Lincoln Perry 02 - Sorrow's Anthem (7 page)

Richards turned back to me. “Now we’re going to have an official
talk. This is my murder investigation, and that incompetent
asshole Padgett took it upon himself to conduct an interview with
you and then put you back on the streets last night without ever
bothering to check in with me. I’ve already put the fear of God
into him, but I still need to hear what went down.”
And so I told it again, a story I was already growing weary of telling. Richards asked more questions than anyone else had, so it
took longer to tell, but in the end I couldn’t provide him with anything
more.
“Were you with Padgett and Rabold when they went to arrest
Ed Gradduk?” Joe asked Richards when I was done.
He shook his head. “No. They got the tip from the liquor store
owner, it seems. Not too surprising, considering those guys have
worked that neighborhood for years. They got hungry for a headline,
went in alone, and botched the arrest. Gradduk got away, and
then your partner saw how well it turned out.”
I willed away an image that came with sounds of squealing
brakes and crunching bone.
“Yeah,” I said. “I saw.”
Richards got to his feet, and this time he offered his hand to me.
“I owe you a shake. But take me seriously with this, and don’t get in
my way on this investigation.” He released my hand. “I forgot how
damn young you are. Have you even hit thirty yet?”
“Not yet, but I’m about to take a swing.”
He pursed his lips and whistled noiselessly. “You must have been
the youngest detective in department history.”
“No. But I was close.”
“Ever miss it?”
“Just pissing off the brass,” I said, and he almost smiled before
he left.

It was harder for me to walk into the Hideaway this time. It had
given me a moment’s pause the night before, standing at the
threshold of a building filled with memories. But that night I’d
had a mission, and at its end was a chance to see an old friend. This
time I would walk out of here alone.
Only a handful of people were at the bar when I stepped
inside—two guys and three women, all of them smoking cigarettes
and drinking Budweiser. When I opened the door, I sent
sunlight spilling into the dark room, and everyone turned and
squinted at me, expecting a familiar face. Those were the faces you
saw most in the Hideaway, and that antiquated the place maybe
even more than the ancient building itself. The kid from my last
visit was behind the bar again, and Scott Draper was standing beside
him, talking softly over the counter with an older guy who
wore jeans and a silk shirt. I moved toward them, but before I got
to the bar, someone spoke from behind me.
“The hell you think you’re doing in here, prick.”
I turned to see an old man with an ugly scowl set on his fleshy
face sitting at one of the little tables across from the bar. He was
maybe sixty, with thick gray hair and red-rimmed eyes, and he was
staring at me like he wanted to break his beer bottle over my head.
“Good to see you, too, Bill,” I said.
“Kiss my ass.”
Bill Foulks had been in the neighborhood for every one of his
sixty-some years on the earth, and as far as I knew, he’d never left
for more than a week. He’d worked at one of the meat shops in the
West Side Market when I was a kid, and he’d been one of Norm
Gradduk’s closest friends.
“Somebody invite you here, asshole?” he said. “You haven’t had
the balls to hang around here since you busted Eddie, but now that
he’s dead you think it’s okay? Think something changed? Well,
nothing has. Get the hell out.”
I was opening my mouth to suggest Bill get his fat ass off the
stool to make it easier for me to throw him through the window
when Scott Draper stepped over.
“Give it a rest, Bill,” he said.
Foulks looked at him with wide eyes. “You shittin’ me, Scott?
This prick’s the guy—”

