“We’re not trying to bring you any trouble,” I said. “But you might be able to help us stop some. We just want to know why your businesses were burned, Mr. Solich.”
He scowled and slurped his coffee. “How the hell am I supposed to know? Punk kid vandals set a place on fire, then come by and tell me why they did it? Is that what you think? Okay, here’s why they did it: Their parents didn’t love ’em and the schoolteachers didn’t, neither. Satisfied?”
“Your businesses weren’t burned down by kids, Mr. Solich,” Joe said, friendly but firm.
“You don’t know that.”
“But you do,” Joe said. “So why don’t you explain it to us?”
Solich’s only response was a belch.
“Seems there were some rumors about you selling stolen merchandise out of your shops,” I said. “Any chance that had something to do with these fires?”
Solich put two fingers in his mouth and cut loose with a whistle that made my hair stand on end. The crazy little terrier bounded over, gave Joe and me cursory sniffs, then settled down beside Solich, licking his hand.
“I’m retired,” Solich said again. He crossed his legs over bony knees, tightened the belt on his robe.
We waited. Five minutes passed, and Solich was silent. We didn’t push him, though, because it seemed he was working up to it.
“I’m not answering any questions about what I sold twenty damn years ago,” he said eventually.
“This isn’t about what you sold twenty years ago,” I said. “We don’t care, and to be honest, the police probably don’t, either. We just want to know why someone burned three of your pawnshops down.”
He sighed and scratched his head. “I did have three, didn’t I? Most I ever had. Started with a little dump over on Superior, moved into a bigger space, then got another, and another. Yeah, I was doing all right. Making money.” There was a wistful quality to his words. “Yeah, I guess I can tell you. I suppose it don’t do no harm now. Time’s passed.”
“Yes, it has,” I said.
He drank some more coffee. “People brought me quality items, and I bought them, no questions asked. That was the way I did business. Should be the way everyone does business. Over the years, though, I guess I got a pretty good handle on things. Paid better than some of the other guys, got more merchandise, moved more merchandise.”
“Swag,” I said. “Stolen goods.”
His lips curled slightly. “Merchandise.”
“Right.”
“Anyhow, the market in that neighborhood, hell, in most of the west side, was mine. Had been for a few years, and it wasn’t changing. There was another guy moving in, wanted my network. Wanted me gone. I told him to screw, he burned down my shops. Simple as that.” Solich drank some more coffee, then reached down to refill his cup.
“You’ve got to give us the name,” Joe said.
Solich frowned.
“We aren’t going to drag you into it,” Joe said. “But we’ve got to know.”
He sighed. “You two were worth a damn, you could figure it out, anyhow. But I’ll save you the trouble, because I don’t matter to him anymore, so I doubt he’ll come out here to give me grief. Guy’s name was Jimmy Cancerno.”
I leaned forward in my chair. “Cancerno? He’s in the construction business.”
Solich regarded me with amusement. “Man’s in a lot of businesses. Owns half a dozen pawnshops on the west side, too, though from what I hear he’s moving more into the cash loan operations now.” He made a sour face. “I never liked that.”
“Canerno wanted you out of business, so he burned you out?” Joe said.
Solich nodded. “Uh-huh. That was back when Jimmy was an up-and-comer. I suspect he’s long outgrown my sort of thing now.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police?” I said. “Just because you didn’t want them looking at your business operation?”
“Wasn’t too worried about that, since everything that would’ve been there to look at was burned up. I just didn’t want Jimmy to come any harder than he had. Man made his point, and I took it.”
“You think Cancerno would’ve done more than burn down your buildings?” Joe said.
Solich cocked his head at Joe. “You don’t know much about Jimmy, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, the man is one ruthless son of a bitch. Didn’t take me but one fire to figure that out, but he didn’t let it rest there. He didn’t want me to step out of his way, he wanted me to run out of it, and not look back. And he got what he wanted.”
