Missing

by Jonathan Valin

  “Trimble’s taken over the class now,” the boy went on. “But it’s not the same. Greenie was like a kid himself. I mean, he knew how to connect with his students. He wasn’t snotty or condescending like most of them are. He made you feel the relevance of whatever he was teaching. It was a gift.” Lee Marks shook his head again. “I won’t forget him.”

  In spite of the fact that we’d gotten off on the wrong foot, I liked Lee Marks who, as Helen Tobler had said about Greenleaf, seemed to be a sweet, positive soul.

  “You’re going to college in the fall?” I asked him.

  “Harvard.”

  Behind him the door opened and a tall, balding man with a thick-lipped, scowling face came into the room. His knobby cheeks were red and sweaty from the heat, adding to his general look of unappeasable ire, like a Hindu god. No one had to tell me that he was the headmaster.

  “Who are you?” he said to me in a no-nonsense voice.

  I told him who I was—quick, like a bunny. “Your assistant, Ms. Tobler, told me to wait here for you.”

  The man turned the thermostat down on the red, irritable look. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he tamped the sweat on his brow as he walked around the counter toward Helen Tobler’s desk. Almost as an afterthought, he glanced back at the boy.

  “What is it, Marks?”

  “Nothing,” the kid said, straightening. “I was just talking to Mr. Stoner.”

  That didn’t sit well with Tom Snodgrass. “Get back to class,” he snapped.

  As Snodgrass turned away from him, Lee Marks gave me an odd, inquisitive look. He was out the door and Snodgrass was in my face before I had a chance to make anything of it. But I figured I’d already heard what I needed to hear—that Greenleaf was as well-liked by the groundlings as he’d been by the staff.

  “Helen didn’t give you permission to talk to the students, did she?” the man said, sitting down at the desk.

  “No. She said I’d have to ask you.”

  “Then let me tell you right off that I’d prefer that you didn’t talk to them. When a popular teacher like Mason passes away, it’s like a death in the family. And when he takes his own life—well, it’s even worse. The kids need some time to heal. So do I.”

  “Ms. Tobler told me that you two were friends.”

  “We went to grad school together, Mace and I, twenty years ago. He’s known my wife, Sheila, even longer than that—since college. Quite frankly, neither Sheila nor I can understand why he did this. He was a survivor, Mason.”

  I thought about Del Cavanaugh, who was not going to survive, and said, “Sometimes survivors feel guilty.”

  Sighing, Headmaster Tom Snodgrass folded the handkerchief up and packed it neatly into a pocket. “I’ve said the same thing to myself. A lot of Mace’s friends, a lot of our friends, have died recently. It adds to the weight, no question. You get up in the morning and you feel heavier, more burdened. Nothing ages you like friends dying, Stoner. It’s the real clock on the wall.”

  “There wasn’t anything troubling him here at school, was there?” I asked, already knowing what he was going to say. What everyone had said.

  “I don’t think there was,” Snodgrass said. “I mean, I can’t know what he didn’t tell me, but he wasn’t complaining about the job, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Was anyone complaining about him?”

  Snodgrass raised his head sharply as if he caught my drift—and didn’t much like it. “You’re make a reference to his problems with the Cincinnati School Board?”

  “I’m just looking for a reason why he killed himself.”

  “Do you know what happened six years ago?” he said, leaning forward across the desk.

  “I’ve heard several different versions.”

  “Well, let me tell you the one that I know,” he said pointedly, as if he felt obliged to dispel the rumors and false impressions. Given the fact that he’d hired Greenleaf after the incident, I could understand his sense of accountability. “I heard this from Mason himself when I interviewed him for this job. And I had it confirmed by a mutual friend, a supervisor in the public school system.”

