I was suddenly tired of standing. I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor like Corbett, angled to face him. I set the gun down beside my leg.
“You said you were the one who put things in motion,” I said. “I’m assuming you told Ed the story, and he went after Cancerno.”
“Uh-huh. Ed figured he had a score to settle with Jimmy. He knew what was going on with the Neighborhood Alliance houses, so he—”
“What is going on with those houses?”
“I don’t know the details, man. I just ran the crew. My job was to do shit repairs and fleece the HUD grant for four times what we’d actually put into it. Where’s the excess going? Maybe right back into Jimmy’s pockets, maybe somewhere else.”
According to Cal Richards, the excess was going into Gajovich’s campaign fund, Cancerno making a down payment on owning a big piece of the city.
“When Ed went to see Gajovich, what was he trying to do?” I asked.
“Bargain with him. Or blackmail him, whichever you’d prefer. He wanted Gajovich to look at the Neighborhood Alliance scam and throw Cancerno in jail. Ed figured Gajovich owed him that much.”
“So he went to Gajovich and came up empty,” I said. “What happened then? How’d Anita Sentalar get involved?”
“She was always involved. She and Gajovich go way back. He handpicked her to run the Neighborhood Alliance because he trusted her to look the other way. She knew if he got elected mayor, she’d have a high-level position on his staff.”
“Who killed her?”
“Cancerno had it done, though I couldn’t tell you for sure who pulled the trigger. And that was our fault. Ed’s and mine. He needed a strong witness if he was going to bring it down, and he thought she could be it. He was pressuring her to go to the attorney general and roll on Cancerno. She wouldn’t. That’s when Ed and I decided to go in two different directions.”
“Meaning?”
“He decided to start burning the houses down. Figured that would force the cops to take a hard look at the Neighborhood Alliance. And I think he liked the idea, too, saw some element of sweet justice in that. Jimmy had wanted Ed’s dad to start some fires, right? Well, Ed was coming through on that, with fifteen years of interest payments, to boot.”
“And what direction did you take?”
“I was still working on Anita. I showed her around the neighborhood, introduced her to one of the kids who was being put in an Alliance house. They were the people who were losing, you know. Sure, the mortgages were insured, but they thought they were moving into dream houses when they were really hovels with fresh paint and some new drywall. That made an impression on Anita, too. I think she was ready to go with us on it. Cancerno must have thought so, too. Because she got killed.”
“So they set Ed up, and then Padgett and Rabold were sent down to kill him,” I said. “Or at least Padgett was. Rabold was working undercover by then. Which is why he ended up dead, too.”
“Came close to working perfectly for Jimmy,” Corbett said, “except Ed got a few minutes to talk to you. Otherwise, it might have gone without a hitch.”
“You think Cancerno ordered Padgett to try to take us out today? Or could that have been an enterprise project for Padgett?”
“He wouldn’t have rolled out till Jimmy took him off the leash.”
I was thinking about that, wondering what the trigger had been. Why not just send Ramone to kill us right away? Why drive us down for the meeting, then let us go? To find out exactly what we knew. But we’d seemed to buy his story. So what made him send Padgett out to hit us?
“I mentioned Gajovich by name,” I said. “I told Cancerno that I knew he’d been the one to make my father’s complaint about Padgett disappear.”
“Could have mattered,” Corbett said. “Or it could not. I can’t tell you that.”
“Whatever the reason, he definitely wanted us killed.”
“Cancerno’ll kill me, too,” Corbett said matter-of-factly. “He blames me for all of this, and after what he told you, it’s clear he’s also hoping to use me as a fall guy. Wash his hands of the Neighborhood Alliance and put it all back on me. Once I’m dead, I’ll become awfully important. Time this is all done, it’ll be me that was running the books on the Neighborhood Alliance, me who took the cash, me who killed Sentalar. I guarantee it.”
“You helped him out by burning the rest of his houses down.”
Corbett coughed and shook his head. “I didn’t burn those houses down, Perry.”
I frowned. “Be honest, Corbett. You were finishing what Ed started.”
“No. I didn’t set those fires. But I can tell you who did. I was checking out some of the houses that night, thinking maybe I needed to relocate. Instead, I saw one of them burn.”
“Who did it?”
“The guy who owns the Hideaway,” he said. “Draper.”
CHAPTER 29
The name rocked me, but it shouldn’t have. After all, until that day I’d never seen Cancerno without Draper at his side. It explained the phone call I’d gotten from Scott the morning after Ed died, too, the sudden change of heart he’d shown. Cancerno had probably ordered him to bring me down so they could see how much Ed had shared before Padgett had crushed him under the Crown Victoria.
“You’re sure?” I asked Corbett, even as all of the facts supporting it slid through my mind.
He nodded once. “Trust me, I got a good look at the man. No doubt in my mind at all. Jimmy sent him out because Jimmy wants to use me to explain his way out of everything surrounding the Neighborhood Alliance. Burn down the houses, blame it on me, and he’s done. Well, he’s got to find me and kill me, first. But then he’s done.”
I stood up. A muscle in my back clenched hard at the movement, stopping me before I got upright. I winced and pushed past it, taking a deep breath that made the muscle ache worse. I’d been in a car accident, dragged a lifeless man through a river, and had no sleep. No wonder my body was protesting.
“You’ve got to talk to the police, Corbett. I’ve already got them looking at Gajovich, and Padgett’s dead. You can’t just hide here, waiting for other people to figure it out.”
He didn’t say anything.
“People have been murdered,” I said. “No one is going to care about what you did with the Neighborhood Alliance. They’re going to care about taking Cancerno down, and Gajovich. Not about you.”
He was scared, though. A guy like Corbett, who’d spent years working cons and scams, seeing corrupt cops and prosecutors, did not like the idea of solving things through official channels. But he was going to have to do it.
“I’m calling a detective named Cal Richards,” I said. “And you’re going to talk to him. You can trust this one.”
He nodded, slowly. “All right.”
“One more question—how the hell did you know so much about what happened between Cancerno and Padgett and Alberta Gradduk, anyhow?”
For moment, he didn’t respond. Then he lifted his head and looked at me.
“Remember how I told you they put a gun to Norm’s head while Padgett and Cancerno had their fun?”
“Yes.”
“I held the gun.” He did not drop his head. Did not look away. “By then, I owed Jimmy a hell of a lot more than Norm Gradduk ever did. And I’d been working for him for a while. And before Norm killed himself, I burned Solich out of business, like Norm was supposed to.”