“So what exactly is Cancerno into?” I asked. “Swag sales, loan-sharking? That it?”
Solich’s sunken eyes went wide, his eyebrows arched. “What isn’t Jimmy Cancerno into? Back then he was a punk kid, and swag and loan-sharking was about all he had. Man’s gone big-time since then, though. From what I hear, at least. If there’s an illegal enterprise on the near west side that he doesn’t run, I’d be surprised.”
“Organized crime, then,” Joe said. “Is he connected?”
“To what, the Italian mob?” Solich shook his head. “Hell, no. That goombah shit isn’t Jimmy’s style. Too independent for that. He’s got his hand in everyone’s games, but he keeps his distance. In that neighborhood, though, he’s the boss. Ain’t a damn thing goes down between Clark Avenue and Fulton Road that doesn’t get his stamp of approval first.”
We sat quietly for a moment, Solich stroking the terrier’s head, the sprinkler hissing away over the flowerbeds.
“You said you didn’t tell the cops anything because you didn’t want Jimmy to come at you harder,” I said. “What exactly does that mean? Do you think he’d kill?”
Solich turned to me with solemn eyes. “Mister, there’s a reason I retired.”
We stayed for a while longer, maybe ten more minutes, but Solich seemed to grow increasingly uncomfortable. Toward the end he was almost wincing every time we mentioned Cancerno’s name. I had the feeling he was beginning to regret being as forthright as he had been. Fifteen years of sitting on the patio in Parma and watching his dog and grandkids had lulled him into a sense of comfort. Now we’d come along and rattled him. I was glad we’d gotten to him first, though. I doubted he was going to be as cooperative with the next group that showed up asking what Solich knew about his old neighborhood and the people who ran crime in it.
“Do you buy his description of Cancerno?” Joe asked as I drove us back to the office. He spoke loudly, trying to be heard over the roar of the wind ripping through the cab of the truck.
“Yes. It didn’t seem like he was bullshitting us. Besides, it fits. Cancerno told me something the first time I met him about not liking the police in his business, and there was more to it than a general privacy concern.”
“If the guy’s everything Solich says he is,” Joe said, “then this thing is jumping up a few weight classes. Organized crime, even if it’s limited to a neighborhood. And, shit, if Cancerno was burning people out of business, the level he was playing at twenty years ago wasn’t too lightweight, anyhow.”
“Do we take a run at Cancerno?”
Joe shook his head emphatically. “No way. Far too early. Nothing to gain, and plenty to lose. I still want Corbett. What that guy knows about things both past and present could probably go a long way toward helping us straighten this out.”
Back at the office, a message from our spook in Idaho was waiting. Joe called him back immediately, but it wasn’t good news. No activity on any of Corbett’s accounts in the last ten days. He had two credit cards and a debit card and used both regularly. He’d stopped ten days ago.
“Tells us a couple things,” Joe said after he’d related the news to me. “One, Corbett might be dead.”
“Then why were Padgett and Rabold looking for him?”
“Because they didn’t know he was dead,” Joe said. “But that’s not the only possibility. The other possibility is Corbett’s on the run, hiding from somebody. And if he is, he’s smart.
He’s not using plastic because it can be traced. If that’s the case, it tells us something else, too.”
“What’s that?”
“That he expects the guys chasing him might have a pretty broad reach. Pretty good resources, if they can trace a credit card.”
“Right. Doesn’t help us find him, though.”
Joe nodded and sighed. “On to the next option, then.”
“Wearing out shoe leather.”
“You got it.”
We spent five hours at it and got nothing. For the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, Joe and I worked the streets together, trying to find someone who could put us in contact with Mitch Corbett. We went to his brother’s house and almost got the cops called on us. We went back to the Clark Recreation Center, got them to give us a phone list of the other volunteers who’d worked with Corbett, then went through it looking for someone who could help. Nobody could. We canvassed Corbett’s neighborhood, hitting twenty-five houses. Everywhere we went, with the exception of the brother’s house, we heard the same speech. Mitch Corbett was a nice enough guy, kept to himself, and, no, he hadn’t been around for a while. Not for a few days, at least. No, not sure how to get ahold of him, where he might have gone.
