Lincoln Perry 02 - Sorrow's Anthem (4 page)

CHAPTER
4

They let me go home around midnight. Charges of interference
and obstruction had been threatened but I had not been booked.
The cop who’d been in the passenger seat, a guy named Larry
Rabold, lightened up once he learned who I was, but his partner, the
one who had stopped me on the sidewalk, was not so fraternal. His
name was Jack Padgett, and he didn’t show any desire to let bygones
be bygones once he found out I had been a cop. They talked to me
for about an hour, asking all about Ed, particularly what information
might have been exchanged in our brief conversation. They seemed
unconvinced by my claim that I hadn’t spoken to him in years.
“Why the hell did you come running down to his house as soon
as you heard the news, then?” Padgett had asked. It was a good
question, one I’d already failed to answer earlier in the night, and I
still hadn’t come up with anything satisfactory. They’d both been
intrigued by my description of how things had gone down with Ed
and me a few years back, and I knew they’d check it out and see if
they could find anything to indicate I’d had contact with the man
since then. They would come up empty, though.
Once I was kicked loose, I called a cab to take me back to my
truck. Clark Avenue was dark and quiet save for a few stragglers on
the sidewalk and one woman waiting for a bus. I stood at the curb
and stared up the street to where my oldest friend had died a few
hours earlier. They’d hosed the blood off the pavement, and the
night heat had already baked it dry.
I climbed inside the truck and started the engine, sat there listening
to the traffic noise, and wondering if I’d be able to drive
without seeing visions of Ed running into the street. I took a look
at the clock. It was time to go home and go to bed.
I drove to my partner’s house.

Joe Pritchard lives on Chatfield, maybe three minutes from the
office. He was in the neighborhood long before I arrived, and it
was through him that I learned of the gym I own when it went
up for sale. Recently dismissed from the police force and with no
real career plans, I’d purchased the gym and moved into the
building. Joe’s retirement a few years later had led me into the PI
trade.
His house is a brick A-frame that is common in the neighborhood,
two blended triangles with a chimney rising along the front
wall. I once heard that the houses were all products of Sears Roebuck
kits that became popular as the neighborhood expanded following
World War II, but I don’t know if there’s any truth to that.
The neighborhood around Chatfield has been maintained better
than most, although the majority of parents send their children to
private schools rather than enrolling them in the public system.
That was the case when I was growing up, too, but my father
couldn’t afford it—and had no desire to send me to one of the private
schools even if he could. If I couldn’t make it in a public high
school, he often said, how the hell was I going to make it as a cop?
Even then, it was what I told everyone I was going to do, and my
father was right—four years at West Tech were invaluable to that
career acclimation.
Joe’s house is the shining star of a nice block, with a perfectly
manicured lawn, gleaming windows, and a cobblestone path between
the house and the sidewalk. Quite the homemaker, our Joe.
Most of the backyard and a stretch between the driveway and the
house are filled with beautiful flower gardens, heavy on the impatiens.
There’s a garage behind the house, stocked with rakes and
hoes and potting soil and fertilizer, and if you want to find Joe on a
Saturday or Sunday afternoon, you need only look in the yard or in
the garage. When we’d worked the narcotics beat together, it hadn’t
been that way. Joe’s wife, Ruth, tended to the flowers and yard as if
they were her reason for living, but Joe never did much more than
shovel the driveway, and then only in the heaviest snows. It was
winter when Ruth died, and when spring broke the next year, Joe
hated the idea of seeing her flower gardens fail to appear in the
fashion to which the neighbors had become accustomed. Now I
think he spends more time on them than Ruth ever did.
He met me at the door with a wary look, but it was clear he’d
still been awake, which I’d expected. Joe is late to bed and early to
rise and always alert despite that. There are some qualities you
don’t leave behind after thirty years of police work. Poor sleeping
patterns are among them.
“It’s after midnight,” he said, closing the front door and following
me into the living room, “and you wouldn’t show up here at
that time just for small talk. So that makes me think this is case
related, and that troubles me. Why? Because the only cases on our
plate are small-time, and you wouldn’t need to discuss them at this
hour. So I’m guessing you’ve decided to involve yourself in whatever
shit went down with your convict buddy.”
Took him maybe ten seconds to reason that out.

