Lincoln Perry 02 - Sorrow's Anthem (9 page)

Joe spotted the tail before I did, which was embarrassing because I
was driving and should have been paying more attention to the
mirrors than him.
“Check out the black Jeep Cherokee behind us,” he said when I
was at a red light. I shifted my eyes to the mirror and found the vehicle
in question. Its windshield was tinted but I could make out
two occupants in the front seat, both male.
“Yeah?”
“It was parked up the street from Corbett’s house,” he said.
“Maybe five houses down and across the street. Right where I’d put
it if I was watching the place.”
“And it pulled out when we did?”
“Uh-huh.”
The light went green and I pulled away. The Cherokee stayed
with us, lingering a few cars back but always pulling closer when
we neared an intersection, so there was little chance of losing us at
a red light. It’s the way you drive when you’re working one-car
surveillance.
“Well, hell,” I said.
Joe grunted.
“I’m growing curious,” I said. “You?”
“We could lose them easily enough,” he said. “But that wouldn’t
tell us anything.”
“Exactly. So what’s our move?”
He scratched the side of his head and sighed. “I suppose I’ll
shadow the shadowers.”
“Tough to do when you’re in my car.”
“Take me to the office and pull in at the curb. Make it look like
you’re dropping me off. I’ll go back in the parking lot and get my
car. Then you swing around the block. When you pull out, I’ll fall
in line behind them.”
It took us five minutes to get back to the office, and the Cherokee
was still with us. When I pulled up to the curb in front of the
building, the Cherokee slid into a street parking spot about a hundred
feet back.
Joe gave me more instructions. “I’m going to stand on the sidewalk
and talk to you for a bit, make it look more casual, like we’re
oblivious to them.”
“Okay.”
I sat with the engine idling while he stood beside the truck,
leaning in the door with his hand on the roof.
“I’ll stay here until traffic thickens up,” he said. “That way you’ll
have to wait to pull back into the street and it won’t look like you’re
just killing time.”
Joe was the best details cop I’d ever known, and he was proving
it again today. When the cars had backed up at the red light in
front of us, he slammed the door shut, waved at me, and walked
into the parking lot with his hands in his pockets. I stayed at the
curb till the light changed and the waiting cars slid through the intersection,
then pulled back into the street. The Cherokee pulled
with me.
I made a right turn on Rocky River Drive even though I had no
place to go but home, which was in the opposite direction. There
was a gas station on the north side of the street, and I swung in
there and topped off the tank. The black Cherokee cruised past
the gas station and pulled into the parking lot of the strip mall behind
it. I went inside, paid, and came back out to the truck. When
I pulled onto Rocky River again, this time headed back toward the
office, the Cherokee slid out of the parking lot and followed, with
Joe’s Taurus behind. We were a regular caravan of curiosity.
I turned left onto the avenue, passed the office, and drove the
seven blocks to my building. It wasn’t quite five yet, which meant
the gym office was still open. My manager, a sharp-tongued,
gray-haired woman named Grace, smiled when I stepped inside.
I’d lost track of the Cherokee by this point, but I was sure Joe still
had them.
“Hey, boss,” Grace said. “Off early today?”
“We’ve already purged the city of crime,” I said, trying to go
with her good humor even though my mind was elsewhere.
“That easy, huh?”

“You bet.” I took a protein shake from the cooler behind the
desk. I hadn’t eaten lunch, and my stomach was aware of it. “I’m
going to run upstairs and change clothes, then come down for a
workout. Is it crowded in there?”
“Mobbed. Six people instead of our usual three.”
“Funny.”
I went up to my apartment and changed into shorts and a
sleeveless T-shirt, then came back down to the gym, cell phone in
hand. Joe would call me when he had something, I was sure. I just
didn’t know how long that would take.
I was halfway through my third set on the bench press when the
phone rang. It was Joe.
“We’re all still watching your building,” he said. “I’ve got a plate
number from them. You want me to bail and use the plate number
to see who they are, or stick around and see what they do?”
“It’s up to you. You’re the one wasting time on them.”
“I’ll give it another hour.”
I finished my chest workout and moved on to back exercises,
pausing occasionally to talk with some of the gym regulars. Grace
had closed the office and gone home, but the members could still
come in after hours by using the keycard entrance at the front of
the building.
It was nearly six when Joe called back. I was done with the
weights and doing some stretches before going out for a run. I
paused to answer the phone.
“You taking off?” I said.
“Don’t have to make that decision, because they already lost interest
in you.”
“They left?”
“Uh-huh. And I followed. All the way to the police station.”
“What?”
“You heard me. They’re cops. Pulled into the officer parking lot
and got out of the car. One of the guys was plainclothes, the other
was in uniform. He went in the building while the plainclothes
guy went home.”
“Recognize either of them?”
“I was too far away to place them, if I actually knew either one.
I’ll use the plate number to get a name tomorrow.”
“If Corbett’s absence has attracted police interest, why hasn’t he
been released as a missing person yet?” I said. “And why are they
watching his house instead of going out looking for him?”
“And,” Joe said, “why does it appear they are doing it while
off-duty?”
We didn’t have the answers for those questions. Not yet, at least.

