Missing (20 page)

I found a phone stand on Auburn Avenue, outside the
office, and called my own answering machine to check for messages.
But nothing had come in—from Ira Sullivan or Max Carson or anyone
else. I dug another quarter out of my pocket and dialed Sullivan’s
office. I got taffy-haired Cherie the Secretary.

"What can I tell you?" she said with a
laugh. "He never came in. You oughta try him tonight at home, is
what I would do. There’s a nice widow woman lives up the hall from
him, Marlene Bateman, keeps an eye out for Mr. S. when he’s had a
few too many. You try her, if he doesn’t answer the door."

Knowing what a gossip she was, I decided to pump her
for information about the message Sullivan had left the previous
night. "He called me yesterday," I said putting a note of
mild complaint in my voice, "and said that he’d spoken to a
friend of Mason’s. But he didn’t give me his name."

She didn’t even hesitate. "Let me think
now—who all was through here yesterday?" I heard her paging
through an appointment book. "When’d he call you, morning or
afternoon?"

"It was in the evening, sometime after eight."

"I got nothing here for last night. He saw Mr.
Connors late in the afternoon."

"Who’s that?"

"He’s an assistant DA. Mr. Sullivan handles
most of his legal work."

It didn’t sound particularly promising. "Nothing
else?"

" ’Fraid not, hon’," she said, like
they were out of that kind of pie. "He saw him around four. They
were still in his office talking when I went home at five-thirty."

"All right. Connors, district attorney’s
office," I said, writing it down on my pad.

"You want his home address?"

She was a dangerous woman. "Sure."

"He lives at 1673 Celestial Street, up on the
hill. Real close to where Mr. Greenleaf lived."

L It was a short drive from Terry Mulhane’s office,
through the late afternoon sun, to Mount Adams. I followed Elsinore
up the hill, under the Ida Street bridge and through its arching
shadow, circling around to Parkside. The Playhouse sat on a knoll
above the Seasongood Pavilion—a squat red brick structure
undulating along the hilltop like a Cyclopean wall. I parked in the
lot behind the Marx theater and made my way through the shade of the
elm trees to a side door marked "Actors Only."

I knew the building well enough to find the rehearsal
halls, which were deserted at that hour, save for a pudgy, balding
stage manager in overalls and sneakers hammering at the back of a
set. I told him I was looking for Freddy Davis.

"He’s not here," he said, lowering the
hammer.

"It’s kind of important I talk to him," I
said.

"Well, he’s booked pretty solid just now,
buddy. He got a TV part a few months ago. A real nice break for him."

"He’s out of town?"

"He was. I don’t know if he’s back now or
not. Have you tried his agent?"

"It’s a personal thing."

The man gave me a look of disbelief "You’re a
friend of his?"

"No. I’m looking for a guy, Paul Grandin. I
heard he was living with Davis."

The stage manager shook his head. "I don’t
think Fred has had a thing to do with Paul for quite a while. I know
we sure as hell don’t anymore."

"He doesn’t work for the Playhouse?"

"Our director, Steve Meisel, fired him about
two, three weeks ago. Too much trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

The man turned back to the set. "That’s not
for me to say."

"You don’t know where Paul’s living, then?"

He began pounding nails into a two-by-eight.
"Scrounging, I guess, like he usually does. Sponging off
friends—I don’t know what else and don’t want to know."

"You wouldn’t know Davis’s address, would
you? Just so I can double-check."

"Some place on Ida," the guy said over the
hammering noise.

"Take a look at the bulletin board in the
actors’ lounge. There’s probably an old cast list with the
number."
 

21

I FOUND Freddy Davis’s address where the stage
manager said I’d find it, posted on an old call sheet in the shabby
actors’ lounge. Since his house was almost directly across from the
Playhouse, I left the car in the lot and walked down the short slope
to Ida Street. Davis’s bungalow was near the Pavilion side of Ida,
a two-story townhouse with a pitch roof and a cantilevered porch in
back looking out over the east side of town. I was prepared to find
nobody home, but a moment after I knocked, a short, handsome,
black-haired man in his late twenties answered. He was wearing white
shorts and a white tennis shirt that matched his pearly teeth and set
off his deep California tan. An ornately furnished living room spread
out behind him like the train of a robe.

"Can I help you?" he said, smiling like a
sunburst.

"You can if you’re Fred Davis."

"I’m Davis. Who are you?"

I told him who I was and who I was looking for. The
sun set in the man’s face when I said Paul Grandin’s name. But I
was getting used to that reaction.

"Why are you looking for him?" Davis asked.

"A friend of his killed himself Paul was one of
the last people he spoke with."

"What an exit!" the man said with a sharp
laugh. "I pity him."

"You think I could talk to you about Paul for a
few minutes?"

"There isn’t much to say. I haven’t seen him
in several months. Not since April."

"He moved out?"

Davis planted a hand on the doorjamb, as if he felt
the need for anchorage. "Yeah, he moved out. I let him room here
for a few months when he was down on his luck and sick with
bronchitis, and he moved out. That’s about the whole of it. I don’t
know where he went and don’t care."

"Did he have any other friends at the Playhouse
that he might have turned to?"

The man smiled a weary smile. "You know that old
adage about burning your bridges behind you? Paul set fire to them
while he was still standing on them. I don’t think he had a friend
left among the actors at the Playhouse. Steve Meisel used to carry
him on the payroll for old times’ sake, but from what I hear even
Steve finally got sick of Paul’s shenanigans and let him go."
Davis stared out at the sunburnt street. "He’s out there
somewhere. Causing trouble. You can bet on that."

"He never mentioned a man named Mason Greenleaf
to you, did he?"

