Our timing was bad. If we’d been five minutes later getting back to the office, we would have missed Cal Richards. Instead, we pulled into the parking lot just as he was climbing into his car, ready to leave. When he saw us, he got back out and leaned against the trunk of the unmarked Taurus, a smile on his face.
“Gentlemen. How fortunate that you’ve returned. I didn’t want to miss you.”
“What’s up?” Joe said.
“You mind if we go up to your office?” Richards said, stepping away from his car. “Hot as a bastard out here.”
We went in the building and up the steps, Richards walking silently behind us. Joe unlocked the office door and we went inside. Richards sat down across from us and cleared his throat dramatically.
“So, I’ve been out of your office for less than a day and already I’ve got a complaint about your behavior.”
“From?” I said.
“Jerome Huggins. I talked with the man less than an hour ago. He told me a couple of white-boy private eyes were down this morning, giving him grief. Said the old guy of the duo was cool enough, but the young guy was, well, maybe a little headstrong. Jerome didn’t seem to think fondly of him.”
“A lot of PIs in this town,” I said. “Could be anybody.”
Richards rolled his eyes. “Let’s not waste time on the bullshit, okay? I didn’t come down here to bust your balls over this, Perry. I’d be justified in doing that, but I don’t want to. I know you’re investigating your friend’s past, and I got no problem with that. I just want to have some idea of where I can expect you to be turning up.”
“What were you doing at the liquor store?” I countered.
He ran a hand over his bristle-short hair. “Wanted to verify some things with Jerome, is all.”
I grinned. “You lie, Detective.”
“Pardon?”
“You’re too good not to have a problem with the cameras at that place,” I said.
Richards sat expressionless for a minute, until Joe began to laugh softly.
“You confused him, LP. Called him a liar in the same breath as you complimented him. Man doesn’t know what to do now.”
Richards allowed a small smile. “Weighing my options, for sure. And I’m going to play along, Perry, and acknowledge that, yes, I am way too good not to have a problem with those cameras.”
“Any idea who told Jerome to put them up?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. Jerome’s sticking hard and fast to this tale that they’ve been up for years. One look tells you that’s horseshit, but I’m not ready to put him in the box and sweat him yet. Just curious, is all. Jerome’ll be there when I need him.”
“I see.”
“What about you?” he said. “Any idea who’s at the other end of Jerome’s puppet strings?”
I gazed across the room at Joe, who met my look with flat eyes. After a moment’s hesitation, I decided to trust Cal Richards.
“I think your cops set him up. And then I think they killed him. Intentionally.”
Cal let out a long, slow breath. “You want to run that by me again?”
I told him about the discrepancies in the incident report and Alberta Gradduk’s account of the botched arrest, and I told him about Padgett and Rabold watching Mitch Corbett’s house.
Richards didn’t like it. Not a bit.
“Those guys are longtime cops, Perry. Maybe not the best on the force, but they’ve been around. That’s a bold-ass suggestion you just made, implicating them in a conspiracy. In murder.”
“They set him up, Richards. They set him up and they took him down. Ed was innocent.”
He sighed. “Look, Perry, I’m going to give you this because I think you deserve to know. Think you need to know. I exercised a search warrant on Gradduk’s house and on his vehicle. You know what I found? Trunk of his car was filled with bottles of a chemical accelerant and a couple hundred feet of industrial fuse. More of the same in his basement. Also in the basement were two homemade timing devices, designed to run about fifteen minutes before touching off the fuse. Just right for the fire on Train Avenue.”
I was shaking my head even before he was done. “They weren’t his, Richards. Someone planted that shit. Hell, Padgett and Rabold had ample opportunity.”
“I’ve also got a guy who will testify to selling Gradduk the fuse cord. He recognized him from the picture and will swear to it in court.”
“No,” I said again.
