The Night Gardener

by George Pelecanos

“In that community garden they got on Oglethorpe. I always cut through it when I come back from Flora’s. It’s the shortest way to my mother’s house.”

  “Tell us what happened.”

  “I was just walkin through. I came up on this thing, like, lyin in the path. I thought it was a man sleeping, at first. But when I looked down and let my eyes adjust, I saw that it was a boy. His eyes were open and there was blood around his head. It was obvious that he was dead.”

  “What was he wearing?” said Ramone, hearing the catch in his voice.

  “He had on a North Face coat,” said Tinsley. “I could make out the symbol they got in the moonlight. That’s all I can recall.”

  “Anything else you remember about him?”

  “Well, there was the gun.”

  “What gun?” said Ramone.

  “The thirty-eight revolver that was in the boy’s hand.”

  Ramone made a sound. It was a short, low thing that was close to a moan. Rhonda said nothing. They all listened to the air coming from an overhead vent into the room.

  “Did you touch it?” said Ramone.

  “I took it,” said Tinsley.

  “Why?”

  “I saw money lyin there,” said Tinsley.

  “Didn’t you realize that you would be destroying evidence at a crime scene?”

  “Three hundred dollars was all I could see.”

  “So you stole it.”

  “Wasn’t like that little nigga was gonna use it again.”

  Ramone stood out of his chair, his right fist balled.

  “Gus,” said Rhonda.

  Ramone quickly exited the box. Rhonda got up and glanced at her watch.

  “Can I get a soda, somethin?” said Tinsley.

  Rhonda did not answer. Instead she looked into the camera. “Two forty-three p.m.”

  She left Tinsley there with his dread and walked into the offices. She found Ramone sitting and talking quietly with Bill Wilkins by Wilkins’s desk. Rhonda put a hand on Ramone’s shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Why didn’t I see it?” said Ramone.

  “None of us did,” said Rhonda. “No gun on the scene. Any of y’all ever work a gunshot suicide where no weapon was found?”

  “Left-handed mitt,” said Ramone. “Left-handed, shot in the left temple… powder on the fingers of his left hand. He wasn’t wearing that North Face because he was showing it off. He was carrying a gun in its pocket. My son saw him and said he was sweating. But he was crying. I shoulda fuckin seen it.”

  “You gotta admit,” said Wilkins, “it’s unusual, him killin himself.”

  “That’s not true, Bill,” said Rhonda.

  “I’m sayin, black kids don’t do themselves, generally.”

  “See, that’s wrong,” said Rhonda. “Black teenagers do commit suicide. Matter of fact, the suicide rate of black teenagers is on the upswing. One of the benefits of being admitted to the middle and upper class. You know, the cost of money. Not to mention easy access to guns. And a lot of black gay kids just know they’re never gonna be accepted. Part of it’s that unspoken thing in our culture. Some of my people gonna forgive you for just about anything, except that one thing, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Think of how it was for Asa,” said Ramone, “living with guilt in that kind of hyper-macho environment.”

  “He couldn’t live with it,” said Rhonda.

  “Anyway,” said Ramone, standing.

  “Where you goin?” said Rhonda.

  “Still a couple of things I need to sort out. Bill, I’ll call you with an update later on.”

  “What about all the processing and paperwork?”

  “Your case. Sorry, big guy. I’ll talk to the father, if it’s any consolation.”

  “Charges on Tinsley?” said Rhonda.

  “Charge that motherfucker with everything,” said Ramone. “I’ll find a way to make it stick.”

  “We did some good work here today,” said Rhonda.

  “We did,” said Ramone, looking at her with admiration. “I’ll talk to you all later, hear?”

  Out in the parking lot, Ramone phoned Holiday’s cell. Holiday answered and said that he was out by National Airport, dropping off a client.

  “Can you meet me?” said Ramone. “I gotta talk to you in private.”

  “There’s someplace I need to be,” said Holiday.

  “I’ll come to you right now. Gravelly Point, by the airport. The small lot on the southbound lane.”

