a mustache and hadn’t dyed his hair, he lit the description of the
younger man who had been drinking with Mason Greenleaf in Stacie’s
bar. Then again, so did the guy I passed on Elm Street, pushing a
shopping cart full of empties to the recycling center.

It was almost midnight when I pulled into Stacie’s
lot on lower Fifth. The bar was located in a deserted dell beneath
the I-71 distributor—a converted office building with an ornate
Sullivanesque facade. To the west, up Fifth Street, the city ended in
a rubble of red brick, like a fallen wall. To the east, a dark
stretch of Broadway ran haywire through the pillars of the overhead
distributor. There were no other buildings nearby.

As I got out of the car, three men came out the door
of the bar and down a short staircase to the parking lot. The one in
the middle was so drunk, he had to be held up by his buddies on
either side. I watched them walk toward the south end of the lot.
Once they cleared the pale of the neon beer signs flashing in
Stacie’s windows, I had to strain to see them—the lighting was
that poor. With the noise coming from the bar and the overpass above
it, it was
difficult to hear, too. All in
all, a good spot for a mugging.

I walked over to the staircase and up to Stacie’s
front door. The closer I got, the louder the noise grew—a typical
bar racket of  voices, glassware, and music. Through the front
door, another flight of stairs led up to the bar proper. The place
was crowded with men, most of them dressed in ordinary summer wear. A
scattered few sported the cliché motorcycle leather jackets, caps,
and chains, stilldressing up like Brando in
The
Wild Ones
. But they were the exceptions. Most
of the men had the tame, buttoned-down look of United American
bookkeepers. Middle—class professionals, looking for privacy and
safe company in the age of AIDS.