Missing (18 page)

"Hi," she said in a clipped voice. Like
time was money.

"How good a look did you get at his blond man‘?"
I asked Lee Marks.

"I was pretty far away, Mr. Stoner."

"If I showed you a photograph, do you think you
might recognize him?"

"I’m not sure. Maybe."

"How ’bout coming out to the parking lot and
taking a look."

"You have like a mug book or something?" he
said with surprise.

"I have a photo."

The kid glanced at his girlfriend. "Sure, why
not?"

We went back up the corridor—Lee, Gloria, and I—up
the stairs where the band played on, up to the top level and out into
the lot. After the air-conditioned shade of the mall, the sunlight
was almost blinding, the heat ferocious. It took me a while to find
my car—to the amusement of the two kids.

"My mother had to call the cops once,"
Gloria admitted, as we wandered through row after row of gleaming
chrome. We finally came to the one that wasn’t gleaming, my rusty
Pinto. Lee had already seen my hulk, but Gloria’s jaw dropped.

"Is that an American car?"

The Marks boy laughed. I unlocked the passenger side
door and pulled out Mason Greenleaf’s jacket. I found the
photograph of Paul Grandin, Jr., unclipped it from the arrest report,
and showed it to Lee. He stared at it for a moment, holding a hand
above his eyes
to cut the glare.

"The man I saw was older than this. In his
twenties. And his mustache was a lot darker."

"The picture was taken six years ago."

He looked at it again. "I can’t be sure. But,
yeah, I guess it could be this guy." He handed the photo back to
me.

"Who is he?" he asked.

I gave him the short version. "Someone Mason
used to know. You never saw this man at the school before?"

Lee shook his head. "I thought maybe he was one
of the preschool parents. Only I’d never seen him at any other
assembly."

"How was he dressed?"

"Casua1. Sport coat, shirt, jeans. He kept
wiping his nose with the back of his hand, like he had a cold."

I smiled at the kid. "You’d make a good
detective."

"He’s going to be a doctor," the girl
said, chasing that idea with a broom.

I stuck the photo back in the jacket. "You’ve
been a big help, Lee."

"When you find out why he killed himself, then
I’ll know I’ve helped."

I told him I’d tell him when I found out.

As Lee Marks and Gloria wandered off, back to the
playground of the mall, I got in the car and stared at Mason
Greenleaf ’s jacket. I hadn’t even bothered to bring it inside
Cindy’s house the night before. Now it seemed like a good idea to
look at the whole file. It was too hot to sit in the car, so I drove
out of the lot to a chili parlor on the other side of Montgomery. I
found a table in the back of the restaurant, ordered a coifee, and
read through the strange case of Mason Greenleaf and Paul Grandin,
Jr.

The complainant in the arrest had been the boy’s
father, Paul Grandin, Sr. He had an address on Madeira Road in Indian
Hill. On the afternoon of September 3, 1988, Grandin Senior found
five letters written by Mason Greenleaf to his son, hidden in his
son’s desk at the home of his ex-wife in Clifton. There was no
explanation of why the father had been looking through his son’s
things—or ransacking his ex-wife’s house. According to Grandin’s
complaint, Greenleaf had solicited sex from his son in three of the
letters and had referred to a previous instance of consensual sex in
two others. Armed with the letters, Grandin Senior had gone to the
school where Greenleaf was teaching on the morning of September 4,
1988, hauled him out of the classroom, and assaulted him right there
in front of the kids. The police were called, at which time Grandin
Senior made his charges against Mason. Mason counter charged him with
assault. According to the IOs at the scene, Mason took a pretty good
beating.

