Lincoln Perry 02 - Sorrow's Anthem (10 page)

The interrogation room is about the size of a bedroom closet in Shaker
Heights or Pepper Pike. 'They got a table in here somehow, and it seems
to take up the entire space. If you attempt to walk around the table, you
have to flatten yourself against the wall. This spoils any hope of a
pacing-and-shouting routine like on cop shows, but that’s probably
just as well.
Sitting across from my oldest friend, the room and the table could
not feel smaller to me. I’m not in uniform and he’s not handcuffed,
thankfully, but even so the scenario feels wrong in a way I couldn’t have imagined before I found myself here, wrong in a way that makes
my stomach roil and my hands tremble so much that I jam them under
the table so he can’t see.
“Ed,” I say, “I can’t delay things anymore. If you don’t talk now,
there won’t be a plea bargain. You’ll do jail time. A few years of it. “
His eyes are locked on mine, cold and unwavering. He has several
days of beard on his face, but he still looks so young he could have just
come from having a high school yearbook photograph taken instead of
a mug shot. I don’t want to know what I look like.
“Dammit, Ed,” I say after a few minutes of silence. “There’s nobody
listening right now. No recorders, nobody behind a mirror; none
of that shit. Its just you and me. Tell me something. Anything. Anything
that I can take out of this room and use to get you protection.”
He leans back, folds his hands neatly, and rests them on the table.
His face is serene, his eyes indicting. His mouth shut.
“You’re going to go to jail,” I repeat. “They 'we got you with possession
of cocaine and intent to distribute. Got your conviction boxed and
sealed and wrapped with a ribbon. Any leeway you might have had is
going to be thrown aside to make you regret not talking. They’re going
to go after you hard because you spoiled their plans.”
No response.
“You want to see Allison through a piece of glass, Ed?”
Not a word.
“Come on, Ed,” / say, and I hope the sense of desperate pleading
isn’t as clear in my voice as it is in my heart.
His eyes still on mine, he shakes his head slowly.
“What are you worried about? You think Childers will kill you?
He’s not that powerful of a force. We’ll protect you and Allison while
we put him in jail. Once he’s in jail, the rest of his boys won’t be a
threat. They aren’t loyal to Antonio; they’re scared of him.”
I’m hoping the reference to fear will get through to him. Surely, this
is the reason he isn’t talking—he’s afraid of Antonio’s retaliation. But
for two full weeks I’ve had cop after cop and attorney after attorney
promising Ed he’ll have total protection if he talks, and he has not.
I look at my watch. 'Ten minutes late for my meeting with Pritchard
and the deputy prosecutor already. 'This is it. My last chance in the box
with Ed Gradduk. My last chance to produce what I have promised—
testimony that will put Antonio Childers behind bars. My last chance
to save Ed from prison, from Childers, from the potentially deadly impact
at the bottom of the slope that his life has become.
Ed has not spoken, nor has he removed his eyes from mine. 'They
bore into me with all the intensity of a butane torch. He wants me to
feel them. Wants me to feel what he has refused to say with words. I
have betrayed him, my oldest friend. He wants to surround me with
that knowledge, drown me with it.
“I’m trying to help you here,” I say. “Damn you for not accepting
that. You’ve gotten in over your head, brother, and you have got to get
out. I’m offering you a hand here. But you’ve got to reach out and
take it.”
Silence that settles over me like a lead cloak.
“I just want to help you get your life back to where it needs to be,
Ed. Try to understand that, could you?”
He speaks then for the first and only time.
“You, Lincoln, should have tried to understand. Before you brought
the rest of these cops and prosecutors and judges into it. Before you took
away any room I might have had to maneuver: To breathe. That’s
when you should have tried to understand. “
A knock on the door: Neither of us speaks. The knock is repeated.
“Willyou talk?”
He shakes his head.
A third knock, this time louder; more insistent. I hear keys jingling.
They’re about to come in, to take him away, and after this it is done. He will be on his way to jail. I will have sent him there.
A key slides into the lock.

“I’m sorry,” I say.
The handle turns. The door opens.
“I know,” Ed Gradduk tells me, and then he is gone, back in handcuffs
and out through a steel door that clangs shut behind him and
leaves me alone in a little interrogation room with my head in my
hands.

CHAPTER
10

Live in an apartment along a busy city street long enough and you
learn to tune out traffic noise. In the time I’d been in my current
building, the roaring motors, squealing brakes, and harsh horns of
the busy avenue below had gradually become just background
noise.
When I woke the next morning, however, the sounds penetrated
into my brain in a way they would usually not. I was lying half
awake in bed when a car out on the avenue slammed on its brakes.