  “Hurry up,” said Holiday. “I don’t have all fuckin day.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  THE MAIN AREA of Gravelly Point, on the Potomac River and accessible from the northbound lanes of the GW Parkway, was a popular spot for joggers, boat launchers, rugby players, bicyclists, and plane watchers, as the runway of Reagan National was only a few hundred yards away. On the opposite, less picturesque side of the parkway was a small parking lot, used mainly by limo and car service drivers waiting for airport clients.

  Dan Holiday leaned against his Town Car in the smaller lot. He watched as Gus Ramone’s Tahoe pulled alongside his Lincoln. Ramone got out of his SUV and came to where Holiday stood. Holiday took mental note of Ramone’s disheveled appearance.

  “Thanks for seeing me,” said Ramone.

  “What’d you do, sleep in that suit?”

  “I earned my money today.”

  Holiday removed a deck of Marlboros from his jacket. He shook a cigarette free and offered it to Ramone.

  “No thanks. I quit it.”

  Holiday lit one for himself and blew a little smoke in the direction of Ramone. “Still smells good, though, doesn’t it?”

  “I need a favor, Doc.”

  “Seems to me I called you earlier today and asked for a favor. But you wouldn’t help me out.”

  “You know I couldn’t give you the name of that officer.”

  “I said wouldn’t.”

  “No difference, to me.”

  “The straight man,” said Holiday.

  “It’s moot now, anyway,” said Ramone. “Asa Johnson was a suicide. His death had no connection to the Palindrome Murders.”

  Holiday dragged on his cigarette. “I’m disappointed. But I can’t say that I’m surprised.”

  “Cook’s gonna take it hard. I know he thought that this would reopen the case. That this murder would somehow solve the others.”

  “It’s gonna crush him.”

  “I’ll tell him,” said Ramone.

  “I will,” said Holiday.

  “Doc?”

  “What?”

  “That officer’s name is Grady Dunne.”

  “You’re too late. We got it already.”

  “Look, I’ll find out why he was down there that night. Maybe it will help with the prosecution.”

  “Don’t forget the perp in the backseat,” said Holiday.

  “Could have been a teenage suspect,” said Ramone. “Or maybe it was just a lady friend.”

  “You think?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Because I got a history of that,” said Holiday. “That’s what you’re sayin?”

  Ramone didn’t answer.

  “You never did ask me about Lacy,” said Holiday.

  “I would have. You turned in your badge instead.”

  “It was your screwup,” said Holiday. “You should have grand juried her instead of giving her time to skip.”

  “I know it.”

  “The day your informant saw me talking to her, before she disappeared? The conversation wasn’t about your dirty vice cops or anything else to do with your IAD case.”

  “What was it about?”

  “Fuck you, Gus.”

  “I’m interested. You been wanting to tell me. So why don’t you go ahead and get rid of it?”

  “I gave her some money,” said Holiday. “Five hundred dollars. Bus fare back to whatever Bumfuck, Pennsylvania, address she came from and some extra to get started. I was tryi
ng to save her life. ’Cause her pimp, Mister Morgan, would have found a way to cut her to shreds whether he was tied up with the law or not. He was that kind of asshole. But you wouldn’t have known that, working behind your desk. If you had talked to me, man-to-man, you might have understood.”

  “You tanked my case. We never did get to prosecute those vice cops. And Morgan killed a dude six months later. All you did was fuck things up.”

  “I was helping that girl.”

  “That’s not all you were doing with her. She told me all about it in one of our interviews. So don’t get all high and mighty on me, all right?”

  “I helped her,” said Holiday. But he said it weakly and he couldn’t look Ramone in the eye.

  “I’m sorry, Doc,” said Ramone. “I took no pleasure in what happened to you.”

  Ramone watched the sunlight shimmer off the water to the right of the lot, the river runoff that formed a pond. Holiday took a last hit of his cigarette and crushed it under his shoe.

  “So what’s the favor?” said Holiday.

