Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2011 23:30:41 -0400 From: wild wing Subject: Jason's Dilemma - Chapter eight Chapter Eight "He's gone!!!" The words reverberated in my ears. The room began to spin. "Ben, Ben, are you still there?" It slowly registered that I was still on the phone and Mike was trying hard to communicate. "Yes. Yes, Mike. I'm still here. Your words stunned me." "Can you tell me anything?" he begged. "Anything at all that will help me find him?" I decided to be up-front with him for Jason's sake. "I can tell you that he was extremely unhappy at home. On several occasions he talked about running away. I can honestly say that I tried to discourage him. I never thought he would do it." "That checks out with what Jason told me. Did he ever say where he would go?" "He mentioned the city of Weston," I replied. Mike went on to say the obvious. Should I hear from him or learn anything at all I was to call Mike immediately. I agreed and put the phone down. I was in a daze. Poor Jason. Where was he and what was he up to? I knew he had my phone number memorized and I hoped that he would call. I found myself spending countless hours indoors just staring at the telephone. Waiting. Two weeks passed and I couldn't get rid of the horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. One morning a shiny car pulled into my driveway. Two well dressed men stepped out. I recognized their gait. They were policemen. "You're Benjamin Davis?" the taller one inquired. "I am," I responded. They handed me their business cards, confirming my suspicions. Their names didn't register with me. "We're here to question you regarding the disappearance of Jason King." "Yes," I said quietly. "What can you tell us?" the shorter one asked. I suggested we go into my cabin and get comfortable. I indicated I would answer any question they posed. We each took a seat and the shorter one pulled out a notebook and began to write. "What's your full name and your date of birth please?" Everything was duly recorded. I admitted I was very close to Jason. I also related exactly what I had told Mike. The officers were quite polite and not threatening in any way. My story finished, the shorter one explained, "The facts you gave us match what Mr. King told us. Unfortunately we got an entirely different picture from Mrs. King. She's convinced that you're involved in some way with the boy's disappearance." I nodded, acknowledging that I understood what he was telling me. "Understand, Mr. Davis, that in a matter this serious we must check out every allegation. Actually the facts strongly point to another teen run away. We don't suspect foul play and you're not a suspect. Nevertheless your name will remain in the file until he's found. If the circumstances change we may wish to question you again." "I understand fully," I agreed. "You're just doing your job and if it were my boy I would want you to do the same thing." "Exactly," the tall one replied. The short one continued, "The one thing we ask is that if you move or go on a trip for more than forty-eight hours, you inform us of your whereabouts." "Certainly," I offered. "Oh, one more thing," the short one continued, "we don't have a search warrant and you can refuse us but we'd like to look around." "Of course," I responded immediately. They took no more than a minute to check my bedroom. I apologized for the unmade bed. They thanked me for my cooperation and turned for the door. I suddenly thought of a favor that they might do for me. "Look," I pleaded, "I'm really worried about Jason. Could you let me know if you hear anything?" "We can't," the tall one explained. "You're not a blood relative. You'll have to ask the Kings." With that they were gone. The days ticked by. I was convinced that if Jason got in trouble or returned home he would call me immediately. I sat....and waited. The telephone remained silent. The leaves were turning their yellows and crimsons now. It was one of my favourite times for walks. I always felt that nature was putting on one final splash for me to enjoy before the grip of winter took hold. This year however it seemed that all of the brilliant colours had changed to greys and blacks. I still wandered the trails if only for Molly's sake. She moped along in harmony with her master. She knew I was sad. November arrived and the cold winds began to blow. They were harbingers of even tougher times ahead. Of course I wondered if Jason was staying warm. Towards the end of the month I received another unexpected visitor. It was Mike King. "Look, I want to apologize for the police coming here," he began. "No need, the police told me that it was at your wife's insistence that they came." "We had an incredible fight about it afterwards," he admitted. I knew Mike had to be hurting at least as much as I was. "I know I don't deserve it, the way my wife and I have treated you, but I'm here to beg of you a very large favor." I smiled and reminded him, "A long time ago I promised you that with regard to Jason I would help you any way I could. The offer still stands." Mike pulled out a tissue and wiped away some tears. "I miss him so much. I need you to find him for me!" I knew that I had said I would help, but did Mike understand what he was asking? I was no private detective. Where would I go? How would I start? Mike sensed my reaction for he continued, "The police were able to access his banking information. He cleaned out his account. The last withdrawal was in Weston." Weston, I cringed, my old home town. Two million people live there. It covers a huge area and he