CHAPTER
9

There were twelve Corbetts in the Cleveland phone book.
Mitchell was listed, but I was pretty certain he wasn’t going to return
home anytime this evening, so I didn’t bother to call him. The
rest of the unfortunate Corbetts in town got the Lincoln Perry
dinner-hour-telemarketing approach to investigation, however.
Of the first five names on my list, only three were home, and
none of them had a relative named Mitch. One woman, Dorene
Corbett, responded to the question by asking if I was planning to
reunite her with her birth father. When I said that wasn’t the case,
she was disappointed.
“I thought maybe you were from one of those reunion shows,”
she said. “You know, like the ones they’ve got on Oprah now and
then? I like those shows.”
“So you’ve never met your father?” I said, trying to follow her
conversation.
“Of course I have. But I thought maybe you were looking for
someone with my name who hasn’t.”
“I see.
“There’s another Dorene Corbett,” she said. “I got her name
off the Internet once. But she lives in Georgia. Try Georgia,
okay?”
I assured her I would try Georgia, then hung up gratefully and
continued working through my list. On the seventh try, I found a
gentleman who had indeed heard of Mitch Corbett.
“Listen,” Randy Corbett said as soon as I’d asked my question,
“I’m tired of this. I don’t talk to Mitch no more and he don’t talk to
me. We never seen eye to eye on a damn thing, I don’t know where
he is, and I don’t care. Haven’t talked to him in more than a year.”
“But you are related to him?”
“I’m his brother, you jackass. You don’t know that, then why the
hell you calling me?”
“When I asked you if you knew Mitch, you said you were tired
of this. Has someone else been asking about him?”
“Just the police,” he said. “Shows what kind of good family I
got, only time I hear about my own brother is when the police are
looking for him. My mother’s probably rolling in her grave right
now.”
“When did the police ask about him, sir?”
“This morning.” He paused. “And if you’re not one of them,
who the hell are you?”
“A private investigator.”
“Can you tell me what he’s done? 'Cause the police wouldn’t.”
“As far as I know, he hasn’t done anything other than blow off
work. I’m just trying to track him down because he might know
something that could be useful to me in another matter. Are you
sure you don’t have any idea where he would have gone?”
“Absolutely not. We ain’t what you’d call close brothers, mister.
And I’m all the family that old boy’s got.”
“Did he have good friends out of town? Someplace he liked to
vacation, maybe?”
Randy Corbett let out a snort of derision so long that I thought
he might faint from lack of oxygen before he finished. Apparently
my question had been some kind of funny.
“Someplace he liked to vacation,” he said at last. “That’s good.
Mister, Mitch ain’t got enough money to make it to Sandusky, let
alone someplace worth going. I can’t tell you where he is, but I’d be
mighty surprised if it’s any farther away than the east side.”

I’d hardly finished my Cleveland Corbett roundup when the
phone rang. It was Amy.
“How you holding up?” she said.
“I’m up,” I said. “That’s all you can ask, some days.”
“Right. You had dinner yet?”
“Hadn’t even considered it. Hell, I never ate lunch, either.”
“How about I pick up a pizza and stop by?”
“Sounds good. You got something on your mind or just worried
about me?”
“I’m always worried about you,” she said. “But I’d like to talk
some things over, as well. Maybe you’d care to tell me a little more
about your relationship with Gradduk? Like why you hadn’t talked
to him in eight years?”
“We can go into detail when you get here, Ace. For now all
you need to know is I went cop and he went con. Worlds collided.”

Amy
arrived with a box of pizza and a bag of breadsticks about
twenty minutes later, and we sat in the living room with the lights turned low, eating off paper plates. I knew Amy had come largely
to get the rest of the story I’d promised her about my relationship
with Ed, but to her credit she ate nearly half a breadstick before
asking for details.
“So you went cop and he went con,” she said. “That’s all you gave
me this afternoon. Now I want the rest.”
I gave her the rest while we ate the pizza. She sat on the couch
with her legs curled under her and didn’t interrupt with questions
until I was done, which is unusual for Amy.