There was a brief shriek of tires skidding on pavement, but no
subsequent crash as I’ve heard on other mornings. The tires were
enough, though. I opened my eyes wide, fully awake, then closed
them again as I recalled Ed in the street, the Crown Victoria blasting
into him.
The image sickened me. I lay with my palms pressed over my
closed eyes, as if the added pressure could drive the memory from
my mind. I thought of the way his body had snapped, his shoulders
and legs moving in toward the car even as his waist headed in
the opposite direction. That was the last position I’d seen him in,
for all of a fraction of a second, before his body was sucked beneath
the still-moving car and disappeared.
And the sounds. I would never forget the sounds. A muffled whomp of impact after the scream of tires and squeal of brakes. A
wet popping as the tires passed over his body, like a champagne
bottle opened underwater. And then the same sound, but duller,
the champagne gone flat this time, as they’d passed over him again.
I pushed out of bed and went to the window. It was just past
seven, traffic building to its rush-hour peak. I watched the cars
move and I thought of Ed Gradduk and the blood that had been
hosed off the pavement on Clark Avenue, how quickly it had
dried. A thousand cars must have passed over the spot already.
More than that. I wondered if any had slowed.
The light up the street changed and the cars beneath me moved
again, the procession passing through the intersection by our office
a few blocks west. They moved quickly during the green-light cycle,
then backed up again when it went red, came to a stop under
my window, impatient drivers craning their necks and looking
ahead to count the cars, try to figure out if they’d make it through
the light in the next cycle, if they’d get to the office before the
bagels were gone and the first pot of coffee cold.
I left the bedroom, left the apartment, walked down the steps,
and out into the parking lot. The gravel was cold and sharp against
my bare feet. I wore nothing but a pair of gym shorts, but I walked
around the building to the front sidewalk, stood there, and stared
at the street as curious motorists gazed back at me.
You can see something happen right before your eyes, something
profound and important and consuming, and yet you can
somehow miss really seeing it. I knew this from years of taking eyewitness
testimony. The eyes bring information in and the brain
processes it. Simple enough. Except that when the eyes tell the
brain that they have just seen something go wrong, badly wrong,
the brain doesn’t want to process it that way. If at all possible, it rationalizes,
offers a sense of perspective or understanding that the
eyes don’t have. The brain, you see, exists to explain. You can’t discourage
it from doing that.
But then there’s memory, that obnoxious little bastard of the
subconscious. Memory holds the scene, holds what the eyes have
shown. And, down beneath the conscious layer, memory holds it
accurately. Holds the picture without the perspective. When I was
a cop, that’s what we tried to get to. It takes a trigger, generally,
something that affects the senses in such a way that it provokes the
subconscious into action. Something like the squeal of tires I’d
heard this morning.

Joe was at the office when I arrived, a cup of coffee from the corner
doughnut shop in his hand. His computer was humming
through its preliminary motions, and he looked at me with surprise
as I stepped inside. Joe usually beats me to the office by at
least half an hour.
“You run the Jeep plate number yet?” I said.
He sipped his coffee and shook his head. “Just got here.”
“It’s going to belong to Jack Padgett or Larry Rabold.”
“Because they’re working on Gradduk’s case, so interest in Corbett
wouldn’t be unreasonable?”
“No,” I said. “Because they killed Ed Gradduk.”
“Right. But that was an accident. . .” He stopped when I began
to shake my head.
“I’m not so sure it was.”
He watched me with narrowed eyes and took a few swallows of
his coffee. “That’s a hell of an allegation, LP. And I don’t understand
where it’s coming from. Gradduk ran in front of their car.
You saw it happen.”
“I know. They backed up over him, Joe. After they’d already hit
him. And at the time I assumed they were just trying to clear away
from the body.”
“Probably they were.”
I shook my head again. “They’d rolled the front tires right over
him. I heard the sound it made; they had to feel the rise of the
tires. They knew they’d run him over, but they backed up anyhow
and went over him again. I think it was to make sure he was dead.”
Joe took a long, slow breath. “Come on, LP. Think about how
fast that happened. Imagine if you’d been the driver. Hell, he was
probably more horrified by what he’d done than you were standing
there watching it. His first impulse was going to be to move away
from Gradduk. To try to take it back, in effect.”
“They didn’t slow until after he fell. He went down and they
kept going for a second or two, then hit the brakes. By then they
were way too close to stop without hitting him.”
“They were going fast because they saw he was running across
the street.”
“They were going fast because they didn’t want him to make it
across the street.”
He shook his head. “If you’d come to me with this theory the
night it happened, maybe I would have bought it. But not now.