“Shit,” I said as we walked back to the car, “this has been a total waste, Joe.” We’d devoted most of the day to Corbett and had nothing to show for it. Meanwhile, a half dozen other aspects of the investigation sat untouched.
“We had to try,” Joe said. “He’s got answers, LP. You know he does.”
“Other people might have had answers, too. Instead we just lost time.”
We walked back to the car in a silent, shared frustration. The humidity had been building throughout the day. Even in the time it took to walk from the car to the house and back, I’d begun to sweat. Heavy purple clouds hung on the horizon to the northwest, out over the lake. Hopefully, they’d work their way down and into the city, dump some rain on us to cut the heat and humidity that had been increasing for days. It was hard to tell in August, though. Sometimes the storms pushed in off the lake late in the day, other times they simply passed along with a few teasing drops.
Back in the Taurus, Joe started the motor and cranked the air-conditioning up, blasting warm air out of the vents. He’d left his cell phone sitting on the console, and now he picked it up and checked the display.
“Missed a couple of calls.”
“You know, the damn things are portable for a reason,” I said, still awash in my frustration over a fruitless afternoon’s work.
Joe didn’t answer, just put the phone to his ear to play the messages. I stared out the window, tilting my face away from the hot, dusty air that was surging out of the vents. I gazed up the street at Corbett’s empty house, saw the stack of newspapers piled against the door, the mail bulging out of the box. Where the hell had he gone? And what did he know?
“That was Amos Lorenzon,” Joe said, breaking into my thoughts as he lowered the cell phone a minute later. “He wants to meet us. As soon as possible. He said he got something from the conduct reports.”
“Only a day late.”
“Yeah.” Joe’s face was intense. “He said it was big, LP. The kind of big that made him afraid to say a word about it over the phone.”
Amos Lorenzon met us at Bartlett’s Tavern on Lorain Avenue. Several people were at the bar, but Amos sat at a tiny table in the corner of the room, secluded. It had been a few years since I’d seen him, but he hadn’t changed much. The real shock was seeing him out of uniform. I tried to think of another time I’d seen him without the blue on and came up empty.
“How are you, son?” he said, shaking my hand. Amos had always called me son when we’d ridden together, but it had never been in a derogatory fashion, and I didn’t mind hearing it again.
“Doing fine,” I said. “Good to see you again.”
While he exchanged greetings with Joe, I pulled a third chair up and we all sat down. The table between us was about the size of a beer coaster. The bartender, a middle-aged woman with a hoarse voice, shouted over the music to ask Joe and me if we wanted a drink. We both declined.
“I hope you guys understand I wouldn’t have done this for just anybody,” Amos said. His skin tone was light for a black man but looked darker here in the shadows. There was gray in his fuzzy hair now and deep wrinkles across his forehead. He wasn’t tall, but he was built like a fireplug and had the strongest hands of anyone I’d ever known. More than once I’d seen him put what looked like a casual hand on the shoulder of a drunken disorderly and immediately bring the man to his knees with one squeeze.
“We know that,” Joe said. “And you should know how much it’s appreciated.”
“We’ll pay you whatever you think is fair,” I offered, even though we had no client to bill for the expense. I didn’t want Amos to feel like we’d taken advantage of him.
He scowled. “Great idea, son. It gets around that I released this information, I’m in deep enough without it looking like I took a bribe.”
“Fair point.”
“What have you got?” Joe said.
Amos gazed at the crowd around the bar, wary even though there was no way they could have heard us over the Pearl Jam that was pulsing through the speakers. This wasn’t any sort of police bar, and I had a feeling that was why Amos had selected it. He was nervous about the information he was about to offer us.
