Joe’s idea about checking Joseph A. Marsh had been a good one. Assuming Corbett didn’t have money, it had been perfect. Where else would he go without any cash, with no family to take him in? His options would have been slim, and finding someplace—anyplace—to wait the storm out while he tried to come up with a plan would have been hard. The Neighborhood Alliance properties offered him that, and the school was the best option of the lot. Remove that from the list, and who the hell knew where he’d gone.
The thought of the list stopped me cold. The night of the fires, I’d tried to get ahead of Corbett by moving through the list of Neighborhood Alliance properties. Where had the list come from, though? Amy. And she’d gotten it from the county recorder’s office. The houses had nothing to do with Cancerno’s crew until they were instructed to begin working on them. One house, the big one on West Fortieth, had been purchased just a week before Sentalar died. It was almost certain Cancerno’s team wasn’t ready to work on it yet, and quite possible that they didn’t even know about it. But Corbett had been with Sentalar in that last week, touring the neighborhood. He might have known.
“Shit,” I said aloud. “I saw it. I saw the damn thing.”
Mitch Corbett had a cat. There’d been a litter box in the furnace room at his house. The door to the furnace room had been closed. If he’d left the cat in the house, he would have left that door open. Wouldn’t want the cat pissing all over the rug.
There hadn’t been a cat in Corbett’s house, but I’d seen one in the vacant house on West Fortieth. Hard to forget the little beast, considering I’d damn near shot it. It hadn’t been a stray, either, but healthy and well fed, with a collar that had reflected a glitter of light when I’d leveled my gun at it.
It was five past two when I left the hospital to find Mitch Corbett.
CHAPTER 28
I didn’t have my truck at the hospital, so I had to walk it. The house was about two miles from MetroHealth. I walked down the empty sidewalks, keeping my hands in my pockets and my shoulders hunched against the light chill the storms had left in the night air. A car cruised past me slowly, a couple kids sticking their heads out of the windows and yelling at me. I didn’t look up. One of them tossed a bottle that hit ten feet away and shattered. They laughed and drove on.
Although I was feeling confident that Corbett had been in the house, I wasn’t sure he’d still be there. The day after the fires, the cops would have had to put some scrutiny on the Neighborhood Alliance. They would have checked the other houses, probably accompanied by an arson team. If they’d flushed Corbett out, would he have returned? All I could do was hope that he had.
The house on West Fortieth looked just as it had the last time I’d visited it in the night—dark, lonely, and forgotten. A neighborhood lived on around it, but this house was no longer part of that. I approached the back door.
I didn’t have a gun. My Glock had been lost in Rocky River, and I hadn’t gone back to the office or to my apartment before making this trip. I wasn’t in a mood to let that worry me, though.
The door wasn’t locked. The knob turned freely in my hand. I pushed the door open about six inches, then stepped to the side, and listened. There was no sound of movement. I gave it a few seconds longer, then pushed the door all the way open and stepped inside. I remembered the layout and moved fairly quickly through the kitchen and into the living room. As I entered, I heard a soft thump and moved to the side again. A car passed outside, and light slid over the room momentarily. It was enough to show me a familiar gray-and-white cat on the floor, looking up with wide eyes that shone in the darkness, and a large man stretched out on the floor under a thin blanket, a handgun beside him.
I shuffled close to him, and the cat meowed loudly. The man didn’t stir. I felt along the dirty floorboards with my left hand, searching for the gun. I touched something else and discovered it was a metal-handled flashlight. I took it in my right hand, then kept searching till I found the gun and put it in my left hand. When I picked the gun up, the cat yowled again, louder this time. The man on the floor grunted softly and sat up. I hit the flashlight button and shot the beam into his eyes.
“Rise and shine, Mr. Corbett.”
He covered his eyes with one arm and swept the other across the floor, searching for the gun.
“I’ve already got it,” I said, and he stopped moving. His eyes were shielded and he squinted, and still he couldn’t see me, because I was standing behind the light.
“I’m Lincoln Perry,” I said. “And we’re going to do some talking. Talk well enough—and that means honest enough—and you might not die tonight, Corbett.”
He sat on the floor with his back against the wall while I stood in front of him. He was a big man, over six feet and carrying probably 220 pounds. He wore grimy jeans and a T-shirt, and a new growth of beard covered his face. The cat had curled up beside him, and he stroked its fur absently while he talked.
“Whatever Cancerno told you is a lie. The only thing he knows about the truth is how to avoid it. Ed was my friend. You think I had anything to do with what happened with him, you’re out of your mind.”
“You know what did happen, though?”
“Most of it.”
“Then what the hell are you doing here, instead of down at a police station trying to help before more people die?”
“You just told me,” Corbett said, “that it was a cop who shot your partner.”
“Yes.”
He laughed softly. “So there you go, man. There you go. First Anita went down, then Ed, and I knew it was time for my ass to clear out. Not that I expected to make it long. I got no money, no place to go. And Jimmy Cancerno is not going to let me stay gone for long. When the man finds me . . .” He shook his head. “Dying isn’t going to be easy for me. He’ll make damn sure of that. Take his time.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because I put it all in motion, man. I told the old stories. And he knows that. Everything that’s happened since? Jimmy’s holding me personally responsible. I guarantee that.”
“Explain it. If you put it all into motion, I want to know how. Every last detail, Corbett.”
He ran a hand over his scruffy beard and sighed. My night vision had adapted to the point that I could see him even without the flashlight. The empty living room smelled heavily of dust and mold.
“It goes back a ways,” he said. “For you to understand what Eddie got into, you got to listen a bit.”
“I’ve been through a lot to hear the story. I’m sure as hell not going to get impatient now.”
His eyes searched for me in the darkness, and he nodded once. “Okay. Then I’ll get to telling it.”
______
It started, Mitch Corbett told me, when Norm Gradduk lost his job. It hadn’t been in April, which was what Norm had offered to his family. It had been the previous October. For six months, Norm had left the house every day pretending he was on his way to work. In reality, he was on his way to the Hideaway or another drinking establishment of choice. Norm had gone through a handful of jobs in the two years leading up to that, and at his last firing Alberta had hit the roof. He didn’t want to deal with that scene again, so he decided he’d just keep things quiet till he found another job.
“Problem was,” Corbett said, “he didn’t find another job.”
So Norm needed cash, and a steady supply of it. Didn’t want to go for unemployment, though. There was pride at stake, and of course it was more likely Alberta would find out the truth if he did go on the county. Maybe even leave him. One of Norm’s friends, maybe Scott Draper’s dad, maybe somebody else, introduced him to a neighborhood guy named Jimmy Cancerno. Told him this was a man who could give him some cash, a short-term loan, a long-term loan, whatever he needed. Cancerno was more than cooperative when the two men met; he was downright friendly. Slapped Norm on the shoulder and told him the money was his. They’d work out terms of repayment later, he said with a wink. At first, Norm borrowed as little as possible, just enough to keep the electric bill paid and food on the table. But the money was given so freely, without hassle or heartache, that it also became easier to ask for it. The weekly loans increased. So did the debt. And Norm’s drinking and gambling.