The Night Gardener

'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. 'Thanks.'

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 thumb-tacked 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.