could be anywhere. "I know I'm asking a lot," he continued, "but I hardly know Weston. You've lived there. You must know it well. Also since you're gay you would know where to look. Please! I beg of you. I'll pay for everything. I know if you find him he'll come back with you. I'm not sure if he would return with me." "What does your wife say about it?" I queried. "My wife is out of the picture. Jason's disappearance was the last straw. She packed up and moved to her mother's place with Mike Jr. She wants a divorce and I agreed to give it to her." "Doesn't she care about Jason?" "Not at all," he explained. "After he visited you last July she called him the Devil's child. She washed her hands of him and refused to talk to him." Poor Jason, I thought, ostracized by his own mother. No wonder he had run away. Mike was still talking. "And now I've not only lost my wife and youngest son, I've lost Jason too. I'm devastated." I felt as sorry for Mike as I did for Jason. Well.....almost. "I'll pay for everything," he repeated. It didn't take me long to decide. I had to at least try. I responded, "I haven't visited my clients in person for a long time. It's about time I reacquainted myself. I can spend half days looking for Jason and the other half talking to my clients. My business affairs should take about two weeks. If it takes longer to find Jason I'll probably need some financial help." Mike agreed immediately and couldn't thank me enough. We spent the next hour or so discussing logistics. Mike would make two hundred coloured posters with our phone numbers and instructions to call collect. I insisted on a guardianship document permitting me to bring Jason back. It was also agreed that we would visit the police station together to explain our plans. I would leave in a week's time. Mike found a great photo of a smiling Jason and the posters looked terrific. The police were not so impressed. "You'll get tips all right," they warned, "but the vast majority of them will be dead ends. Some will break your heart. Most will come from well meaning but badly misguided individuals. Let us do our job and put our phone number on instead." We left the posters the way they were. Mike gave me an excellent guardianship document. He also provided a suitcase full of Jason's winter clothes. I in turn gave him a large bag of dog food and Molly to tend while I was gone. She wasn't happy with me. Around the first of December I checked into the Red Lion Motel on Ingham Street in Weston. It wasn't ritzy but it wasn't seedy either. It was what I could afford. I decided to begin my search on the first afternoon by visiting the police headquarters. The building was imposing indeed, made as it was of granite and marble. After a short wait I was ushered into a small interview room by a well built detective. He carried a large binder with him. "Understand I have half a dozen of these interviews a month with distraught parents. Hundreds of runaways gravitate to this city every year. Frankly we don't have the manpower to come close to tracking them all down." "What happens to them?" I asked grim faced. "Thankfully most go home on their own, especially when it starts to get cold." "And the rest?" "A few find sugar daddies who keep them until they lose their sex appeal. Then they get tossed out in the snow. Others stay on the street and sell their bodies. Many become drug addicted. A few of them end up in the morgue." I shuddered and gritted my teeth. "What do they die of?" "Look," he warned me, "I know this is rough. Are you sure you want to know?" "Please." "Some get AIDS, but most of them OD on drugs. Occasionally one gets beaten to death, but that's pretty rare. Look, you might find him but the odds are strongly against you. Further you might not like what you find." He finished by showing me his binder. It contained hundreds of posters of missing kids from across the country. I noted that many of the posters were years old. I also noticed that almost every picture was of a smiling face, as if they didn't have a care in the world. The detective's last act was to turn to a picture of a smiling Jason. I left the station very depressed. I called Mike from the motel. I gave him a report but I left out the gruesome details. I reasoned that Jason might be drawn to the gay village so the next day I visited Browning Avenue. The grey cloudy day matched my mood. A few snowflakes, the first of the season, wafted down. I checked the restaurants and coffee shops but avoided the bars. I handed out some posters and talked to strangers, most notably the managers and owners of various establishments. I looked at a thousand faces hoping the next one would be Jason's. A couple of times I thought I saw him down the street. Both times I raced down the sidewalk towards the sighting. I accidentally bowled one poor fellow over. Both times when I got close I realized that I was sadly mistaken. I finished by taping more posters up on the street corners. Weston had a gay community centre and I chose to visit it the next day. They were quite cordial. The director I spoke to admitted they had visits from parents with missing children all the time. "You know, the sad thing is that if these parents had accepted their gay children from the start they never would have gone missing." He took one of my posters and allowed me to tape another to their community bulletin board. I asked him where he thought I should look. He gave me the names and addresses of several youth hostels for both straight and gay kids. He finished by asking if I had checked out Walden Road. I professed