The Night Gardener (35 page)

She hugged him tightly. They lay in the dark and neither of them could find sleep.

“Will you go to church with us on Sunday?” said Regina.

Ramone said that he would.

A
FTER CHURCH, RAMONE
took the family to a restaurant over the District line for lunch. It was family owned and had survived despite the encroachment of the chains into downtown Silver Spring. Diego ordered the Vietnamese steak, his favorite dish, and Alana drank fresh lemonade and walked back and forth through the beaded curtains that led to the restrooms. Church had been much needed, and this was a nice way to continue the afternoon. Also, Ramone was putting off what he knew had to be done.

Back at the house, Ramone stayed in his suit and told Regina he’d be back soon. He dropped Diego, who had changed into shorts, Nikes, and a Ronald Spriggs-designed T, down at the basketball courts on Third, where Shaka was waiting. He instructed Diego to keep his cell on and to call either him or Regina if he went anywhere else.

Ramone drove slowly over to the Johnson house. He parked but did not immediately get out of the car. He had told Bill Wilkins that he would update Terrance Johnson on the findings of the case. Now he almost wished he had let Garloo take the lead. He was about to tell Johnson that his son had committed suicide and that he had done so with Terrance’s gun. In addition, he had to tell Terrance that Asa was gay. There was no predicting Terrance’s reaction. But this needed to be done.

Terrance must have known that his gun was missing, and he had to have suspected that Asa took it. His fear would have been that Asa had been robbed of the gun and shot with it. The death of his son, coupled with extreme feelings of guilt, had shattered him. But even with that, he could not have imagined that Asa had used the gun on himself.

Ramone had not told Wilkins or any of his other coworkers about the gun. If Wilkins were to enter it into his paperwork, Terrance Johnson could be charged with possession of an illegal firearm. Only police officers, federal agents, and special security types were permitted to own handguns in D.C. Johnson had bought the thirty-eight hot or he had been a down-the-chain recipient of a straw purchase originated in Virginia or Maryland. Legally, he was wrong. But Ramone wasn’t going to report it. Johnson had enough to live with. There wasn’t a point in piling any more misery on him, his wife, and their last living child.

He wasn’t going to be entirely forthcoming with Terrance Johnson, either. Ramone had deduced the identity of Asa’s older boyfriend, called RoboMan in the journal. Asa’s math teacher had said that Asa had come to him for extra-credit work after school the day of his death. But there were no such papers in Asa’s locker, book bag, or bedroom. RoboMan had to be a thinly veiled moniker for Robert Bolton. Ramone had found Bolton extremely defensive on the subject of stereotyping young black men when they had their conversation. But he had been defending Asa. Bolton was in love with him.

Ramone would mention his suspicions to the people who worked in Morals. This kind of thing was out of his bailiwick. He simply didn’t know what to do with what he’d found. He wanted to get rid of it.

He intended to keep information from his fellow officers in the MPD. He would keep information from the boy’s father. It was like Holiday said: He wasn’t so straight.

He got out of the Tahoe, walked up to the Johnson residence, and knocked on the front door. He heard Terrance Johnson’s footsteps approaching. Ramone’s impulse was to go back to his SUV. But the door opened, and he shook Johnson’s hand and stepped into the house.

DAN HOLIDAY LIT A
cigarette and tossed the match into the ashtray before him. It sat next to a vodka tonic on the bar. He stood in the middle of a group including Jerry Fink, Bob Bonano, and Bradley West. They were kidding themselves with Bloody Marys. Holiday had no such self-delusions. He needed a real drink.

Leo’s was empty except for Leo Vazoulis and the four of them. Fink had just returned from the juke. A strong horn-and-backup-girl intro, and then a husky male vocal came into the room.

“‘It isn’t what you got, it’s what you give,’” sang Fink, doing the girl part.

“The Jimmy Castor Bunch,” said Bradley West, the writer.

“Nah, this was before the Bunch,” said Fink, “and all that Troglodyte shit. Jimmy Castor was a soul singer before he was a novelty act.”

“Okay,” said West, “I got the Bunch thing wrong. But here’s the five-dollar question. What singer did Jimmy Castor replace in a famous group, way back in his career?”

“Clyde McPhatter,” said Fink. “From the Drifters.”

“Wrong.”