  Snodgrass made a church out of his fingers and stared red-faced over the steeple. “Mason had a student named Paul Grandin, a senior interested in theater arts. Paul was a troubled kid from a split family. His father was a nasty, brutal man who had physically abused Paul from an early age. His mother was an overweening alcoholic who couldn’t say no to her husband or to Paul himself. The kid grew up hating both of them and despising himself. He had no confidence, no sense of purpose, and a conflicted sexual identity. As an adolescent, Mason had many of the same problems, so he strongly identified with Paul and treated him the way he wished he’d been treated at that age—with compassion and intelligence. He found the boy a psychotherapist to help him work through his neuroses; he got him a part-time job at the Playhouse-in-the-Park; he encouraged him to become involved in extracurricular activities at school. Naturally the boy was very grateful and very fond of Mason, as Mason was of him. There was never anything more than a bond of affection between them.”

  “I was told about some letters?”

  “If Mason made any mistake, it was writing those notes to Paul,” Snodgrass conceded, sinking behind his tented hands. “Paul had graduated that June and gone off to a theater arts camp in Wisconsin before his freshman year at college. Mason wrote the letters to him while Paul was at camp—just as anyone would write to a friend who was away. Paul brought the letters back home with him when he returned to town. Somehow Paul’s father found them.

  “If a heterosexual had written such a letter to a friend, no one would have thought twice about it. But as you undoubtedly know, Mason was bisexual and, at that time, involved with a man. Apparently someone told the father that Mason was bi, and the father blew up. The police really put Mason through the wringer, you know. If his lawyer hadn’t secured a restraining order, I think they would have hounded him to death. Even at that, if he hadn’t found Cindy, I’m not sure he would have survived.”

  Given the upshot, I didn’t have much confidence that his relationship with Cindy had been the answer to his problems, either—or that Mason Greenleaf had ever allowed anyone to know what that answer might have been.

  Thanking the man for his time, I got up from the chair.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help, Mr. Stoner,” Tom Snodgrass said. “I hate to say it, but I’d feel less troubled and confused if Mason had been killed by accident or even murdered.”

  It was a little shocking to hear it put like that. But as I walked back out to the lot, I realized it was just another way of saying that, like everyone else I’d talked to that blistering July day, he really didn’t understand why his friend had taken his life.

  12

  FEELING DISCOURAGED at having struck out with the cops and at Nine Mile, I drove back to the office to check for messages from Sullivan or Sabato. Neither man had called, leaving me pretty much where I’d been that morning—without a lead or much hope of finding one. Even if I got lucky and found Mason’s Scotch-drinking friend or the young blond man he’d gotten drunk with in the bar, I had the feeling I wasn’t going to get to the bottom of the suicide. Greenleaf’s silence had simply been too complete. In spite of his open relationship with Cindy Dorn, it looked to me as if it had been that way for years—hidden in the folds of his cheerfulness and despair, a core of silence that had never changed. I could nibble around its edges for months, wasting my time and Cindy’s hopes, and come up with little more than the simple, self-evident formula that Sullivan, Cavanaugh, and Jack McCain had proposed that morning—that he’d killed himself because he was unhappy with his life. Because I liked her and wanted to help her, I’d been trying to see the thing from Cindy’s point of view. But I had the feeling there would come a time when even she would have to accept her lover’s silence as final.

  Around five-thirty, I grabbed a bite to eat at a Chinese restaurant on Sixth Street, then wa
lked uptown to the Parkade. I picked up the Pinto and headed east on the Parkway through the ruins of Over-the-Rhine to Dr. Terry Mulhane’s office in Corryville. The late afternoon sun had laid its hand on everything in the north-side slum, firing the red-brick tenements ash white and driving the men and women who lived in them out of their airless rooms and onto the cement stoops. On the sidewalks their kids jeered and jostled, the older ones slap-fighting and darting out into traffic to touch base with the big boys in the BMWs with the black-out windows and the boom boxes going inside like fireworks.

  I followed Reading Road out of the slum, north to Taft and then down to Auburn. Terry Mulhane’s office was a block beyond the McMillan intersection—a made-over mansion house with French windows and gray Robin Hood trim. It was only a mile from Over-the-Rhine, but it was a different world.

