The Bottle Ghosts Page 4

  “Good idea.”

  *

  With Bradshaw out of town, I was sort of running on empty as far as possible leads were concerned. I did make a note to check out the baths to see if anyone might know Shea there, but it was a long shot: baths are almost as anonymous as A.A. meetings. There were only two baths left in town—most had closed when even the most dense members of the community finally realized that AIDS was definitely transmitted by sex—and especially the rampant unsafe sex usually associated with baths. One, Rage, had changed ownership a couple of times since I’d had occasion to go there as part of a case I was working on. It had added a large workout room and now referred to itself as a “health spa for men,” but a rose by any other name…. The other, the Six-Ten, was to baths what the Troc was to bars—it was so sleazy it didn’t even bother with a name: just an address. How it managed to hold on was beyond me, but I guess there were enough guys out there who got a thrill out of playing Russian Roulette with sex to keep it open.

  I considered calling Bradshaw to ask about the credit cards, but without his being home to possibly be able to look up any information from old bills, it wouldn’t be practical. I also toyed with the idea of having lunch at the Imperator and perhaps talking with a couple of the waiters but decided against it, for now at least. The Imperator, in addition to being very expensive, was strictly a suit-and-tie place, and I didn’t feel like going home and getting what my grandfather used to call “all spiffed up.” It was still an option for the near future if I ran completely out of other leads, but…

  At 10:03, the phone rang.

  I let it ring the customary two times before answering.

  “Hardesty Investigations.”

  “Mr. Hardesty?” I didn’t recognize the voice. “This is Officer Marty Gresham. Lieutenant Richman says you’d like to talk to me about some missing persons cases?”

  Richman doesn’t waste any time, I thought.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I would. I’d like to get a little better feel for how the department handles missing persons reports, and maybe pick up a few pointers, if it’s not violating some ordinance for me to know.”

  Gresham laughed. “No, I don’t think it is. But I don’t do any actual investigating myself. I’m mainly assigned right now to records and filing. But I’d be glad to tell you what I can.” There was a slight pause, then: “I understand you’re gay.”

  “Yes, I am. Is that some sort of problem?” I suddenly realized how Bradshaw must have felt when I asked about Shea’s being alcoholic. I was also a little surprised, in a way, to think that Richman would even have mentioned it.

  “Oh, no! No. Not at all. It’s just that I don’t think I’ve ever met a gay guy before.”

  Riiiiiight! I thought. I started to say “Gee, that’s a coincidence: I don’t think I’ve ever met a straight one,” but decided against it.

  Apparently he realized how naive he sounded, because he quickly added: “What I mean is that maybe I can learn something from you, too, that would help when I’m analyzing case reports where the missing person is gay.”

  “Great. So when can we get together?” I figured that if he might want to take things the wrong way, I’d be happy to play along.

  “Well, my fiancée packs my lunch and I usually eat it here, but if you’d like to meet me in Warman Park a little after noon, we could talk for a while.”

  “That’s fine.” The subtlety of the fiancée reference didn’t escape me. “How about by the fountain?”

  “Okay. You shouldn’t have much trouble spotting me—I’ll probably be the only uniformed cop there—at least the only one carrying a brown paper bag.”

  And I’ll be the one with the two heads wearing the feather boa, my sarcastic side thought.

  Now, now, be fair…my rational side responded.

  “I’ll find you,” I said. “See you there, then. And thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. See ya.”

  *

  Rather than hassle with taking the car and paying to park in the underground garage below Warman Park—I knew on-street parking would be next to impossible—I decided to be adventurous and take the #12 bus which ran a block down from my office and went directly past Warman Park. A ten minute ride at most.

  I debated on stopping at the diner downstairs for carry-out to take with me, but then opted just to go to one of the hotdog vending carts in the park when I got there.

