Sorrow's Anthem Page 3

  “He’s taking a few hours to get himself together,” Draper said to me, eyes still on the door. “Had to get his mind in order, sober up, cool off. Maybe call an attorney, maybe get his hands on a car and bail.” Draper snapped his eyes back to me and now they were hard and unfriendly. “I’m not going to make the call, Lincoln. Wasn’t when he showed up, and I won’t now.”

  “Nobody’s making any calls just yet,” I said. Ed was watching me with a leering grin, swaying like a sailor on board a pitching ship.

  “The hell you doing here?” he said, and his voice was filled with wonder and not anger. “I mean, damn, Lincoln. You just gotta be there when I go down, huh? Gotta soak it up, savor it?”

  I met his eyes, and I waited for my own response, waited for the words to form themselves into something that would get through to him, tell him how it had been for me, tell him why I’d had to do it. The words didn’t come, though. After eight years of waiting for them, I shouldn’t have been surprised.

  “Good luck, Ed,” I told him, and then I turned and walked for the door.

  He started after me, and when Draper tried to pull him back, Ed told him to stay the hell inside. I pushed the door open and stepped out into the cooling air, stood on the sidewalk with my hands at my sides and my eyes on the ground while Ed joined me. He took out a cigarette and lit it, and we stood there together in silence. The smell of the alcohol was heavy on him, but somehow I had the sense his mind was sober right now.

  “They execute a guy for murder in Ohio, don’t they?” he said.

  “Sometimes.”

  He nodded and smoked some more.

  “Sometimes they don’t,” I said. “Depends on the circumstances. What are yours?”

  He laughed, and it was a menacing sound, so empty it chilled me to the core.

  “What are my circumstances?” He laughed again. “Oh, man. You don’t even want to hear about it, Lincoln. They are not clean. I can tell you that. They are not clean.”

  He began to walk down the sidewalk then, swaying and weaving but moving fast enough, and he motioned for me to follow with a jerk of his hand. I shot a glance down the street, looking, as Draper had, for a police presence. When I saw none, I followed.

  “My circumstances,” he said around the cigarette, “are a little difficult to explain. I hear there’s a videotape of it, though, and that’s all the jury needs to see. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what’s a video against words from an ex-con? Probably worth a million of those. A guy like me could run the world dry of words, still not have enough.”

  The breeze picked up, rustling the trash and gravel on the sidewalk and sending dust and bits of fine dirt into our eyes. I blinked against it, ducked my shoulders, and put my head down.

  “What happened, Ed?”

  He worked on the cigarette for a while, and when I glanced at him the gash above his eye was brighter than it had been, the wound opening up again and spilling more blood.

  “In the beginning,” Ed Gradduk told me, “it was all about money. The revenue stream, as my old man would have called it. I found one, buddy. It was already there, but I got my piece of the action, played my role, and took my cut. All you can ask, right?”

  I didn’t answer, and we walked on in silence for maybe a block, Ed sorting out his thoughts.

  “So it was money,” he said. “A lot of money to some people, less to others.”

  “And to you?”

  “Enough to me. It was enough. But then . . .” The menacing laugh came again, and with it the temperature seemed to drop ten degrees. “Then it stopped being about money. Got personal.”

  “Why?”

  He stopped walking and looked at me, tilting his head to the side.

  “A man told me a story.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “What story?”

  “The one he didn’t want to tell,” Ed answered. “And I do feel bad about that. It was hard on him, because he knew it’d be hard on me. Stuff like that, well, it doesn’t tell easy, Lincoln. But I guess that’s how it goes. The stories that matter most are the hardest to tell.”

  “Did you kill the woman?”

  He blew smoke wearily. “I did not kill the woman. And I don’t give a damn if they have a video or a picture or a thousand eyewitnesses to whatever it is they say happened, Lincoln—that’s not how it went down.”

  “I can help you, Ed,” I said, and he raised his eyebrows and snorted. “I can help you, but you’ve got to tell me the whole score. Give me the names, give me the facts, lay it out there.”

  His eyes had drifted past me, over my shoulder and into the houses behind me. He pointed at them with his cigarette.

  “Andy Butcher used to live in a house up that street. ’Member him? Crazy little shit. We were standing out in his front lawn that day the bus from the Catholic school went by.” He laughed and smiled, seemingly carefree, just another guy out for an evening stroll. What murder charge? Nope, not me.

  “The bus from the Catholic school goes by, and one of those shirt-and-tie boys tosses a bottle at us? You remember it; I know you do. Little prick throws a bottle at us, and it hits the grass instead of the sidewalk, doesn’t bust. And Andy, shit, he picks it up and takes off running. Bus must be doing twenty miles an hour, but he catches up to it.”

  I remembered it, the scene playing through my head now like a movie clip: Andy Butcher sprinting after the bus with the bottle in his hand; the bus slowing because a car had just swung out of a driveway in front of it. Andy making a jump right at the side of the bus, Ed and I standing back in the yard with our mouths hanging open, staring in amazement, as Butcher hooked his left arm through the half-opened bus window and hung there, clinging to the side of the moving bus while he brought the bottle in with his right hand and smashed it against the stunned Catholic school kid’s face.

  “Man, we ran like hell,” Ed said.

  I nodded, and somehow I wanted to smile, even though this was no time to reminisce. “We did,” I said. “The bus driver got out, started chasing us, screaming about getting the police.”

  We’d gone probably twenty blocks that day before any of us had the sense to cut in one direction or the other, get out of the driver’s line of sight. Ran through a few yards until we collapsed in a heap, laughing our asses off and exchanging high fives.

  “Butcher, he was one hell of an athlete,” Ed said. “Never played an organized sport in his life, but he could catch a moving bus and hang in the window. Amazing.”

