Extenuating Circumstances (3 page)

"He sounds like an old-fashioned do-gooder," I said, smiling.

"That's exactly what he is," Geneva said. "Ira can bore you to death with facts and figures. I mean, he's a stickler for detail. But under the bow tie and pressed shirt, he's got a heart of gold and everyone knows it."

His face fell. "Look, if there's anything I can do to help find him, don't hesitate to call me. Here or at home. I really mean that."

"I'm sure the Lessings will appreciate your offer."

"I just hope it's a false alarm."
 
 

4

Before returning to the Lessing house I caught a cab to the Lighthouse Clinic on upper Monmouth Street. On the way uptown I took a look at the bars that Geneva had mentioned -little brick boxes, with light bulbs flashing around their doors and sandwich signs on the sidewalks advertising the most beautiful girls in Kentucky, all nude, all the time. And of course there was the street traffic that had apparently upset Lessing. Sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls in Madonnaware, with their spikey hair spray-painted purple and their eyes made up like Halloween masks.

Twentyyear-olds in leather minis and tube tops, their breasts oozing out of their bodices like squibs of toothpaste. They schooled together in groups, according to their ages, wandering up and down the blocks in front of the bars, occasionally darting out into the street, getting swallowed up by a passing car and speeding off. I'd seen that kind of thing so many times before in so many different cities that the bars and the whores seemed like part of the urban landscape now, like fireplugs and phone lines. I guessed Lessing had seen them differently.

The Lighthouse was a half mile north of the redlight district, a brick storefront in the middle of a commercial block. The front window had been boarded over with painted plyboard, and a sign had been hung above the door picturing a lighthouse. A teenage girl was sitting in the doorway, looking very stoned and very lost. As I got out of the cab she walked over and panhandled me for change.

"Why don't you go inside?" I said to her, pointing at the building.

"Why don't you get fucked?" she said, stalking off. "I ain't ready to be saved."

Judging from the thinness of her arms and the sallowness of her complexion, I gave her a few more weeks. Then she'd be ready for anything.

I walked through the open door into a reception room filled with folding chairs. A half-dozen spacedout kids sat there, nodding off. There was an unmanned secretary's desk at the rear of the waiting area, with a sign on its corner saying "Counseling." A long aisle ran from the back of the waiting area to a pair of swinging doors with the word "Clinic" printed on them. Behind that door a kid was screaming holy murder. The junkies on the folding chairs didn't seem to notice, but it got my attention, all right. After a few minutes the screaming subsided into sobs, then stopped altogether. A young nurse, looking ashenfaced, came through the swinging doors and up the aisle. She sat down at the counseling desk.

I walked over to her.

"You all right?" I asked.

She nodded slowly, as if she were making up her mind about it at that very moment. "Yeah, I'll be all right. Can I help you?"

"I'd like to talk to Sam Kingston."

She glanced over her shoulder at the swinging doors. "Sam's busy at the moment."

"I heard."

"Some kid freaked out on T's and B's. Sam's talking him down. He shouldn't be too much longer if you want to wait."

I sat on one of the folding chairs, next to a kid who smelled like a clothes hamper. A few minutes went by, then a stocky, bearded black man in a doctor's frock coat came through the swinging doors. He walked over to the waiting area and sat down heavily on the corner of the nurse's desk.

"What's next, I wonder?" he said, rubbing savagely at his thick black beard.

"Sam?" the nurse said. "That fellow's been waiting to talk to you." She pointed at me.

The man turned his head toward me and held out his hand. "I'm Sam Kingston. How can I help you?"

"My name is Stoner, Dr. Kingston," I said, shaking with him. "Could I talk to you for a few minutes?"

"You a narc, Mr. Stoner?"

I smiled at his savvy. "No. A private detective. I'm working for the Lessing family."

The name Lessing made Sam Kingston straighten up.

"Come on back to the office," he said.
 
 

The office was nothing more than a glassed-in carrel in one corner of the clinic. The Hippocratic oath was hung like a stitched motto above a tiny desk and chair. The only other furnishing was a stained Mr. Coffee machine sitting on a plastic table.

"What exactly do you do for Ira?" Kingston said, pouring two cups of coffee and handing one to me.

"Right now, what I'm doing is looking for him."

"Did you try at his office or over at the Court House?"

"He's disappeared, Dr. Kingston. Since Sunday night no one has seen or heard from him."

Kingston sat down on his desk chair, slopping a little coffee on the floor. "Seriously?"

"I'm afraid so."

Kingston set the coffee cup on the corner of his desk and stared at me with concern. "I sure hope nothing's happened to him. It might sound corny, but the guy is a saint. Without him none of this would exist. Not the Lighthouse or half a dozen other charities and halfway houses around town. My God, he's put over ten thousand of his own dollars in this place alone. And if we run short or some kid needs money for special treatment, all you have to do is ask Ira. I don't know how much he's handed out over the years. All you have to do is ask."

"You haven't seen or heard from him this week or weekend, have you?"

"I talked to him on Saturday afternoon," Kingston said.

"What did he say?"

"The usual things. He asked how we were doing, if there was anything we needed."

"Did you need anything special?"

"Money," Kingston said with an embarrassed laugh. "We always need money. The Lighthouse is funded by the commission now. But, in spite of the dole, we're perpetually short. Ira mails us a monthly check to help defray costs. And of course we're always sending local kids to him for handouts -to help get them started in the program."

I asked Kingston the same thing I'd asked Don Geneva: "Why is he so charitable to street kids?"

"Because he's a good man," Kingston said thoughtfully, as if he'd asked himself the same question many times before. "I mean I've talked to him about it. Sometimes you can't help thinking you're taking advantage of a guy who's that generous. But he says it's something he needs to do. He has more money than he can use, and he doesn't have any children of his own. He just wants to help kids."