Fink grinned stupidly. “Bo Donaldson, from the Heywoods?”

“He replaced Frankie Lymon,” said West. “As in, and the Teenagers.”

“The little junkie,” said Bonano. His cell phone, sitting on the bar, was playing Ennio Morricone’s most famous theme, but Bonano was ignoring it.

“You owe me five,” said West.

“You take credit cards, right?” said Fink.

“Leo does,” said Bradley. “Just buy the next round.”

“Ain’t you gonna answer your phone, Bobby?” said Fink.

“Nah, it’s just a customer.”

“Another satisfied client of Home Butchers,” said Fink.

“It’s this bitch from Potomac,” said Bonano. “She doesn’t like the way I hung her cabinets. I’ll show her something that’s hung right.”

“On account of you’re Italian,” said West.

“There used to be a natural bridge from the boot to Africa,” said Bonano. “I ever tell you guys that?”

“Guy’s got a vowel on the end of his name,” said Fink, “he thinks he’s Milton Berle.”

“Berle was a Jew,” said Bonano. “Like you, Jerry.”

“His name ends with a vowel.” Fink wiped vodka and tomato juice off his chin. “Uncle Milty was hung like a donkey, that’s all I was sayin.”

They paused to sing along with the Jimmy Castor tune, light smokes, and sip their drinks.

Fink looked over at Holiday. “Why so quiet, Doc?”

“No reason,” said Holiday. “I’m a little self-conscious, is all it is. Listening to you Einsteins, I feel kinda inferior.”

“Tell us a bedtime story,” said West.

“I don’t have one.”

“He’s just solemn,” said Fink, “’cause of all the violent crime we had in the area this weekend.”

“Yeah, that off-duty police that bought it out in P.G. County,” said Bonano. “You guys read about it?”

“It was in the
Post,
” said Fink. “You saw it, didn’t you Doc?”

Holiday nodded. He had read about Grady Dunne yesterday. The story said that an off-duty MPD cop had been shot to death in P.G. County, along with two other men. One of them was a fairly well-known ex-offender with drug distribution priors. The other man was only identified as a black male. Romero, something like that. Holiday could not remember his name.

Police were looking for a third suspect who was believed to be the shooter of the police officer. Tellingly, a spokesman gave no explanation for Officer Dunne’s presence at the scene.

“Either he was undercover or sumshit like that,” said Fink, “or he was involved with those guys, as in, he was as dirty as the doo-doo stains on my drawers. What do you think, Doctor?”

“I don’t know,” said Holiday.

“Ward Nine,” said Bonano. “It’s like Tombstone out in that motherfucker.”

Holiday had also searched for news in the
Post
about Cook, and had found it in a single paragraph in Metro’s “In Brief.” He was only identified by his name, a man who had been found in a car in New Carrollton and appeared to have died of natural causes. The longer story would come later, when someone in the newsroom figured out who he was: that old detective haunted by the unsolved Palindrome Murders.

West signaled Leo for a fresh round.

“You in, Doc?” said Bonano.

“No,” said Holiday, swallowing the last of his vodka tonic. He dropped a ten on the bar. “I gotta get to work.”

“On a Sunday?” said Fink.

“People need rides on Sundays, too,” said Holiday. He gathered his cigarettes and matches and slipped them into his black suit jacket. “Gents.”

Fink, Bonano, and West watched Holiday walk from Leo’s. They listened to the introduction to “Just a Little Overcome” by the Nightingales and bowed their heads in reverence to the beauty of the song as they waited for Leo to prepare and serve them their drinks.

A half hour later, Holiday sat behind the wheel of his Town Car on a side street of Good Luck Estates. Beside him were T. C. Cook’s binoculars, a couple of granola bars, and a bottle of water. On the floor was a large empty cup into which he could urinate if needed. In the trunk of the Lincoln were a jimmy bar, a Streamlight Stinger rechargeable steel-cased flashlight, which could double as a weapon, a friction-lock expandable baton, a set of blued handcuffs, duct tape, a hundred-foot retractable tape measure, a digital camera, which he did not know how to use, and other tools and cop tools.

Several houses away sat the ranch-style, white-sided home of Reginald Wilson. Wilson’s Buick was parked in the driveway.

