Sorrow's Anthem

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. He’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.”

I frowned. “That doesn’t sound like Ed.”

Amy pushed the can aside and rummaged in her purse until she found a notebook. She flipped it open, said, “These are direct quotes from the bartender,” and began to read.

“The guy, Gradduk, he kept putting his hand on her arm, leaning down to talk real soft to her, pretty intense. And she shrugged him off a couple times. I remember once she said, ‘You don’t have a prayer.’ And then he said, ‘I’m not taking no for an answer.’ And she answered that he was going to have to take no for an answer. They talked for another minute or two, and then she pulled away from him and said, in a loud voice, ‘Just leave me the hell alone.’ That was when I stepped in and told him he needed to listen to the lady. And he ignored me—well, didn’t say anything to me—but he did get up and walk off. And as he was walking, he looked back at her and said, ‘You know I’m not going away.’ ”

Amy closed the notebook and returned it to her purse.

I shook my head. “I don’t believe it. This is some loser just hoping to steal fifteen seconds of fame by making up a story or fabricating what he really saw.”

Amy raised her eyebrows. “He remembers the incident pretty damn clearly. And Cal Richards was very interested. I called him and filled him in late this afternoon, and he said it actually meshed nicely with the picture he was developing of their relationship. Thanked me for my reporting, like all of a sudden I was his favorite person.”

“What’s the picture he’s developing?”

“He wouldn’t tell me a whole lot of it, obviously, but he did say Anita Sentalar’s phone records showed numerous but brief calls from Gradduk in recent weeks. And apparently the guy she works with, the partner in her law firm, said he knew Gradduk had shown up at the office a few times, and Sentalar had asked him to leave.”

I sat with a half-eaten breadstick in my hand and felt myself beginning a slow burn toward anger. This wasn’t fair to Ed. Not by a long shot. It was just a snippet of a weeks-old conversation in a crowded bar, but it would convict him in the public’s opinion even more than he already was.

“You can’t run that story, Amy,” I said. “It’s ridiculous. That’s an unsubstantiated, one-sided account of a conversation that may never have even happened.”

This time her eyebrows arched so high they almost joined her hairline. “Excuse me? I can’t run that story? Like you’re my editor or something? This story is huge, Lincoln, and it’s good journalism. I’m the first person to provide any sort of account of a relationship between Sentalar and Gradduk. It’s the biggest scoop I’ve had in months.”

“Biggest since I gave you the story of your life, you mean?”

Now the eyebrows lowered and her eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean? That because you gave me a good opportunity once, you’re allowed to dictate what I do and do not report?”

“You can’t run that story,” I said. “It’ll make Ed look like some sort of a psycho stalker, and that’s absurd. If you’d ever known the guy—”

“Known him when he was twelve, like you did? Give me a break, Lincoln! You don’t even know who he was anymore. Think about it: The last two times you even spoke to Gradduk, he was in the process of being arrested. And justifiably so.”

I shoved off the chair and walked back into the kitchen, wanting to get away from her, the hostility building so quickly that I was afraid of losing my composure. I stood in the kitchen with my back to her for a few minutes, cleaning already-clean dishes, taking slow breaths, and keeping silent. Eventually, she stood up and gathered her things. She left the living room but did not follow me into the kitchen, walking instead to the door.

“It’s been a long time since you knew him, Lincoln,” she said.

“I knew him well during a time when boys become men, Amy,” I said, stepping out of the kitchen so I could see her. “I think a person’s character is pretty well established by then.”

“You arrested him, Lincoln! What sort of character assessment were you making then?”

“There’s a difference between a guy being willing to move some drugs when he’s broke and a guy who’s a sexual predator and a murderer, Amy.” My voice was rising now, the towel I’d been drying the dishes with clenched tightly in my hands.

“You hadn’t seen him in eight years.”

We stood there facing each other with cold stares, a pair of gunslingers in a dusty street.

“I’ve got to get back to work,” she said eventually, turning and putting her hand on the doorknob. “I didn’t want to run the story without telling you what I had first. But it’s running, Lincoln. And it’s the right thing for me to do.”

“Obviously. It’ll strengthen your résumé for the tabloids.”

She jerked the door open so hard I was surprised she didn’t dislocate her shoulder, stepped through it, and slammed it shut. I threw the dish towel at the door; it hit with a splat and left a smear on the paint as it slid to the ground. Count on me to come through with the childish gesture.

