She brought it up, though. “Look, Lincoln, I didn’t suggest Gradduk was some sort of perverted loser who killed the woman because she’d rejected him. I just put out what I knew—”
“And let the readers determine he was a perverted loser who killed the woman because she’d rejected him,” I finished, but there was no hostility or bitterness in my voice.
“I’m sorry if that’s how you feel,” Amy said softly.
“It’s okay, Ace. I didn’t like it. I still don’t. But you did your job, and you’d do the same thing again, and I guess it’s easier for me to take because I know that’s the case.”
“I think your day mellowed you out, Lincoln.”
“That’s one word for it.” Hollowed was another one, but I didn’t want to say that out loud.
We sat together and watched a few courageous stars try to make themselves visible in a sky clouded with a city’s light pollution. Traffic hummed along the avenue beneath us. I finished the beer and wanted another, but didn’t get up.
“So Anita Sentalar knew Mitch Corbett,” Amy said. “And he’s been missing for a few days. A couple cops were looking for him, too. The same cops that killed Ed Gradduk and filled an incident report about it with lies. And now one of those cops is dead. Is that the gist?”
“Basically.”
She leaned back in the lounge chair and made a light clicking noise with her tongue. “What a mess.”
“That’s what Cal Richards said.”
“Well, he was right. What’s your plan now? I assume you haven’t decided to take up permanent residence on this roof.”
“Some nights, it doesn’t seem like that poor an idea. But I’ll probably come down eventually. And when I do, I’ll have to get back to work. Because we haven’t done anything yet. Generated a hell of a lot of questions today, and got damn few answers to go with them.”
“Where do you start?”
I raised my eyebrows and stared at the sky, wondering that myself.
“I suppose we’ll have to start with the fires,” I said. “I don’t know what connects fires that happened almost twenty years ago and fires that happened last week, but it seems something does. The only link we had is dead now, though.”
“Well, if you need any help, just ask.”
I started to thank her, then realized she could actually help. I reminded her about the house that had burned on Clark Avenue and explained again that it had belonged to the same group that owned the home on Train Avenue.
“I want to know more about the Neighborhood Alliance,” I said. “Run them through the paper’s archives and fax me any article that mentions them, would you?”
“Sure. And I’ll see if we ran a story about this fire on Clark.”
“Thanks, Amy.”
Her face was lost in shadows, but even so her eyes looked intense. “That’s pretty damn interesting, Lincoln. Two fires to these houses in one week, both of the homes vacant?”
“There’s more,” I said, remembering now details I’d left out the first time. “Mitch Corbett has a background in demolitions. He’s experienced with fuses and explosives, would have a good idea of how to go about setting a fire.”
“You think he killed Anita Sentalar?”
“Could be. But why the other fire?”
“Arson for profit?”
I shook my head. “These houses are old, broken-down homes in a low-rent neighborhood, Ace. Insurance claims on them wouldn’t be worth a damn.”
“So why the second fire?”
I shook my head. “Like I said before, I’m coming up with questions, not answers. That has to change.”
She didn’t stay long after that. When she left, she gave me a hug, and somehow the softness of her hair and the smell of her seemed to cleanse some things from me, like the coppery odor of Larry Rabold’s blood and the chilling sound of his daughter’s scream. There was no more discussion of her article, and I knew there wouldn’t be again. It was done now, and I was glad. True friends are precious, and lost friends are the kind of ghosts that never wander far away. I knew too much about both ends of that.
CHAPTER 17
Andrew Maribelli was a tall, thin man with a shock of gray hair that was combed over to hang long on the right side and was trimmed short on the left. It gave him an off-balance look, as if his head were always tilted. His chest was broad but his shoulders were small, pointed knobs of bone. The starched blue shirt he wore looked like it had been pulled over a door, all broad and flat with those pointy shoulders at either end.
When he stepped into his narrow office in the Cleveland Fire Department headquarters on Superior Avenue at eight that morning to find me sitting behind his desk and Joe studying a framed photograph on the wall, he handled it well enough.
“Gentlemen,” he said, closing the door gently behind him, showing no real confusion, “while I always do encourage my guests to get comfortable, I prefer to know when they’re arriving. You know, so I can tidy up the place.”
I stood up and came around the desk, and Joe turned to face him. When I’d called Joe at seven that morning to suggest we take a run at Maribelli, he’d been in favor. Putting our interest where Rabold’s had been right before he was killed could be a productive venture. And probably a risky one.
“I’m Lincoln Perry. I spoke with you on the phone yesterday.”
He frowned. “Uh-huh. And I told you—”
“I know what you told me,” I said, “and it doesn’t matter anymore, Mr. Maribelli. Because the cop whose interest you were protecting is dead. He was murdered.”
He winced. “Shit. I’d heard that a cop . . . but I didn’t know, I mean, I didn’t hear the name, right? Didn’t know it was that guy.”
“It was him,” I said. “He was shot in his basement. We found the body.”
Maribelli sighed heavily and moved past me, squeezed around the desk, and dropped into his chair.
