Free Missing by Jonathan Valin Page B

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
summer-weights. I made my way through the throng up to Homicide on
the third fioor. 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
ilatly. "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