Missing (5 page)

I shook my head. "She called me last week when
Greenleaf went missing."

"Yeah, she said he’d dropped out of sight for
several days. Wonder where the hell he went?"

McCain turned away and walked off toward the parking
lot, leaving the unanswered question frying in the July sun.
 

5

THE examining intern decided to keep Cindy Dorn in
the hospital overnight. They’d already moved her to a fourth-floor
room by the time I got back to the emergency room. I took an elevator
up to four and followed a series of signs to the west wing. I found
the girl propped up in bed with a bottle of saline plugged into her
right arm. She had some color again and a sharper focus in her eyes,
but she still didn’t look fully there. Part of her was still
standing in that run-down hotel room staring in terror at the raw
remains of Mason Greenleaf ’s life and death.

"I’m sorry," she said as I came in. "I
freaked out."

I could tell from the slur in her voice that they’d
given her a tranquilizer of some kind.

"You’ve got nothing to apologize for." I
sat down on a plastic chair by the hospital bed. Cindy Dorn held out
her hand, and I took it in mine.

"Is there anybody you want me to call? A friend?
Your ex?"

The woman smiled weakly. "No. I’ll be all
right. Later tonight, I’ll talk to Mason’s family. Everything’ll
get taken care of. It always does when somebody dies. I remember with
my mother. It was like a piece of machinery I didn’t know I had
switched on and . . . things happened." She turned her face away
toward the tall window at the far side of the room. "I wish I
could shake the feeling that this is a movie. I wish I could go back
to last Wednesday night and say something or do something that would
change it. He ended up so alone."

I didn’t say anything.

She closed her eyes and squeezed my hand tight. "I
keep seeing his face—"

"Don’t think about it, Cindy."

"How can I not? I loved him." She started
to sob. "I loved him, and if I’d taken better care of him, if
I’d watched over him the way he watched over me, this terrible
thing wou1dn’t have happened."

Holding her hand, I leaned toward the bed. "What
happened to Mason, it might as well have happened in a different
solar system, on a different star, for all you or anyone else had to
do with it." I felt a blush creep up my neck, enough of a burn
to make me lean back in the chair. "It just wasn’t in your
control."

"That’s the way you see it? Like we’re on
different stars?"

"That’s the way I
see it," I said, wishing I hadn’t said anything at all.

***

That was Thursday. On Friday morning, Cindy Dorn was
released from the hospital. I met her at the emergency room, drove
her back to the little yellow birdhouse in Finneytown, and dropped
her at the door. There were already several cars parked in the
driveway—friends come to comfort her and mourn over Mason
Greenleaf.

"I’m dreading going in there," Cindy
said, as she stared glumly at the tiny house. "I mean, I know
they loved him, too. But I don’t really want to hear their
condolences or display my grief I just want to sit by myself and be
sad."

"You’ll do fine."

Cindy reached out and touched my hand. "I’m
getting used to you saying that."

"Did you want me to keep looking into this
thing? We still don’t know where Mason spent the last week."

"I’ve thought about it, and I decided that if
he’d wanted me to know where he was, he would have told me. If he
took that secret with him when he left, that’s the way it should
stay."

"The cops will probably have a few more
questions."

Smiling, she said, "I’ll be fine." Cindy
Dorn leaned toward me and kissed me lightly on the cheek. "Maybe
you’ll stop in sometime? I’ve grown sort of fond of you, Harry
Stoner."

She opened the car door
and walked slowly up the walk, past the hawthorn tree, to her door.
As I pulled away, another woman, with blond hair and a long face,
came out the door and put her arm around Cindy, guiding her inside.

***

The next day, a gray Saturday afternoon, Mason
Greenleaf was buried at Spring Grove Cemetery. His death and the
funeral were well publicized in the papers. I didn’t go to the
graveside or to the wake that was held at Cindy Dorn’s house
following the service. But I thought enough of the woman to call her
Saturday night. Someone else answered the phone at her house. I could
hear the other mourners murmuring softly in the background. When the
girl came on the line, I said the usual things. Sorry about her
lover, if I could be of any help. I felt stupid saying them, but she
seemed pleased that I had called.