We sat in the living room and I asked him if he’d seen the news,
if he’d seen the footage of Ed Gradduk on his way to do murder.
He told me that he had.
“You remember anything about the guy?” I asked.
His eyes flicked off mine momentarily. “You kidding me? It was
the first case we ever worked together, LP. And in all the cases
we we worked since, I’ve never seen you so locked in. You were robotic
about it. I liked working with you, could tell you had ability,
but at the same time I was a little concerned about your emotional
stamina. You seemed burned-out already, like an old cop who’s
hung on five years too long.”
I nodded.
“I remember it didn’t go the way you’d expected it to go,” Joe
continued. “And the kid took a fall. But that wasn’t your fault. He
had options. Not your fault he decided against cooperating.”
I was silent.
“There’s more to it than you ever told me,” Joe said. “And it involves
the girl.”
I looked at him, surprised. He was waiting for a response.
“There’s more to it,” I said. “And it involves the girl. But not in
the way you’re thinking.”
He shrugged. “Whatever. That’s not the issue of the night,
though. Tell me what happened.”
I took him from Amy’s phone call to the scene in the street to
my interview with Padgett and Rabold. I realized halfway through
the story that I was rubbing my temples, trying to drive away a
headache that I didn’t consciously feel.
“I’d ask you why you ended up going down to Clark Avenue,” he
said when I was through, “but I expect you don’t really have an answer
for that.”
“Accurate expectation.”
Joe stared at the muted television. It was tuned to
ESPN
Classic,
as it always seems to be, and the network was airing a basketball
game between the Bulls and the Jazz from sometime in the
late nineties.
“Rough seeing a guy die like that,” he said. “Especially when it
was a guy you used to be close to.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m taking it this abbreviated conversation with Gradduk
meant something to you. Makes you, what, curious? Skeptical?”
“Makes me think the guy could have been set up.”
“But he told you it was all on tape.”
“Well, it is all on tape. Amy, Ed, and the cops all agree on that
point. You just said you saw it on the news.”
“So he murdered the girl.”
“He said he didn’t.”
“But the police have a tape of him setting this house on fire. The
same house from which a body was recovered.”
“Yeah.”
“Cut-and-dried,” he said, but I knew he was too good a detective
to buy that for even a minute.
“Who was the woman?” I asked. “I don’t even know her name.”
“Anita Sentalar. They had a long feature about her on the news
tonight. She’s a thirty-seven-year-old attorney, good-looking, intelligent,
single.”
“And the connection to Gradduk?”
“Undisclosed, as of yet.”
“Maybe she was already in the house, dead.”
He snorted. “Oh, yeah, I like this idea. Someone else kills her,
leaves her in the house, and Gradduk just happens to come by and
set fire to it, concealing the body? What, he’s trying to do someone
a favor by torching the place? Insurance on that dump wasn’t
worth a thing, from what I’ve heard.”
“What’s the tape show?”
“Shows him going into the house and coming back out. Shows
his face pretty clear. Shows his car, and apparently they could zoom
in enough to get a plate number off it.”
“And the fire?”
“House went up about twenty minutes after he left it. There was
a small explosion of sorts before the flames, I guess. Fire investigators
think he used a timer and an incendiary device.”
“Twenty minutes? Damn, Joseph, that’s a hell of a lot of time.”
“Camera didn’t show anyone else going into the house after him,
though.”
“Camera had a panoramic angle on the house? Covered every
side at once?”
He sighed. “Just the front.”
“So a dozen people could have waltzed in and out the back door
during those twenty minutes?”
“Maybe. But what’s Gradduk doing in a vacant house in the first
place if he’s not the guy who set it on fire?”
“That,” I said, “is what I’d like to look into.”
Joe sighed again and leaned back in his recliner, rolling the
footrest out and up. I was sitting forward on the couch, elbows on
my knees, watching him. Joe was the best cop I’d ever worked with,
and he was my business partner. If I was going to get started with
this thing, I wanted his support, for both reasons.
“He told me he went to the prosecutor, Joe. Said he went there
and was sent home. At the very least, I want to talk to the prosecutor.
See what Gradduk went in there with.”
“If he sent Gradduk home,” Joe said, “it was probably with good
reason.”
We sat together in the dark living room and watched the muted
old basketball game, Michael Jordan slicing his way through the
lane, tossing in off-balance shots and drawing fouls.
“This guy Gradduk,” Joe said, “was not the kid you remember
growing up with. He’d done time, and it looks like he should have
been doing some more. Shitty brakes on a Crown Vic saved him
the agony of years in a cell, and saved the taxpayers the cost of
putting him where he belonged.”
I didn’t answer.
“Regardless of what he said to you, the man appears to have
murdered someone, Lincoln.”
“Appears.”
“Why does it matter?” He grabbed the remote and snapped the
television off. “If he did kill her, or didn’t? He was never convicted
of the crime, just suspected of it. The man is dead, LP, and dead he
is going to stay, with or without your involvement. And, whether
you choose to believe it or not, you did him no wrong. Not tonight,
and not the time before that.”
I sat and thought about everything I wanted to say to that, how
I wanted to tell him that it went back to walking the same sidewalks
and fighting the same guys and chasing the same girls, that
it went back to twelve years of a bond that you simply can’t match
upon reaching adulthood, not even with your partner.
“Ed never caught a break in his life,” I said. “From the cradle to
the grave, the guy was taking it on the chin. Did he earn it sometimes?
Sure. Every time? Hell, no.”
“And he’s gone now. Can’t help him anymore.”
“It’s not about helping him. It’s about making sure someone else
isn’t getting away with something far worse than any of Ed’s sins.”
Silence.
“I watched him die tonight, Joe. A few hours ago. I watched it
happen. And tomorrow morning when everyone turns on the news
or opens their paper, all they’ll think is—'Good, the guy was a
killer and he got what he deserved.’”
He sighed and shook his head, looked past me out the dark window
toward the rows of flowers his wife had planted and he still
tended. You do things for the dead, even if you don’t have to.
Maybe because you don’t have to. Joe knew that as well as anyone.
He stared at the window for quite a while, then turned back
around and picked up the remote. He turned the television back
on, settled into his chair, and put his attention on the game.
“We’ll go see the prosecutor,” he said, and that was all he said
until I got to my feet and let myself out of the house.