Davis gripped the doorjamb a little more tightly, as
if he could feel that anchor slipping. He didn’t want to talk about
Paul Grandin, and I didn’t blame him.

"Yeah, he might have mentioned him. An old
friend of his. Why do you ask?"

"He’s the one who committed suicide."

"That’s too damn bad," Davis said,
lowering his eyes. "I guess he was one of the only people Paul
knew whom he could count on in a pinch. At least, it seemed like Paul
used to turn to him whenever he was in trouble. Now that he’s
gone—Paul must really be alone." Reddening, Davis looked over
his shoulder at a sliding-glass window at the back of the fussy
living room. Out on the sunlit porch I could see someone in white,
sitting in a lounge chair.

"I don’t really want to talk about Paul
anymore," Davis said. "I’m sorry about his friend. I sure
as hell hope that Paul didn’t have a hand in it."

But he didn’t say it with much hope in his voice.
Turning away, Fred Davis closed the door on me—and my questions.

I walked back across Ida, up the grass hill to the
Playhouse. I went into the building through the main entrance and
found a pretty blond usher stacking programs in a ticket booth. I
asked her where I could find Steve Meisel. She smiled at me as if I
was a little lost boy.

"Through that corridor," she said, pointing
to her right. "The last office on the left."

I followed her directions to Meisel’s office, down
a hall filled with framed posters of past Playhouse productions lit
softly by a skylight. The door to Meisel’s suite was half open.
Through it I could see a tall, gangly man with a lumpy face sitting
at a desk, reading a script. He had a pair of half-frame glasses on
the tip of his nose, with a chain lavaliere attached to either
earpiece. I knocked lightly.

"I’m busy just now," the man said,
without looking up.

"I’ll only take a minute or two," I said,
edging into the room.

Meisel turned toward me, the pages of script drooping
in his hand.

"My name is Stoner," I said before he could
get started. "I’m looking for an employee of yours, Paul
Grandin."

He was primed to get angry—I could see it in his
face. But at the mention of Grandin’s name, the anger seemed to
evaporate. Reaching up, he lifted the reading glasses from his nose
and let them drop on their chain at his chest. He put the script
down, too, delicately on the crowded desktop.

"Are you with the police?" he asked.

"I’m a private investigator."

"What has he done, now?" the man said in a
dead voice—sounding like Grandin’s father, like Tim Bristol, like
Freddy Davis.

"I just need to talk to him. A friend of his
committed suicide, and I need to talk to him."

Meisel shook his head. "I can’t help you. I
let Paul go about two and a half weeks ago."

"May I ask why?"

"All sorts of reasons. He seldom showed up for
work, for one thing. He was in a production we had staged for the
schools—a little piece of propaganda about AIDS and drugs. It
wasn’t a stretch, but it was a steady paycheck for a very small
amount of work. Sometime late this spring, Paul decided that even
that was too much of a demand on his time. Once or twice a week he’d
make the performance. The rest of the time, we had to have his
understudy fill in. Paul claimed he’d been sick with the flu, but
he was never too sick to make the scenes in the bars—or to steal
whatever wasn’t nailed down around the set. Frankly, he’d caused
so much trouble over the past two or three years that I should have
fired him a long time ago."

"Why didn’t you?"

The man smiled ruefully. "Paul has a way of
making you feel responsible for his problems, even though you know
rationally that you’re not. It’s the kind of wounded helplessness
that children have, when they’re hurt or bewildered. You feel the
need to help them, even if they’ve brought the trouble on
themselves. It was Paul’s peculiar charm. And I guess I was a
sucker for it."

Mason Greenleaf had fallen for the Grandin charm,
too. Only in Greenleaf ’s case there was a mixed history of guilt
and obligation behind it that had apparently made Paul Grandin’s
appeal undeniable.

"Can you tell me why you asked me if I was a cop
when I first came in?"

"That’s not something I’m at liberty to
discuss," the man said uneasily.

"Did it have something to do with why you fired
him?"

"Not really. It had to do with Paul alone, and a
come-uppance that he had been courting for too long. For most of his
life."

"Did this happen recently, this thing with the
law?"

"I told you, I can’t discuss it. And I won’t."
The man picked up the script and placed his reading glasses back on
his nose.

"You don’t have any idea where Paul is living
now, do you?"

Meisel shook his head. "I haven’t seen him
since I let him go. And don’t expect to see him again. Unless I go
to his funeral. Which I probably would do. What Paul is isn’t all
Paul’s fault. He had some encouragement along the way."

As I walked back out of the office I wondered
whether, wittingly or not, Mason Greenleaf had been part of that
encouragement. It was almost seven when I got back to the office.
There was a message from Cindy, asking me to call. Before phoning
her, I dialed Dick Lock at CPD Criminalistics. I wanted to know
exactly what the trouble was that Steve Meisel had been hinting at.
It didn’t take long to find out.

"Yeah, I ran a LEADS on the kid," Dick
said, after I asked him whether he’d pulled Paul Grandin’s rap
sheet. "Turns out he’s a right nasty little customer. The
computer came back on line a couple hours ago and spat out a list of
priors. Two solicitations and three possession busts in six years."

"Possession of what?"

"Grass and cocaine. On the grass, he got off
with a couple of speeding tickets. The coke, he got probated. The
first solicitation was dropped. The second one is currently pending.
He’s got a prelim next month."

"How come the first charge was dropped?"

"He was eighteen when it happened, so maybe his
age was a factor. Also he comes from a political family. His dad’s
a bigwig Republican, Paul Grandin, Sr. Ran for council once, about
ten years ago."

"The first solicitation bust," I asked.
"When was that?"

"August 31, 1988. In Mount Storm Park. The kid
brushed up against the wrong guy in a public john—an undercover cop
from Vice."