Missing (9 page)

"You don’t know if he’d been harassed again
recently, do you?" I said, thinking it would make a damn good
motive for suicide.

"If he was, he didn’t tell me. As his lawyer,
I am sure that he would have come to me with such a problem."

But this time he sounded defensive, which made me
think I should follow up on it. The obvious fact that Greenleaf
hadn’t confided in him prior to killing himself was bothering
Sullivan, just as it was tormenting Cindy Dorn. It occurred to me
that Mason Greenleaf hadn’t confided in any of the people one might
have expected him to turn to—Cindy, Sullivan, or Del Cavanaugh.
Outside of the vague malaise he’d voiced to the girl, he had gone
to his grave silently, like a man with a secret. Which led me back to
Stacie’s bar and the only two people I knew for a fact that
Greenleaf had talked to before he committed suicide.

"Mason was seen in a bar called Stacie’s on
the night he died, in the company of two other men, a gray-haired
older man who drank a good deal of Scotch and a younger blond man
with a mustache. I thought at first that the Scotch-drinker was Del
Cavanaugh, but now I’m not sure. You wouldn’t know any old
friends of Mason’s that match those descriptions, would you?"

Sullivan thought this over. "I can’t say, the
descriptions are so vague. You understand I don’t want to put
anyone in a difficult position without further checking."

"Meaning that you do know people who would fit
the bill?"

"Several," Sullivan conceded. "I’ll
make inquiries for you."

Under the circumstances it was the best I could have
hoped for.

"I appreciate the help," I told him,
getting up and holding out my hand. We shook like old pals.

"I’ll call you after I’ve checked into it,"
Sullivan said as I left the room.
 

10

THE conversation with Sullivan had gone well enough
to give me hope that he would eventually help out, especially if he
could see his way to naming names. And I had the feeling that in time
he would. Like Cindy, he had been wounded by Greenleaf’s silence;
and, like Cavanaugh, he was vain enough to take it personally.

Sullivan had already helped me in one way: by making
it clear that Mason Greenleaf’s life and death had had shapes of
their own—independent of my bad memories of Ira Lessing’s tragic
death, and my part in revenging it—and that at their heart was a
secret that he hadn’t been able to impart to his lover or his
ex-lover or his friends. Both Cavanaugh or Sullivan had guessed that
that secret was his inability to come to terms with being gay, a fate
that he had tried to escape and couldn’t. Where Cindy Dorn saw
inexplicable betrayal, they saw self-delusion and a sad, inevitable
self-reckoning. While their version of Mason Greenleaf smacked
heavily of their own biases, it did have the merit of fitting the few
facts that I knew. Like it or not, I couldn’t get around the fact
that Greenleaf had ended up in a gay bar with two gay men.

As I rode the elevator back down to the Dixie
Terminal lobby, I plotted a bit of strategy to take me through the
rest of that afternoon, until it was late enough to catch the night
help who had served Greenleaf and his friends at Stacie’s bar. I
decided to begin at the beginning, with whatever had been bothering
Greenleaf during the weeks before he disappeared. Besides his
homosexuality, Sullivan had suggested three possible motives: a fear
of contracting AIDS, a terror of harassment by the law, or a serious
problem at work. I had already seen what AIDS could do, and it was
fearsome indeed. But according to Cindy, Greenleaf did not himself
have AIDS, unless of course he’d had his blood tested during the
week before he dropped into limbo. Had he, in fact, been diagnosed
with HIV, it would have been more than enough to start him in
decline. It was the first thing I planned to check when I got back to
the office. The other two possible motives, job- and cop-related
trouble, could be handled by a couple of quick trips. I didn’t have
much hope that any of it would pan out, especially since Cindy had
already told me that Mason wasn’t having a problem at work, and
neither Sullivan nor the cops themselves had said that he was having
any current problems with the law. But without a solid lead, I had to
start somewhere.

