The Bottle Ghosts (6 page)

“Sure.” He took the final bite from his apple. “The first one, nearly five years ago, was…uh…Bernard Benson; the second, about a year after that was, I think, Marvin Spritzer. Then in the more recent batch, the first was…uh…Fred DeCarlo,…” He paused to think, and to drop the apple core into his own bag, “…Sam Roedel, and…uh…Benicio…Martinez. Then Shea.”

I made a mental note of each of the names, none of which, other than Shea's, was familiar to me. Hardly surprising given the size of the local gay population.

Gresham had started to crumple up his paper bag but suddenly stopped, hastily reopened it, and extracted a folded piece of paper from the bottom. He gave me a sheepish look and unbuttoned his shirt pocket to put the paper in. “Fiancée,” he said with a small, quick grin.

You're good, Hardesty,
I told myself.
I'll bet it's got a couple hearts and a smiley face on it somewhere, too.

“What I was wondering,” he said as he rebuttoned his shirt pocket and smoothed it flat with one hand, “is that if I could get my lieutenant to approve it, would you be willing to take a look at these six reports and see if you can spot something I might have missed, or if there was something we should be asking and aren't? Anything would help.”

“Sure. But tell me, on these six cases, are there any other common elements other than being gay, in the same rough age bracket, and alcoholic?”

He shook his head. “Not really. Nothing else much in common; most went to A.A., and a couple were apparently in therapy, but those are dead ends—there are God knows how many A.A. groups around town, and since A.A.'s built on anonymity, it would be next to impossible to find anybody who would admit to knowing them even if they did. Let alone having anyone from the police snooping around an A.A. meeting. And psychiatrists and therapists are bound by patient-doctor confidentiality. So….”

“You said a couple were seeing a therapist. The same one, by any chance?”

He shook his head. “I don't remember if the names are in the records or not. I'm afraid our missing persons forms aren't exactly what you'd call ‘definitive.' I'll check, though, and let you know.”

He looked at his watch. “Wow, I'd better be heading back. Jeez, and we hardly scratched the surface.”

“That's okay.” We both got up and headed toward a waste receptacle directly across the walkway from us. “Maybe we can get together again sometime. And let me know what your lieutenant has to say about my looking at those reports.”

“I will…and thanks.”

We shook hands and turned to go our separate ways. I glanced back and saw him unbuttoning the pocket of his uniform shirt. Nice to know gays aren't the only romantics left in the world.

*

Thinking about it on the bus back to the office, I wondered exactly what I'd expected/hoped to find out from meeting with Gresham. Just grabbing at straws, mostly, I realized, but perhaps I could learn something more if I got a chance to actually see some of the reports and the kind of information they contained.

When I got back to the office I made a list of questions to ask Bradshaw when I talked to him:
if
Shea had any credit cards—even if Bradshaw probably wouldn't have the numbers with him—if Bradshaw knew or had tried to contact any of Shea's family back in Boston to see if they might have heard from him, if Shea had any out-of-town friends or special places he liked to go. I wanted to know more about that counseling group he and Shea belonged to at Qualicare; maybe get the names of the members and try to contact them. I had no idea how the group worked—if it worked like A.A., maybe anonymity was stressed. Well, I'd find out.

I got out Bradshaw's itinerary and called his hotel, leaving him a message to call me. I specified that it was in regards to some questions I had so that he wouldn't get his hopes up by thinking I'd found Shea.

Finally, I called the Imperator's personnel office, introduced myself and explained that I was checking on one of their former employees who had disappeared, asking if I might be able to contact some of the people he worked with to see if they might know something. The lady to whom I spoke was very polite, but told me to put my request in writing and she would forward it to the Supervisor of Food Services. Just about what I expected, but I said I would and thanked her for her time.

By the time I'd typed up the letter and did some other minor puttering around the office, it was about time to go home. I was rather hoping to hear from Bradshaw before I left, but knew he was probably busy and that he had my home number.

*

I walked in the door of the apartment. No sign of Jonathan—until I heard the shower running. I walked to the bathroom and, not wanting to scare him, called: “I'm home.” He shut the water off and slid the shower door open to look out, his hair invisible beneath a mountain of shampoo, small rivulets of which ran down his face.

“Hi!” he said with his usual grin. “Why don't you come join me? The soap's getting really heavy, and I might drop it any second.”

I returned his grin. “Well, hold on to it real tight until I can get undressed,” I said, unbuttoning my shirt.

We were still at that stage of our relationship where spontaneous sex was a regular, frequent and really fun occurrence, and it hadn't shown signs of slowing down yet. And since both of us had vivid imaginations and healthy libidos, I was pretty sure boredom wouldn't be setting in any time soon. Jonathan's playful nature ran to liking to “pretend,” and he would come up with some pretty elaborate and creative scenarios (The Cowboy and the Indian—with some interesting twists, The Hitchhiker and the Trucker, The Prison Guard and the Convict—you get the idea). The bathroom scenario wasn't one of them, exactly, but it sure was fun.

We were both busy cleaning up the mess (what started in the shower carried over to the sink, the toilet, the clothes hamper, and the floor) when the phone rang. I padded out into the hall for the phone, confident I was dry enough not to be leaving little puddles of water with every step.

“Dick Hardesty,” I wondered for the ten thousandth time why I couldn't just say “Hello?” like everybody else on the planet.

“Mr. Hardesty, this is John Bradshaw. I got your message. Have you…?”

“No,” I interrupted, not wanting to hear the sound of false hope in his voice, “I'm afraid not yet. Everything I've checked out thus far hasn't been of much help. But I did have a couple questions that might give me some new directions to explore.”

