Missing

by Jonathan Valin

  After a short pause, a man picked up the phone. “This is Terry Mulhane,” he said. “You say your name is Steiner?”

  “Stoner. I’m a private investigator Cindy Dorn hired to look into Mason Greenleaf’s death.”

  “I thought the police had ruled it a suicide,” the man said.

  “We’re still looking for a motive.”

  Mulhane sighed. “All I can say, and I told Cindy this at the funeral, is that it wasn’t because of a medical problem. There was nothing wrong with Mason. I checked him out myself no more than a few days before he did this thing, and he was fine.”

  I felt relieved for Cindy—and for myself—and curious about what had motivated Greenleaf to go to the doctor before he died. “Did his complaints have anything to do with AIDS—or fear of AIDS?”

  “I suppose in some way all of his complaints had to do with that. Fear of AIDS or fear of retribution—it amounted to the same thing with Mason, I’ve always thought. What I can tell you for certain is that he wasn’t sick when he came to see me. He said he’d been having trouble sleeping. His BP was up. But it was generally up when he came in for a visit. White jacket BP. There was nothing about his condition that indicated suicidal depression. Nothing like that at all.”

  I could tell from the tone of his voice that Dr. Terry Mulhane felt guilty about Mason Greenleaf’s suicide. As he had probably supplied Mason with the sleeping pills that he’d used to kill himself with, I could understand his pain.

  “Was this a regular scheduled visit?” I asked.

  “No, he just came in for a quick check. Look, I’ve got a waiting room full of people,” the man said, as if he wanted to be done with the conversation—and the bad feelings it evoked.

  “I have a few other questions, doctor, if you could spare some time later today.”

  “Under the circumstances, I can hardly say no,” he said, sounding like no was exactly what he wanted to say. He went off the line for a moment, and I could hear him talking to his receptionist. “I should be free ‘round six-thirty this evening.”

  “I’ll come to the office.”

  “Mr. Stoner,” he said before hanging up, “I knew Mason as a friend and a patient for better than ten years. And the fact that he did what he did is not easy for me to accept—or talk about. You understand that it was my job to keep him well.”

  “If it’s any consolation, doctor, he didn’t tell anyone how close he was to killing himself.”

  “I’m afraid that isn’t a consolation,” the man said.

  I glanced at my watch as I put down the phone. It was just a little past noon, which gave me more than enough time to follow up on Ira Sullivan’s other suggestions and talk to Mason’s colleagues at Nine Mile School, before returning to Corryville for my meeting with Mulhane. Since the CPD building on Ezzard Charles was more or less on the way to Nine Mile, I decided to stop there first and confirm the fact that Greenleaf hadn’t had any recent brushes with the law.

  ******

  The blue sky had clouded up while I was on the phone with Mulhane. By the time I got back down the street, it had begun to rain—a loud pop-up thunderstorm that only lasted the few minutes it took me to walk uptown to the Parkade on Sixth and pick up the Pinto. By the time I pulled into the ‘GUC parking lot across from the CPD building, the storm was over and the threatening clouds had begun to divide.

  The pavement was so hot that the rain raised a mist on the sidewalks. It trailed me out of the lot and up the pathway that led, between flagpole and cut stone marker, to the front doors of the penal yellow police building. Inside the shifts were changing, and the traffic on the first floor was heavy with patrolmen in summerweights. I made my way through the throng up to Homicide on the third floor. Jack McCain was sitting in an office carrel off the Homicide squad room, staring morosely at an arrest report.

  “Did you talk to the girl?” he said, looking up as I came through the door.

  I nodded. “She’s still got me looking into it.”

  McCain dropped the arrest report on the desk and fumbled through his shirt pocket for a cigarette. “Well, good luck. We did what we could, you know.”

  “I know, Jack. It’s a kind of therapy for her, I think.”

  “So what can I do for you?” he said, lighting up.

  “A couple of things. For one, you can check to make sure that Greenleaf wasn’t having any problems with you guys. Ask around at Vice, Narco, Munie, and Park. I guess it’s possible that he could have been picked up using a false name, so you better give them a physical description, too.”

