“This is not the way I like to do things, Lincoln.”
“Sorry, but I’ve got a bad feeling about this one.”
I stepped past him and into the house. The side door led into a small kitchen that smelled of lemon Pledge. It was clean and tidy, no dishes stacked on the counter, no bag of chips open on the table. No body on the floor.
Joe had stepped into the house behind me, his complaints ceasing for the moment. Together we moved out of the kitchen and into the adjacent living room. A few issues of Sports Illustrated were on the coffee table, and an empty beer can was on the floor beside the couch. I picked the can up and studied its top. It was bone-dry, the contents not recently consumed.
I replaced the can as Joe walked past me, down the narrow hall that led out of this room. I trailed. He opened a closed door and stepped into what turned out to be a laundry room. There was nothing inside but a washer-dryer combination, water heater, a few mops and brooms, and a cat’s litter box. We moved out of that room and continued down the hall, past an empty bathroom and on to another closed door on the right. Joe and I hadn’t spoken since entering the house, and now he opened this door without a word and held it while I walked into a small spare bedroom furnished with a ragged couch and a thrift-shop-quality desk. We left that room and went on to the last room in the little house, this door closed, too.
This was the main bedroom, and it, too, held nothing other than the expected. A small desk was in the corner of the room, and I pulled a few of the drawers open, but found nothing more interesting than a videotape for the continuing-education programs at Cuyahoga Community College.
“Satisfied?” Joe said. “No corpses, no signed confessions of setting up Ed Gradduk.”
“Also no Mitch Corbett,” I said. “And somebody broke into this house not long ago.”
“Could have been him, Lincoln. Have you ever locked yourself out of your apartment?”
“It wasn’t him. And you don’t think so, either.”
“I want to get out of this house,” he said. “Your door-kicking approach to investigation leaves something to be desired.”
We walked back out the way we’d come in and closed the carport door behind us. It still locked, but even a slight bit of pressure would pop it open now. Good thing the owner was a carpenter.
Joe spotted the tail before I did, which was embarrassing because I was driving and should have been paying more attention to the mirrors than him.
“Check out the black Jeep Cherokee behind us,” he said when I was at a red light. I shifted my eyes to the mirror and found the vehicle in question. Its windshield was tinted but I could make out two occupants in the front seat, both male.
“Yeah?”
“It was parked up the street from Corbett’s house,” he said. “Maybe five houses down and across the street. Right where I’d put it if I was watching the place.”
“And it pulled out when we did?”
“Uh-huh.”
The light went green and I pulled away. The Cherokee stayed with us, lingering a few cars back but always pulling closer when we neared an intersection, so there was little chance of losing us at a red light. It’s the way you drive when you’re working one-car surveillance.
“Well, hell,” I said.
Joe grunted.
“I’m growing curious,” I said. “You?”
“We could lose them easily enough,” he said. “But that wouldn’t tell us anything.”
“Exactly. So what’s our move?”
He scratched the side of his head and sighed. “I suppose I’ll shadow the shadowers.”
“Tough to do when you’re in my car.”
“Take me to the office and pull in at the curb. Make it look like you’re dropping me off. I’ll go back in the parking lot and get my car. Then you swing around the block. When you pull out, I’ll fall in line behind them.”
It took us five minutes to get back to the office, and the Cherokee was still with us. When I pulled up to the curb in front of the building, the Cherokee slid into a street parking spot about a hundred feet back.
Joe gave me more instructions. “I’m going to stand on the sidewalk and talk to you for a bit, make it look more casual, like we’re oblivious to them.”
“Okay.”
I sat with the engine idling while he stood beside the truck, leaning in the door with his hand on the roof.
“I’ll stay here until traffic thickens up,” he said. “That way you’ll have to wait to pull back into the street and it won’t look like you’re just killing time.”
Joe was the best details cop I’d ever known, and he was proving it again today. When the cars had backed up at the red light in front of us, he slammed the door shut, waved at me, and walked into the parking lot with his hands in his pockets. I stayed at the curb till the light changed and the waiting cars slid through the intersection, then pulled back into the street. The Cherokee pulled with me.
I made a right turn on Rocky River Drive even though I had no place to go but home, which was in the opposite direction. There was a gas station on the north side of the street, and I swung in there and topped off the tank. The black Cherokee cruised past the gas station and pulled into the parking lot of the strip mall behind it. I went inside, paid, and came back out to the truck. When I pulled onto Rocky River again, this time headed back toward the office, the Cherokee slid out of the parking lot and followed, with Joe’s Taurus behind. We were a regular caravan of curiosity.
I turned left onto the avenue, passed the office, and drove the seven blocks to my building. It wasn’t quite five yet, which meant the gym office was still open. My manager, a sharp-tongued, gray-haired woman named Grace, smiled when I stepped inside. I’d lost track of the Cherokee by this point, but I was sure Joe still had them.
“Hey, boss,” Grace said. “Off early today?”
“We’ve already purged the city of crime,” I said, trying to go with her good humor even though my mind was elsewhere.
