Sorrow's Anthem

by Michael Koryta

  “I made my own bed on that one, Amos.”

  “Sure, son. But I remember, is all I’m saying. And I heard about it when he got killed a couple days back, but I didn’t think of it right off when Pritchard called me.”

  We waited.

  “There was a harassment complaint filed on Padgett more than fifteen years ago,” Amos said. “Of the sexual nature. Claim was that he’d drop in on this woman time to time, make her perform for him. Seemed he had something on her, or maybe just intimidated her, because she let it go on for a while.”

  He paused, then said, “The woman was Gradduk’s mother.”

  For a long time the only voice in the room was Eddie Vedder’s as he wailed over the guitar and the drums.

  “You think there was bad blood going back a long time with those two, don’t you?” Amos said.

  “Looks like it,” I answered, my voice flat.

  “Looks like an awful mess, is what it looks like,” Amos said. “One of the cops that ran that kid down in the street was harassing the kid’s mother years ago? Man, that’s a shit storm waiting to happen.”

  “What were the details?” I said. “That’s a substantial complaint, but Padgett’s still on the force all these years later. It never came around to bite him.”

  “That’s the hell of it,” Amos said. “The Gradduk woman wouldn’t make out a complaint herself. Wouldn’t tell anyone a damn thing. The complaint came in and the department saw what a hellacious pain in the ass it could be, realized they had to go heavyweight with it right at the start, so they sent it up the line to the attorneys, who talked to the woman. She wouldn’t tell them anything. Without a victim stating she’d been victimized, all they had left was a rumor. It died a quiet death and got shoved under the rug. Stayed there, too.”

  “At least till now,” Joe said, and Amos grimaced.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “If Alberta Gradduk wouldn’t say anything about it, then who made the complaint initially?”

  “I got that.” Amos slipped a piece of paper out of his back pocket and scanned it quickly. “I’m not giving this to you, because I want all this exchange to stay in the mind and not on paper; you know, protect myself. We get done, this sucker’s going down the toilet back in that bathroom.”

  We waited while he searched for the name. After a minute, he had it.

  “The original complaint was filed by a friend of the family. Went right in to the chief, himself. Guy who made the complaint was named Thomas Perry. Says he was with a city ambulance team.”

  Joe looked at me. “Shit, Lincoln. Was that your—”

  “Father,” I said. “Yes. That was him.”

  CHAPTER 19

  My father had not been close to the Gradduks. He hadn’t much in common with Norm, and Alberta had always been in the house, out of sight. The only member of the family my father had regularly seen was Ed, because Ed had always been at my house. There had been times when just the two of them were together, though. Times that had been difficult for me to understand at first, when I was young.

  They used to play baseball together in the front lawn of Ed’s house on Tuesday evenings, the only weeknight my dad was home for dinner. I stumbled across them by accident once, watched them with shock for a few minutes, then retreated, feeling hurt and left out. My father had seen me there, though, and that night he came into my room to talk. Told me he needed to spend some time alone with my friend now and then, that Ed was feeling the loss of his father heavily. He said he was glad I was mature enough to understand that. It was a subtle, kind way to let me know that if I didn’t like the two of them having some time without me, I needed to grow up. I took the lesson.

  And so they spent time together, occasionally. But I’d never considered that my father might have been hearing things from Ed that I was not. I was Ed’s best friend; my father was an old guy. If anyone knew secrets, it was going to be me, right? Wrong.

  Long after Joe and I left Bartlett’s Tavern I was still stunned. I wondered what exactly my father had known, wondered why Ed had told him and not me. But maybe there are things you can tell your best friend when you’re a fourteen-year-old male and things you can’t. Admitting that your mother was being sexually harassed might have fit into the latter category. And I didn’t have to wonder why my father had never told me—if he felt strongly about keeping his own problems quiet, and he did, then he felt stronger still about keeping the problems of others quiet. Thomas Perry was not a man who passed neighborhood gossip along. He was the brick wall that brought it to a halt.

  You’re just like your father, Alberta Gradduk had said, scowling at me. I never liked meddlers.

  So he’d meddled. But how far? He’d made a complaint to the police, obviously, had instigated an investigation into Padgett. But then what happened? Did Padgett go away, or did he linger? What had his contact with the Gradduks been over the years? What had put him at Ed’s house with a gun in his hand three days ago? And why the hell wouldn’t Alberta talk? She’d been cooperative enough until I’d asked if she knew one of the cops, and then she’d thrown us out.

  These were the questions that ran through my head as Joe drove us back to the office. It was growing late now, the sun a fading red mass at the end of the avenue, the day gone. We didn’t have much to show for it, either. More questions, maybe. Not a lot of answers. That seemed to be the pattern.

  Joe went upstairs when we got back to the office, claiming he was just going to shut his computer down. I knew he was probably going to get to work on the paying cases we’d been neglecting for days, though. I said good-bye and walked back to my apartment. When I got there, I didn’t go upstairs, but kept walking east down the avenue. I walked until I got to the West Park library, then went around the building and lifted myself up onto the cool stone wall that bordered the steps. I could hear laughter from the little park that’s just down the street from the library, kids playing tag or chasing the season’s last fireflies, maybe.