  “I’ll tell you right now we’ve had no contact with him since the solicitation thing,” McCain said flatly. “I mean, we did do a little checking, Harry, no matter what the girl thinks. But if it’ll make you happy, I’ll double-check.”

  “Thanks. You guys would make a good motive.”

  McCain smiled. “Why not just face the obvious? He was half gay and couldn’t keep living half straight?”

  It was the same theory that Cavanaugh and Sullivan had advanced—a man who had painted himself into a spot he could no longer live in and who didn’t have the will or the hardness of heart to force his way out. It was tidy and quite possibly true. Only it depended entirely on the assumption that Greenleaf’s relationship with Cindy Dorn had been a self-deception. From what I’d seen of the woman, I had trouble believing that she wouldn’t have scented that out at the start, although it was a fact that she’d feared Greenleaf’s past.

  “I haven’t ruled it out,” I said to him.

  “What else can I do for you?”

  “I’d like to take a look at the jacket from Greenleaf’s solicitation bust.”

  “Jesus Christ, that was six, seven years ago. What the hell would that tell you?”

  “Known haunts, MO, acquaintances—something. I mean, the ground is so thin already, I figure anything could be a lead.”

  “All right,” he said, stretching it out with a sigh. “Go down the hall. Talk to Rob Sabato in Vice. He was IO on the solicitation case. Tell them I said it was okay to give you the jacket.”

  “I appreciate the help,” I said, getting up from the chair.

  He gestured with one of his hands, shooing away the gray smoke that hung between us. “It’s okay. But let’s not make this into an industry, Harry.”

  “I’m just trying to make the woman happy, Jack.”

  I walked out of McCain’s office and down the hall to the Vice squad room. A sergeant directed me to Ron Sabato, who was sitting at a desk at the back of the room, feet up, reading a classified section of the newspaper. As I approached him, he lowered the paper and stared at me drearily over the top of the page. He was a thin middle-aged man with an acne-scarred face, hinged like a corner at either side of a hawklike nose. His peppercorn hair was cut short, military style, and like mine was going gray at either temple.

  “What can I do for you?” he said, all business.

  I told him who I was and what I wanted.

  “Yeah, I kinda remember the case. Something along the lines. A fag solicitation thing. Teacher goes after high school kid. Right?”

  I smiled at his “headline” capsule. “Right.”

  Sabato put the newspaper down on the desk and patted it with his right palm. “I read these things every day. You never know what you might find. I once busted a prostie ring had an ad in the Gold Chest.”

  I laughed.

  “It was an escort service run out of Dayton. They come down here in a Lincoln Town Car, as many girls as you wanted, come right to your door. The chauffeur was the pimp. It was a sweet little bust.”

  He got up from the desk and went over to a long metal file. “What was this guy’s name again?”

  “Greenleaf. Mason Greenleaf.”

  Sabato opened a drawer and thumbed through the folders. “Might be the jacket’s over at A&D, being from so far back.” He came to the end of the drawer and nodded. “Yeah, it’s A&D. I can call over there. Have it for you maybe late tonigh
t or tomorrow.”

  “That’d be fine.”

  “So what’s your interest in this case?” he said, closing the file and going back behind the desk.

  “The guy killed himself a week ago. The family hired me to look into it.”

  “Suicides,” Sabato said, shaking his head. “They’re the worst. Did he leave a note?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll tell you, fella, you’re wasting your time. Ain’t nobody gonna figure out the reason why. I had a friend who killed himself, so I know what I’m talking about. My advice would be to tell the family to try to forget it.”

  “I’ve been getting a lot of that advice.”

  “It’s good advice,” the guy said. “You should take it.”

  I wasn’t feeling particularly encouraged as I walked back down to the ground floor of the CPD building and across Ezzard Charles to the ‘GUC lot. A lot of people, from Del Cavanaugh to hatchet-faced Ron Sabato, had been telling me to quit. If it wasn’t for how I felt about the girl, I probably would have. If it wasn’t for the girl, I wouldn’t have started in the first place.

