She sat down on the couch and shoved the bottle to the side. I took a chair across from her and leaned forward, my elbows braced against my knees. Joe sat beside me.
“Please tell us about Padgett,” I said. “What happened with him?”
The ceiling fan turned overhead, the blades shedding dust. I waited for her.
“I was the one who suffered,” she said. “I was the victim.”
“I know,” I said.
“Norm just felt sorry for himself.”
“What do you mean?” Joe said.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Mrs. Gradduk . . .” I tried to make my voice as soothing and sympathetic as I could without sacrificing a tone of command, the voice I’d used as a cop dealing with hysterical accident victims or witnesses to brutal violence.
She looked back at the empty glasses. “I won’t talk about it. Not again.”
“It’s important, Mrs. Gradduk. I think it is very important.”
She lifted her hands to her hair, tugged on the ragged gray ends, pulled until the skin lifted around her skull. She made a low hissing sound as she did it.
“You can tell us,” I said. “It’s just the three of us in this room, Mrs. Gradduk. You don’t need to be scared.”
“That’s what the lawyer said,” she told me, releasing her hair. “And he was lying, too.”
I nodded. “Yes, let’s talk about the lawyer. We know about him.” I reached in my pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper with Gajovich’s picture printed on it. I’d made a copy before I’d left the office not too many hours earlier. “Was this the lawyer that came to see you?”
She looked at the picture with wary distaste, as if she wanted to spit at it but was afraid Gajovich might spring to life if she did.
“Was this the lawyer?” I asked again.
She laughed, a fast, breathless series of rasping chuckles that made the skin at the back of my neck prickle. It was the kind of laugh you might hear in the corridors of an asylum late at night.
“Oh, you know he’s the one. Your father sent him. Don’t pretend he didn’t. They were the ones to blame, you know. Norm and your father, the both of them. Norm started it, and then, your father, he tried to make it worse. But I wouldn’t let that happen. I wouldn’t let that happen to us.”
“So my father sent this man to talk to you,” I said, pointing at Gajovich’s picture. “But how did that make it worse?”
“I protected us,” she said. “The lawyer wanted to make . . . wanted to make a spectacle out of us. He came here and told me to talk to him, just like you are. And I talked, and talked, and talked. And then when I was done, he told me what it would be like. I asked if it couldn’t be handled quietly, and he laughed at me. Told me it was going to be a big story. Told me I’d have to be on TV and in the papers, in courtrooms and on the radio. Me and my son. As if we hadn’t been through enough. As if I hadn’t been through enough. That’s what your father did for me.” She smiled too wide, mouth open, blackened cavities visible along her molars. “But I didn’t let it happen. I protected us. Norm couldn’t do it, but I did it. I did it for my son.”
Joe was leaning forward now, and I found myself doing the same, edging my chair closer to the coffee table.
“What happened with Padgett, Mrs. Gradduk? You’ve got to explain what you’re talking about.”
She shook her head and pushed back into the couch.
“Tell me.”
“It’s all so long ago.”
“But it still matters,” I said. “More than you can imagine, it matters.”
“No.”
“Explain it to me.”
“I’m not doing this!” she shrieked, her hands back in her wild gray hair again, clawlike fingers locking on the strands. “I’m not!”
“Just tell me what happened,” I said. “Tell me so I can know how to help.”
“No!”
“Yes!” I shouted back, rising out of my chair. “Damn it, you are going to tell me, because your son is dead and I need to know why!”
She looked up at me and cowered against the couch, then slumped and began to sob. She cried like a child, her fingers tightening on her hair, her face shoved against the couch cushion. Joe had reached up and put his hand on my biceps, as if to restrain me, but Alberta Gradduk’s reaction had frozen me more than any physical force could. I looked at her and saw her the way she’d been once, a beautiful young woman with a husband and a son and a future, and I crossed to the couch and dropped to my knees and put my arms around her. She resisted at first, pushing at me, but then she gave up and pressed her face into my chest and cried. I closed my eyes and felt her dirty gray hair against my neck and jaw, and I knew that I would not ask her again. I wanted to know, but I did not want this woman to have to tell it to me.
