“You look good, Lincoln,” she said as she walked to my truck with me. “It’s been a while since I saw you, too, you know.”
“I know.” I turned to her and gave her a hug. She squeezed me tightly and her fingernails bit into my back. I pulled away when I felt the first fresh teardrop on my neck.
“You’re still the most beautiful woman I never wanted to sleep with,” I said, and she laughed not because that was funny but because she knew it to be true.
She watched me climb into the truck, then motioned for me to put the window down. When I did, she said, “Call me, Lincoln. Tell me what you learn.”
Her voice held both a note of pleading and one of command. It was a blend I’d heard before.
The house is dark because the sun sets behind it, the long shadows in the room making it seem later than it really is. I’m on the couch. Allison is on her knees in front of me. Her elbows are braced against my thighs, her hands clasped. It’s as if she is praying to me, and in a sense she almost is. Tonight I have been called upon to be a savior.
“You know I’m right,” she says. “I’ve talked to him until I simply have run out of things to say. He’s not listening. And he won’t listen.”
“He might,” I lie. “You can’t give up on him this easily, Allison. He loves you the same as ever. He’s just . . .”
“He’s just killing himself,” she finishes for me. “You’re trying to turn a blind eye to that, Lincoln, but you know it’s true. You’re the one who told me what Antonio Childers is like.”
I turn away from her and stare at the wall. Antonio Childers is one of the great social menaces in our city, a drug dealer who is also a suspect in nearly a dozen unsolved homicides. For several months now, Ed Gradduk has been working for him. It started as petty shit, muling and couriering mostly, but it’s escalated. Ed’s in construction, had a run of bad luck with lost jobs and bad bosses, and apparently he found an alternative income source. I haven’t seen much of him recently; I’m working nights for the Cleveland police, putting in as much overtime as possible, trying to get noticed and get promoted. That’s how you make detective, I know, and that’s what I intend to do.
“He’s going to get killed,” Allison repeats, and I avoid looking down directly into her face.
“I know,” I say softly. Allison and I have had this conversation before. Ed and I have had this conversation before, too. He told me to keep my eyes on the other side of the street when I pass him in my cruiser, and otherwise things would be normal. I told him it couldn’t work that way. We haven’t spoken much since.
“He’s gone all the time now,” Allison says. “We’ve had calls at all hours of the night. Once a guy sat in front of the house in a van for hours, just waiting for Ed to come back.”
They still live on the near west side, which is part of the problem. Childers has recruited Ed because Ed knows the neighborhood well, knows who to talk to and who to avoid, and works the streets with all the familiarity you want from a foot soldier. For the life of me, I cannot reason out how this began, how Ed could possibly have allowed himself to get involved with Childers.
“There’s only one way to get him to listen,” Allison says, and she reaches out and squeezes my upper arms to emphasize her point. “You told me you could arrange things if it came to that. I’m telling you it has come to that.”
“Shit, Allison.” I shake my head. “He’s got to talk for it to work. If he doesn’t . . .”
“He will. Trust me, Lincoln. If it comes down to a choice between freedom and jail, between me and a cell, he will make the right decision. You know he will. But until he’s faced with that choice, I’m afraid he’s going to keep looking at it as a game.”
“He’s got to talk,” I repeat.
“He’ll talk. He may not care enough to save himself right now, but if we press him to that point, Lincoln . . . if we put his back to the wall, he’ll have to.”
“We’ll save him despite himself,” I say sarcastically, but she nods with an equal amount of sincerity.
“Yes,” she says. “That’s exactly what we’ll do. But I need your help. You have to be involved, have to make sure he has the options. Are you sure you can do that?”
I run my tongue across dry lips. “I’m sure. There’s a narcotics detective named Pritchard. Joe Pritchard. He’s got a good reputation, supposed to be a hell of a cop. And he’s got a serious hard-on for Antonio Childers. He’s not going to send a small player like Ed to jail when he could trade that conviction for information about Childers.”
“So you’ll do it.”
I take a long look at her face, then look back at the window, the glass dark with growing shadows.
“Lincoln,” she says, “Ed is losing his life here. He’s going to be killed or he’s going to get sent to jail by someone else, someone who will see that he’s kept there a long time. You know talking is not doing any good. We have to force to him to walk away from this.”
I swallow and get to my feet, step around her and into the middle of the living room, heading for the door.
“I’ll call Pritchard tonight.”
CHAPTER 6
When I got to the office, Joe had the little television on top of the tall filing cabinet tuned to a news station. I watched while a grim-faced announcer stood on the sidewalk on Clark Avenue, recounting the “brutal end to a tragic tale” that had occurred there the night before.
For a moment the screen was filled with a picture of Anita Sentalar: a smiling, beautiful young woman who appeared to be Puerto Rican. She had glossy dark hair framing a fine-boned, mocha-skinned face, and kind, intelligent eyes.
The next face we saw was a different extreme. Old, sour, and angry. Red-rimmed eyes narrowing on the camera in a glower. This was Anita Sentalar’s father.
“What comment do I have on the death of Ed Gradduk?” he said, responding to the question he’d just been asked. “Are you kidding me? My comment is, fantastic. Good. Street graves are just what guys like that deserve. It doesn’t bring my daughter back, though.”
They switched from the Clark Avenue report back to the studio, where the anchor explained that no relationship between Gradduk and Sentalar had as yet been disclosed, and then told us we were about to see some “horrific footage” of the fire that had killed the female attorney on Train Avenue. I moved closer to the television screen and watched carefully.
The liquor store security camera had provided a crisp, black-and-white image of the sidewalk in front of it, and, in turn, the house across the street. It was a run-down home, a crumbling structure that had been left untended and empty.
The footage showed a man who walked down the sidewalk right in front of the liquor store, and the camera got a clear look at his face. It was unquestionably Ed Gradduk, and he was smiling while he crossed the street and disappeared along the side of the house.
“Now we’ll move ahead seventeen minutes,” the news anchor said, and the black-and-white footage jumped to a new clip. After a short pause, white flames showed themselves inside the house across the street, spreading with astonishing speed, licking their way up the walls and over the eaves.