“And told the cops it was him,” I said.
“Yes.”
I exhaled loudly and shook my head. “Did Ed know?”
“Yes. It’s how I started the story when I told it to him.”
I stood and stared at him.
“I changed a lot over the years,” Corbett said softly. “Never forgot that night, Perry. And then when Ed started working with us . . . and, man, we got along. He was a good guy. One of the best I’ve ever known. And loyal. If you were his friend, he’d break his back to help you. No questions asked.”
“Yes,” I said. “He would.”
“A time came when I knew I had to tell him. Had to. Man was my friend, and he didn’t know. And he was working for Jimmy, and didn’t know. And that wasn’t right.”
It had been a hard story for Corbett to tell, all right. Ed hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d told me that.
“He listened to it all, and he didn’t turn on me, not right then, and not after,” Corbett said. “Can you imagine? The things that happened to his family, you know? The things that I was a part of. And all he did was thank me for telling him.”
I watched the shadows on the opposite wall. “Could be he’d learned something about holding grudges.”
“I thought it was the right thing to do,” Corbett said. “But now? Shit. I’d do anything to take it back. Because look what it started. Look what it did.”
I shook my head. “No. You needed to tell him, Corbett. It needed to be settled. Ed started to settle it, and now we’re going to finish it. You and me. You’re talking to Cal Richards. Telling him everything you told me. You’re going to do that because you’re too much of a man not to. You can’t hide from it anymore.”
“Okay,” he said, his voice low and sad. He snapped his fingers, and out of nowhere the cat emerged again, purring. It sat beside him, and he scratched its head.
“You know,” I said, “you should have left the cat at home. It certainly wasn’t helping you hide.”
“He’s fifteen years old,” Corbett said, as if that explained everything. “Couldn’t leave him.”
“I’ll have someone come to get you.”
He shook his head. “No. I’m not going to do it that way. You say I can trust this guy, Richards, then I’ll trust Richards. But you’re not going to send them out to get me, put me in handcuffs. You set up a meet with him, and I’ll be there.”
I thought about it, then nodded.
“Tomorrow morning, Richards and I will come here. Just the two of us. You’ll be here?”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
I believed him. He was not a man who had any energy left to hide, or to run.
“I’m leaving now,” I said. “And I’m taking your gun.”
“Where you going?”
“To see an old friend.”
The neighborhood was silent when I stepped out of the back door of the house on West Fortieth Street with Corbett’s revolver tucked in my waistband. There was a pay phone up the street. I could use it to call Cal Richards. I could send him down to the Hideaway, let him pick up Draper.
I walked past the phone, though, moving north toward Clark Avenue at that time when the night seemed to have forgotten to which day it belonged. The police would get their chance at Draper soon enough. Right now, I wanted my own. I wanted to hear him explain it. To understand how he’d let it happen.
It was past three when I got to the Hideaway, and even Clark, usually an active street, was still. The bar would have been closed for nearly an hour now, but I was hoping to find Draper there, anyhow. People in the bar business typically go to bed about the time most of us wake up.
I walked up the sidewalk to the front door, over cracked stone steps where I’d once sat with Ed and Draper and watched the regulars drift in and out of the bar. Now I stood on them alone and tugged on the heavy door, found it locked. I pulled my hand back and knocked several times, the enormous piece of wood soaking the sound up even when I pounded hard with a closed fist.
Nobody came to the door. It was hard to make a good, loud knock on that front door, though, and if Draper was in the back, it was no surprise that he hadn’t heard it. I walked around the building and down the alley that ran beside it. The back door was familiar to me; when Ed and Draper and I used to snag a couple bottles of booze from Draper’s old man’s supply, that was how we made our exit.
The back door was open. I stepped through it and into a narrow, musty corridor with rubber mats on the floor. A couple empty kegs were stacked along the wall to my right, and it was dark. I started to yell out for Draper, but stopped. Something felt wrong about the place.
I moved slowly down the hall, sidestepping the kegs, and trying to keep quiet. I didn’t hear anything from the bar, and that bothered me. If Draper was still here, it seemed he’d be cleaning up from one day and getting ready for the next, moving chairs and adjusting kegs and filling the coolers with bottles of beer. Instead it was completely still.
There was a door to my left that would take me out of the hall and into the back portion of the dining room. I passed it up and continued until the hall took a sharp, ninety-degree turn and opened out behind the bar. I had Corbett’s revolver in my hand now, held against my thigh. I stepped around the corner of the hall and raised the gun as Scott Draper came into view.
He was sagging forward in front of the tall shelves that stood behind the bar, his hands over his head, cuffed to the heavy wooden shelves that were lined with bottles of liquor. He’d been cuffed just high enough that when he fell forward, his knees hung a few inches off the floor, increasing the pressure and pain in his wrists. He hung there now, his body limp, head down, and I could see blood dripping off his face and onto the floor. His T-shirt was soaked with sweat and blood, and even from ten feet away I could see swollen knots rising on his face. While I watched, Jimmy Cancerno stepped forward with a gun in his hand and swung the butt of the gun into Draper’s face. It connected without the hard crack of metal hitting bone that I’d expected; instead, it was more like the sound of someone stepping on a wet sponge. That gave me an immediate idea of just how swollen Draper’s face already was.
The scene in front of me was wildly different from anything I could have expected when I stepped around the corner, but I didn’t pause to consider it. Instinct took over. Draper had been a friend once, and moving to help him wasn’t a decision so much as a reflex action.
“Not surprised you had to put him in handcuffs before you had the balls to hit him, Cancerno,” I said, taking another step forward and pointing the revolver at his head.
It wouldn’t be like Cancerno to travel alone to take on somebody like Draper, but I couldn’t see anyone else yet, so pointing the gun at him was my best bet. I stepped forward some more, clearing the edge of the wall so I could see into the rest of the room. That was when Ramone came around the corner and lifted a shotgun at me.
I switched the revolver’s muzzle quickly from Cancerno to Ramone, bringing it to bear on his chest before he could get his gun high enough to fire, and he froze for a moment, just a few feet away with the shotgun at his waist. Even while I stopped his advance, I knew I was screwed. He and Cancerno were positioned at opposite angles from me, and they were close. Keeping both of them at bay was going to be difficult.
“Get out of here, Lincoln,” Scott Draper said, the words sounding as if they’d been spoken through a mouthful of newspaper as he spit them out through busted, bloodied lips.
“I’d prefer it if he stays,” Cancerno said, and there was a flash of motion as he turned to face me, reversing the gun in his hand so it was no longer held by the barrel.