Sorrow's Anthem lp-2

by Michael Koryta

  Ed turns and runs past me, out the door and into the yard. He’s still screaming, and after one more look at Norm Gradduk, I begin to shout, too. Inside the house, Ed’s mother yells for everyone to keep it down out there.

  It takes the paramedics seven minutes to arrive, and about seventy seconds for them to tell Ed and his mother that there is nothing they can do.

  CHAPTER 2

  I still knew the house, although I hadn’t been inside in years. Word of mouth brought me the news that Ed had bought his childhood home, and while I could no longer remember the source, I remembered hearing about it. The house had never been a showpiece—nothing in our neighborhood was—but when Ed’s dad was alive it had been the best on the block, hands down. He’d spent hours on it, painting and repairing and weeding. My own father had always been impressed by it, telling me on many occasions that while Norm Gradduk had his faults, he took pride in his home, and there weren’t enough men around who still did that.

  It was evident that Ed intended to match his father’s devotion. The house looked bad, with a sagging porch roof, a broken window on the second story, and paint that had forgotten whether it was pale yellow or white and decided to settle on grimy gray. A ladder was leaning against the west side of the house, though, and it was clear that someone had been scraping the peeling paint off that wall with the idea of applying a fresh coat. A stack of discarded scrap wood near the porch was evidence of new planking laid on the floor. No doubt the porch roof was next on the list.

  No police cars were in the driveway or at the curb when I arrived, but I saw a black Crown Victoria parked on the street two blocks down. They would be there all night, watching for a return that would surely not occur. I parked my truck facing them, and then I walked through the yard and up the front steps. Maybe someone would be home. A girlfriend, or a roommate. Hell, he could be married by now for all I knew.

  My footsteps were loud on the new porch. I stood there and looked around for a minute, lost in memories, then nearly fell back off the porch when someone screamed at me from inside the house.

  “Go away, go away, go away,” a woman’s voice screeched. “I told you filthy bastards to go away!”

  I started to heed the command, but then the voice jarred something loose in my memory, and I stopped and turned to the closed front door.

  “Mrs. Gradduk, it’s Lincoln Perry,” I said, speaking loudly.

  Cars passed on the street, and a few blocks down some kids were yelling and laughing, bass music thumping in the background, a party building. The streetlight flickered and hummed, and I stood with my hands in my pockets and waited. I waited until I was sure she was not coming to the door, and then I reached out and knocked. I’d hardly laid my knuckles to the wood when the door swung open and a thin woman with hollow eye sockets and deep wrinkles stood before me.

  “You son of a bitch,” she said. Her voice was as thin as she was; you could hear it fine but it always seemed on the verge of breaking, maybe disappearing altogether. If you didn’t know the woman, you’d associate those vocal qualities with old age or a lifetime of cigarettes. But I knew that the voice had always been the same and that she’d never smoked. Her hand rested on the door-knob, and her forearm and wrist were the sort of severely thin that made me think of starving children in Africa and black-and-white footage of Holocaust concentration camps. Her skin hung draped from sharp, angular bones in the same fashion as her sleeveless dress, creased and puckered and wrinkled. Her blond hair was gray now, filled with split ends and tangles. Looking at her, it was hard to believe that she had once been a beautiful woman. Not that many years had passed, but it seemed she’d aged ten with every one that had gone by on the calendar.

  “Evening, Mrs. Gradduk,” I said. Evening. As if I’d dropped by for a glass of lemonade and a chance to discuss the weather and the kids.

  She tightened her hand on the knob, and I couldn’t help but stare at it, waiting for the bones to splinter.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing here?”

  A fine question. I licked dry lips and ran a hand through my hair, my eyes on the fresh planks beneath my feet.

  “Well?” she said.

  “I didn’t know you were living here, too,” I said, just to fill the silence with something.

  “I asked what you want.”

  I straightened up and looked her in the eye again. “I guess I’d like to find Ed. Maybe I can . . . maybe I can help him.”

