Lincoln Perry 02 - Sorrow's Anthem (19 page)

Amos Lorenzon met us at Bartlett’s Tavern on Lorain Avenue.
Several people were at the bar, but Amos sat at a tiny table in the
corner of the room, secluded. It had been a few years since I’d seen
him, but he hadn’t changed much. The real shock was seeing him
out of uniform. I tried to think of another time I’d seen him without
the blue on and came up empty.
“How are you, son?” he said, shaking my hand. Amos had always
called me son when we’d ridden together, but it had never been in
a derogatory fashion, and I didn’t mind hearing it again.
“Doing fine,” I said. “Good to see you again.”
While he exchanged greetings with Joe, I pulled a third chair up
and we all sat down. The table between us was about the size of a
beer coaster. The bartender, a middle-aged woman with a hoarse
voice, shouted over the music to ask Joe and me if we wanted a
drink. We both declined.
“I hope you guys understand I wouldn’t have done this for just
anybody,” Amos said. His skin tone was light for a black man but
looked darker here in the shadows. There was gray in his fuzzy hair
now and deep wrinkles across his forehead. He wasn’t tall, but he
was built like a fireplug and had the strongest hands of anyone I’d
ever known. More than once I’d seen him put what looked like a
casual hand on the shoulder of a drunken disorderly and immediately
bring the man to his knees with one squeeze.
“We know that,” Joe said. “And you should know how much it’s
appreciated.”
“We’ll pay you whatever you think is fair,” I offered, even
though we had no client to bill for the expense. I didn’t want Amos
to feel like we’d taken advantage of him.
He scowled. “Great idea, son. It gets around that I released this
information, I’m in deep enough without it looking like I took a
bribe.”
“Fair point.”
“What have you got?” Joe said.
Amos gazed at the crowd around the bar, wary even though
there was no way they could have heard us over the Pearl Jam that
was pulsing through the speakers. This wasn’t any sort of police
bar, and I had a feeling that was why Amos had selected it. He was
nervous about the information he was about to offer us.
“I went through the conduct evaluations like you asked. For
both Rabold and Padgett. Same day I’m doing that, Rabold gets
killed.”
Silence.
“Didn’t think you’d have a whole lot to say about that,” Amos
said. “But I don’t like it.”
“When I asked you to check out the conduct reports, I didn’t
know the guy was going to get killed,” Joe said. “Now what do you
have?”
“They’ve had their share of criticism,” Amos said. “Rabold got
busted eight years back for letting a guy slip him a few hundred in
cash in exchange for not arresting him for drunk driving. The guy
talked about it at a party when there was a city official in the room,
and Rabold got his ass chewed good on that. No suspension,
though; it never made the papers so it was all done quietly. That
was about the only serious knock on Rabold other than general
complaints about laziness.”
“And Padgett?” Joe said.
“He’s a different matter.” Amos shifted in his chair, pulling
closer to the little table. “Never gets a positive review, but he’s been
around so long and he’s so loud and overbearing that I think some
guys are intimidated by him. He’s had nearly a dozen complaints
of excessive force over the years, but none of them developed into
anything. Internal affairs investigated a rumor of him taking bribes
over some swag sales about ten years back, but they cleared him.”
“Swag sales,” I said. “You know if that involved a guy named
Cancerno?”
“I don’t remember any names being mentioned on that. It was
just a few sentences saying he’d been checked out and cleared.”
Amos stopped talking and sipped the glass of water that was on
the table, his eyes on the bar again. I glanced over my shoulder and
saw we were getting a stare from the bartender as she poured
someone a fresh draft. Three guys sitting at a corner table in a bar,
drinking nothing but one ice water between them. This was probably
the most suspicious behavior she’d seen in a while.
“Tell you something else I found out that I don’t like,” Amos
said. “When I asked records to pull those conduct evaluations for
me, the girl there said something about Rabold being a popular
guy. I didn’t know what she was talking about and said so. She told
me there have been a couple requests for his evaluations in the past
few weeks—one from internal affairs, another from the
FBI
.”
“
FBI
,” Joe echoed. “Wonderful. She have any idea what it was
about?”
“No. But like an idiot, I decided I’d pursue it a little bit. I called
a guy I know with internal affairs, asked him what he knew about
Rabold. The man got seriously bothered. Wanting to know what
the hell I was asking about Rabold for. I told him I was doing conduct
reviews and was curious, but he didn’t buy it, and if he checks