  11

  NINE MILE School was located in Madeira, northeast of the Kenwood exit of I-71, a cluster of white stucco buildings, vaguely Spanish in style, nestled in the wooded hillside above the expressway. It was a little past two when I got out there. As I turned onto the access road that led to the complex, I passed a couple of riders in jodhpurs and boots, urging their horses up a trail beside the road. It was that kind of neighborhood, that kind of school.

  I parked the Pinto close by the entrance gate and stepped out into dappled shade, redolent of spruce and horse piss. A couple of kids standing by a red Mercedes watched me closely as I walked across the gravel lot to the white stucco buildings—like I was someone who bore watching. The lot was filled with Mercedes and BMWs.

  An archway in the front building led me directly onto a pillared portico, running around a quadrangle of sunburnt grass. On the complex side of the portico, windowed doors opened onto airy schoolrooms. I followed a series of signs hung from the rafters to the main office.

  Inside, a plump middle-aged woman in a flouncy peasant dress was sitting at a desk behind a countertop. She had a haggard face and long gray-brown hair, cut in bangs and worn in a ponytail down her back. The length of her hair—or perhaps the fact that she was still wearing it that long into her late forties or early fifties—made her look a little desperate. The gold in her smile and the peasant colors added to the air of wilted youth.

  Behind her and to her right a varnished wood letterbox, stuffed with memos, depended from the wall. The polished wood caught the sunlight coming through the open windows on the lot side of the building. Everything in the room was bright with sunlight, floors, desk, whitewashed walls.

  “Can I help you?” the woman said, smiling amid the glare.

  “My name is Stoner,” I told her. “I’d like to talk to your headmaster about one of your teachers, Mason Greenleaf.”

  The woman dropped her eyes to the desktop, like she’d been slugged from behind. “You’re a police officer?”

  “I’m working for Cindy Dorn, a friend of Mason’s.”

  “Of course. I’m Helen Tobler. Assistant headmistress here at Nine Mile.”

  “Would you mind answering a few questions, Ms. Tobler?”

  “No. I wouldn’t mind at all. I was very fond of Mason. All of us here were fond of him. It’s a terrible tragedy.”

  She gestured to a chair in front of her desk. “Please sit.”

  I came around the counter. As I sat down, I noticed that the fingers of the woman’s right hand were stained blue with mimeo ink. She caught me staring at them and shrugged. “Can’t afford to Xerox everything.”

  “I would have thought you could,” I said, smiling.

  “I know,” the woman said. “People see the cars in the lot and the horses on the trails and think we’re as rich as our clientele. Well, I assure you we are not. Private schools like ours are run on very tight budgets. Most of our staff and personnel do far less well financially than they could in the public schools.”

  “Then why do they teach here?”

  “We offer them small classes and the chance to work with gifted children. You’d be surprised how attractive that is to a certain kind of teacher. The ones for whom teaching is a calling.”

  “Like Mason Greenleaf?”

  She nodded. “Yes, he was extremely dedicated. I would say he was among the most dedicated and effective teachers we had.”

  “You think it would be possible for me to talk to any of his students?”

  The woman sighed, drumming her blue-stained fingers on the desk. “If it were up to me, I’d see no problem with it. But the headmaster, Tom Snodgrass, might object. Frankly, some of the parents might object, too. You understand that one of the things we’re supposed to offer is privacy.”

  “Perhaps I could talk to Snodgrass myself?” I asked.

  She nodded. “He’s at lunch, but he should be back shortly.”

  I cleared my throat, trying to think of some decent way to broach the question of Greenleaf’s motive for suicide. But the woman didn’t need coaxing.

  “Obviously, you want to know why Mason did what he did?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course, I’ve thought about it quite a lot,” she said, leaning back into a sloping beam of sunlight. “And all I can say is that whatever problems he had, he didn’t say a word about them to any of us here at Nine Mile. In fact he was such a sweet, positive soul that it makes what happened especially disturbing.

