Missing (15 page)

I found a table to myself near one of the side
windows. While a  waiter in a white shirt with a garter on each
sleeve brought me a beer, I looked around. The bar occupied two
stories, with the second floor torn out and made into a landing that
surrounded the first. Upstairs a rock band was going like a storm
siren. Downstairs the room pulsed with talk. To my left, a long,
mirrored bar with a chrome rail and chrome-edged stools ran halfway
down the room. The liquor bottles lined up behind it were lit softly
from panels below. Outside of a few baby spots, it was the brightest
light in the place. It occurred to me that Greenleaf and his friends
would have to have been making quite a ruckus to stand out in that
dim, noisy room. Either that, or someone who knew him or his friends
had been keeping an eye on them.

The waiter came back with the beer. Polishing the
table with a washrag, he set the bottle and glass down in front of
me. He was a thin, pale, black-haired kid in his early twenties, with
heavy-lidded  eyes and a scraggly mustache that had been filled
in with mascara to make him look grown up.

"Two bucks." He had to shout to make
himself heard.

I handed him a five. "Keep it."

He nodded. "You’re new to Stacie’s, aren’t
you?"

"You know all the customers by sight?"

"Pretty much. Most of ’em. You just get into
town?"

"This month. I was looking for a friend."

"Aren’t we all?" the kid said, smiling.

"The guy’s name is Mason Greenleaf. You know
him?"

The waiter thought about it for a moment. "I
don’t know the name. What’s he look like?"

I described Mason to him.

"Still doesn’t ring a bell," he said.
"You should talk to Maxie, the bartender." He nodded toward
the long, dim bar. "He’s been here forever. If anyone could
tell you, it’s him." The kid slapped his washcloth over his
shoulder. "You can’t find your friend, maybe you’d like to
have a drink with me. I’m off at two-thirty."

He walked into the crowd, glancing at me heavy-eyed
over his shoulder, like it was WWII and we were saying good-bye at
the railroad station. As soon as he was out of sight, I downed my
beer, then went over to the bar. As I sat down on a stool, the
bartender came over to get my order. He was a huge, fat man with a
curly red beard and red hair cut in a crew on top and tied in a short
pigtail in back. He wore a gold earring in his right ear and a bib
apron with a picture of Paul Prudhomme on it.

"What can I get you?" he said.

"I’ll take a Cutty, straight up."

Turning to the bar, he grabbed a bottle with a chrome
snout and flipped an ounce of booze into a shot glass. "There
you go," he said, setting it down in front of me like a chess
piece.

I decided to cut to the chase with this one—the
small talk with the waiter had been too depressing. Pulling a couple
of twenties out of my wallet, I slid them across the bar.

The guy laughed. "Where’ve you been drinking?
State prison?"

"It’s for some information." l

"There are magazines, you know?" he said,
still grinning.

"Classified ads. Cost you a lot less than this."
A doubt crossed his face, killing the smile on its way down from his
eyes. "Unless, of course, you’re a cop." He tugged
thoughtfully at his gold earring.

"Are you a cop?"

"When’s the last time a cop gave you forty
bucks to answer a few questions?"

The guy smiled again weakly, showing a mouth of mossy
teeth, grayed like a baby’s teeth with mother’s milk. "You’ve
got a point." He laid his fat forearms on the bar, stroking the
two twenties with his right hand like he was petting the cat. "All
right. So what do you want to know?"

"A week ago last Thursday, three men came into
your bar. Early in the evening. One of them was gray-haired,
middle-aged, drank a lot of Scotch. The second was young, blond, had
a mustache. The third one had dark hair, fair skin, blue eyes, lean
face, late thirties.

The gray-haired guy and the dark-haired one got into
an argument—"

The guy started nodding his head. "Sure. Helluva
argument. Shouting, finger-pointing. I thought the gray-haired one
was going to get physical. He was one angry drunk."