“Man,” she said when I was through, “that had to be hard on you, Lincoln. Sending your best friend to jail when you’d actually
set out to help him.”
“Had to be hard on him,” I answered, “being sent to jail by his
best friend.”
“Did you really believe he’d talk?”
I nodded. “I was sure he would. Maybe that was because Allison
did a good job of convincing me, but, yeah, I thought he’d talk to
stay out of jail. Don’t get me wrong, I expected he’d be bitter at
first, but I thought maybe later …” I shook my head and sighed.
“What?”
“I had this vision of how it would go,” I said. “There’d be a tense
period, sure, but then he’d clean his act up and we’d begin to relax
again. Things would get back to the way they used to be. He’d
marry Allison, and sometime, maybe a couple of years down the
road, we’d be out having a few beers, laughing, and then he’d turn
serious. He’d lift his beer to me and say …” I stopped talking.
Amy set her pizza down. “He’d say?”
“I don’t know. Thank me, I guess,” and even as I said it I felt
small. It had come out as if in my mind the situation had been
more about me than Ed. Or was that not just in the way I’d
phrased things?
“It sounds like this neighborhood is a tight little community,”
Amy said. “Kind of unusual now.”
I nodded. “It’s damn unusual. And most of the neighborhood
isn’t that tight, at all. It’s a pretty transient area, now. But there are
a few families scattered around that are vestiges of what it used to
be. That’s the group that stays close. Ed and Scott Draper were
both third-generation in the neighborhood. Everyone that had
been around for a while knew their families well. I was an outsider
at first; we didn’t move into that neighborhood until after my mom
died. But my grandpa had lived in that neighborhood for most of
his life, and my dad grew up there. When my mom died, my dad
pulled a career change, became a paramedic, and said he wanted to
live close to MetroHealth, because that was where his ambulance
ran out of. I think in reality he just wanted to go back to familiar
ground, because he was feeling a little lost. It was kind of like going
home to him.”
“How’d your mother die?”
“Killed by a drunk driver.”
She winced. “I’m sorry. I knew she’d died when you were young,
but I never knew how.”
“Right. I was only three when she died.”
“You remember her at all?”
“Vague things. I can still hear her laugh in my head even now,
but the only really clear memory I have of her face is the way she
looked the day I fell down the stairs. I nicked my head on something,
and it just bled like crazy. I can remember her standing at
the top of the steps and looking down at me with this utterly terrified
expression. That one’s just frozen in my memory.”
“I didn’t know your dad was a paramedic.”
“Yeah. He’d been working as a plant manager in Bedford, making
good money. Decided he wanted to do something else, and that
was what he picked. We ended up back in the city, and I fell in with
Ed and Draper, grew up around the families that had been around
there for generations, and for a while I was part of the club. In a
way, it was like growing up in a time warp. The neighborhood I got
to know was more like the neighborhood of the fifties and sixties,
before all the blue collars moved to the suburbs and the houses
around there started turning over faster than apartments.”
“And you’re not part of the club anymore?”
I shook my head. “Far from it, Ace. The old-timers hate me. It
was an unusually loyal group because it was getting smaller every
year. They looked out for each other. They didn’t send each other
to jail.”
I pushed out of the chair and went into the kitchen to pour a
fresh glass of water.
When I came back, Amy had closed the pizza box and was sitting
upright on the couch, less like a cat and more like a human for
a change.
“I have a tip for you,” she said. “It will be in the paper tomorrow,
but you deserve to hear it early.”
“Yeah?” Something about her attitude was a little off suddenly,
something in the way she kept her eyes away from mine while she
talked that made me uneasy.
“I got a call from a guy today who read my first story about Gradduk
and said he could tell me when Sentalar and Gradduk met.”
“That’s pretty huge,” I said, dropping back into my chair.
She nodded and took a sip of diet Coke but didn’t say anything
immediately.
“Well, where was it? Where’d they meet?”
“At a bar on Lorain,” she said. “This guy, he’s a bartender. Told
me that he remembered both Gradduk and Sentalar as soon as he
saw their pictures. According to him, they met in the bar about
two weeks ago.”
“He get a sense for whether it was a friendly meeting, romantic,
or professional?”
She pushed the diet Coke can around the coffee table with her
fingertips. “He said Gradduk was making a pass at Sentalar, and
she was trying to get him to leave her alone.”
I frowned. “That doesn’t sound like Ed.”
Amy pushed the can aside and rummaged in her purse until she
found a notebook. She flipped it open, said, “These are direct
quotes from the bartender,” and began to read.
