Missing
Page 1
MISSING
The Harry Stoner Series, #11
Jonathan Valin
TO MY MOTHER, MARCELLA VALIN, AND MY WIFE, KATHERINE
Copyright © 1995 by Jonathan Valin
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from the publisher.
First ebook edition © 2013 by AudioGO. All Rights Reserved.
Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-332-7
Library ISBN 978-0-7927-9366-3
Cover photo © Simon Podgorsek/iStock.com.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
MORE HARRY STONER EBOOKS
MISSING
1
THE WOMAN on the phone, Cindy Dorn, had given me elaborate directions to her house in Finneytown, but I got lost anyway in a maze of twisty side streets named after birds and lined with identical yellow-brick, two-bedroom, split-level houses that began to look, to my jaundiced eye, like yellow-brick bird-houses on yellowing patches of lawn. It was a Saturday afternoon in July, so the householders were out in their swimsuits, the kids six inches deep in the round plastic pools with the hoses in them. I kept driving by in the rusty Pinto—a big sweaty stranger staring sullenly out a car window. It was just a matter of time before the cops were called.
I was kind of wondering what I’d say to them, when I got lucky and turned left at the end of Oriole Lane. And there it was, Blue Jay Drive. The same damn street I’d been driving down for thirty minutes—only this one was called Blue Jay Drive. The Dorn house was third from the corner on the left. Two-bedroom split-level with the bedrooms over the garage, the picture window looking out on a tiny lawn, the dead hawthorn tree in a bed of mulch, like a spade in a freshly turned grave.
I parked on the street and walked up the cement path to the house. A tall, athletic-looking woman in a sweat shirt and jeans came out on the stoop. She was about forty. Attractive, weatherbeaten face, curly black hair, green eyes, big smile. I liked the smile so much, I smiled back at her.
“You got lost, didn’t you?” she said.
“Yep.”
The woman laughed cheerfully, showing a lot of teeth. “It’s always tough the first time. The houses look the same.”
“The streets, too. Those names.”
“The developer liked birds, I guess.” She laughed again. “He didn’t like people very much, that’s for sure. See for yourself.”
She waved me through the front door into the living room. It was oblong and incredibly narrow, with a spackled ceiling that dropped so low, I found myself stooping.
“It’s like incoming fog,” the woman said, pointing up. “The whole subdivision was built for a different race.”
She flopped down on a brown tufted sofa, dug a loose red sock from under her butt, and draped it over her knee. I sat on an armchair across the room from her—about eight feet away. It was like sitting in a Pullman car. There were a couple of framed movie posters on the walls—Chinatown and Last Tango. No other furnishing or decorations—no room for any.
“I’m not much on housekeeping,” Cindy Dorn said, toying with the sock as if it were the pet cat.
“There doesn’t seem to be much house to keep.”
She stretched one arm lazily above her head. “It seemed like heaven when Randy and I first moved in, fourteen years ago.”
“Randy is . . . ?”
“My ex. He lives in Denver now with a stewardess. Good old Randy.” She made a fist with her right hand and popped it into her left palm. “The son of a bitch broke up with me two weeks before our tenth wedding anniversary. We were in Scotland on vacation. Scotland, for chrissake! I said, ‘Randy, we’re Jewish. Why Scotland?’ Well, it’s different, he says. Besides, he wants to see Nessie. So I take a leave of absence from grad school and off we go to the Highlands. We’re there about a week, hopping from pub to pub, when he says to me, ‘Cindy, I had an amazing experience last night. After you fell asleep, I went back to the little pub we were in and started talking with this old fisherman. We had a few drinks, and he begins telling me about his life. It turns out he’s been all over the world. Done things you wouldn’t believe. And he’s still going strong at ninety. So at last call I ask him, “What’s the secret?” You know what he says? He says “The secret is doing what you want to do, because you only pass through here once.’”
“Now Randy just can’t get over this—that you can actually do what you want with your life. Of course, for a Jewish kid from Roselawn, maybe it was a revelation. Anyway, it’s all he talks about for the next week. And a week after that, as we’re driving to Edinburgh, he tells me he’s made up his mind. From now on he’s going to do exactly what he wants to do with his life. And he’s going to begin by divorcing me!”
Cindy Dorn stared at me incredulously. “I mean, there are epiphanies and epiphanies. But when a ninety-year-old alcoholic from Aberdeen and a schmuck accountant from Cincinnati start playing darts with my life . . . a sense of unreality doesn’t cover it. It didn’t start to come clear to me until a year later, when I found out about his stew honey-bunny, who just happened to fly the transatlantic route to Scotland. My guess is that most of those long lunches weren’t spent with his aged guru. In fact, I don’t even think the old man existed.”
Cindy Dorn stopped talking just long enough to catch her breath. She had a low flip voice, and she spoke the way youngest children eat—urgently, with both hands, as if she’d never gotten her fair share of the words in.
“That’s how I inherited this house,” she said when she’d gotten her second wind. “And the car payments and the student loans. They apparently weren’t covered by the ‘doing what you want to do’ philosophy.”
I glanced at the Tango poster and said, “I hope you’re not hiring me to kill Randy.”
She laughed. “It’s a thought, but no. I got over him years ago. It’s Mason.”
“Who’s Mason?”
“Mason Greenleaf is my lover,” she said blithely.
“And?”
“And he’s disappeared. He’s been missing for three days.”
******
We retired to the kitchen—another box within a box—where Cindy Dorn made coffee and told me about Mason Greenleaf.
