The Night Gardener Read online

  He walked into Brock’s room, as messy as a teenage boy’s. Brock was sitting on the bed, checking the load of a Gold Cup .45.

  “That new?” said Gaskins.

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened to your other piece?”

  “I traded up,” said Brock.

  “Why you got to bring it?”

  “I always carry when I work. You gonna need a roscoe, too.”

  “Why?”

  “I spoke to the man,” said Brock. “Fishhead gonna give us something for tonight.”

  “What kinda somethin?”

  “Something good, is all I know. The man say we gonna get us some real.”

  “I shouldn’t even be in a car with someone got a gun. We get searched, that’s an automatic nickel for me.”

  “Then stay here. I can find someone else to back me up.”

  Gaskins looked him over. Boy was headed for prison or a grave, and neither one of those prospects made him shudder. Long as he left a rep behind. Wasn’t like Gaskins was gonna stop it from happening. But he had to try.

  “What you got for me?” said Gaskins.

  Brock pulled a piece of oilskin out from under his bed. Inside the cloth was a nine-millimeter automatic. He handed it to Gaskins.

  “Glock Seventeen,” said Brock.

  “Shit is plastic,” said Gaskins.

  “It’s good enough for the MPD.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Gun man down there in Landover?”

  Gaskins inspected the weapon. “No serial number?”

  “Man filed it off.”

  “That there’s another automatic fall. You don’t even have to be using the motherfucker; they catch you with shaved numbers, you goin back in on a felony charge.”

  “Why you so piss-tess?”

  “Tryin to teach you somethin.”

  Gaskins released the magazine, thumbed the top shell, and felt pressure against the spring. He pushed the magazine back into the grip with his palm. He holstered it behind the waistband of his jeans, grip rightward so that he could reach it naturally with his right hand. It felt familiar against his skin.

  “You ready?” said Gaskins.

  “Now you talkin,” said Brock.

  IVAN LEWIS HAD BEEN called Fishhead most of his life because of his long face and the way his big eyes could see things without his having to turn his neck. It wasn’t that he looked like a real fish, but more that he looked liked a cartoon version of one. Even his mother, up to the day she passed, had called him Fish.

  He was coming from his sister’s place, walking down Quincy Street in Park View, looking at what the new people were doing to the houses he had been knowing his whole life. He never thought Park View would gentrify, but the evidence of it was on every block. Young black and Spanish buyers with down-payment money were fixing up these old row homes, and some pioneer white folks were, too. Shoot, a couple of white boys had opened up a pizza parlor on Georgia earlier in the year. Whites starting up businesses again in the View, that was something Fishhead thought he’d never see.

  Not that the gamers had gone away. There was plenty of dirt being done on this side of Georgia, especially down around the Section Eights on Morton. And the Spanish had gripped up much of the avenue’s west side, into Columbia Heights. But property owners were making improvements around here, house by house.

  Fishhead Lewis wondered how a man like him was gonna fit in this town much longer. Once people put money into their homes, they didn’t want to see low-down types walking out front their properties, not even on the public sidewalks. These folks voted, so they could make things happen. Now you had politicians, like that ambitious light-skinned dude, councilman for that area up top of Georgia, trying to make laws about loitering and stopping cats from buying single cans of beer. Shoot, not everyone wanted a six-pack or could afford one. Friends of Fishhead said, “How they gonna discriminate?” Fishhead had to tell them, with money and power behind you, you damn sure could. The light-skinned dude, he didn’t really care about folks hanging out, and he didn’t care if a man wanted to enjoy himself one beer on a summer night. But he was running for mayor, so there it was.

  He turned into an alley behind Quincy, up by Warder Place. There, idling down at the end of the alley, was a black Impala SS. They were waiting on him where they liked to do.

