22

I WENT down to Wah Mee’s on Sixth Street and had some supper without my usual double Scotch chaser. I had a single Scotch instead.

There were some things about myself I couldn’t change as quickly as I had a roommate. Some things Cindy Dorn would have to accept. Or so I told myself. But I did feel a little like I had suddenly developed an eye over my shoulder. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. I hadn’t felt like anybody’d been watching for years. Who wants to watch somebody drink?

It was close to eight when I stepped back out onto Sixth. I walked west up to the Parkade, through the powdery twilight with its mix of late sun and early streetlamp. The temperature had dropped to a velvety touch with a breezy promise of rain in the air. I figured I’d stop at Sullivan’s brownstone and check the office again for messages, before going home. It had been a long time since I’d thought pleasantly about going home. It was where I went when I couldn’t go anywhere else. Last call of the day.

I got the car out of the garage and headed north up the Parkway—all the way to Ludlow. Dark was falling in earnest, as I coaxed the Pinto up the steep hill to the gaslight district and circled around Telford to Sullivan’s building. I parked in the ivory pale of a fluted gas lamp and walked up to the front door of the bundled-up apartment house. There was no one in the dim lobby. Just in case, I went over to the brass mailboxes and looked up Marlene Bateman, Sullivan’s nanny. She was in apartment 21, two doors down from Ira.

I climbed the marble stairs to the second floor and walked down the hall to Sullivan’s door without hearing a peep. Not the cricketing of television sets, or the dull drum of stereos, or even the rattle of bolts being shot in answer to my footsteps. The hallway was as still as a still life. It was a good place for a man like Sullivan to hide out.

Given what Cherie the Secretary had said about him, I figured that Ira was as unlikely to answer his door as he was to answer his phone, so I rapped hard. When no one responded, I sidled two doors down and knocked again. A black-haired woman with dark eyes and a high-cheeked, vaguely Indian-looking face answered my knock. She was wearing a robe cinched tightly at her waist.

“Can I help you?”

I told her who I was and who had sent me—like I was trying to get into the back room of a pool hall. She smiled as if she were used to fielding calls for Ira Sullivan.

“I haven’t seen Sully since last night,” she said. “He went out around ten-thirty, just as I was coming in from the movies. I waved at him in the parking lot, but I don’t think he saw me.”

“Was he alone?”

The woman laughed. “Nooo. He had a man with him. Gray hair, rather distinguished. I must admit, I thought he was a little too distinguished for Sully.”

Clearly she found her friend’s company amusing, although if she knew anything about the Greenleaf case, she wouldn’t have. I didn’t know how Ira Sullivan had found him, but the man sounded like the older guy from Stacie’s bar. I was almost certain that the younger blond had been Paul Grandin himself. If Sullivan made the same connection, it could explain why he had thought there was something odd about Greenleaf’s last night on earth.

“They drove off together,” the woman went on. “I assume Sully must’ve come back late and gone out again early, because his car was gone this morning.”

The woman gave me a searching look. “You’re being so mysterious, Mr. Stoner. Is something wrong?”

“I don’t think so. I just need to talk to Ira.”

I dug into my wallet and pulled out a card.

“If Sullivan comes back later tonight, would you mind phoning me? It’s rather important.”

“If it’s not too late, I’ll tell him to call you,” the woman said.

******

I hadn’t wanted to confront another Grandin so soon after the scene at the tennis court, but given his legal problems, it had occurred to me that Paul might stick closer to home. According to Tim Bristol, Mom had always been a port in a storm—and she had already gone bail for him. Luckily, the woman’s condo was only a few long blocks to the south of Telford, back down Ludlow in a little hairpin cul-de-sac pretentiously called Rue de la Paix. Rue de la Paix didn’t exist until up to ten years ago, when a contractor decided to build a posh highrise overlooking Cincinnati Technical College. I always assumed the fancy French name was meant to console people for the view—and the bite out of their wallet.

I parked on the street in the too-sweet breath of a honeysuckle and walked up a short cement stair to the apartment house outer lobby. I found the woman’s name on a buzzer box and rang her number. After a moment she answered in a weary, vaguely boozy voice. It was a sound I knew too well. The sound of five or six straight shots on an empty stomach.

“What is it?”

“My name is Stoner, Mrs. Grandin. I’m looking for your son, Paul.”

“Are you the police?” she said, as if that was the one and only natural response to his name.

Since it sounded like that would get me in—and I had strong reason to believe the truth wouldn’t—I told her I was a cop.

“This is about the bond I posted?” she said almost hopefully.

I told her it was about the bond and she buzzed me in.

The inner lobby was a far cry from Ira Sullivan’s old mahogany address. Plate glass and tessellated tile, overhead fluorescents, flock wallpaper, stainless fixtures—like something unfortunate and modern in a Jacques Tati film.

Sarah Grandin lived on the twelfth floor, near the top of the highrise. The woman was waiting for me in the hall just outside the elevator doors. She had big, strawberry blond hair inflated in a bouffant around her small, nervous triangular face. Her hair was so large and her face so tiny, she looked like a child’s foot in an oversize shoe. She wore a red silk kimono over a gold silk camisole—and smelled like juniper and Chanel.

“I thought this had all been taken care of by my lawyer,” she said, rocking a bit unsteadily. Her blue eyes were heavy with drink, and she kept blinking them open, alarmingly wide, as she struggled to focus.

“There are some details,” I said, not liking the lie but stuck with it.