  “Help him? Help him?” She took a half step out onto the landing, peering up at me, her mouth twisted with distaste. “You’re the one to blame for this, you know? He made one mistake and then you ruined him. He was never the same.”

  “That was a long time ago,” I said. “I can’t fix that. But I hear Ed’s in a lot of trouble now. I’d like to find him.”

  She leaned back and glared at me. “You even spoken to him in the last ten years?”

  It hadn’t been ten years, but I also hadn’t spoken to him. I didn’t answer, just stood there awkwardly before a woman who’d once baked me cookies and was now looking at me as if she’d like to sink her teeth into me, pour venom into my veins.

  “What the hell do you think you can do, you asshole?” she said, and I was struck by her language, the stream of profanity. In all the years I’d known Alberta Gradduk, I couldn’t think of one time I’d heard her swear. “The police have it all on tape. He did it, you know. He set that fire and burned that girl up. And you want to know why he did it?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Because it’s what he turned into after you turned your back on him. He made a mistake. People make mistakes. And you were supposed to be his friend. His best friend.”

  “I did what I was required to do, Mrs. Gradduk. I’d taken an oath, and it didn’t stop with friends.”

  “What do you think you can do now?” she said, and while there was still hostility in her voice, there was also a hint, however vague, of hope.

  “I don’t know.” Down the street, the shouts and the music were getting louder, the party picking up steam. I took a glance at the Crown Victoria at the curb, saw the streetlight reflecting off the tinted windshield, then looked back at Ed Gradduk’s mother.

  “I know attorneys, and I know the police,” I said. “I’m an investigator now. I don’t know what the situation was, but I do know he’s only doing himself more harm by running. He needs to come in and get legal help, get some people behind him. I can help him with that. Right now, he’s just getting himself into more trouble.”

  “And you’d know all about getting him into trouble.”

  “Listen,” I began, but she wasn’t having it.

  “Get away from my house,” she said, stepping back inside. I saw for the first time that she was barefoot, the veins on her pale feet standing out stark and thick and purple against the skin.

  “I can help him if I can find him,” I said, and somehow I believed it, though I had no reason to. “Where would he go, Mrs. Gradduk?”

  But she closed the door then, the old windowpane rattling as it slammed. I heard the bolt roll shut and the security chain slip into place. For one wild moment I was ready to lean back and slam my foot against the door, kick it again and again until it was open and I could grab the crazy old bitch and shake her and tell her that it wasn’t my fault, it had never been my fault, Ed had screwed up and I’d had no choice but to be the one who made him accountable. It’s tough to raise that kind of anger and conviction over something you’re not entirely sure you believe, though. I turned and walked back down the steps.

  His closest friend was Scott Draper. It had been me once, but that was long in the past, and Draper had lingered as a presence in Ed’s life while I had not. At least four years had passed since I’d seen Draper, but he wouldn’t be hard to find; the Hideaway on Clark Avenue had been in his family for three generations, and unless the building had crumbled around him, he’d be there now.

  To get there, I had to walk west down the str
eet, past the Crown Vic. I was about ten feet from it when there was the soft purr of a power window, and a drawling voice said, “How’s it going, partner?”

  “Fine,” I said, walking past, but then the door opened and one of the car’s occupants stepped out onto the sidewalk in front of me. I pulled up and looked at a cop whom I’d never seen before. If he knew me, he didn’t show it.

  “Nice night, huh?” he said, leaning against the car. I glanced in the vehicle, trying to see the face of the man in the passenger seat, but it was too dark.

  “Fine night,” I said, trying to step around him and continue on my way. He stepped with me, though, and I pulled up again.

  “Mind my asking what your business with Mrs. Gradduk was?” He was tall enough that I had to look up at him, into a face that was set in a hard scowl, dark brown eyes looking at me coldly. It wasn’t the eyes that held my attention, though, but his nose. It was swollen and purple, the bridge askew beneath the puffiness, the discoloration spreading into his eye sockets. He’d had his nose broken very recently. Probably by Ed Gradduk, if Amy’s information about his fight with police had been accurate.

