Cancerno. If he ever had been, the partnership no longer seemed to be amicable. I don’t want to drop the hammer on Draper for those fires until I hear why he did it.”
“Do you know what he’s told Cal Richards?”
“Draper?” I shook my head. “No, I don’t. But Cal was still asking me about the fires this morning.”
“And what did you say?”
“Not much. Just pointed out that Cancerno was ready to burn the Hideaway last night. Let him take it from there.”
“The story will be all over the front page tomorrow,” she said. “I only wrote some of it, but I did offer a headline suggestion for the sidebar: ‘Gradduk Not Guilty.’ ”
“Got a hell of a good sound to it.”
We sat quietly for a while and watched Joe. His chest rose and fell under the blankets, his heart thumping away, smooth and steady.
“He’s going to be okay,” Amy said.
“Yes. Dr. Crandall’s eight hours of surgery got it done.”
She kept her hand on my leg. “So it’s over.”
“Yes,” I said again. It was almost over.
Sometime that afternoon, while I talked to police and doctors attended to my partner and Scott Draper, Ed Gradduk was buried without ceremony, at his mother’s request.
It was late the next day before I saw Draper. He called me as soon as he was released from the hospital and asked me to meet him outside. I walked out of Joe’s room and down the steps, came out into a hot, bright day with a sky so blue it seemed artificial.
Draper was standing at the corner. When I got closer, I saw his face was a ghastly collage of bruises and stitches. There was a cast on his nose and a bandage over his right eye. But the rest of him looked fine, strong and sturdy.
He put out his hand. “Thanks for coming down. Now, and the last time.”
I shook his hand. “Thanks for pulling me out of the house fire a few nights ago. Too bad you didn’t stick around at the time. Maybe some things would have gone a little easier on a lot of people.”
“Let’s take a walk,” he said.
We walked north on West Twenty-fifth, the cars buzzing past us. It was late in the afternoon, the heat as intense as it would get all day, and after only a block of it I could feel my pores begin to open up. The storm that had cooled things off was forgotten now, the sky clear, the air still. The heat would continue to build till the next storm blew through. August in Cleveland.
“Cops cut me loose,” Draper said eventually. “A lot of questions first, sure, but at the end of the day it seems I’m just a victim to them. They seem to think Cancerno was punishing me for helping you, and I didn’t discourage that line of logic. Problem is, I know it’s not the truth, and you know it’s not the truth. Corbett came by to see me in the hospital. Told me what he told you.”
I walked on without saying a word, head down.
“So you know Cancerno came after me because he found out I set those fires,” Draper said.
“I got that impression. But how did he know?”
“One of his guys was in my bar that night. I came in through the back, went into the bathroom, and was running water over my arms. I had some burns. Smelled of smoke. I should have gone home, but there were so many cops out that I just wanted to get off the streets for a while. This guy walked in the bathroom and saw it. I guess he reported back to Cancerno the next afternoon, once he heard whose houses had been lit.”
“How’d you know which houses to burn?”
“Not too hard—all the ones they were working on had signs in the yard. I drove around the neighborhood and found a half dozen without much trouble.”
“I see.”
“Uh-huh. And now I got a question—you knew I set the fires, but you didn’t tell the cops that, and you got your friend to find Corbett, make sure he didn’t say anything.” Draper turned to look at me. “Thanks for that, Lincoln. I could be in jail right now. But I’m wondering . . . if you knew I’d burned those houses, and you thought I was working with Jimmy, why the hell did you come down to the bar? Why didn’t you just call the cops and let them finish me off?”
“I wanted to hear you explain it. I just wanted to understand why the hell you would’ve done it.”
“Well, I’m damn lucky you did. Because you saved me down there.”
“Were you working with Cancerno, at any point?”
He shook his head. “Not in the way you’re thinking. Reason I set the fires was simple—it was what Ed had in mind when he went down. And I owed him. So I decided I’d finish his job.”
“Did you know what had happened between Cancerno and Ed’s family?”
He nodded. “He told me the night he ran from the cops and hid at my bar.”
“So you knew all of it? Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t know all of it. I just knew the old stuff. Didn’t know anything about the houses and Anita Sentalar and Mike Gajovich. Cops explained all that to me yesterday. All I knew was that Ed was out to settle a score with Cancerno.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“I pointed you at him,” he said. “I brought him down and introduced you to him, I told you about Mitch Corbett, and later I reminded you about the old fires. I got you started. I figured you’d do the rest. And you did. I just didn’t know . . . I had no idea how bad it would all get.”
Two women were walking toward us. When we got close, they looked at Draper’s face with undisguised horror and stepped off the sidewalk to get away from him. He didn’t blink.
“So you directed me,” I said. “When you could have just told me from day one. And people got shot, and people died, and you got your face beat to shit, and half the neighborhood burned down.” I shook my head and looked away, across the street.
“Like I said, I didn’t know what would happen, and I didn’t know how deep it all ran. I only knew what Ed had told me about Padgett and Cancerno.” Draper ran a hand over his bald head and sighed. “And there’s something else to it, Lincoln. Something that made it a little difficult for me to really talk to you, bring you into it.”
“What?”
He stopped walking, turned to face me. I didn’t want to stop moving, but I had to when he did. I looked at him and waited.
“When Ed went to jail, he wasn’t protecting Antonio Childers. He was protecting me.”
“What . . .” I didn’t even finish the question. I just stood and stared at him. A city bus roared by beside us, belching a cloud of exhaust smoke. The sun was harsh in my eyes.
“I was in serious money trouble,” Draper said. “I was going to lose the bar. Less than two years after my old man died and left it to me, and already I’d run it into the ground. I couldn’t let that happen. I talked to Jimmy Cancerno. He was the guy you talked to in the neighborhood with something like that, or so I thought at the time. He told me he could definitely help. Said a guy in my position could be useful as hell. He had the connection to Childers. Offered serious cash if I’d run some stuff out of the bar. Said I needed one good guy I could trust, though, to handle the transactions.”
His eyes flicked down, seeming lost in the swollen, bruised tissue that surrounded them.
“I picked Ed.”
I stood with my arms at my sides and didn’t speak. After a while, I turned away from him and looked out at the street, watched the cars go by. Then I began to walk again.
He followed. “That’s why he wouldn’t tell you anything. That’s why he took the fall. He was protecting me. Ed didn’t know anything about Antonio Childers; I did.”
I spoke for the first time in a while then, my voice tight. “So when the neighborhood was cursing my name for being such a traitor, you kept quiet.”
“No,” he said. “I led their cheers.”
I shot him a hard look at that, and he met my gaze evenly. I held his eyes for a moment and then looked away.
