10

THE CONVERSATION with Sullivan had gone well enough to give me hope that he would eventually help out, especially if he could see his way to naming names. And I had the feeling that in time he would. Like Cindy, he had been wounded by Greenleaf’s silence; and, like Cavanaugh, he was vain enough to take it personally.

Sullivan had already helped me in one way: by making it clear that Mason Greenleaf’s life and death had had shapes of their own—independent of my bad memories of Ira Lessing’s tragic death, and my part in revenging it—and that at their heart was a secret that he hadn’t been able to impart to his lover or his ex-lover or his friends. Both Cavanaugh or Sullivan had guessed that that secret was his inability to come to terms with being gay, a fate that he had tried to escape and couldn’t. Where Cindy Dorn saw inexplicable betrayal, they saw self-delusion and a sad, inevitable self-reckoning. While their version of Mason Greenleaf smacked heavily of their own biases, it did have the merit of fitting the few facts that I knew. Like it or not, I couldn’t get around the fact that Greenleaf had ended up in a gay bar with two gay men.

As I rode the elevator back down to the Dixie Terminal lobby, I plotted a bit of strategy to take me through the rest of that afternoon, until it was late enough to catch the night help who had served Greenleaf and his friends at Stacie’s bar. I decided to begin at the beginning, with whatever had been bothering Greenleaf during the weeks before he disappeared. Besides his homosexuality, Sullivan had suggested three possible motives: a fear of contracting AIDS, a terror of harassment by the law, or a serious problem at work. I had already seen what AIDS could do, and it was fearsome indeed. But according to Cindy, Greenleaf did not himself have AIDS, unless of course he’d had his blood tested during the week before he dropped into limbo. Had he, in fact, been diagnosed with HIV, it would have been more than enough to start him in decline. It was the first thing I planned to check when I got back to the office. The other two possible motives, job- and cop-related trouble, could be handled by a couple of quick trips. I didn’t have much hope that any of it would pan out, especially since Cindy had already told me that Mason wasn’t having a problem at work, and neither Sullivan nor the cops themselves had said that he was having any current problems with the law. But without a solid lead, I had to start somewhere.

When I got back to my office, I looked up Mason’s internist, Terry Mulhane, in the Yellow Pages. He had an office on Auburn Avenue in Corryville. I dialed his number and got a receptionist who put me on hold. A few moments later she came back on, full of apologies.

“We’ve got some sort of flu bug going around, and the phone’s been ringing off the hook.”

I told her who I was and asked her if it would be possible to talk to Mulhane about Mason Greenleaf.

“I can ask,” she said dubiously, as if Greenleaf was a painful subject.

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 tonight 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.