The longer I listened to her cry, felt her skeletal body heave beneath my arms, the more I began to wonder if I even really wanted to know.
Back to the office, under a pewter sky that darkened as I drove, heavy with the promise of rain. It was hardly past eight, but the humidity was already noticeable. The windows were down, and the air that rushed in through them was thick, seeming to pass over me like a soft fabric. At every stoplight sweat sprang from my pores. The digital thermometer in the corner of my rearview mirror gave the temperature at eighty degrees, but the still, muggy quality made it seem hotter. This in the early morning. I left the air-conditioning off, though, preferring to feel the wind hard against my face, forcing my eyes half-shut as I accelerated.
“You backed off pretty quickly,” Joe said after we’d been on the road for several minutes. “Quickly for you, at least.”
“She was my friend’s mother, Joe,” I said, and then regretted it. I’d just confirmed exactly what he was so worried about, telling him I’d changed my normal approach because of my personal connection to the case. He didn’t say anything, though. Just drummed his fingers on the door panel and stared out the window.
“It was Gajovich,” I said. “We got that much, and that matters. He went in there with his stories about television interviews and courtroom appearances and he scared her into silence. To protect Jack Padgett. And his brother’s running the show in that district.”
“We need to talk to someone,” Joe said. “This morning. Cal Richards, maybe.”
“Or Dean and Mason. Neither of them gives a shit about Ed, but they’re on the corruption task force. If one Gajovich is involved, let alone two, they need to know about it.”
“I want to start with Richards,” Joe said. “He’s the only guy in the mix that I really trust.”
“Call him, then.” I wanted Richards involved, too. The names we were connecting to this went too high now. We stood on the edge of an investigation that was going to rock the city’s law enforcement community and horrify the public. I didn’t want any part of it. All I wanted to do was pull Ed Gradduk’s legacy away from the fallout zone.
We were on the interstate now, doing seventy-five, and the wind was too loud for conversation. Joe rolled up his window, and I followed suit, then turned the air-conditioning on. Once the cab was quiet, Joe took out his cell phone and made the call into police dispatch. He was told Richards wasn’t available, so he asked the dispatcher to get Cal a message as soon as possible. It was urgent, Joe said.
The sky was still darkening—pale clouds skimming quickly across the horizon, heavier, purplish clouds trudging somberly behind. I’d had all of four hours of sleep—after surviving a fire and nearly splitting my skull open on a brick wall—and the fatigue hung heavy with me, tightening the big muscles in my back and shoulders and creeping into the small muscles with little bursts of pain. I rolled my neck and winced.
The thermometer in the mirror said eighty-two. Climbing. We didn’t talk much until I was back off the interstate, on Lorain. Traffic was thin, and I caught green lights heading back to the office. As I drove, a few fat drops of rain broke free from the clouds and splattered the win
dshield. There was thunder, but it was faint, the heart of the storm still miles away.
I turned onto Rocky River, then made another immediate turn into the narrow parking lot behind our building. A few more unusually heavy raindrops fell, plunking off the hood of my truck like golf balls as I pulled into a parking space beside a green van. I shut the engine off, and the van’s side door slid open. A short, muscular Hispanic man stepped out, holding a handgun down against his thigh. Ramone, the guy from Jimmy Cancerno’s construction crew. He didn’t look any friendlier today than he had in the picture Dean and Mason had shown me the night before. He tapped on my window with the gun, then nodded his head at the backseat of the van. Whoever was driving it started the motor.
“Richards may have to wait,” I said to Joe. “I think we’re on our way to see Jimmy Cancerno.”
CHAPTER 24
Ramone didn’t turn out to be the talkative sort. I was wearing a gun, and he took that, then waved me into the van without a word while he checked Joe for a weapon. He moved smoothly and professionally, not like a construction worker who had no experience at this sort of thing. That wasn’t exactly comforting.