“I went through the conduct evaluations like you asked. For both Rabold and Padgett. Same day I’m doing that, Rabold gets killed.”
Silence.
“Didn’t think you’d have a whole lot to say about that,” Amos said. “But I don’t like it.”
“When I asked you to check out the conduct reports, I didn’t know the guy was going to get killed,” Joe said. “Now what do you have?”
“They’ve had their share of criticism,” Amos said. “Rabold got busted eight years back for letting a guy slip him a few hundred in cash in exchange for not arresting him for drunk driving. The guy talked about it at a party when there was a city official in the room, and Rabold got his ass chewed good on that. No suspension, though; it never made the papers so it was all done quietly. That was about the only serious knock on Rabold other than general complaints about laziness.”
“And Padgett?” Joe said.
“He’s a different matter.” Amos shifted in his chair, pulling closer to the little table. “Never gets a positive review, but he’s been around so long and he’s so loud and overbearing that I think some guys are intimidated by him. He’s had nearly a dozen complaints of excessive force over the years, but none of them developed into anything. Internal affairs investigated a rumor of him taking bribes over some swag sales about ten years back, but they cleared him.”
“Swag sales,” I said. “You know if that involved a guy named Cancerno?”
“I don’t remember any names being mentioned on that. It was just a few sentences saying he’d been checked out and cleared.” Amos stopped talking and sipped the glass of water that was on the table, his eyes on the bar again. I glanced over my shoulder and saw we were getting a stare from the bartender as she poured someone a fresh draft. Three guys sitting at a corner table in a bar, drinking nothing but one ice water between them. This was probably the most suspicious behavior she’d seen in a while.
“Tell you something else I found out that I don’t like,” Amos said. “When I asked records to pull those conduct evaluations for me, the girl there said something about Rabold being a popular guy. I didn’t know what she was talking about and said so. She told me there have been a couple requests for his evaluations in the past few weeks—one from internal affairs, another from the FBI.”
“FBI,” Joe echoed. “Wonderful. She have any idea what it was about?”
“No. But like an idiot, I decided I’d pursue it a little bit. I called a guy I know with internal affairs, asked him what he knew about Rabold. The man got seriously bothered. Wanting to know what the h
ell I was asking about Rabold for. I told him I was doing conduct reviews and was curious, but he didn’t buy it, and if he checks me out, I could be in some trouble. That is, if you two tell anyone I passed information along to a couple civilians.”
“We’re not telling anyone,” I said. “But this guy didn’t give you any idea of what’s going on with Rabold?”
“No. And he’s a guy I know well, too. A friend, almost. So his reaction surprised me.” Amos lowered his voice another level, which made him practically inaudible. “The records girl gave me the name of the FBI guy who requested Rabold’s evaluations. Name was Robert Dean. I checked him out just enough to find out that he’s with the RICO task force.”
Joe looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “RICO task force, and Rabold wearing a wire?”
“Sounds heavy,” I said. “And the RICO angle could bring Cancerno into the fold easily enough.”
“Wire?” Amos said.
“Rabold was wearing a wire when he was killed,” Joe said. “You think he could have been working for internal affairs? Maybe setting up Padgett?”
Amos leaned away from the table and held up his hands. “I have no idea, man. None.”
We were all quiet for a bit, thinking it over. Then Joe asked Amos if that was all he had.
“I’m not done yet,” Amos said. “But before I keep going, I want to ask you boys a straight question and get a straight answer in return. Fair?”
Joe and I nodded.
“All right. Now, Pritchard, you didn’t tell me what this was all about, and I respected that. But I remember some things, maybe more than you two think I would, and I’ve got my own ideas. Does this have something to do with Ed Gradduk getting killed?”
Joe left the answer to me.
“Yes. That’s what it’s about, Amos.”
He pursed his lips and frowned. “I was afraid of that. I remembered what happened between you and that guy before you made the jump to narcotics, son. Remember it didn’t go easy on you.”
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