“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 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 hardwood 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 soapdishes.
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.”
“Maybe Mason decided to tie one on.”
She shook her head. “Mason doesn’t usually drink Scotch.”
We stared at each other.
“Looks like there was somebody here after I left,” Cindy said, trying to sound indifferent and not succeeding. “Somebody who really liked Scotch.”
“Who does Mason know who drinks Scotch by the fifth?”
Cindy righted the bottle and set it down hard on the Parsons table. “Del, the guy that Mason used to live with, the guy I told you about . . . he drank a lot of Scotch.” She smiled forlornly. “That’s one of the few things Mason told me about him—that Del drank Chivas like soda pop and did a lot of drugs.”
She folded her arms across her chest and turned her head away from me, staring out the picture window at the winking lights of the city. In spite of the emotional openness that was her chief article of faith, Cindy Dorn wasn’t prepared to handle the reality of a rival.
“We don’t know what happened yet,” I said.
“Except that he wasn’t alone,” she said in a hollow voice.
“Del could have paid a chance visit. Or it might have been someone else—a stranger.”
She shook her head. “I’ve been through this before, Harry. I know the signs. Mason wouldn’t have gone off with a stranger. But he might have gone off with a friend. If he was in a hurry, he might have left that goddamn glass out on the deck. He might even have forgotten the promise he made to me.”
She put a hand over her eyes and drew her knees to her chin.
“How do we find Mason’s friend?” I asked after a time.
“Sully would know where Del lives,” she said, still huddling on the couch. “Ira Sullivan. He’s been a friend of Mason’s for years.”
I glanced at my watch. “It’s ten-thirty. You think Sullivan would mind a visit?”
“He’s a night owl and he loves company.”
“Where does he live?”
“On Telford in Clifton.”
3
IT TOOK us about ten minutes to reach the Clifton hillside and another five to find Ira Sullivan’s brownstone apartment building on Telford. I parked beside a gas lamp and sat there for a time, waiting for Cindy to decide whether she still wanted to press the question of where Mason Greenleaf had disappeared to.
“I guess I gotta do this, huh?” she finally said.
“No, you don’t. It’s my bet that Mason will show up in a couple of days. You could wait and let him explain it to you.”
“Half of me is so pissed off, I could care less about explanations. But the other half—” She turned on the car seat and stared at me with that frank look of hers. “I gotta find out, Harry. I’d worry too much if I didn’t.”
“All right.”
I opened the car door, and the hot night air came pouring in, full of the smell of magnolia and the rasping of crickets. Cindy got out and started for the brownstone apartment building. I fell in behind her.
The apartment house was old and well-tended—the kind of neat, bundled-up Clifton address that caters to elderly couples and well-to-do singles. No children, no pets, no nonsense. Ira Sullivan’s place was on the second floor, up a wide staircase trimmed in brass and floored in marble. The wide landings were cool like marble and shot with the soft glow of burnished wood and polished brass.
When we got to Sullivan’s door, Cindy gave me a cautionary look. “Sully’s a little odd.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I should do the talking.”
“Fine.”
She stared at the polished door with foreboding. “He’s going to eat this up,” she said under her breath.
Raising a hand, she knocked.
A moment passed, and then an extremely tall, ungainly-looking man answered the door. At first glance he looked like a wildly overgrown Tweedledum. He had that same petulant, downturned mouth and barrel belly. His red hair stood straight up about three inches high, mowed level on top like a fade. His blue eyes were so lively, they looked electrified, as if he’d just pulled his hand from a socket.
“Cin,” he said in a booming bass voice. “What brings you to my neck of the woods? And where the hell is Mason?” He craned his neck and stared at me so intently, I thought his eyes would pop. “You’re not Mason.”
“Harry Stoner,” I said, holding out a hand.
The man shook with me. “Well, come the hell in, Harry Stoner. And Miss Cindy.”
He waved us through the doorway.
The living room was papered in stripes and furnished in dark blue chintz. A gilt Japanese screen, picturing geese flying over a temple pagoda, blocked off the view of the street. A red Persian rug covered the floors. We sat down on the chintz couch. Sullivan sat across from us in a fanback chair the size of a stuffed bear.
“Can I offer you a drink?” Sullivan said. “Or is this a social visit?”
I could feel Cindy squirm beside me. “We’re looking for Mason, Sully.”