“I know damn well who he is,” Draper said, his voice low and
cold, “and I don’t need to hear your opinion on him, either. Lincoln’s
here because I asked him to be.”
Foulks gaped at him in disgust. “You telling me you want the
son of a bitch down here?”
Draper wouldn’t look at me. “He’s here on business,” he told
Foulks, and then he motioned for me to follow him back into the
dining room. Foulks glared at me and showed me his fat middle
finger as I left.
I followed Draper into the dining room, which was empty. On
the wall all along this row of booths were pictures of the neighborhood
through the years. I was in one of them, standing with
Ed and Draper on the steps outside the bar the day we graduated
from high school, and I was pleasantly surprised to notice the picture still hung above the old booth where we’d all carved our
names. I took a step toward it, wanting a closer look, but Draper
took my elbow and guided me away from it and into another
booth.
“What can I get you to drink? On the house, of course.”
“Whatever’s cold and in a bottle.”
“Be right back.” He went back out to the bar, and I heard him
talking in low tones with Bill Foulks. I wondered what Draper was
saying. Probably not giving me a hell of a lot of support. He’s here
on business.
When Draper came back to the dining room, he had a bottle of
Moosehead Canadian in each hand, and the guy in the jeans and
silk shirt trailing behind him. Draper handed me one of the beers,
then nodded at his companion.
“This guy was Ed’s boss,” Draper said. “I was just filling him in
on what happened last night.”
I looked at the stranger with interest now.
“Jimmy Cancerno,” he said, offering his hand as he slid into the
booth beside Draper. He wasn’t as old as I’d originally thought,
probably no more than fifty, but he carried himself with slouched
shoulders, and his thinning hair was shot with gray.
“You want anything to eat?” Draper asked me.
“You kidding me?” I hadn’t eaten in many hours, but the Hideaway
food wasn’t going to improve on an empty stomach.
“What? Food’s better around here now, Lincoln. We made some
changes.”
“So the grill got cleaned?”
He grinned. “Some of the changes are still on the list. But we
got new pickles.”
“Dill chips?”
“Spicy dill chips. They were on sale, of course.”
Cancerno watched this interplay without interest. We were
jammed together in one of the tiny booths, hunched over an old
wooden table. Above the booth we sat in today was an old blackand-white
photograph showing Draper’s grandfather sitting on
the hood of a big Oldsmobile, probably taken around 1950.
“Bar’s been here a long time,” I said, looking at the picture.
“Better than a half century,” Draper said. “My grandfather
opened it when he got back from World War II. Dad took over
when he came home from 'Nam. Family tradition called for me to
fight a war before I could run the show, but then my old man died
before I had the chance, so I took over.”
“Died too young,” I said. David Draper had died from lung cancer
a few years after we graduated from high school. He’d smoked
better than a pack a day for forty years and spent the rest of his
time working in a bar that was generally so hazy with smoke it was
difficult to see the television screens.
“Hell, all of our dads did,” Draper said. “Yours was the oldest
when he went, and he was still too young.”
Draper took out a pack of cigarettes, shook one out for himself,

and offered them to me. Apparently his father’s illness had done
nothing to deter Scott’s habit. I declined, and he lit his own, then
immediately set it on the edge of the ashtray.
“They put Ed in the ground this week,” he said, and his brown
eyes were flat. “I haven’t decided if I’m going out for it or not.
Wouldn’t make a bit of difference to Ed.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Poor bastard,” Draper said, sighing and lifting his cigarette
back to his lips. “But in a way, it’s almost better, you know? Things
would have been ugly for him, Lincoln. You know that.”
“If he didn’t kill her, we could have proven that, maybe gotten
him back out.”
“We?”
I shrugged. “The police, then. I offered to help him, but it’s too
late now.”
Draper drained a third of his Moosehead in one swallow and
wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He was wearing a
white T-shirt that hugged his muscles closely, a thin silver chain
hanging over the collar.
“I got to admit, I was pissed off at you last night, and I mean
good,” he said. “It’s for the best that they put you in the police car.
I was blaming you for it, even if you hadn’t shoved him. I mean, he
was fine upstairs until you showed up.”
I sipped my beer and kept silent. Ed had been anything but fine,
hiding out in a bar, drunk, with a cop’s blood on his shirt, but if
Draper wanted to tell himself he’d played the role of a protector, I
wouldn’t challenge it.
“I’m past that now,” he said. “Blaming you, that is. You showed
up, right? And I know you showed up 'cause you wanted to help
him. That took some serious balls, Lincoln.”
I leaned back, trying to clear some space in the little booth. He
watched my face carefully, smoking his cigarette. Then he
shrugged. “I think Ed had to appreciate the effort. And if he was
going to go down that day, well, must have been nice for him to
have an old friend by his side as he went.”
I thought of Ed’s drunken run into the street, the clumsy way
his feet had tangled, the screech of brakes that were doing too little,
too late.
“Sure,” I said. “Must have been nice.”
Cancerno hadn’t said a word during our exchange, just sat and
sipped a whiskey on the rocks.
“How long had Ed worked for you?” I asked him.
“Six months, maybe?” He shrugged. “Scott’s the one recommended
him to me.” He gave Draper a look that had more bite
than the whiskey in his glass.
Draper met it coolly. “I’d recommend him to you again, Jimmy.”
“Hell of a thing to say, considering.” Cancerno scowled.
“Pretty broken up about Ed, huh?” I said, the small booth feeling
smaller to me with every word Cancerno said.
“I supposed to give a shit?” he said, eyes wide. “I hardly knew
the guy. He was just a carpenter and a painter, same as a dozen
other guys. 'Cept a dozen other guys don’t bring the cops to my
door.”
“That bothers you,” I said, and his gaze narrowed.
“Yeah. It bothers me. I’m a guy that likes his distance from the
cops, asshole. That’s all you need to know.”
“Easy, Jimmy, Lincoln’s not challenging you.” Draper’s tone
made it clear that if I was challenging him, I’d better stop it.
We drank for a bit, none of us speaking. Draper finished his cigarette
and took the pack out, but didn’t light another one.
“You guys were gone, what, ten minutes before he got hit by that
car?” he asked.
“Not even that.”
“But enough time to talk a little, right?”
'We talked. He was pretty drunk. His mind was going places
without taking me along.”