  Fishhead did not have a payroll job. He made money by selling information. Heroin users were perfect for such work. They went places other people couldn’t go. They heard dope and murder gossip that went deeper than the ghetto telegraph of the stoop and the barbershop. They seemed harmless and pitiful, but they had ears, a brain, and a mouth that could speak. Addicts, testers, cutters, and prostitutes were inside to the extreme, and the best informants on the street.

  Fishhead had got something that morning. He had heard about it from a boy he knew, worked at a cut house in lower LeDroit. Boy said some pure white was coming in tomorrow from New York, to be distributed by a man looking to become a player but not yet there. A man not plugged into a network, what they called a consortium, with other dealers. An independent with no one to watch his back but an underling who was hoping to go along for the ride.

  Fishhead was looking to get out of his sister’s basement. It had been their mother’s house, but the sister had managed to claim it, and the inheritance, with the help of a lawyer. Because she did have a conscience, she allowed him a room downstairs, rent-free but with no kitchen privileges and a lock on the door leading up to the first floor. It was not much more than a mattress, a hot plate for cooking, a cooler, and a toilet with a stand-up shower, had roaches crawling on the floor. He didn’t blame her for treating him like a dog you didn’t let upstairs. All the shit he’d done to disappoint his family, he could understand it. But no man, not even a low-ass doper like him, should have to live like that.

  This information he had today was his way out. He had been getting low that morning with his cut man friend when the dude started talking. Matter of fact, Fishhead had just pushed down on the plunger when the news came his way. He hoped he had heard it right.

  Fishhead slipped into the backseat of the SS and settled down on the bench.

  “Charlie the motherfuckin tuna,” said Brock, under the wheel. He did not turn his head but communicated with his eyes via the rearview. “What you got for us, slim?”

  “Somethin,” said Fishhead. He liked the drama of giving it up slow. Also, he didn’t care for Romeo Brock. Slick boy, always looking down from his high horse. The quiet one, his older cousin, he was all right. And tougher than the boy with the mouth.

  “Give it up,” said Brock. “I’m tired of these bullshit plays. Tired of shakin change out the pockets of kids.”

  “That’s what you do,” said Fishhead. “Ya’ll rob independents got no protection. Most times, they be kids. If they was men, shit, they’d be connected, and it would come back on you.”

  “Said I’m ready to move up from that.”

  “Well, I got somethin.”

  “Talk about it,” said Brock.

  “Dude name of Tommy Broadus. Tryin to act like he big-time, but he just startin out. Came to the cut house where my friend works, inquiring about fees, all that. Said he got some white comin in. I’m talking about keys, and I’m hearin it’s tomorrow. My friend say this man can be got.”

  “So? I ain’t want no fuckin dope. Do I look like a goddamn her-won salesman to you?”

  “He gonna need to pay for the package, right? If he sending a mule to NYC, he gonna send the cash up with him. Seein as how he green with the New York connect, he surely don’t have no credit.”

  “What about guns?” said Gaskins.

  “Huh?”

  “Even an amateur gonna have something behind him.”

  “That’s on y’all,” said Fishhead. “I stay out the mechanics. I’m sayin, some big money gonna come out this man’s house this evening and some dope gonna come back in. I’m just passin this along.”

>   “When?” said Brock.

  “After dark, but not too late. Mules don’t like to make that Ninety-five run when the traffic too thin. Look for a trap car, I’d expect. The Taurus is popular, or the Mercury sister car.”

  “Where this man stay at?” said Brock.

  Fishhead Lewis passed a slip of paper over the bench. Brock took it, read it, and slipped it into the breast pocket of his rayon shirt.

  “How you get the address?” said Gaskins.

  “Our man ran his name through the database, somethin. Parked on the street, watched him go in and out his house. He stayin in a detached in a residential area. Real quiet around there, too.”

  “Not too smart, let yourself get seen so easy.”

  “What I’m sayin. Man that sloppy can get took.”

  “Where he get the money?” said Gaskins, thinking it through.

  “By turning his inventory,” said Fishhead, now improvising but trying to sound as if he knew. “This here can’t be the first buy the man done made.”