His obvious disappointment in my not having found anything concrete yet was reflected in his voice. “Sure.”

“Does Jerry have any credit cards?”

He gave a short, weak laugh, but there was no humor in it. “No. You can buy things with credit cards. Like booze. He had three when we first got together, and they were all maxed out. We're still paying one of them off.”

That was more or less what I'd figured, but I had to ask.

“How about his relatives? I assume you've contacted them?”

“Yes. It was a little awkward, because Jerry's not officially out to them, but I think they know his story. But no, no one has heard from him since his last phone call to his parents the week before he disappeared. They said he sounded just fine then. They're all well aware of his alcoholism, of course, so they didn't seem to be overly concerned by his dropping out of sight for a while. I asked them to please call if they heard from him, and I think they would.”

Well, so much for that,
I thought.
Two more dead ends.

“Any out-of-town friends he might go see? Any special places he liked to go to get away?”

“Not really. And he wouldn't have had the money to go anywhere in any case. I handle all the finances, and especially now that he's not working, I keep pretty good track of how much he has. It was his idea, I should add.”

One last try: “What about this group you belong to at Qualicare? Would anyone there be likely to know anything?”

There was a pause, then: “I doubt it. We'd only gone to seven or eight meetings and while it's a friendly group—with one exception—we never socialized with any of them outside the meetings.”

“Do you by any chance know their names?”

Another slight pause. “First names only, I'm afraid: Carl and Jay, Keith and Victor, Andy and John, and Paul and Frank.”

“So only five couples in the group, then?”

“They try to keep it to between five and six couples, I think. And not everybody is at every meeting. Paul and Frank, especially. They hadn't been to the last two meetings. Most of the others are probably there three times out of four. It varies. I don't think Carl and Jay have missed one, though: at least when we were there. I really like Jay, but I could do without Carl very nicely.”

“Oh? Why's that?”

“Carl—he's the non-alcoholic—has some real attitude problems when it comes to alcoholics, Jay included. The meetings got pretty heated sometimes, and usually Carl was behind it.” He paused, then said: “Oh, and there was another couple when we joined, but they were only there at our first meeting, then they dropped out. Ted and Benicio, I think their names were. I only remember because I've never heard the name ‘Benicio' before.”

From the back of my mind came the familiar clanging of alarm bells.

I have,
I thought.

Chapter 3

Come on, now, Hardesty, don't go jumping to conclusions,
I cautioned myself, making a conscious effort to mute, if not switch off, the alarm bells. Granted, Benicio's not exactly a common name, but it's not unheard of. I remember a trick I had once whose name was Benicio, way back before I met Chris. No big deal.

And how often have you heard the name since?

Well, okay, not until Marty Gresham mentioned a Benicio Martinez as one of the missing men. Still, it could all be just a coincidence that an alcoholic gay guy named Benicio was missing and another alcoholic gay guy named Benicio belonged to the same therapy group as Jerry Shea and had “dropped out” right after Jerry and John joined it.

Sure.

I'd asked Bradshaw, before we hung up, for the name of the psychologist who conducted the group: Brian Oaks. I wrote it down and made a mental note to call Marty Gresham in the morning. I was beginning to have a lot of questions for him.

*

The weekend put an effective halt to everything, which was just as well; I needed the breather. It also gave me…excuse me:
us
…time for a little together time and socializing. Chores mostly Saturday (some things never change, relationships or no), then out to dinner with Tim and Phil, our friends who had given Jonathan his goldfish, and for whom Jonathan had named them. Sunday, it was just the two of us to brunch, then to an art fair in one of the suburbs where Jonathan went ape-shit wanting to buy everything in sight. I managed to keep the reins in, though, and he limited his purchase to a small painting of a cat which he said reminded him of Oscar, one of his favorite pets when he was a kid.

So two days passed as quickly as reading one paragraph in a book.

And then it was Monday.

Since I didn't want to take unfair advantage of the relationship I'd developed with the police over time, I wanted to let Lieutenant Richman know what was going on and get his okay before approaching Gresham again. I called as soon as I got into the office Monday morning, sketched out what I thought I might be looking for, and got Richman's go-ahead, with the usual request that I keep him posted if I found out anything the police might be interested in knowing.

That kind of promise would have made me pretty uncomfortable when I first started out as a P.I., but I'd dealt with Richman enough to know that we could work pretty closely in tandem without stepping on one another's feet. When it came to cases involving the gay community, the police had given me pretty free rein, knowing full well that I was a lot better able to move around in the community than they were, and that anything at all I could do to help catch the bad guys saved them time, effort, and taxpayers' dollars. And in a case like this one, which didn't involve any apparent violation of the law, the police wouldn't have any particular interest in it beyond the missing person aspect.

Richman transferred me to Missing Persons Records, and I recognized the voice that answered, even if he hadn't said: “Officer Gresham.”

“Marty, hi. This is Dick Hardesty.”

“Ah, good morning, Dick,” he said cheerfully. “I was just going to call you. I checked the reports on the three cases before Shea, and didn't find a specific name of a therapist. One of 'em, DeCarlo, was apparently in some sort of a group.”

Clang! Clang!

“And Martinez?”

“Nothing specific. Just a note that he was in therapy.”

“How long ago was Martinez reported missing?” I asked, pretty sure I already knew.

There was a pause. “Let's see…uh…I've got it right here somewhere…uh…here it is…June 23rd…that'd be….”

“Seven weeks,” I finished. Shea had been missing one week: Shea and Bradshaw had been in the Qualicare group for “seven or eight” weeks, and Martinez and his partner had “dropped out” after Shea and Bradshaw's first week. I strongly suspected that Martinez had disappeared sometime during the week following. The alarm bells were really starting to ring now.