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me out, I could be in some trouble. That is, if you two tell anyone I
passed information along to a couple civilians.”
“We’re not telling anyone,” I said. “But this guy didn’t give you
any idea of what’s going on with Rabold?”
“No. And he’s a guy I know well, too. A friend, almost. So his
reaction surprised me.” Amos lowered his voice another level,
which made him practically inaudible. “The records girl gave me
the name of the
FBI
guy who requested Rabold’s evaluations.
Name was Robert Dean. I checked him out just enough to find out
that he’s with the
RICO
task force.”
Joe looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “
RICO
task force, and
Rabold wearing a wire?”
“Sounds heavy,” I said. “And the
RICO
angle could bring Cancerno
into the fold easily enough.”
“Wire?” Amos said.
“Rabold was wearing a wire when he was killed,” Joe said. “You
think he could have been working for internal affairs? Maybe setting
up Padgett?”
Amos leaned away from the table and held up his hands. “I have
no idea, man. None.”
We were all quiet for a bit, thinking it over. Then Joe asked
Amos if that was all he had.
“I’m not done yet,” Amos said. “But before I keep going, I want
to ask you boys a straight question and get a straight answer in return.
Fair?”

Joe and I nodded.
“All right. Now, Pritchard, you didn’t tell me what this was all
about, and I respected that. But I remember some things, maybe
more than you two think I would, and I’ve got my own ideas. Does
this have something to do with Ed Gradduk getting killed?”
Joe left the answer to me.
“Yes. That’s what it’s about, Amos.”
He pursed his lips and frowned. “I was afraid of that. I
remembered what happened between you and that guy before you made
the jump to narcotics, son. Remember it didn’t go easy on you.”
“I made my own bed on that one, Amos.”
“Sure, son. But I remember, is all I’m saying. And I heard about
it when he got killed a couple days back, but I didn’t think of it
right off when Pritchard called me.”
We waited.
“There was a harassment complaint filed on Padgett more than
fifteen years ago,” Amos said. “Of the sexual nature. Claim was
that he’d drop in on this woman time to time, make her perform
for him. Seemed he had something on her, or maybe just intimidated
her, because she let it go on for a while.”
He paused, then said, “The woman was Gradduk’s mother.”
For a long time the only voice in the room was Eddie Vedder’s as
he wailed over the guitar and the drums.
“You think there was bad blood going back a long time with
those two, don’t you?” Amos said.
“Looks like it,” I answered, my voice flat.
“Looks like an awful mess, is what it looks like,” Amos said. “One
of the cops that ran that kid down in the street was harassing the
kid’s mother years ago? Man, that’s a shit storm waiting to happen.”
“What were the details?” I said. “That’s a substantial complaint,
but Padgett’s still on the force all these years later. It never came
around to bite him.”
“That’s the hell of it,” Amos said. “The Gradduk woman
wouldn’t make out a complaint herself. Wouldn’t tell anyone a
damn thing. The complaint came in and the department saw what
a hellacious pain in the ass it could be, realized they had to go
heavyweight with it right at the start, so they sent it up the line to
the attorneys, who talked to the woman. She wouldn’t tell them
anything. Without a victim stating she’d been victimized, all they
had left was a rumor. It died a quiet death and got shoved under
the rug. Stayed there, too.”
“At least till now,” Joe said, and Amos grimaced.
“Wait a second,” I said. “If Alberta Gradduk wouldn’t say anything
about it, then who made the complaint initially?”
“I got that.” Amos slipped a piece of paper out of his back
pocket and scanned it quickly. “I’m not giving this to you, because
I want all this exchange to stay in the mind and not on paper; you
know, protect myself. We get done, this sucker’s going down the
toilet back in that bathroom.”
We waited while he searched for the name. After a minute, he
had it.
“The original complaint was filed by a friend of the family.
Went right in to the chief, himself. Guy who made the complaint
was named Thomas Perry. Says he was with a city ambulance
team.”
Joe looked at me. “Shit, Lincoln. Was that your—”
“Father,” I said. “Yes. That was him.”

