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it was hardly worth the effort. Outside of a few
contusions on his face, which he probably got from falling down after
taking the overdose, there was nothing unusual. Death was caused by
barbiturate poisoning, Seconals and booze. It’ll be ruled a suicide
by the coroner."
    "Have you told the girl?" I asked him.
    "I thought maybe you’d want to. Of course,
I’ll be happy to answer any questions she might have."
    "I’ll call her."
    "Good," he said, sounding relieved. "By
the way, we still have some of his belongings in the property room.
Watch, ring. The girl can pick them up anytime she wants. Just tell
her to have the duty sergeant buzz me, and I’ll pass her through."
    "I don’t suppose anyone ever figured out why
he ended up in that hotel?"
    "We have him drinking at a bar called Stacie’s
down on lower Fifth Street earlier that night. He had some company,
according to the two witnesses."
    "Christ, don’t tell me," I said, feeling
the ghost of Ira Lessing pass through the room.
    "Yeah, they were fags all right. And a pretty
noisy bunch. Maybe he had a lovers’ quarrel with one of ’em.
Anyway, he left alone, sometime around eleven-thirty, and that’s
the last anyone saw him, before he started stinking up the hotel
room."
    "You didn’t get the names of his drinking
buddies, did you?"
    "I guess we could find out. But it’d mean a
helluva lot of leg-work, and with the family just wanting the whole
thing to go away and the physical being so cut-and-dry, I doubt if
the coroner’ll want to open that can of worms. Guys like Greenleaf
kill themselves all the time, Harry. They just get tired of being
fags."
    "This guy was bi," I said.
    "Same difference," McCain said. "It’s
hard to kid yourself into believing you’re half one thing and half
another."
    "Maybe."
    "Look, if it’ll make it easier to break this
thing to the girl, you can talk to the IOs who did the interviews at
Stacie’s. Segal and Taylor, at Six. They can fill you in on the
chain of  vidence."
    I jotted down the names Segal and Taylor as I hung up
the phone.
 
    6
    THE District Six station was on a Ludlow Avenue
hillside just west of the viaduct, a ranch-style building with a
hedge in front and a fenced lot to the side. Immediately below the
station house, the smoggy industrial flats of Ivorydale stretch north
along the Mill Creek. On a boiling hot afternoon like that Sunday, I
could smell the soap stink of lye all the way around to the front of
the building, where it mixed with magnolia and the taste of hot tar.
A semicircular counter inside the station house door divided the
lobby off from the squad room. I went up to the counter and asked one
of the desk sergeants if I could talk to Detectives Segal or Taylor.
    "Tell them Jack McCain gave me their names. It’s
about the Mason Greenleaf suicide."
    The sergeant pointed me to a bench, and I sat there
for a time, listening to the beat cops in the squad room taking names
and kissing ass: bad boys and honest cits all treated to the same
monotone rhetoric, like a class of slow children practicing
arithmetic.
    Eventually a husky man in a cheap blue suit came up
to get me. He had a square, tan, heavily seamed face cleft sharply at
the chin, and a mane of white hair streaked with the yellow of old
blond.
    "I just got the word from Jack McCain that I’m
supposed to give you whatever help you need," he said, smiling
so broadly, I could see the wad of chewing gum at the back of his
mouth. He held out his right hand. "Nate Segal."
    "Harry Stoner."
    As I shook with him, Segal clapped me on the arm with
his other hand, pinching the muscle beneath my sport coat like he was
chucking a kid under the chin.
    "I hear you used to be a cop, Harry."
    I shrugged off his hand. "I was with the DA’s
office for a couple of years, before I went private."
    "Yeah?" he said, chewing his gum
vigorously. "Is that good money, private?" He didn’t wait
for an answer. "Let’s go on back to the office where we can
cut through some