  Leaning back until I was flat on the wall, I cupped my hands behind my head and looked up at the night sky. I listened to the kids and remembered how it had felt to be one of them on a hot, muggy summer night. They’re all special when you’re a kid, three months of treasures strung together before you’re sent back to school. There’s nothing quite like that when you reach adulthood. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, feeling the stone cold on my back. Ed and Draper and I used to sit on the concrete steps outside the Hideaway late into the summer nights, saying hello to the regulars that went into the bar, watching for any girls that might pass by on the avenue. It seemed like a million years ago, and like yesterday.

  I was bothered by how much had gone on without my knowledge. Norm Gradduk had been a suspect in the neighborhood fires the summer he’d killed himself, his wife had apparently been harassed by a cop, and my father had made a complaint about the cop’s behavior. It had all happened right around me, along the streets I’d walked every day, to the people I knew best in the world. And I hadn’t known a damn thing about it.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket. I thought about letting it go, not wanting to lose the brief moment of peacefulness to whoever was calling, but I took it out of my pocket and checked the display. It was Amy’s work number.

  “How you doing, Ace?”

  “Okay,” she said. “Did you get those faxes?”

  “Yes. Thanks a lot.”

  “Anytime. Did you see the recorder’s-office list, though?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Good. Remember how I added that note that said there hadn’t been any other fires to the Neighborhood Alliance properties?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you can erase that. I heard a fire run called in on the police scanner ten minutes ago. It’s a house on West Twenty-fifth. The same one on the list I faxed you.”

  I sat up.

  “You there?” Amy said.

  “Yes.”

  “Ed Gradduk didn’t start this fire.”

  “No.�
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  “But another Neighborhood Alliance house is burning. So what the hell’s going on, Lincoln?”

  “I don’t know.” I dropped down from the wall. “But I’d like to see for myself.” I walked away from the library, back toward the avenue.

  “Are you going down there? To the house fire?”

  “Seems like I ought to.”

  “Want me to meet you down there?”

  “If you’d like.”

  I thanked her, hung up, slipped the phone back into my pocket, and quickened my pace. I wanted to get to West Twenty-fifth while the house was still burning. And I wanted my gun.

  I had the Glock in its holster and the key in the ignition of my truck when Amy called again. I started the truck and answered the phone as I pulled out of my parking space.

  “I’m on my way, Amy.”

  “It’ll be a shorter trip then you thought.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not going to believe this, Lincoln, but we’ve got another fire going now. Another Neighborhood Alliance house. It’s on Hancock Avenue.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive. They just called it in. We’ve got two fires going at Neighborhood Alliance houses now. Two in about twenty minutes, Lincoln. Who’s doing this? And why?”

  The annoying thing about hanging out with a reporter is that she tends to keep asking questions, even when she knows you don’t have the answers. I told Amy I’d call her back, and I pulled into the street and hammered the accelerator, the big truck’s exhaust roaring. While I drove, I dialed Joe’s home number and put the phone back to my ear. It took six rings before I remembered that he’d still be at the office. I disconnected and called him there. He answered immediately.

  “Something strange is going down, Joe.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Two house fires just started on the near west side in the last half hour. They’re both Neighborhood Alliance houses.”

  Silence.

  “This isn’t Ed Gradduk’s work,” I said, echoing Amy’s obvious statement.

  “Where are you?”

  “On my way to Hancock Avenue. It’s fresher.”

  “You think it’s going to do one damn bit of good for you to stand on the sidewalk watching that thing burn?”

  “I don’t know, Joe. But I’m sure not going to sit at home and wait for Amy to call me with updates. This has to be arson. Somebody might have seen something, just like Gradduk was caught on tape with the last fire. The time to try to talk to people is now, while they’re all out on the street watching the show. It’ll be easier than trying to knock on doors tomorrow, hoping to find out who was home when the fire got started.”

  He grunted, which was the best acknowledgment of support I could hope for. “You want me to meet you down there? Work the crowd as a team?”

  “I don’t know yet. Let me get an idea of what the situation is and call you back.”

  “All right.” There was a long pause, and then he said, “You got any bright ideas as to what this could be about?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  “I’ll call you back, Joe.”

  A quarter mile away from the fire on Hancock, I could hear the sirens and see the smoke. I got within two blocks of the house before I ran into a roadblock of police cruisers parked sideways in the street, keeping traffic away from the fire. There was no parking at the curb on this side of the street, but I pulled my truck in anyhow, rolling the passenger-side tires up onto the sidewalk to get as much of the vehicle out of the way as possible. I left it there, sitting at an angle, half on and half off the sidewalk, and then I began to jog toward the house.