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked hard at me. “I’ll tell you what else I’ve got—a coroner’s report on the victim. Sentalar was burned pretty badly, but not so badly that you can’t tell that she didn’t die from the fire. She had a bullet in her, first, one right in the center of her forehead. Medical examiners can tell me without a doubt that it was a thirty-two-caliber round. Only one gun is registered to Ed Gradduk, Perry. Also a thirty-two. Now missing.”
I shook my head but didn’t speak. Joe said, “Can they get a specific ballistics match on the bullet?”
“No. Bullet blew out the back side of her skull. If we had it, we might get a precise match, but the fire took care of that. It was in the rubble somewhere, and the fire department guys didn’t locate it. Not that I blame them for that.”
“He got set up,” I said. “Ed got set up, Richards.”
Richards nodded. “He got set up. But not framed for a murder. He killed that girl, Perry. But I think he got set up in having his picture taken while he was doing it. And I want to know why.”
“But Padgett and Rabold—”
“Are a couple of good ol’ boy cops looking for a hot collar,” he said. “That’s all they are. Believe me, I’ll take a good look at this guy, Corbett, and I’ll burn those two good for working a surveillance on him without letting me know. But in the end, I think they’re just looking to make headlines. If they’re guilty of anything, it’s holding out on a tip. I bet they were given some real detail about this, but they don’t want to pass it off because it’ll go to me and they’ll miss the glory.”
I got out of my chair and walked to the window, stood with my back to him, my hands clenched at my sides.
“I know he was your friend,” Richards said. “But he killed her. I’m almost sure of it.”
I didn’t answer. He sat there for a while, then said good-bye to Joe and left. When the door closed behind him, it was quiet. I stayed at the window. Joe let a few minutes pass before he broke the silence.
“All right, LP. It’s not what you wanted to hear him say. But that doesn’t mean the work we did in the morning was for nothing. Let’s get back to that now, get focused.”
I turned away from the window, still angry. “He’s convinced Ed killed her, Joe. He just shrugged off everything we gave him on those cops.”
“He didn’t shrug it off. He’s a good detective. Maybe as good as you. He’ll take what we gave him and blend it with what he’s got, and he’ll keep moving. Hell, did you expect him to leap in the air and click his heels at the idea Gradduk was set up by two of his own cops? Come on.”
I gave that a grudging nod and returned to my chair. “Okay. I hear you. So what’s our play then? Start with the cameras?”
He tugged at his tie and frowned. “I don’t think so. The best way to get the truth about them is probably to break Huggins down, and I think we can do that by connecting him to Padgett and Rabold. I’d rather start with a hard look at those two. I want to know where they’re from, how long they’ve been cops, what cases they’ve worked, who they drink with, who they sleep with. First things I want to look at when I’m investigating sleazy cops are their conduct evaluations.”
“Think we can get those?”
He allowed a rare cocky smile to slide across his face. “I can get the chief’s checkbook if I want it, LP.”
“Then make the call. But you’re forgetting about something.”
“Oh?”
“Mitch Corbett.”
He let his breath out loudly and nodded. “Shit, you’re right. I had forgotten about him. If he’s important to Padgett, he needs to be important to us.”
I told him what little I’d learned with my phone calls the previous night.
“His brother wasn’t helpful,” I said, “nor was he fond of Mitch. Could be the truth, or it could be a smokescreen he’s putting up because his brother’s hiding out at his place.”
“All right,” Joe said. “Let’s do it like this: You work Corbett this afternoon. Get everything you can. And I’ll do the background on Padgett and Rabold.”
Family hadn’t proved particularly helpful in my quest for information about Mitch Corbett, and I didn’t know any of his friends other than the dead one. That left me with coworkers. Jimmy Cancerno was Corbett’s boss, but he hadn’t appeared to be too interested in cooperating the previous day. I decided I’d drive out to Cancerno’s construction company anyhow, talk to whomever I could find, and see where it led me. If Ed and Corbett had become friends on the job, it stood to reason there had been a couple other guys in the mix.