“You taking us to see somebody, or to kill us?” Joe asked while Ramone ran a hand over Joe’s ankles, making sure there wasn’t a gun holstered down there. It seemed like a fair enough question, and I was hoping for an answer myself.
“Get in,” was all Ramone said.
I was already in the van, and Ramone had his back to me. It would have been the perfect opportunity to jump him, had there not been another guy in the passenger seat, pointing a SIG-Sauer automatic at my chest. This guy looked like he went about 250 pounds. Just in the shoulders.
Joe got into the van, and I slid down the seat to make room for him. Ramone climbed in behind him, then slammed the door shut and sat on the floor with his back against the door, the gun trained on Joe.
“Classy van,” Joe said, gazing around with all the trepidation of a man settling onto a familiar barstool and scanning the room for friends. “Is this the one with stow-’n’-go seating? That always sounded like a hell of a feature. Don’t know exactly what it means, but it sounds good.”
“Shut up,” Ramone said.
Joe frowned at him, then gave me a sidelong glance. “Not real friendly,” he said.
“No.”
I didn’t recognize the lumberjack in the passenger seat, who had turned around once Ramone was inside, or the driver. I could see him only through the mirror, but that was enough to show that he was older, with gray hair and wrinkles across his forehead. He took us out of the parking lot and back onto Rocky River. From there we pulled onto I-90 and headed east. The van rode smooth. So smooth that Ramone’s gun never wavered.
We were on the highway for a while before the driver slowed and pulled into the exit lane. We got off on West Forty-fourth, then turned onto Train Avenue, back in my old neighborhood—Jimmy Cancerno’s empire.
The van driver pulled off the street at a place called Pinnacle Pawn Plus. Judging from the sign in the window, the “plus” referred to cash loans, tobacco products, and lottery tickets. Something for everyone.
Behind the store was an old warehouse. A pickup truck and a green Mercedes sedan were parked in front of it. When the van came to a stop, Ramone rose to a crouch and slid the door open. Then he waved at us with the gun.
“Out.”
We climbed out and stood in front of the warehouse while the three of them gathered around us. Thunder rumbled overhead, closer now than before. A fat raindrop hit the back of my neck, slid down my spine with a chill that continued even after the water was gone.
“Inside,” Ramone said.
I went first, opening the door and stepping into a small office, the main room of the warehouse empty and dark behind it. Jimmy Cancerno sat in the office, his feet propped up on a steel desk, watching a flat-screen television that hung on the wall. He turned as we entered, then scowled when he saw the gun in Ramone’s hand.
“What the hell are you doing?” he said.
“You said make sure they come,” Ramone replied. “You said don’t give them an option about it.”
“That doesn’t mean you need to act like a damn fool,” Cancerno snapped. He was wearing glasses today, and his gray hair was slightly tousled, not the perfect comb off the forehead I’d seen before.
Ramone just shrugged, not looking particularly chagrined, then led the other two past us and into the warehouse. Cancerno let them go without a word. He motioned at a set of chairs in front of his desk.
“Sit down.”
We sat. He took his feet off the desk, turned off the television, and swung around to face us.
“Look, I didn’t tell that idiot to bring you in here at gunpoint. I just told him to make sure he got you here.”
“Well, he got us here,” Joe said. “Efficient, if nothing else.”
Cancerno took his glasses off, folded them, and set them on the desk. There was none of the irritable quality to him today, just calm and control.
“There are different sorts of problems,” he said. “You got minor nuisances—a flat tire, leak in the roof, maybe a splinter in your ass. They’re frustrating, you know? Annoying. But they aren’t big deals, either. None of them is a crisis. Demands some attention, sure, but nothing serious. You address the issue, you move on. You forget about it.”
Neither one of us responded.
