Lincoln Perry 02 - Sorrow's Anthem (22 page)

CHAPTER
21

Consciousness returned like an abrupt end to a long journey, as if
I’d been deep in water swimming upward slowly and easily, then
broken the surface without warning. I opened my eyes, but my vision
was fading in and out, and the room I found myself in seemed
to be on its own axis, spinning fast. Above me the ceiling went on
forever into blackness. Two hard blinks later I realized the ceiling
was the sky, and I wasn’t in a room at all. I was on my back on
pavement.
I started to move upright, but a quick surge of nausea and dizziness
stopped me. I dropped back down and rolled on my side, feeling
as if I was about to get sick. It was then I noticed the men with
the guns.
There were two of them—both in suits, both with automatics in
shoulder holsters, no attempt made to cover the weapons with
their jackets.
“Probably shouldn’t have sat up so fast,” the taller one said conversationally.
The shorter one just stood and glared at me. I didn’t
know what to make of them yet, but they didn’t seem inclined to
shoot me, so I just put my head back down on the pavement and
closed my eyes, waiting for the sickness to pass.

It was a few minutes before I was able to stand. The suits had carried
me away from the fire, probably as far as a few blocks, then
dropped me in an alley. We were beside a Dumpster, and the smell
of garbage wasn’t helping my nausea. On either side of the alley
were tall stone buildings, dark and quiet. None of the light from
the fire that had to be still burning was visible, and it was strangely
quiet here in the alley.
“Hell of a thing you did,” the suit on my right said. He was the
taller one, with short dark hair and close-set eyes. “Running right
into a wall like that. Never seen anything like it. You came out running
like you had a gold medal in mind, head down, and then— boom—right into the wall. Hell of a thing.”
It’s always nice to have your athletic achievements appreciated.
“Can you walk now?” the other suit said. He was looking
around, shifting his weight, edgy. The taller guy was relaxed.
“Yeah,” I said, my tongue thick against my teeth.
“Great. We’re going to walk down the alley and get into a car.
Then we’re all going to go get you some water and some painkillers
and have a nice little talk.”
My legs were unsteady beneath me, but they moved well
enough, and everything above my waist seemed fine except for the
pounding in my head. The lump on the top of my skull went warm
and then cool, warm and then cool, like a coal fanned by a breeze.
I winced against the pain and then, slowly, started to walk. The
nameless men in the suits stayed on each side of me, standing
close.
“FBI?” I said as we moved down the alley.
“Just me,” the taller one said, his voice as lighthearted as his
springy, fast step. He was walking down the alley with bouncing
enthusiasm, as if he were coming out of Jacobs Field after watching
the Indians win on a walk-off homer. “I apologize for forgetting
the formal introduction, Mr. Perry. My name’s Robert Dean.”
The
FBI
agent who had requested Rabold’s files. A member of
the
RICO
task force, according to Amos Lorenzon.
“And you?” I asked the other.
“Brent Mason, internal affairs, Cleveland police.” He clipped
the words off individually, as if he were counting. If I’d had to
guess, I would have put them the other way around. Seemed like
the guy with the rod up his ass would have been federal. Then
again, the internal affairs guys can’t help the rod—nobody likes
them, and after a while that begins to affect your personality a bit.
We came out of the alley and I saw we were back on Fulton
Road. They’d hauled me quite a ways.
“Didn’t want to let me be rescued by the fire department or some
other cops,” I said.
“Oh, no,” Dean said. “Couldn’t have that. You might not believe
it, Mr. Perry, but there are some cops in this neighborhood that
wouldn’t have had all that much interest in rescuing you.”
They put me in the back of an unmarked Taurus that looked
identical to the one Joe drove. Mason drove and Dean sat in the
front beside him, so at least they trusted me not to leap from the
car and flee. No handcuffs, no indication that I was a suspect in the
fires. That was a plus.
“So I look all beat to shit,” I said as we stopped at a red light on
Fulton, “and you guys seem pretty fresh. No cuts, no burns—suits
aren’t even wrinkled.”
“Uh-oh,” Dean said. “I get the feeling he’s deducing something.”
Mason didn’t say a word.
“I’m guessing you didn’t pull me out of that fire,” I said. “But it’s
just the three of us in here. So who did?”
Mason didn’t answer, but I could tell from the way his shoulders
tightened that he didn’t appreciate the question.
Dean twisted around to face me and grinned broadly. “Can’t tell
you. Because we missed the son of a bitch.”
“Missed him?”
“Sure did,” Dean said cheerfully. Mason’s shoulders tightened
even more, as if someone were ratcheting up the tension in him
with a wrench. “You came running out, and we both went after
you. You stopped yourself with that header into the building next
door, and, like a couple of jackasses, we were both there when you
went down. The other guy bailed out right then, cleared the yard,
and was long gone. It was, Mr. Perry, a serious drop of the ball on
our part. And, oh, man, you do not want to imagine the response
we’re going to get when we offer this one up to the powers that be.”
Dean concluded with a chuckle, and Mason looked at him as if
he’d like to take his hands off the steering wheel and wrap them
around the
FBI
agent’s throat. He kept his mouth shut, though.
He was good at that.
“But you saw him go in?” I said.
“We did.”
“And?”
“And he was a big son of a bitch in a baseball cap,” Dean said.
“We were across the street, and you saw how damn dark it was behind
that house. By the time we got across, things were burning.
We probably would have been in fine shape if you hadn’t come
storming out when you did.”
“Sorry. If I’d known burning to death would have helped you
boys, I’d have stayed inside, of course.”
“You say the guy pulled you out of the fire?” Dean said.
“That’s right. I jumped down the stairs and put my foot right
through one of the steps. Fell and got hung up, and then he came
in and pulled me loose. Got me out of the living room and shoved
me through the back door and I just kept going.”
“So you were right next to him,” Mason said, speaking for the
first time since we’d gotten in the car. “You got a good look.”