CHAPTER
5

When my alarm went off at six that morning, I grabbed it, tore the
cord from the outlet, and threw the clock into the closet. Then I
remembered why I’d set the alarm so early in the first place. For a
long moment I remained in bed, eyes squeezed shut, trying not to
think about what I’d seen the previous night and what duty it had
provided for me this morning. Sleep is a temporary shield, though,
and I’d slipped from behind it. I got out of bed and went into the
shower. Twenty minutes later I was out the door and on my way to
break a heart that had been broken too many times already.

Allison Harmell lived in North Olmsted. Fifteen years earlier
she’d lived on Scranton Road, a neighbor but not a classmate. Allison’s
parents came up with the cash to send her to a Catholic
school, but she’d hung out more with the West Tech crowd than
with her friends from school.
She was an accountant now, recently resigned from one of the
large national chains to work independently. I’d learned this in the
same way I’d learned everything else that had happened in Allison’s
life in the last eight years—through letters. We didn’t talk on
the phone because the silences that inevitably slid between us
never felt as comfortable as they should have between old friends.
We used to meet for drinks occasionally, always at a hotel bar in
Middleburg Heights, in a room filled with strangers, but now
those meetings had gone by the wayside, as well. These were the
rules of contact that had developed between us as the years had
passed, and while they were always unspoken, they were also rigid.
She worked out of her house, I knew, so I didn’t have to rise so
early simply to catch her at home. I was more interested in catching
her before she turned on the television.
She came to the door within seconds of my knock, but she wore
a robe and had her hair in a towel.
“Lincoln,” she said, lifting a hand to her temple. “What in the
world . . .” Halfway through the question she answered it for herself.
“Something’s wrong.”
I nodded. “Yeah. Something’s wrong.”
Seeing her again, I regretted that I’d designated myself as the
messenger. I’d known it wouldn’t be any fun for me, but it had also
seemed better than letting her hear it from some idiot television
news reporter or as overheard conversation in a grocery store
checkout line. Now I was struck by just how difficult the disclosure
was going to be.
“He’s in trouble,” she said, stepping aside from the door. “I’ve already
heard. But, Lincoln, he couldn’t have killed that woman. He
couldn’t have.”
“He didn’t,” I said. “But that doesn’t matter anymore. Not where
he’s concerned.”
I was inside the house now, following her through a tiny dining
room and into a kitchen that smelled warmly of brewing coffee.
Allison sat on a kitchen stool, the robe sliding off slim, bare legs.
“What are you talking about?”
“Ed’s dead.” I was standing in the kitchen doorway, tall and
rigid, hands hanging at my sides.
“No. Dead? No. He’s just in jail, Lincoln. They were going to
send him back to . . .” The attempt died then, and she shut up and
stared at me.
“It happened last night,” I said. “I was there when he died. The
cops came after him and he ran into the street. He was drunk and he couldn’t make it across. They hit him with their car.”
She didn’t say anything, just reached up and slowly unwound the
towel from her long blond hair. It fell to her shoulders, some of the
wetter strands sticking to her neck.
“Three years and seven months,” she said. Silence for a moment,
and then: “That’s how long it’s been since I talked to him. I figured
that out when I heard about the fire on the news last night. We saw
each other once when he got out of jail, and then no more.”
There was another long pause before she said, “So then I
shouldn’t be sad, right? Not really.”
She started to cry then, softly and without theatrics, just a quiet
supply of tears that she’d occasionally wipe with the back of her
hand. I didn’t move toward her. For a long time we remained like
that—her crying on the stool, me standing with my hands at my
sides in the doorway.
“Shit,” she said eventually, sniffing back the last of the tears and
shaking her head. “He’s dead and I’m mad at him for that. Make
any sense?”
“Yes.”
She barked out a laugh that was still wet with tears and shook
her head again. “Good. I’d hate to seem crazy.”
The silence that followed lasted a few minutes. Then she took a
long breath and said, “Now are you going to tell me how you ended
up with him when he died? Because if it’s been almost four years
since I talked to him, it had been a lot longer for you.”
“It had been longer.”
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me why you were there, tell me how he
looked, tell me what he said. Tell me how it was when he died.”
Thirty minutes later we were still in the kitchen. The coffee had
finished brewing but sat unpoured, and Allison’s hair was air-
drying and fanning out a bit with static. I was still standing in the
doorway, refusing to cross the threshold and join her in the room.
“Did you believe him?” Allison asked.
“When he said he didn’t kill her?”