You’ve had too much time to consider it, restructure what you saw
until it gave you something to work with.”
“Wrong. When I saw it happen, I assumed it was an accident
because that’s the way my brain was trained to think. You don’t expect
cops to intentionally run a man down, so you assume that they
didn’t. But they did.”
“No, Lincoln. They didn’t.”
“Answer me this, then: Why did Padgett and Rabold go to Ed’s
house to make the arrest in the first place?”
“Richards said they got the tip from the liquor store owner.”
I nodded. “Exactly. They got a tip even though it wasn’t their
case. And rather than follow police protocol, which they both
know from years on the force, and pass the tip along to the detective
on the case, they went down alone. And Ed fought them and
ran. Why? If he was innocent, why’d he run?”
“Maybe he wasn’t—,” Joe began, but my look shut him down
and he looked away and nodded. “Right. We’re assuming he was.”
“He told me he was,” I said. “And I believed him. Still do.”
“It’s a hell of a thing to suggest. You’re talking about two cops,
LP. You know what you’re going to get started with this?”
“I’ve got an idea.”
“I don’t know a thing about Padgett, but I’ve been around Larry
Rabold more than a few times. Seems like a nice guy. Solid cop, too.”
“Run the plate number,” I said. “See if I’m wrong.”
After a long pause, he turned away from me and logged on to
his computer. Private investigators in Ohio have access to the motor
vehicle bureau’s database, and it isn’t hard to run a license number.
He was busy for a few minutes and then looked up.
“The Jeep is registered to Jack Padgett.”
We sat and looked at each other.
He groaned and rubbed his face with his hands. “Shit, Lincoln.”
All I could do was agree.

The first thing I wanted to see was a copy of the officer’s incident
report from the botched arrest of Ed Gradduk. Such reports aren’t
public record, not the details at least, but that’s the advantage of
having worked with the police department. We could always find
some old friend who was willing to help out with the minor stuff.
Well, Joe could, at least. I had my contacts at the department, sure,
but Joe was a legend. He had friends with the police he hadn’t even
met yet.
He made a few calls and got a promise that the report was on its
way. When he’d hung up, he lifted a newspaper off the desk and
held it in the air. “You read Amy’s article yet?”
“No.”
I’d almost forgotten about Amy’s discovery, thanks to my preoccupation
with Padgett and Rabold. Now I took the paper reluctantly.
A glance at the front-page, above-the-fold headline was
almost enough to make me put it down:
MURDER
SUSPECT
WAS
UNWANTED
PRESENCE
IN VICTIM’S
LIFE
.
I read the article, then folded it so the front page was hidden
and stuffed it in the garbage can.
I couldn’t call it editorializing, because it wasn’t. All Amy had
done was take her quotes and lay them out there: Gradduk allegedly
had an unpleasant exchange with Sentalar at a bar; Gradduk
apparently made numerous calls to her office and residence;
Sentalar’s law partner, a guy named David Russo, said the dead
woman had viewed Gradduk as a nuisance and seemed at times to
be afraid of him. Amy had written what she’d been told, and I supposed
the television news stations were cursing her for beating
them on the story. That didn’t make it any easier for me to read.
“What do you think?” Joe said.
“I think it’s bullshit.”
“Has to be some fact to it, LP. Has to be.”
“Sure, there might be some fact to it, but without explanation or
context the readers are going to take one look and make a snap
judgment that Ed was some sort of stalker.”
Joe smiled wanly. “And that’s Amy’s fault?”
“I didn’t say it was her fault.”
“But you’re thinking it.”
I stood up and walked over to the fax machine, checked the display
to make sure it was on. No sign of the incident report yet.
“You know she couldn’t have enjoyed writing it about your old
friend,” he said. “But it’s her job.”
“She talk to you?”
“No. I’m just seeing your reaction and warning you to take a step
back. You’re from a police and PI background, LP. You build an investigation
one day at a time, then produce your result. Amy
doesn’t have that luxury. When she has a productive day of investigation,
she has to slam it into the next day’s paper, or she’s considered
a professional failure.”
“But it makes him look—,” I began, and Joe interrupted with a
snort.
“It makes him look bad? Makes him look like something he
wasn’t? Spreads misconceptions, encourages unfounded gossip? No
shit, Lincoln. Welcome to the world of the media. You’d think
you’d never encountered it before.”
“I’ve encountered it.”
“Exactly. So think about that and then ask yourself if you’d be
this mad if it hadn’t been Amy breaking the story.”
The fax machine ground to life then, sucking a blank page from
the feed tray and pumping it through. I grabbed it as it came out
and saw a Cleveland Police Department cover sheet. This would be
the incident report.