“We were cops, too,” Joe said, and Maribelli looked up as if noticing him for the first time. “I was one for thirty years. So was my father. So was his father. So this matters to us. A cop gets killed, we don’t like it. And we want to know why it happened.”
Maribelli’s reservations about talking to us the previous day had been strong enough, but there’s a sense of brotherhood between people like cops and firefighters, and we were counting on it helping us here. He studied us for a moment, silent, but then he nodded and leaned back in his chair.
“You said you found the body?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
I nodded.
“If my old case is so damn important, though,” Maribelli said, “why do I have PIs down here instead of a homicide detective?”
“Things go the way we expect,” Joe said, “and you will have a homicide detective down here. Anything we produce, they’ll get. But slowing down our work isn’t helping them. Not a bit.”
“Well, what do you need?” Maribelli leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “Those fires the officer wanted to know about, they happened seventeen years ago. Three fires on the near west side, all in a short time during the summer, all to property owned by a man named Terry Solich. But I assume you’ve already got that much.”
“We read the old newspaper articles,” I said. “According to them, you investigated the fires, determined them to be arson.”
He nodded.
“What can you tell us about the investigation?”
“Speculation was that Solich was being burned out of business. He ran a couple pawnshops around that neighborhood, was generally regarded as a pretty shady operator. Police theory was that he either pissed off the wrong guys, or somebody was trying to muscle in on his action. They thought Solich knew who was responsible, but he wasn’t saying. That was frustrating to the police and me because by the time the third business went up in flames, it was becoming a pretty big pain in the ass. Scaring people in the neighborhood, getting a lot of media atte
ntion. We wanted to put it to bed, and Solich wasn’t helping us at all, even though he probably could have.”
“And you never did put it to bed?” Joe asked.
Maribelli started to shake his head, then stopped. “Well, we did and we didn’t.”
“Meaning?”
“No arrests were made, but we had a suspect who looked good for the fires. By the time we got onto him, though, he was dead. Killed himself.”
“Killed himself,” I echoed. “You remember the name?”
“Wouldn’t have yesterday, but since I just looked this over with the cop, I can tell you. Suspect’s name was Norman Gradduk.”
He pronounced it gra-duke instead of grad-uk, but that didn’t lessen the impact of the name. I felt something inside me tighten.
“How’d you come to him as the suspect?” I said.
“Tips from the neighborhood. One of the beat cops down there had his ear to the ground, passed some news back to Conrad, the police detective. He and I had been looking at another guy, a guy we’d interviewed in another arson case about a year before, same neighborhood. Word around there was that it was this Gradduk guy, though. Time we came around to see him, he’d been dead a few days already. Shit got crazy that fall, Conrad was busy and so was I, and the case went cold. Best suspect was dead, anyhow. Fires had stopped.”
“What do you remember about the fires themselves?” Joe said.
It was a good question. Like any specialist, Maribelli remembered more about the details of the case than the generalities of it.
“All three were set using a small explosive and a kerosene accelerant,” he said without hesitation. “The guy ran fuse cord around the building and sprayed the walls down with the accelerant. That ensured that when the place went up in flames, they weren’t going to be put out until the building came down. I suspected he was using a timing device, too. The fuse cord he used was fast-burning stuff, you couldn’t just touch a match to it and run away, have the place blow a few minutes later. It wasn’t as fast as Primacord, that shit the military uses that goes up at something absurd like ten thousand feet in a second, but it was too fast to use with a match-light technique.”
Joe and I exchanged a glance. It was the same method Richards had described to us.
“We’re not sure what, if anything, these old fires have to do with a few recent arson fires in the same neighborhood,” I said. “But what you just described sounds like it fits with the new fires, and some of those old names are popping up again. You mentioned the tip came from a beat cop in the neighborhood. You remember who it was?”
He groaned and looked at the ceiling. “Shit, I’m not the best with names. Yesterday morning my wife asked me to sign a card for her sister, and I wrote ‘Dear Alice,’ when the woman’s name is Allison. You should’ve heard my wife. She pitched a fit.” He looked back at us and grinned. “Or bitched a fit, maybe. That’s a little more like it.”
“The name?” I said.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m working on it. Oh, man. Seventeen years ago, this is asking a lot.” He screwed his face up, an expression of intense effort, but then sighed and shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I can’t think of it.”
“Wouldn’t have it in the old files, something you could reference?”
“I went through the file yesterday. I don’t remember seeing that cop’s name in it. Maybe it’s in Conrad’s notes, if you can track them down. But it wasn’t in mine. I had most of the technical stuff.”
I didn’t want to put a name in his mouth rather than have him offer it, but I had to ask. “Could it have been Jack Padgett?”
He frowned. “Could it have been? Sure. Could have been a lot of things, though. I honestly can’t remember.”
“All right. What about the suspect you’d been looking at before you got the tip on Gradduk?”
“I know that one. Guy’s name was Mitchell Corbett. Local guy, had a background in demolitions, had been a suspect in an earlier fire, like I said.”
I turned and looked at Joe, who was gazing back at me.
“You know,” he said, “we really need to find that son of a bitch.”
