Lincoln Perry 02 - Sorrow's Anthem (24 page)

again.”
“It’s important, Mrs. Gradduk. I think it is very important.”
She lifted her hands to her hair, tugged on the ragged gray ends,
pulled until the skin lifted around her skull. She made a low hissing
sound as she did it.
“You can tell us,” I said. “It’s just the three of us in this room,
Mrs. Gradduk. You don’t need to be scared.”
“That’s what the lawyer said,” she told me, releasing her hair.
“And he was lying, too.”
I nodded. “Yes, let’s talk about the lawyer. We know about him.”
I reached in my pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper with
Gajovich’s picture printed on it. I’d made a copy before I’d left the
office not too many hours earlier. “Was this the lawyer that came

to see you?”
She looked at the picture with wary distaste, as if she wanted to
spit at it but was afraid Gajovich might spring to life if she did.
“Was this the lawyer?” I asked again.

She laughed, a fast, breathless series of rasping chuckles that
made the skin at the back of my neck prickle. It was the kind of
laugh you might hear in the corridors of an asylum late at night.
“Oh, you know he’s the one. Your father sent him. Don’t pretend
he didn’t. They were the ones to blame, you know. Norm and your
father, the both of them. Norm started it, and then, your father, he
tried to make it worse. But I wouldn’t let that happen. I wouldn’t
let that happen to us.”
“So my father sent this man to talk to you,” I said, pointing at
Gajovich’s picture. “But how did that make it worse?”
“I protected us,” she said. “The lawyer wanted to make . . .
wanted to make a spectacle out of us. He came here and told me to
talk to him, just like you are. And I talked, and talked, and talked.
And then when I was done, he told me what it would be like. I
asked if it couldn’t be handled quietly, and he laughed at me. Told
me it was going to be a big story. Told me I’d have to be on TV and
in the papers, in courtrooms and on the radio. Me and my son. As
if we hadn’t been through enough. As if I hadn’t been through
enough. That’s what your father did for me.” She smiled too wide,
mouth open, blackened cavities visible along her molars. “But I
didn’t let it happen. I protected us. Norm couldn’t do it, but I did it.
I did it for my son.”
Joe was leaning forward now, and I found myself doing the
same, edging my chair closer to the coffee table.
“What happened with Padgett, Mrs. Gradduk? You’ve got to
explain what you’re talking about.”
She shook her head and pushed back into the couch.
“Tell me.”
“It’s all so long ago.”
“But it still matters,” I said. “More than you can imagine, it
matters.”
“No.”
“Explain it to me.”
“I’m not doing this!” she shrieked, her hands back in her wild
gray hair again, clawlike fingers locking on the strands. “I’m not!”
“Just tell me what happened,” I said. “Tell me so I can know how
to help.”
“No!”
“Yes!” I shouted back, rising out of my chair. “Damn it, you are
going to tell me, because your son is dead and I need to know why!”
She looked up at me and cowered against the couch, then
slumped and began to sob. She cried like a child, her fingers tightening
on her hair, her face shoved against the couch cushion. Joe
had reached up and put his hand on my biceps, as if to restrain me,
but Alberta Gradduk’s reaction had frozen me more than any
physical force could. I looked at her and saw her the way she’d been
once, a beautiful young woman with a husband and a son and a
future, and I crossed to the couch and dropped to my knees and put
my arms around her. She resisted at first, pushing at me, but then
she gave up and pressed her face into my chest and cried. I closed
my eyes and felt her dirty gray hair against my neck and jaw, and I
knew that I would not ask her again. I wanted to know, but I did
not want this woman to have to tell it to me.
The longer I listened to her cry, felt her skeletal body heave beneath
my arms, the more I began to wonder if I even really wanted
to know.