  “I’m askin, how we know this Tommy Broad-ass fella ain’t bein bankrolled by someone with power?”

  “’Cause my man at the cut house said he was braggin on the fact that he all alone.”

  Gaskins looked at Brock. He could see from his eager look that Brock had already decided to go. He was looking at the money, feeling it between his fingers, spending it on women and clothing, a suit in red. What he wasn’t doing was thinking it through.

  “What’s he look like?” said Gaskins.

  “Say what?”

  “Wouldn’t want to take the wrong man.”

  “My friend say he fat. Too old for the game, but I guess he startin late. Came to the cut house with a woman, had it all in the right places. Had a mouth on her, too. They was arguing over shit the whole time they was in there.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Not that my man said.”

  “You gonna earn somethin serious, this plays out,” said Brock. “Buy yourself a mermaid or sumshit.”

  Fishhead forced a smile. His teeth were rotted, and there were scabs on his face.

  “I been wonderin,” said Brock. “Do it smell like fish to a fish?”

  “All day,” said Fishhead, who hadn’t had a clean woman in years.

  “Get the fuck out. We’ll take it from here.”

  Fishhead got out of the car, hiking his pants up as he moved along. Brock and Gaskins watched him walk down the alley, a pit bull barking at him furiously from behind chain-link as he passed.

  Brock turned to Gaskins. “What you think?”

  “I think we don’t know shit.”

  “We know enough to park ourselves outside this man’s house and see what we can see.”

  “I ain’t stayin out late. I gotta be at the shape-up spot at dawn.”

  Brock punched a number into his cell.

  THIRTEEN

  RAMONE, RHONDA WILLIS, Garloo Wilkins, and George Loomis methodically canvassed the residents living on the short block of McDonald Place, interviewing those who were home during a workday and leaving contact cards for those who were not. Ramone recorded the pertinent details of his conversations in a small Mead spiral notebook, the same type he had been using for many years.

  Nothing significant came from the interviews. One elderly woman did say that she had been awakened by what she thought was the snap of a branch during the night but did not know the time, as she had not bothered to look at her clock radio before falling back to sleep. No one they spoke to had seen anything suspicious. Except for the woman, all, apparently, had slept soundly.

  The Baptist church on the end of the block, where South Dakota came in, was unoccupied at night.

  Wilkins and Loomis had spoken with the night crew at the animal shelter by phone. They would talk to these workers face-to-face later in the day. But the preliminary conversations indicated that no one at the shelter had heard or seen a thing relative to Asa Johnson’s death.

  “That ain’t no surprise,” said Wilkins. “All those fuckin Rovers in there, barking their asses off.”

  “You can’t think in that motherfucker,” said George Loomis, “much less hear.”

  “Still some folks we haven’t talked to on McDonald Place,” said Rhonda. “They’ll be comin home from work later on.”

  “I suppose the city, or the community organization, or whoever runs this garden’s got a list of the people who work all these plots,” said Ramone.

  “I doubt they do gardening in the middle of the night, Gus,” said Wilkins.

  “Doubtin ain’t knowin,” said Rhonda, repeating of one of her most used homilies.

  “No stone unturned,” said Ramone, adding one of his.

  “I’ll get that list,” said Wilkins.

  Rhonda looked at her watch. “You gotta get downtown for that arraignment, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” said Ramone. “And I need to call my son.”

  Ramone walked down a path cutting through the center of the garden. He passed plots decorated with lawn ornaments and homemade crosslike signs with sayings like “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” “Let It Grow,” and “The Secret Life of Plants” painted on the horizontal planks. He passed things that twirled in the breeze and miniature flags like the kind displayed in used-car lots, and then he was out of the garden and near his car.

