“So he went to Gajovich and came up empty,” I said. “What happened then? How’d Anita Sentalar get involved?”
“She was always involved. She and Gajovich go way back. He handpicked her to run the Neighborhood Alliance because he trusted her to look the other way. She knew if he got elected mayor, she’d have a high-level position on his staff.”
“Who killed her?”
“Cancerno had it done, though I couldn’t tell you for sure who pulled the trigger. And that was our fault. Ed’s and mine. He needed a strong witness if he was going to bring it down, and he thought she could be it. He was pressuring her to go to the attorney general and roll on Cancerno. She wouldn’t. That’s when Ed and I decided to go in two different directions.”
“Meaning?”
“He decided to start burning the houses down. Figured that would force the cops to take a hard look at the Neighborhood Alliance. And I think he liked the idea, too, saw some element of sweet justice in that. Jimmy had wanted Ed’s dad to start some fires, right? Well, Ed was coming through on that, with fifteen years of interest payments, to boot.”
“And what direction did you take?”
“I was still working on Anita. I showed her around the neighborhood, introduced her to one of the kids who was being put in an Alliance house. They were the people who were losing, you know. Sure, the mortgages were insured, but they thought they were moving into dream houses when they were really hovels with fresh paint and some new drywall. That made an impression on Anita, too. I think she was ready to go with us on it. Cancerno must have thought so, too. Because she got killed.”
“So they set Ed up, and then Padgett and Rabold were sent down to kill him,” I said. “Or at least Padgett was. Rabold was working undercover by then. Which is why he ended up dead, too.”
“Came close to working perfectly for Jimmy,” Corbett said, “except Ed got a few minutes to talk to you. Otherwise, it might have gone without a hitch.”
“You think Cancerno ordered Padgett to try to take us out today? Or could that have been an enterprise project for Padgett?”
“He wouldn’t have rolled out till Jimmy took him off the leash.”
I was thinking about that, wondering what the trigger had been. Why not just send Ramone to kill us right away? Why drive us down for the meeting, then let us go? To find out exactly what we knew. But we’d seemed to buy his story. So what made him send Padgett out to hit us?
“I mentioned Gajovich by name,” I said. “I told Cancerno that I knew he’d been the one to make my father’s complaint about Padgett disappear.”
“Could have mattered,” Corbett said. “Or it could not. I can’t tell you that.”
“Whatever the reason, he definitely wanted us killed.”
“Cancerno’ll kill me, too,” Corbett said matter-of-factly. “He blames me for all of this, and after what he told you, it’s clear he’s also hoping to use me as a fall guy. Wash his hands of the Neighborhood Alliance and put it all back on me. Once I’m dead, I’ll become awfully important. Time this is all done, it’ll be me that was running the books on the Neighborhood Alliance, me who took the cash, me who killed Sentalar. I guarantee it.”
“You helped him out by burning the rest of his houses down.”
Corbett coughed and shook his head. “I didn’t burn those houses down, Perry.”
I frowned. “Be honest, Corbett. You were finishing what Ed started.”
“No. I didn’t set those fires. But I can tell you who did. I was checking out some of the houses that night, thinking maybe I needed to relocate. Instead, I saw one of them burn.”
“Who did it?”
“The guy who owns the Hideaway,” he said. “Draper.”
CHAPTER 29
The name rocked me, but it shouldn’t have. After all, until that day I’d never seen Cancerno without Draper at his side. It explained the phone call I’d gotten from Scott the morning after Ed died, too, the sudden change of heart he’d shown. Cancerno had probably ordered him to bring me down so they could see how much Ed had shared before Padgett had crushed him under the Crown Victoria.
“You’re sure?” I asked Corbett, even as all of the facts supporting it slid through my mind.
He nodded once. “Trust me, I got a good look at the man. No doubt in my mind at all. Jimmy sent him out because Jimmy wants to use me to explain his way out of everything surrounding the Neighborhood Alliance. Burn down the houses, blame it on me, and he’s done. Well, he’s got to find me and kill me, first. But then he’s done.”
