The Night Gardener

by George Pelecanos

  They pulled away from the curb.

  HOLIDAY DIDN’T SPEAK MUCH to his client, an Arnold and Porter lawyer, on the run down to Reagan National. Guy was on his cell most of the time and never once made eye contact with Holiday in the rearview the entire ride. To the lawyer, he was invisible, and to Holiday that was fine.

  Coming back from 395, he shot through the tunnel and took New York Avenue out of town, where he hooked up with the Beltway in Maryland and ramped off onto Greenbelt Road. He listened to Channel 46 on the XM, a station called Classic Album Cuts, and kept it up loud. They were showcasing ax standards today, starting with “Blue Sky,” and Holiday could see his brother, long-haired and higher than Hopper, playing air guitar to that beautiful, fluid Dickey Betts solo, a piece of music that just spelled happiness to Holiday, because his brother had been happy then and his sister was there, happy too, and alive. And then the deejay went right into “Have You Ever Loved a Woman,” Clapton and Duane Allman dueling, both of them on fire, and something cold touched Holiday, like the finger of death, but then there came the memories of his family, and Holiday relaxed and let the window down and drove on.

  He passed Eleanor Roosevelt High and made a right down Cipriano Road, checking the detail map on the bench beside him as he went along woods and past a Vishnu temple, going right on Good Luck Road on the edge of New Carrollton and making another right into a community known as Magnolia Springs, ramblers and ranchers mostly, some well tended, others in need of care. He found the house he was looking for on Dolphin Road. It was a yellow-sided, white-shuttered one-story affair with a brownish lawn and a late-model Mercury Marquis, the step-up Crown Vic, in the driveway. Holiday smiled, looking at the car. Once a cop.

  He parked the Lincoln curbside, killed the motor, got out of it, and walked to the house. He passed a dead lilac tree in the yard and wondered why the owner hadn’t removed it. He rang the doorbell and found himself straightening the lapels of his jacket as he heard footsteps approaching the door. And then the door opened, and a bald, average-sized black man with a gray mustache stood in the frame. He wore a sweater, though the day was warm. He was well past middle-aged and stepping off the bridge to elderly. Holiday had never seen him without his hat.

  “Yes?” said the man, his eyes hard and unwelcoming.

  “Sergeant Cook?”

  “T. C. Cook, th-that’s right. What is it?”

  “Have you read the Post today? There was a boy found over in that community garden on Oglethorpe Street. Shot in the head.”

  “Fourth District, yes. I saw the segment on Fox Five.” Cook unfolded his arms. “You’re not with the media. Some kind of law enforcement, right?”

  “I’m ex-police. MPD.”

  “No such thing as ex-police.” Cook’s mouth sloped down slightly on one side as he spoke.

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Television man said that the boy’s first name was Asa.”

  “It’s spelled the same way,” said Holiday, “forwards and back.”

  Cook studied Holiday and said, “Come inside.”

  SEVENTEEN

  LEON MAYO WORKED as an apprentice auto mechanic in a small garage on a single-digit block of Kennedy Street. He had been given the opportunity to learn the trade by the owner, who had done Lorton time himself back in the early ’90s. The owner’s former parole officer, who now had Leon as an offender, had put them together. Ramone and Rhonda Willis found Leon after stopping by to see his mother at the apartment where both of them lived. She had told them that Leon was working, hitting the word emphatically, and gave them the location of the garage.

  The owner of Rudy’s Motor Repair, Rudy Montgomery, met them with unwelcoming body language and a glare, but he led them to Leon Mayo when they described the nature of their visit. Leon was in a bay illuminated by a droplight, using a sprocket wrench to loosen a water pump with the intention of pulling it out of a beat-to-shit Chevy Lumina. They badged him and gave him the news about his friend. Leon put his fingers to the bridge of his nose and stepped away. They left him to his grief. A few minutes later he emerged from the garage and met them in a lot overfilled with previous-decade sedans and coupes manufactured, primarily, in Detroit.