  With my usually impeccable to-the-second timing, I was once again ten minutes early getting to the park. Well, it was a nice day, and there was plenty of eye candy around to keep me busy while I waited. I did stop at one of the carts and got a polish sausage with the works, a bag of chips, and a can of soda. I even had the vendor put it in a brown paper bag for me, so I’d fit right in with Gresham.

  I was sitting on one of the marble benches surrounding the central fountain, facing away from it and watching two hot-looking early-twenties playing Frisbee. When I glanced around, I saw a uniformed police officer, brown paper bag in hand, standing two benches away from me, obviously trying to figure out which one of the people around the fountain might be me.

  I got up from my bench and walked over to him.

  “Officer Gresham.” I extended my hand. “Dick Hardesty.”

  He took it in a strong grasp and shook it vigorously, like a politician at a fundraiser. “Mr. Hard—uh, Dick…it’s nice to meet you. Call me Marty, please.”

  We headed back to the bench I’d been sitting on, which was now empty, and sat down. While he was opening his paper bag, I had a chance to get a closer look at him. No hat, brown hair, crewcut. A nice, open face. All-American Boy type. He looked about Jonathan’s age, but I assumed he had to be around twenty-five or so. He saw me looking at him, and gave me a quick grin.

  “I want to apologize about that stupid gay remark I made on the phone. Of course I’ve met gay guys before…I just didn’t know they were gay.”

  It didn’t matter, of course, but my curiosity got the better of me. “So how did you know I’m gay—did Lieutenant Richman mention it?”

  He unwrapped a sandwich, neatly cut in half, diagonally, and shook his head. “No, he didn’t say anything—your name’s pretty well known around headquarters.”

  Oh, that’s a happy thought! Just what I’ve always wanted!

  “Everybody knows you helped get rid of Chief Rourke,” he said, referring to one of my more notorious cases some while back, “and we all know about Officer Brady.”

  I wasn’t prepared for the fact that the mention of Tom’s name hurt like hell. A long story I thought I’d consigned to my past. I was wrong.

  We ate in silence—I was very unhappy to find the bun around my polish sausage was pretty soggy by this time from the sauerkraut. I hate soggy buns. I made a mental note to put in my “don’t do that again” file.

  “So,” I said, trying discreetly to eat the polish sausage without having to eat the bun, “tell me about this project you’re working on.”

  “Mmm,” he said, taking the last bite of the second half of his sandwich. I wondered idly if his fiancée had put a little love note in the bag. I wouldn’t have been surprised. “Yeah, it’s really interesting,” he continued after wadding up the wrapper and dropping it into the bag, extracting a huge, shiny red apple that reminded me somehow of the one the Queen had given Snow White. “I’m working on my Masters in criminology, and I decided that, since I was assigned to Missing Persons Records, I could do my thesis on it. I talked to my sergeant, then to my lieutenant, and they okayed my trying to see if I could come up with patterns and perhaps some ideas on how to change or add to the information we gather. So I started going through the reports for the past five years, dividing the cases into categories, picking stuff out of the notes the investigating officers made on the reports, that sort of thing.”

  He rubbed the apple vigorously on his shirtfront, though it was already so highly polished it reflected the sunlight, and took a huge bite, then made a quick swipe of his
jaw with the back of his wrist to catch a trickle of juice.

  “The report form itself is pretty elementary,” he said between chews, “but we mainly try to find out the basics: who’s missing, who it is making the report and why, how long has the person been gone, has he disappeared before? Is he depressed or suicidal? Did he mention to anyone that he might be going away somewhere? Is he in trouble with the police, the courts, or anyone else? If we feel there is a reason to do so, we’ll list the missing with the N.C.I.C.—the National Crime Information Center—which has pretty strict guidelines for entering missing persons. The N.C.I.C.’s main function is to list criminals being sought, and it would be totally swamped if every single missing persons report was filed with them. When the police stop someone for a driving violation or any other infraction, they routinely enter the driver’s name into the N.C.I.C.. A lot of missing persons show up that way.