  “Ed, you’ve got to tell me what happened,” I began, not wanting to talk about Andy Butcher anymore, but he held up his hand and interrupted again.

  “People talk about memories like they’re the best things in the world, Lincoln. They love the word, love the feel of it, say it with this breathlessness, all nostalgic and shit. Memories, they say. Oh, how I love those memories.”

  He tossed his cigarette to the pavement and ground it out under a well-worn Nike. “Sometimes, they hurt.” He looked up at me. “Memories, I mean. I know there are good ones, but bad ones? Man, that’s the worst. You’d do whatever you could to put them away, drive them out of your mind, lock them out for good. But you can’t do that. They’ll keep coming back, and, Lincoln, those suckers can hurt. It’s like your memory’s bleeding, you know? And you can’t do anything but give it some time, wait for it to clot. Can’t stitch it up. Just got to wait it out.”

  “Ed”—I tried to fill my voice with some of the commanding tone I’d used on the bartender—“give that talking-in-riddles shit a rest, all right? Maybe you didn’t want to see me down here, but I came, anyhow. And if you want my help, I’ll do the best I can. But you got to tell it to me.”

  He started walking again, and while his steps seemed a little surer now than they had when we’d left the bar, it still wasn’t difficult to tell he was drunk. His eyes looked sober, though, and his face had a serious cast that told me his mind was—finally—very much in the moment.

  “You don’t need to b
e a part of this, Lincoln,” he said. He still moved with shuffling steps, his feet seeming not to come off the ground at all. It was the way he’d walked when he was twelve.

  “I know that.”

  “I went to the prosecutor,” he said. “You know what he told me?”

  “I don’t know, Ed.”

  “Told me to go home and keep myself out of trouble. Told me he had enough problems without a con like me coming to him with wild schemes and rumors. You believe that? The man’s paid with taxpayer cash, Lincoln, and he sent me out of his office. Told me to stay out of trouble.”

  “Why’d you go to the prosecutor?”

  “I’ll tell you something else—I tried to do it the right way. The legitimate way, you know?” His eyes had a milky cast to them again, wandering, fading back into the recesses of his booze-addled brain. “I tried. And they sent me home and told me to stay out of trouble. Then I said the hell with it. I’ll get them to take a look one way or the other, right? Because, Lincoln, the man needed somebody to bring it back to him. One way or the other.”

  A car was drifting up the street behind us. I was looking at Ed’s face, but he turned to glance at the car, and when he did, his eyes went flat.

  “Shit.”

  I turned and looked myself, and when I did, I echoed him. It was the Crown Vic that had been parked outside his mother’s house. The cops realized we’d seen them, and the driver punched the accelerator, closing the gap with a squeal of rubber. A flashing bubble light came on at the top of the windshield, and Ed Gradduk ran.

  “Don’t run—let them take you in, and we’ll go from there,” I yelled, but he ignored me. I ran after him and tried to grab him, hating the cops for showing up just when Ed was beginning to explain things. My hand caught a piece of his shirt, and when I tugged it, he spun off-balance before twisting away from me. The loss of balance sent his right foot off the sidewalk and into the street. I saw him glance up at the minivan that was traveling in his direction, then back at the Crown Vic coming from the opposite side. He looked at them both, then tried to run across the street as I lunged after him again. He made it a couple of steps, but there was too much alcohol in his bloodstream for such rapid movements, and halfway across Clark Avenue his feet tangled beneath him and he went down.

  The Crown Victoria driver had been pushing it, trying to get in front of Ed and block his path across the avenue. When Ed fell, the driver didn’t slow immediately, his reaction time poor. When he finally did register what had happened, he locked up the brakes, but far too late. The car rode the skid into and over Ed Gradduk.

  I stood on the curb and screamed something that was supposed to make sense but came out like the howl of a wounded animal, and then I ran into the street, too. Ed’s body lay under the car, and the stupid son of a bitch in the driver’s seat put it in reverse and backed up, rolling the front wheels over Ed once more. I screamed again, and then the car was in park and the cops were clambering out it, shouting at me to keep back. I ignored them and ran toward Ed, reached under the car for him.

  I had my hands on Ed’s shoulders when the cop who’d been driving grabbed me and tried to pull me back, shouting at me to get out of the way. I spun and put my right fist into his stomach without thinking about it, then crawled back under the car while he doubled over. Ed’s body was only partially covered by the front end of the Crown Vic, and as I tugged him free, I knew he was dead—blood was flowing from his nose, mouth, and even his ears, the flesh ripped and scraped, bits of the skull stark and white against the blood and torn skin. I got only a glance before the second cop wrapped his arm around my throat and pulled me back, pushing the barrel of his gun in my ear.

  There was more shouting then, but I don’t remember what was said. Some of it was directed at me, some of it was from me. The cops were shoving me away, and I was screaming in their faces. The middle-aged woman who’d been driving the van from the opposite direction got out of her vehicle, took one look at Ed, dropped to her knees, and vomited in the street. More cars had gathered now, and people were standing on the curb, watching the scene. One of them was moving forward, and I turned away from the cops in time to see Scott Draper just before he threw a punch at my head.

  “You shoved him!” he screamed. “You shoved him!”

  “He ran,” I shouted back, and he swung at me again as the cops tried to get in our way. “I tried to stop him, you stupid bastard.”

  He was still trying to get at me. I grabbed him by the shoulders and knocked him backward onto the pavement. I would have gotten a punch in if the cop who’d been driving the Crown Vic hadn’t caught my wrist. He slammed me onto the ground next to Draper. That’s where I remained while they put the handcuffs on—facedown on the street, my right cheek against the road, my left eye watching a trickle of Ed Gradduk’s blood work its way toward me, cutting a determined path over the pavement as if its last mission were to touch my flesh.

  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 bet
ween 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.