Missing (4 page)

I walked up to the front door, and one of the cops
lounging in the shade held up a meaty hand.

"Hold on, fella. Nobody’s allowed inside."

"My name is Stoner," I told him. "I’m
a friend of Ms. Dorn’s."

"Just a minute."

The cop went through the doorway into the house and
came out again a few moments later, grinning.

"Fucking unbelievable," he said, as if he
were responding to something outrageous inside the house. "You
can go in," he said to me.

A couple of other patrolmen were standing inside the
door, laughing. One of them elbowed the other as I walked past them,
and the second one stopped laughing immediately.

Cindy Dorn was sitting on the blue couch. A CPD
homicide detective sat across from her. I knew him to say hello. His
name was McCain.

"Oh, God, I’m glad to see you," Cindy
said.

Reaching up, she clutched my hand tightly in hers.
Her eyes were red from crying, her voice hoarse from it.

"Hello, Stoner," McCain said, nodding at
me.

"Jack."

It was hot in the living room with the morning sun
pouring through the huge glass windows. McCain’s flaccid, brick-red
face was coated with sweat. I could feel sweat popping out on my
forehead, too.

"You think you can make the identification now,
Ms. Dorn?" McCain said.

Cindy nodded weakly.

Looking relieved, McCain stood up and wiped his brow
with his coat sleeve. Cindy stood up, too, using my arm as a brace.
Outside one of the beat cops guided her over to a squad car parked at
the curb. I hung back to ask McCain a few questions.

"Who found the body?"

"The hotel desk clerk. About an hour ago. He got
complaints about the smell from other roomers on the floor."

"Greenleaf’s still in the hotel?"

McCain nodded.

"Have any idea how long he’d been dead?"

"From the look of him, I’d guess ten, twelve
hours. He isn’t a pretty sight, Harry. Not after half a day in this
heat."

I glanced over at Cindy, who was staring at us,
pasty-faced, through the back window of the cruiser. "Does she
have to see it?"

McCain shrugged. "Somebody does. Did you know
him?"

I shook my head.

"Then I guess it’s gotta be the girl."
McCain wiped his brow with his coat again and squinted up into the
blazing noonday sky.

"Sometimes I hate this job."

We started across the sidewalk to the cruiser.

"Do you have any idea what the cause of death
was?"

"There was a tin of pills on the dresser. A
bottle of booze on the nightstand. My guess is suicide."

I got in the backseat of the cruiser beside Cindy.
McCain got in front.

"Let’s go," he said to the patrolman
behind the wheel.

The cop took off down Celestial, then jogged right
onto a walled stretch of Columbia Parkway. Cindy Dorn stared
wide-eyed at the cagelike interior of the cruiser. It was her first
time in the back of a cop car, and the first time is always a shock.
Everything about it smacks of punishment and the raw work of
detention. I’d made the trip she was taking more times than I cared
to remember. But the one that stuck with me was Len Trumaine on the
Lessing case. Cindy had the same blasted look on her face that
Trumaine had had on his—the look of someone who has stepped right
through the crust of the world.

Cindy didn’t say a word as the cruiser blew down an
exit ramp and headed straight into the lower east side. She was going
to see a terrible thing, and she knew it. She was girding herself for
it. There was very little I could do to make it any less terrible,
except to be there with her.

The cruiser bucked as we rounded Fourth Street,
throwing Cindy against my shoulder. The jolt seemed to rock her out
of her trance.

"He’s going to look awful, isn’t he?"
she said in a sick voice.

I said, "What he looks like doesn’t matter to
him. It happens after someone dies."

"I’ve seen this in movies. It feels like we’re
in a movie. Only I can’t get up and leave."

"That’s a pretty fair description."

Cindy bent toward me, lowering her voice until it was
just a bitter, heartbroken whisper. "They were laughing at him,
Harry."

"Who was?"

"Those cops. They were laughing at him because
he was a homosexual."

"How did they know that?"

She shook her head. "They knew." She
started to weep. "It’s like he didn’t matter because he was
gay."

We were on Main Street by then. A block later, the
cruiser jerked to a stop beneath the wrought-iron arcade of the
Washington Hotel. There was an ambulance parked just ahead of us. The
cops had set up sawhorses on either side of the hotel door to block
off the pedestrian flow. A few lunchtime bystanders were stacked up
on either side of the obstacles, wondering what all the fuss was
about. Jack McCain turned in the seat.

"Can you do this now, Ms. Dorn?" he asked
gently.

Cindy raised her head from my chest. "I guess I
have to, right?"

"It may help us find out what happened."

Drawing herself up on the bench seat, Cindy nodded
sharply. "Then I’m ready."

McCain opened the back doors of the cruiser, and we
stepped out into the brilliant midday sun. Side by side we walked out
of the sunlight into the darkness of the old hotel.

A narrow wainscoted hallway led to the clerk’s
desk—a booth on the left-hand wall. Beyond it the hall opened into
the lobby proper, which in the Washington Hotel was little more than
a dingy common room lined with secondhand chairs and benches. An old
man in a stained shirt and yellow rayon slacks sat on one of the
benches, resting his dazed-looking head in his hands. He had a red,
heavily weathered face, with a band of paper white around his
forehead, where a cap had shielded his head from the sun. In front of
him a small portable TV, propped on an old mahogany table, flashed
silent pictures. The place smelled of dust and mildew and old, tired
men.

A stout, genial-looking man in his midfifties came
out from behind the reception desk. He was wearing a T-shirt and
khaki trousers and had a Reds cap on his head.

"Are you going to want to be going back up
there?" he said to McCain.