Holiday had no particular plan. Wait for Wilson to slip up in some way. Or break into Wilson’s home when he was at work and look for evidence. Toss the shit out of the place until he turned something up. Or plant evidence, if need be. Anything that would open the door to DNA tests that would link Wilson to the murders. Cook had been certain about his guilt, and that was good enough for Holiday.

He was prepared to sit here all day and, if necessary, the next day. Holiday had phoned Jerome Belton, his sole employee, and told him that he would be taking some time off. Now he had no immediate commitments. No family, no friends to speak of, no woman waiting for him at home. He had this. He’d fucked up damn near everything in his life, but maybe he could get this one thing right. He still had time.

DIEGO RAMONE AND SHAKA
Brown walked south on Third Street. They had finished playing ball. Neither of them had been into it and they had only gone hard for one game. Afterward they had sat on the court with their backs against the chain-link fence and talked and reminisced about their friend, the secret he had lived with, and the way he had chosen to go out. Diego had promised his father that he would never talk about the gun, and he had honored his pledge by not speaking of it with Shaka. Mostly the two of them had stared out into the daylight or at the Spanish playing on the soccer field or the occasional neighborhood resident they recognized, using the park or walking by, because they could think of little to say.

“I better get home,” said Diego.

“Why? You ain’t got no homework.”

“I’m startin back at my old school next week.”

“That’s next week,” said Shaka. “It’s not like you’re in the middle of something.”

“I been reading a book, believe it or not,” said Diego. “It’s called
True Grit
. My father gave it to me. It’s pretty good.”

“Go ahead, Dago. You know, soon as you go home you’re gonna fall on the sofa and watch the Redskins. It’s Dallas day, boy.”

“True.”

They walked along the commercial strip. Down by the barbershop, they gave each other a pound.

“Later, dawg,” said Shaka.

“Later.”

Shaka went west, in the direction of his mother’s place, dribbling his basketball with his left hand, his right hand behind his back, as his coach had told him to do. Diego walked up the rise of Rittenhouse, toward the pale yellow colonial that had always been his home.

His mother would be in the kitchen, planning dinner or having a nap, what she called resting her eyes, on the couch in the living room. Alana would be reading her picture book about rabbits or doing the voices to all her dolls up in her room. And, hopefully, his father had come back home. He’d be in his chair right now, watching the Skins-Cowboys game, pounding his fist on the padded arm of the chair, yelling stuff at the players on the screen. Pushing his hair off his forehead and stroking his black mustache.

Diego stopped halfway up the rise. His father’s Tahoe was parked out on the street, and his mother’s Volvo was in the driveway. Alana’s purple bicycle, with the streamers coming out the handles, sat up on the porch.

Everything was as it should have been. Diego walked to his house and touched the knob of his front door, warm in the afternoon sun.

D
ETECTIVE SERGEANT T. C.
Cook took another look at the dead girl lying in the grass of a community garden near E Street, on the edge of Fort Dupont Park. Her eyes were fixed and reflected the strobing blues and reds coming from the light bars of the cruisers still on the scene. Cook closely examined the girl’s braids, decorated with colorful beads, and saw that one was shorter than the others. There was no doubt now in Cook’s mind. Truly, the decedent was one of them.

“I will find him, darling,” said Cook, very softly so that no one could hear.

Cook labored to his feet. More often than not, it was an effort to do so. Well into his middle age, and after years of crouching down over victims, his knees were beginning to betray him. He shook a Viceroy out of his deck and lit it. He felt the satisfaction of his addiction as the nicotine hit his lungs. Cook nodded to the ME and stepped out of the immediate vicinity so as not to foul the scene with his ashes.

Walking away, he noticed that the superintendent of detectives and Captain Bellows had gone back to their offices. Knowing he would not have to deal with the white shirts relaxed him. He called them the Spaghetti Lids because of those silly strands of nautical rope decorating the brims of their hats. He had no time for their kind.

Cook walked to the crime scene tape, where two white uniformed officers stood, keeping back the spectators, reporters, and cameras. One was tall, blond, and skinny and the other was of medium height and build and had a darker complexion and hair. Cook had been rough on them earlier, but there was no reason to apologize. He had dressed them down for a reason, and now they were doing fine.

“Keep these people back,” said Cook to the blond officer. “Especially the media, you hear?”

“Yes, sir,” said Dan Holiday.

“Don’t ‘sir’ me, son. I’m a sergeant.”