I reached into my coat and pulled out the two canceled checks I'd found in Ira's calendar.
"I found these on Lessing's desk. They might have meant something special to him. Do they mean anything to you?"

Kingston reached out and took the checks. "They look like Ira's usual doles -to get kids started in the drug rehab program."

"Nothing unusual about them?"

"Not that I can see. I could have our bookkeeper,, Marty Levine, examine them if you want to leave them with me. She's out on vacation this week, but she should be back next Monday."

"All right," I said. "Just don't lose track of them, Doc, okay?"

Kingston pulled open the drawer of his desk and laid them gently inside, as if he was burying a pet.
 
 

5

It was close to four when I finished with Kingston. I caught a cab on Monmouth and had the cabbie drive me back to Riverside Drive. As we turned onto the street I spotted a rusting blue-and-white Cincinnati police cruiser parked beneath the graceful French Quarter house. At first I thought that Trumaine must have talked Janey Lessing into calling the cops, although why she'd called the Cincinnati cops rather than the Covington department was a mystery. But as I paid the cabbie I saw Trumaine come out the front door with a plainclothes detective beside him. Even at a distance I recognized the detective -his name was Art Finch and he was on the CPD homicide squad.

"Christ," I said to myself.

When Trumaine spotted me on the sidewalk, he began waving his arms wildly, as if the fine, delicate house behind him had suddenly caught fire in the July sun. Despite Trumaine's arm-waving, I took my time climbing the stairs. I don't run toward tragedies unless I can do something to prevent them. And in this case it looked like I was too late to do anything at all.

Finch nodded at me as I came up onto the terrace. He was a big man with a stolid, brick-red face and sunstreaked reddish-blond hair. By habit and temperament, his expression was always sullen. Len Trumaine's face told all.

"They found Ira's car," he said in a stricken voice. "My God, my God."

I turned to Finch. "Where?"

"In Queensgate, in the Terminal lot."

"Was he inside?"

Finch shook his head, no. "Lots of blood, though."

Trumaine literally shrank back out of the burning sunlight into the shade of the veranda. "I think I'm going to be sick," he said hoarsely. "I don't believe this is happening." His head fell heavily to his chest.

I walked over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. His polo shirt was slick to the touch, and the flesh underneath it felt like bagged ice. "Try to get hold of yourself," I said softly. "Janey's going to need you."

Trumaine jerked his head up as if I'd slapped him, bumping the back of his skull against the stucco wall of the house. His face contracted with pain and he said, "Ow," before he could check himself. It was just the sort of indignity that had been visited upon the poor, overweight son-of-a-bitch all his life. He knew it, and he knew that I knew it, with a fat man's cruel sense of injured vanity. He reached back to rub his head, his lips trembling.

"Goddamnit," he said.

"Go on in the house. Clean up."

"I'll be all right," he said, fighting to control his voice.

He started through the door, then turned back to me. "Janey's out with Meg. She doesn't know."

"Are you anxious to tell her?"

He shook his head violently.

"Then look after yourself for a while," I told him.

Once Trumaine had gone inside, I asked Finch for the details.

"The car had been parked there for a couple of days," he said. "Somebody at the Terminal got curious and took a look inside. Then they called us. We found a bunch of credit cards piled up on the front seat and this man Lessing's wallet. There was dried blood all over the front seat, on the roof of the car, and in the back too."

"You haven't found a body?"

"Not yet." He glanced at the front door of the house. "We're going to need that guy to make an identification on the personal stuff. You think he can handle it?"

"Better him than the wife."

"Okay. I'll go down to the car and radio in. You get him and meet me down there. And don't take too long. People are dying in this heat."
 
 

I found Trumaine in the living room, with a bottle of scotch in his hand and a blasted look on his face. I didn't have the heart to tell him that this was just the beginning. That he'd strayed into a piece of machinery that could eat him alive -and Janey Lessing too. The pitiless, piddling, inexact machinery of justice.

"They're going to need you to identify the car and Lessing's belongings."

"I don't want to do it," he said flatly.

"It's you or Janey."

Trumaine half smiled, as if in the back of his mind he'd already known it would come to that. He took a big swig of scotch, then got to his feet, digging fecklessly at his loose blue shirttail.

"I ought to call a few of Ira's friends. Somebody should be here when Janey and Meg get back. I'd better call my sister, Fran, too, in Louisville."

"Make your calls," I said. "I'll meet you at the car."
 
 

Nobody said a word on the short, hot ride across the river to Queensgate. Trumaine stared out the side window, trying like hell to hold himself together in the boiling, fetid air of the police cruiser. It was an environment he hadn't experienced -the backseat of a police car, with its handleless doors, its windows that open a finger's width and no more, its jail smells of dirt, destitution, and fear. I'd made the trip before, and I wasn't any more comfortable than he was. Riding in the back of a cop car always made me squirm.

In the front Finch played finger games on the steering wheel. Now and then the radio squawked like a startled crow. The misty river went by us in a blur of bridge struts and passing cars. Then we were on the expressway, in the concrete bottom of the old industrial basin. Then we were off the highway, on the worn brick border of the projects. And then we were there -at the Union Terminal, its huge half-dome looming like a band shell on a vast lawn of glaring concrete.

We'd arrived too quickly for Len Trumaine. I could see it in his face, the way his eyes and mouth dropped as if he'd been slugged, the motion of his throat as if he were trying to swallow but didn't have the spit. He needed more time to prepare himself. And for just a second, as the car pulled up in front of the old train depot plaza, I was afraid he was going to panic. But he didn't.