Sorrow's Anthem

“I know.”

“Do you know what he does, though?”

“Administrative, right?”

“He’s a commander.”

“Okay.”

“He’s the commander of District Two.”

District Two. Clark-Fulton.

There was a period of silence. The lights were still off, but the computer monitor filled the office with a soft blue glow. Outside, a car blew its horn at the intersection, maybe at some drunk running the red light, or somebody so tired they’d sat through the change to green.

“If either Gajovich really is tied to Cancerno . . .” Joe let the sentence die.

“Yeah,” I said, and it was enough. We both understood the rest. It wasn’t the type of thing you wanted to put into words at this hour of the night, anyhow. Not if you had any hope of finding sleep.

CHAPTER 23

There was no car in Alberta Gradduk’s driveway, but there hadn’t been on any of our previous visits, either. Whatever Ed drove had been impounded by the police, and maybe Alberta didn’t have a car. I wondered if she even had a driver’s license, or if some medical issue prevented her from being on the road. After seeing her with her bourbon earlier in the week, that was more of a hope than a passing thought.

She was home, as I’d assumed she would be this early in the morning, and her face had an ugly expression as she pushed the blinds aside and peered through the window after Joe knocked on the front door.

“You’ve been told twice,” she said. “Go away. Please, just go away.”

“Mrs. Gradduk,” I said, “you’ve got to understand that I am trying to help.”

“Go away,” she repeated, then let the blinds swing back in place and stepped away from the window.

I raised my voice. “I know about the cop that came to arrest Ed, Mrs. Gradduk. I know that my father made a complaint to the police about him years ago.”

She came back to the door, opened it, and stood before me with naked hatred in her eyes.

“You don’t know anything. Not a thing.” Her eyes were still sunken and her skin was still tinged gray, but she’d changed clothes, at least.

“We know you had some problems with Sergeant Padgett,” Joe said. “And we need you to talk about that. We think it’s important.”

“You know I had problems with him?” she said, spitting the word back at him. “That’s what you’ve been told?”

“Am I wrong?”

She was holding on to the doorknob as if she needed the support to remain on her feet. “Problems with him,” she repeated. “Yes. Yes, I had problems with him, if that’s the word you want to use.”

“Explain it to us, Mrs. Gradduk,” I said, taking a step toward the door. “We didn’t come here to upset you. We just want to understand.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Can we come inside?”

“You don’t want to understand,” she said, but she moved aside and let us in. We went back into the living room, and I saw a cluster of fresh glasses on the coffee table, all of them empty, a half-full bottle of bourbon on the floor beside the couch.

She sat down on the couch and shoved the bottle to the side. I took a chair across from her and leaned forward, my elbows braced against my knees. Joe sat beside me.

“Please tell us about Padgett,” I said. “What happened with him?”

The ceiling fan turned overhead, the blades shedding dust. I waited for her.

“I was the one who suffered,” she said. “I was the victim.”

“I know,” I said.

“Norm just felt sorry for himself.”

“What do you mean?” Joe said.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Mrs. Gradduk . . .” I tried to make my voice as soothing and sympathetic as I could without sacrificing a tone of command, the voice I’d used as a cop dealing with hysterical accident victims or witnesses to brutal violence.

She looked back at the empty glasses. “I won’t talk about it. Not again.”

“It’s important, Mrs. Gradduk. I think it is very important.”

She lifted her hands to her hair, tugged on the ragged gray ends, pulled until the skin lifted around her skull. She made a low hissing sound as she did it.

“You can tell us,” I said. “It’s just the three of us in this room, Mrs. Gradduk. You don’t need to be scared.”

“That’s what the lawyer said,” she told me, releasing her hair. “And he was lying, too.”

I nodded. “Yes, let’s talk about the lawyer. We know about him.” I reached in my pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper with Gajovich’s picture printed on it. I’d made a copy before I’d left the office not too many hours earlier. “Was this the lawyer that came to see you?”

She looked at the picture with wary distaste, as if she wanted to spit at it but was afraid Gajovich might spring to life if she did.

“Was this the lawyer?” I asked again.

She laughed, a fast, breathless series of rasping chuckles that made the skin at the back of my neck prickle. It was the kind of laugh you might hear in the corridors of an asylum late at night.

“Oh, you know he’s the one. Your father sent him. Don’t pretend he didn’t. They were the ones to blame, you know. Norm and your father, the both of them. Norm started it, and then, your father, he tried to make it worse. But I wouldn’t let that happen. I wouldn’t let that happen to us.”

“So my father sent this man to talk to you,” I said, pointing at Gajovich’s picture. “But how did that make it worse?”

“I protected us,” she said. “The lawyer wanted to make . . . wanted to make a spectacle out of us. He came here and told me to talk to him, just like you are. And I talked, and talked, and talked. And then when I was done, he told me what it would be like. I asked if it couldn’t be handled quietly, and he laughed at me. Told me it was going to be a big story. Told me I’d have to be on TV and in the papers, in courtrooms and on the radio. Me and my son. As if we hadn’t been through enough. As if I hadn’t been through enough. That’s what your father did for me.” She smiled too wide, mouth open, blackened cavities visible along her molars. “But I didn’t let it happen. I protected us. Norm couldn’t do it, but I did it. I did it for my son.”

Joe was leaning forward now, and I found myself doing the same, edging my chair closer to the coffee table.

“What happened with Padgett, Mrs. Gradduk? You’ve got to explain what you’re talking about.”

She shook her head and pushed back into the couch.

“Tell me.”

“It’s all so long ago.”

“But it still matters,” I said. “More than you can imagine, it matters.”

“No.”

“Explain it to me.”

“I’m not doing this!” she shrieked, her hands back in her wild gray hair again, clawlike fingers locking on the