After I hung up, I went to a bar in Northside, close
by the house of an old friend, a free-lance writer. I was hoping he’d
be at his usual spot at the bar. He wasn’t there, so I drank for a
while on my own, listening to the bar talk and nursing a Scotch. I
didn’t want to get drunk, but there didn’t seem to be much else
to do. It had been that way for so long that I’d stopped thinking
about it, stopped admonishing myself. Night came, and if I didn’t
have some sort of surveillance job or if none of the small circle of
women that I slept with—Jo Riley, Lauren Sharp, and a few
others—were free, I drank.

You get to a certain age, mid-forties, and it comes
to you that this is it, that whatever chance it is that you’ve been
waiting for, the woman, the money, the peace of mind, has come and
gone without you even noticing, like a hand that was dealt while you
were away from the table, that somebody else bet and folded for you,
that you never got to play. You feel cheated—most of us do. But the
truth is that everything that’s necessary happens to everyone. The
trick is showing up. Somewhere in some magazine I thumbed through in
some outer office, where I sat waiting for a client to call me in, to
find whatever necessary thing it was he thought he’d lost, I read
that opportunity used to be pictured as a woman rushing past you,
with her hair streaming out in front of her face. If you grab her
hair as she approaches, you get a good grip. Once she passes by,
there is nothing to hold on to.

That evening I held on to my glass of Scotch. And I
didn’t think about Cindy Dorn, whom I liked well enough to reach
out for, but whom I already knew I was going to let pass by and
regret. The next day, Sunday, I slept in with a hangover. Around two
o’clock I made my way into the shower. As I was toweling off, the
phone rang. I padded out to the bedroom before the answering machine
clicked on, and picked up. It was Jack McCain.

"We got criminalistics on Greenleaf," he
said.

"It took you long enough."

"There were comp1ications," McCain said.

"Like what?"

"Like for one, his family wasn’t crazy about
us doing an autopsy. Have you talked to that bunch?"

"I missed them."

"It was like they just wanted it to go away
without any fuss. Anyway, we finally got permission from Greenleaf ’s
brother. Turned out it was hardly worth the effort. Outside of a few
contusions on his face, which he probably got from falling down after
taking the overdose, there was nothing unusual. Death was caused by
barbiturate poisoning, Seconals and booze. It’ll be ruled a suicide
by the coroner."

"Have you told the girl?" I asked him.

"I thought maybe you’d want to. Of course,
I’ll be happy to answer any questions she might have."

"I’ll call her."

"Good," he said, sounding relieved. "By
the way, we still have some of his belongings in the property room.
Watch, ring. The girl can pick them up anytime she wants. Just tell
her to have the duty sergeant buzz me, and I’ll pass her through."

"I don’t suppose anyone ever figured out why
he ended up in that hotel?"

"We have him drinking at a bar called Stacie’s
down on lower Fifth Street earlier that night. He had some company,
according to the two witnesses."

"Christ, don’t tell me," I said, feeling
the ghost of Ira Lessing pass through the room.

"Yeah, they were fags all right. And a pretty
noisy bunch. Maybe he had a lovers’ quarrel with one of ’em.
Anyway, he left alone, sometime around eleven-thirty, and that’s
the last anyone saw him, before he started stinking up the hotel
room."

"You didn’t get the names of his drinking
buddies, did you?"

"I guess we could find out. But it’d mean a
helluva lot of leg-work, and with the family just wanting the whole
thing to go away and the physical being so cut-and-dry, I doubt if
the coroner’ll want to open that can of worms. Guys like Greenleaf
kill themselves all the time, Harry. They just get tired of being
fags."

"This guy was bi," I said.

