“I made my own bed on that one, Amos.”
“Sure, son. But I remember, is all I’m saying. And I heard about it when he got killed a couple days back, but I didn’t think of it right off when Pritchard called me.”
We waited.
“There was a harassment complaint filed on Padgett more than fifteen years ago,” Amos said. “Of the sexual nature. Claim was that he’d drop in on this woman time to time, make her perform for him. Seemed he had something on her, or maybe just intimidated her, because she let it go on for a while.”
He paused, then said, “The woman was Gradduk’s mother.”
For a long time the only voice in the room was Eddie Vedder’s as he wailed over the guitar and the drums.
“You think there was bad blood going back a long time with those two, don’t you?” Amos said.
“Looks like it,” I answered, my voice flat.
“Looks like an awful mess, is what it looks like,” Amos said. “One of the cops that ran that kid down in the street was harassing the kid’s mother years ago? Man, that’s a shit storm waiting to happen.”
“What were the details?” I said. “That’s a substantial complaint, but Padgett’s still on the force all these years later. It never came around to bite him.”
“That’s the hell of it,” Amos said. “The Gradduk woman wouldn’t make out a complaint herself. Wouldn’t tell anyone a damn thing. The complaint came in and the department saw what a hellacious pain in the ass it could be, realized they had to go heavyweight with it right at the start, so they sent it up the line to the attorneys, who talked to the woman. She wouldn’t tell them anything. Without a victim stating she’d been victimized, all they had left was a rumor. It died a quiet death and got shoved under the rug. Stayed there, too.”
“At least till now,” Joe said, and Amos grimaced.
“Wait a second,” I said. “If Alberta Gradduk wouldn’t say anything about it, then who made the complaint initially?”
“I got that.” Amos slipped a piece of paper out of his back pocket and scanned it quickly. “I’m not giving this to you, because I want all this exchange to stay in the mind and not on paper; you know, protect myself. We get done, this sucker’s going down the toilet back in that bathroom.”
We waited while he searched for the name. After a minute, he had it.
“The original complaint was filed by a friend of the family. Went right in to the chief, himself. Guy who made the complaint was named Thomas Perry. Says he was with a city ambulance team.”
Joe looked at me. “Shit, Lincoln. Was that your—”
“Father,” I said. “Yes. That was him.”
CHAPTER 19
My father had not been close to the Gradduks. He hadn’t much in common with Norm, and Alberta had always been in the house, out of sight. The only member of the family my father had regularly seen was Ed, because Ed had always been at my house. There had been times when just the two of them were together, though. Times that had been difficult for me to understand at first, when I was young.
They used to play baseball together in the front lawn of Ed’s house on Tuesday evenings, the only weeknight my dad was home for dinner. I stumbled across them by accident once, watched them with shock for a few minutes, then retreated, feeling hurt and left out. My father had seen me there, though, and that night he came into my room to talk. Told me he needed to spend some time alone with my friend now and then, that Ed was feeling the loss of his father heavily. He said he was glad I was mature enough to understand that. It was a subtle, kind way to let me know that if I didn’t like the two of them having some time without me, I needed to grow up. I took the lesson.
And so they spent time together, occasionally. But I’d never considered that my father might have been hearing things from Ed that I was not. I was Ed’s best friend; my father was an old guy. If anyone knew secrets, it was going to be me, right? Wrong.
Long after Joe and I left Bartlett’s Tavern I was still stunned. I wondered what exactly my father had known, wondered why Ed had told him and not me. But maybe there are things you can tell your best friend when you’re a fourteen-year-old male and things you can’t. Admitting that your mother was being sexually harassed might have fit into the latter category. And I didn’t have to wonder why my father had never told me—if he felt strongly about keeping his own problems quiet, and he did, then he felt stronger still about keeping the problems of others quiet. Thomas Perry was not a man who passed neighborhood gossip along. He was the brick wall that brought it to a halt.
You’re just like your father, Alberta Gradduk had said, scowling at me. I never liked meddlers.
So he’d meddled. But how far? He’d made a complaint to the police, obviously, had instigated an investigation into Padgett. But then what happened? Did Padgett go away, or did he linger? What had his contact with the Gradduks been over the years? What had put him at Ed’s house with a gun in his hand three days ago? And why the hell wouldn’t Alberta talk? She’d been cooperative enough until I’d asked if she knew one of the cops, and then she’d thrown us out.
These were the questions that ran through my head as Joe drove us back to the office. It was growing late now, the sun a fading red mass at the end of the avenue, the day gone. We didn’t have much to show for it, either. More questions, maybe. Not a lot of answers. That seemed to be the pattern.
Joe went upstairs when we got back to the office, claiming he was just going to shut his computer down. I knew he was probably going to get to work on the paying cases we’d been neglecting for days, though. I said good-bye and walked back to my apartment. When I got there, I didn’t go upstairs, but kept walking east down the avenue. I walked until I got to the West Park library, then went around the building and lifted myself up onto the cool stone wall that bordered the steps. I could hear laughter from the little park that’s just down the street from the library, kids playing tag or chasing the season’s last fireflies, maybe.
Leaning back until I was flat on the wall, I cupped my hands behind my head and looked up at the night sky. I listened to the kids and remembered how it had felt to be one of them on a hot, muggy summer night. They’re all special when you’re a kid, three months of treasures strung together before you’re sent back to school. There’s nothing quite like that when you reach adulthood. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, feeling the stone cold on my back. Ed and Draper and I used to sit on the concrete steps outside the Hideaway late into the summer nights, saying hello to the regulars that went into the bar, watching for any girls that might pass by on the avenue. It seemed like a million years ago, and like yesterday.
I was bothered by how much had gone on without my knowledge. Norm Gradduk had been a suspect in the neighborhood fires the summer he’d killed himself, his wife had apparently been harassed by a cop, and my father had made a complaint about the cop’s behavior. It had all happened right around me, along the streets I’d walked every day, to the people I knew best in the world. And I hadn’t known a damn thing about it.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I thought about letting it go, not wanting to lose the brief moment of peacefulness to whoever was calling, but I took it out of my pocket and checked the display. It was Amy’s work number.
“How you doing, Ace?”
“Okay,” she said. “Did you get those faxes?”
“Yes. Thanks a lot.”
“Anytime. Did you see the recorder’s-office list, though?”