“I got no look.”
He shifted his eyes to the rearview mirror and gave me a hard
squint, as if he thought I were lying. I stared back at the mirror and
shook my head slowly.
“No lie, Detective. The place was on fire, and the guy was behind
me. I had my eyes closed because of the heat for most of it,
anyhow.”
Mason grunted with disgust and dropped his eyes from the
mirror.
They drove to Clark, then west to the intersection of Clark and
Sixty-fifth, where Mason pulled into the narrow, steep parking lot
of Mom’s Restaurant. Mom’s had been there forever; as long as I
could remember and a few decades beyond that, at least. When I
was a kid, my dad would take me to breakfast at Mom’s on Saturdays.
We’d make the walk up from the house—always a walk,
never a drive, even if it was pouring rain or blowing snow—and
then eat and talk. My dad would drink water and coffee, and I’d
have orange juice and pancakes. He’d wince every time I ordered
it—orange juice and syrup, he’d say, your teeth will rot out.
Mason shut off the engine and we all got out and went inside.
The room was nearly empty, and I realized the place had to be
close to shutting down for the night. When I’d gotten older and
joined the force, I’d still meet my dad here sometimes, generally
early in the morning when I got off the night shift. The last time
I’d set foot in the place, a guy who’d known the Gradduks well had
come over and talked to my dad at length without ever acknowledging
me. Neither of us commented on it, but we never went
back, either.
A waitress came around the corner, saw us, and raised her eyebrows.
Dean said, “Enough time for coffee?”
“Always time for coffee,” she said, and led us back to a booth
along the front wall.
Dean had a first-aid kit with him, retrieved from the glove compartment.
He found some aspirin in it and gave them to me with a
couple of antiseptic cloths in plastic wrappers.
“Wipe those over your arms,” he said. “You got some burns on
the arms, and one across the back of your neck. Don’t look too serious,
but you might want to get them looked at. You’re talking well
enough that a concussion doesn’t seem likely, but I don’t want you
suing us for denying you medical treatment, either. You want to get
checked out before we talk, we’ll run you down to the hospital.”