I stood up. A muscle in my back clenched hard at the movement, stopping me before I got upright. I winced and pushed past it, taking a deep breath that made the muscle ache worse. I’d been in a car accident, dragged a lifeless man through a river, and had no sleep. No wonder my body was protesting.
“You’ve got to talk to the police, Corbett. I’ve already got them looking at Gajovich, and Padgett’s dead. You can’t just hide here, waiting for other people to figure it out.”
He didn’t say anything.
“People have been murdered,” I said. “No one is going to care about what you did with the Neighborhood Alliance. They’re going to care about taking Cancerno down, and Gajovich. Not about you.”
He was scared, though. A guy like Corbett, who’d spent years working cons and scams, seeing corrupt cops and prosecutors, did not like the idea of solving things through official channels. But he was going to have to do it.
“I’m calling a detective named Cal Richards,” I said. “And you’re going to talk to him. You can trust this one.”
He nodded, slowly. “All right.”
“One more question—how the hell did you know so much about what happened between Cancerno and Padgett and Alberta Gradduk, anyhow?”
For moment, he didn’t respond. Then he lifted his head and looked at me.
“Remember how I told you they put a gun to Norm’s head while Padgett and Cancerno had their fun?”
“Yes.”
“I held the gun.” He did not drop his head. Did not look away. “By then, I owed Jimmy a hell of a lot more than Norm Gradduk ever did. And I’d been working for him for a while. And before Norm killed himself, I burned Solich out of business, like Norm was supposed to.”
“And told the cops it was him,” I said.
“Yes.”
I exhaled loudly and shook my head. “Did Ed know?”
“Yes. It’s how I started the story when I told it to him.”
I stood and stared at him.
“I changed a lot over the years,” Corbett said softly. “Never forgot that night, Perry. And then when Ed started working with us . . . and, man, we got along. He was a good guy. One of the best I’ve ever known. And loyal. If you were his friend, he’d break his back to help you. No questions asked.”
“Yes,” I said. “He would.”
“A time came when I knew I had to tell him. Had to. Man was my friend, and he didn’t know. And he was working for Jimmy, and didn’t know. And that wasn’t right.”
It had been a hard story for Corbett to tell, all right. Ed hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d told me that.
“He listened to it all, and he didn’t turn on me, not right then, and not after,” Corbett said. “Can you imagine? The things that happened to his family, you know? The things that I was a part of. And all he did was thank me for telling him.”
I watched the shadows on the opposite wall. “Could be he’d learned something about holding grudges.”
“I thought it was the right thing to do,” Corbett said. “But now? Shit. I’d do anything to take it back. Because look what it started. Look what it did.”
I shook my head. “No. You needed to tell him, Corbett. It needed to be settled. Ed started to settle it, and now we’re going to finish it. You and me. You’re talking to Cal Richards. Telling him everything you told me. You’re going to do that because you’re too much of a man not to. You can’t hide from it anymore.”
“You know,” I said, “you should have left the cat at home. It certainly wasn’t helping you hide.”
“He’s fifteen years old,” Corbett said, as if that explained everything. “Couldn’t leave him.”
“I’ll have someone come to get you.”
He shook his head. “No. I’m not going to do it that way. You say I can trust this guy, Richards, then I’ll trust Richards. But you’re not going to send them out to get me, put me in handcuffs. You set up a meet with him, and I’ll be there.”
I thought about it, then nodded.
“Tomorrow morning, Richards and I will come here. Just the two of us. You’ll be here?”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
I believed him. He was not a man who had any energy left to hide, or to run.
“I’m leaving now,” I said. “And I’m taking your gun.”
“Where you going?”
“To see an old friend.”
The neighborhood was silent when I stepped out of the back door of the house on West Fortieth Street with Corbett’s revolver tucked in my waistband. There was a pay phone up the street. I could use it to call Cal Richards. I could send him down to the Hideaway, let him pick up Draper.
