Lincoln Perry 02 - Sorrow's Anthem (17 page)

“And let the readers determine he was a perverted loser who
killed the woman because she’d rejected him,” I finished, but there
was no hostility or bitterness in my voice.
“I’m sorry if that’s how you feel,” Amy said softly.
“It’s okay, Ace. I didn’t like it. I still don’t. But you did your job,
and you’d do the same thing again, and I guess it’s easier for me to
take because I know that’s the case.”
“I think your day mellowed you out, Lincoln.”
“That’s one word for it.” Hollowed was another one, but I didn’t
want to say that out loud.
We sat together and watched a few courageous stars try to make
themselves visible in a sky clouded with a city’s light pollution.
Traffic hummed along the avenue beneath us. I finished the beer
and wanted another, but didn’t get up.
“So Anita Sentalar knew Mitch Corbett,” Amy said. “And he’s
been missing for a few days. A couple cops were looking for him,
too. The same cops that killed Ed Gradduk and filled an incident
report about it with lies. And now one of those cops is dead. Is
that the gist?”
“Basically.”
She leaned back in the lounge chair and made a light clicking
noise with her tongue. “What a mess.”
“That’s what Cal Richards said.”
“Well, he was right. What’s your plan now? I assume you haven’t
decided to take up permanent residence on this roof.”
“Some nights, it doesn’t seem like that poor an idea. But I’ll
probably come down eventually. And when I do, I’ll have to get
back to work. Because we haven’t done anything yet. Generated a
hell of a lot of questions today, and got damn few answers to go
with them.”
“Where do you start?”

I raised my eyebrows and stared at the sky, wondering that myself.
r
“I suppose we’ll have to start with the fires,” I said. “I don’t know
what connects fires that happened almost twenty years ago and
fires that happened last week, but it seems something does. The
only link we had is dead now, though.”
“Well, if you need any help, just ask.”
I started to thank her, then realized she could actually help. I reminded
her about the house that had burned on Clark Avenue and
explained again that it had belonged to the same group that owned
the home on Train Avenue.
“I want to know more about the Neighborhood Alliance,” I said.
“Run them through the paper’s archives and fax me any article that
mentions them, would you?”
“Sure. And I’ll see if we ran a story about this fire on Clark.”
“Thanks, Amy.”
Her face was lost in shadows, but even so her eyes looked intense.
“That’s pretty damn interesting, Lincoln. Two fires to these
houses in one week, both of the homes vacant?”
“There’s more,” I said, remembering now details I’d left out the
first time. “Mitch Corbett has a background in demolitions. He’s
experienced with fuses and explosives, would have a good idea of
how to go about setting a fire.”
“You think he killed Anita Sentalar?”
“Could be. But why the other fire?”
“Arson for profit?”
I shook my head. “These houses are old, broken-down homes in
a low-rent neighborhood, Ace. Insurance claims on them wouldn’t
be worth a damn.”
“So why the second fire?”
I shook my head. “Like I said before, I’m coming up with questions,
not answers. That has to change.”
She didn’t stay long after that. When she left, she gave me a hug,
and somehow the softness of her hair and the smell of her seemed
to cleanse some things from me, like the coppery odor of Larry
Rabold’s blood and the chilling sound of his daughter’s scream.
There was no more discussion of her article, and I knew there
wouldn’t be again. It was done now, and I was glad. True friends
are precious, and lost friends are the kind of ghosts that never
wander far away. I knew too much about both ends of that.

