The Night Gardener

Holiday took his drink and a pack of smokes out to the balcony of his apartment and had a seat. The balcony faced the parking lot and beyond the lot the rear of the Hecht's at the P.G. Plaza mall. A man and a woman were arguing somewhere, and as cars drove slowly in the lot there was rapping and window-rattling bass, and as other cars passed there was toasting, and from the open windows of still other cars came the call-and-response, synthesizers, and percussion of go-go.

The sounds reached Holiday, but they did not bother him or interrupt the scenario forming in his head. He was thinking of a man who would like to hear the story of the dead teenager lying in the community garden on Oglethorpe. Holiday had a sip of his drink and wondered if this man was still alive.

Ramone and Regina ate dinner and shared a bottle of wine, and when they were done they opened another bottle, which they normally didn't do. The two of them talked intensely about the death of Diego's friend, and at one point Regina cried, not only for Asa, and not only for his parents, to whom she was not particularly close, but for herself, because she was thinking about how completely and permanently crushing it would be to lose one of her own in that way.

'The Lord oughtta strike me down for being so selfish,' said Regina, wiping tears off her face and chuckling with embarrassment. 'It's just that I'm afraid.'

'It's natural to feel that way,' said Ramone. He didn't tell her that he feared for his children also, every day.

In bed, they kissed and held each other, but neither of them took the step to make love. For Gus especially the passionate kiss was always a prelude to something else, but not tonight.

'God is crying,' said Ramone.

'What?'

'That's what Terrance Johnson said. We were standing in his backyard, and it had started to rain. Can you imagine?'

'Not unusual for him to be thinking on God.'

'What I mean is, you'd think that if your kid died like that, you'd either lose your faith completely or you'd be so angry at God that you'd turn your back on him.'

'Terrance is gonna look to God now stronger than ever. That's what faith is.'

'You sound like Rhonda.'

'Us black women do love us some church.'

'Regina?'

'What?'

'You know, Asa's name… It's spelled the same way backward as it is forward. It's a palindrome.'

'All right.'

'You were on the force back when those kids from Southeast were killed.'

'I was still a recruit. But, yeah, I remember.'

'Those kids were found in community gardens, too. All of them, shot in the head.'

'You think this is connected?'

'I have to sleep on it. Tomorrow I guess I'll go ahead and open some files.'

'Tomorrow. You forget about it now.'

After a while Ramone said, 'Diego seems okay. He'll never forget this, but he's handling it pretty well.'

'He had a rough day, all in all. On top of everything, they went and sent him home-'

'For laughing during a fire drill. I wonder how many white kids laughed.'

'Now, Gus. Don't go hatin on white kids.'

'Fuck that school,' said Ramone. 'I've about had it with that bullshit, too.'

'Easy, soldier,' said Regina, brushing hair off his forehead and kissing him behind his ear. 'Your heart's gonna get to fluttering, you're not going to be able to sleep.'

They wrapped their arms around each other, and he felt his breathing slow. And holding her, smelling the scent that was only hers and feeling the buttery skin of her cheek against his, he thought, This is why I am married to this woman.

This is something I will never have with anyone else.

CHAPTER 16

The passing of Asa Johnson made the second page of Metro in the next morning's Washington Post. The event carried more weight than the usual one- or two-paragraph mention given black victims under the Crime or In Brief headings, informally called the 'Violent Negro Deaths' by many area residents. Johnson, after all, was not a project kid. He was a middle-class teenager, and a young one at that. What made him newsworthy was that his age at death was part of a disturbing trend.

In the middle of the summer, a six-year-old boy, Donmiguel Wilson, had been found gagged, bound, and asphyxiated facedown in a bathtub, dead for several hours in an apartment in Congress Heights. That horrific event had made the Post's front page. The random shooting of Donte Manning, nine years old, while he played outside his apartment house in Columbia Heights, had also warranted extra press, and outrage, back in the spring. The year's murder rate was down, but juvenile murders were higher than they had ever been.

The statistic dogged both the mayor and the D.C. police chief. It wasn't just the bad press that bothered them, though that, of course, added to their anxiety. Everyone, even the most hardhearted, felt a chill when a child was murdered for no other reason than the fact that he or she had been born and raised in the wrong section of the city. Any time a kid was killed, police, officials, and citizenry alike were reminded that they lived in a world gone terribly wrong.

Still, Asa Johnson's death, not yet officially classified as a murder, did not draw the type of attention or prioritization afforded white victims or black preteens. There were other murders to investigate as well. Several bodies, in fact, had dropped in the past couple of days.

Rhonda Willis had caught one of them, a shooting victim found overnight in Fort Slocum Park, a few blocks west of the community garden on Oglethorpe Street.

'You wanna ride out there with me?' said Rhonda, seated at her desk in the VCB. It was early in the morning, not yet nine. Gus Ramone and Rhonda Willis were pulling eight-to-fours for the next two weeks.

'Sure,' said Ramone. 'But I need to talk to Garloo first.'

'Go ahead. We already got an ID on my decedent. I'm gonna run his name through the system, get some background.'

'Let me do this and I'll be ready to go.'

Garloo Wilkins was in his cubicle, reading something on the Internet. He closed the screen as Ramone approached. It was either sports or porn sites for Garloo. He was into fantasy baseball and mature women with big racks.

Wilkins's desk was clean, with his files aligned neatly in a steel vertical holder to the side. There were no religious icons, family shots, or photos on his corkboard, except for a Polaroid, taken from an evidence file, of a local go-go keyboardist and murder suspect fucking a young female from behind, smiling as he stared into the camera. The musician had been questioned but never charged due to lack of evidence and witnesses. It had not been one of Garloo's cases, but the whole of the unit had been angered by the suspect's ability to evade arrest, and the photo was a reminder that he was still out there, having fun and breathing free air. Also on Garloo's desk was a lighter lying atop a pack of Winstons. The lighter had a map of North and South Vietnam on it. Wilkins was ex-army but had been too young to serve in that war.

'Bill.'

'Gus.'

Ramone pulled someone's chair over and had a seat. 'What's shaking on Asa Johnson?'

Wilkins reached over and pulled the file out of the holder. He opened it and stared at some unmarked paperwork. Ramone eyed the top sheet. There were no notes scribbled upon it. Usually a well-worked case had notations written in the margins and greasy fingerprints staining the manila. This one was bone clean.

Wilkins closed the file and replaced it. He had recorded nothing in it, but the handling of the file added to the drama he was trying to project. Apparently he had some news.

'We got a probable time of death from the pre-autopsy notes. The ME says between midnight and two a.m. Gunshot wound to the left temple, exit at the crown.'