We started with an information broker in Idaho. The term “information broker” was code for a government spook and a hacker. The guy was ex-CIA and knew how to get into most of the computer databases that you aren’t supposed to be able to get into. There are a handful of guys like this across the country, and while it’s not commonly discussed, any private investigator worth a damn knows one or two of them. You don’t ask for help from a guy like that on a routine investigation, though. That kind of help is for a special case, only. There are a couple of reasons for that: risk and cost. Make a habit of having information you shouldn’t have, and you’ll get into trouble eventually. And guys like our man in Idaho don’t work cheap. When Joe made the call, he did so knowing that our nonexistent expense account was going to take a serious hit. He didn’t hesitate to do it, though.
Joe asked for an activity check on Mitch Corbett’s credit cards and bank accounts. If he’d made a credit card purchase, we’d know where and when. Same for the debit card, same for an ATM withdrawal. It was the right place to start. The guy in Idaho told Joe to give him a few hours to work on it, then he’d call us back.
I checked our fax machine and found a dozen pages waiting in the tray. Amy had remembered my request. She’d sent a few articles about the Neighborhood Alliance, along with a complete list of the Alliance’s properties, compiled from the recorder’s office database. The early articles were trivial things—a few clichéd quotes about rebuilding a sense of community by rebuilding houses, a mention of Sentalar as the director, and damn little else. The last article was more significant, however. Just two months old, it explained that the Neighborhood Alliance, with the assistance of funding from the city and a fifteen-million-dollar HUD grant, was going to be converting the old Joseph A. Marsh Junior High School building into apartments, all of which would be rented at low rates to people who met limited-income requirements. The old brick school, which was now close to ninety years old, had stood empty for more than a decade. Like West Tech, it had been closed shortly after I passed through its halls. I had that effect on a school, apparently.
West Tech, which was an equally historic building, had also been converted into apartments within the last few years. I’d been in the building once just to see how it looked, and I was impressed. They’d somehow managed to turn the school style into something that was so unique it was appealing. The tenant mailboxes were positioned between the old locker bays, the gym had been converted into a workout room, the auditorium was available for special functions. Upstairs, the classrooms had become apartments—some of them two levels, with spiral staircases and wide banks of windows. While the rent wasn’t aimed at the lower-income tenants the way the Joseph A. Marsh project seemed to be, it had gathered a lot of favorable publicity when it was completed. I wasn’t surprised to see that a similar idea had been pitched for the Joseph A. Marsh building.
“Whatever money was tied into the Neighborhood Alliance for the houses just got kicked up to the big leagues,” I said to Joe, and showed him the article. “There’s a fifteen-million-dollar grant involved in this one, alone.”
While he read the article, I looked through the recorder’s-office list Amy had included. It showed that the Neighborhood Alliance currently owned nine houses in addition to the school building, all on the near west side. Two of the nine were vacant lots now, I knew, the houses that had once stood on them turned to ashes. The ninth house on the list had just closed on a sale a week before, for the inspiring sum of thirty-two thousand dollars. That made me shake my head. Nine vacant houses, crumbling mortgage foreclosures, probably, in the neighborhood I’d grown up in. I thought of the old black-and-white photos on the wall in the Hideaway, the houses and businesses tall and solid, clean and well maintained, the men and women standing in front of them with some pride.
“Interesting,” Joe said, finished with the
article. “Considering what your friend had to say about cutting in on somebody else’s revenue stream, this would seem to have some potential. We’ve got a couple hours to wait and see if our guy in the mountains can get a line on Corbett. I suppose we could find that consultant Cancerno mentioned, the HUD guy.”
I shook my head. “I think we’ll use the time to go see Terry Solich, ask why my dead friend’s dead father would have wanted to burn down his businesses. Or why Mitch Corbett would have.”
“Guy didn’t help the cops all those years ago,” Joe pointed out.
I smiled. “Right. But the cops didn’t break his arms, either. I’ll get him to talk.”
“What did I tell you about control?” Joe said. “We don’t need to start by breaking arms, LP. Not when the man has fingers.”
CHAPTER 18
Terry Solich had liver spots on his face and on his bald head, and his sunken eyes were rimmed with dark circles. It was closing in on noon, but he opened the front door of his house wearing a robe, with a pot of coffee in one hand and a ceramic mug in the other.
“You gotta be kidding me,” he said. “How many times I have to tell you people, I’m not going to join your stupid neighborhood watch program.”
“We don’t live around here,” Joe said.
“And the neighborhood looks damn peaceful already,” I said.
“You bet your ass,” Terry Solich said.
Five minutes later we were sitting on the backyard patio. A sprinkler was hissing out in the grass, casting a fine spray on a row of flowers that grew along the fence. A little terrier ran in circles out on the lawn, barking at nothing in high, incessant yips.
“I moved out of that damn neighborhood fifteen years ago,” Terry Solich was saying. “I’m retired now. I got grandkids. Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
He’d made the mistake of offering coffee before we’d gotten to the point of our visit, and right now I figured that was the only thing preserving our interview. Solich was a cranky old bastard, but he wasn’t so low as to throw us out of his home before we’d finished our coffee. Manners.
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