Back to the office, under a pewter sky that darkened as I drove,
heavy with the promise of rain. It was hardly past eight, but the
humidity was already noticeable. The windows were down, and the
air that rushed in through them was thick, seeming to pass over
me like a soft fabric. At every stoplight sweat sprang from my
pores. The digital thermometer in the corner of my rearview mirror gave the temperature at eighty degrees, but the still, muggy
quality made it seem hotter. This in the early morning. I left the
air-conditioning off, though, preferring to feel the wind hard
against my face, forcing my eyes half-shut as I accelerated.
“You backed off pretty quickly,” Joe said after we’d been on the
road for several minutes. “Quickly for you, at least.”
“She was my friend’s mother, Joe,” I said, and then regretted it.
I’d just confirmed exactly what he was so worried about, telling
him I’d changed my normal approach because of my personal connection
to the case. He didn’t say anything, though. Just drummed
his fingers on the door panel and stared out the window.
“It was Gajovich,” I said. “We got that much, and that matters.
He went in there with his stories about television interviews and
courtroom appearances and he scared her into silence. To protect
Jack Padgett. And his brother’s running the show in that district.”
“We need to talk to someone,” Joe said. “This morning. Cal
Richards, maybe.”
“Or Dean and Mason. Neither of them gives a shit about Ed,
but they’re on the corruption task force. If one Gajovich is involved,
let alone two, they need to know about it.”
“I want to start with Richards,” Joe said. “He’s the only guy in
the mix that I really trust.”
“Call him, then.” I wanted Richards involved, too. The names
we were connecting to this went too high now. We stood on the
edge of an investigation that was going to rock the city’s law enforcement
community and horrify the public. I didn’t want any
part of it. All I wanted to do was pull Ed Gradduk’s legacy away
from the fallout zone.
We were on the interstate now, doing seventy-five, and the
wind was too loud for conversation. Joe rolled up his window, and
I followed suit, then turned the air-conditioning on. Once the cab
was quiet, Joe took out his cell phone and made the call into police
dispatch. He was told Richards wasn’t available, so he asked the
dispatcher to get Cal a message as soon as possible. It was urgent,
Joe said.
The sky was still darkening—pale clouds skimming quickly
across the horizon, heavier, purplish clouds trudging somberly behind.
I’d had all of four hours of sleep—after surviving a fire and
nearly splitting my skull open on a brick wall—and the fatigue
hung heavy with me, tightening the big muscles in my back and
shoulders and creeping into the small muscles with little bursts of
pain. I rolled my neck and winced.
The thermometer in the mirror said eighty-two. Climbing. We
didn’t talk much until I was back off the interstate, on Lorain.
Traffic was thin, and I caught green lights heading back to the office.
As I drove, a few fat drops of rain broke free from the clouds
and splattered the windshield. There was thunder, but it was faint,
the heart of the storm still miles away.

I turned onto Rocky River, then made another immediate turn
into the narrow parking lot behind our building. A few more unusually
heavy raindrops fell, plunking off the hood of my truck
like golf balls as I pulled into a parking space beside a green van. I
shut the engine off, and the van’s side door slid open. A short,
muscular Hispanic man stepped out, holding a handgun down
against his thigh. Ramone, the guy from Jimmy Cancerno’s construction
crew. He didn’t look any friendlier today than he had in
the picture Dean and Mason had shown me the night before. He
tapped on my window with the gun, then nodded his head at the
backseat of the van. Whoever was driving it started the motor.
“Richards may have to wait,” I said to Joe. “I think we’re on our
way to see Jimmy Cancerno.”

CHAPTER
24

Ramone didn’t turn out to be the talkative sort. I was wearing a
gun, and he took that, then waved me into the van without a word
while he checked Joe for a weapon. He moved smoothly and professionally,
not like a construction worker who had no experience
at this sort of thing. That wasn’t exactly comforting.
“You taking us to see somebody, or to kill us?” Joe asked while
Ramone ran a hand over Joe’s ankles, making sure there wasn’t a
gun holstered down there. It seemed like a fair enough question,
and I was hoping for an answer myself.
“Get in,” was all Ramone said.
I was already in the van, and Ramone had his back to me. It
would have been the perfect opportunity to jump him, had there
not been another guy in the passenger seat, pointing a SIG-Sauer
automatic at my chest. This guy looked like he went about 250
pounds. Just in the shoulders.
Joe got into the van, and I slid down the seat to make room for
him. Ramone climbed in behind him, then slammed the door shut
and sat on the floor with his back against the door, the gun trained
on Joe.
“Classy van,” Joe said, gazing around with all the trepidation of
a man settling onto a familiar barstool and scanning the room for
friends. “Is this the one with stow-'n’-go seating? That always
sounded like a hell of a feature. Don’t know exactly what it means,
but it sounds good.”
“Shut up,” Ramone said.