“You won’t find him here,” the big man said amiably. “In fact, I haven’t seen him in ages. Not since the last time we all got together at the Cincinnati Club. You remember that evening, don’t you, Cin?”
Cindy shuddered. “I remember.”
Sullivan laughed a booming laugh. “I never did apologize for my behavior, did I? Well, I was a little drunk and you both forgave me. Right?
“People always forgive Sully,” he said merrily. “It’s written in the social contract. ‘Sully is to be forgiven his excesses.’”
“About Greenleaf?” I said.
Sullivan arched an eyebrow at me. “Yes?”
“He’s disappeared, Sully,” Cindy said, getting it over with.
For a split second Ira Sullivan looked shocked. Then he smiled cynically. “When you say ‘disappeared,’ Cin, honey, exactly what do you mean?”
“He hasn’t been at home or work for three days. His car is gone, too.”
“Is he out of town, perhaps?”
“I don’t think so.”
Sullivan put on his thinking cap. “Could he be staying with a friend?”
“It’s possible.”
“Uh-huh.” Sullivan gave Cindy a wry look. “Did you two have a little tiff, maybe?”
“Sully, this is serious. Mason vanished three days ago without a word. We need to talk to him. I need to talk to him.”
Sullivan took this in dispassionately, then shifted his gaze to me. “And who are you, sir?”
“I’m a detective Ms. Dorn hired to find Greenleaf.”
Sullivan paled. “Detective? You say you are a detective?”
I pointed a finger at him. “Right the first time.”
Sullivan turned back to Cindy—his expression completely changed. “This is rather melodramatic, Cin, even for you. You hired a detective?”
“I’m worried, Sully.”
“You must be crazed with anxiety,” he said caustically. “What is it you want from me?”
“She wants the address of Greenleaf’s friend Del,” I said.
Sullivan bit his lower lip. “You think he’s with Del again?”
Cindy nodded. “I think it’s possible.”
“Well, I don’t.” Sullivan leaned back in the huge chair, folding his arms across his Tweedledum belly. “That’s over with. Anyway, Mason wouldn’t do that to you, sweetie. For better or worse, he loves you.”
“I didn’t think he would, either,” she said sadly. “But somebody was with him in the apartment. We found an empty bottle of Scotch and a glass. Mason once told me that Del drank a lot of Scotch.”
“A lot of people drink a lot of Scotch, for heaven’s sake. That’s no reason to call a cop. I myself have been known to drink a lot of Scotch.”
“I don’t,” Cindy said. “Neither
does Mason. Please, Sully. Help us find Del.”
Sullivan shifted uncomfortably in the chair. “The man you’re talking about has problems of his own right now, hon. Serious problems. The last things in the world he needs in his life are burly detectives and hysterical women.”
“Why don’t you just give us the address,” I said, “and let Del decide what he does or doesn’t need?”
“Don’t try to intimidate me,” Sullivan snapped. “I’m a lawyer. So don’t you try to intimidate me, Mr. Stoner.”
“I’m not trying to intimidate you. Just give us the address, and we’ll leave.”
“Please, Sully,” Cindy said.
Sullivan sighed dramatically. “Del Cavanaugh lives on Rose Hill in Avondale. 52 Rose Hill Place. But for chrissake, don’t you go upsetting him.” He shot me an angry glance, then said to Cindy, “He’s a sick man, Cin. A dying man.”
“AIDS?” Cindy said, looking horrified.
Sullivan nodded. “If Mason did have a drink with him, if he did go to visit him for a few days . . . well, it was just to comfort an old friend. Keep that in mind, okay?”
Cindy Dorn whispered, “Okay.”
Out in the car again, in the hot, too-sweet-smelling night, Cindy stared through the windshield at Sullivan’s apartment house.
As I started up the engine, she turned on the seat and said, “I think you’d better take me back to Finneytown.”
“What about Del Cavanaugh?”
She shook her head. “I can’t do it.”
“Then why don’t you let me do it? That’s what you hired me for.”
“No, Harry. If Mason is with Del . . . well, he’s got a good reason to be there. And I should have known that. I shouldn’t have doubted him.”
“If you’re satisfied, I’m satisfied.”
Cindy frowned. “I won’t be satisfied until Mason is back, until I can touch him and hold him again. But I’m not going to barge in on a dying man. That would be unforgivable. Mason will come home when he’s ready. And he’ll explain it or not explain it. That’s just the way it’ll have to be.”
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