Free Missing by Jonathan Valin

of plague
and propaganda, it was there now, in the back of my mind, this
unsettling, invasive fear that changed everything.
    "Cindy says she practiced safe sex and their
last blood tests were negative," I said, trying not to sound
defensive.
    But Sullivan wasn’t buying it. "That must be a
great relief to you," he said. "I would still check with
Terry Mulhane. I would also talk to the staff at Nine Mile to see if
things were going smoothly on his job."
    "You have some reason to think that they
weren’t?"
    "No. I just know that Mason took his work very
seriously. When the school board finally decided to let him go, he
was so despondent that he threatened to kill himself. Of course, he
got over it."
    "He didn’t make a habit of that, did he?
Threatening suicide?"
    Sullivan shook his head no. "Mason wasn’t that
unstable. You have to remember that the circumstances of his arrest
were humiliating, and the police were still hounding him in spite of
the fact that the charges had been reduced. Once they get your name,
they can make life quite miserable for a gay man. For a while there
they were dragging Mason into every lineup that involved a charge of
solicitation or molestation. I actually had to secure an injunction
to get them to lay off."
    "You don’t know if he’d been harassed again
recently, do you?" I said, thinking it would make a damn good
motive for suicide.
    "If he was, he didn’t tell me. As his lawyer,
I am sure that he would have come to me with such a problem."
    But this time he sounded defensive, which made me
think I should follow up on it. The obvious fact that Greenleaf
hadn’t confided in him prior to killing himself was bothering
Sullivan, just as it was tormenting Cindy Dorn. It occurred to me
that Mason Greenleaf hadn’t confided in any of the people one might
have expected him to turn to—Cindy, Sullivan, or Del Cavanaugh.
Outside of the vague malaise he’d voiced to the girl, he had gone
to his grave silently, like a man with a secret. Which led me back to
Stacie’s bar and the only two people I knew for a fact that
Greenleaf had talked to before he committed suicide.
    "Mason was seen in a bar called Stacie’s on
the night he died, in the company of two other men, a gray-haired
older man who drank a good deal of Scotch and a younger blond man
with a mustache. I thought at first that the Scotch-drinker was Del
Cavanaugh, but now I’m not sure. You wouldn’t know any old
friends of Mason’s that match those descriptions, would you?"
    Sullivan thought this over. "I can’t say, the
descriptions are so vague. You understand I don’t want to put
anyone in a difficult position without further checking."
    "Meaning that you do know people who would fit
the bill?"
    "Several," Sullivan conceded. "I’ll
make inquiries for you."
    Under the circumstances it was the best I could have
hoped for.
    "I appreciate the help," I told him,
getting up and holding out my hand. We shook like old pals.
    "I’ll call you after I’ve checked into it,"
Sullivan said as I left the room.
 
    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