“We’ll do it, Sergeant Cook.”

“I’m not playin. You let that girl through earlier, and she up and puked not ten feet from the decedent.”

“It won’t happen again,” said Gus Ramone.

“You do your jobs right,” said Cook, “someday you two are gonna be the police officers that you
think
you are today.”

“Right,” said Holiday.

Cook turned and studied the spectators on the other side of the yellow tape. There were several neighborhood kids, a couple of them on bicycles, and adults whose homes backed up to the community garden. An old lady in a housedress and an unbuttoned coat, her breasts sagging down to her belly. And a man in his twenties, dressed in a security guard’s uniform, a Sam Browne belt around his waist and a red company patch on his sleeve, one hand in the pocket of his blue trousers. Cook looked them all over as he dragged deeply on his Viceroy, then dropped the cigarette to the damp ground and crushed it under his shoe.

“Carry on,” said Cook. He walked back to the corpse of Eve Drake, his fresh Stetson cocked just so on his bald head.

A young neighborhood lady with a high ass moving inside acid-washed jeans walked in front of Holiday, glancing at him playfully as she passed. He stood straight, and the corners of his ice blue eyes crinkled as he smiled.

“I’d murder that,” said Holiday.

“She’s a little young, Doc.”

“You know what they say: ‘Old enough to sit at the table, old enough to eat.’ ”

Ramone made no further comment. He had heard all of Holiday’s nuggets of wisdom before.

Holiday began to imagine the young lady naked on his sheets. And then his mind drifted, as it tended to do, toward his aspirations. He wanted more than anything to earn the respect of a man like T. C. Cook. He wanted to be good police. And so he projected and fantasized about how his career would go. He saw commendations, medals, promotions. And to the victor, the spoils of war.

Ramone had no such ambitions. He was simply doing his job, keeping the civilians back from the tape. He stood there, his feet spread wide, and thought of a woman he’d seen standing on the edge of the academy pool in a blue bathing suit. Her figure and her warm smile had haunted him since he’d touched her hand. He planned to call her very soon.

AS HOLIDAY AND RAMONE
worked and dreamed in Ward 6, Washingtonians and suburbanites on the other side of town spent their disposable income in restaurants and bars, eating prime-cut steaks and drinking single-malt scotch, the men in charcoal suits and red power ties, the women in padded-shoulder dresses, high-heeled pumps, and teased hairdos they had seen on Krystle Carrington. In the bathrooms of these restaurants and bars, Republicans and Democrats put aside their differences and came together to do many blasts of cocaine. “Money for Nothing” played from every radio, and Simple Minds were scheduled to perform in town. It was rumored that Prince would be shopping in Georgetown that weekend, and the wealthy “punk” kids at Commander Salamander were anticipating his arrival. Artistic types caught a double feature of
A Passage to India
and
Heat and Dust
at the Circle Theatre. At the Capital Centre, basketball fans watched Jeff Ruland, Jeff Malone, and Manute Bol take it to the Detroit Pistons. The applause in the auditorium and the laughter in the bars were raucous and deafening, and blinding, too. AIDS jokes were told at parties, and there was talk of a new drug that was coming to town, like cocaine, except that it got smoked and was meant for blacks. Outside of newsrooms and among local law enforcement professionals, the violent deaths of three black teenagers in Southeast were hardly discussed.

As these movers of the Reagan generation enjoyed themselves, murder cops and techs worked at a crime scene at 33rd and E, in the neighborhood of Greenway, in Southeast, D.C. On this cool, wet evening in December 1985, two young uniformed police officers and a middle-aged homicide detective were on the scene.

Near the crime tape, a security guard stood alone, fingering a braid of hair decorated with colorful beads that he carried in his pocket like a charm. Later he would return to his place, slip the braid inside a plastic bag and place it in one of the album sleeves of his extensive electric jazz collection, alongside the hair he had taken from Otto Williams and Ava Simmons. The album’s title,
Live Evil,
was spelled the same way forward and back. It was the Miles Davis record that had been playing in the living room of his uncle’s apartment, the very first time he’d been sexually abused as a child.

Soon it began to drizzle for the second time that night. The drops grew heavier and became visible in the headlights of the cars. It was said by some of the police on the scene that God was crying for the girl in the garden. To others, it was only rain.