Sorrow's Anthem

by Michael Koryta

  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 résumé 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.

  The interrogation room is about the size of a bedroom closet in Shaker Heights or Pepper Pike. They got a table in here somehow, and it seems to take up the entire space. If you attempt to walk around the table, you have to flatten yourself against the wall. This spoils any hope of a pacing-and-shouting routine like on TV cop shows, but that’s probably just as well.

  Sitting across from my oldest friend, the room and the table could not feel smaller to me. I’m not in uniform and he’s not handcuffed, thankfully, but even so the scenario feels wrong in a way I couldn’t have imagined before I found myself here, wrong in a way that makes my stomach roil and my hands tremble so much that I jam them under the table so he can’t see.

  “Ed,” I say, “I can’t delay things anymore. If you don’t talk now, there won’t be a plea bargain. You’ll do jail time. A few years of it.”

  His eyes are locked on mine, cold and unwavering. He has several days of beard on his face, but he still looks so young he could have just come from having a high school yearbook photograph taken instead of a mug shot. I don’t want to know what I look like.

  “Dammit, Ed,” I say after a few minutes of silence. “There’s nobody listening right now. No recorders, nobody behind a mirror, none of that shit. Its just you and me. Tell me something. Anything. Anything that I can take out of this room and use to get you protection.”

  He leans back, folds his hands neatly, and rests them on the table. His face is serene, his eyes indicting. His mouth shut.

  “You’re going to go to jail,” I repeat. “They’ve got you with possession of cocaine and intent to distribute. Got your conviction boxed and sealed and wrapped with a ribbon. Any leeway you might have had is going to be thrown aside to make you regret not talking. They’re going to go after you hard because you spoiled their plans.”

  No response.

  “You want to see Allison through a piece of glass, Ed?”

  Not a word.

  “Come on, Ed,” I say, and I hope the sense of desperate pleading isn’t as clear in my voice as it is in my heart.

  His eyes still on mine, he shakes his head slowly.

  “What are you worried about? You think Childers will kill you? He’s not that powerful of a force. We’ll protect you and Allison while we put him in jail. Once he’s in jail, the rest of his boys won’t be a threat. They aren’t loyal to Antonio; they’re scared of him.”

  I’m hoping the reference to fear will get through to him. Surely, this is the reason he isn’t talking—he’s afraid of Antonio’s retaliation. But for two full weeks I’ve had cop after cop and attorney after attorney promising Ed he’ll have total protection if he talks, and he has not.

  I look at my watch. Ten minutes late for my meeting with Pritchard and the deputy prosecutor already. This is it. My last chance in the box with Ed Gradduk. My last chance to produce what I have promised—testimony that will put Antonio Childers behind bars. My last chance to save Ed from prison, from Childers, from the potentially deadly impact at the bottom of the slope that his life has become.

  Ed has not spoken, nor has he removed his eyes from mine. They bore into me with all the intensity of a butane torch. He wants me to feel them. Wants me to feel what he has refused to say with words. I have betrayed him, my oldest friend. He wants to surround me with that knowledge, drown me with it.

  “I’m trying to help you here,” I say. “Damn you for not accepting that. You’ve gotten in over your head, brother, and you have got to get out. I’m offering you a hand here. But you’ve got to reach out and take it.”

  Silence that settles over me
like a lead cloak.

  “I just want to help you get your life back to where it needs to be, Ed. Try to understand that, could you?”

  He speaks then for the first and only time.

  “You, Lincoln, should have tried to understand. Before you brought the rest of these cops and prosecutors and judges into it. Before you took away any room I might have had to maneuver. To breathe. That’s when you should have tried to understand.”

  A knock on the door. Neither of us speaks. The knock is repeated. “Will you talk?”

  He shakes his head.

  A third knock, this time louder, more insistent. I hear keys jingling. They’re about to come in, to take him away, and after this it is done. He will be on his way to jail. I will have sent him there.

  A key slides into the lock.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  The handle turns. The door opens.

  “I know,” Ed Gradduk tells me, and then he is gone, back in handcuffs and out through a steel door that clangs shut behind him and leaves me alone in a little interrogation room with my head in my hands.

  CHAPTER 10

  Live in an apartment along a busy city street long enough and you learn to tune out traffic noise. In the time I’d been in my current building, the roaring motors, squealing brakes, and harsh horns of the busy avenue below had gradually become just background noise.

  When I woke the next morning, however, the sounds penetrated into my brain in a way they would usually not. I was lying half-awake in bed when a car out on the avenue slammed on its brakes. There was a brief shriek of tires skidding on pavement, but no subsequent crash as I’ve heard on other mornings. The tires were enough, though. I opened my eyes wide, fully awake, then closed them again as I recalled Ed in the street, the Crown Victoria blasting into him.

  The image sickened me. I lay with my palms pressed over my closed eyes, as if the added pressure could drive the memory from my mind. I thought of the way his body had snapped, his shoulders and legs moving in toward the car even as his waist headed in the opposite direction. That was the last position I’d seen him in, for all of a fraction of a second, before his body was sucked beneath the still-moving car and disappeared.

  And the sounds. I would never forget the sounds. A muffled whomp of impact after the scream of tires and squeal of brakes. A wet popping as the tires passed over his body, like a champagne bottle opened underwater. And then the same sound, but duller, the champagne gone flat this time, as they’d passed over him again.

  I pushed out of bed and went to the window. It was just past seven, traffic building to its rush-hour peak. I watched the cars move and I thought of Ed Gradduk and the blood that had been hosed off the pavement on Clark Avenue, how quickly it had dried. A thousand cars must have passed over the spot already. More than that. I wondered if any had slowed.