“That easy, huh?”
“You bet.” I took a protein shake from the cooler behind the desk. I hadn’t eaten lunch, and my stomach was aware of it. “I’m going to run upstairs and change clothes, then come down for a workout. Is it crowded in there?”
“Mobbed. Six people instead of our usual three.”
“Funny.”
I went up to my apartment and changed into shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, then came back down to the gym, cell phone in hand. Joe would call me when he had something, I was sure. I just didn’t know how long that would take.
I was halfway through my third set on the bench press when the phone rang. It was Joe.
“We’re all still watching your building,” he said. “I’ve got a plate number from them. You want me to bail and use the plate number to see who they are, or stick around and see what they do?”
“It’s up to you. You’re the one wasting time on them.”
“I’ll give it another hour.”
I finished my chest workout and moved on to back exercises, pausing occasionally to talk with some of the gym regulars. Grace had closed the office and gone home, but the members could still come in after hours by using the keycard entrance at the front of the building.
It was nearly six when Joe called back. I was done with the weights and doing some stretches before going out for a run. I paused to answer the phone.
“You taking off?” I said.
“Don’t have to make that decision, because they already lost interest in you.”
“They left?”
“Uh-huh. And I followed. All the way to the police station.”
“What?”
“You heard me. They’re cops. Pulled into the officer parking lot and got out of the car. One of the guys was plainclothes, the other was in uniform. He went in the building while the plainclothes guy went home.”
“Recognize either of them?”
“I was too far away to place them, if I actually knew either one. I’ll use the pla
te number to get a name tomorrow.”
“If Corbett’s absence has attracted police interest, why hasn’t he been released as a missing person yet?” I said. “And why are they watching his house instead of going out looking for him?”
“And,” Joe said, “why does it appear they are doing it while off-duty?”
We didn’t have the answers for those questions. Not yet, at least.
CHAPTER 9
There were twelve Corbetts in the Cleveland phone book. Mitchell was listed, but I was pretty certain he wasn’t going to return home anytime this evening, so I didn’t bother to call him. The rest of the unfortunate Corbetts in town got the Lincoln Perry dinner-hour-telemarketing approach to investigation, however.
Of the first five names on my list, only three were home, and none of them had a relative named Mitch. One woman, Dorene Corbett, responded to the question by asking if I was planning to reunite her with her birth father. When I said that wasn’t the case, she was disappointed.
“I thought maybe you were from one of those reunion shows,” she said. “You know, like the ones they’ve got on Oprah now and then? I like those shows.”
“So you’ve never met your father?” I said, trying to follow her conversation.
“Of course I have. But I thought maybe you were looking for someone with my name who hasn’t.”
“I see.”
“There’s another Dorene Corbett,” she said. “I got her name off the Internet once. But she lives in Georgia. Try Georgia, okay?”
I assured her I would try Georgia, then hung up gratefully and continued working through my list. On the seventh try, I found a gentleman who had indeed heard of Mitch Corbett.
“Listen,” Randy Corbett said as soon as I’d asked my question, “I’m tired of this. I don’t talk to Mitch no more and he don’t talk to me. We never seen eye to eye on a damn thing, I don’t know where he is, and I don’t care. Haven’t talked to him in more than a year.”
“But you are related to him?”
“I’m his brother, you jackass. You don’t know that, then why the hell you calling me?”
“When I asked you if you knew Mitch, you said you were tired of this. Has someone else been asking about him?”
“Just the police,” he said. “Shows what kind of good family I got, only time I hear about my own brother is when the police are looking for him. My mother’s probably rolling in her grave right now.”
“When did the police ask about him, sir?”
“This morning.” He paused. “And if you’re not one of them, who the hell are you?”
“A private investigator.”
“Can you tell me what he’s done? ’Cause the police wouldn’t.”
“As far as I know, he hasn’t done anything other than blow off work. I’m just trying to track him down because he might know something that could be useful to me in another matter. Are you sure you don’t have any idea where he would have gone?”
“Absolutely not. We ain’t what you’d call close brothers, mister. And I’m all the family that old boy’s got.”
“Did he have good friends out of town? Someplace he liked to vacation, maybe?”
Randy Corbett let out a snort of derision so long that I thought he might faint from lack of oxygen before he finished. Apparently my question had been some kind of funny.
“Someplace he liked to vacation,” he said at last. “That’s good. Mister, Mitch ain’t got enough money to make it to Sandusky, let alone someplace worth going. I can’t tell you where he is, but I’d be mighty surprised if it’s any farther away than the east side.”
______
I’d hardly finished my Cleveland Corbett roundup when the phone rang. It was Amy.
“How you holding up?” she said.
“I’m up,” I said. “That’s all you can ask, some days.”
“Right. You had dinner yet?”
“Hadn’t even considered it. Hell, I never ate lunch, either.”
“How about I pick up a pizza and stop by?”
“Sounds good. You got something on your mind or just worried about me?”