“What do you mean?”
“Seemed like he was talking to himself as much as he was talking
to me,” I said. “He’d hint at some stuff but not get specific.
When I asked questions, he jumped in new directions.”
Draper stared at the table, sliding the pack of cigarettes back
and forth between his fingers.
“He was into some trouble,” I said, and Draper looked up. “You
know anything about that? Who he was dealing with?”
“As far as I knew, he was clean and had been for years.” Draper
stood up. “I’m going to grab another beer. Be right back.”
He slid out and then it was just me and Jimmy Cancerno in the
booth. Cancerno worked on what was left of his whiskey and
looked bored.
“Was he a good worker for you?” I asked.
He spoke over the glass. “Good as any of them. Showed up on
time and went home on time and billed for the time he’d worked.
We do things a little different on my projects, see. Not a lot of paperwork.
Pay in cash. It was a good job for him.”
“What kind of projects was he working on?”
“Fixed houses, mostly. Was supposed to be fixing the one he
burned down. It was a small job; I wouldn’t have made much off it.
Now I’m likely to get sued thanks to the son of a bitch.”
“I thought the house was empty.”
“It was,” Cancerno said as if he were explaining something to a
child. “But the property company that owned the place wanted it
fixed. So they could sell it, right? Go figure.”
I leaned forward, suddenly glad Cancerno was here, after all.
“But he had a reason to be on the property, then?”
Cancerno hacked something up and re-swallowed it. Attractive.
“We hadn’t started the work on that house yet, but he knew it
was coming, and he had the keys. Could be he went over to get a
look, maybe think about what materials would be needed.”
“Well, that’s pretty damn important,” I said. Cancerno looked as
if he couldn’t care less.
“That’s better beer than I remembered,” Draper said, sliding a
fresh Moosehead across the table to me and dropping back in the
booth. “I sell it, but I don’t drink it much. Might have to change
that.”
I didn’t touch the bottle. “I need to know what that girl was to Ed.”
Draper raised his eyebrows. “That’s what the cops said to me. I
can only tell you what I told them—I have no clue. I asked him last
night when he showed up here, and he ignored me. Just said he
didn’t kill her and asked for a drink while he figured out what he
needed to do next. Told me to get my ass back downstairs because
the cops would be looking for him soon and he needed me to deal
with them. I’d hardly sent them away before you showed up.”
“So you’ve got no ideas at all,” I said.
He shook his head, his eyes sad. “Wish I did, Lincoln. Wish I
did.”
“Who else was he close with?” I said. “Was there a girlfriend,
anything like that?”
“He wasn’t seeing anyone.” This time Draper’s answer was confident.
“Worked a lot and came in here and drank and watched
baseball. That was really about it. The last couple weeks, he hadn’t
even been in here.”
“He told me he went to the prosecutor about something, Scott.”
He frowned. “He went to the prosecutor?”
“Yeah.”
He shook his head again. “Can’t help you. Like I said, he’d been
out of sight for the last few weeks.”
I was frustrated with the lack of help. I’d counted on Draper
knowing more. I wasn’t sure if he was really this clueless or if he
just didn’t want to let me know anything, which was also quite