When I got back to my office, I looked up Mason’s
internist, Terry Mulhane, in the Yellow Pages. He had an office on
Auburn Avenue in Corryville. I dialed his number and got a
receptionist who put me on hold. A few moments later she came back
on, full of apologies.
"We’ve got some
sort of flu bug going around, and the phone’s been ringing off the
hook."

I told her who I was and asked her if it would be
possible to talk to Mulhane about Mason Greenleaf.

"I can ask," she said dubiously, as if
Greenleaf was a painful subject.

After a short pause, a man picked up the phone. "This
is Terry Mulhane," he said. "You say your name is Steiner?"

"Stoner. I’m a private investigator Cindy Dorn
hired to look into Mason Greenleaf ’s death."

"I thought the police had ruled it a suicide,"
the man said.

"We’re still looking for a motive."

Mulhane sighed. "All I can say, and I told Cindy
this at the funeral, is that it wasn’t because of a medical
problem. There was nothing wrong with Mason. I checked him out myself
no more than a few days before he did this thing, and he was fine."

I felt relieved for Cindy—and for myself—and
curious about what had motivated Greenleaf to go to the doctor before
he died. "Did his complaints have anything to do with AIDS—or
fear of AIDS?"

"I suppose in some way all of his complaints had
to do with that. Fear of AIDS or fear of retribution—it amounted to
the same thing with Mason, I’ve always thought. What I can tell you
for certain is that he wasn’t sick when he came to see me. He said
he’d been having trouble sleeping. His BP was up. But it was
generally up when he came in for a visit. White jacket BP. There was
nothing about his condition that indicated suicidal depression.
Nothing like that at all."

I could tell from the tone of his voice that Dr.
Terry Mulhane felt guilty about Mason Greenleaf ’s suicide. As he
had probably supplied Mason with the sleeping pills that he’d used
to kill himself with, I could understand his pain.

"Was this a regular scheduled visit?" I
asked.

"No, he just came in for a quick check. Look,
I’ve got a waiting room full of people," the man said, as if
he wanted to be done with the conversation—and the bad feelings it
evoked.

"I have a few other questions, doctor, if you
could spare some time later today."

"Under the circumstances, I can hardly say no,"
he said, sounding like no was exactly what he wanted to say. He went
off the line for a moment, and I could hear him talking to his
receptionist. "I should be free ’round six-thirty this
evening."

"I’ll come to the office."

"Mr. Stoner," he said before hanging up, "I
knew Mason as a friend and a patient for better than ten years. And
the fact that he did what he did is not easy for me to accept—or
talk about. You understand that it was my job to keep him well."

"If it’s any consolation, doctor, he didn’t
tell anyone how close he was to killing himself."

"I’m afraid that isn’t a consolation,"
the man said.

I glanced at my watch as I
put down the phone. It was just a little past noon, which gave me
more than enough time to follow up on Ira Sullivan’s other
suggestions and talk to Mason’s colleagues at Nine Mile School,
before returning to Corryville for my meeting with Mulhane. Since the
CPD building on Ezzard Charles was more or less on the way to Nine
Mile, I decided to stop there first and confirm the fact that
Greenleaf hadn’t had any recent brushes with the law.

***

The blue sky had clouded up while I was on the phone
with Mulhane. By the time I got back down the street, it had begun to
rain—a loud pop-up thunderstorm that only lasted the few minutes it
took me to walk uptown to the Parkade on Sixth and pick up the Pinto.
By the time I pulled into the GUC parking lot across from the CPD
building, the storm was over and the threatening clouds had begun to
divide.

The pavement was so hot that the rain raised a mist
on the sidewalks. It trailed me out of the lot and up the pathway
that led, between flagpole and cut stone marker, to the front doors
of the penal yellow police building. Inside the shifts were changing,
and the traffic on the first floor was heavy with patrolmen in
summer-weights. I made my way through the throng up to Homicide on
the third fioor. Jack McCain was sitting in an office carrel off the
Homicide squad room, staring morosely at an arrest report.