Pinnacle Properties, Cancerno’s contracting company, was located on Pearl Road, just south of Riverside Cemetery. On the other side of the interstate was MetroHealth, where my father had worked as a paramedic for years. MetroHealth was home to the city’s busiest emergency room, and that had provided a constant sound track to the neighborhood when I was growing up. As I drove, an ambulance siren was wailing a few blocks away, and as soon as it faded, I could hear the thumping of helicopter blades as a medical chopper headed north for the landing pad on the roof of the hospital.
Pinnacle Properties was housed in a long prefabricated warehouse that gleamed in the afternoon sun. A small office was built into the front of the warehouse, and a half dozen cars were in the parking lot. I got out of the truck and walked into the office.
A young, blond girl with a good smile was behind the only desk inside. I told her I was looking for Mitch Corbett, just in case she had more up-to-date information than I did.
“Hmm,” she said, “Mitch hasn’t been working this week. I don’t know what that’s about. I can radio out to the site and see if he showed up late today, though.”
“Tell you what, you tell me where those guys are and I’ll drive out and have a word with them myself. If Mitch isn’t around, I can always talk to . . .” I frowned, thoughtful, then pointed at her for assistance, as if I’d drawn a momentary blank on the name.
“Jeff.”
“Right, Jeff.” I smiled at her. “I’ll talk to Jeff if Mitch isn’t around. Where are they?”
She gave me an address on Erin Avenue. I thanked her, returned to my truck, and drove north on Pearl until it became West Twenty-fifth Street just past Clark Avenue. A left turn onto Erin Avenue, and then I slowed down to look at the house numbers. I found the one I needed without bothering to look at the address; a Pinnacle Properties pickup truck was parked in front of the house. The home itself was a narrow, two-story duplex that had seen better days. A pile of trash and debris was at the curb, and a weather-beaten sign stuck in the weed-riddled front yard claimed the house as a NEIGHBORHOOD ALLIANCE ACQUISITION.
I parked across the street and walked over and up the driveway. I could hear a stereo going inside, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Three Steps” playing just as I was on my way up the three front steps of the house. Then the side door opened with a bang and a thick guy with red hair and no shirt stepped outside, followed by a Hispanic man with chiseled muscles. Each held bulging garbage bags in their hands as they marched down the driveway. They tossed them on top of the pile, and both bags promptly rolled off and fell on the sidewalk, something inside one of them shattering. The Hispanic guy turned around, indifferent, and spotted me standing at the door. The redhead was replacing the fallen bags to the top of the garbage heap.
“This is private property,” the Hispanic guy said. “You got a reason to be up there?” His companion turned around at that and gave me a curious glance.
I left the front door and walked down to the driveway to meet them. “How’s it going? I’m looking for a Jeff?”
“You got him,” the redhead said. “Jeff Franklin.” He pulled off a thick work glove and offered me his meaty hand. We shook, both of us squinting against the sun that shone down uninhibited by any trees. The Hispanic guy spat on the sidewalk and looked bored.
“My name’s Lincoln Perry. I was hoping you could help me find someone.”
“Yeah?”
“Mitch Corbett.”
Jeff Franklin gave me an interested look as he pulled a red bandanna from his back pocket and wiped his face with it. His barrel chest was soaked with sweat beneath a mat of curly red hair, and his upper arms were all freckles.
“Mitch’s missing, I’m afraid,” he said. “Hasn’t been in for a few days.”
“Is that unusual?”
He nodded. “Very. I’ve worked with him for more’n a year and I can’t think of a single sick day he took. Man’s a hard worker.”
“What’re you, a cop?” the Hispanic guy asked, then spat on the pavement again.
“No. Just someone who needs to talk to this man.” I nodded pointedly at Jeff Franklin, making it clear that I had no interest in the other guy, nor any desire for him to stick around. Before he could object to that, Franklin handled it for me.