CHAPTER
19

My father had not been close to the Gradduks. He hadn’t much in
common with Norm, and Alberta had always been in the house,
out of sight. The only member of the family my father had regularly
seen was Ed, because Ed had always been at my house. There
had been times when just the two of them were together, though.
Times that had been difficult for me to understand at first, when I
was young.
They used to play baseball together in the front lawn of Ed’s
house on Tuesday evenings, the only weeknight my dad was home
for dinner. I stumbled across them by accident once, watched them
with shock for a few minutes, then retreated, feeling hurt and left
out. My father had seen me there, though, and that night he came
into my room to talk. Told me he needed to spend some time alone
with my friend now and then, that Ed was feeling the loss of his
father heavily. He said he was glad I was mature enough to understand
that. It was a subtle, kind way to let me know that if I didn’t
like the two of them having some time without me, I needed to
grow up. I took the lesson.
And so they spent time together, occasionally. But I’d never considered
that my father might have been hearing things from Ed
that I was not. I was Ed’s best friend; my father was an old guy. If
anyone knew secrets, it was going to be me, right? Wrong.
Long after Joe and I left Bartlett’s Tavern I was still stunned. I
wondered what exactly my father had known, wondered why Ed
had told him and not me. But maybe there are things you can tell
your best friend when you’re a fourteen-year-old male and things
you can’t. Admitting that your mother was being sexually harassed
might have fit into the latter category. And I didn’t have to wonder
why my father had never told me—if he felt strongly about keeping
his own problems quiet, and he did, then he felt stronger still
about keeping the problems of others quiet. Thomas Perry was not
a man who passed neighborhood gossip along. He was the brick
wall that brought it to a halt.
You’re just like your father, Alberta Gradduk had said, scowling at
me. / never liked meddlers.
So he’d meddled. But how far? He’d made a complaint to the
police, obviously, had instigated an investigation into Padgett. But
then what happened? Did Padgett go away, or did he linger? What
had his contact with the Gradduks been over the years? What had
put him at Ed’s house with a gun in his hand three days ago? And
why the hell wouldn’t Alberta talk? She’d been cooperative enough
until I’d asked if she knew one of the cops, and then she’d thrown
us out.
These were the questions that ran through my head as Joe drove
us back to the office. It was growing late now, the sun a fading red
mass at the end of the avenue, the day gone. We didn’t have much
to show for it, either. More questions, maybe. Not a lot of answers.
That seemed to be the pattern.
Joe went upstairs when we got back to the office, claiming he
was just going to shut his computer down. I knew he was probably
going to get to work on the paying cases we’d been neglecting for
days, though. I said good-bye and walked back to my apartment.
When I got there, I didn’t go upstairs, but kept walking east down
the avenue. I walked until I got to the West Park library, then went around the building and lifted myself up onto the cool stone wall
that bordered the steps. I could hear laughter from the little park
that’s just down the street from the library, kids playing tag or
chasing the season’s last fireflies, maybe.
Leaning back until I was flat on the wall, I cupped my hands behind
my head and looked up at the night sky. I listened to the kids
and remembered how it had felt to be one of them on a hot, muggy
summer night. They’re all special when you’re a kid, three months
of treasures strung together before you’re sent back to school.
There’s nothing quite like that when you reach adulthood. I closed
my eyes and breathed deeply, feeling the stone cold on my back. Ed
and Draper and I used to sit on the concrete steps outside the
Hideaway late into the summer nights, saying hello to the regulars
that went into the bar, watching for any girls that might pass by on
the avenue. It seemed like a million years ago, and like yesterday.
I was bothered by how much had gone on without my knowledge.
Norm Gradduk had been a suspect in the neighborhood fires
the summer he’d killed himself, his wife had apparently been harassed
by a cop, and my father had made a complaint about the
cop’s behavior. It had all happened right around me, along the
streets I’d walked every day, to the people I knew best in the world.
And I hadn’t known a damn thing about it.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I thought about letting it go,
not wanting to lose the brief moment of peacefulness to whoever
was calling, but I took it out of my pocket and checked the display.
It was Amy’s work number.
“How you doing, Ace?”
“Okay,” she said. “Did you get those faxes?”
“Yes. Thanks a lot.”
“Anytime. Did you see the recorder’s-office list, though?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Good. Remember how I added that note that said there hadn’t
been any other fires to the Neighborhood Alliance properties?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you can erase that. I heard a fire run called in on the police
scanner ten minutes ago. It’s a house on West Twenty-fifth.
The same one on the list I faxed you.”
I sat up.
“You there?” Amy said.
“Yes.”