“I’m always worried about you,” she said. “But I’d like to talk some things over, as well. Maybe you’d care to tell me a little more about your relationship with Gradduk? Like why you hadn’t talked to him in eight years?”
“We can go into detail when you get here, Ace. For now all you need to know is I went cop and he went con. Worlds collided.”
Amy arrived with a box of pizza and a bag of breadsticks about twenty minutes later, and we sat in the living room with the lights turned low, eating off paper plates. I knew Amy had come largely to get the rest of the story I’d promised her about my relationship with Ed, but to her credit she ate nearly half a breadstick before asking for details.
“So you went cop and he went con,” she said. “That’s all you gave me this afternoon. Now I want the rest.”
I gave her the rest while we ate the pizza. She sat on the couch with her legs curled under her and didn’t interrupt with questions until I was done, which is unusual for Amy.
“Man,” she said when I was through, “that had to be hard on you, Lincoln. Sending your best friend to jail when you’d actually set out to help him.”
“Had to be hard on him,” I answered, “being sent to jail by his best friend.”
“Did you really believe he’d talk?”
I nodded. “I was sure he would. Maybe that was because Allison did a good job of convincing me, but, yeah, I thought he’d talk to stay out of jail. Don’t get me wrong, I expected he’d be bitter at first, but I thought maybe later . . .” I shook my head and sighed.
“What?”
“I had this vision of how it would go,” I said. “There’d be a tense period, sure, but then he’d clean his act up and we’d begin to relax again. Things would get back to the way they used to be. He’d marry Allison, and sometime, maybe a couple of years down the road, we’d be out having a few beers, laughing, and then he’d turn serious. He’d lift his beer to me and say . . .” I stopped talking.
Amy set her pizza down. “He’d say?”
“I don’t know. Thank me, I guess,” and even as I said it I felt small. It had come out as if in my mind the situation had been more about me than Ed. Or was that not just in the way I’d phrased things?
“It sounds like this neighborhood is a tight little community,” Amy said. “Kind of unusual now.”
I nodded. “It’s damn unusual. And most of the neighborhood isn’t that tight, at all. It’s a pretty transient area, now. But there are a few families scattered around that are vestiges of what it used to be. That’s the group that stays close. Ed and Scott Draper were both third-generation in the neighborhood. Everyone that had been around for a while knew their families well. I was an outsider at first; we didn’t move into that neighborhood until after my mom died. But my grandpa had lived in that neighborhood for most of his life, and my dad grew up there. When my mom died, my dad pulled a career change, became a paramedic, and said he wanted to live close to MetroHealth, because that was where his ambulance ran out of. I think in reality he just wanted to go back to familiar ground, because he was feeling a little lost. It was kind of like going home to him.”
“How’d your mother die?”
“Killed by a drunk driver.”
She winced. “I’m sorry. I knew she’d died when you were young, but I never knew how.”
“Right. I was only three when she died.”
“You remember her at all?”
“Vague things. I can still hear her laugh in my head even now, but the only really clear memory I have of her face is the way she looked the day I fell down the stairs. I nicked my head on something, and it just bled like crazy. I can remember her standing at the top of the steps and looking down at me with this utterly terrified expression. That one’s just frozen in my memory.”
“I didn’t know your dad was a paramedic.”
“Yeah. H
e’d been working as a plant manager in Bedford, making good money. Decided he wanted to do something else, and that was what he picked. We ended up back in the city, and I fell in with Ed and Draper, grew up around the families that had been around there for generations, and for a while I was part of the club. In a way, it was like growing up in a time warp. The neighborhood I got to know was more like the neighborhood of the fifties and sixties, before all the blue collars moved to the suburbs and the houses around there started turning over faster than apartments.”
“And you’re not part of the club anymore?”
I shook my head. “Far from it, Ace. The old-timers hate me. It was an unusually loyal group because it was getting smaller every year. They looked out for each other. They didn’t send each other to jail.”
I pushed out of the chair and went into the kitchen to pour a fresh glass of water.
When I came back, Amy had closed the pizza box and was sitting upright on the couch, less like a cat and more like a human for a change.
“I have a tip for you,” she said. “It will be in the paper tomorrow, but you deserve to hear it early.”
“Yeah?” Something about her attitude was a little off suddenly, something in the way she kept her eyes away from mine while she talked that made me uneasy.
“I got a call from a guy today who read my first story about Gradduk and said he could tell me when Sentalar and Gradduk met.”
“That’s pretty huge,” I said, dropping back into my chair.
She nodded and took a sip of diet Coke but didn’t say anything immediately.
“Well, where was it? Where’d they meet?”
“At a bar on Lorain,” she said. “This guy, he’s a bartender. Told me that he remembered both Gradduk and Sentalar as soon as he saw their pictures. According to him, they met in the bar about two weeks ago.”
“He get a sense for whether it was a friendly meeting, romantic, or professional?”
She pushed the diet Coke can around the coffee table with her fingertips. “He said Gradduk was making a pass at Sentalar, and she was trying to get him to leave her alone.”
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