There was no car in Alberta Gradduk’s driveway, but there hadn’t been on any of our previous visits, either. Whatever Ed drove had been impounded by the police, and maybe Alberta didn’t have a car. I wondered if she even had a driver’s license, or if some medical issue prevented her from being on the road. After seeing her with her bourbon earlier in the week, that was more of a hope than a passing thought.
She was home, as I’d assumed she would be this early in the morning, and her face had an ugly expression as she pushed the blinds aside and peered through the window after Joe knocked on the front door.
“You’ve been told twice,” she said. “Go away. Please, just go away.”
“Mrs. Gradduk,” I said, “you’ve got to understand that I am trying to help.”
“Go away,” she repeated, then let the blinds swing back in place and stepped away from the window.
I raised my voice. “I know about the cop that came to arrest Ed, Mrs. Gradduk. I know that my father made a complaint to the police about him years ago.”
She came back to the door, opened it, and stood before me with naked hatred in her eyes.
“You don’t know anything. Not a thing.” Her eyes were still sunken and her skin was still tinged gray, but she’d changed clothes, at least.
“We know you had some problems with Sergeant Padgett,” Joe said. “And we need you to talk about that. We think it’s important.”
“You know I had problems with him?” she said, spitting the word back at him. “That’s what you’ve been told?”
“Am I wrong?”
She was holding on to the doorknob as if she needed the support to remain on her feet. “Problems with him,” she repeated. “Yes. Yes, I had problems with him, if that’s the word you want to use.”
“Explain it to us, Mrs. Gradduk,” I said, taking a step toward the door. “We didn’t come here to upset you. We just want to understand.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Can we come inside?”
“You don’t want to understand,” she said, but she moved aside and let us in. We went back into the living room, and I saw a cluster of fresh glasses on the coffee table, all of them empty, a half-full bottle of bourbon on the floor beside the couch.
She sat down on the couch and shoved the bottle to the side. I took a chair across from her and leaned forward, my elbows braced against my knees. Joe sat beside me.
“Please tell us about Padgett,” I said. “What happened with him?”
The ceiling fan turned overhead, the blades shedding dust. I waited for her.
“I was the one who suffered,” she said. “I was the victim.”
“I know,” I said.
“Norm just felt sorry for himself.”
“What do you mean?” Joe said.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Mrs. Gradduk . . .” I tried to make my voice as soothing and sympathetic as I could without sacrificing a tone of command, the voice I’d used as a cop dealing with hysterical accident victims or witnesses to brutal violence.
She looked back at the empty glasses. “I won’t talk about it. Not again.”
“It’s important, Mrs. Gradduk. I think it is very important.”
She lifted her hands to her hair, tugged on the ragged gray ends, pulled until the skin lifted around her skull. She made a low hissing sound as she did it.
“You can tell us,” I said. “It’s just the three of us in this room, Mrs. Gradduk. You don’t need to be scared.”
“That’s what the lawyer said,” she told me, releasing her hair. “And he was lying, too.”
I nodded. “Yes, let’s talk about the lawyer. We know about him.” I reached in my pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper with Gajovich’s picture printed on it. I’d made a copy before I’d left the office not too many hours earlier. “Was this the lawyer that came to see you?”
She looked at the picture with wary distaste, as if she wanted to spit at it but was afraid Gajovich might spring to life if she did.
“Was this the lawyer?” I asked again.
She laughed, a fast, breathless series of rasping chuckles that made the skin at the back of my neck prickle. It was the kind of laugh you might hear in the corridors of an asylum late at night.
“Oh, you know he’s the one. Your father sent him. Don’t pretend he didn’t. They were the ones to blame, you know. Norm and your father, the both of them. Norm started it, and then, your father, he tried to make it worse. But I wouldn’t let that happen. I wouldn’t let that happen to us.”
“So my father sent this man to talk to you,” I said, pointing at Gajovich’s picture. “But how did that make it worse?”
“I protected us,” she said. “The lawyer wanted to make . . . wanted to make a spectacle out of us. He came here and told me to talk to him, just like you are. And I talked, and talked, and talked. And then when I was done, he told me what it would be like. I asked if it couldn’t be handled quietly, and he laughed at me. Told me it was going to be a big story. Told me I’d have to be on TV and in the papers, in courtrooms and on the radio. Me and my son. As if we hadn’t been through enough. As if I hadn’t been through enough. That’s what your father did for me.” She smiled too wide, mouth open, blackened cavities visible along her molars. “But I didn’t let it happen. I protected us. Norm couldn’t do it, but I did it. I did it for my son.”
Joe was leaning forward now, and I found myself doing the same, edging my chair closer to the coffee table.
“What happened with Padgett, Mrs. Gradduk? You’ve got to explain what you’re talking about.”