“Go on inside and help the rest of the guys, Ramone. We got a lot to finish up today.”
Ramone shrugged and went back up the driveway, shoulders slouched, swaggering. Jeff Franklin watched him and sighed, then tucked the bandanna back in his pocket.
“Can I ask why you’re needing Mitch?”
There was something about Jeff Franklin that I liked. He carried himself confidently but without pretense, and I had the sense he would reciprocate straight talk with more of the same.
“I’m a private investigator. And I was a friend of Ed Gradduk’s a long time ago.”
Jeff Franklin gazed at me with sad eyes. “Let’s you and I go sit down. You want a Coke?”
I started to shake my head, but he was already gone. He went out to the pickup truck, dug two cans of Coke out of a cooler, then walked back up the driveway and over to the sagging front porch. He sat down on it, opened one can of Coke, and handed the other to me.
“Ed was a good man,” he said after he took a drink. “He’d only worked with us for about six months, but you get to know a fella pretty well in six months of work. And I liked him.”
“I did, too.”
He drank some more of the Coke, then muffled a belch and studied me. “You think he killed that woman?”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t. And that’s why I’m here.”
“Looking for Mitch? What’s he got in it?”
“Maybe nothing. But I won’t know till I ask him. And I’m a little concerned that he’s missing. I was told he and Ed were pretty close.”
“They were.” Jeff Franklin tugged the bandanna out of his pocket again, held it idly in one hand, the Coke in the other. “Mitch and Ed took to each other. Mitch was about twenty years older, of course, but they had a similar sort of personality, you know? Laughed at jokes nobody else thought was funny, noticed things nobody else noticed. Yeah, they got along, all right.”
“How long have you known Corbett?”
He chewed on his lip absently while he thought about it. “I guess almost two years. That’s how long I’ve been working for Jimmy, and Mitch was on when I got the job. He’s the crew supervisor.”
“Longtime construction worker, then?”
“All his life. Went into the army and came out a demolitions specialist, hired on with Jimmy. Been with him ever since.”
“You say he was a demolitions expert?”
Jeff started to nod, then stopped and narrowed his eyes. “You thinking about that fire?”
“Maybe.”
He shook his head. “Mitch is a good man, mister.”
“So was Ed.”
“I agree. And that’s why I like to think neither of them had anything to do with it.”
“You seen Mitch since Ed died?”
“No, I haven’t. Last time I saw Mitch was the day before all that got started.” He crumpled the Coke can and looked at me. “You think those two were into something together, don’t you?”
“Could be. You got any ideas?”
He shook his head, and I believed him. He looked as if he would love to help me if he could.
“I need to talk to somebody who was close to him,” I said. “Hell, close to either of them. I’m starting from scratch here. Take what I can get.”
Jeff Franklin frowned. “I dunno what I can tell you. We all worked together, but not much was said other than the usual, you know? Sports and trucks and women and such. I got four kids, so when it’s quitting time I’m done and gone. Didn’t have much chance to hang out with the rest of the boys. Mitch and Ed ran around together some, I know, but that’s about it.”
“You don’t know anyone else that Corbett spent time with?”
He chewed on his lip. “Well, this isn’t a person, but he had a volunteer job in the evenings and on weekends, working down at some gym on Clark Avenue. Refereeing basketball and keeping the kids in line, that sort of thing.”
“Clark Rec Center?” I said, and he nodded.
“It ain’t much,” he said, “but it’s all I got for you.”
When I left, Jeff Franklin asked me to call him if I learned anything about Mitch, and I told him that I would.
“Nobody around to worry about Mitch,” he said. “No family to speak of, and not many friends. Man kept to himself. I keep wondering if we shouldn’t talk to the police, but everybody else told me not to sweat it. Said Mitch was fine and that he’d be back when he got ready to be back.”
He cocked his head at me. “But you know? I’m not feeling so sure about that anymore.”