“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.