The Devil's Garden

by Richard Montanari

  Michael would tell Tommy about the call from Max Priest, but not over the phone. “Who’s got it?”

  Michael heard the clicking of keyboard keys. “Paul Calderon.”

  “Do you think he’ll give it up?”

  Tommy took a few seconds. “Hang on.”

  Paul Calderon was good news. When the call had gone out at around 4 AM, it had most likely been a Group Seven notification – the ADA on call, the chief assistant, the executive staff. The ADA, in this case Paul Calderon, would have been awakened, along with a riding assistant, usually a first- or second-year lawyer. It may have been the assigned ADA who supervised everything, but it was the riding assistant who figured out the details, the legal propriety of the warrant, the probable cause, whether or not the information was timely. Staleness was always a concern.

  Michael knew that Calderon was no more than a month or two from announcing his retirement, and a case like this, a brutal homicide of a well known figure, was going to take a lot of time and effort, effort Michael was hoping Calderon did not want to expend. The hope, for the moment, was that Tommy could wrest the case away.

  Tommy returned a full minute later. “I’m in,” he said. “We have to run it by the boss, but Calderon was happy to let it go.”

  “Any warrants?”

  “There’s one in the works. It’s already with a judge.”

  “I want to ride on this.”

  Tommy fell silent. “Uh, aren’t you in court at two?”

  “I’ll explain when I see you.”

  Tommy knew Michael well enough to let it go. “You know where it is?”

  Michael would never forget. “Yeah. 31st and Newtown.”

  “That’s it,” Tommy said. “Meet me in front of Angelo’s.”

  “Thanks,” Michael said.

  Michael clicked off the phone. He took another Advil, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and brought out a windbreaker with the QDA logo on the back. He scribbled a quick note on the whiteboard in the kitchen, took five hundred dollars in cash from the safe. He took his suit and shirt and new tie, grabbed his briefcase, got into the car, and headed to the train station.

  FOURTEEN

  Abby spent the early part of the afternoon at the block sale, haggling good-naturedly with other women from the neighborhood, bargaining over glassware, picture frames, jigsaw puzzles, flatware.

  She had always thought that garage sale items were nothing more than worthless junk being sold and resold to the same people over and over again. Granted, sometimes there were pearls to be found in the suburban oyster, but rarely.

  Earlier in the day she had brought over three large boxes from the house, a good deal of it things she had picked up at garage sales and flea markets over the years, proving her point. One of the boxes was full of paperbacks; yellowed mass-market copies of books she had been shelving and reshelving since college. Colleen McCollough, Harold Robbins, Stephen King. She found it terribly difficult to part with books, but she made herself a promise this time.

  At just after one, while talking to Mindy Stillman, who seemed to have an immeasurable trove of anecdotes about her ex-husband’s infidelities, Abby waved over Charlotte and Emily. She needed to get them fed and ready to drop off at the babysitter’s house.

  She did not see or hear the black SUV turn the corner, drive up her long driveway, and park behind the garage.

  In the distance, the smoke of burning thatch writes the village’s epitaph in the sky. He feels alive, connected to history by the blood beneath his boots, still electrified from the insanity of battle. He checks himself for wounds. He is unscathed. Around him is a meadow sown with the fallen.

  He enters the farmhouse. He knows every stone, every timber, every sill. It has lived in his dreams for a long time.

  The old woman glances up from her task. She has met Koschei before, knows the centuries of madness in his eyes. Her house is warm, heated by the burning fields, the fires that have brought Grozny to its knees. The kitchen smells of fresh bread and human flesh. The senses are ashamed of their hungers.

  “You,” she says softly, the tears rimming her ancient eyes. She draws the knife to her own throat. “You.”

  WHILE ABBY FLIPPED through the new issue of Architectural Digest, the girls played in the backyard. In about an hour Abby needed to drop them off at the babysitters, before heading to the clinic. She had a twelve-hour shift coming up and, as much as she had intended to catch up on her sleep, she was tired already. On the days when she worked, and Michael was in court, there was usually a three- or four-hour window where they needed someone to watch the girls.

