The Bottle Ghosts (5 page)

“How about we go have dessert first?” I asked, leading him toward the bedroom.

Jonathan's face broke into an ear-to-ear grin. “Sure!”

*

After dinner, which was pleasantly delayed by about an hour, I got out the friends' list that Bradshaw had given me and began calling them. I managed to reach all but one of those on the list, though of course no one had any really directly useful information, other than to sketch in a little more fully a picture of who Jerry Shea was as a person.

Originally from the Boston area, from a large and hard-drinking old-school Irish family, Shea had apparently been fighting alcoholism long before he moved here, and had a history of bouts with serious depression. In the vicious circle of alcoholism, the depression would lead to drinking, and the drinking would lead to depression. Some of the guys on the list had known him quite a while before he and Bradshaw had met. They, the friends, had held hopes that Shea's having a lover would alleviate the depression and subsequently the drinking. It didn't.

When he was sober, Shea was, like a great many alcoholics, outgoing, friendly, and cheerful, apparently without a care in the world. He and Bradshaw weren't having any problems the friends knew about, other than the obvious and monumental one of the drinking. Everyone who knew Shea liked him, until the demons came, and then he would just drop out of their lives for a week or so while he binged and recovered. He never bothered any of his friends while he was drunk.

All of the friends were naturally concerned about his having disappeared, and expressed a great deal of empathy for Bradshaw, but most assumed that he was just on a very long, rough binge and that he'd be coming home any time now, to start the cycle all over again.

As I hung up from the last call, I reflected again on how much of a P.I.'s life is spent in running around in circles or in wandering down long, convoluted paths only to come to a dead end of one sort or another. I determined, next time I spoke to Bradshaw, to see if I could expand his list to Shea's relatives, or out of town friends. I'd also see if Shea had any credit cards that might be traced for any charges made since he disappeared.

Out of curiosity, I looked up Bradshaw's home number and dialed it to see if he had in fact taken my advice and gotten an answering machine before he left town. Sure enough, he had, and the message he'd recorded was almost word-for-word what I'd suggested to him.

Jonathan, who had been sitting cross-legged on the floor reading a textbook assignment for school, totally absorbed, looked up as I got up from the sofa to put the phone back where it belonged.

“About ready for bed?”

I grinned. “Didn't we just do that a little while ago?”

He returned the grin. “Well, I meant to
sleep.
But if you want…”

I walked over to him to take his hands and pull him up from the floor. “Well, why don't we just go to bed and see what comes up?”

“Good idea.”

*

With Bradshaw out of town, I was sort of running on empty as far as possible leads were concerned. I did make a note to check out the baths to see if anyone might know Shea there, but it was a long shot: baths are almost as anonymous as A.A. meetings. There were only two baths left in town—most had closed when even the most dense members of the community finally realized that AIDS was definitely transmitted by sex—and especially the rampant unsafe sex usually associated with baths. One, Rage, had changed ownership a couple of times since I'd had occasion to go there as part of a case I was working on. It had added a large workout room and now referred to itself as a “health spa for men,” but a rose by any other name…. The other, the Six-Ten, was to baths what the Troc was to bars—it was so sleazy it didn't even bother with a name: just an address. How it managed to hold on was beyond me, but I guess there were enough guys out there who got a thrill out of playing Russian Roulette with sex to keep it open.

I considered calling Bradshaw to ask about the credit cards, but without his being home to possibly be able to look up any information from old bills, it wouldn't be practical. I also toyed with the idea of having lunch at the Imperator and perhaps talking with a couple of the waiters but decided against it, for now at least. The Imperator, in addition to being very expensive, was strictly a suit-and-tie place, and I didn't feel like going home and getting what my grandfather used to call “all spiffed up.” It was still an option for the near future if I ran completely out of other leads, but…

At 10:03, the phone rang.

I let it ring the customary two times before answering.

“Hardesty Investigations.”

“Mr. Hardesty?” I didn't recognize the voice. “This is Officer Marty Gresham. Lieutenant Richman says you'd like to talk to me about some missing persons cases?”

Richman doesn't waste any time,
I thought.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I would. I'd like to get a little better feel for how the department handles missing persons reports, and maybe pick up a few pointers, if it's not violating some ordinance for me to know.”

Gresham laughed. “No, I don't think it is. But I don't do any actual investigating myself. I'm mainly assigned right now to records and filing. But I'd be glad to tell you what I can.” There was a slight pause, then: “I understand you're gay.”

“Yes, I am. Is that some sort of problem?” I suddenly realized how Bradshaw must have felt when I asked about Shea's being alcoholic. I was also a little surprised, in a way, to think that Richman would even have mentioned it.

“Oh, no! No. Not at all. It's just that I don't think I've ever met a gay guy before.”

Riiiiiight!
I thought. I started to say “Gee, that's a coincidence: I don't think I've ever met a straight one,” but decided against it.

Apparently he realized how naive he sounded, because he quickly added: “What I mean is that maybe I can learn something from you, too, that would help when I'm analyzing case reports where the missing person is gay.”

“Great. So when can we get together?” I figured that if he
might
want to take things the wrong way, I'd be happy to play along.

“Well, my fiancée packs my lunch and I usually eat it here, but if you'd like to meet me in Warman Park a little after noon, we could talk for a while.”

“That's fine.” The subtlety of the fiancée reference didn't escape me. “How about by the fountain?”

“Okay. You shouldn't have much trouble spotting me—I'll probably be the only uniformed cop there—at least the only one carrying a brown paper bag.”

And I'll be the one with the two heads wearing the feather boa,
my sarcastic side thought.

