Missing (26 page)

Up close, he looked considerably worse than he had
from the doorway. Haggard, sallow, sweaty, as if he were wasting with
fever.

"A few days ago. I saw something in a
newspaper." The kid took a deep, labored breath. "He
shouldn’t have done it."

"What?"

"Tried to help me. I didn’t think he was going
to. I didn’t think anyone was. But he knew I was sick from last
year—when we first came up here to have the bloodwork done."

"Last year?"

The boy nodded. "I hadn’t been well for a
while. I was getting a lot of colds. I half knew that it was the
beginning of—what it is. I just wanted to let the thing run its
course. But he made me come with him up to Presbyterian Memorial. So
Tim wouldn’t find out, so they wouldn’t know at work. So I
wouldn’t lose my friends and the job."

"This would have been last summer?" I said,
thinking about that first time that Mason Greenleaf had dropped out
of Cindy’s life. He’d said he’d gone home.

"Yeah, I guess. Summer or fall. After I found
out, I moved out of Timmy’s house. I couldn’t keep being with
him. After that I couldn’t . . . be with anybody. So I bummed
around from place to place. Freddy. That prick Rodner."

"You have HIV?" I said, saying what was
obvious from one look at him.

"I got full-blown AIDS is what I got, mister."
Paul Grandin, Jr., turned his head away, toward the gray window.
Through it, you could see the backyard of a neighboring house, with a
white swing-set dripping rain. "Can’t keep it secret anymore."

It was why he’d left Tim Bristol, why he’d missed
so much work. Why he’d ended up getting fired by Steve Meisel, who
thought he’d been goldbricking.

"Toward the end there, it was more trouble to
fake being well than it was worth. I had to make a lot of excuses to
a lot of people. It was lonely—not being able to make contact. It
was almost a relief to get busted."

"Do the cops know that you have AIDS?"

"They know what they know that I was a previous
offender. The guy who busted me, he was the same one from before."
The kid laughed. "Like I’m stupid enough to hit on the same
cop
twice."

I stared at the boy. "Are you saying you were
set up?"

"I’m saying it doesn’t make a difference
anymore." He moved around in the bed, propping himself on the
pillow as he stared out at the swings and the scattering of flowers
and shrubs. "It’s a gray day. It makes me think of the past."

Even though his life had led him to that hospital
bed, even though he’d betrayed just about everyone he’d ever
known, I started to feel sorry for Paul Grandin, Jr. He was just too
young to be looking back.

"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 fmd 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 stifiiy 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 iirst
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?"