I walked past the phone, though, moving north toward Clark Avenue at that time when the night seemed to have forgotten to which day it belonged. The police would get their chance at Draper soon enough. Right now, I wanted my own. I wanted to hear him explain it. To understand how he’d let it happen.
It was past three when I got to the Hideaway, and even Clark, usually an active street, was still. The bar would have been closed for nearly an hour now, but I was hoping to find Draper there, anyhow. People in the bar business typically go to bed about the time most of us wake up.
I walked up the sidewalk to the front door, over cracked stone steps where I’d once sat with Ed and Draper and watched the regulars drift in and out of the bar. Now I stood on them alone and tugged on the heavy door, found it locked. I pulled my hand back and knocked several times, the enormous piece of wood soaking the sound up even when I pounded hard with a closed fist.
Nobody came to the door. It was hard to make a good, loud knock on that front door, though, and if Draper was in the back, it was no surprise that he hadn’t heard it. I walked around the building and down the alley that ran beside it. The back door was familiar to me; when Ed and Draper and I used to snag a couple bottles of booze from Draper’s old man’s supply, that was how we made our exit.
The back door was open. I stepped through it and into a narrow, musty corridor with rubber mats on the floor. A couple empty kegs were stacked along the wall to my right, and it was dark. I started to yell out for Draper, but stopped. Something felt wrong about the place.
I moved slowly down the hall, sidestepping the kegs, and trying to keep quiet. I didn’t hear anything from the bar, and that bothered me. If Draper was still here, it seemed he’d be cleaning up from one day and getting ready for the next, moving chairs and adjusting kegs and filling the coolers with bottles of beer. Instead it was completely still.
There was a door to my left that would take me out of the hall and into the back portion of the dining room. I passed it up and continued until the hall took a sharp, ninety-degree turn and opened out behind the bar. I had Corbett’s revolver in my hand now, held against my thigh. I stepped around the corner of the hall and raised the gun as Scott Draper came into view.
He was sagging forward in front of the tall shelves that stood behind the bar, his hands over his head, cuffed to the heavy wooden shelves that were lined with bottles of liquor. He’d been cuffed just high enough that when he fell forward, his knees hung a few inches off the floor, increasing the pressure and pain in his wrists. He hung there now, his body limp, head down, and I could see blood dripping off his face and onto the floor. His T-shirt was soaked with sweat and blood, and even from ten feet away I could see swollen knots rising on his face. While I watched, Jimmy Cancerno stepped forward with a gun in his hand and swung the butt of the gun into Draper’s face. It connected without the hard crack of metal hitting bone that I’d expected; instead, it was more like the sound of someone stepping on a wet sponge. That gave me an immediate idea of just how swollen Draper’s face already was.
The scene in front of me was wildly different from anything I could have expected when I stepped around the corner, but I didn’t pause to consider it. Instinct took over. Draper had been a friend once, and moving to help him wasn’t a decision so much as a reflex action.
“Not surprised you had to put him in handcuffs before you had the balls to hit him, Cancerno,” I said, taking another step forward and pointing the revolver at his head.
It wouldn’t be like Cancerno to travel alone to take on somebody like Draper, but I couldn’t see anyone else yet, so pointing the gun at him was my best bet. I stepped forward some more, clearing the edge of the wall so I could see into the rest of the room. That was when Ramone came around the corner and lifted a shotgun at me.
I switched the revolver’s muzzle quickly from Cancerno to Ramone, bringing it to bear on his chest before he could get his gun high enough to fire, and he froze for a moment, just a few feet away with the shotgun at his waist. Even while I stopped his advance, I knew I was screwed. He and Cancerno were positioned at opposite angles from me, and they were close. Keeping both of them at bay was going to be difficult.
“Get out of here, Lincoln,” Scott Draper said, the words sounding as if they’d been spoken through a mouthful of newspaper as he spit them out through busted, bloodied lips.