  “Anyway, I think the report forms we use could be a lot more comprehensive and easier to review. I’m working on that, too. So, I started dividing the cases into basic categories—gender, age, marital status, that sort of thing. Kind of a process of elimination. I found when I got through that I had a bunch of miscellaneous cases left over that didn’t fit the more basic categories I’d set up, so I went through them looking to see if there might be subcategories. I came up with five cases of single men, age twenty-six to forty-five, pretty obviously gay from the other information. That’s not a lot of cases, really, over five years—averages out at only one a year. But then I realized that the earliest case was almost exactly five years ago, the second oldest was just under four and a half years ago, and the last four, counting Shea, were within the past six months. It’s probably all coincidence, but…”

  Yeah, ‘but’…I thought.

  “Do you know if any of the guys missing were listed with the N.C.I.C.?”

  He shook his head slowly. “I’m pretty sure not. None of them had any flags that would indicate they needed to be.”

  That figured, I suppose. “Do you remember the other guys’ names, by any chance?” I asked, finishing off my soda and putting the can in my paper bag. I wondered if any of them might ring a bell of some sort. Unlikely, but possible.

  “Sure.” He took the final bite from his apple. “The first one, nearly five years ago, was…uh…Bernard Benson; the second, about a year after that was, I think, Marvin Spritzer. Then in the more recent batch, the first was…uh…Fred DeCarlo,…” He paused to think, and to drop the apple core into his own bag, “…Sam Roedel, and…uh…Benicio…Martinez. Then Shea.”

  I made a mental note of each of the names, none of which, other than Shea’s, was familiar to me. Hardly surprising given the size of the local gay population.

  Gresham had started to crumple up his paper bag but suddenly stopped, hastily reopened it, and extracted a folded piece of paper from the bottom. He gave me a sheepish look and unbuttoned his shirt pocket to put the paper in. “Fiancée,” he said with a small, quick grin.

  You’re good, Hardesty, I told myself. I’ll bet it’s got a couple hearts and a smiley face on it somewhere, too.

  “What I was wondering,” he said as he rebuttoned his shirt pocket and smoothed it flat with one hand, “is that if I could get my lieutenant to approve it, would you be willing to take a look at these six reports and see if you can spot something I might have missed, or if there was something we should be asking and aren’t? Anything would help.”

  “Sure. But tell me, on these six cases, are there any other common elements other than being gay, in the same rough age bracket, and alcoholic?”

  He shook his head. “Not really. Nothing else much in common; most went to A.A., and a couple were apparently in therapy, but those are dead ends—there are God knows how many A.A. groups around town, and since A.A.’s built on anonymity, it would be next to impossible to find anybody who would admit to knowing them even if they did. Let alone having anyone from the police snooping around an A.A. meeting. And psychiatrists and therapists are bound by patient-doctor confidentiality. So….”

  “You said a couple were seeing a therapist. The same one, by any chance?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t remember if the names are in the records or not. I’m afraid our missing persons forms aren’t exactly what you’d call ‘definitive.’ I’ll check, though, and let you know.”

  He looked at his watch. “Wow, I’d better be heading back. Jeez, and we hardly scratched the surface.”

  “That’s okay.” We both got up and headed toward a waste receptacle directly across the walkway from us. “Maybe we can get together again sometime. And let me know what your lieutenant has to say about my looking at those reports.”

  “I will…and thanks.”

  We shook hands and turned to go our separate ways. I glanced back and saw him unbuttoning the pocket of his uniform shirt. Nice to know gays aren’t the only romantics left in the world.

  *

  Thinking about it on the bus back to the office, I wondered exactly what I’d expected/hoped to find out from meeting with Gresham. Just grabbing at straws, mostly, I realized, but perhaps I could learn something more if I got a chance to actually see some of the reports and the kind of information they contained.