CHAPTER
17

Andrew Maribelli was a tall, thin man with a shock of gray hair
that was combed over to hang long on the right side and was
trimmed short on the left. It gave him an off-balance look, as if his
head were always tilted. His chest was broad but his shoulders were
small, pointed knobs of bone. The starched blue shirt he wore
looked like it had been pulled over a door, all broad and flat with
those pointy shoulders at either end.
When he stepped into his narrow office in the Cleveland Fire
Department headquarters on Superior Avenue at eight that morning to find me sitting behind his desk and Joe studying a framed
photograph on the wall, he handled it well enough.
“Gentlemen,” he said, closing the door gently behind him,
showing no real confusion, “while I always do encourage my guests
to get comfortable, I prefer to know when they’re arriving. You
know, so I can tidy up the place.”
I stood up and came around the desk, and Joe turned to face
him. When I’d called Joe at seven that morning to suggest we take
a run at Maribelli, he’d been in favor. Putting our interest where
Rabold’s had been right before he was killed could be a productive
venture. And probably a risky one.
“I’m Lincoln Perry. I spoke with you on the phone yesterday.”
He frowned. “Uh-huh. And I told you—”
“I know what you told me,” I said, “and it doesn’t matter anymore,
Mr. Maribelli. Because the cop whose interest you were protecting
is dead. He was murdered.”
He winced. “Shit. I’d heard that a cop . . . but I didn’t know, I
mean, I didn’t hear the name, right? Didn’t know it was that guy.”
“It was him,” I said. “He was shot in his basement. We found the
body.”
Maribelli sighed heavily and moved past me, squeezed around
the desk, and dropped into his chair.
“We were cops, too,” Joe said, and Maribelli looked up as if
noticing him for the first time. “I was one for thirty years. So was
my father. So was his father. So this matters to us. A cop gets
killed, we don’t like it. And we want to know why it happened.”
Maribelli’s reservations about talking to us the previous day had
been strong enough, but there’s a sense of brotherhood between
people like cops and firefighters, and we were counting on it helping
us here. He studied us for a moment, silent, but then he nodded
and leaned back in his chair.
“You said you found the body?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“I’m sorry.
I nodded.
“If my old case is so damn important, though,” Maribelli said,
“why do I have Pis down here instead of a homicide detective?”
“Things go the way we expect,” Joe said, “and you will have a
homicide detective down here. Anything we produce, they’ll get.
But slowing down our work isn’t helping them. Not a bit.”
“Well, what do you need?” Maribelli leaned back in his chair and
clasped his hands behind his head. “Those fires the officer wanted
to know about, they happened seventeen years ago. Three fires on
the near west side, all in a short time during the summer, all to
property owned by a man named Terry Solich. But I assume you’ve
already got that much.”
“We read the old newspaper articles,” I said. “According to
them, you investigated the fires, determined them to be arson.”
He nodded.

“What can you tell us about the investigation?”
“Speculation was that Solich was being burned out of business.
He ran a couple pawnshops around that neighborhood, was generally
regarded as a pretty shady operator. Police theory was that he either
pissed off the wrong guys, or somebody was trying to muscle in
on his action. They thought Solich knew who was responsible, but
he wasn’t saying. That was frustrating to the police and me because
by the time the third business went up in flames, it was becoming a
pretty big pain in the ass. Scaring people in the neighborhood, getting
a lot of media attention. We wanted to put it to bed, and Solich
wasn’t helping us at all, even though he probably could have.”
“And you never did put it to bed?” Joe asked.
Maribelli started to shake his head, then stopped. “Well, we did
and we didn’t.”
“Meaning?”
“No arrests were made, but we had a suspect who looked good
for the fires. By the time we got onto him, though, he was dead.
Killed himself.”
“Killed himself,” I echoed. “You remember the name?”
“Wouldn’t have yesterday, but since I just looked this over with
the cop, I can tell you. Suspect’s name was Norman Gradduk.”
He pronounced it gra-duke instead of grad-uk, but that didn’t
lessen the impact of the name. I felt something inside me tighten.
“How’d you come to him as the suspect?” I said.

“Tips from the neighborhood. One of the beat cops down there
had his ear to the ground, passed some news back to Conrad, the
police detective. He and I had been looking at another guy, a guy
we’d interviewed in another arson case about a year before, same
neighborhood. Word around there was that it was this Gradduk
guy, though. Time we came around to see him, he’d been dead a
few days already. Shit got crazy that fall, Conrad was busy and so
was I, and the case went cold. Best suspect was dead, anyhow. Fires
had stopped.”
“What do you remember about the fires themselves?” Joe said.
It was a good question. Like any specialist, Maribelli remembered
more about the details of the case than the generalities of it.
“All three were set using a small explosive and a kerosene accelerant,”
he said without hesitation. “The guy ran fuse cord around
the building and sprayed the walls down with the accelerant. That
ensured that when the place went up in flames, they weren’t going
to be put out until the building came down. I suspected he was using
a timing device, too. The fuse cord he used was fast-burning
stuff, you couldn’t just touch a match to it and run away, have the
place blow a few minutes later. It wasn’t as fast as Primacord, that
shit the military uses that goes up at something absurd like ten
thousand feet in a second, but it was too fast to use with a match
light technique.”
Joe and I exchanged a glance. It was the same method Richards
had described to us.
“We’re not sure what, if anything, these old fires have to do with
a few recent arson fires in the same neighborhood,” I said. “But
what you just described sounds like it fits with the new fires, and
some of those old names are popping up again. You mentioned the
tip came from a beat cop in the neighborhood. You remember who
it was?”
He groaned and looked at the ceiling. “Shit, I’m not the best
with names. Yesterday morning my wife asked me to sign a card
for her sister, and I wrote 'Dear Alice,’ when the woman’s name is
Allison. You should’ve heard my wife. She pitched a fit.” He looked
back at us and grinned. “Or bitched a fit, maybe. That’s a little
more like it.”
“The name?” I said.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m working on it. Oh, man. Seventeen years ago,
this is asking a lot.” He screwed his face up, an expression of intense
effort, but then sighed and shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I
can’t think of it.”