  The light up the street changed and the cars beneath me moved again, the procession passing through the intersection by our office a few blocks west. They moved quickly during the green-light cycle, then backed up again when it went red, came to a stop under my window, impatient drivers craning their necks and looking ahead to count the cars, try to figure out if they’d make it through the light in the next cycle, if they’d get to the office before the bagels were gone and the first pot of coffee cold.

  I left the bedroom, left the apartment, walked down the steps, and out into the parking lot. The gravel was cold and sharp against my bare feet. I wore nothing but a pair of gym shorts, but I walked around the building to the front sidewalk, stood there, and stared at the street as curious motorists gazed back at me.

  You can see something happen right before your eyes, something profound and important and consuming, and yet you can somehow miss really seeing it. I knew this from years of taking eyewitness testimony. The eyes bring information in and the brain processes it. Simple enough. Except that when the eyes tell the brain that they have just seen something go wrong, badly wrong, the brain doesn’t want to process it that way. If at all possible, it rationalizes, offers a sense of perspective or understanding that the eyes don’t have. The brain, you see, exists to explain. You can’t discourage it from doing that.

  But then there’s memory, that obnoxious little bastard of the subconscious. Memory holds the scene, holds what the eyes have shown. And, down beneath the conscious layer, memory holds it accurately. Holds the picture without the perspective. When I was a cop, that’s what we tried to get to. It takes a trigger, generally, something that affects the senses in such a way that it provokes the subconscious into action. Something like the squeal of tires I’d heard this morning.

  Joe was at the office when I arrived, a cup of coffee from the corner doughnut shop in his hand. His computer was humming through its preliminary motions, and he looked at me with surprise as I stepped inside. Joe usually beats me to the office by at least half an hour.

  “You run the Jeep plate number yet?” I said.

  He sipped his coffee and shook his head. “Just got here.”

  “It’s going to belong to Jack Padgett or Larry Rabold.”

  “Because they’re working on Gradduk’s case, so interest in Corbett wouldn’t be unreasonable?”

  “No,” I said. “Because they killed Ed Gradduk.”

  “Right. But that was an accident . . .” He stopped when I began to shake my head.

  “I’m not so sure it was.”

  He watched me with narrowed eyes and took a few swallows of his coffee. “That’s a hell of an allegation, LP. And I don’t understand where it’s coming from. Gradduk ran in front of their car. You saw it happen.”

  “I know. They backed up over him, Joe. After they’d already hit him. And at the time I assumed they were just trying to clear away from the body.”

  “Probably they were.”

  I shook my head again. “They’d rolled the front tires right over him. I heard the sound it made; they had to feel the rise of the tires. They knew they’d run him over, but they backed up anyhow and went over him again. I think it was to make sure he was dead.”

  Joe took a long, slow breath. “Come on, LP. Think about how fast that happened. Imagine if you’d been the driver. Hell, he was probably more horrified by what he’d done than you were standing there watching it. His first impulse was going to be to move away from Gradduk. To try to take it back, in effect.”

  “They didn’t slow until after he fell. He went down and they kept going for a second or two, then hit the brakes. By then they were way too close to stop without hitting him.”

  “They were going fast because they saw he was running across the street.”

  “They were going fast because they didn’t want him to make it across the street.”

  He shook his head. “If you’d come to me with this theory the night it happened, maybe I would have bought it. But not now. You’ve had too much time to consider it, restructure what you saw until it gave you something to work with.”

  “Wrong. When I saw it happen, I assumed it was an accident because that’s the way my brain was trained to think. You don’t expect cops to intentionally run a man down, so you assume that they didn’t. But they did.”

  “No, Lincoln. They didn’t.”

  “Answer me this, then: Why did Padgett and Rabold go to Ed’s house to make the arrest in the first place?”

  “Richards said they got the tip from the liquor store owner.”

  I nodded. “Exactly. They got a tip even though it wasn’t their case. And rather than follow police protocol, which they both know from years on the force, and pass the tip along to the detective on the case, they went down alone. And Ed fought them and ran. Why? If he was innocent, why’d he run?”

  “Maybe he wasn’t—,” Joe began, but my look shut him down and he looked away and nodded. “Right. We’re assuming he was.”

  “He told me he was,” I said. “And I believed him. Still do.”

  “It’s a hell of a thing to suggest. You’re talking about two cops, LP. You
know what you’re going to get started with this?”

  “I’ve got an idea.”

  “I don’t know a thing about Padgett, but I’ve been around Larry Rabold more than a few times. Seems like a nice guy. Solid cop, too.”

  “Run the plate number,” I said. “See if I’m wrong.”

  After a long pause, he turned away from me and logged on to his computer. Private investigators in Ohio have access to the motor vehicle bureau’s database, and it isn’t hard to run a license number. He was busy for a few minutes and then looked up.

  “The Jeep is registered to Jack Padgett.”

  We sat and looked at each other.

  He groaned and rubbed his face with his hands. “Shit, Lincoln.”

  All I could do was agree.

  The first thing I wanted to see was a copy of the officer’s incident report from the botched arrest of Ed Gradduk. Such reports aren’t public record, not the details at least, but that’s the advantage of having worked with the police department. We could always find some old friend who was willing to help out with the minor stuff. Well, Joe could, at least. I had my contacts at the department, sure, but Joe was a legend. He had friends with the police he hadn’t even met yet.

  He made a few calls and got a promise that the report was on its way. When he’d hung up, he lifted a newspaper off the desk and held it in the air. “You read Amy’s article yet?”

  “No.”

  I’d almost forgotten about Amy’s discovery, thanks to my preoccupation with Padgett and Rabold. Now I took the paper reluctantly. A glance at the front-page, above-the-fold headline was almost enough to make me put it down: MURDER SUSPECT WAS UNWANTED PRESENCE IN VICTIM’S LIFE.