Sorrow's Anthem

CHAPTER 4

They let me go home around midnight. Charges of interference and obstruction had been threatened but I had not been booked. The cop who’d been in the passenger seat, a guy named Larry Rabold, lightened up once he learned who I was, but his partner, the one who had stopped me on the sidewalk, was not so fraternal. His name was Jack Padgett, and he didn’t show any desire to let bygones be bygones once he found out I had been a cop. They talked to me for about an hour, asking all about Ed, particularly what information might have been exchanged in our brief conversation. They seemed unconvinced by my claim that I hadn’t spoken to him in years.

“Why the hell did you come running down to his house as soon as you heard the news, then?” Padgett had asked. It was a good question, one I’d already failed to answer earlier in the night, and I still hadn’t come up with anything satisfactory. They’d both been intrigued by my description of how things had gone down with Ed and me a few years back, and I knew they’d check it out and see if they could find anything to indicate I’d had contact with the man since then. They would come up empty, though.

Once I was kicked loose, I called a cab to take me back to my truck. Clark Avenue was dark and quiet save for a few stragglers on the sidewalk and one woman waiting for a bus. I stood at the curb and stared up the street to where my oldest friend had died a few hours earlier. They’d hosed the blood off the pavement, and the night heat had already baked it dry.

I climbed inside the truck and started the engine, sat there listening to the traffic noise, and wondering if I’d be able to drive without seeing visions of Ed running into the street. I took a look at the clock. It was time to go home and go to bed.

I drove to my partner’s house.

Joe Pritchard lives on Chatfield, maybe three minutes from the office. He was in the neighborhood long before I arrived, and it was through him that I learned of the gym I own when it went up for sale. Recently dismissed from the police force and with no real career plans, I’d purchased the gym and moved into the building. Joe’s retirement a few years later had led me into the PI trade.

His house is a brick A-frame that is common in the neighborhood, two blended triangles with a chimney rising along the front wall. I once heard that the houses were all products of Sears Roebuck kits that became popular as the neighborhood expanded following World War II, but I don’t know if there’s any truth to that. The neighborhood around Chatfield has been maintained better than most, although the majority of parents send their children to private schools rather than enrolling them in the public system. That was the case when I was growing up, too, but my father couldn’t afford it—and had no desire to send me to one of the private schools even if he could. If I couldn’t make it in a public high school, he often said, how the hell was I going to make it as a cop? Even then, it was what I told everyone I was going to do, and my father was right—four years at West Tech were invaluable to that career acclimation.

Joe’s house is the shining star of a nice block, with a perfectly manicured lawn, gleaming windows, and a cobblestone path between the house and the sidewalk. Quite the homemaker, our Joe. Most of the backyard and a stretch between the driveway and the house are filled with beautiful flower gardens, heavy on the impatiens. There’s a garage behind the house, stocked with rakes and hoes and potting soil and fertilizer, and if you want to find Joe on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, you need only look in the yard or in the garage. When we’d worked the narcotics beat together, it hadn’t been that way. Joe’s wife, Ruth, tended to the flowers and yard as if they were her reason for living, but Joe never did much more than shovel the driveway, and then only in the heaviest snows. It was winter when Ruth died, and when spring broke the next year, Joe hated the idea of seeing her flower gardens fail to appear in the fashion to which the neighbors had become accustomed. Now I think he spends more time on them than Ruth ever did.

He met me at the door with a wary look, but it was clear he’d still been awake, which I’d expected. Joe is late to bed and early to rise and always alert despite that. There are some qualities you don’t leave behind after thirty years of police work. Poor sleeping patterns are among them.

“It’s after midnight,” he said, closing the front door and following me into the living room, “and you wouldn’t show up here at that time just for small talk. So that makes me think this is case-related, and that troubles me. Why? Because the only cases on our plate are small-time, and you wouldn’t need to discuss them at this hour. So I’m guessing you’ve decided to involve yourself in whatever shit went down with your convict buddy.”

Took him maybe ten seconds to reason that out.

We sat in the living room and I asked him if he’d seen the news, if he’d seen the footage of Ed Gradduk on his way to do murder. He told me that he had.

“You remember anything about the guy?” I asked.

His eyes flicked off mine momentarily. “You kidding me? It was the first case we ever worked together, LP. And in all the cases we’ve worked since, I’ve never seen you so locked in. You were robotic about it. I liked working with you, could tell you had ability, but at the same time I was a little concerned about your emotional stamina. You seemed burned-out already, like an old cop who’s hung on five years too long.”

I nodded.

“I remember it didn’t go the way you’d expected it to go,” Joe continued. “And the kid took a fall. But that wasn’t your fault. He had options. Not your fault he decided against cooperating.”

I was silent.

“There’s more to it than you ever told me,” Joe said. “And it involves the girl.”

I looked at him, surprised. He was waiting for a response.

“There’s more to it,” I said. “And it involves the girl. But not in the way you’re thinking.”

He shrugged. “Whatever. That’s not the issue of the night, though. Tell me what happened.”