  “It’s complicated. Asa Johnson’s gun was stolen by a guy named Aldan Tinsley after Asa committed suicide. Aldan sold the gun to a Dominique Lyons, who used it in a homicide the following night. I got a confession out of Tinsley, but I shit the bed in the process. I roughed up Tinsley pretty bad, and I ignored his request for a lawyer three times. When the defense attorneys get ahold of this, and the testimonies mutate, I could have a problem. These are bad guys, and I’d like to see them go away.”

  “You need what?”

  “I need you to positively identify Aldan Tinsley as the man you saw walking across the garden that night.”

  “I told you, all I saw was a Number One Male. I can’t remember anything about him except that he was black.”

  “I don’t care what you saw, Doc. I’m telling you, that’s what I need.”

  Holiday grinned. “You ain’t so straight.”

  “Will you do it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thanks. I’ll bring you in for the ID.”

  Ramone pivoted, heading for his car.

  “Gus?”

  “What?”

  “I apologize for what I said about your wife. I hear she’s good people. That was the alcohol talking.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m envious, I guess.”

  “Okay…”

  “A family just isn’t in the cards for me.” Holiday squinted against the sun. “You know, back when I was in uniform I was ordered to go see the department shrink. My lieutenant recommended it because of my drinking and what he called my excessive womanizing. He said my lifestyle was interfering with my job performance.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “So I’m there at the voodoo office, and I’m talking about my personal history. The shrink says, ‘It occurs to me that you have a fear of separation,’ or some bullshit like that, on account of I was fucked up for so long after my little sister passed. He’s telling me that I tend to run away from lasting relationships because I’m afraid that I might, how did he put it, lose my partner to circumstances beyond my control. And I say to the shrink, ‘That might be true. Or it might just be that I like strange pussy.’ Do you think that’s what it is, Gus?”

  “And here I was,” said Ramone, “thinking you were going to tell me a nice story, with one of those, you know, morals at the end of it.”

  “Some other time.” Holiday glanced at his watch. “I gotta get out of here.”

  Ramone put out his hand and Holiday took it.

  “You were good police, Doc. No bullshit.”

  “I know it, Giuseppe. Way better than you.”

  Ramone watched as Holiday opened the door to his Lincoln, reached in and got his chauffeur’s hat, and placed it on his head.

  “Asshole,” said Ramone under his breath.

  But he was smiling.

  MICHAEL TATE AND ERNEST Henderson, well fed, waited in the lot of the Hair Raisers on Riggs Road until Chantel Richards emerged from the shop and got into a red Toyota Solara.

  “Nice car,” said Tate.

  “For a girl,” said Henderson. “What, you want one now?”

  “I’m sayin, it’s got style. Figures that she would be rockin it.”

  Chantel drove it across the lot and out the exit lane.

  “Be real hard for her to lose us,” said Tate. “Seein as how red it is.”

  “’Less you let her.”

  “Huh?”

  “What you waitin on?”

  “I’m about to go.”

  “You ain’t gone yet?”

  They followed her into Maryland, through Langley Park and up New Hampshire Avenue. She got onto the Beltway and took it deep through Prince George’s County. Nesto Henderson had been right. The color of the Solara made it an easy tail.

  Chantel got off at the westbound ramp of Central Avenue and after a mile or so made a right onto Hill Road. Tate, behind the wheel, hung back, as the traffic had thinned. When Chantel parked behind another vehicle, on the berm at the crest of a rise, past a residential cluster that stopped at a large stand of trees, Tate slowed and put the Maxima to the shoulder a hundred yards back.

  “What she doin,” said Henderson, “walkin into the woods?”

  “Nah, that’s gravel. Can’t you see it? Some kind of road.”

  “There’s a car parked in front of her.”

  “Impala SS.”

  “Could be that it’s our man’s car. Could be he stayin in a house back in there.”

  “Okay, then,” said Tate. “We did our thing. We followed her and we know where she at. Let’s go back and tell Raymond.”

  “We ain’t done.” Henderson pulled his cell and began to dial in a number. “Ray’s gonna want to come out.”

  “For what?”