  I parked in a lot at the back of the building and walked through the sunlight, around to the front door. Inside, a lone receptionist sat behind a dry-wall divider with a rectangular opening in its center that framed her like a landscape. There was a good deal of New Age artwork on the walls, dolphins and sunsets and kids looking coy. I guess it was supposed to be soothing, but it made my skin crawl.

  Even though the door had chimed when I opened it, it took the receptionist a moment to raise her head and ask what I wanted. It could have been that she was tired—she certainly looked tired—but, given the decor, her lack of haste may have been a deliberate mood-setter too.

  “My name is Stoner,” I told her. “I’m here to talk to Dr. Mulhane.”

  She nodded indifferently and waved to the empty waiting area, littered at day’s end with magazines. I sat in a padded chair, staring at the dolphins and wondering what Mason Greenleaf’s New Age medicine man was going to look like. After a time a tall bearded gent with the suffering, doleful face of a feast day saint came out a door beside the reception desk and scanned the room. He wore a white hospital jacket over Dockers and a checked shirt.

  “Are you Stoner?” he said, sounding more the martyr than the saint.

  “I’m Stoner.”

  “Terry Mulhane,” he said, nodding hello. “I’ll give you a few minutes. Then I’m going to go home, eat supper, and collapse. Okay?”

  “A few minutes is all I need.”

  I followed him through the door into a complex of examination rooms. Mulhane pointed to a doorway and I walked through into a paneled office. To my surprise there was nothing New Age about it, just the usual diplomas on the walls, the picture of the wife and kids, a couple of bookshelves for show. There was a couch to one side of the room and a desk the size of a double-oven stove on the other. I took the couch.

  “I don’t mean to sound like an asshole,” Mulhane said, settling behind the desk, “but I’ve been going since six-thirty this morning, and I’m beat.”

  “Like I said, it’ll just take a few minutes.”

  Swiveling in his chair the man cupped his hands behind his head and stared at me with curiosity.

  “When’s the last time you saw a doctor, Mr. Stoner?”

  “I don’t believe in doctors.”

  He smiled. “Well, I’d advise you to change your religion. You look like you could use a physical.”

  “I’ve been up for a while, too.”

  “Chasing Mason’s ghost,” Mulhane said with melancholy “Have you had any luck?”

  “Not much. None at all, really.”

  Leaning forward in the chair, the man dropped his hands and folded them in front of him on the desktop. “The best I can come up with is that he simply broke down emotionally. I didn’t see it coming. I should have, but I didn’t.”

  Mulhane sat there for a long moment, looking somber. I didn’t for a moment doubt the sincerity of his remorse, but his guilt wasn’t going to get me anywhere. Nor was the talk about sudden, inexplicable breakdowns. I’d been hearing it all day.

  “He may have been upset by a visit to his ex-lover, Del Cavanaugh,” I said, trying to turn him to specifics.

  Mulhane looked up at me and sighed. “I’m sure he was. He told me he was dreading it.”

  “Mason told you he’d gone to see Cavanaugh?” I said with surprise.

  “He told me he was planning to go.”

  “When was this?”

  Mulhane shuffled through a folder on his desk. “A week ago last Thursday. The last time I saw him. He stopped in that morning to complain about the insomnia.”

  Presumably before he went to see Cavanaugh that same Thursday afternoon. It wasn’t much of a chronology, but it was a start.

  “Did he tell you how he’d heard that Cavanaugh was dying?”

  “I think I may have told him myself when he came to the office. Del is also a patient of mine.”

  It certainly blew hell out of my theory that the Scotch-drinking stranger Greenleaf had met on the Wednesday night before he disappeared had told him about Cavanaugh’s illness. And it maybe blew hell out of the idea that Cavanaugh was part of the reason for his despair. Whatever had been bothering Greenleaf had clearly started before he’d seen his ex-lover, although I supposed the news that he was dying and the subsequent visit to his home could have accelerated his decline.

  “If you’ve been talking to Del,” Mulhane went on, “you may have gotten a wrong impression about why Mason went to see him. Del’s a bitter man just now. Actually, he’s been a bitter man most of his life. And Mason breaking up with him was a blow he never got over. Anyway, Mason didn’t go to him because he was still holding a flame. He went out of kindness and a sense of obligation, to say good-bye to a friend.”