I took him from Amy’s phone call to the scene in the street to my interview with Padgett and Rabold. I realized halfway through the story that I was rubbing my temples, trying to drive away a headache that I didn’t consciously feel.

“I’d ask you why you ended up going down to Clark Avenue,” he said when I was through, “but I expect you don’t really have an answer for that.”

“Accurate expectation.”

Joe stared at the muted television. It was tuned to ESPN Classic, as it always seems to be, and the network was airing a basketball game between the Bulls and the Jazz from sometime in the late nineties.

“Rough seeing a guy die like that,” he said. “Especially when it was a guy you used to be close to.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m taking it this abbreviated conversation with Gradduk meant something to you. Makes you, what, curious? Skeptical?”

“Makes me think the guy could have been set up.”

“But he told you it was all on tape.”

“Well, it is all on tape. Amy, Ed, and the cops all agree on that point. You just said you saw it on the news.”

“So he murdered the girl.”

“He said he didn’t.”

“But the police have a tape of him setting this house on fire. The same house from which a body was recovered.”

“Yeah.”

“Cut-and-dried,” he said, but I knew he was too good a detective to buy that for even a minute.

“Who was the woman?” I asked. “I don’t even know her name.”

“Anita Sentalar. They had a long feature about her on the news tonight. She’s a thirty-seven-year-old attorney, good-looking, intelligent, single.”

“And the connection to Gradduk?”

“Undisclosed, as of yet.”

“Maybe she was already in the house, dead.”

He snorted. “Oh, yeah, I like this idea. Someone else kills her, leaves her in the house, and Gradduk just happens to come by and set fire to it, concealing the body? What, he’s trying to do someone a favor by torching the place? Insurance on that dump wasn’t worth a thing, from what I’ve heard.”

“What’s the tape show?”

“Shows him going into the house and coming back out. Shows his face pretty clear. Shows his car, and apparently they could zoom in enough to get a plate number off it.”

“And the fire?”

“House went up about twenty minutes after he left it. There was a small explosion of sorts before the flames, I guess. Fire investigators think he used a timer and an incendiary device.”

“Twenty minutes? Damn, Joseph, that’s a hell of a lot of time.”

“Camera didn’t show anyone else going into the house after him, though.”

“Camera had a panoramic angle on the house? Covered every side at once?”

He sighed. “Just the front.”

“So a dozen people could have waltzed in and out the back door during those twenty minutes?”

“Maybe. But what’s Gradduk doing in a vacant house in the first place if he’s not the guy who set it on fire?”

“That,” I said, “is what I’d like to look into.”

Joe sighed again and leaned back in his recliner, rolling the footrest out and up. I was sitting forward on the couch, elbows on my knees, watching him. Joe was the best cop I’d ever worked with, and he was my business partner. If I was going to get started with this thing, I wanted his support, for both reasons.

“He told me he went to the prosecutor, Joe. Said he went there and was sent home. At the very least, I want to talk to the prosecutor. See what Gradduk went in there with.”

“If he sent Gradduk home,” Joe said, “it was probably with good reason.”

We sat together in the dark living room and watched the muted old basketball game, Michael Jordan slicing his way through the lane, tossing in off-balance shots and drawing fouls.

“This guy Gradduk,” Joe said, “was not the kid you remember growing up with. He’d done time, and it looks like he should have been doing some more. Shitty brakes on a Crown Vic saved him the agony of years in a cell, and saved the taxpayers the cost of putting him where he belonged.”

I didn’t answer.

“Regardless of what he said to you, the man appears to have murdered someone, Lincoln.”

“Appears.”

“Why does it matter?” He grabbed the remote and snapped the television off. “If he did kill her, or didn’t? He was never convicted of the crime, just suspected of it. The man is dead, LP, and dead he is going to stay, with or without your involvement. And, whether you choose to believe it or not, you did him no wrong. Not tonight, and not the time before that.”

I sat and thought about everything I wanted to say to that, how I wanted to tell him that it went back to walking the same sidewalks and fighting the same guys and chasing the same girls, that it went back to twelve years of a bond that you simply can’t match upon reaching adulthood, not even with your partner.

“Ed never caught a break in his life,” I said. “From the cradle to the grave, the guy was taking it on the chin. Did he earn it sometimes? Sure. Every time? Hell, no.”

“And he’s gone now. Can’t help him anymore.”

“It’s not about helping him. It’s about making sure someone else isn’t getting away with something far worse than any of Ed’s sins.”

Silence.

“I watched him die tonight, Joe. A few hours ago. I watched it happen. And tomorrow morning when everyone turns on the news or opens their paper, all they’ll think is—‘Good, the guy was a killer and he got what he deserved.’ ”

He sighed and shook his head, looked past me out the dark window toward the rows of flowers his wife had planted and he still tended. You do things for the dead, even if you don’t have to. Maybe because you don’t have to. Joe knew that as well as anyone.

He stared at the window for quite a while, then turned back around and picked up the remote. He turned the television back on, settled into his chair, and put his attention on the game.

“We’ll go see the prosecutor,” he said, and that was all he said until I got to my feet and let myself out of the house.