"Yeah. One more trip."

"C’mon, then."

The clerk led us over to the open door of an elevator
to the left of the reception desk.

"Keep an eye on things, will ya, Pat?" he
called back to the man on the bench. Without taking his eyes off the
TV, the guy raised one hand to acknowledge that he’d gotten the
message.

"Christ, I don’t know about Pat," the
clerk said with a nervous laugh. "It’s like he’s wired to
that damn box."

McCain and I stepped into the elevator. The fat clerk
helped Cindy Dorn through the doors.
"Are
you a relative of the deceased, ma’am‘?" he said with
surprising gentleness.

"I was his friend."

"I’m very sorry," the man said.

He tipped his cap, smoothing down the thin gray hair
underneath it before reseating it on his head.

The clerk threw a switch, and the elevator lurched up
with a sound of rattling chains.

"What floor is he on?" Cindy said in a
distant voice.

"He’s on five, ma’am. All the way to the
top. When he checked in last night, he asked if he could have a room
on the top floor. I guess he wanted to look out at the view."

The fat man cleared his throat nervously.

"He seemed like a nice man. Leastwise he was
polite to me."

When we got to five, the clerk held the elevator door
open with his right hand as we got off. "You wanta come back
down, you press the bell." He pointed to a painted-over buzzer
on the jamb. "I’ll come up quick as I can."

He tipped his hat again to Cindy and released the
door, disappearing behind it with a rattle of pulley chains.

"It’s down here on the front right,"
McCain said.

Diffuse daylight was coming from a bank of windows at
the end of the hall. Through the grimy glass you could see the east
side of the city, crumbling away in a rubble of faded brick to the
green base of Mount Adams. Atop the hill the brilliant white steeple
of St. Gregory’s Church blazed in the sun.

"You can see Mason’s house," Cindy Dorn
said heavily. "There on the hillside."

I squinted into the glare and could just make it out,
a tiny drop of red on the green hillside.

A CID man with a pair of magnifying goggles perched
on his forehead came out the door of Greenleaf ’s room.

"We’re set," he said to McCain. He
glanced at Cindy. "You’ll want to wear a mask, ma’am."
 
He handed her a blue hospital mask. Cindy
stared at it with a sick look of terror.

"Let’s just do it," I said.

The CID guy stepped out of the doorway. "He’s
on the bed at the back of the room. Take a look at his face, ma’am.
Just a look."

The blue mask dangling loosely in her hand, Cindy
stepped through the hotel room door. I went in behind her. The smell
of death rose up like an animal and ran toward us in a blind rush
that made the girl’s knees buckle. I grabbed her arms to steady
her. He was lying on the mattress at the back of the grim little
hotel room—something the color of a roach wing, swathed in white
sheets.

Somehow the girl made herself stare at it before
collapsing against me with a sob.

"It’s him," she said, gagging.

I lifted her to her feet and maneuvered her out of
the room into the hall. McCain ducked his head with embarrassment.

"Sorry, Ms. Dorn," he said heavily. "Very
sorry."

By the time we got back out to the car, the girl had
gone into shock. I told the driver to take her to the emergency room
at Jewish.

McCain rode with us to the hospital. No one said a
word on the ride.

The emergency room was triaged, but McCain flashed
his badge and they took the girl immediately, wheeling her in a chair
into one of the curtained-off examination carrels. I didn’t know
McCain particularly well, but the concern he was showing for Cindy
Dorn was
enough to make me like him.

We sat in a waiting area, drinking vending machine
coffee. All around us weary, sad-eyed people sprawled on hospital
chairs and benches. Above them, on wall consoles, television sets
murmured late-afternoon fare.

"Do they let you smoke anymore?" McCain
said, pulling a pack of Luckies from his shirt pocket.

"You have to go outside."

"Smokers are the new niggers, you know that?"
He rammed the cigarettes back in his pocket as if he were stabbing
himself in the heart. "The nineties are starting to depress me.
The whole world depresses me." McCain got to his feet. "I
gotta have a nail."

I followed him through the exit door, out onto a
cement concourse. The afternoon sun lit the pavement like sheet ice.

"Christ, it’s hot," McCain said,
squinting into the glare as he screwed a cigarette into his mouth and
touched its tip with a lighter.

"When’s this weather gonna break, huh? It’s
been like a hundred for a solid week."

"That was a nice thing you did back there for
the girl."

McCain shook his head. "She showed a lot of
guts, considering."

"When do you figure you’ll get criminalistics
on Greenleaf?"

"Day or two. There wasn’t much for them to do.
Hell, you saw the hotel room. Now why would a guy like him end up in
a place like that?"

I remembered what Cindy Dorn had said about being
able to see Greenleaf ’s house from the top floor. "It’s
close to the hill. You can see his condo from the window."

"If he was homesick, why didn’t he just go
home? I mean, it’s just a mile or two away."

"Maybe he didn’t want to leave a mess."

"Fags," McCain said listlessly. "They’re
a different breed."

"How’d you guys know he was homosexual?"

"How’d you think?"

"He’s got a record?"

McCain nodded. "Indecent carriage, soliciting.
The usual."

"When was this?"

"Six, seven years ago."

"Nothing more recent?"

"No. He got probated to some shrink. Judging by
the girl, maybe it helped. She seems like a nice kid." He took a
couple of drags, then stubbed the butt out on a concrete pillar. "I
gotta get back downtown. Tell the girl I’ll be in touch soon as I
know the details. If he’s got other family in the area, steer ’em
to me."

McCain started to walk away, then turned back. "How’d
you get involved in this, anyway? You a friend of the woman’s?"