  Leon stood before them, rubbing his hands on a shop rag and twisting and untwisting the rag. His eyes were pink, and he kept them focused on the asphalt. The fact that they had seen him spontaneously break down had shamed him. He was a thin, strong young man who looked five years older than his twenty.

  “When?” said Leon.

  “Sometime last night, I expect,” said Rhonda.

  “Where was he got?”

  “He was found at Fort Slocum, around Third and Madison.”

  Leon shook his head. “Why they have to do that?”

  “They?” said Rhonda.

  “I’m sayin, why would anyone do Jamal like that? He wasn’t into no dirt.”

  “Your records say otherwise,” said Ramone.

  “That’s all past,” said Leon.

  “It is?” said Ramone.

  “We did our thing.”

  “You stole cars, isn’t that right?”

  “Yeah. We touted and ran for a while, too, over there on Seventh. To us it was all in fun. We wasn’t tryin to make no career out of it. We were just kids.”

  “Seventh and Kennedy,” said Rhonda Willis, who had worked UC around that hot corner for several weeks back when she was plainclothes and on the way up to Homicide. “That was more than just boys playin like they were in the game. They were serious over there.”

  “There was some like that in the mix. But not us.”

  “What made y’all special?” said Ramone.

  “We caught grand-theft charges on the cars before the drug thing went to the next level. Ain’t nothin more complicated than that.”

  “And you don’t have any idea who would have done this to Jamal.”

  “Jamal was my boy. If I knew —”

  “You’d tell us,” said Rhonda.

  “Look, I’m on paper right now. I come to work every day.” Leon held out his greasy hands and looked hard at Ramone. “This is me, dawg, right here.”

  “What about Jamal?” said Rhonda.

  “The same way.”

  “What was he doing for money?”

  “Jamal had steady work as a housepainter. I mean steady. And he was fixin to start his own business, soon as he learned the finer points, you know what I’m sayin?”

  “Sure.”

  “He wasn’t never gonna go back. We talked about it all the time. I’m not lyin.”

  Ramone believed him. “Why would Jamal be walking around late at night?”

  “He didn’t have no whip,” said Leon. “Jamal rode buses and walked all over town. He didn’t mind.”

  “Any girlfriends?” said Rhonda.

  “Lately, he was just interested in one.”

  “You got a name?”

  “Darcia. Petworth girl, that’s all I know. Pretty redbone he met a while back.”

  “No last name? No address?”

  “She lives with this other girl, a dancer down at the Twilight, goes by the name of Star. Far as I know, Darcia dance there, too. I don’t know where they stay at. I told Jamal, don’t be fuckin with girls like that, you ain’t even know who they runnin with.”

  “Girls like what?”

  “Fast.” Leon looked away. His voice was hoarse, a whisper. “I told Jamal that.”

  “We’re sorry for your loss,” said Rhonda Willis.

  T. C. COOK LED HOLIDAY through the house back to the kitchen, where Holiday had a seat at a table that took up much of the space. As they moved through the living and dining rooms, Holiday noted the disarray and sloppiness that were typical of a man who lived alone. The house was not dirty but had widower’s dust on its tables and shelves. The windows were closed and their shades were drawn, holding in the smell of decay.

  “Black for me,” said Holiday, as Cook poured coffee into a couple of mugs. “T
hanks.”

  A schoolhouse clock was hung on the wall, its time off by several hours. Holiday wondered if Cook had even noticed.

  “I don’t get many visitors,” said Cook, putting a mug in front of Holiday and sitting with his own across the table. “My daughter once in a while. She’s living down in the Tidewater area of Virginia. Married a navy man.”

  “Your wife passed?”

  “Ten years back.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s a helluva thing, being where I’m at. You know those commercials on the TV, talking about the golden years? And those ads for retirement communities, handsome couples with straight teeth, golf clubs and swimming pools? It’s all bullshit. There ain’t one goddamn thing good about being old.”

  “Did your daughter give you any grandchildren?”

  “Yeah, she has a couple. So?”

  Holiday grinned.