After a minute, I sighed, walked over, and picked up the towel. I cleaned up the rest of the mess in the living room, washed the rest of the dishes, turned the lights off, and stood at the window. I stared through it without seeing anything. Worlds collided, I’d told Amy. They certainly had.

The interrogation room is about the size of a bedroom closet in Shaker Heights or Pepper Pike. They got a table in here somehow, and it seems to take up the entire space. If you attempt to walk around the table, you have to flatten yourself against the wall. This spoils any hope of a pacing-and-shouting routine like on TV cop shows, but that’s probably just as well.

Sitting across from my oldest friend, the room and the table could not feel smaller to me. I’m not in uniform and he’s not handcuffed, thankfully, but even so the scenario feels wrong in a way I couldn’t have imagined before I found myself here, wrong in a way that makes my stomach roil and my hands tremble so much that I jam them under the table so he can’t see.

“Ed,” I say, “I can’t delay things anymore. If you don’t talk now, there won’t be a plea bargain. You’ll do jail time. A few years of it.”

His eyes are locked on mine, cold and unwavering. He has several days of beard on his face, but he still looks so young he could have just come from having a high school yearbook photograph taken instead of a mug shot. I don’t want to know what I look like.

“Dammit, Ed,” I say after a few minutes of silence. “There’s nobody listening right now. No recorders, nobody behind a mirror, none of that shit. Its just you and me. Tell me something. Anything. Anything that I can take out of this room and use to get you protection.”

He leans back, folds his hands neatly, and rests them on the table. His face is serene, his eyes indicting. His mouth shut.

“You’re going to go to jail,” I repeat. “They’ve got you with possession of cocaine and intent to distribute. Got your conviction boxed and sealed and wrapped with a ribbon. Any leeway you might have had is going to be thrown aside to make you regret not talking. They’re going to go after you hard because you spoiled their plans.”

No response.

“You want to see Allison through a piece of glass, Ed?”

Not a word.

“Come on, Ed,” I say, and I hope the sense of desperate pleading isn’t as clear in my voice as it is in my heart.

His eyes still on mine, he shakes his head slowly.

“What are you worried about? You think Childers will kill you? He’s not that powerful of a force. We’ll protect you and Allison while we put him in jail. Once he’s in jail, the rest of his boys won’t be a threat. They aren’t loyal to Antonio; they’re scared of him.”

I’m hoping the reference to fear will get through to him. Surely, this is the reason he isn’t talking—he’s afraid of Antonio’s retaliation. But for two full weeks I’ve had cop after cop and attorney after attorney promising Ed he’ll have total protection if he talks, and he has not.

I look at my watch. Ten minutes late for my meeting with Pritchard and the deputy prosecutor already. This is it. My last chance in the box with Ed Gradduk. My last chance to produce what I have promised—testimony that will put Antonio Childers behind bars. My last chance to save Ed from prison, from Childers, from the potentially deadly impact at the bottom of the slope that his life has become.

Ed has not spoken, nor has he removed his eyes from mine. They bore into me with all the intensity of a butane torch. He wants me to feel them. Wants me to feel what he has refused to say with words. I have betrayed him, my oldest friend. He wants to surround me with that knowledge, drown me with it.

“I’m trying to help you here,” I say. “Damn you for not accepting that. You’ve gotten in over your head, brother, and you have got to get out. I’m offering you a hand here. But you’ve got to reach out and take it.”

Silence that settles over me like a lead cloak.

“I just want to help you get your life back to where it needs to be, Ed. Try to understand that, could you?”

He speaks then for the first and only time.

“You, Lincoln, should have tried to understand. Before you brought the rest of these cops and prosecutors and judges into it. Before you took away any room I might have had to maneuver. To breathe. That’s when you should have tried to understand.”

A knock on the door. Neither of us speaks. The knock is repeated. “Will you talk?”

He shakes his head.

A third knock, this time louder, more insistent. I hear keys jingling. They’re about to come in, to take him away, and after this it is done. He will be on his way to jail. I will have sent him there.

A key slides into the lock.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

The handle turns. The door opens.

“I know,” Ed Gradduk tells me, and then he is gone, back in handcuffs and out through a steel door that clangs shut behind him and leaves me alone in a little interrogation room with my head in my hands.