  Ramone got in the Impala and stared through its windshield. That had been Dan Holiday in the monkey suit, standing by his Town Car. Wasn’t any question about it. Ramone had heard over the MPD telegraph that Holiday had started some kind of drive-for-hire business after he’d resigned. His appearance had changed very little since the both of them had been in uniform. A comical little belly on him, but other than that, he looked pretty much the same. Question was, why was he here? Holiday did love being police. He was probably one of those sad ex-cops who listened to the scanners long after they’d turned in their badge and gun. Maybe Holiday was having trouble getting the blue out of his system. Well, he should’ve considered that before he fucked up.

  Holiday’s image faded. Ramone thought of Asa Johnson and the extreme fear he had probably experienced in his last moments. He thought of what Asa’s parents, Terrance and Helena, were facing. He saw Asa’s name and he turned it around and saw it the same way. He sat there for a while, thinking of that. Then Ramone thought of his son.

  He cranked the ignition and headed downtown.

  HOLIDAY STARED AT HIS drink. He took a sip of it and, before putting the rocks glass back on the bar, another. He shouldn’t have gone to that crime scene. He was curious, was all it was.

  “Tell us a story, Doc,” said Jerry Fink.

  “I’m fresh out,” said Holiday. He could not even remember the name of the woman he had done the night before.

  Bob Bonano came back from the jukebox. He had just dropped quarters into it, and now he was strutting as mournful harmonica and the first solemn bars of “In the Ghetto” came into the room at Leo’s.

  “Elvis,” said Jerry Fink. “Trying to be socially relevant. Who blew smoke up his ass and told him he was Dylan?”

  “Yeah,” said Bonano, “but who’s doing this version?”

  A woman began to sing the first verse. Fink and Bradley West, seated beside Holiday, closed their eyes.

  “It’s that ‘Band of Gold’ broad,” said Jerry Fink.

  “Nope,” said Bonano.

  Holiday wasn’t hearing the song. He was thinking of Gus Ramone, standing over the body of the boy. Some cosmic fucking joke that Ramone had caught the case.

  “She did that Vietnam song, too,” said West. “ ‘Bring the Boys Home,’ right?”

  “That was Freda Payne, and I don’t care what she did,” said Bonano. He blew into a deck of Marlboro Lights and watched as the filtered end of one popped out. “She didn’t do this.”

  Holiday wondered if Ramone had noticed that the boy’s first name, Asa, was the same spelled backward as it was forward. How the name was one of those palindromes
.

  “Then who is it, smart guy?” said Fink.

  “Candi Staton,” said Bonano, lighting his smoke.

  “You only know ’cause you read the name off the juke,” said Fink.

  “Now for a dollar,” said Bonano, ignoring Fink, “what was Candi Staton’s big hit?”

  Holiday wondered if Ramone had connected the boy with the other teenage victims with palindrome names. How all of them were found shot in the head, in community gardens around town.

  Ramone was a good enough cop, though he was stymied, Holiday believed, by his insistence on following procedure. He wasn’t anywhere near the cop that he, Holiday, had been. He lacked that rapport with citizens at which Holiday had excelled. And those years Ramone had spent in IAD, working mostly behind a desk, hadn’t done him any favors as police.

  “No clue,” said Fink.

  “ ‘Young Hearts Run Free,’” said Bonano with a self-satisfied grin.

  “You mean ‘Young Dicks Swing Free,’” said Fink.

  “Huh?”

  “It’s one of them disco songs,” said Fink. “Figures you’d like it.”

  “I didn’t say I liked it. And you owe me a dollar, ya fuckin Jew.”

  “I don’t have a dollar.”

  Bonano reached over and pushed down on the back of Fink’s head. “How ’bout a dollar’s worth of this, then?”

  Holiday killed his drink and put cash on the bar.

  “What’s your hurry, Doc?” said West.

  Holiday said, “I got a job.”

  RAMONE ATTENDED THE TYREE arraignment, returned to the crime scene, took part in some more interviews with potential witnesses, ran Rhonda Willis back to the VCU lot, called Diego on his cell, then went back uptown in his own car, a gray Chevy Tahoe. He drove into his neighborhood but did not go home. He was off the clock, but his workday was not done.