She shook her head and pushed back into the couch.
“Tell me.”
“It’s all so long ago.”
“But it still matters,” I said. “More than you can imagine, it matters.”
“No.”
“Explain it to me.”
“I’m not doing this!” she shrieked, her hands back in her wild gray hair again, clawlike fingers locking on the strands. “I’m not!”
“Just tell me what happened,” I said. “Tell me so I can know how to help.”
“No!”
“Yes!” I shouted back, rising out of my chair. “Damn it, you are going to tell me, because your son is dead and I need to know why!”
She looked up at me and cowered against the couch, then slumped and began to sob. She cried like a child, her fingers tightening on her hair, her face shoved against the couch cushion. Joe had reached up and put his hand on my biceps, as if to restrain me, but Alberta Gradduk’s reaction had frozen me more than any physical force could. I looked at her and saw her the way she’d been once, a beautiful young woman with a husband and a son and a future, and I crossed to the couch and dropped to my knees and put my arms around her. She resisted at first, pushing at me, but then she gave up and pressed her face into my chest and cried. I closed my eyes and felt her dirty gray hair against my neck and jaw, and I knew that I would not ask her again. I wanted to know, but I did not want this woman to have to tell it to me.
The longer I listened to her cry, felt her skeletal body heave beneath my arms, the more I began to wonder if I even really wanted to know.
Back to the office, under a pewter sky that darkened as I drove, heavy with the promise of rain. It was hardly past eight, but the humidity was already noticeable. The windows were down, and the air that rushed in through them was thick, seeming to pass over me like a soft fabric. At every stoplight sweat sprang from my pores. The digital thermometer in the corner of my rearview mirror gave the temperature at eighty degrees, but the still, muggy quality made it seem hotter. This in the early morning. I left the air-conditioning off, though, preferring to feel the wind hard against my face, forcing my eyes half-shut as I accelerated.
“You backed off pretty quickly,” Joe said after we’d been on the road for several minutes. “Quickly for you, at least.”
“She was my friend’s mother, Joe,” I said, and then regretted it. I’d just confirmed exactly what he was so worried about, telling him I’d changed my normal approach because of my personal connection to the case. He didn’t say anything, though. Just drummed his fingers on the door panel and stared out the window.
“It was Gajovich,” I said. “We got that much, and that matters. He went in there with his stories about television interviews and courtroom appearances and he scared her into silence. To protect Jack Padgett. And his brother’s running the show in that district.”
“We need to talk to someone,” Joe said. “This morning. Cal Richards, maybe.”
“Or Dean and Mason. Neither of them gives a shit about Ed, but they’re on the corruption task force. If one Gajovich is involved, let alone two, they need to know about it.”
“I want to start with Richards,” Joe said. “He’s the only guy in the mix that I really trust.”
“Call him, then.” I wanted Richards involved, too. The names we were connecting to this went too high now. We stood on the edge of an investigation that was going to rock the city’s law enforcement community and horrify the public. I didn’t want any part of it. All I wanted to do was pull Ed Gradduk’s legacy away from the fallout zone.
We were on the interstate now, doing seventy-five, and the wind was too loud for conversation. Joe rolled up his window, and I followed suit, then turned the air-conditioning on. Once the cab was quiet, Joe took out his cell phone and made the call into police dispatch. He was told Richards wasn’t available, so he asked the dispatcher to get Cal a message as soon as possible. It was urgent, Joe said.
The sky was still darkening—pale clouds skimming quickly across the horizon, heavier, purplish clouds trudging somberly behind. I’d had all of four hours of sleep—after surviving a fire and nearly splitting my skull open on a brick wall—and the fatigue hung heavy with me, tightening the big muscles in my back and shoulders and creeping into the small muscles with little bursts of pain. I rolled my neck and winced.
The thermometer in the mirror said eighty-two. Climbing. We didn’t talk much until I was back off the interstate, on Lorain. Traffic was thin, and I caught green lights heading back to the office. As I drove, a few fat drops of rain broke free from the clouds and splattered the windshield. There was thunder, but it was faint, the heart of the storm still miles away.
I turned onto Rocky River, then made another immediate turn into the narrow parking lot behind our building. A few more unusually heavy raindrops fell, plunking off the hood of my truck like golf balls as I pulled into a parking space beside a green van. I shut the engine off, and the van’s side door slid open. A short, muscular Hispanic man stepped out, holding a handgun down against his thigh. Ramone, the guy from Jimmy Cancerno’s construction crew. He didn’t look any friendlier today than he had in the picture Dean and Mason had shown me the night before. He tapped on my window with the gun, then nodded his head at the backseat of the van. Whoever was driving it started the motor.
“Richards may have to wait,” I said to Joe. “I think we’re on our way to see Jimmy Cancerno.”