  Regardless, she needed to give the girls a bath before they left. It was getting to be more and more of an ordeal these days, ever since Charlotte and Emily discovered the world of skincare products. She also needed to make them a snack.

  As she took out the peanut butter and jelly she heard the back door open and close.

  “Let’s get ready for your bath, girls,” Abby said.

  She made the sandwiches by rote, her mind on her upcoming shift. She cut the crust off Emily’s sandwich. Charlotte liked the crust. Grape jam for Emily; strawberry for Charlotte. She bagged the half-sandwiches, listened to the house.

  Had the girls come in? If so, they were a little too quiet. It could only mean one of two things. They were tired, or they were scheming.

  “Come on, girls.”

  “You are even more beautiful than I imagined.”

  Abby dropped the jar of strawberry preserve at the sound of the man’s voice. A strange man’s voice. She spun around. In front of her, just a few feet away, stood a tall, broad-shouldered man. He wore a long black leather coat. His face was rugged, chiseled, and bore a ragged scar on his left cheek. He did not brandish a weapon of any sort. Instead, in his right hand, was a red rose.

  The reality dawned. There was a stranger in the hallway.

  A stranger. In her house.

  The girls.

  Abby opened her mouth to scream, but no sound emerged. It was as if her ability to make a noise was somehow stillborn within her. She darted around the man, toppling a chair in the process. Somewhere behind her another glass shattered on the floor. The man did not move in any way to stop her.

  “Girls?” she yelled.

  She ran into the living room. They were not there. The sense of panic soon swelled to an overwhelming feeling of terror.

  “Girls?”

  She looked in the bathroom, the downstairs bedroom. She ran to the back door, opened the sliding glass door leading to the patio, her heart racing to burst. In the backyard she saw another man sitting on the picnic table. A younger man, strong looking. Charlotte and Emily stood at the back of the property. They were holding each other, their eyes wide with fear. A few seconds later the man in the house stepped up behind Abby. He did not touch her, did not raise his voice. His voice was almost reassuring. He had an accent.

  “That young man is with me. Trust me, no harm will come to you or your family if you do as I say.”

  Trust me. It sounded unreal, like dialogue in a movie. But Abby knew it was real. Everything she had dreaded the night before was now in front of her. Somehow, the fact that it was broad daylight did not make it any easier.

  “It is important that you do exactly as I say.”

  Abby turned to face him. He had stepped back, into the hallway leading to the kitchen. The anger began to bloom inside her.

  “Get out of my house!”

  The man did not move.

  The gun, Abby thought. Her eyes flicked to the stairs. She would never make it past him. She glanced at the kitchen counter. The scissors sat there, gleaming in the afternoon sunlight, daring her to reach for them. They looked a hundred miles away.

  “You must try to remain calm,” he said.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Abby screamed.

  The man seemed to wince at her profanity. Then his features softened. “My name is Aleksander Savisaar.” He closed the sliding glass door, slid
the bolt. He turned back to Abby. “Before we go any further, I would like you to do something for me.”

  The man spoke with a quiet authority that chilled Abby to the bottom of her soul. She did not respond.

  “First, I would like you to calm down. As I said, nothing bad is going to happen to you, your husband, or your lovely home. Can you calm down for me?”

  Abby tried to stop shaking. She stood staring at the man. Crazily, she thought of the time her brother Wallace fell off a jungle gym at the school playground, breaking his arm, twisting it at an unnatural angle behind his neck. Abby had been only five years old at the time, and had known that something bad had happened, but she had been immobilized by the sight of his arm doing something it could never do. He looked likea broken doll.

  She felt that way now. Frozen by the idea of what was happening. In a second, it occurred to her that this man, this man who did not belong in her house, her life, her world, had asked her a question.

  “What?” she asked, returning to the moment.

  “Can you remain calm for me?”