"Same difference," McCain said. "It’s
hard to kid yourself into believing you’re half one thing and half
another."

"Maybe."

"Look, if it’ll make it easier to break this
thing to the girl, you can talk to the IOs who did the interviews at
Stacie’s. Segal and Taylor, at Six. They can fill you in on the
chain of  vidence."

I jotted down the names Segal and Taylor as I hung up
the phone.
 

6

THE District Six station was on a Ludlow Avenue
hillside just west of the viaduct, a ranch-style building with a
hedge in front and a fenced lot to the side. Immediately below the
station house, the smoggy industrial flats of Ivorydale stretch north
along the Mill Creek. On a boiling hot afternoon like that Sunday, I
could smell the soap stink of lye all the way around to the front of
the building, where it mixed with magnolia and the taste of hot tar.
A semicircular counter inside the station house door divided the
lobby off from the squad room. I went up to the counter and asked one
of the desk sergeants if I could talk to Detectives Segal or Taylor.

"Tell them Jack McCain gave me their names. It’s
about the Mason Greenleaf suicide."

The sergeant pointed me to a bench, and I sat there
for a time, listening to the beat cops in the squad room taking names
and kissing ass: bad boys and honest cits all treated to the same
monotone rhetoric, like a class of slow children practicing
arithmetic.

Eventually a husky man in a cheap blue suit came up
to get me. He had a square, tan, heavily seamed face cleft sharply at
the chin, and a mane of white hair streaked with the yellow of old
blond.

"I just got the word from Jack McCain that I’m
supposed to give you whatever help you need," he said, smiling
so broadly, I could see the wad of chewing gum at the back of his
mouth. He held out his right hand. "Nate Segal."

"Harry Stoner."

As I shook with him, Segal clapped me on the arm with
his other hand, pinching the muscle beneath my sport coat like he was
chucking a kid under the chin.

"I hear you used to be a cop, Harry."

I shrugged off his hand. "I was with the DA’s
office for a couple of years, before I went private."

"Yeah?" he said, chewing his gum
vigorously. "Is that good money, private?" He didn’t wait
for an answer. "Let’s go on back to the office where we can
cut through some of this static."

I followed him down an aisle that ran past the front
desk to a back wall lined with doors. Segal opened one with his name
on it and ushered me in—this time without laying a hand on me.
There was a small bright window at the back of the room, with an air
conditioner rattling in it like a card in a bicycle wheel. A desk and
long file took up the left-hand wall. The right had a couple of
chairs parked against it and several framed commendations with
Segal’s name on them.

"Have a seat," the man said, settling in
behind the desk. Reaching into his mouth, he pulled out the wad of
gum and deposited it in a glass ashtray.

"I quit smoking last year," he said, wiping
his fingers on his pants leg. "The wife kept hounding me about
it. First I couldn’t light up in the bedroom, then it was the
living room. Before I knew it, I was out on the porch every time I
wanted a butt. It got to be such a hassle, I just said fuck it. Now
I’m a sugar junkie." He patted the paunch that gathered above
his belt. "Gained twenty-nine pounds, teeth hurt. It’s like
they got it set up so whatever you need to make it through the day is
going to kill you. You know?"

"It’s a tough world," I said, pulling a
chair up across from him.

"I wasn’t kidding when I asked about the money
you make. I got two more years to retirement, and then I gotta find
something to do. I was thinking security, maybe. You do any of that?"

I shook my head. "Just PI work."

"What’s that, divorce mostly?"

I didn’t feel like going into it. "About
Greenleaf?"

"Got it right here." Segal spun in his
chair and opened the long file. "I guess Jack already told you
that we didn’t come up with a whole lot," he said, pulling out
a folder and scanning it as he turned back to me. "Greenleaf
spent a few hours in a bar called Stacie’s, left alone around
eleven-thirty, checked into the Washington a little before midnight.
And you know the rest."