“The guy, Gradduk, he kept putting his hand on her arm, leaning
down to talk real soft to her, pretty intense. And she shrugged
him off a couple times. I remember once she said, 'You don’t have
a prayer.’ And then he said, “I’m not taking no for an answer.’ And
she answered that he was going to have to take no for an answer.
They talked for another minute or two, and then she pulled away
from him and said, in a loud voice, 'Just leave me the hell alone.’
That was when I stepped in and told him he needed to listen to the
lady. And he ignored me—well, didn’t say anything to me—but he
did get up and walk off. And as he was walking, he looked back at
her and said, 'You know I’m not going away.’”
Amy closed the notebook and returned it to her purse.
I shook my head. “I don’t believe it. This is some loser just hoping
to steal fifteen seconds of fame by making up a story or fabricating
what he really saw.”
Amy raised her eyebrows. “He remembers the incident pretty
damn clearly. And Cal Richards was very interested. I called him
and filled him in late this afternoon, and he said it actually meshed
nicely with the picture he was developing of their relationship.
Thanked me for my reporting, like all of a sudden I was his favorite
person.”
“What’s the picture he’s developing?”
“He wouldn’t tell me a whole lot of it, obviously, but he did say
Anita Sentalar’s phone records showed numerous but brief calls
from Gradduk in recent weeks. And apparently the guy she works
with, the partner in her law firm, said he knew Gradduk had
shown up at the office a few times, and Sentalar had asked him to
leave.”
I sat with a half-eaten breadstick in my hand and felt myself beginning
a slow burn toward anger. This wasn’t fair to Ed. Not by a
long shot. It was just a snippet of a weeks-old conversation in a
crowded bar, but it would convict him in the public’s opinion even
more than he already was.
“You can’t run that story, Amy,” I said. “It’s ridiculous. That’s an
unsubstantiated, one-sided account of a conversation that may
never have even happened.”
This time her eyebrows arched so high they almost joined her
hairline. “Excuse me? I can’t run that story? Like you’re my editor
or something? This story is huge, Lincoln, and it’s good
journalism. I’m the first person to provide any sort of account of a relationship
between Sentalar and Gradduk. It’s the biggest scoop I’ve
had in months.”
“Biggest since I gave you the story of your life, you mean?”
Now the eyebrows lowered and her eyes narrowed. “What’s that
supposed to mean? That because you gave me a good opportunity
once, you’re allowed to dictate what I do and do not report?”
“You can’t run that story,” I said. “It’ll make Ed look like some
sort of a psycho stalker, and that’s absurd. If you’d ever known
the guy—”
“Known him when he was twelve, like you did? Give me a break,
Lincoln! You don’t even know who he was anymore. Think about
it: The last two times you even spoke to Gradduk, he was in the
process of being arrested. And justifiably so.”
I shoved off the chair and walked back into the kitchen, wanting
to get away from her, the hostility building so quickly that I was
afraid of losing my composure. I stood in the kitchen with my
back to her for a few minutes, cleaning already-clean dishes, taking
slow breaths, and keeping silent. Eventually, she stood up and
gathered her things. She left the living room but did not follow me
into the kitchen, walking instead to the door.
“It’s been a long time since you knew him, Lincoln,” she said.
“I knew him well during a time when boys become men, Amy,”
I said, stepping out of the kitchen so I could see her. “I think a person’s
character is pretty well established by then.”
“You arrested him, Lincoln! What sort of character assessment
were you making then?”
“There’s a difference between a guy being willing to move some
drugs when he’s broke and a guy who’s a sexual predator and a
murderer, Amy.” My voice was rising now, the towel I’d been drying
the dishes with clenched tightly in my hands.
“You hadn’t seen him in eight years’'
We stood there facing each other with cold stares, a pair of gunslingers
in a dusty street.
“I’ve got to get back to work,” she said eventually, turning and
putting her hand on the doorknob. “I didn’t want to run the story
without telling you what I had first. But it’s running, Lincoln. And
it’s the right thing for me to do.”
“Obviously. It’ll strengthen your resume for the tabloids.”
She jerked the door open so hard I was surprised she didn’t dislocate
her shoulder, stepped through it, and slammed it shut. I
threw the dish towel at the door; it hit with a splat and left a smear
on the paint as it slid to the ground. Count on me to come through
with the childish gesture.
After a minute, I sighed, walked over, and picked up the towel. I
cleaned up the rest of the mess in the living room, washed the rest
of the dishes, turned the lights off, and stood at the window. I
stared through it without seeing anything. Worlds collided, I’d told
Amy. They certainly had.