“I’d prefer it if he stays,” Cancerno said, and there was a flash of motion as he turned to face me, reversing the gun in his hand so it was no longer held by the barrel.
“Keep the gun down, Cancerno,” I said, taking a step back, close to the wall, and shifting the gun quickly from Ramone to Cancerno and then back to Ramone as he started to raise his gun again. I had to get at least one of them disarmed, fast, or this was going to be over all too quickly. My choice was Ramone—he would be the better shooter, the better fighter, and he was closer.
Keeping an eye on Cancerno, who was walking around the bar toward me, I took a few shuffling steps toward Ramone. All the lights were off in the bar except for one thin fluorescent lamp above the mirrors, and behind Ramone the dining room was dark. I hoped they didn’t have more backups waiting there.
“Put it down, Ramone,” I said, and he stood completely still, looking unconcerned. In Ramone’s eyes, I had already lost this fight because I hadn’t shot him as soon as I’d seen him. He was a killer, and his mind worked in a kill-or-be-killed fashion. I had failed to kill him, and now he was sure that I would die before this was over.
I was about to repeat my command when I saw Cancerno lift his gun quickly to shoulder level. I jerked the barrel of the revolver away from Ramone and fired a quick snap shot at Cancerno almost exactly as he fired at me. Both of us missed. Even as I was pulling the trigger, through, I was diving to my left, into Ramone, knowing that I had to prevent him from getting that shotgun up and firing at close range.
I hit him in the chest with my shoulder, but he’d been prepared for my lunge, and rather than attempt to bring his gun up, he dropped it, wrapped one arm around my head, and went with my momentum. We fell together, Ramone clutching my head and neck, and landed painfully on the floor of the bar. I tried to roll onto my right shoulder immediately and bring my gun around on him, but Cancerno was running toward us, trying to get a clear look at me, so I leaned back and fired two rounds into the glass mirrors behind the bar, making him drop. That was too much time to give Ramone, though, and he was on his knees, swinging his fist at my face.
He caught me high on the side of my head, as I had just enough time to turn my face away. It was a hard punch, and the next
one was even harder. I swung the gun at his mouth, but he blocked it with his forearm and the gun flew from my hand. I grabbed at his chest with both hands as he threw another punch, and another, both connecting with my forehead.
Then it was over, Cancerno standing above me with a Beretta 9 mm pointed at my face. Ramone threw one last punch, this one splitting the skin above my right eye, then climbed off me and retrieved his shotgun.
“Thanks for coming by,” Cancerno said, and kicked me in the ribs. I rolled onto my stomach and tried to push myself up, but he kicked me again and pushed the Beretta against my skull.
“Stay down,” he said, and then to Ramone, “Get him over with Draper.”
“No more handcuffs,” Ramone said.
“That’s all right.”
Ramone lifted me off the floor by my hair, pushing the barrel of a gun I assumed was Mitch Corbett’s revolver in my spine. He shoved me past the bar and then kicked me behind the knees, making me fall forward. I caught myself with my palms out, but he ground his boot into my back, shoving me down on my stomach again.
I looked up at Scott Draper, and it took a great deal of effort to keep my eyes on him. His face was a pulpy mess of blood and bruises. I saw his front teeth hanging loose and chipped behind torn lips, and his nose had been smashed flat against his face. Blood dripped from various areas of his face and fell onto the rubber mat below him in slow, steady drops. His eyes, though, were remarkably clear. Clear, and angry. More than once while we were growing up—and even a few times in the last week—I’d had the passing thought that Draper was a man who could take a hell of a lot of punishment before he stayed down. Now I had proof of that hanging in front of me.
Draper coughed, and a fine spray of blood flew from his lips and landed on the back of my hand, covering it with tiny crimson droplets. Ramone stepped away and Cancerno stood over me and kicked me again in the side. He hit me directly in the ribs, but he wasn’t a powerful man, and the blow didn’t do the damage he’d hoped to inflict.
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