I shook my head. “I’m good.”
“Hell of a knock on the head he took,” Mason said, looking unhappy, no doubt envisioning his ass on the line for losing an arson suspect and denying a victim medical treatment in the same hour.
“I gave him an aspirin,” Dean said, and I had a brief recollection of some bad Harrison Ford movie where guys in a submarine are dying from radiation and Ford keeps screaming at the medic to give them some aspirin. It made me want to laugh, but I figured an outburst of laughter would probably convince them to take me to the hospital, after all.
“All right, guys,” I said. “I want to go home, take a shower, and go to sleep with a bag of ice on my head. So let’s get to it.”
“Half of Clark-Fulton’s on fire, and this guy wants to go to bed,” Dean said.
“You think I set the fires, take me to jail.”
“We know you didn’t set the fires,” Dean said. “But you’ve got a real knack for showing up in hot-action places lately, Mr. Perry. Thought we should discuss that.”
“Is that why you were following me tonight?”
“Didn’t start out following you,” he said. “Started out following Jack Padgett. Then you showed your face and we got more than a little intrigued. Split with the two other guys we were with and went with you. Got a hell of a show, too.”
I made a little bow that caused the lump on my head to pulse with heat and pressure, like a balloon filling with hot water. I gritted my teeth and leaned back in the chair. Tonight wasn’t a good occasion for physical comedy.
“A few nights ago, Jack Padgett and Larry Rabold ran over a fugitive in Clark Avenue,” Dean said. “You were there. Last night, Rabold was found murdered. You did the finding. Tonight, houses all over the neighborhood are catching fire, Padgett’s patrolling the crowds, and you’re sprinting through the streets.”
“How’d you get in it, Perry?” Mason said. “And how, exactly, do we convince you to get out of it?”
I looked at Mason and then back at Dean. “I got in it when my friend got run over by Padgett and Rabold. I’ll stay in it until I can explain why that happened.”
“Anybody paying you?” Dean asked.
“Nope.”
“Can we interest you in a government-funded vacation out of state for, say, three weeks?”
“Nope.”
Dean laughed loudly.
“I don’t know who set these fires,” I said. “If you’re expecting otherwise, you’re going to be disappointed.”
“We don’t expect otherwise. Not at all.”
“Do you understand the fires?” I asked. “What the purpose was?”
“We’re not here about the fires,” Dean said. “That’s somebody else’s case. A serious one, yes. But it’s not ours.”
“So why did you need to haul me off the property to assure yourselves of a private conversation?”
All the humor and charm slid off his face as he leaned forward. “To explain to you, Mr. Perry, that you are going to get yourself killed.”
They explained that to me, and a few other things, as well. Although Mason contributed, it was still Dean’s show all the way. There were four of them on the task force, I learned—two internal affairs detectives and two FBI agents from the racketeering and corruption squad. The task force had a simple purpose: explore the depths of police corruption in the department and its ties to Jimmy Cancerno’s criminal empire.
“By and large, this department is clean,” Mason said. “Any department of this size has its bad actors. It’s inevitable. That’s why you need guys like me. To keep it as clean as possible. And in this department, we’ve noticed a disturbing trend—most of the serious allegations keep coming up in the same district.”
The Cleveland police department has eight districts. Clark-Fulton is in District Two, and Padgett and Rabold were District Two officers. Had been for a long time, it seemed.
“We’ve been hearing it for years,” Mason said. “Complaints come and go all the time. But there have been too many in District Two. We noticed something else—there are a handful of officers who routinely turn down promotions that would place them in other districts, and fight transfers passionately. Why? We didn’t know. And then these guys”—he nodded at Dean—“got involved.”
The FBI’s organized crime and RICO squad had gone through a turnover in Cleveland over the years. The Italian mob was once prevalent in the city, trailing only New York and Chicago in activity. That was decades ago, though. Then the Russians moved in, and the organized crime folks had—and still have—their hands full with them. The Russian mobs aren’t like the Italians, though; they aren’t interested in dominating a neighborhood. They’ve got their eyes on bigger projects, and they don’t care about the street-corner shit.
“But we kept getting a sense of this network,” Dean said, “on the near west side. Drugs, prostitution, swag, real estate scams, everything on down to low-level neighborhood hustles and bookkeeping. I’ll be the first to admit we didn’t dedicate a lot of attention to this. Didn’t get really intrigued until we got more and more tips—every one anonymous—about corrupt cops, all in the same damn neighborhood. People feeding us tips about cops who’d been paid off, about detectives who drank with suspects, patrol officers who turned away when certain drunk drivers would roll up on the sidewalk right in front of them.
“So we ask ourselves,” Dean continued, “who the hell is running this show? Like I said before, most of the serious forces left in organized crime are on to bigger and better things. We can’t connect any of this shit around Clark-Fulton to a larger network. But then we began to get it. What if the show down there isn’t about a larger network? What if it’s a lot simpler—a crime throwback, you might say. What if it’s just one cunning son of a bitch who wants to own a neighborhood?”
“Cancerno,” I said.
Dean nodded. “Took us a while to get to him. The man is distanced, I’ll say that. He runs his games with an exceptional blend of control and distance. You don’t see a guy put it together so well very often. But it’s him. No doubt about it. At the end of the day, almost everyone working any sort of hustle in that neighborhood is tied to Cancerno in some way.”
“As are,” Mason threw in, “a concerning number of cops.”
“Right,” Dean said. “And that’s what we’re doing here. We have to know how deep it goes. How far does it spread? He owns street cops, sure. A few detectives, maybe. And every indication says there’s someone higher. But Cancerno’s good—the left hand never knows what the right is doing. One bought cop may not know the next. The information chain is broken by design. But it was for damn sure that an insider could learn more than an outsider. We needed help.”
“Larry Rabold,” I said.
“Yes. We picked Mr. Rabold for two simples reasons: we had good evidence of his wrongdoing, and he had a family.”
“Leverage,” I said, thinking of Rabold’s daughter, her blanched face and bloody shoes, and feeling sick. “Nice, Dean. Real nice.”
“What happened from that scenario is a shame,” Dean said. “A true and profound shame. But we were giving Mr. Rabold the opportunity to avoid jail. We believed it would have worked out better all the way around.”
“Sometimes it doesn’t,” I said. “You should have checked with me first. I could have explained that to you.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Dean said.
“What did he give you before he died?”