  “Get his money. That boy Romeo took him off for fifty.” Henderson waited for the ring tone. “Ray Benjamin’s quiet till you scheme him. He gonna get serious behind this.”

  Michael Tate’s mouth went dry. He was thirsty, and he wanted to run away. At the very least, he needed to be out of this car.

  “While you talk to Ray,” said Tate, “I’ll go up in those woods, see what I can see.”

  “Right,” said Henderson, just as Benjamin came on the line.

  RAMONE PARKED HIS TAHOE on the 6000 block of Georgia Avenue, north of Piney Branch Road. He walked down the sidewalk, then turned right and took a few steps up to the iron gate that fronted the Battleground National Cemetery. Ramone lifted the latch on the gate, pushed it open, and stepped between two six-pound smoothbore guns and onto the grounds.

  He went down a concrete walkway, past an old stone house that was a residence, and several large headstones, and continuing on to the centerpiece of the cemetery, an American flag flying from atop a pole surrounded by forty-one grave markers. There lay the Union soldiers who had died at the battle of Fort Stevens. Outside points of the circle were four poems mounted on brass plates, set up on stands. Ramone went to one of the plates and read its inscription:

  THE MUFFLED DRUM’S SAD ROLL HAS BEAT

  THE SOLDIER’S LAST TATTOO;

  NO MORE ON LIFE’S PARADE SHALL MEET

  THAT BRAVE AND FALLEN FEW.

  Ramone looked around. It was quiet here, an acre of grass, trees, and spare commemoration in an urban environment. Despite the country atmosphere, the cemetery was visible from a highly traveled thoroughfare to the west and, on the eastward side, the residential block of Venable Place. There were less risky locations to meet partners. Ramone didn’t think Asa would have come here for sex. It was probably the closest spot to his house where he could escape his home life and neighborhood and find a little peace.

  Asa had told the Spriggs twins that he was headed for the Lincoln-Kennedy Monument. He had wanted them to remember it. He had wanted someone to find something he had left behind, and it had to be here.

  Ramone went back to the entrance to the cemetery, where the large hea
dstones sat, four in a row. And there he saw that they were not traditional headstones but monuments to Army Corps, Volunteer Cavalry, and National Guard Units from Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania.

  One monument that was topped with a peaked cap stood taller than the rest. Ramone stood before it and read its face: “To the Gallant Sons of Onondaga County, N.Y., who fought on this field July 12, 1864, in Defence of Washington and in the presence of Abraham Lincoln.”

  Ramone stepped around the monument’s side. On it were listed the names of the killed and wounded. Among those listed was the name John Kennedy.

  He looked at the ground surrounding the monument. He kicked at it. He went behind the monument and studied the turf and saw that a square of it had been placed or replaced there. He got down on one knee and lifted the square of turf. In the dirt beneath it lay a large plastic ziplock bag, the size used for marinating a piece of meat. A book with no letters on its cover or spine was in the bag.

  Ramone took Asa’s journal out of the bag. He went to a maple tree in the corner of the grounds, sat down in its shade, leaned his back against the maple’s trunk, and opened the journal.

  He began to read. Time passed, and the shadows in the cemetery lengthened and crawled toward his feet.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  DAN HOLIDAY SAT behind the wheel of his Town Car, parked on Peabody, watching the entry and exit space of the lot behind the 4th District station. T. C. Cook was up on Georgia, his Marquis along the curb and pointed north. He wore his faded brown Stetson with the multicolored feather in the chocolate band. He had put on a houndstooth sport jacket and a tie.

  They had set the frequencies of their voice-activated Motorolas, and the radios were live. They had been there for the better part of an hour.

  “Anything?” said Cook.

  “He’s gotta come outta there soon.”

  Using Cook’s binoculars, Holiday had scoped Officer Grady Dunne pulling into the lot in car number 461 and watched him, in full uniform, walk into the station’s back entrance. He was a six footer, lean and pale, blond and sharp featured. There was a practiced, military-issue confidence in his straight posture and step. He had not stopped to talk to his fellow officers who were hanging around at the shift change, shooting the shit and haggling over the most coveted cruisers.