Missing (2 page)

"You don’t spend the nights together?"

"Some nights we do. Some nights we don’t.
Neither one of us wants the relationship to feel too much like a
marriage."

"Have you been sleeping together less often
lately?"

She shook her head. "Sex has been great, better
than ever. If it was a sexual problem, Harry, I think I would have
known it. It was—it felt more important than that."

"When did you realize he was missing?"

"On Thursday afternoon. I called him after
school like I usually do, but he didn’t answer the phone. We were
supposed to have dinner that night, so I went over to his place
around six and let myself in with my key. I have a key. I waited
there until almost midnight—
potchtying
around the house—and when he didn’t show up, I went home. The
next morning, Friday, I tried calling him at work. The principal said
he hadn’t come in and that he hadn’t been there on Thursday,
either. I called his house all day Friday and got no answer. This
morning I finally got the nerve up to get out the phone book and call
a private detective. You just happened to be the lucky party."

I laughed. "Has Mason ever disappeared like this
before? Without telling you or notifying the school?"

"Once. Last August. He dropped out of sight for
a week. He said he’d gone home."

"Did you believe him?"

"Of course I believed him," she said.
"Mason never lies to me. Jeez, we’ve been through so much
together and apart, there’s no reason to lie to each other. There’s
nothing left to lie about."

"What makes you think he hasn’t gone home
again?"

"Because I made him promise never to leave me
again without telling me first," Cindy Dorn said, staring
straight into my eyes.

"He knows how important that promise is to me."

"When you went to his place on Thursday, did you
find anything missing? Like clothes or a suitcase?"

She shook her head. "The house looked the way it
had on Wednesday night."

"Had his bed been slept in?"

"It was made up. But Mason’s always neat, so
that doesn’t mean much. Anyway, I’m no detective."

I got up from the table. "All right, Cindy,
let’s go look at the apartment."

"Then you’re 'taking the case'?"

"I guess I am."

Cindy Dorn smiled. "Thank you, Harry. Really.
Thank you."

"Have you contacted the police yet?" I
asked as we walked, single file, from the kitchen to the living-room
door.

"No po1ice!" she said so sharply that I
turned to look at her. "I don’t want the cops involved."

"If Mason’s a genuine missing person, I may
have to involve them, Cindy. Without police cooperation there may be
no other way to find him."

She shook her head. "Then he won’t be found.
The cops in this city treat homosexuals like dirt. I will not subject
Mason to that kind of humiliation and abuse. It’s that simple."

I didn’t say it to Cindy Dorn, but it wasn’t that
simple. Not if she wanted her lover back.
 

2

IT was twilight by the time Cindy Dorn and I arrived
at Mason Greenleaf ’s condo on Celestial Street in Mount Adams. It
was a beautiful, three-story town house perched on the south-most lip
of the hill, with a Chinese-red door and black louvered windows on
the street side. On the hill side, it was mostly plate glass and
railed redwood decks.

As Cindy and I got out of the car, two fox-faced
Appalachian boys trotted past us, heading down the slanting street
toward the Parkway. One of them was dragging a worn leather dog leash
with a chain choker behind him. No dog, just the leash. The chain
rattled on the concrete pavement all the way down the hill. The noise
made Cindy Dom laugh nervously.

"Marley’s ghost," she said. "I don’t
know where those kids come from, but there’s a flock of them around
here all the time."

"It used to be their hill," I said, "before
people like your friend Mason bought it out from under them. They
still own bits and pieces of it. In fact, a few shrewd hillbillies
have made a fortune in Mount Adams real estate."

"It does have the best views of the city,"
Cindy said, digging through a pocket for the key to the house. She
opened the door, and we went in.

The first floor was walled on the far side with
sliding-glass panels that opened onto a railed deck. Through the
glass panels I could see the view that Cindy had spoken of, the view
that had made the hill a trendy reserve for the rich and arty. The
entire city stretched out in the near distance, glowing softly in the
twilight. Beyond it, the river coursed past the stadium and the
coliseum, picking up different-colored waterlights at each stop.
Toward the dark Kentucky side, a July moon bobbed restlessly in the
current.

"How can Mason afford a place like this on a
teacher’s salary?" I asked.

"Mason is from a wealthy family," Cindy
said. "He moved here from Nashville to get away from them, but
he’s got a trust fund or something that he can draw on whenever he
likes." She came up beside me. "You want to go out on the
deck?"

"Sure."

She took my hand and guided me through the dark room
to the sliding-glass door. Throwing a latch, she opened it, and the
room, which had been as quiet as it was dark, filled with the night
sounds of crickets and distant traffic.

A warm breeze was rushing up the hillside, rustling
through the tops of the trees. Cindy Dorn went over to the railing
and leaned into the wind, letting it tug at the edges of her curly
black hair. She stood that way for some time.

There were two wrought-iron chairs and a wrought-iron
umbrella table with a glass top on the right side of the porch.
Something sitting on the deck beside one of the chairs caught my eye.
A glass tumbler with a saucer on top of it.

"Were you and Mason sitting out here on
Wednesday night?"

"Yes," Cindy said, turning back to me.
"Why?"

"There’s a glass and a plate by that chair."

She glanced over her shoulder. "It’s funny I
didn’t notice that before. They must be mine." She wrinkled
her brow. "It’s not like Mason to leave them out, though. He’s
a real pain in the ass about cleaning up."

"When did you leave here on Wednesday?"

"Around one A.M."

"Did you drive yourself home?"

She nodded. "Mason was asleep. But his car is
gone, too, if that’s what you’re getting at. He always parks on
Celestial, as close as he can to the house. I checked the whole
street and a couple of A adjoining streets, but the car’s not
there."

"What kind of car does he drive?"