"Did you talk to the girl?" he said,
looking up as I came through the door.

I nodded. "She’s still got me looking into
it."

McCain dropped the arrest report on the desk and
fumbled through his shirt pocket for a cigarette. "Well, good
luck. We did what we could, you know."

"I know, Jack. It’s a kind of therapy for her,
I think."

"So what can I do for you?" he said,
lighting up.

"A couple of things. For one, you can check to
make sure that Greenleaf wasn’t having any problems with you guys.
Ask around  at Vice, Narco, Munie, and Park. I guess it’s
possible that he could have been picked up using a false name, so you
better give them a physical description, too."

"I’ll tell you right now we’ve had no
contact with him since the solicitation thing," McCain said
ilatly. "I mean, we did do a little checking, Harry, no matter
what the girl thinks. But if it’ll make you happy, I’ll
double-check."

"Thanks. You guys would make a good motive."

McCain smiled. "Why not just face the obvious?
He was half gay and couldn’t keep living half straight?"

It was the same theory that Cavanaugh and Sullivan
had advanced—a man who had painted himself into a spot he could no
longer live in and who didn’t have the will or the hardness of
heart to force his way out. It was tidy and quite possibly true. Only
it depended entirely on the assumption that Greenleaf’s
relationship with Cindy Dorn had been a self-deception. From what I’d
seen of the woman, I had trouble believing that she wouldn’t have
scented that out at the start, although it was a fact that she’d
feared Greenleaf’s past.

"I haven’t ruled it out," I said to him.

"What else can I do for you?"

"I’d like to take a look at the jacket from
Greenleaf ’s solicitation bust."

"Jesus Christ, that was six, seven years ago.
What the hell would that tell you?"

"Known haunts, MO, acquaintances—something. I
mean, the ground is so thin already, I figure anything could be a
lead."

"All right," he said, stretching it out
with a sigh. "Go down the hall. Talk to Rob Sabato in Vice. He
was IO on the solicitation case. Tell them I said it was okay to give
you the jacket."

"I appreciate the help," I said, getting up
from the chair.

He gestured with one of his hands, shooing away the
gray smoke that hung between us. "It’s okay. But let’s not
make this into an industry, Harry."

"I’m just trying to make the woman happy,
Jack."

I walked out of McCain’s oflice and down the hall
to the Vice squad room. A sergeant directed me to Ron Sabato, who was
sitting at a desk at the back of the room, feet up, reading a
classified section of the newspaper. As I approached him, he lowered
the paper and stared at me drearily over the top of the page. He was
a thin middle-aged man with an acne-scarred face, hinged like a
corner at either side of a hawklike nose. His peppercorn hair was cut
short, military style, and like mine was going gray at either temple.

"What can I do for you‘?" he said, all
business.

I told him who I was and what I wanted.

"Yeah, I kinda remember the case. Something
along the lines. A fag solicitation thing. Teacher goes after high
school kid. Right?"

I smiled at his "headline" capsule.
"Right."

Sabato put the newspaper down on the desk and patted
it with his right palm. "l read these things every day. You
never know what you might find. I once busted a prostie ring had an
ad in the Gold Chest."

I laughed.

"It was an escort service run out of Dayton.
They come down here in a Lincoln Town Car, as many girls as you
wanted, come right to your door. The chauffeur was the pimp. It was a
sweet little bust."

He got up from the desk and went over to a long metal
file. "What was this guy’s name again?"

"Greenleaf. Mason Greenleaf."

Sabato opened a drawer and thumbed through the
folders.

"Might be the jacket’s over at A&D, being
from so far back." He came to the end of the drawer and nodded.
"Yeah, it’s A&D, I can call over there. Have it for you
maybe late tonight or tomorrow."

"That’d be fine."

"So what’s your interest in this case?"
he said, closing the file and going back behind the desk.