  I jogged into view just in time to see the porch roof fall in under the deluge from the fire hose. Two trucks were working on the blaze, one parked in the street and one pulled into the narrow driveway. Neighbors stood huddled in little groups of five or six across the street, watching with a mix of horror and excitement. The flames seemed to have been beaten back by the water, but thick black smoke continued to pour out of the second-floor windows. When the roof of the porch caved in and collapsed, one woman screamed and covered her eyes, while a young boy beside her clapped his hands and bounced up and down on his toes, eyes wide, soaking up a scene that was much better than whatever show he’d been watching on television before the sirens had interrupted and drawn him out of the house.

  The temptation was to stand there with them and watch the blaze, stare with awe as the old house—first burned and now soaked—continued to crumble to the ground. I put my back to it, though, and looked at the crowd instead.

  Maybe twenty-five people were watching, staying in small groups, but I didn’t see any familiar faces. I approached the woman who had covered her eyes when the porch roof fell in and pulled out my wallet, letting it flip open to expose my private investigator’s license. Showing a license, any type of license, is often a great way to convey authority and convince people to give you more than cursory attention, and in this situation I figured it would be the only way to get this woman to look away from the fire.

  “Ma’am, do you live around here?” I said, showing the license for all of two seconds before snapping the wallet shut and returning it to my hip pocket. She looked at me and blinked, surprised by my approach and not following the question. She was about thirty, with shoulder-length, blond hair and an ample stomach and abdomen pinched by a belt. I assumed the boy beside her was her son, judging from the way she kept pulling him back onto the sidewalk and out of the street.

  “Do you live around here?” I repeated once I had her attention.

  “Um, what? I mean, yeah, I live, you know . . .” She waved a hand behind her that could have indicated any of ten houses, and her eyes began to drift back to the fire.

  “When did this get started?” I said, stepping closer, trying to command her attention.

  “Like, five minutes ago?”

  The kid beside her, who was maybe ten, was looking at me with far more interest than his mother, and he shook his head impatiently. “No, it was longer than that. Before the end of the inning. We were watching the Indians game.”

  “Were you out here before the fire department got here?”

  She looked from the kid to me and shook her head. “No. Well, like, about the same time. We heard the sirens, right? So I went to the window and looked out, and I saw the house was burning. We came outside right when the fire trucks were pulling up.”

  My phone was vibrating in my pocket, but I ignored it and stepped closer to her, fighting to hear over the sound of the hoses and the shouting firefighters and neighbors.

  “Any idea how it got started?” I asked.

  “What? No. I mean, nobody lives there, so it couldn’t have been like a cooking fire or anything.” We were standing close now, our faces huddled together, and her breath came at me with a heavy smell of pickles that made me want to lean back.

  “Was there any sort of explosion?”

  “I don’t know. Jared had the TV on so loud . . .”

  Another man who’d been standing near us, a tall, lean guy with an Indians baseball cap and a scraggly goatee, now interrupted.

  “Yeah, there was an explosion. Well, you could hear it go up, at least. Kind of a whoosh noise.”

  I turned to him. “Where were you when it got started?”

  He pointed at the house immediately to my left. “Right there, smoking a cigarette on the lawn. I was the one who called it in.” He looked at me curiously. “You with the police?”

  “I’m an investigator.”

  “Oh, fire department?” he said, and rather than answer the question I threw another back at him.

  “How long had you been on the lawn?”

  He tugged at the goatee with his fingers. “Oh, ten minutes at least.”

  “You notice anything going on across the street? See anybody walking around, maybe sitting in a car watching the place, anything like that?”

 
One of the fire hoses changed direction now, approaching the house from a new angle, and the breeze caught the spray and carried some of it across the street, brushing over us like raindrops blown off a tree’s leaves. The smell and taste of the smoke was heavy in the air.

  “I didn’t notice anything,” the man with the goatee told me as the fire captain shouted that it was time to go inside the house. I turned away long enough to see three of the firefighters approach the porch in full gear, armed with axes.

  “The house has been empty for a while, right?” I said.

  “Oh, yeah. Couple months, now. I never seen nobody over there, though. Probably was a neighbor kid or something. You know, playing with matches.”

  More sirens were coming from the east now, growing steadily louder, and the kid who’d been fidgeting around us the whole time covered his ears with hands. His mother had turned away from me completely to refocus on the scene across the street. My phone was vibrating again, buzzing against my leg, and I held my finger up at the man with the goatee, asking him to wait a minute, then stepped away and pulled the phone from my pocket. The display showed it was Amy’s work number. She hadn’t even left yet.

  I answered and said, “I’m down here, Amy. Get in your car and drive instead of calling me for updates.”

  “Lincoln, this shit is getting out of control. There’s another one burning now. Clark and West Thirty-sixth.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. We’ve got three houses up in flames, all of them in under an hour. All Neighborhood Alliance properties.”

  The sirens were close now, making me wince. I hunkered down on the sidewalk, elbows on my knees, and covered one ear, fighting to hear Amy.

  “We’ve got two reporters out now, and my editor asked me to stay here and coordinate with the field reporters,” she said. “Not my choice, but I’m going to have to stay here.”

  “This is insane,” I said. “Three of them burning at once?”

  “Hate to be a pessimist,” Amy said, “but do you really think it’s going to stop there?”