“Oh?”
“Mitch Corbett.”
He let his breath out loudly and nodded. “Shit, you’re right. I had forgotten about him. If he’s important to Padgett, he needs to be important to us.”
I told him what little I’d learned with my phone calls the previous night.
“His brother wasn’t helpful,” I said, “nor was he fond of Mitch. Could be the truth, or it could be a smokescreen he’s putting up because his brother’s hiding out at his place.”
“All right,” Joe said. “Let’s do it like this: You work Corbett this afternoon. Get everything you can. And I’ll do the background on Padgett and Rabold.”
Family hadn’t proved particularly helpful in my quest for information about Mitch Corbett, and I didn’t know any of his friends other than the dead one. That left me with coworkers. Jimmy Cancerno was Corbett’s boss, but he hadn’t appeared to be too interested in cooperating the previous day. I decided I’d drive out to Cancerno’s construction company anyhow, talk to whomever I could find, and see where it led me. If Ed and Corbett had become friends on the job, it stood to reason there had been a couple other guys in the mix.
Pinnacle Properties, Cancerno’s contracting company, was located on Pearl Road, just south of Riverside Cemetery. On the other side of the interstate was MetroHealth, where my father had worked as a paramedic for years. MetroHealth was home to the city’s busiest emergency room, and that had provided a constant sound track to the neighborhood when I was growing up. As I drove, an ambulance siren was wailing a few blocks away, and as soon as it faded, I could hear the thumping of helicopter blades as a medical chopper headed north for the landing pad on the roof of the hospital.
Pinnacle Properties was housed in a long prefabricated warehouse that gleamed in the afternoon sun. A small office was built into the front of the warehouse, and a half dozen cars were in the parking lot. I got out of the truck and walked into the office.
A young, blond girl with a good smile was behind the only desk inside. I told her I was looking for Mitch Corbett, just in case she had more up-to-date information than I did.
“Hmm,” she said, “Mitch hasn’t been working this week. I don’t know what that’s about. I can radio out to the site and see if he showed up late today, though.”
“Tell you what, you tell me where those guys are and I’ll drive out and have a word with them myself. If Mitch isn’t around, I can always talk to . . .” I frowned, thoughtful, then pointed at her for assistance, as if I’d drawn a momentary blank on the name.
“Jeff.”
“Right, Jeff.” I smiled at her. “I’ll talk to Jeff if Mitch isn’t around. Where are they?”
She gave me an address on Erin Avenue. I thanked her, returned to my truck, and drove north on Pearl until it became West Twenty-fifth Street just past Clark Avenue. A left turn onto Erin Avenue, and then I slowed down to look at the house numbers. I found the one I needed without bothering to look at the address; a Pinnacle Properties pickup truck was parked in front of the house. The home itself was a narrow, two-story duplex that had seen better days. A pile of trash and debris was at the curb, and a weather-beaten sign stuck in the weed-riddled front yard claimed the house as a NEIGHBORHOOD ALLIANCE ACQUISITION.
I parked across the street and walked over and up the driveway. I could hear a stereo going inside, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Three Steps” playing just as I was on my way up the three front steps of the house. Then the side door opened with a bang and a thick guy with red hair and no shirt stepped outside, followed by a Hispanic man with chiseled muscles. Each held bulging garbage bags in their hands as they marched down the driveway. They tossed them on top of the pile, and both bags promptly rolled off and fell on the sidewalk, something inside one of them shattering. The Hispanic guy turned around, indifferent, and spotted me standing at the door. The redhead was replacing the fallen bags to the top of the garbage heap.
“This is private property,” the Hispanic guy said. “You got a reason to be up there?” His companion turned around at that and gave me a curious glance.
I left the front door and walked down to the driveway to meet them. “How’s it going? I’m looking for a Jeff?”
“You got him,” the redhead said. “Jeff Franklin.” He pulled off a thick work glove and offered me his meaty hand. We shook, both of us squinting against the sun that shone down uninhibited by any trees. The Hispanic guy spat on the sidewalk and looked bored.
“My name’s Lincoln Perry. I was hoping you could help me find someone.”
“Yeah?”
“Mitch Corbett.”
Jeff Franklin gave me an interested look as he pulled a red bandanna from his back pocket and wiped his face with it. His barrel chest was soaked with sweat beneath a mat of curly red hair, and his upper arms were all freckles.
“Mitch’s missing, I’m afraid,” he said. “Hasn’t been in for a few days.”
“Is that unusual?”
He nodded. “Very. I’ve worked with him for more’n a year and I can’t think of a single sick day he took. Man’s a hard worker.”
“What’re you, a cop?” the Hispanic guy asked, then spat on the pavement again.
“No. Just someone who needs to talk to this man.” I nodded pointedly at Jeff Franklin, making it clear that I had no interest in the other guy, nor any desire for him to stick around. Before he could object to that, Franklin handled it for me.
“Go on inside and help the rest of the guys, Ramone. We got a lot to finish up today.”
Ramone shrugged and went back up the driveway, shoulders slouched, swaggering. Jeff Franklin watched him and sighed, then tucked the bandanna back in his pocket.
“Can I ask why you’re needing Mitch?”
There was something about Jeff Franklin that I liked. He carried himself confidently but without pretense, and I had the sense he would reciprocate straight talk with more of the same.
“I’m a private investigator. And I was a friend of Ed Gradduk’s a long time ago.”
Jeff Franklin gazed at me with sad eyes. “Let’s you and I go sit down. You want a Coke?”
I started to shake my head, but he was already gone. He went out to the pickup truck, dug two cans of Coke out of a cooler, then walked back up the driveway and over to the sagging front porch. He sat down on it, opened one can of Coke, and handed the other to me.
“Ed was a good man,” he said after he took a drink. “He’d only worked with us for about six months, but you get to know a fella pretty well in six months of work. And I liked him.”
“I did, too.”
He drank some more of the Coke, then muffled a belch and studied me. “You think he killed that woman?”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t. And that’s why I’m here.”
“Looking for Mitch? What’s he got in it?”
“Maybe nothing. But I won’t know till I ask him. And I’m a little concerned that he’s missing. I was told he and Ed were pretty close.”
“They were.” Jeff Franklin tugged the bandanna out of his pocket again, held it idly in one hand, the Coke in the other. “Mitch and Ed took to each other. Mitch was about twenty years older, of course, but they had a similar sort of personality, you know? Laughed at jokes nobody else thought was funny, noticed things nobody else noticed. Yeah, they got along, all right.”
“How long have you known Corbett?”
He chewed on his lip absently while he thought about it. “I guess almost two years. That’s how long I’ve been working for Jimmy, and Mitch was on when I got the job. He’s the crew supervisor.”
“Longtime construction worker, then?”
“All his life. Went into the army and came out a demolitions specialist, hired on with Jimmy. Been with him ever since.”