He put out his hand. “Thanks for coming down. Now, and the last time.”
I shook his hand. “Thanks for pulling me out of the house fire a few nights ago. Too bad you didn’t stick around at the time. Maybe some things would have gone a little easier on a lot of people.”
“Let’s take a walk,” he said.
We walked north on West Twenty-fifth, the cars buzzing past us. It was late in the afternoon, the heat as intense as it would get all day, and after only a block of it I could feel my pores begin to open up. The storm that had cooled things off was forgotten now, the sky clear, the air still. The heat would continue to build till the next storm blew through. August in Cleveland.
“Cops cut me loose,” Draper said eventually. “A lot of questions first, sure, but at the end of the day it seems I’m just a victim to them. They seem to think Cancerno was punishing me for helping you, and I didn’t discourage that line of logic. Problem is, I know it’s not the truth, and you know it’s not the truth. Corbett came by to see me in the hospital. Told me what he told you.”
I walked on without saying a word, head down.
“So you know Cancerno came after me because he found out I set those fires,” Draper said.
“I got that impression. But how did he know?”
“One of his guys was in my bar that night. I came in through the back, went into the bathroom, and was running water over my arms. I had some burns. Smelled of smoke. I should have gone home, but there were so many cops out that I just wanted to get off the streets for a while. This guy walked in the bathroom and saw it. I guess he reported back to Cancerno the next afternoon, once he heard whose houses had been lit.”
“How’d you know which houses to burn?”
“Not too hard—all the ones they were working on had signs in the yard. I drove around the neighborhood and found a half dozen without much trouble.”
“I see.”
“Uh-huh. And now I got a question—you knew I set the fires, but you didn’t tell the cops that, and you got your friend to find Corbett, make sure he didn’t say anything.” Draper turned to look at me. “Thanks for that, Lincoln. I could be in jail right now. But I’m wondering . . . if you knew I’d burned those houses, and you thought I was working with Jimmy, why the hell did you come down to the bar? Why didn’t you just call the cops and let them finish me off?”
“I wanted to hear you explain it. I just wanted to understand why the hell you would’ve done it.”
“Well, I’m damn lucky you did. Because you saved me down there.”
“Were you working with Cancerno, at any point?”
He shook his head. “Not in the way you’re thinking. Reason I set the fires was simple—it was what Ed had in mind when he went down. And I owed him. So I decided I’d finish his job.”
“Did you know what had happened between Cancerno and Ed’s family?”
He nodded. “He told me the night he ran from the cops and hid at my bar.”
“So you knew all of it? Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t know all of it. I just knew the old stuff. Didn’t know anything about the houses and Anita Sentalar and Mike Gajovich. Cops explained all that to me yesterday. All I knew was that Ed was out to settle a score with Cancerno.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“I pointed you at him,” he said. “I brought him down and introduced you to him, I told you about Mitch Corbett, and later I reminded you about the old fires. I got you started. I figured you’d do the rest. And you did. I just didn’t know . . . I had no idea how bad it would all get.”
Two women were walking toward us. When we got close, they looked at Draper’s face with undisguised horror and stepped off the sidewalk to get away from him. He didn’t blink.
“So you directed me,” I said. “When you could have just told me from day one. And people got shot, and people died, and you got your face beat to shit, and half the neighborhood burned down.” I shook my head and looked away, across the street.
“Like I said, I didn’t know what would happen, and I didn’t know how deep it all ran. I only knew what Ed had told me about Padgett and Cancerno.” Draper ran a hand over his bald head and sighed. “And there’s something else to it, Lincoln. Something that made it a little difficult for me to really talk to you, bring you into it.”
“What?”
He stopped walking, turned to face me. I didn’t want to stop moving, but I had to when he did. I looked at him and waited.
“When Ed went to jail, he wasn’t protecting Antonio Childers. He was protecting me.”
“What . . .” I didn’t even finish the question. I just stood and stared at him. A city bus roared by beside us, belching a cloud of exhaust smoke. The sun was harsh in my eyes.
“I was in serious money trouble,” Draper said. “I was going to lose the bar. Less than two years after my old man died and left it to me, and already I’d run it into the ground. I couldn’t let that happen. I talked to Jimmy Cancerno. He was the guy you talked to in the neighborhood with something like that, or so I thought at the time. He told me he could definitely help. Said a guy in my position could be useful as hell. He had the connection to Childers. Offered serious cash if I’d run some stuff out of the bar. Said I needed one good guy I could trust, though, to handle the transactions.”
His eyes flicked down, seeming lost in the swollen, bruised tissue that surrounded them.
“I picked Ed.”
I stood with my arms at my sides and didn’t speak. After a while, I turned away from him and looked out at the street, watched the cars go by. Then I began to walk again.