"This place is pretty noisy," I said,
glancing over my shoulder. "How come you happened to notice? Had
these men caused some trouble before?"

The bartender thought about it for a moment. "Look,
you know and I know that the one guy is dead, right? I mean, the cops
werehere about this, a week or so ago."

"Yeah, he’s dead. He killed himself."

"So what’s your interest? You’re like . . .
what? A relative? A reporter? A friend?"

"I’m a friend of a friend who wants to know
why he did it."

The man sighed. "I wish I could help. I knew a
fella killed himself not too long ago. It’s a hard thing to take."

"You’re saying you didn’t recognize any of
these guys?"

"No, I didn’t. They just made a lot of noise.
Knocked over a chair. I think maybe somebody complained. That’s why
I kept an eye out."

I shook my head. "I don’t know if that’s
worth forty."

He pressed the money under his right palm, as if that
cat he’d been petting were struggling to get loose. "Look, I
can ask around for you. Maybe somebody else recognized them. Only
thing is, it was early on a slow night. I don’t think there were a
whole lot of other people around. What I’m trying to say is, I
wouldn’t hold your breath. Your friend, either."

"After the three of them had the argument, the
dark-haired one left?"

He nodded. "Yeah. Just stormed out. All pissed
off."

"How drunk would you say he was?"

The man looked puzzled, like I’d thrown him a
curve. "How drunk?"

"I mean, was he falling-down drunk?"

"I don’t remember him being drunk at all,"
the bartender said uncertainly. "It was the other one—the guy
with the gray hair who got loaded."

"You’re telling me the one who left wasn’t
drunk?"

"I dunno. Could be I’m not remembering it
right. Maybe he was kind of loaded."

But he looked and sounded exactly like someone who
had said something he shouldn’t have said, although I’d be
goddamned if I knew why he’d be holding anything back.

"The guy who left—he left alone?"

"Yeah. The other two stayed in the bar for
another hour or so."

"Did they have any more arguments? Say anything
you remember?"

"Naw." He shook his head. "They just
drank a few more drinks and . . . I dunno where they went."

"Was there any commotion in the lot that night?
A fight, maybe?"

He shrugged. "Nothing I heard or saw."

I dug through my wallet and pulled out a plain
business card with my name and phone number on it. "What’s
your name‘?" I said to him.

"Max Carlson."

"You think over what we talked about, Max. You
search your memory. Ask around. Something new comes to you, you come
up with a name for the other two men, you call me. If it pans out,
there’s a reward in it. Couple thousand bucks."

"Couple thousand?" the guy said, his eyes
getting big.

After examining the man’s bankbook, I figured
Mason’s estate
could afford it. "Yeah."

The bartender studied the card, then tucked it in his
apron pocket. "I’ll think about it," he said. "What
about the forty?"

"Earnest money," I said, turning for the
door.
 

16

I WAS sure that Max Carlson would do all that he
could to find the names of the two men who’d been drinking with
Mason Greenleaf on the night he died. The two thousand dollars were
weighing on him like a pang of conscience. I could see it in his
eyes, a wonderful change of heart.

Max had made me curious about Mason Greenleaf ’s
sobriety, or lack of it. When I’d first asked him, he had said
Greenleaf wasn’t particularly drunk. The second time, he’d acted
like he’d been caught in a lie. If Greenleaf hadn’t loaded up at
Stacie’s, it could change things slightly. To end up with a blood
alcohol content of one-point-four, Mason would have had to put away a
good deal of booze in that hotel room—or in the half hour between
the bar and the hotel. It was an odd thing to do—to get drunk after
leaving a bar. Unless what had happened in Stacie’s—or in
Stacie’s lot—had upset him so much that he couldn’t stand to
think, or be Mason Greenleaf, one more minute.