“So you got your minor nuisances,” Cancerno said. “And then you got your crisis. The flat tire blows out, rolls the car over. The leak in the roof spreads, rots out the wood, the whole damn thing caves in on you. The splinter in your ass gets infected, you can’t even sit down, end up in the hospital.”
Cancerno spread his hands. “You’re wondering,” he said, “which one you are. Right? You’re thinking—just how much of a problem have I become? Am I the splinter in the ass, or am I the infection?”
Silence filled the room for a minute. Joe and I didn’t look at each other, just held Cancerno’s gaze, which alternated between us. His calm hadn’t been disrupted, but that didn’t make me feel any more comfortable. He was a man who liked his temper. Liked knowing just how much damage would occur when it was tripped. Right now he was toying with the trigger like a man enjoying the feel of a big gun in his hand, savoring the moment before the shooting began. I didn’t enjoy feeling like the target at the other end of the range.
“You want us to guess?” I said. “And there’s not a C, none-of-the-above, category?”
Cancerno smiled. “Nah, you don’t need to guess. I’ll go ahead and tell you.” There was another pause before he said, “You’re the splinter. The flat tire, the leak. For now.”
He studied me. “You come off like a good guy. Working your ass off to help a dead guy out, I mean, shit, what better kind of friend is there than the one who looks after you when you’re dead? Don’t know that I got any of those kind, myself.”
He leaned forward in his chair. “You got somebody to look after you when you’re dead?”
I didn’t say anything. Beside me Joe was completely still. Out in the warehouse everything was quiet, but I knew there were men out there, and that they all had guns. My gun, too.
“I understand,” Cancerno said, “that you’re just doing what you do. You’re looking for answers. That’s fine. I’d prefer to stay the hell out of it, but I can’t anymore. Because the places you’re looking for answers are, well, a little sensitive to me.”
“We still need to go through them,” I said. “Sensitive or not.”
His eyes flashed at that, a brief, cold glimmer, but he nodded.
“Sure. That’s what I like about you. No back-down quality in you, right? None. Aren’t a lot of guys that I’ll say that about. I respect that. And that’s why I had my guys bring you down here. I’m going to give you all the answers you need. And they’re the ones you want, too.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’ll give you your answers, and then you get the h
ell out of here, stay gone. Because I simply cannot have you doing this anymore. Those fires, they don’t matter anymore. Terry Solich told you that, himself. No need to involve police or anybody else at this point.”
So Solich had made the call. It didn’t surprise me. By the time we’d left his house, I’d had the feeling he was worried, and pondering some damage control. Apparently, he’d decided reporting to Cancerno was the best option. Knowing Solich had made the call was good, though. It told me Cancerno was probably oblivious to my dialogue with Dean and Mason. The less he believed me to know, the better.
“You tell everyone all you’re interested in is Gradduk,” Cancerno said. “That’s good. That’s all you need to be interested in. You get too interested in me, it won’t be any good at all. And at the end of the day, it’s not about me.”
“Who’s it about?” Joe said.
“Mitch Corbett.”
“Explain.”
Cancerno braced his arms on the desk. “You said you want to know how it went down with Gradduk. I’m telling you it’s all about Corbett. Son of a bitch dragged me into it, but it’s not about me.”
“Corbett killed Sentalar?”
Cancerno nodded. “Would be my guess.”
“Why?”
“Because Gradduk was talking to her. Gradduk was trying to take Corbett apart.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he told me that. The night before he died.”
“I’d heard Ed and Corbett were friends,” I said.
“They were.”
“So what happened?”
Cancerno looked at the little window in the door, which was now covered with raindrops. “I told Gradduk about something that happened a long time ago. I don’t know why. I shouldn’t have told him, maybe.”
A man told me a story. What story? The one he didn’t want to tell.
“What did you tell him?” I asked.
“I didn’t know Gradduk well, but I knew Scott Draper,” Cancerno said. “Draper recommended Gradduk to me, said he needed work. I gave him work. This isn’t unusual for me. Guys come to me needing a favor, I help them if I can.”
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