Missing (27 page)

"I know he’s dead."

The man flinched with his whole body, as if he’d
been jolted with electricity. "What do you mean, he’s dead?"

"He was killed on the interstate last night in a
car wreck, coming back from Columbus—where you’d sent him, Del."

Cavanaugh’s face trembled with an emotion so strong
that he had to bite his own lip to keep from breaking down. I watched
him battle his grief with a mixed feeling of pity and contempt. He’d
literally willed himself to stop feeling anything for anyone but
himself. But I’d taken him by surprise. With an effort that was
almost as impressive as his march past Mom to the front door, he
managed to keep from crying out.

"I did not know that," he said, fighting
the tremor in his voice. "I confess I am sorry to hear it. Ira
was a . . . friend."

"He died helping me try to solve this puzzle,
Del."

"Then you must feel quite terribly responsible."

"I’ve had better days."

He nodded, as if the high jinks were finally over, as
if the news about Sullivan had momentarily blasted him back into the
human race.

"Mason came here on Monday evening. He told me
what he’d done with Paul. He told me he was going to meet with some
people that night and try to settle things for Paul—and himself."

"What did he mean by that?"

Cavanaugh took a deep breath. "I assumed he was
going to talk with the district attorney. Ira had the same
impression. Ira had talked to a friend who knew Mason’s problem,
someone in the district attorney’s office, and there had been . . .
various allegations had been made."

"What allegations?"

"I honestly don’t know. I just know that he
was going to try to resolve the problems that night. So that he and
Paul could live out Paul’s final days in peace."

"He said that?"

"In so many words."

But I didn’t believe him anymore—not when it came
to Mason Greenleaf's various loves. Cavanaugh’s hatred for Cindy
Dorn was so intense that he would have said anything to obliterate
her memory of Mason.

When I told him I didn’t believe him, the man
stared at me contemptuously, as if I’d ceased to be a worthy
adversary. He called out, "Mother! Show Mr. Stoner to the door,"
as if he was calling a new opponent into the ring.
 

29

I WENT back to the office. As soon as I got upstairs,
I searched my desk, looking for the little notepad on which I’d
scratched the name and address of Ira Sullivan’s last interview—his
old friend from the DA’s office. I found it under some loose
papers: Connors.

I dialed the DA’s ofiice and got a general
secretary who directed my call to Connors’s secretary.

"I’m afraid he’s not in today," she
said, when I asked to speak to her boss. "A good friend of
Larry’s was killed in an automobile accident, and he decided not to
come in this morning. He’ll be back tomorrow, if you’d like to
leave a message."

I told her there was no message.

The address that Cherie the Secretary had given me
for Larry Connors was on Celestial, catercorner to Mason Greenleaf ’s
condo on the hill side of the street—a rustic A-frame aerie fronted
by large cantilevered wooden porch.

I parked on the street and stepped out onto the
sidewalk, staring up the hill at the house. The only way in was
through a gated fence, up a long flight of stairs that pierced the
porch and ended at Larry Connors’s front door. I went over to the
gate, pressed the buzzer on an intercom, and waited.

A moment went by, and a man answered, "Who is
it?"

"My name is Stoner, Mr. Connors. I’m a friend
of Ira Sullivan’s. He was helping me with a case I’ve been
working on—Mason Greenleaf ’s suicide."

"Oh, yes, the detective," the man said and
buzzed me through, as if I’d been expected.

I started climbing the stairs, glancing back halfway
up at the row of houses on the opposite side of Celestial, colorless
in the gray light. Beyond them, down the hill, I could see the rain
falling in the river. By the time I got to the porch, I was breathing
hard—it was that much of a climb. A middle-aged man was waiting for
me at the door—tall, slim, with silver hair and a haggard, handsome
face. He was dressed in a black turtleneck shirt and black pants—a
kind of casual mourning. From the look of his eyes, he’d had a
tough day.

He waved me through the door into a spacious white
room with a cathedral ceiling and a second-story loft on its far
wall, railed like a balcony. There wasn’t much furniture in the
room, adding to the sense of blank space. The few pieces he had, dark
leather sofas and chairs, were tightly grouped in the center of the
room—as if they had been gathered there while the painters worked.

"You want a drink, Stoner‘?" Connors
said.

I could hear from his voice that he’d been drinking
most of the afternoon. Scotch, judging from his breath.

"I’m okay."

He went over to a little bar below the loft and
poured himself a Cutty in a tall glass, then carried it over to the
sofa.

"I’ve been expecting you," he said, with
a look of resignation.

"Once I heard about Ira, I expected you."

"Why do you say that?" I asked him.

"Don’t be coy. I know he talked to you."

"I never got a chance to talk to him, Mr.
Connors. Not in detail."

The look of resignation on Connors’s face changed
abruptly.

"He didn’t mention me to you?"

"No."

"Then what brought you here?"

"Sullivan told me that he’d talked to a
witness who had seen Mason before he died. You were the last person
Ira talked to before he talked to me."

The man laughed. "How absurdly simple."

"There are other reasons I figured it might be
you."

"Such as?"

"Such as you’re with the DA, and Paul Grandin
has problems with the police."

"What do you know about Paul Grandin’s
arrest?"

"Just that he was busted for solicitation a few
weeks ago in a Mount Adams bar."

Connors took another pull of Scotch, chewing on it
deliberately, as if he was considering what he was going to do about
me. Before I’d told him the truth, he’d clearly assumed I had
leverage on him—something Sullivan had confided to me that would
compel him to cooperate. Without that leverage I had no way of
forcing him to tell me what he knew. I had to hope that Sullivan’s
unexpected death would weigh in my favor. Connors clearly cared
enough about the man to have stayed home from work—and gotten
drunk—after hearing about the accident.