As I walked out to the lot, I decided to stop at the
Washington before calling it a day. Drunk or sober, if Greenleaf had
come to harm in Stacie’s parking lot—and the bloodstains in the
Saab indicated that he had—he would have been wearing the bruises
when he checked into the hotel. Nobody at the scene had mentioned
bruises, not the cops or the desk clerk. But by this point no kind of
mistake or oversight would have surprised me, the investigation had
been so slipshod.

The Washington was only a couple blocks north and
west of the bar, easy walking distance even if you were drunk and a
little banged up. As I climbed Fifth Street to Elm, I glanced back
down at Stacie’s, trying to imagine what Mason Greenleaf had been
thinking on the night he died. He reportedly left the bar at
eleven-thirty, then either fell down or was knocked down in the lot
after having words in the bar. Hurt, he’d crawled into the backseat
of the Saab. Maybe he’d even passed out. In any event, it was
possible that he’d been in the car for the half hour that had
elapsed between his leaving Stacie’s and checking into the
Washington.

It had been a particularly bad week for Greenleaf The
dreams about old betrayals that wouldn’t let him sleep, the visits
to Dr. Mulhane and to Cavanaugh, and then four days of silence and
the rocky night at a bar that he shouldn’t have been in, with two
men he shouldn’t have been with. When he got his head together, he
didn’t drive home from the parking lot, even though home was only a
mile or so away. Instead he got back out of the car and climbed the
hill that I just c1imbed—heading for oblivion.

It was close to one o’clock, about the same time of
night that Greenleaf had checked into the Washington. Looking across
town from where I was standing, at Fifth and Elm, I could see the
string of streetlights stretching west—and little else. Uptown or
downtown, there was nothing to catch the eye. No bars, no
restaurants, no shops open late on a weekday night. Nothing but the
Washington Hotel two blocks north, with its crummy little arcade
announcing Rooms BY THE DAY OR THE WEEK in flickering neon. It was
either there—or back down the hill to the noisy bar beneath the
overpass and his angry friend.

I walked up to the Washington, in and out of the
soft-edged patches of streetlight and darkness, crossing over to the
west side of Elm at Sixth. I could hear the neon frazzle of the hotel
sign from a block away. Beneath the arcade, rows of bulbs cut a broad
circle out of the night. The hotel door was ajar, propped open with a
rubber stopper. I eased through it down a short wainscoted hall
decorated with postcard photographs of the city framed in dusty
glassless frames. A television was going in the common room at the
far end of the hall, lighting the dim lobby with a flicker like
firelight. I could see a couple of nodding old men and one pretty
young black woman dressed in shorts and halter—in out of the heat,
on a night with no trade—sitting on the couches and chairs, staring
mindlessly at the TV.

The stout middle-aged man drowsing behind the desk
was the  same guy who had ushered Cindy and me up to Mason
Greenleaf’s room. He was still wearing the Reds cap he’d had on
the week before, brim pulled down over his forehead to shade his eyes
against the bare bulb hanging above his meshed-in cage. He stirred
from the chair as I came up to the desk, squaring the hat up with one
hand and rubbing the sleep out of his jaws with the other.

"Sorry, buddy. Got no rooms left," he said,
barely conscious.

"Welfare took ’em all. Won’t have anything
available for several weeks."

He yawned, patting his open mouth like a tom-tom. He
didn’t remember me.

"Human Services uses you for temporary shelter?"
I asked.

The clerk nodded. "We never know when they’re
gonna call."

He sat back down hard on the metal chair, propping
his elbows on the counter and his head on his hands. "This used
to be a nice hotel, you know that?" he said to nobody in
particular, to himself.

"We had a bar and a restaurant. Good food."
He sighed. "Every once in a while I actually rent a room."

He looked up at me again, struggling to keep his eyes
open.

"Did I tell you we ain’t got no vacancies?"

"I don’t want a room. I want some
information."

"You’re a cop?" he said without surprise,
as if cops were no strangers to the Washington Hotel.

"No. I’m a private investigator looking into
the death of the man who killed himself in your hotel."