“Well, c’mon.”

She turned around, almost buckling at one knee, and walked ahead of me up a hall to a door that opened on a white-on-white living room, as fleecy as down lining.

“Sit,” she said, pointing to a couch that framed a glass coffee table. There was a bottle of Gilbey’s sitting on the table—no glass or tumbler—and a pair of tufted mules and a book, Striptease, on the floor beneath it. The woman waggled over to the couch and dropped like a piano onto pavement.

“That’s better, huh?” she said, encouraging herself. She blinked wide at me and asked, “What is it? You said the bond?”

“Some questions. Routine questions.”

She nodded as if I made sense.

“When’s the last time you saw your son?”

She stared at the gin, as if the answer was inside—like a note in a bottle.

“A few weeks ago,” she said. “After he was arrested. He came . . . he needed some money. I gave him what I could.”

“He’s not staying here with you now, then?”

“Is he supposed to?” she said with a pained look, afraid she’d inadvertently given him away.

“No. He just has to stay in the city.”

Maybe out of a fear that she was going to say something else that damaged her boy’s chances, she made an effort to summon up sobriety. I watched her do it, blinking her eyes, stretching her mouth, straightening up on the couch.

“Wha’d you say your name was?” she asked.

“Stoner. Harry Stoner.” I had an old deputy’s badge that I saved for these occasions. I showed it to her, pocketed it without pride, and took out my notebook. “At the time your son was arrested, do you know where he was living?”

“Here and there. He had several friends in Mount Adams. I don’t remember the names.” She extended one arm along the top of the sofa, in a ludicrous attempt to look more relaxed. “You know this whole thing was a terrible mistake. This thing in the bar. Paulie wasn’t . . . he was just joking.”

“He was arrested for soliciting once before, Mrs. Grandin.”

“That charge was dismissed,” she said immediately.

“There was also an incident with a teacher of his—Mason Greenleaf?”

I expected her to turn red, like her husband had, at the mention of Mason’s name. To my surprise she had just the opposite reaction, shrinking back into the couch with a shiver, as if she’d felt someone step on her grave.

“I could use a drink,” she said with a grotesque smile. “How ‘bout you?” She didn’t wait for an answer, patting around the coffee table like she’d misplaced her glass. I spotted a tea tray on the opposite side of the room, near a picture window looking out on the illuminated green oval of the CTC parking lot and the dark night that surrounded it like a woods. I got up and fetched her a tumbler, setting it down by the bottle.

“Thank you,” she said, sounding genuinely grateful.

She poured a stiff shot and brought the glass to her mouth with both hands, shutting her eyes as she drank. It was enough to bring her back into focus, although I knew from experience she’d drift away again before long.

“Mason Greenleaf?” I said again.

She nodded, setting the glass back down. “It was a tragic thing. Very tragic. You know we were all so upset about . . . when Paulie was arrested in the park. And we didn’t know what to do, or why it had happened. And Paulie was so frightened, so very frightened.” Her voice filled with sympathy for her son. “The policemen had told Paul Senior that in cases like Paulie’s, there was always an adult who . . . someone who . . .”

She couldn’t bring herself to say it, so I said it for her. “Seduced the boy?”

She nodded and took another drink. “You know, Paul Senior was always such a disciplinarian. He never tried to understand Paulie’s needs. Or anyone else’s needs,” she said with casual bitterness. “I couldn’t live with a man like that. Neither could my son. So I left him and took Paulie with me. But Paulie suffered without a man’s guidance. I couldn’t give him that. And of course his father wouldn’t help unless Paulie did things his way. So when this other man, Mason Greenleaf, took such an interest in Paulie, why, I thought it was a blessing. Paulie just seemed to blossom after he befriended him. He blossomed. But then this thing happened, this mistaken thing in the park. And Paul was so angry, and Paulie was frightened. And the police were so sure there had been—what you said. They told Paul that it wasn’t Paulie’s fault, that if we found this other man, they would drop the charges. And Paulie . . . he finally admitted who it was to Paul.”

She smiled a sick smile. “I never would’ve guessed it was Mr. Greenleaf.”

The way she’d told the story, I suspected that it had come as a surprise to Greenleaf, too. It sounded to me as if he’d been deliberately sacrificed by the boy’s father—and possibly by the boy himself—to keep little Paulie out of the newspapers. But the fact that he’d been set up didn’t mean that Mason hadn’t been guilty of some kind of misbehavior with Paul Grandin, Jr. Indeed, his subsequent behavior toward Paul was hard to explain as anything but an admission of guilt—or partial guilt.

“There were some letters Greenleaf wrote,” I said.

Sarah Grandin smiled fondly. “Beautiful letters. I read them over with Paulie several times. Full of confidence in him. And affection. And of course, he kept sending Paulie money, too. Little sums to buy himself treats and to treat his friends.” Her smile went away. “Of course, Paul never gave Paulie a dime. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to give him money out of the alimony payments, because his father is so cheap and vindictive toward me.”

I suppose I could have asked her a dozen more questions and gotten the same vague, boozy, dishonest answers. But it was Paul Grandin, Jr., I needed to talk to.

“Mrs. Grandin,” I said, “it’s very important that I talk to your son. Do you know where he is staying?”

“He’s in town. He’s with friends.”

“Which friends?”

She shifted her eyes wildly, as if she were coming to the sharp edge of that corner I’d backed her into. “I have it written down. Do you need me to . . . ?”

“Get it,” I said coldly, like a cop.