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’ve 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?”
“Yes.”
“I believed that before he said a word. Ed was a lot of things, Allison, but a murderer wasn’t one of them.”
“People change. Especially when they . . .”
“When they spend years in jail,” I said for her. She winced, but it wasn’t because she’d stopped the sentence to protect my feelings. It was a whole lot more personal than that.
“Yes,” she said. “That changes a person.”
“Not that much. I don’t believe it changes someone that much. But then I’ve never been to jail.” I paused a second before saying, “For more than a night, that is,” as if that detail mattered.
“He hadn’t been in any trouble,” she said. “Nothing since he got out. I watch the papers for his name.”
“You have any idea what he was doing since then?”
She shook her head.
“Me neither,” I said, and something in those two words made her cock her head and frown at me.
“You’re going to find out, though, is that it?”
I shrugged.
“Are you?” she prompted.
“Would it be wrong if I did?”
She shook her head, her eyes watching me with a measure of pity. “No, Lincoln. But it’s too late to make amends.”
“You think that’s what it’s about? I don’t have to make amends, Allison.”
“Right,” she said. “We never did. But I’m not sure you ever believed that.”
“I did. I do.”
She smiled slightly. “So tell me again why you went after Ed last night?”
“I wanted to help a friend.”
“He wasn’t your friend, Lincoln. Not anymore. Hadn’t been for years.”
“He’s my friend.”
“And you’re his,” she said. “That’s what you wanted to prove. To him, to Scott Draper, to anyone who ever knew the two of you. To the whole damn neighborhood, whatever’s left of it.”
I looked at the wall behind her.
“I’m not discouraging you,” she said. “I’m just reminding you of what you came here to tell me—he’s dead.”
“His name’s not. It’s still going strong right now, and headed in the wrong direction. You want the city to remember him as a killer?”
“No.”
We were quiet for a while, and then she asked if I ever saw anyone from the old neighborhood.
I shook my head. “Some people sent cards or called after my dad’s funeral. That was the old guard, though, most of them over fifty. As far as the kids we grew up with, no. You?”
She smiled at me the way you smile at someone who’s just asked an utterly absurd question.
“No, Lincoln. I’m not thought of too highly around there.”
“Neither one of us is, Allison.”
She tried to make her tone light. “We did what we had to do, right? Just didn’t work out the way anyone wanted it to. No regrets, Lincoln. No regrets.”
There wasn’t much more to say after that. I stayed in the kitchen with her a while longer. She finally poured the coffee. I drank mine while she cried over hers. She was dry-eyed again when I left.
“You look good, Lincoln,” she said as she walked to my truck with me. “It’s been a while since I saw you, too, you know.”
“I know.” I turned to her and gave her a hug. She squeezed me tightly and her fingernails bit into my back. I pulled away when I felt the first fresh teardrop on my neck.
“You’re still the most beautiful woman I never wanted to sleep with,” I said, and she laughed not because that was funny but beca
use she knew it to be true.
She watched me climb into the truck, then motioned for me to put the window down. When I did, she said, “Call me, Lincoln. Tell me what you learn.”
Her voice held both a note of pleading and one of command. It was a blend I’d heard before.
The house is dark because the sun sets behind it, the long shadows in the room making it seem later than it really is. I’m on the couch. Allison is on her knees in front of me. Her elbows are braced against my thighs, her hands clasped. It’s as if she is praying to me, and in a sense she almost is. Tonight I have been called upon to be a savior.
“You know I’m right,” she says. “I’ve talked to him until I simply have run out of things to say. He’s not listening. And he won’t listen.”
“He might,” I lie. “You can’t give up on him this easily, Allison. He loves you the same as ever. He’s just . . .”
“He’s just killing himself,” she finishes for me. “You’re trying to turn a blind eye to that, Lincoln, but you know it’s true. You’re the one who told me what Antonio Childers is like.”
I turn away from her and stare at the wall. Antonio Childers is one of the great social menaces in our city, a drug dealer who is also a suspect in nearly a dozen unsolved homicides. For several months now, Ed Gradduk has been working for him. It started as petty shit, muling and couriering mostly, but it’s escalated. Ed’s in construction, had a run of bad luck with lost jobs and bad bosses, and apparently he found an alternative income source. I haven’t seen much of him recently; I’m working nights for the Cleveland police, putting in as much overtime as possible, trying to get noticed and get promoted. That’s how you make detective, I know, and that’s what I intend to do.
“He’s going to get killed,” Allison repeats, and I avoid looking down directly into her face.
“I know,” I say softly. Allison and I have had this conversation before. Ed and I have had this conversation before, too. He told me to keep my eyes on the other side of the street when I pass him in my cruiser, and otherwise things would be normal. I told him it couldn’t work that way. We haven’t spoken much since.
“He’s gone all the time now,” Allison says. “We’ve had calls at all hours of the night. Once a guy sat in front of the house in a van for hours, just waiting for Ed to come back.”
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