  When I got back to the office I made a list of questions to ask Bradshaw when I talked to him: if Shea had any credit cards—even if Bradshaw probably wouldn’t have the numbers with him—if Bradshaw knew or had tried to contact any of Shea’s family back in Boston to see if they might have heard from him, if Shea had any out-of-town friends or special places he liked to go. I wanted to know more about that counseling group he and Shea belonged to at Qualicare; maybe get the names of the members and try to contact them. I had no idea how the group worked—if it worked like A.A., maybe anonymity was stressed. Well, I’d find out.

  I got out Bradshaw’s itinerary and called his hotel, leaving him a message to call me. I specified that it was in regards to some questions I had so that he wouldn’t get his hopes up by thinking I’d found Shea.

  Finally, I called the Imperator’s personnel office, introduced myself and explained that I was checking on one of their former employees who had disappeared, asking if I might be able to contact some of the people he worked with to see if they might know something. The lady to whom I spoke was very polite, but told me to put my request in writing and she would forward it to the Supervisor of Food Services. Just about what I expected, but I said I would and thanked her for her time.

  By the time I’d typed up the letter and did some other minor puttering around the office, it was about time to go home. I was rather hoping to hear from Bradshaw before I left, but knew he was probably busy and that he had my home number.

  *

  I walked in the door of the apartment. No sign of Jonathan—until I heard the shower running. I walked to the bathroom and, not wanting to scare him, called: “I’m home.” He shut the water off and slid the shower door open to look out, his hair invisible beneath a mountain of shampoo, small rivulets of which ran down his face.

  “Hi!” he said with his usual grin. “Why don’t you come join me? The soap’s getting really heavy, and I might drop it any second.”

  I returned his grin. “Well, hold on to it real tight until I can get undressed,” I said, unbuttoning my shirt.

  We were still at that stage of our relationship where spontaneous sex was a regular, frequent and really fun occurrence, and it hadn’t shown signs of slowing down yet. And since both of us had vivid imaginations and healthy libidos, I was pretty sure boredom wouldn’t be setting in any time soon. Jonathan’s playful nature ran to liking to “pretend,” and he would come up with some pretty elaborate and creative scenarios (The Cowboy and the Indian—with some interesting twists, The Hitchhiker and the Trucker, The Prison Guard and the Convict—you get the idea). The bathroom scenario wasn’t one of them, exactly, but it sure was fun.

  We were both busy cleaning up the mess (what started in the shower carried over
to the sink, the toilet, the clothes hamper, and the floor) when the phone rang. I padded out into the hall for the phone, confident I was dry enough not to be leaving little puddles of water with every step.

  “Dick Hardesty,” I wondered for the ten thousandth time why I couldn’t just say “Hello?” like everybody else on the planet.

  “Mr. Hardesty, this is John Bradshaw. I got your message. Have you…?”

  “No,” I interrupted, not wanting to hear the sound of false hope in his voice, “I’m afraid not yet. Everything I’ve checked out thus far hasn’t been of much help. But I did have a couple questions that might give me some new directions to explore.”

  His obvious disappointment in my not having found anything concrete yet was reflected in his voice. “Sure.”

  “Does Jerry have any credit cards?”

  He gave a short, weak laugh, but there was no humor in it. “No. You can buy things with credit cards. Like booze. He had three when we first got together, and they were all maxed out. We’re still paying one of them off.”

  That was more or less what I’d figured, but I had to ask.

  “How about his relatives? I assume you’ve contacted them?”

  “Yes. It was a little awkward, because Jerry’s not officially out to them, but I think they know his story. But no, no one has heard from him since his last phone call to his parents the week before he disappeared. They said he sounded just fine then. They’re all well aware of his alcoholism, of course, so they didn’t seem to be overly concerned by his dropping out of sight for a while. I asked them to please call if they heard from him, and I think they would.”

  Well, so much for that, I thought. Two more dead ends.

  “Any out-of-town friends he might go see? Any special places he liked to go to get away?”

  “Not really. And he wouldn’t have had the money to go anywhere in any case. I handle all the finances, and especially now that he’s not working, I keep pretty good track of how much he has. It was his idea, I should add.”