“Wouldn’t have it in the old files, something you could reference?”
“I went through the file yesterday. I don’t remember seeing that
cop’s name in it. Maybe it’s in Conrad’s notes, if you can track
them down. But it wasn’t in mine. I had most of the technical

stuff.”
I didn’t want to put a name in his mouth rather than have him
offer it, but I had to ask. “Could it have been Jack Padgett?”
He frowned. “Could it have been? Sure. Could have been a lot
of things, though. I honestly can’t remember.”
“All right. What about the suspect you’d been looking at before
you got the tip on Gradduk?”
“I know that one. Guy’s name was Mitchell Corbett. Local guy,
had a background in demolitions, had been a suspect in an earlier
fire, like I said.”
I turned and looked at Joe, who was gazing back at me.
“You know,” he said, “we really need to find that son of a bitch.”

We started with an information broker in Idaho. The term “information
broker” was code for a government spook and a hacker. The
guy was ex-
CIA
and knew how to get into most of the computer
databases that you aren’t supposed to be able to get into. There are
a handful of guys like this across the country, and while it’s not
commonly discussed, any private investigator worth a damn knows
one or two of them. You don’t ask for help from a guy like that on
a routine investigation, though. That kind of help is for a special
case, only. There are a couple of reasons for that: risk and cost.
Make a habit of having information you shouldn’t have, and you’ll
get into trouble eventually. And guys like our man in Idaho don’t
work cheap. When Joe made the call, he did so knowing that our
nonexistent expense account was going to take a serious hit. He
didn’t hesitate to do it, though.
Joe asked for an activity check on Mitch Corbett’s credit cards
and bank accounts. If he’d made a credit card purchase, we’d know
where and when. Same for the debit card, same for an
ATM
withdrawal.
It was the right place to start. The guy in Idaho told Joe to
give him a few hours to work on it, then he’d call us back.
I checked our fax machine and found a dozen pages waiting in
the tray. Amy had remembered my request. She’d sent a few articles
about the Neighborhood Alliance, along with a complete list
of the Alliance’s properties, compiled from the recorder’s office
database. The early articles were trivial things—a few cliched
quotes about rebuilding a sense of community by rebuilding
houses, a mention of Sentalar as the director, and damn little else.
The last article was more significant, however. Just two months
old, it explained that the Neighborhood Alliance, with the assistance
of funding from the city and a fifteen-million-dollar
HUD
grant, was going to be converting the old Joseph A. Marsh Junior
High School building into apartments, all of which would be
rented at low rates to people who met limited-income requirements.
The old brick school, which was now close to ninety years
old, had stood empty for more than a decade. Like West Tech, it
had been closed shortly after I passed through its halls. I had that
effect on a school, apparently.
West Tech, which was an equally historic building, had also been
converted into apartments within the last few years. I’d been in the
building once just to see how it looked, and I was impressed. They’d
somehow managed to turn the school style into something that was
so unique it was appealing. The tenant mailboxes were positioned
between the old locker bays, the gym had been converted into a
workout room, the auditorium was available for special functions.
Upstairs, the classrooms had become apartments—some of them
two levels, with spiral staircases and wide banks of windows.
While the rent wasn’t aimed at the lower-income tenants the way
the Joseph A. Marsh project seemed to be, it had gathered a lot of
favorable publicity when it was completed. I wasn’t surprised to see