Now, now, be fair…
my rational side responded.

“I'll find you,” I said. “See you there, then. And thanks.”

“You're welcome. See ya.”

*

Rather than hassle with taking the car and paying to park in the underground garage below Warman Park—I knew on-street parking would be next to impossible—I decided to be adventurous and take the #12 bus which ran a block down from my office and went directly past Warman Park. A ten minute ride at most.

I debated on stopping at the diner downstairs for carry-out to take with me, but then opted just to go to one of the hotdog vending carts in the park when I got there.

With my usually impeccable to-the-second timing, I was once again ten minutes early getting to the park. Well, it was a nice day, and there was plenty of eye candy around to keep me busy while I waited. I did stop at one of the carts and got a polish sausage with the works, a bag of chips, and a can of soda. I even had the vendor put it in a brown paper bag for me, so I'd fit right in with Gresham.

I was sitting on one of the marble benches surrounding the central fountain, facing away from it and watching two hot-looking early-twenties playing Frisbee. When I glanced around, I saw a uniformed police officer, brown paper bag in hand, standing two benches away from me, obviously trying to figure out which one of the people around the fountain might be me.

I got up from my bench and walked over to him.

“Officer Gresham.” I extended my hand. “Dick Hardesty.”

He took it in a strong grasp and shook it vigorously, like a politician at a fundraiser. “Mr. Hard—uh, Dick…it's nice to meet you. Call me Marty, please.”

We headed back to the bench I'd been sitting on, which was now empty, and sat down. While he was opening his paper bag, I had a chance to get a closer look at him. No hat, brown hair, crewcut. A nice, open face. All-American Boy type. He looked about Jonathan's age, but I assumed he had to be around twenty-five or so. He saw me looking at him, and gave me a quick grin.

“I want to apologize about that stupid gay remark I made on the phone. Of course I've met gay guys before…I just didn't know they
were
gay.”

It didn't matter, of course, but my curiosity got the better of me. “So how did you know I'm gay—did Lieutenant Richman mention it?”

He unwrapped a sandwich, neatly cut in half, diagonally, and shook his head. “No, he didn't say anything—your name's pretty well known around headquarters.”

Oh,
that's
a happy thought! Just what I've always wanted!

“Everybody knows you helped get rid of Chief Rourke,” he said, referring to one of my more notorious cases some while back, “and we all know about Officer Brady.”

I wasn't prepared for the fact that the mention of Tom's name hurt like hell. A long story I thought I'd consigned to my past. I was wrong.

We ate in silence—I was very unhappy to find the bun around my polish sausage was pretty soggy by this time from the sauerkraut. I hate soggy buns. I made a mental note to put in my “don't do that again” file.

“So,” I said, trying discreetly to eat the polish sausage without having to eat the bun, “tell me about this project you're working on.”

“Mmm,” he said, taking the last bite of the second half of his sandwich. I wondered idly if his fiancée had put a little love note in the bag. I wouldn't have been surprised. “Yeah, it's really interesting,” he continued after wadding up the wrapper and dropping it into the bag, extracting a huge, shiny red apple that reminded me somehow of the one the Queen had given Snow White. “I'm working on my Masters in criminology, and I decided that, since I was assigned to Missing Persons Records, I could do my thesis on it. I talked to my sergeant, then to my lieutenant, and they okayed my trying to see if I could come up with patterns and perhaps some ideas on how to change or add to the information we gather. So I started going through the reports for the past five years, dividing the cases into categories, picking stuff out of the notes the investigating officers made on the reports, that sort of thing.”

He rubbed the apple vigorously on his shirtfront, though it was already so highly polished it reflected the sunlight, and took a huge bite, then made a quick swipe of his jaw with the back of his wrist to catch a trickle of juice.

“The report form itself is pretty elementary,” he said between chews, “but we mainly try to find out the basics: who's missing, who it is making the report and why, how long has the person been gone, has he disappeared before? Is he depressed or suicidal? Did he mention to anyone that he might be going away somewhere? Is he in trouble with the police, the courts, or anyone else? If we feel there is a reason to do so, we'll list the missing with the N.C.I.C.—the National Crime Information Center—which has pretty strict guidelines for entering missing persons. The N.C.I.C.'s main function is to list criminals being sought, and it would be totally swamped if every single missing persons report was filed with them. When the police stop someone for a driving violation or any other infraction, they routinely enter the driver's name into the N.C.I.C.. A lot of missing persons show up that way.

“Anyway, I think the report forms we use could be a lot more comprehensive and easier to review. I'm working on that, too. So, I started dividing the cases into basic categories—gender, age, marital status, that sort of thing. Kind of a process of elimination. I found when I got through that I had a bunch of miscellaneous cases left over that didn't fit the more basic categories I'd set up, so I went through them looking to see if there might be subcategories. I came up with five cases of single men, age twenty-six to forty-five, pretty obviously gay from the other information. That's not a lot of cases, really, over five years—averages out at only one a year. But then I realized that the earliest case was almost exactly five years ago, the second oldest was just under four and a half years ago, and the last four, counting Shea, were within the past six months. It's probably all coincidence, but…”

Yeah,
‘but'
…
I thought.

“Do you know if any of the guys missing were listed with the N.C.I.C.?”

He shook his head slowly. “I'm pretty sure not. None of them had any flags that would indicate they needed to be.”

That figured, I suppose. “Do you remember the other guys' names, by any chance?” I asked, finishing off my soda and putting the can in my paper bag. I wondered if any of them might ring a bell of some sort. Unlikely, but possible.