  Calm. Yes. She remembered helping Wallace – big, goofy, ungainly Wallace – back to the house, where her mother had called an ambulance. She had taken charge. She would take charge now.

  “Yes.”

  The man smiled. “Good. Next I want you to go into the backyard, and tell the girls not to be afraid. Tell them that Kolya and I – Kolya is the young man – are friends of the family, and that the girls have nothing to fear from either of us. Will you do this?”

  Abby just nodded.

  Aleks looked out the window, nodding to the man in the backyard, then returned his attention to her. “You have nothing to fear either, Abigail.”

  The sound of her name was a sudden twist of the knife. “How do you know my name?”

  “I know many things,” he said. He held forth the rose. Abby noticed a single drop of dew on one of the petals, the way one of the thorns had broken off.

  Funny that, she thought. The things you notice.

  “And there is no need to worry.” When Abby didn’t take the flower from him, he put it down on the dining-room table, then slipped back into the shadows of the hallway. When he turned away from her his coat fell open. On his hip was a large knife in a leather sheath.

  This was everything Abby had ever feared, and it was all happening. Right this minute.

  “If you do everything I say,” the man who called himself Aleksander Savisaar added, “Anna and Marya will be just fine.”

  FIFTEEN

  People’s Legal Services was on the second floor of a sooty brick building on 31st Street, near Newtown Avenue. On one side was a Russian market; on the other a twenty-four-hour bail bondsman.

  This day there was yellow crime-scene tape strung out onto the sidewalk, wrapped around two parking meters, and back. The sidewalk was blocked, much to the inconvenience and consternation of the people walking up 31st Street. Profanity in an assortment of languages floated just below the maddeningly enticing aroma of borscht coming from the market.

  Michael had driven to the Ardsley-on-Hudson station in Irvington, and taken the Metro North train. He got off at Grand Central and took the uptown 5 train to the 59th Street/Lexington station, then caught the R to Astoria. For New Yorkers, life was a series of numbers and letters, the alphabet-soup language of riding the subway. It seemed you spent half your time discussing the best and alternate routes to get where you were trying to go, and the other half stuck on trains, lamenting the fact that you didn’t take another path. Today, Michael did it all by rote. He almost missed his stop.

  As he walked up Ditmars Boulevard, he found that the buildings and people and pavement had melted away, replaced by a single mental image:

  His father, smiling, handing a loaf of brown bread to old Mrs Hartstein, antique even then, her rouge a deep scarlet sunburst on paper-white skin.

  Ghosts walk here, Michael Roman thought. He did not glance at the building at number 64.

  In the years following the murder of his parents, the bakery and the apartment above sat vacant. A few tenants tried to make a go of the downstairs space, but most prospective tenants, after learning of the horrors that had taken placeat 64 Ditmars Boulevard, moved on. The upstairs apartment had never been rented again.

  Four years earlier, on their first wedding anniversary, the first phase of Abby’s trust fund kicked in, and at dinner that night she presented Michael with the deed to the building. If Abby’s parents had not initially been enamored with Abby marrying Michael, their reaction to Abby taking the bulk of her check for $750,000 – one of two she would receive, the other to be given on her thirty-second birthday – and buying an ugly brick building on a struggling block in Astoria, had all but caused them apoplexy.

  Michael had no idea if and when they would ever do anything with the property. At first he wasn’t sure how he even felt about the gesture. Over time he came to understand that it somehow kept his parents closer, and for that he could never thank his wife enough. It was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever done for him.

  To this day, he had not been back inside.

  TOMMY WAS WAITING FOR him in front of Angelo’s. He had on his court face.

  “Hey,” Tommy said.

  “Hey.”

  “Fucking city.”

  “Fucking city.”

  Tommy told him what he knew about the case, which was not much. The 911 call had come in at 4 AM that morning.

  All 911 calls for the entire city of New York were routed to a central Manhattan-based location. After the location of the call was determined, the call was routed to the local precinct and sector therein. In Astoria, it would be the 114th precinct.