  “It will help Cindy to hear that,” I said. “She’s tormented by the fear that Mason betrayed her.”

  “It’s natural for her to feel that way, given what Mason did. But I honestly believe that he was happy with her. In fact, Mason once told me that the thing he was most afraid of was losing Cindy. He had in his mind that whatever made him happy wouldn’t last very long.”

  “Why?”

  The doctor shook his head. “I guess when people have been telling you that you’re undeserving of love for most of your life, it begins to sink in.”

  The way he was putting it, it sounded like Mason Greenleaf had been primed for suicide for a long time. Which made Mulhane’s surprise that he’d gone through with it a bit mystifying.

  “If he was this chronically depressed,” I said, “why wasn’t he in therapy or on medication?”

  “Mr. Stoner,” Mulhane said, “Mason wasn’t clinically depressed. He functioned quite effectively given the load he had to bear, and he did so with unusual grace and good humor. The fears he had were reality-based. Certainly he had every reason to be terrified of AIDS, especially given what has happened to Del. He had reason to fear the loss of love—his past was checkered with broken relationships. It bothers me that people, even many professionals, automatically assume a pathogenesis because someone is occasionally and reasonably unhappy. Mason Greenleaf was not without considerable resources.”

  It was the first time he’d sounded like a guru. But it was an enlightened kind of guruism, based on close, affectionate observation of his patient. Clearly Mulhane was the kind of doctor who treated the “whole” person. And just as clearly, Greenleaf had been his friend. Which must have made his suicide especially painful.

  “Something must’ve happened during that week after I saw him,” he said, as if he’d been reading my mind, “some awful blow. I have to believe that whatever it was hit him where he was weakest, where he was most afraid.”

  “That he would lose Cindy,” I said, completing the thought.

  “That’s my best guess.”

  It was a new theory and, on the surface, not a particularly persuasive one, given the fact that Cindy Dorn hadn’t even hinted at a possible breakup.

  “When he came to see you on Thursday afternoon, did he talk about any trouble with Cindy?” I asked.

  “Not specifically,” Mulhane said. “But looking back on it, I can’t help thinking
there was some sort of coded message in Mason’s complaints. Something that I just missed at the time. I’ve gone over it again and again, trying to decipher it. But frankly, save for the fact that the visit was unscheduled, it was so much like his usual office check-ups that I can’t be certain that I’m not reading my own remorse into what he said.”

  “What exactly did he say?”

  “He complained that he was tired, that he hadn’t been able to sleep. He said he’d had a number of bad dreams.”

  “Did he tell you what the dreams were about?”

  “Cindy, Del, Ralph Cable.”

  “Who is Cable?”

  “Mason’s college roommate at Rutgers. Mason had a love affair with Cable, and Cable took advantage of it to more or less blackmail Mason into giving him cash and other possessions. It was a particularly crushing experience for Mason—one that set the tone for many future disappointments.”

  “Do you know if he saw Cable again recently?”

  “Cable is dead,” Mulhane said. “He was killed in Viet Nam in 1971.”

  The next question was obvious. “You think it was possible that someone else was blackmailing him?”

  “I think that would be the sort of thing you would be best equipped to find out. But I’ll say this, Mason was not the naïve, trusting soul he’d been when he was a college kid. I doubt if anyone could have extorted money from him simply by threatening to reveal that he was homosexual or bisexual.”

  In light of the storm he’d weathered after the Paul Grandin scandal, I doubted it, too. Still it was the first thing like a lead that I’d come across—something I could easily check out by examining Greenleaf’s bank statements.

  “At the time I thought the dreams were symptomatic of Mason’s usual complex of anxieties. He tended to convert them into physical complaints, and fatigue and sleeplessness were nothing new. I gave him a prescription without thinking twice about it.”

  I could see where the Seconals had become a major regret. “He could have gotten the sleeping pills anywhere.”