  “Expressing my condolences,” I said. “Heard her son had a run of bad luck today.”

  “Or caused one,” the cop said. “What’s he got to do with you?”

  “I’m his priest,” I said, and stepped away one more time. He reached out and put his hand on my arm, but I twisted free and kept going.

  I should have stopped and talked to him. I should have explained the situation for exactly what it was, tell him that I was an old friend with no idea what I was doing here, chased by bad memories. Tell him that I’d been a cop, too, maybe swap a few stories about long nights on stakeout duty. Everything about the evening had suddenly become surreal, though, twisted and strange. And so, even while I told myself to stop and clear the air, I lengthened my stride and pulled away. He did not pursue me.

  I walked west on Clark for several blocks, past the Clark Recreation Center, an ancient brick building that had started as a bath-house around the turn of the century. For decades now it had been a rec center, and I remembered many furious basketball games played on the small court inside, a handful of onlookers watching from the balcony that ringed the court. Tonight a group of Hispanic teens sat on the steps and watched me go past. The neighborhood was shifting more and more toward the Hispanic and Puerto Rican populations now, but it had been even when I was growing up. Beside the kids was a vacant lot, nothing left but a concrete pad where a house had once stood. I remembered the house, and seeing the lot empty made me feel much older than my years.

  The Hideaway was just west of the rec center, tucked in a narrow building with a crumbling brick facade and a PABST BLUE RIBBON sign hanging in the window. I hesitated on the cracked sidewalk for a moment, looking up at the familiar structure. First place I’d been served a beer. I was fourteen—something the bartender had been well aware of—and I’d knocked the neck of my bottle together with Ed’s before I’d downed it. Budweiser, of course. That’s what you choose to drink when you’re fourteen; it’s got to be called the King of Beers for a reason, right? I’d spent countless hours in the place growing up, and I remembered the interior of the bar as well as my old house. Upstairs, there was a storeroom and an attic, but those windows were dark tonight. Whatever business had been next door was gone, the space empty now. I went up the steps and entered the bar.

  Inside, the room seemed long and narrow, with cramped booths lining the walls and cigarette smoke hanging in the air. A broken jukebox sat beside a pay phone on the back wall. This was the dining room, and although I could remember some booths as the permanent residences of local boozehounds, I didn’t remember anyone doing much dining here. A Hideaway cheeseburger was considered a real risk; the sirloin steak, for no one but the foolish or suicidal. They could pour a cold Bud or PBR, though, fill a glass with Jack, and that’s all anyone there tended to need.

  Through the doorway to my left was the bar, a long expanse of oak lined with vinyl-covered stools, the way a bar is supposed to be. Behind the bar was a massive shelving unit with liquor bottles stacked in front of a long mirror, and at the end of it stood two pool tables. Both were in use now, and only a handful of the barstools were occupied. A white kid in a sleeveless shirt and toboggan-style hat was manning the bar. Summer, and he’s wearing a toboggan. Tough.

  “What can I get you?” he said.

  “Your boss,” I answered, and he frowned.

  “’Scuse me?”

  “Scott Draper still own this place?”

  A slow nod. “Uh, huh.”

  “Well, go get him.”

  He didn’t like the commanding quality of my tone, but he responded to it, walking out from behind the bar and toward the steps at the rear of the building. He paused on the first step and looked back at me.

  “Who’s here for him?”

  “Lincoln Perry.” The guys at the bar were watching the exchange, but my name didn’t seem to mean anything. It had been a while since I’d spent any time in the Hideaway.

  The kid went up the stairs and I settled onto a stool with a split vinyl cover. The television above the bar had the Indians game on, the Tribe down two in the bottom of the seventh with bases loaded and the cleanup hitter at the plate. First pitch was low and away, but he swung and caught air. Second pitch, same location, same result. Third pitch a heater right down the middle and he sat on it for called strike three.

  “Lincoln.”