Greenleaf ’s half of the case was then referred to
the vice squad. Two detectives, a man named Art Stiehl and my new pal
Ron Sabato, were assigned to the investigation. Various interviews
were held at the school itself with other students and teachers.
Grandin’s mother was interviewed, and so was Grandin himself at his
mother’s home. Although Ira Sullivan had said that Grandin never
cooperated with the cops, the IO report indicated that, on the
initial interview, Paul had "expressed guilt" about his
relationship with Greenleaf without explicitly confirming a sexual
liaison. Whatever Paul Grandin, Jr., had said was enough, in
combination with the letters themselves, to send the case to a grand
jury. Which, in this town, with this kind of charge, meant an
automatic indictment. Stapled inside the back of the jacket was a
frontal mug shot of Greenleaf, taken on the day of his arrest, on the
day that Paul Grandin, Sr., had worked him over. I hadn’t paid
attention to it when I’d first skimmed the jacket. This time, I
did. Behind the bruises—and he was badly banged up—Mason
Greenleaf looked like a man who had been condemned to death.

I closed the jacket on his haunted face. There was a
phone stand by the restaurant door. I went over to it and called Dick
Lock at CPD Criminalistics.

"I need another LEADS search," I said.
"Paul Grandin, Jr." I gave him Grandin’s last known
address, at his mother’s home on Rue de la Paix in Clifton.

"What’re we looking for, Harry?" Dick
asked.

"Anything. Misdemeanor, felony, warrant. And a
current address, if you can get one."

"I can cross-check with the state BMV for that."

"Call me at my oflice when you have the results.
I’ll be in after five."

After hanging up on Dick, I paid my chit and walked
back out to the car. Paul Grandin, Sr., lived a couple of miles from
where I was standing. Even though it was half-past two on a weekday
aftemoon, I decided to pay him a visit on the off chance that he was
home. If he wasn’t, I would leave him a card with a note to call
me.
 

19

THERE was a gold Mercedes 450 sitting in the carriage
circle in front of Paul Grandin, Sr.’s, Indian Hill home. I could
see it gleaming through the hedgerow in front of his estate as I
turned off Madeira Road into his driveway. Then I saw the house. A
huge brick Georgian with a stern Tory look to it, red-cheeked and
disapproving.

A good amount of timbered ground spread out behind
and around the house, enough square acreage to convince me that Paul
Grandin, Sr., was top United American Soap management or big money
law. Way out in the green distance, shimmering like a mirage, a boy
was riding a lawn tractor. I watched him loop around a stand of
cherry trees, trailing a jet of cuttings behind him that sparkled in
the sunlight like the plume of a speedboat.

The front door was oak and brass with a scalloped
window above it set with ruby glass. I lifted the knocker and let it
fall. I waited a moment, and when no one answered, I dug a business
card out of my wallet, penciled a message to call me on its back, and
stuck it in the mailbox. As I turned to the car, I heard a girl
shriek with laughter. Her voice startled me enough to make me whirl
around. I Someone else, a man, shouted, "Goddamn lucky!"
And I realized the voices were coming from behind the house.

A cut-stone path led from the door around the north
side of the mansion. I followed it to a concrete landing, where a
canopied stairway began its descent to a fenced tennis court in a
dell below the house. I listened to the Hap of the canvas awning
above the stairs and the distant sound of the tennis match and,
figuring the worst the Grandins could do was call a cop, started
down.

As I got closer to the court, I could hear the two
voices more clearly, along with the pock of a tennis ball and the
squeak of shoes on a clay surface. The girl was riding the man
mercilessly for losing point after point. From the bile in his voice,
he didn’t much like it. As I got to the bottom of the stair, the
girl spotted me. She was a very pretty kid, maybe seventeen or
eighteen, dressed in blinding white. Ball in hand, she lowered her
racket and stared as if I were a unicorn.

"Serve the goddamn thing," the man called
out to her angrily.

He cou1dn’t see me because of a tarp that was
strung along his half of the fence, blocking his view of the
staircase. But when I got down to ground level, he saw me.

"What the hell!" he shouted.

