He started after me, and when Draper tried to pull him back, Ed told him to stay the hell inside. I pushed the door open and stepped out into the cooling air, stood on the sidewalk with my hands at my sides and my eyes on the ground while Ed joined me. He took out a cigarette and lit it, and we stood there together in silence. The smell of the alcohol was heavy on him, but somehow I had the sense his mind was sober right now.
“They execute a guy for murder in Ohio, don’t they?” he said.
“Sometimes.”
He nodded and smoked some more.
“Sometimes they don’t,” I said. “Depends on the circumstances. What are yours?”
He laughed, and it was a menacing sound, so empty it chilled me to the core.
“What are my circumstances?” He laughed again. “Oh, man. You don’t even want to hear about it, Lincoln. They are not clean. I can tell you that. They are not clean.”
He began to walk down the sidewalk then, swaying and weaving but moving fast enough, and he motioned for me to follow with a jerk of his hand. I shot a glance down the street, looking, as Draper had, for a police presence. When I saw none, I followed.
“My circumstances,” he said around the cigarette, “are a little difficult to explain. I hear there’s a videotape of it, though, and that’s all the jury needs to see. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what’s a video against words from an ex-con? Probably worth a million of those. A guy like me could run the world dry of words, still not have enough.”
The breeze picked up, rustling the trash and gravel on the sidewalk and sending dust and bits of fine dirt into our eyes. I blinked against it, ducked my shoulders, and put my head down.
“What happened, Ed?”
He worked on the cigarette for a while, and when I glanced at him the gash above his eye was brighter than it had been, the wound opening up again and spilling more blood.
“In the beginning,” Ed Gradduk told me, “it was all about money. The revenue stream, as my old man would have called it. I found one, buddy. It was already there, but I got my piece of the action, played my role, and took my cut. All you can ask, right?”
I didn’t answer, and we walked on in silence for maybe a block, Ed sorting out his thoughts.
“So it was money,” he said. “A lot of money to some people, less to others.”
“And to you?”
“Enough to me. It was enough. But then . . .” The menacing laugh came again, and with it the temperature seemed to drop ten degrees. “Then it stopped being about money. Got personal.”
“Why?”
He stopped walking and looked at me, tilting his head to the side.
“A man told me a story.”
I raised my eyebrows. “What story?”
“The one he didn’t want to tell,” Ed answered. “And I do feel bad about that. It was hard on him, because he knew it’d be hard on me. Stuff like that, well, it doesn’t tell easy, Lincoln. But I guess that’s how it goes. The stories that matter most are the hardest to tell.”
“Did you kill the woman?”
He blew smoke wearily. “I did not kill the woman. And I don’t give a damn if they have a video or a picture or a thousand eyewitnesses to whatever it is they say happened, Lincoln—that’s not how it went down.”
“I can help you, Ed,” I said, and he raised his eyebrows and snorted. “I can help you, but you’ve got to tell me the whole score. Give me the names, give me the facts, lay it out there.”
His eyes had drifted past me, over my shoulder and into the houses behind me. He pointed at them with his cigarette.
“Andy Butcher used to live in a house up that street. ’Member him? Crazy little shit. We were standing out in his front lawn that day the bus from the Catholic school went by.” He laughed and smiled, seemingly carefree, just another guy out for an evening stroll. What murder charge? Nope, not me.
“The bus from the Catholic school goes by, and one of those shirt-and-tie boys tosses a bottle at us? You remember it; I know you do. Little prick throws a bottle at us, and it hits the grass instead of the sidewalk, doesn’t bust. And Andy, shit, he picks it up and takes off running. Bus must be doing twenty miles an hour, but he catches up to it.”
I remembered it, the scene playing through my head now like a movie clip: Andy Butcher sprinting after the bus with the bottle in his hand; the bus slowing because a car had just swung out of a driveway in front of it. Andy making a jump right at the side of the bus, Ed and I standing back in the yard with our mouths hanging open, staring in amazement, as Butcher hooked his left arm through the half-opened bus window and hung there, clinging to the side of the moving bus while he brought the bottle in with his right hand and smashed it against the stunned Catholic school kid’s face.
“Man, we ran like hell,” Ed said.
I nodded, and somehow I wanted to smile, even though this was no time to reminisce. “We did,” I said. “The bus driver got out, started chasing us, screaming about getting the police.”
We’d gone probably twenty blocks that day before any of us had the sense to cut in one direction or the other, get out of the driver’s line of sight. Ran through a few yards until we collapsed in a heap, laughing our asses off and exchanging high fives.
“Butcher, he was one hell of an athlete,” Ed said. “Never played an organized sport in his life, but he could catch a moving bus and hang in the window. Amazing.”
“Ed, you’ve got to tell me what happened,” I began, not wanting to talk about Andy Butcher anymore, but he held up his hand and interrupted again.
“People talk about memories like they’re the best things in the world, Lincoln. They love the word, love the feel of it, say it with this breathlessness, all nostalgic and shit.
He tossed his cigarette to the pavement and ground it out under a well-worn Nike. “Sometimes, they hurt.” He looked up at me. “Memories, I mean. I know there are good ones, but bad ones? Man, that’s the worst. You’d do whatever you could to put them away, drive them out of your mind, lock them out for good. But you can’t do that. They’ll keep coming back, and, Lincoln, those suckers can
“Ed”—I tried to fill my voice with some of the commanding tone I’d used on the bartender—“give that talking-in-riddles shit a rest, all right? Maybe you didn’t want to see me down here, but I came, anyhow. And if you want my help, I’ll do the best I can. But you got to tell it to me.”
He started walking again, and while his steps seemed a little surer now than they had when we’d left the bar, it still wasn’t difficult to tell he was drunk. His eyes looked sober, though, and his face had a serious cast that told me his mind was—finally—very much in the moment.
“You don’t need to be a part of this, Lincoln,” he said. He still moved with shuffling steps, his feet seeming not to come off the ground at all. It was the way he’d walked when he was twelve.
“I know that.”
“I went to the prosecutor,” he said. “You know what he told me?”
“I don’t know, Ed.”
“Told me to go home and keep myself out of trouble. Told me he had enough problems without a con like me coming to him with wild schemes and rumors. You believe that? The man’s paid with taxpayer cash, Lincoln, and he sent me out of his office. Told me to stay out of trouble.”
“Why’d you go to the prosecutor?”
“I’ll tell you something else—I tried to do it the right way. The
A car was drifting up the street behind us. I was looking at Ed’s face, but he turned to glance at the car, and when he did, his eyes went flat.