Joe frowned at him, then gave me a sidelong glance. “Not real
friendly,” he said.
“No.”
I didn’t recognize the lumberjack in the passenger seat, who had
turned around once Ramone was inside, or the driver. I could see
him only through the mirror, but that was enough to show that he
was older, with gray hair and wrinkles across his forehead. He took
us out of the parking lot and back onto Rocky River. From there
we pulled onto 1-90 and headed east. The van rode smooth. So
smooth that Ramone’s gun never wavered.
We were on the highway for a while before the driver slowed
and pulled into the exit lane. We got off on West Forty-fourth,
then turned onto Train Avenue, back in my old neighborhood—
Jimmy Cancerno’s empire.
The van driver pulled off the street at a place called Pinnacle
Pawn Plus. Judging from the sign in the window, the “plus” referred
to cash loans, tobacco products, and lottery tickets. Something
for everyone.
Behind the store was an old warehouse. A pickup truck and a
green Mercedes sedan were parked in front of it. When the van
came to a stop, Ramone rose to a crouch and slid the door open.
Then he waved at us with the gun.
“Out.”
We climbed out and stood in front of the warehouse while the
three of them gathered around us. Thunder rumbled overhead,
closer now than before. A fat raindrop hit the back of my neck,
slid down my spine with a chill that continued even after the water
was gone.
“Inside,” Ramone said.
I went first, opening the door and stepping into a small office,
the main room of the warehouse empty and dark behind it.
Jimmy Cancerno sat in the office, his feet propped up on a steel
desk, watching a flat-screen television that hung on the wall. He
turned as we entered, then scowled when he saw the gun in Ramone’s
hand.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said.
“You said make sure they come,” Ramone replied. “You said
don’t give them an option about it.”
“That doesn’t mean you need to act like a damn fool,” Cancerno
snapped. He was wearing glasses today, and his gray hair
was slightly tousled, not the perfect comb off the forehead I’d
seen before.

Ramone just shrugged, not looking particularly chagrined, then
led the other two past us and into the warehouse. Cancerno let
them go without a word. He motioned at a set of chairs in front of
his desk.

“Sit down.”

We sat. He took his feet off the desk, turned off the television,
and swung around to face us.
“Look, I didn’t tell that idiot to bring you in here at gunpoint. I
just told him to make sure he got you here.”
“Well, he got us here,” Joe said. “Efficient, if nothing else.”
Cancerno took his glasses off, folded them, and set them on the
desk. There was none of the irritable quality to him today, just
calm and control.
“There are different sorts of problems,” he said. “You got minor
nuisances—a flat tire, leak in the roof, maybe a splinter in your ass.
They’re frustrating, you know? Annoying. But they aren’t big deals,
either. None of them is a crisis. Demands some attention, sure, but
nothing serious. You address the issue, you move on. You forget
about it.”

Neither one of us responded.
“So you got your minor nuisances,” Cancerno said. “And then
you got your crisis. The flat tire blows out, rolls the car over. The
leak in the roof spreads, rots out the wood, the whole damn thing
caves in on you. The splinter in your ass gets infected, you can’t
even sit down, end up in the hospital.”
Cancerno spread his hands. “You’re wondering,” he said, “which
one you are. Right? You’re thinking—-just how much of a problem
have I become? Am I the splinter in the ass, or am I the infection?”
Silence filled the room for a minute. Joe and I didn’t look at each
other, just held Cancerno’s gaze, which alternated between us. His
calm hadn’t been disrupted, but that didn’t make me feel any more
comfortable. He was a man who liked his temper. Liked knowing
just how much damage would occur when it was tripped. Right
now he was toying with the trigger like a man enjoying the feel of
a big gun in his hand, savoring the moment before the shooting
began. I didn’t enjoy feeling like the target at the other end of the
range.
“You want us to guess?” I said. “And there’s not a C, none-of
the-above, category?”
Cancerno smiled. “Nah, you don’t need to guess. I’ll go ahead
and tell you.” There was another pause before he said, “You’re the
splinter. The flat tire, the leak. For now.”
He studied me. “You come off like a good guy. Working your ass
off to help a dead guy out, I mean, shit, what better kind of friend
is there than the one who looks after you when you’re dead? Don’t
know that I got any of those kind, myself.”
He leaned forward in his chair. “You got somebody to look after
you when you’re dead?”
I didn’t say anything. Beside me Joe was completely still. Out in
the warehouse everything was quiet, but I knew there were men
out there, and that they all had guns. My gun, too.
“I understand,” Cancerno said, “that you’re just doing what you
do. You’re looking for answers. That’s fine. I’d prefer to stay the hell
out of it, but I can’t anymore. Because the places you’re looking for
answers are, well, a little sensitive to me.”