  “I’m not even seventy yet. But I had a stroke a few years ago that knocked me on my ass. I guess you can tell, the way my mouth turns down. And I stutter some when I’m searching for words or I get flustered ’bout something.”

  “That’s rough,” said Holiday, hoping to end this part of the conversation.

  “I can’t write too good,” said Cook with determination, cataloging his ailments the way old folks tended to do. “I can read the newspaper some, and I do it every morning, but it’s a struggle. In the hospital, the doctor said I’d never read again, and that right there made me determined to prove him wrong. My motor skills are fine, though, and my memory is sharper than it was before I got ill. Funny how one piece of the brain gets turned off, the others get more bright.”

  “Yep,” said Holiday. “About the Johnson boy…”

  “Yeah, you came over here for a reason.”

  “Well, I was thinking that there might be a connection between the Asa Johnson death and the Palindrome Murders you worked.”

  “Because of the boy’s name.”

  “And the fact that the body was found in that garden. The kid was shot in the head as well.”

  “Why?”

  “Why was he killed?”

  “Why are you here?” said Cook.

  “I discovered the body. Well, to be more accurate, I came upon the body and was the first one who called it in.”

  “Now, how’d that happen?”

  “It was late, after midnight. Around one-thirty, I would guess, sometime after last call.”

  “You’d been drinking?”

  “I was more tired than I was drunk.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I was driving down Oglethorpe, thinking it cuts through to New Hampshire.”

  “And you hit a dead end. ’Cause it stops down there by the railroad tracks. The animal shelter and printing company on that street, too, if I recall.”

  “You weren’t kidding about your memory.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I have a car service, like a limo thing. I had fallen asleep in my Lincoln, and when I woke up I got out to take a leak in the garden. There he was.”

  “How long were you sleeping?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You were out cold?”

  “No. I remember a couple of things. A police car with a perp in the back drove by me slow. And a young black man walking through the garden. The times and the spaces in between are foggy.”

  “This police officer saw you sleeping in your car and he didn’t stop to investigate it?”

  “No.”

  “You get a car number, something?”

  “No.”

  “Have you talked to the MPD?”

  “Beyond the anonymous call-in, no.”

  “So you really don’t know anything.”

  “Only what I saw and read in the Post.”

  “I’m gonna ask you again. Why are you here?”

  “Look, if you’re not interested —”

  “Not interested? Shit, boy.”

  Cook made a come-on gesture with his head. Holiday got up and followed him out of the kitchen.

  They went down a hall past an open bedroom door and one that was closed. And then a bathroom and toward a third room, from which Holiday began to hear squawk and a dispatcher’s drone. Cook and Holiday walked into the room.

  It was Cook’s office. A computer monitor sat on a desk, its CPU beneath it. On the screen, a police scanner site was up, with the RealPlayer box activated in the top left corner. Holiday knew the Web site, which allowed users access to the dialogue between dispatchers and patrolmen in most major cities and states. He often listened to it himself in his apartment.

  A large map of the metropolitan area was thumbtacked to the wall. Yellow pushpins marked the various community gardens of the District. Red pushpins marked those gardens where the three victims of the Palindrome Murders had been found. Blue pins marked their home neighborhoods, the probable streets where they first disappeared. There was one lone green pin among the blues.

  “Not interested,” said Cook. “Three kids killed under my watch, and you say I’m not interested. Otto Williams, fourteen. Ava Simmons, thirteen. Eve Drake. Fourteen. Young man, I’ve been haunted by those murders for twenty years.”

  “I was there,” said Holiday. “I was in uniform at the Drake crime scene.”

  “If you were, I don’t remember you.”

  “No reason why you would. But we all knew who you were. They used to call you the Mission Man.”

  Cook nodded. “That’s ’cause I went after it. Most of the time I got it, too. That was before… well, that was before everything about the job got all fucked up. I retired with the Palindrome case unsolved. Hell of a note to go out on, right? Not that I didn’t give it my best. We just couldn’t get a handle on the killer, hard as we tried.

