“Yeah, yeah, I’m working on it. Oh, man. Seventeen years ago, this is asking a lot.” He screwed his face up, an expression of intense effort, but then sighed and shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I can’t think of it.”
“Wouldn’t have it in the old files, something you could reference?”
“I went through the file yesterday. I don’t remember seeing that cop’s name in it. Maybe it’s in Conrad’s notes, if you can track them down. But it wasn’t in mine. I had most of the technical stuff.”
I didn’t want to put a name in his mouth rather than have him offer it, but I had to ask. “Could it have been Jack Padgett?”
He frowned. “Could it have been? Sure. Could have been a lot of things, though. I honestly can’t remember.”
“All right. What about the suspect you’d been looking at before you got the tip on Gradduk?”
“I know that one. Guy’s name was Mitchell Corbett. Local guy, had a background in demolitions, had been a suspect in an earlier fire, like I said.”
I turned and looked at Joe, who was gazing back at me.
“You know,” he said, “we really need to find that son of a bitch.”
We started with an information broker in Idaho. The term “information broker” was code for a government spook and a hacker. The guy was ex-CIA and knew how to get into most of the computer databases that you aren’t supposed to be able to get into. There are a handful of guys like this across the country, and while it’s not commonly discussed, any private investigator worth a damn knows one or two of them. You don’t ask for help from a guy like that on a routine investigation, though. That kind of help is for a special case, only. There are a couple of reasons for that: risk and cost. Make a habit of having information you shouldn’t have, and you’ll get into trouble eventually. And guys like our man in Idaho don’t work cheap. When Joe made the call, he did so knowing that our nonexistent expense account was going to take a serious hit. He didn’t hesitate to do it, though.
Joe asked for an activity check on Mitch Corbett’s credit cards and bank accounts. If he’d made a credit card purchase, we’d know where and when. Same for the debit card, same for an ATM withdrawal. It was the right place to start. The guy in Idaho told Joe to give him a few hours to work on it, then he’d call us back.
I checked our fax machine and found a dozen pages waiting in the tray. Amy had remembered my request. She’d sent a few articles about the Neighborhood Alliance, along with a complete list of the Alliance’s properties, compiled from the recorder’s office database. The early articles were trivial things—a few cliched quotes about rebuilding a sense of community by rebuilding houses, a mention of Sentalar as the director, and damn little else. The last article was more significant, however. Just two months old, it explained that the Neighborhood Alliance, with the assistance of funding from the city and a fifteen-million-dollar HUD grant, was going to be converting the old Joseph A. Marsh Junior High School building into apartments, all of which would be rented at low rates to people who met limited-income requirements. The old brick school, which was now close to ninety years old, had stood empty for more than a decade. Like West Tech, it had been closed shortly after I passed through its halls. I had that effect on a school, apparently.
West Tech, which was an equally historic building, had also been converted into apartments within the last few years. I’d been in the building once just to see how it looked, and I was impressed. They’d somehow managed to turn the school style into something that was so unique it was appealing. The tenant mailboxes were positioned between the old locker bays, the gym had been converted into a workout room, the auditorium was available for special functions. Upstairs, the classrooms had become apartments—some of them two levels, with spiral staircases and wide banks of windows. While the rent wasn’t aimed at the lower-income tenants the way the Joseph A. Marsh project seemed to be, it had gathered a lot of favorable publicity when it was completed. I wasn’t surprised to see that a similar idea had been pitched for the Joseph A. Marsh building.
“Whatever money was tied into the Neighborhood Alliance for the houses just got kicked up to the big leagues,” I said to Joe, and showed him the article. “There’s a fifteen-million-dollar grant involved in this one, alone.”
While he read the article, I looked through the recorder’s-office list Amy had included. It showed that the Neighborhood Alliance currently owned nine houses in addition to the school building, all on the near west side. Two of the nine were vacant lots now, I knew, the houses that had once stood on them turned to ashes. The ninth house on the list had just closed on a sale a week before, for the inspiring sum of thirty-two thousand dollars. That made me shake my head. Nine vacant houses, crumbling mortgage foreclosures, probably, in the neighborhood I’d grown up in. I thought of the old black-and-white photos on the wall in the Hideaway, the houses and businesses tall and solid, clean and well maintained, the men and women standing in front of them with some pride.
“Interesting,” Joe said, finished with the article. “Considering what your friend had to say about cutting in on somebody else’s revenue stream, this would seem to have some potential. We’ve got a couple hours to wait and see if our guy in the mountains can get a line on Corbett. I suppose we could find that consultant Cancerno mentioned, the HUD guy.”
I shook my head. “I think we’ll use the time to go see Terry Solich, ask why my dead friend’s dead father would have wanted to burn down his businesses. Or why Mitch Corbett would have.”
“Guy didn’t help the cops all those years ago,” Joe pointed out.
I smiled. “Right. But the cops didn’t break his arms, either. I’ll get him to talk.”
“What did I tell you about control?” Joe said. “We don’t need to start by breaking arms, LP. Not when the man has fingers.”
CHAPTER 18
Terry Solich had liver spots on his face and on his bald head, and his sunken eyes were rimmed with dark circles. It was closing in on noon, but he opened the front door of his house wearing a robe, with a pot of coffee in one hand and a ceramic mug in the other.
“You gotta be kidding me,” he said. “How many times I have to tell you people, I’m not going to join your stupid neighborhood watch program.”
“We don’t live around here,” Joe said.
“And the neighborhood looks damn peaceful already,” I said.
“You bet your ass,” Terry Solich said.
Five minutes later we were sitting on the backyard patio. A sprinkler was hissing out in the grass, casting a fine spray on a row of flowers that grew along the fence. A little terrier ran in circles out on the lawn, barking at nothing in high, incessant yips.
“I moved out of that damn neighborhood fifteen years ago,” Terry Solich was saying. “I’m retired now. I got grandkids. Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
He’d made the mistake of offering coffee before we’d gotten to the point of our visit, and right now I figured that was the only thing preserving our interview. Solich was a cranky old bastard, but he wasn’t so low as to throw us out of his home before we’d finished our coffee. Manners.
“We’re not trying to bring you any trouble,” I said. “But you might be able to help us stop some. We just want to know why your businesses were burned, Mr. Solich.”
He scowled and slurped his coffee. “How the hell am I supposed to know? Punk kid vandals set a place on fire, then come by and tell me why they did it? Is that what you think? Okay, here’s why they did it: Their parents didn’t love ’em and the schoolteachers didn’t, neither. Satisfied?”
“Your businesses weren’t burned down by kids, Mr. Solich,” Joe said, friendly but firm.
“You don’t know that.”
“But you do,” Joe said. “So why don’t you explain it to us?”
Solich’s only response was a belch.
“Seems there were some rumors about you selling stolen merchandise out of your shops,” I said. “Any chance that had something to do with these fires?”