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 simple 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?”
“Not nearly enough.”
“Where does Ed Gradduk fit? That’s all I care about, Dean.”
“Listen,” he said, “we’re not here to answer your questions. It’s
not advantageous to us, and, frankly, we don’t have any desire for
you to get more involved than you already are. You’re not law enforcement
anymore. You don’t even have a client. You are nothing
more than a concerned friend in this case, Mr. Perry, albeit a concerned
friend with some unusual abilities. But while our sympathies
may lie deep for concerned friends, our loyalties do not.”
“Rabold was in the car when they hit him,” I said. “He had to
know what happened. What did he tell you?”
“Did you miss everything I just said?” Dean asked.
Everyone was quiet for a minute. The waitress came back to refill
the coffees and saw that we all had full cups. She frowned and
disappeared again. Across the room, a kid was working with a
mop. Closing time.
“It’s personal to you,” Dean said. “We understand that. But
when you let personal problems carry you into the middle of something
you don’t understand, Mr. Perry, you’re inviting disaster.”
I didn’t say anything. Dean’s eyes were hard on mine, his jaw
set. The comic partner of the duo was now making Mason look
cheerful.
“The last time Larry Rabold made contact with us was the
morning before he was killed,” Dean said. “At that time, it seemed
some people viewed you as a problem. Perhaps one that needed to
be dealt with. It is my assumption that nothing about your activities
in the past few days diminished that perspective.”
“So Padgett’s on his way, then? Cancerno’s problem-solver out
to clean up another mess like he did with Ed?”
“Cancerno’s got more problem-solvers than Padgett.” Dean had
a leather-bound folder with him, and he reached inside it, withdrew
a photograph, and slid it across the table to me. It was a color
headshot of a mean-looking Hispanic guy wearing an orange
jumpsuit. A prison photo.
“Recognize him?”
“His first name’s Ramone,” I said. “He works for Cancerno’s
construction crew.”
Dean took the photograph back and smiled at me. “He’s no
master carpenter, Mr. Perry. Most of Cancerno’s people are not.”
“All of them?” I said, thinking of Jeff Franklin, the good vibe I’d
had from him.
“He has to have some people who are legitimate on that end,”
Dean said. “He handles enough work that having a few good people
would be a requirement. But many people on Cancerno’s payroll,
be they construction workers or pawnshop cashiers or
warehouse laborers, are earning their keep in other ways. The gentleman
in that picture is Ramone Tavarez. He’s served time for assault
on two occasions, but he’s managed to rotate back to the free
world pretty quickly each time, somehow. He’s an enforcer. Violent
son of a bitch. He also contacted Jack Padgett about you the day
Larry Rabold was murdered. Seemed concerned, Larry thought.
As did Padgett.”
“Interesting that I’m the only person bothering these guys. Too
bad they aren’t distracted by dealing with, say, police or the
FBI
.”
“It would be best,” Dean said, “if they were left to dealing with
the police and the
FBI
. Understand me when I say this, Mr.
Perry—Cancerno is evil. People who piss him off? Bad things
happen. Businesses burn down. Cars blow up. Arms are broken.
Some people turn up dead.”
“You know he kills people, why don’t you arrest him?”
Dean smiled. “Right. Good thinking. Why don’t we arrest him. I
like that plan.”
I waited.
“I think you’re going to help,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows. “By?”
“What do you think of the word 'bait,’ Mr. Perry?”
“I’ve never been a big fan of the concept that it’s associated
with.”
“Too bad,” Dean said. “But while you might not be a fan of that
concept, you’re putting it in motion for us right now, whether you
realize it or not. And while we may be able to capitalize from the
result, I’m afraid it won’t work out nearly so well for you.”