It was seven pages long, and I ran it through the copier before I
read it, so Joe and I could take a look simultaneously. The incident
report had been written by Sergeant Jack Padgett the morning after
Ed’s death. It began with the tip.
On the afternoon of August 12, at approximately 3:45 P.M., I received
a phone call on my cellphone. The number is one I frequently distribute
to witnesses, informants, and others who could be of assistance to
police business. The caller identified himself as Jerome Huggins of the
Liquor Locker on Train Avenue. Mr. Huggins asked me if I was familiar
with afire on Train Avenue. He said the fire had occurred the previous
day. I told him that I knew about it. He then told me he believed his
security camera had captured information that would be of value to the
police. Mr. Huggins chose to call me because I had previously worked
with him on a robbery that had occurred in his business a few years earlier.
I told Mr. Huggins that I would stop by to look at his film.
Upon arriving at the Liquor Locker, I was shown to a small television
monitor by Mr. Huggins. He then played the portion of tape that
he found relevant. Some of this tape showed the fire, other segments
showed a white male entering and leaving the vacant house shortly before
the fire began. In one segment the mans vehicle was visible. I asked
Mr. Huggins if he thought the man in the tape was familiar, and he
said he did. He identified the male as someone from the neighborhood.
He suggested the mans first name was Ed, but he could not recall the last
name. I obtained the license plate number from a careful study of the
tape. I then called in to dispatch and asked them to run the plate match.
They informed me that the plate was registered to an Edward Gradduk.
I then asked Mr. Huggins if he believed this individual could be the
man he identified on the tape, and he told me that he believed that to be
true. At this point myself and Officer Rabold took the surveillance tape
to be entered as police evidence and went to locate the suspect, Edward
Gradduk. At this point myself and Officer Rabold believed we had
probable cause to suggest that Mr. Gradduk had trespassed on private
property shortly before a criminal act of arson was committed at that
property.
“ A criminal act of arson,’ he says.” I looked at Joe, who just
grunted and continued reading. I dropped my eyes back to the
paper.
Dispatch informed me that Edward Gradduk’s home address was on
Clark Avenue. Together with Officer Rabold, I proceeded to this address
in order to determine if the suspect was home. His vehicle, a Ford sedan,
was found to be in the driveway of the residence. Officer Rabold requested
that he remain outside to watch the house in case Gradduk tried to leave
from the back, and I approved. I myself entered the house with permission
of an older white female who identified herself as the mother of Edward
Gradduk. We stood in the kitchen and waited for Edward Gradduk to
come down the steps. He came down at his mothers request and seemed
immediately to resent me being in the house. I told him that I wanted to
speak with him about afire on Train Avenue and asked if he would be
willing to come to the police station for questioning. At this point the
mother grew hostile, shouting at me and insisting that I leave. Edward
Gradduk told me he wanted to call an attorney. I said he could call an attorney
to meet him at the police station but that I would be taking him
into custody as a suspect in an arson and homicide investigation. It was at
this point that Edward Gradduk struck me in the face with his right fist
and exited the residence through the front door. Officer Rabold had been
watching the rear of the property and did not see Edward Gradduk leave.
The report went on to describe the arrival of backup, the
delegation of duties in the search for Gradduk, and the medical condition
of Padgett, whose nose turned out not to be broken, just
bloodied. There was a mention of their encounter with me, followed
by a concise description of the “accidental” death of Ed
Gradduk, which was described as “unavoidable contact during pursuit
of a fleeing homicide suspect.”
I’d finished the report before Joe, so I flipped through the pages
again until he’d read the last page and set it aside.
“The detail is a little sparse for an incident report that resulted
in a suspect’s death,” he said. “But other than that, it doesn’t seem
especially unusual.”
“Other than the tip.”
“I don’t see anything particularly odd about the tip. If Padgett
knew this guy Huggins from a previous robbery case and from
working in the neighborhood, it’s not surprising that he’d get the
call. If there’s one breed of businessman who appreciates his local
street cops, it’s the liquor store owners.”
“I still don’t like it.”
Joe shrugged. “I’m not telling you to like it. Just saying it isn’t
enough to base such a serious charge on, and wondering what
you’ve got planned from here.”
“I want to talk to Huggins, and I want to talk to Alberta Gradduk.”
Joe
nodded, looking not too subtly at our stack of active case
files.
“If you’re worried about the paying clients, I’ll work it alone.
Dock me for a couple vacation days.”
He rolled his eyes and stood up. “There’s nothing on our plate
that can’t hold a day. And no limit to the trouble you’ll get into if I
leave you to go at this alone.”