"A Saab 900 Turbo. He’s got the license plate
number written down upstairs in his desk."

"Maybe we should get it."

Cindy walked briskly back into the living room,
flipping on a dimmer switch by the door. Overhead spots lit the room
up, giving me my first look at Mason Greenleaf ’s digs. The place
was sparely but expensively furnished in svelte Italian furniture and
creamy enameled Parsons tables. A Kilim rug covered the pegged
hard-wood floors. The walls were hung with watercolors—street
scenes mostly, some of them by local artists. There was one in a
small, ornate gold frame that turned out to be a Utrillo. I paused a
minute to look at it before following Cindy up a circular staircase
to the second floor.

Cindy flipped on another dimmer at the top of the
stairs, lighting up track lights that ran the length of the ceiling.
The second story was one large bedroom, with another sliding-glass
window on the far wall and another deck looking out on the city and
the river. The walls of the bedroom were hung with modern art—huge
canvases streaked with black and red and framed in gleaming stainless
steel. A made-up bed sat on the street side of the room, elevated on
a wooden pedestal and lit by its own soft yellow spot. A white enamel
desk sat across from it on the east wall.

Cindy walked over to the desk. "Mason loves
beautiful things," she said, bending over the desk.

"With this kind of money, why does he bother to
teach?"

"You have to do something with your life, if
you’re going to call it a life. Mason picked teaching because he
liked working with children. His own childhood was miserable."

"You’ve met his family?"

"His mother and father are dead. I met his
brother once." She pulled a folder from the desk drawer and
walked over to where I was standing near the bed. "Here it is.
This has all the vital information in it. His Social Security number,
his credit cards, bank accounts, driver’s license, health
insurance, will . . ."

Frowning, she sank down onto a corner of the bed.
"Christ, I hope nothing’s happened to him. He’s endured so
many rotten things in his life, and he’s still so damn cheerful. So
good to people, so generous, so willing to—forgive."

Cindy Dorn put a hand to her face. "I’m
sorry."

I walked over to the bed and touched her shoulder.
She patted my hand with one of her own.

"He’s really all I’ve got."

"We’ll find him, Cindy," I told her.

I spent the next half hour searching the bedroom and
didn’t come up with anything that would lead me to Mason Greenleaf.
As Cindy Dorn had said, he was a fastidious man. His clothes were
tucked away in built-in closets and drawers that slid right out of
the walls—the shirts smelling of naphtha and wrapped in plastic
bags; the socks joined with plastic clips as if they’d just been
purchased; the suits, slacks, and ties all pressed and dry-cleaned
and carefully arrayed on hangers.

"Amazing, isn’t it?" Cindy Dorn said.
"I’m such a slob, and he’s so orderly. Do you know that he
even changes the sheets on the bed after we make love? He’s got a
thing about cleanliness. I used to kid him by telling him he was born
to be a housewife."

"You joke like that?"

"Sure," she said, smiling. "What did
you think? We spend all day avoiding the subject? Mason’s perfectly
open about his past. In fact, he kids himself all the time."

Cindy walked back over to the desk and picked up a
framed photograph. She stared at it fondly, then brought it over to
me.

"You haven’t even seen him yet."

She handed the photograph to me. It was a picture of
Cindy and a short, thin, dark-haired man in his mid·to-late
thirties. He had fair skin and blue eyes. His face was lean and
angular, hollowed out dramatically at the cheeks and beneath the
eyes. The dark hollows gave him a look of romantic suffering and made
the smile on his lips seem ironic.

"Three years ago Mason bought a camera with a
self-timer," Cindy said. "This was the first time we tried
it out. As you can see, neither one of us was sure when the flash was
going to go off. Mason kept the picture because he said it was just
the way he usually felt about life."

"And how is that?"

"Never sure when to smile," she said.

She took the photograph back to the desk and set it
down gently, brushing the frame with her fingertips as if she were
caressing Mason Greenleaf ’s face. Her lips began to tremble, and
she bit into the lower one lightly.

"Go downstairs," I told her. "Have a
drink and a few minutes to yourself. This kind of work is no fun."

Cindy Dorn nodded. "I’ll look around down
there. See if I can do us any good."

There was a john built into the west wall of the
bedroom. I went through it and found nothing but a few bottles of
over-the-counter remedies in the medicine cabinet. The bathtub was as
shiny as a polished apple; the toilet bowl had azure blue water in
it; you could have eaten off the tiled floor. I didn’t even see a
loose hair in the drains or the soap dishes.

I walked back into the bedroom, went through the
desk, and struck out again. Aside from a few bank books, some school
papers, and a teak box filled with pencils, there was nothing in it.
The house was like a model showroom for the rich and rootless: it had
the look but not the feel of being lived in. Only the abstract
artwork, its black ground slashed with red, had the idiosyncratic
pull of personality. But I wouldn’t have wanted to speculate on
what the canvases meant.

I found Cindy downstairs on the blue couch. An
uncorked bottle of Chivas and a glass with a little whiskey in it
stood on an enameled Parsons table to her right.

"Feeling better?" I said, sitting beside
her.

"No," she said heavily.

"Have that drink." I nodded toward the
glass.

"That’s the one from outside. I brought it
in." She stared at the glass for a moment and shook her head.
"It’s not mine. I mean, it’s not the one from Wednesday
night like I thought it was."

"Are you sure?"

"I don’t like Scotch. And that’s Scotch."
She picked up the Chivas bottle. "I found this, too, in the
wastebasket in the kitchen. I didn’t notice it on Thursday."
She turned the bottle upside-down, and a single drop of Scotch rolled
out of the spout and dropped to the pegged-wood floor. "This
bottle was almost full on Wednesday night. I know because I had to
move it to get to the bourbon."