  I looked over my shoulder. Scott Draper was as I’d remembered—tall, thick, and bald. He had a natural sort of muscle; as far as I knew, he’d never set foot in a gym, but he could probably bench-press a Honda if he needed to. He’d been shaving his head since we were kids.

  “Long time, brother,” he said, extending his hand. His voice was warm, but his eyes didn’t show anything one way or the other.

  “Has been,” I said, shaking his hand, his palm rough and calloused against mine. “Good to see you’ve kept the place running.”

  “Would’ve closed down a year ago, but I couldn’t convince these drunks to go home,” he said loudly. The men beside me laughed, one of them giving Draper the finger. Regulars.

  I gave it a half smile, then said, “You heard about Ed?”

  He let his eyes linger on mine for a moment, then looked up at the television, a beer commercial playing, and picked up a pack of cigarettes that lay on the bar. I didn’t think they were his, but nobody said anything. He shook one out, took a Zippo from one of the guys at the bar, and lit it.

  “I heard,” he said when he’d taken his first drag.

  “It doesn’t sound good,” I said.

  He shook his head and blew smoke at me. “Not good. Some serious shit, is what it is. Murder. Plus arson, but at that point who cares?”

  I nodded. “Cops come down here?”

  “Not long ago, actually. Asked a lot of questions, I told ’em where they could stick it, they made some noise about building inspections and liquor licenses, you know, trying to be heavy about it. Then they left.”

  “They caught up with him and he got away, is the way I hear it.”

  “That’s the way they tell it, yes.” He put his eyes back on the television. After a brief period of silence he flicked them back at me. “And what’s it got to do with you, Perry?”

  “Not a damn thing.”

  “But you’re here?”

  I nodded. “Figured if I could find him, I might be able to help him out.”

  He raised an eyebrow, amused. “Help him?”

  I wasn’t sure if he was entertained by the notion that I would try to help Ed, or that I thought I could.

  “I don’t know how,” I said. “But he’s not doing himself any good taking off like this. They’ll catch up with him eventually, and then it’ll go harder than ever.”

  The game was back on, taking the attention of the drinkers at the bar again, so we were alone even in the group. Draper put out his cigarette
and frowned at me.

  “You haven’t said a word to him in all these years, have you?”

  I shook my head. “Tried once,” I said, and then, after a beat of silence, “but not very hard.”

  “And yet you drive down here as soon as you hear about this shit? Feel the need to involve yourself?”

  I understood his disbelief, because I was feeling it, too. But all I could do was nod.

  “Well, I guess that’s a hell of a nice thing for you to do,” he said. “But I don’t know what to tell you, Lincoln. I don’t know where he is. If he shows, I’ll tell him the same thing you’d tell him—to go turn himself in.”

  “If anybody can get in touch with him, Scott, it’s you. I’d like to talk to him.”

  He kept his eyes on the television but I could see the muscles in his chest and shoulders tighten.

  “Listen,” he said, “you already know how I feel about the way you dicked Ed over to help your career. But you’ve stayed out of the neighborhood and out my bar since then, and, shit, we were friends once. Because of that I thought I’d do my damnedest to be cordial when you showed up here. But you’re making that awfully hard, Lincoln.”

  “I appreciate the attempt at cordiality,” I said, “however poorly executed.”

  “Please don’t make me . . . ,” he began, but before he could get any further, Ed Gradduk came down the stairs that led up to the storeroom and shouldered his way past the crowd at the pool table.

  CHAPTER 3

  I watched Ed walk toward us, and when Draper saw my face, he turned and swore under his breath.

  Ed was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. There was blood on the shirt and a nasty gash over his right eye. His hair was tousled and long, and beneath it his face was tan and smooth. Not yet thirty, and facing life in prison, if the jury went easy.

  “A friend in need,” he shouted as he approached, and it took only those four slurred words to let me know he was hammered. “Where does that put me, Lincoln? I’m in need, my man, that’s for damn sure. But you a friend? Shit.”