“He’s probably the sweetest man I’ve ever known,” she said as she set a teakettle on the range. “And I’ve known a few guys. After Randy split, I kind of overdid it with men. You know, drowning my sorrows in flesh—trying to prove something. Anyway, it got so that I really didn’t like my new life much at all. And then I met Mason.” She glanced at the teakettle and adjusted the flame. “You’re not supposed to use boiling water for coffee. Did you know that?”
“I’ve been boiling mine for years.”
“Well, you’re not supposed to.” She came over to the little Formica breakfast table and sat down across from me. “It’s tough for me to tell you about Mason. I mean, how do you
explain why you love someone?”
“I could take your word for it,” I said with a smile.
She smiled back at me. “But I want you to understand what a good man he is.”
“Why?”
“Maybe I think you’ll do a better job.”
“I always try to do the best I can.”
“I’m sure you do. I can tell that about you. You’re steadfast.”
I didn’t say anything.
“That’s a terrific quality,” she said. “Take it from someone who knows. That’s part of why I love Mason. He’s always there when I need a friend. Not just someone to sleep with. If you’re moderately good-looking and have a taste for it, you can always find someone to sleep with. But you can’t always find a friend.” She shook her head. “See what I mean. That’s so trite it makes me shudder.”
“I can handle it.”
The teakettle began to shriek. Cindy Dorn said, “Crap!” and leaped to her feet. She went over to the range and flipped the burner off. Then turned back to me.
“I’m sorry. I screwed up. I’ll start a fresh pot.”
“I’m used to boiled coffee.”
She sighed. “All right. But I can do better.”
She poured two cups of her second-rate brew and brought them back to the table.
“I met Mason in 1990,” she said, sitting down again. “At a teachers’ conference in Louisville. I teach preschool up here. He teaches at Nine Mile. I’d gone to that conference to get away from a man. He was . . . he’d hurt me. So I went away for a few days to get my head straight—not in the best shape of my life—and I met Mason.
“Right away he started looking after me. The way I felt, I could’ve been had for a kind word. But he didn’t take advantage. He just stayed with me in my room, where I bitched and moaned and shed a few tears. When we got back to town, Mason let me stay at his place in Mount Adams for a week. The week became two and three. And then I lost track of the time, and the other man. Mason and I have been together ever since.”
Cindy Dorn cocked her head to one side and stared at me searchingly, as if she’d just then noticed that I was sitting in the room with her. It was a funny time to start wondering who I was, considering how open she’d already been about her life. But then, she was the kind of person who sat down to candor the way older generations used to sit down to the piano in the parlor. It was a peculiarly sixties kind of social grace.
Whatever it was about me that had been hanging her up, she got over it. She stopped staring and smiled at me with her big, engaging smile. “What I am going to tell you . . . well, it’s just between you and me. Because I promised Mason I wouldn’t tell anyone else. Ever.”
“It’ll stay between us,” I promised her.
Cindy Dorn took a deep breath. “Mason is bisexual. And I’m worried that . . .” She waved her hand as if she couldn’t summon the right words. “I’m just worried.”
I’m not sure what I was expecting the woman to say, but that wasn’t it.
“That bothers you, doesn’t it?” Cindy Dorn said nervously. “About him being bisexual.”
“I would think it would bother you more.”
“You mean because of AIDS?”
“Yes.”
“We practice safe sex, and I have my blood tested every six months. Mason is even more fanatic. So far, we’re both HIV-negative.” She put her fist to her chin and chewed on her knuckles. “That doesn’t help though, does it?”
“Generally I don’t like taking cases that involve homosexuals.”
“What you really mean is that you don’t like homosexuals, right?”
I told her the truth. “Queer-bashing’s not a religion with me, but no, I’m not crazy about them. I had a case a few years back that left a bad memory.”
“Would it help if I told you that Mason is a great lay?”
“Not a whole lot.”
The woman dropped her hand to the table and opened it in a frank appeal for help. “Well, do we go on with this? Or do I get out the phone book again and start over with someone else?”
“Let me think about it, Ms. Dorn.”
“I’d say you know me well enough to call me Cindy.”
I’d been there less than a half hour, but she was right.
******
Cindy Dorn brewed another pot of coffee—unboiled, this time. While we sat at the table drinking, she picked up the story of her love affair with Mason Greenleaf.
“The funny thing about Louisville was that Mason was on the rebound, too. He’d just broken up with this guy—Del somebody. Del was the one part of his past that Mason would never really open up about. It was not, as they say, a healthy relationship.”
“Meaning?”
“I think it had gotten a little rough,” she said softly.
Great, I said to myself. “Do you have any reason to believe that Mason might be back with this guy Del?”
“As far as I know, they haven’t seen each other in four years.”
“Then why are you worried?”
“I don’t know why, for sure,” she said. “I do know that for the last week Mason hasn’t been himself.”
“In what way hasn’t he been himself?”
She shrugged. “I can’t put my finger on it. But when you know someone as well as I know Mason, you sense when something’s wrong. And something was wrong. I finally asked him about it on Wednesday night—if anything had happened at summer session to upset him. But he said that it wasn’t a school thing, he was just feeling a little low and it would pass. In fact he made an effort to be cheerful for the rest of the evening. We had supper, made great love, watched a little tube until Mason fell asleep, then I came back here.”
“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—potchkying 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 police!” 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 southmost 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 Dorn 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.