Back in the Taurus, Joe started the motor and cranked the air-conditioning up, blasting warm air out of the vents. He’d left his cell phone sitting on the console, and now he picked it up and checked the display.
“Missed a couple of calls.”
“You know, the damn things are portable for a reason,” I said, still awash in my frustration over a fruitless afternoon’s work.
Joe didn’t answer, just put the phone to his ear to play the messages. I stared out the window, tilting my face away from the hot, dusty air that was surging out of the vents. I gazed up the street at Corbett’s empty house, saw the stack of newspapers piled against the door, the mail bulging out of the box. Where the hell had he gone? And what did he know?
“That was Amos Lorenzon,” Joe said, breaking into my thoughts as he lowered the cell phone a minute later. “He wants to meet us. As soon as possible. He said he got something from the conduct reports.”
“Only a day late.”
“Yeah.” Joe’s face was intense. “He said it was big, LP. The kind of big that made him afraid to say a word about it over the phone.”
Amos Lorenzon met us at Bartlett’s Tavern on Lorain Avenue. Several people were at the bar, but Amos sat at a tiny table in the corner of the room, secluded. It had been a few years since I’d seen him, but he hadn’t changed much. The real shock was seeing him out of uniform. I tried to think of another time I’d seen him without the blue on and came up empty.
“How are you, son?” he said, shaking my hand. Amos had always called me son when we’d ridden together, but it had never been in a derogatory fashion, and I didn’t mind hearing it again.
“Doing fine,” I said. “Good to see you again.”
While he exchanged greetings with Joe, I pulled a third chair up and we all sat down. The table between us was about the size of a beer coaster. The bartender, a middle-aged woman with a hoarse voice, shouted over the music to ask Joe and me if we wanted a drink. We both declined.
“I hope you guys understand I wouldn’t have done this for just anybody,” Amos said. His skin tone was light for a black man but looked darker here in the shadows. There was gray in his fuzzy hair now and deep wrinkles across his forehead. He wasn’t tall, but he was built like a fireplug and had the strongest hands of anyone I’d ever known. More than once I’d seen him put what looked like a casual hand on the shoulder of a drunken disorderly and immediately bring the man to his knees with one squeeze.
“We know that,” Joe said. “And you should know how much it’s appreciated.”
“We’ll pay you whatever you think is fair,” I offered, even though we had no client to bill for the expense. I didn’t want Amos to feel like we’d taken advantage of him.
He scowled. “Great idea, son. It gets around that I released this information, I’m in deep enough without it looking like I took a bribe.”
“Fair point.”
“What have you got?” Joe said.
Amos gazed at the crowd around the bar, wary even though there was no way they could have heard us over the Pearl Jam that was pulsing through the speakers. This wasn’t any sort of police bar, and I had a feeling that was why Amos had selected it. He was nervous about the information he was about to offer us.
“I went through the conduct evaluations like you asked. For both Rabold and Padgett. Same day I’m doing that, Rabold gets killed.”
Silence.
“Didn’t think you’d have a whole lot to say about that,” Amos said. “But I don’t like it.”
“When I asked you to check out the conduct reports, I didn’t know the guy was going to get killed,” Joe said. “Now what do you have?”
“They’ve had their share of criticism,” Amos said. “Rabold got busted eight years back for letting a guy slip him a few hundred in cash in exchange for not arresting him for drunk driving. The guy talked about it at a party when there was a city official in the room, and Rabold got his ass chewed good on that. No suspension, though; it never made the papers so it was all done quietly. That was about the only serious knock on Rabold other than general complaints about laziness.”
“And Padgett?” Joe said.
“He’s a different matter.” Amos shifted in his chair, pulling closer to the little table. “Never gets a positive review, but he’s been around so long and he’s so loud and overbearing that I think some guys are intimidated by him. He’s had nearly a dozen complaints of excessive force over the years, but none of them developed into anything. Internal affairs investigated a rumor of him taking bribes over some swag sales about ten years back, but they cleared him.”
“Swag sales,” I said. “You know if that involved a guy named Cancerno?”
“I don’t remember any names being mentioned on that. It was just a few sentences saying he’d been checked out and cleared.” Amos stopped talking and sipped the glass of water that was on the table, his eyes on the bar again. I glanced over my shoulder and saw we were getting a stare from the bartender as she poured someone a fresh draft. Three guys sitting at a corner table in a bar, drinking nothing but one ice water between them. This was probably the most suspicious behavior she’d seen in a while.
“Tell you something else I found out that I don’t like,” Amos said. “When I asked records to pull those conduct evaluations for me, the girl there said something about Rabold being a popular guy. I didn’t know what she was talking about and said so. She told me there have been a couple requests for his evaluations in the past few weeks—one from internal affairs, another from the FBI.”
“FBI,” Joe echoed. “Wonderful. She have any idea what it was about?”
“No. But like an idiot, I decided I’d pursue it a little bit. I called a guy I know with internal affairs, asked him what he knew about Rabold. The man got seriously bothered. Wanting to know what the hell I was asking about Rabold for. I told him I was doing conduct reviews and was curious, but he didn’t buy it, and if he checks me out, I could be in some trouble. That is, if you two tell anyone I passed information along to a couple civilians.”
“We’re not telling anyone,” I said. “But this guy didn’t give you any idea of what’s going on with Rabold?”
“No. And he’s a guy I know well, too. A friend, almost. So his reaction surprised me.” Amos lowered his voice another level, which made him practically inaudible. “The records girl gave me the name of the FBI guy who requested Rabold’s evaluations. Name was Robert Dean. I checked him out just enough to find out that he’s with the RICO task force.”
Joe looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “RICO task force, and Rabold wearing a wire?”
“Sounds heavy,” I said. “And the RICO angle could bring Cancerno into the fold easily enough.”
“Wire?” Amos said.
“Rabold was wearing a wire when he was killed,” Joe said. “You think he could have been working for internal affairs? Maybe setting up Padgett?”
Amos leaned away from the table and held up his hands. “I have no idea, man. None.”
We were all quiet for a bit, thinking it over. Then Joe asked Amos if that was all he had.
“I’m not done yet,” Amos said. “But before I keep going, I want to ask you boys a straight question and get a straight answer in return. Fair?”
Joe and I nodded.
“All right. Now, Pritchard, you didn’t tell me what this was all about, and I respected that. But I remember some things, maybe more than you two think I would, and I’ve got my own ideas. Does this have something to do with Ed Gradduk getting killed?”
Joe left the answer to me.
“Yes. That’s what it’s about, Amos.”
He pursed his lips and frowned. “I was afraid of that. I remembered what happened between you and that guy before you made the jump to narcotics, son. Remember it didn’t go easy on you.”