“So why the second fire?”
I shook my head. “Like I said before, I’m coming up with questions, not answers. That has to change.”
She didn’t stay long after that. When she left, she gave me a hug, and somehow the softness of her hair and the smell of her seemed to cleanse some things from me, like the coppery odor of Larry Rabold’s blood and the chilling sound of his daughter’s scream. There was no more discussion of her article, and I knew there wouldn’t be again. It was done now, and I was glad. True friends are precious, and lost friends are the kind of ghosts that never wander far away. I knew too much about both ends of that.
CHAPTER 17
Andrew Maribelli was a tall, thin man with a shock of gray hair that was combed over to hang long on the right side and was trimmed short on the left. It gave him an off-balance look, as if his head were always tilted. His chest was broad but his shoulders were small, pointed knobs of bone. The starched blue shirt he wore looked like it had been pulled over a door, all broad and flat with those pointy shoulders at either end.
When he stepped into his narrow office in the Cleveland Fire Department headquarters on Superior Avenue at eight that morning to find me sitting behind his desk and Joe studying a framed photograph on the wall, he handled it well enough.
“Gentlemen,” he said, closing the door gently behind him, showing no real confusion, “while I always do encourage my guests to get comfortable, I prefer to know when they’re arriving. You know, so I can tidy up the place.”
I stood up and came around the desk, and Joe turned to face him. When I’d called Joe at seven that morning to suggest we take a run at Maribelli, he’d been in favor. Putting our interest where Rabold’s had been right before he was killed could be a productive venture. And probably a risky one.
“I’m Lincoln Perry. I spoke with you on the phone yesterday.”
He frowned. “Uh-huh. And I told you—”
“I know what you told me,” I said, “and it doesn’t matter anymore, Mr. Maribelli. Because the cop whose interest you were protecting is dead. He was murdered.”
He winced. “Shit. I’d heard that a cop . . . but I didn’t know, I mean, I didn’t hear the name, right? Didn’t know it was that guy.”
“It was him,” I said. “He was shot in his basement. We found the body.”
Maribelli sighed heavily and moved past me, squeezed around the desk, and dropped into his chair.
“We were cops, too,” Joe said, and Maribelli looked up as if noticing him for the first time. “I was one for thirty years. So was my father. So was his father. So this matters to us. A cop gets killed, we don’t like it. And we want to know why it happened.”
Maribelli’s reservations about talking to us the previous day had been strong enough, but there’s a sense of brotherhood between people like cops and firefighters, and we were counting on it helping us here. He studied us for a moment, silent, but then he nodded and leaned back in his chair.
“You said you found the body?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
I nodded.
“If my old case is so damn important, though,” Maribelli said, “why do I have PIs down here instead of a homicide detective?”
“Things go the way we expect,” Joe said, “and you will have a homicide detective down here. Anything we produce, they’ll get. But slowing down our work isn’t helping them. Not a bit.”
“Well, what do you need?” Maribelli leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “Those fires the officer wanted to know about, they happened seventeen years ago. Three fires on the near west side, all in a short time during the summer, all to property owned by a man named Terry Solich. But I assume you’ve already got that much.”
“We read the old newspaper articles,” I said. “According to them, you investigated the fires, determined them to be arson.”
He nodded.
“What can you tell us about the investigation?”
“Speculation was that Solich was being burned out of business. He ran a couple pawnshops around that neighborhood, was generally regarded as a pretty shady operator. Police theory was that he either pissed off the wrong guys, or somebody was trying to muscle in on his action. They thought Solich knew who was responsible, but he wasn’t saying. That was frustrating to the police and me because by the time the third business went up in flames, it was becoming a pretty big pain in the ass. Scaring people in the neighborhood, getting a lot of media attention. We wanted to put it to bed, and Solich wasn’t helping us at all, even though he probably could have.”
“And you never did put it to bed?” Joe asked.
Maribelli started to shake his head, then stopped. “Well, we did and we didn’t.”
“Meaning?”
“No arrests were made, but we had a suspect who looked good for the fires. By the time we got onto him, though, he was dead. Killed himself.”
“Killed himself,” I echoed. “You remember the name?”
“Wouldn’t have yesterday, but since I just looked this over with the cop, I can tell you. Suspect’s name was Norman Gradduk.”
He pronounced it
“How’d you come to him as the suspect?” I said.
“Tips from the neighborhood. One of the beat cops down there had his ear to the ground, passed some news back to Conrad, the police detective. He and I had been looking at another guy, a guy we’d interviewed in another arson case about a year before, same neighborhood. Word around there was that it was this Gradduk guy, though. Time we came around to see him, he’d been dead a few days already. Shit got crazy that fall, Conrad was busy and so was I, and the case went cold. Best suspect was dead, anyhow. Fires had stopped.”
“What do you remember about the fires themselves?” Joe said.
It was a good question. Like any specialist, Maribelli remembered more about the details of the case than the generalities of it.
“All three were set using a small explosive and a kerosene accelerant,” he said without hesitation. “The guy ran fuse cord around the building and sprayed the walls down with the accelerant. That ensured that when the place went up in flames, they weren’t going to be put out until the building came down. I suspected he was using a timing device, too. The fuse cord he used was fast-burning stuff, you couldn’t just touch a match to it and run away, have the place blow a few minutes later. It wasn’t as fast as Primacord, that shit the military uses that goes up at something absurd like ten thousand feet in a second, but it was too fast to use with a match-light technique.”
Joe and I exchanged a glance. It was the same method Richards had described to us.
“We’re not sure what, if anything, these old fires have to do with a few recent arson fires in the same neighborhood,” I said. “But what you just described sounds like it fits with the new fires, and some of those old names are popping up again. You mentioned the tip came from a beat cop in the neighborhood. You remember who it was?”
He groaned and looked at the ceiling. “Shit, I’m not the best with names. Yesterday morning my wife asked me to sign a card for her sister, and I wrote ‘Dear Alice,’ when the woman’s name is Allison. You should’ve heard my wife. She pitched a fit.” He looked back at us and grinned. “Or bitched a fit, maybe. That’s a little more like it.”
“The name?” I said.