  The detective assigned to the case would be the one next “up” for the assignment, which was, by tradition, selected by rotation throughout the squad. Michael had never been a fan of the system, which was deeply entrenched in the NYPD, because it sometimes led to the most challenging cases being assigned to the detective with the least imagination and initiative. Detectives were 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade, with 1st being the highest. Promotion of grade was based on another tradition, a combination of time-in-grade, seniority, office politics, performance and timing. Injustice was sadly the all-too-frequent result.

  When Michael saw the tall, regal figure standing in the doorway leading up to People’s Legal Services, it was good news and bad news. The fact that Detective First Grade Desiree Powell was the lead investigator into the suspicious death of Viktor Harkov was good news for the friends, family, and loved ones of the deceased, among whom Michael Roman could be probably be counted. It was bad news for anyone who had anything to hide, anyone who had even the most peripherally shady dealings with the lawyer, of whom Michael Roman might also well be grouped. If it was there, Desiree Powell would find it. She was relentless.

  The scene was crawling with uniforms, suits, forensic investigators, brass. It wasn’t that Viktor Harkov was a celebrity victim, or that this case was necessarily going to make headlines for more than a day, but Harkov knew a lot of people, on both sides of the law, and whenever a defense attorney was killed, the ripples went far and wide. The NYPD wanted a ring around this potential circus as soon as possible.

  As Michael and Tommy crossed the street, toward the building that housed Viktor Harkov’s office, Powell looked up from a report at which she was glancing. She gave a slight dip to her chin, acknowledging Michael. Michael waved back, knowing that in the next few minutes he would talk to Powell and everything he said would become part of the record, part of the maelstrom surrounding this place where evil had visited, and once again left its indelible mark.

  SIXTEEN

  Desiree Powell was a striking woman – soft-spoken, fastidious in her dress and speech, a legendary ballroom dancer. She was of Jamaican descent, born and raised in a small village in the Blue Mountains north of Kingston.

  Powell had now been a police officer for twenty-four years, the first seven in uniform on the st
reets of the 103, patrolling Hollis and South Jamaica in those hard years when crack came to south-eastern Queens.

  When you’re a female police officer in your twenties you get it from all corners – suspects, witnesses, fellow officers, ADAs, judges, CSU techs, chiefs, captains, commanders and, providing it was not a homicide, quite often from the victims themselves. When you’re just shy of six feet tall, you get even more. More than once she’d had to mix it up, and in all the years, she had not lost that edge.

  These days, on the good days, when the light hit her right and she put in her forty-five minutes on the treadmill, she could pass for a decade younger than her forty-six years. Other days she looked and felt every second, plus. She knew she could still turn heads, but sometimes the effort wasn’t worth the whistle.

  Standing on the corner of Newtown and 31st Street, directing a perimeter, Powell knew that it may have been her gold badge that gave her access, but it was her manner that gave her authority.

  What she had seen in that blood-splattered office was in every way wrong. The worse the scene, the more she wanted it.

  Two men from the DA’s office approached. Michael Roman and Tommy Christiano. Powell had worked with both of them. The Glimmer Twins. They were stars in the office, and, although the police and DA’s office were in theory on the same side, sometimes ego trumped justice.

  And, Detective Desiree Powell thought, there was definitely ego to spare on this corner, on this day.

  SEVENTEEN

  Powell glanced between them, back and forth. She wore an impeccably tailored black suit, lavender blouse, a simple gold chain around her slender neck. Her nails, which she had wisely cut short – a necessity for fieldwork – were highly polished, the color of her blouse. She and Michael were the same height.

  “Do we have a suspect in custody I don’t know about?” Powell asked.

  As a rule, any number of officials could be summoned to the scene of a homicide – Squad Commander, Chief of Detectives, Crime Scene Unit, Medical Examiner. Representatives of the district attorney’s office were routinely called only when the suspect was detained or arrested at the scene. There were, however, many exceptions to this.