  “The kids had been murdered in different spots from where they were found. They had been re-dressed in new clothes. That made the forensics work tough. All had semen and lubricant in their rectums. None had defensive marks or foreign tissue under their nails. To me it means that he had gained their confidence, or at least convinced them they wouldn’t be harmed. He seduced them, in a way.

  “All lived in Southeast. All of them had been picked up off the street, headed to the corner market or the convenience stores in their neighborhoods. Nobody saw them disappear or get into a car. It was unusual back then for no one to see anything or come forward, the way folks used to look out for their neighbors’ kids. We had a ten-thousand-dollar reward out for any information. We got a lot of bullshit calls, but nothing that led to anything real.

  “Had to be a black man for those black children to get into his car. I also figured it was a person of authority. Police, military, fireman, or someone wearing a uniform of some kind. Some said it was a taxi driver offering free rides, but I didn’t buy into that. City kids wouldn’t have fallen for it. A police or a police wannabe would think to put new clothes on the victims, clean them up, and dump them in various locations. He’d know that would mess us up on the lab work. The wannabe angle was the one that stuck in my head.

  “We canvassed friends, teachers, boyfriends and girlfriends, any potential sexual partner. I went to Saint Elizabeth’s and interviewed the violent sex offenders they had there at the time. The criminally insane were locked up tight, so they couldn’t have perpetrated those murders, but I interviewed them as well. Zombies on meds is all they were. So there was nothing there.

  “I caught the first murder. Me and this white homicide police, Chip Rogers, who I considered to be my partner at the time. Chip’s now deceased. After the second body they added a few other investigators. Finally, after the third and all the newspaper articles, the mayor ordered a force of twelve detectives, exclusively, to focus on the deaths. I was in charge of the detail. We shot miles of film at those kids’ funerals, hoping the killer would post. We stationed squad cars at all the community gardens in the District, around the clock. I’d park my own car near those gardens some nights and just sit there, waiting.r />
  “Some folks in the community said we weren’t working the murders as hard as we would have if the victims had been white. I can’t lie; that hurt me deep. Everything I went through, coming up in the ranks as a black man. First I wasn’t smart enough to be police, then I wasn’t seasoned enough to work Homicide. Not to mention, my own little girl was about the same age as those kids in nineteen eighty-five. You think it didn’t wear on me? Funny thing was, if you looked at the closure rates of black and white victims in the city at the time, they were exactly the same. We worked all the cases hard. We worked them all the same way.

  “And then the Palindrome Murders just stopped. Some say the killer got sick and died or was killed hisself. Could be he went to prison on other charges. I don’t know. But I’ll tell you this: I still think about it, every goddamn day.”

  “I didn’t mean to offend you,” said Holiday.

  Cook fixed his eyes on Holiday’s. “Why are you here?”

  “First thing I ought to tell you is, I didn’t retire from the MPD.”

  “Figured that. You’re too young.”

  “I resigned. Internal Affairs was investigating me on some bullshit allegations, and I walked.”

  “You sayin you were true blue?”

  “No. But I was good police. I’d love to turn up something on this Asa Johnson thing and shove it up the MPD’s ass.”

  “Passion’s good.”

  “I have that.”

  “Let me see your identification,” said Cook.

  Holiday showed Cook his driver’s license. Cook went to an answering machine on his desk, hit the “memo” button, and recorded a message. “This is T. C. Cook. I’m headed out with a Daniel Holiday, former MPD officer, for a look at the residence of Reginald Wilson.” Cook hit the stop button. “It would take me forever to write it, and sometimes I can’t read what I wrote. Just leaving a record of my whereabouts, is all.”

  Cook reached into a drawer, pulled out a micro-cassette recorder, and handed it to Holiday. He then extracted a holstered .38 Special from the same drawer and clipped it on the right side of his belt.

  “I got a license; don’t worry about that.”

  “I’m not sayin a word,” said Holiday. “I got a piece myself, out in the car. And I don’t have a license. I’d rather have a gun and get popped for it than not have one and need it.”