After a time he leaned back in the chair with a heavy
sigh.

"Look, I don’t have to say anything to you at
all."

"I know that."

"But I promised Sully I’d . . . talk to you.
Given what happened, I guess I ought to live up to the promise."

"You know something about Paul Grandin’s
arrest?"

"I know that there’s some question whether he
was actually soliciting anyone when he was busted," the man
said, crossing his legs and resting the tumbler on his knee. "He
claimed that he was being harassed by the police."

"How harassed?"

The man sighed. "How cops usually harass
homosexuals—by roughing them up. One of the officers recognized
Grandin from a previous arrest. He started giving Grandin a hard time
outside the bar. Grandin ran back inside to escape him and was
collared in the john of the bar."

"Who told you this?"

"Mason Greenleaf. I had a talk with him late one
Wednesday night. At his house." He nodded toward the window, at
Celestial Street. "The Grandin boy had come to Mason, looking
for help earlier that week. Mason called me on Tuesday, asking me to
look into it. After I nosed around, we talked it over on his porch
the following night. I told him the truth: There was no way to prove
the kid’s story about the alleged harassment, not with the cop’s
partner backing him up all the way."

"Who was the cop?"

"A guy named Art Stiehl. He’s a
well-connected, well-liked veteran. Does a lot of undercover work.
Got a spotless record, tough as nails, decorated for bravery, devout
Catholic. Wife, two kids."

"Did you talk to Stiehl?"

The guy plucked the Scotch from off his knee and took
a long drink. "No."

"Why not?"

He stared at me over the lip of the glass of booze.
"Because I don’t have the guts to get involved in this case. I
still don’t, even though Ira got himself killed on account of it.
So don’t bother to ask. My answer is no."

Given his close connection to Sullivan and Greenleaf,
he didn’t have to tell me why he feared involvement in a homosexual
solicitation case. The callow son of a bitch flushed with
self-disgust anyway.

"I can’t expose myself in a matter like this,"
he said, leaning forward and dropping the glass like a gavel on the
coffee table in front of him. "I told Ira that. Guys like Stiehl
are untouchable. Everyone goes to bat for them. It’s just the way
it is."

I doubted that line of thinking had sat well with Ira
Sullivan. He’d been a prig, but he’d had guts.

"What was Mason doing in Stacie’s bar on the
night he died?"

"I don’t know for sure," Connors said. "I
just know that Mason told me he was going to arrange a meeting with
Stiehl."

"To do what?"

The man shrugged. "Try to talk him out of
pressing charges. I don’t know for sure."

"He did that for Grandin, huh?" I said,
impressed with Mason Greenleaf’s courage. Cops scared the hell out
of him. And Stiehl, who had interrogated him in the Grandin case,
must have been particularly frightening.

"That night on the porch, I asked him the same
thing: Why bother? The kid had been nothing but trouble to Mason,
stealing things from his house, lying to him, abusing his generosity.
Why stick your nose out for him?"

"What did he say?"

"He didn’t say anything. I told him to refer
the kid to Ira, but he wouldn’t do that, either. In fact he asked
me to keep the conversation secret."

"Have any idea why?"

"I guess he just didn’t want to explain Paul
Grandin, Jr., to his friends. I mean, he was putting himself out for
the kid he’d been accused of abusing. Ira, for one, would have had
a hemorrhage. He did have a hemorrhage the other night, when I told
him."

"You went back to Su1livan’s apartment to
talk?" I said.

"Yeah, why?"

"Someone saw you in the parking lot. A friend of
Sullivan’s."

"We talked at his office, then talked some more
after supper. He was livid about the whole thing. You can imagine how
the people at Nine Mile would have reacted. After all the protests
that were made on Mason’s behalf and all the friends who had gone
to bat for him, it made him look guilty of something, you know?"

"Maybe he felt guilty," I said half to
myself. Or maybe he just didn’t know how to explain Paul Grandin,
Jr., to Cindy Dorn. Losing her was the thing he most feared,
according to Terry Mulhane. And whether Greenleaf was involved with
the kid or not, the risks he was taking on the boy’s behalf made it
look like betrayal.

"Do you have any idea who Stiehl’s partner was
in the Grandin boy’s bust?"

"Yeah. Ron Sabato. A cop in Vice."

After finishing with Connors, I drove straight down
Celestial to the Parkway, getting off at Filth and circling down
below the distributor to the dell in which Stacie’s was located.
There were just a handful of cars in the lot at that hour of the
afternoon. I parked near the door and walked up the flight of stairs
to the bar floor.

The downstairs was virtually empty, save for a few
self-starters sitting by themselves in dark corners of the room. I
went up to the bar and crooked a finger at Max Carlson. He ambled up
slowly, biting at the corner of his lip—as if he had an intuition
that this was not going to be a fun visit. Maybe it was the look on
my face: I wasn’t disguising my anger.

"How long did you say you worked here, Max?"
I asked him as he got close.

He shrugged his massive shoulders. "Fifteen
years, maybe."

"So you pretty well know everybody, right? All
the regulars? The old hands?"

He smiled uncertainly. "Yeah."

"How ’bout the cops, Max? Vice cops? They ever
come in here?"

He took a step back, knocking against a stack of
glasses on the ledge behind him, making them ring.

"Uh—huh," I said, nodding. "I know
all about it, Max."

"I don’t know what you’re talking about."

"You better remember pretty quick. Or I’m
going beat the shit out of you. Then I’m going to call Vice and
tell them that you spilled the beans about Stiehl and Sabato."