He followed. “That’s why he wouldn’t tell you anything. That’s why he took the fall. He was protecting me. Ed didn’t know anything about Antonio Childers; I did.”
I spoke for the first time in a while then, my voice tight. “So when the neighborhood was cursing my name for being such a traitor, you kept quiet.”
“No,” he said. “I led their cheers.”
I shot him a hard look at that, and he met my gaze evenly. I held his eyes for a moment and then looked away.
We came to Clark and turned left, walking west, toward Ed Gradduk’s old house and what was left of Draper’s bar.
“I know it went rough on you,” he said.
I gave a short laugh and shook my head. “You know it went rough on me? Good call, man.”
We walked on together, but it was different now. Our steps were falling in sync, but it seemed as if they shouldn’t be, as if we both thought maybe we should change our pace, let the other fall behind or pull ahead. We stayed together, though, through several blocks of silence.
“You hear people talk about going home all the time,” I said eventually. “Every Christmas, people from out of state, from across the country, tell me they’re going back home. I’ve lived ten minutes down the damn street for years, Draper, and I couldn’t go home. So much as walk in this neighborhood, and anybody who knew me would tell me to leave. My father, who it turns out was the only guy who tried to fix anything the right way, moved out a year after Ed went to jail. It wasn’t because he wanted to leave the neighborhood, either.”
Draper didn’t say anything.
“But, yeah,” I said. “It went rough on me. Yes, it did. Thanks for understanding, buddy.”
“I was a coward,” he said. “I know that. You took the heat for trying to help, and I kept my coward’s mouth shut and let Ed do his time and you pay the rest of the price. I was looking at more time than Ed if they really investigated me, and I used that to tell myself it was all right. Ed was just weighing it and making the best decision for both of us, right? That’s what I told myself.”
“You ever visit him in jail?”
“Every week.”
“You look him in the eye when you were there?”
He didn’t say anything to that. We went another block before a red light brought us to a halt.
“Ed knew what you were t
rying to do,” Draper said. “I’m not saying he appreciated it, the idea you and Allison cooked up, but he understood. He told me that, himself. You were trying to help. You were a bigger man than me. Without question.”
I shook my head. “Ed was. You were the coward and I was the fool who wanted to be the hero. Ed was the man.”
We kept walking, but didn’t say anything more for a long while. We went for many blocks. Past Ed’s house. I looked up when we went by, wondered about Alberta. Should I go see her? What would I say? None of it would matter now. Not to her.
“I’d give anything for a chance to talk to him,” Draper said. “Just one more conversation. To be able to tell him that it’s done. That you finished it for him.”
“It was done for him five days ago.”
We reached the Hideaway and stopped. We stood together on the sidewalk and looked up at it. The fire department had done a hell of a job, but then they’d had a hell of a lot of practice in the days leading up to the fire. They’d managed to save the building, though the interior was demolished. The sturdy old stone remained, though, the ancient walls and that massive door standing strong and steadfast.
“You gonna get it back up and running?”
“Hell, yes,” Draper said quietly. “No doubt, Lincoln. It’ll be back. I’m one of the only people on this block who actually had fire insurance.”
“Good. You belong behind that bar.”
“It’ll be a while before I can work the bar without turning people’s stomachs. I’ve got plastic surgery ahead, it seems.” He snorted. “Plastic surgery, and me a guy from Clark Avenue. What do you think my regulars will say when they hear that?”
“Probably tell you to spring for the boob job while you’re at it.”
He laughed. “You know, it’ll be a surprise if one of them doesn’t say something close.”
I nodded and turned away. “I’m going to take off, man. Get back up to the hospital, see how my partner’s doing.”
“Wait.”
I turned again and looked at him expectantly.
“Lincoln, I owe you . . . ,”he began, but I waved him off.
“Don’t say that. I don’t want to hear it. Not about owing people, about debts and balances and making amends. It can’t be about that, Scott.”
He frowned, shifted his weight, and hooked his thumbs on his belt, then took them off again. I’d never seen Scott Draper look so awkward.
“Listen,” he said, “I was thinking, maybe you and Allison could drop by later this week. We could grab a drink, have some dinner or something. Hang out again.”
I gazed up the street. “That group’s one name short, don’t you think?”
“Yeah. But that can’t be helped anymore. The others can.”
Cars buzzed back and forth along the avenue, crossing over the pavement where Ed Gradduk had died, nobody slowing. I watched them for a while before I nodded.
“Yeah, Scott. We can do that.”
He put out his hand. “I hope so, Lincoln. When I get the bar open again, I want to see you down here. And not just because I owe you.”
I took his hand. “I’ll be down,” I said.
I left him there in front of his bar and walked up Clark Avenue, the sun warm on my back. Joe had been asleep when I’d left, but he’d wake up again soon. I wanted to be there when he did.
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