  “Frankly, I can’t understand it,” she said, dropping her eyes again. “Unless something just overwhelmed him, like somebody dying, or maybe finding out that he had cancer, or Cindy leaving him . . . ?”

  There was an undisguised note of curiosity in her voice. And who could blame her for being curious? I told her the truth. “He wasn’t ill, and he had no recent problems with Cindy.”

  I didn’t mention Del Cavanaugh—given the clean bill of health that Dr. Mulhane had reported, there was no need to broach the subject of AIDS. But I did bring up the solicitation incident from six years past. The off-chance that he’d been enmeshed in a similar situation at Nine Mile was the chief reason I’d come to the school. “You do know that he’d had a problem with a student some years ago?”

  Helen Tobler pursed her lips as if she wanted to spit. “The school board thing was a travesty. But those are the times we are living in. When Mason came to us after being disciplined, we did not hesitate to hire him—and believe me, our standards are the highest. They have to be—they’re what our reputation is founded on.”

  She didn’t mention that Greenleaf had apparently had an in with Tom Snodgrass. It made her umbrage slightly less impressive.

  “You aren’t aware of any such incident that might have occurred here at Nine Mile?”

  “Absolutely not,” Helen Tobler said flatly. “In fact I don’t believe there was an ‘incident’ to begin with—just an overzealous father who had lost custody of his son in a divorce hearing and was trying to score points against his ex-wife. Mason became his whipping boy, thanks to the prosecutor’s zeal to persecute homosexuals.”

  “Prior to the week that he dropped out of school, did Mason seem distant or preoccupied to you?”

  “Not to me he didn’t,” Helen Tobler said. “But our schedules were such that we didn’t see a lot of each other that week. He may have complained a bit about the heat, about having trouble sleeping at night. He didn’t look particularly well rested, but then neither do I. I mean it’s been hot, and our classrooms aren’t air-conditioned. You really ought to talk to Tom. He’s a longtime friend of Mason’s and would have seen more of him than I did. He should be back any minute.”

  I glanced at my watch, which was showing a quarter to three. Since I wanted to talk to some of Greenleaf’s students, I decided to wait.

  ******

  I sat in the office for a g
ood quarter of an hour, watching Helen Tobler run circulars off the noisy mimeo machine. After a while she gathered a bunch of the papers in her blue hands and walked around the counter to the door.

  “I’m going to distribute a few of these up and down the quad. You’re welcome to keep waiting here until Tom gets in.”

  A few minutes after she left, a boy came through the door. He was about seventeen, thin, dark-haired, with a sharp-featured, handsome face. He stood by the counter for a second, staring at me.

  “Where’s Ms. Tobler?” he said with a touch of suspiciousness, as if I’d done something to her.

  It dawned on me that he was one of the kids giving me the eye in the parking lot.

  “She’s delivering some forms to the classrooms.”

  “Uh-huh. Who are you?”

  He said it like he had a right to ask anybody anything he wanted. Which was probably how he’d been raised and educated. It gave me a slightly different feel for the nature of the student body than the official version I’d gotten from Helen Tobler. “I’m a truant officer,” I said.

  The kid smiled. “No, you’re not. You were asking about Mr. Greenleaf.” I wondered just how the hell he knew that, until he glanced at the open window. “I heard you talking.”

  “You always snoop at the window?”

  “I heard you mentioning his name.” The kid ducked his head. “It’s awful what happened to him.”

  “You were a student of his?”

  The boy nodded solemnly. “I was in his senior honors seminar this summer. I’m Lee Marks.”

  He held out his hand across the counter, and I started to feel a little better about his manners.

  “Harry Stoner,” I said, shaking with him.

  “Do you know why he did it?” Lee Marks said, resting his elbows on the countertop and staring at me with an earnestness that was touching.

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t, Lee.”

  “I couldn’t believe it when I heard,” Lee Marks said with emotion. “None of us could. He was such a nice guy. It’s so unfair.”

  It’s a hard lesson, that one about what’s fair. And it’s surprising how often you have to learn it before it sticks, if it ever really does.