Stalking across the court, he came straight at me. He
was a tall man with thin gray hair and a broad, tan, pugnacious face.
He wore his hair in a comb-over that he held in place against the
breeze with his left hand. He swung the tennis racket menacingly in
his right.

"This is private goddamn property," he said
at the top of his lungs, as he came up close.

"There wasn’t any sign posted," I said.

"The hell there isn’t. Right at the top of the
stairs, below the azaleas."

"I must have missed it."

The man lashed at his comb-over as if he was planting
a tent stake. "All right, you’re here. Now what it is you
want?"

"I was looking for Paul Grandin."

He slowly lowered his hand from his head and stared
at me through sun-streaked eyes. "You’re talking to him.
Grandin Senior."

"My name is Stoner, Mr. Grandin. I’m a private
investigator. I wanted to ask you a few questions about your son,
Paul Junior."

"Christ almighty," he said, wincing as if
I’d stabbed him with a knife. "I took an ad out in the
Enquirer three years ago, making it clear that I am no longer
responsible for Paul’s debts. What more do I have to say? His
problems are his to solve. I’ve done all I can."

"This has nothing to do with debts. I’m
working for a woman named Cindy Dorn."

"What did he steal from her?" Grandin asked
bitterly.

It was obvious that Paul Grandin, Jr., had meant
nothing but trouble for the man for quite a long time. The girl had
started over toward us. As she came close, I could see that she had
the same tan, broad-featured face as Grandin Senior, only what looked
pugnacious on him looked like free-spirits in her.

"Who is it, Dad?" she asked.

"A private detective, asking about your
brother," he said miserably.

"I need to get in touch with him," I said
to the girl.

"Why?"

I thought about trying to dodge the question, but
there was no way around the truth without making the interview more
painful than it already was. "Mason Greenleaf killed himself
about a week ago. Your brother may have been one of the last people
who talked to him before he died."

I knew as soon as I said it, there was going to be
trouble. Grandin’s face flushed red to the roots of his thin gray
hair. Alarmed, his daughter reached a hand out to him.

"Jesus wept," the man said in a voice
shaking with rage. "You dare to drag that scum who poisoned my
son’s life into my house! I ought to kill you!"

He raised the tennis racket like a club. I grabbed
his arm before he could swing at me.

"Don’t," I said, staring into his
trembling face.

"Dad, please," the girl said in a terrified
voice. To me she said:

"I think you better leave."

I let the man’s arm go and turned for the stairs.
Grandin walked directly over to a phone, hung from a fence post. "I’m
calling the cops, you son of a bitch."

I had so much adrenaline going, I didn’t much give
a damn what he did—as long as he kept his distance from me. I was
already to the top of the stairs when I heard footsteps behind me. I
looked back and saw the girl.

"Wait, please. He won’t call the police."

"Yeah? What makes you so sure?"

"Look."

She pointed down to the court. Grandin was sitting on
a white stool by the fence, his face in his hands. Even at that
distance, I could tell from the movements of his back that he was
weeping. All the anger drained out of me in an instant.

"I’m sorry," I said. "I was just
doing my job."

"You didn’t know about Paul and . . . that
man?"

"I knew there had been some accusations made,
several years ago."

"That man ruined my brother’s life and
destroyed our family," the girl said flatly. "You can’t
expect us to care if he’s dead. We wished him dead."

"I only wanted to talk to Paul."

"Paul has nothing to do with him anymore. Not
for years. It’s crazy to think differently. Who said he was talking
to that man?"

"Someone said he thought he’d seen them
talking."

"Then he’s mistaken," she said. "You
should go. And please don’t come back. We don’t want to hear that
man’s name again." I went over to the car. The girl watched me
as I got in.  "Leave my brother alone," she called out
as I pulled away.

"Leave my father alone."

I drove off with her voice ringing in my ears. In the
space of a few minutes, I’d managed to alienate a young woman and
reduce her father to tears of rage—just by mentioning Mason
Greenleaf’s name.