ignorance. "Walden Road is where all the young prostitutes hang out. It can be a busy place, especially on Friday and Saturday nights." I thanked him for his time and strode outside. A cold drizzle was waiting. Since the village was nearby I spent the next hour or so scanning faces before turning towards Ingham Street. I had precious little to cheer Mike up with that evening. I lay on my bed mulling over my next move. I chose to visit the bus station. "Yeah," the fat ticket seller stated, "we get dozens of runaways using the buses every month. It gets so that it's hard to remember individual faces." I showed him a poster and he furrowed his brow and studied it for a minute. A grin suddenly appeared. "Yeah, I recognize him!" My spirits soared before he raised a plump finger and pointed to the far side of the room. "Look at that bulletin board over there," he instructed. Sure enough among a dozen other posters was a smiling face of Jason. I sat in a nearby coffee shop pondering my next foray. I was getting tired of hearing, "I wish you the best of luck in your search." I debated just for a minute about visiting the morgue. I realized that I could never face that grim reality and permanently shut the idea out of my mind. Instead I pulled out the list of hostels I had amassed at the gay centre. One was close by and I headed there. There was a familiarity in the reception I received. Lots of sympathy but not much more. I put up yet another poster beside several others before I headed back to the Red Lion. "I got two calls from the posters you put up," Mike reported that evening. "One guy said he was positive he saw Jason get on a bus heading for the west coast. The second was a woman who claimed she was a psychic. She said there was no point in searching because Jason was already dead and would never be found." Mike's reports did nothing for my spirits. Tomorrow was Friday and it was time to visit Walden Road. At dusk the next day I parked the car at the top of the road and watched. I saw nothing at first and wondered if I had the right street. Where are the boys? I wondered. A luxury vehicle passed me and slowly hugged the sidewalk. A block away it stopped. A figure emerged from a darkened doorway and approached the car. He stuck his head into the open car window. Whatever was said must have worked for he opened the door and hopped in. The car drove away at a good rate of speed. I watched and saw the operation repeated twice more in the next twenty minutes. A gentleman walking on the sidewalk stopped and appeared to be addressing someone in the shadows. Soon he melted with his shadow into a dark alley. It was time for me to go into action. I drove ever so slowly down the street. Just a few buildings on I noticed the soft glow of a cigarette in an alleyway. I stopped. A boy emerged and stuck his head through my car window. Well, I called him a boy. He was actually nineteen or twenty. His hair was matted and he hadn't seen a bar of soap for some time. With his crooked teeth he was downright ugly. "I'll suck you off until your eyes pop out," he boldly stated. "Just twenty bucks." "Hop in," I told him. He no sooner got in than he began groping me without being invited. "Goddamn, mister," he exclaimed, "you're fuckin big!" "I'm not looking for sex," I replied. "I want information. There's two hundred dollars in it for you." "Two big ones? I ain't seen that much money since I was thirteen," he grinned. I handed him a copy of the poster. "All you have to do is show this boy to me and the money is yours." He peered at the poster under the dome light of the car. He admitted, "I don't think I never seen 'im." I frowned and suggested he keep the poster just in case. I then handed him a ten dollar bill. "This is for your trouble. Go and get yourself a good meal." "Thanks mister, I appreciate it. But I sure would like to hang out on that long pole of yours for a while. For another ten bucks I'll get you off easy." I declined with thanks and moved on. On the next block another lad stepped out. He was a little younger and decidedly more handsome. His price was fifty dollars. He left my car ten minutes later with a copy of the poster and ten bucks tucked in his pocket. By one in the morning I was exhausted, one hundred and seventy dollars poorer, and no closer to finding Jason. I got a couple of maybes but nothing concrete. I headed for bed. I slept in Saturday morning before I made a report to Mike. He said it was tough for him to imagine Jason as a prostitute. He said he'd had another call but he didn't bother relaying the contents to me. We tried to cheer each other up with some positive banter. It didn't do much for me. Saturday evening I repeated Friday's efforts on Walden Road. I found fourteen new kids. One appeared to be about twelve but most were at least eighteen. There were a couple of repeaters from Friday night. They had nothing new to report but they still wanted their ten bucks. On Sunday I spent almost the entire day in the gay village. I must have scanned two thousand faces. On Monday and Tuesday I covered the remaining hostels. By Wednesday I was so drained and so discouraged I called Mike and told him I was coming home. He told me he had received several more calls. "They were all crank calls," he told me. "This one creepy kid called me twice. He said he had found Jason and he wanted his two hundred bucks. I knew it was a crank call though because he said the kid's name wasn't Jason. It was Dermot." "Dermot?" I repeated. "Dermot!!" I was shouting into the telephone now. "That's him! That's him! It's Jason. He's alive!"