Buried on Avenue B (3 page)

“Thanks,” says Jandorek. “We appreciate it, particularly the attitude.”

Two blocks from St. Vincent's, Jandorek stops at a Rite Aid and comes out carrying an over-the-counter elixir called Sambucus. When he gets into the car, he rips off the packaging and takes a long swig directly from the bottle. “Immune syrup,” he says, “made with elderberries and echinacea. My buddy in Brooklyn Homicide, he swears by this stuff.”

 

CHAPTER 4

WHEN O'HARA PARKS
her old Jetta in front of a hydrant on Sixth Street, there's less than ten minutes of light left in the summer sky. She drops her NYPD placard on the dash and walks across the street toward a tall gate that runs half the length of the block along the west side of Avenue B between Fifth and Sixth Streets. The entrance is locked, but there's enough light to read the sign—“The Sixth Street and Avenue B Community Garden”—and make out at the top the decorative pattern of children's hands stamped out of the green steel. At waist level, near where an iridescent yellow-green bike has been bolted to the gate, another decorative piece of metalwork bears the year the garden was founded, 1983. At least the garden existed when the old man claims to have turned it into a burial ground.

In the thickening dusk, O'Hara walks the perimeter and peers through the untrimmed bushes and evergreens that push out against the gate from inside, as if trying to escape. What little she can see of the garden is not nearly as lovely as the gate that surrounds it. Crowded into a quarter square block are scores of individual wood-framed plots the approximate dimensions of a queen-size bed. Everything else—over, around, and in between—is visual and vegetative chaos. The damp night is pungent with urban rot, the smell of everything growing, sprouting, and dying all at once. In the past couple weeks, a malty nausea-inducing odor has wafted over lower Manhattan, and she wonders if it started here.

The night is dropping quickly. O'Hara can't see with any detail more than twenty feet. In the dim space she can penetrate, the horticultural free-for-all suggests a Montessori cemetery. Stone walkways start promisingly, then stall or disappear, as if the pavers lost interest, suffered a falling-out, or stopped to smoke a joint, and stuck into the ground between two trees is a broken ladder leading nowhere—four rungs and then nothing. It's such a tangled mess, a person could wander in and never find their way out.

In the center of the garden, there's just enough light for O'Hara to make out some tables, an archway, and a bigger structure of some kind. For a second she thinks she spots a figure in the shadows. He or she resembles a garden gnome, but O' Hara can't tell if it's human or inanimate. When she rubs her eyes and squints, it's gone. To the north of the tables and in front of the larger structure is the willow tree that Williamson described. It is by far the largest and thickest tree in the garden. Backing up on the garden are four brick tenements, in which only a few windows look out on the garden. The only other windows with facing views are in a couple apartments in the higher floors of the tenements on the north side of Sixth Street.

By now O'Hara can barely see a thing, but that is also a kind of answer. After dropping Jandorek at the precinct, O'Hara stopped at the garden to see if she could rule out the old junkie's confession as implausible if not impossible, but she can't. On a summer night when the growth of the trees and bushes was as thick as this, a quiet gravedigger could easily plant a corpse under that tree without being seen. Seventeen years ago, when there wasn't a bar on every corner, he could have buried a dozen.

 

CHAPTER 5

THE ASSAULT ON
McBeth may not have blossomed into a homicide, but it's still attempted murder, and O'Hara spends the next morning on follow-up. She returns to St. Vincent's, where she gets more pushback from Priestly, and a terse message from McBeth's old-school mom. Her son, she says, has no intention of cooperating with the police on this matter—i.e., he'll handle it himself—and since McBeth just came off parole, O'Hara doesn't have the leverage to change his mind. Jandorek spends the morning looking for MTA video of McBeth's assailant ducking into a subway after the attack, but also comes up empty, and at 1:15 he inquires if O'Hara is interested in lunch. “I was thinking of a nice piece of fish,” he says.

Thanks to Jandorek, O'Hara's diet has undergone a massive upgrade since leaving the 7. Instead of a slice on a paper plate or a carton of Chinese, it's cod grilled in rice paper, penne arrabbiata, pork bellies, and roasted beets. As far as O'Hara can tell, it works like this. Jandorek goes to a restaurant, has a glass of wine at the bar, and gets to talking to the owner, a lonely, overworked immigrant who may have arrived from Macedonia or Belarus or Albania twenty years before, but feels like one foot is still in the boat. Because he works a hundred-hour week and has been fucking his tattooed waitress instead of his sturdy child bride, he has marital problems, and Jandorek gets to hear about them in considerable detail. By the time Jandorek pushes wearily from the bar, the Macedonian has a new American pal, and not just any native, but an NYPD detective, homicide no less, and for the first time in twenty years, he feels like he's rooted on solid ground. In return, Jandorek has another restaurant in his rotation, where his only cost is the tip.

Today, however, O'Hara declines. Instead of grilled halibut and a glass of rosé, she picks up a turkey sandwich and an Amstel at the bodega on Sixth and B, and carries them across the street to the entrance to the garden. The weather has turned seasonably hot and muggy, and in the unforgiving midday light, the garden looks even scruffier and more chaotic than it did at dusk. The gate is still locked, but a handful of aging East Village hippies, who are presumably key-holding members, loiter at picnic tables. Eventually O'Hara succeeds in making eye contact with a man with a gray ponytail.

“Whatsa matter, you can't read? It's only open to the public on weekends.”

O'Hara doesn't want to identify herself as a cop. She smiles and holds up her sandwich and beer. “Is it going to kill you to let a woman step out of the sun?”

Reluctantly, the man rouses himself and lets her in. “Clean up when you're done,” he says.

Just inside the gate is a foul koi pond she hadn't noticed the night before, and the blurry structure in the back can be identified as a crude stage. Scattered among the individual plots, which are more numerous than she realized, are watering cans, pieces of green hose, and ceramic shards, as well as chipped and discolored statuary in plastic and Styrofoam of birds, turtles, cherubs, and saints. Every few trees, a bird feeder dangles from a branch, or an obsolete flyer for a performance long past is taped to a trunk, and flapping from a pole stuck into a garden pot is the flag for the People's Republic of China.

Although the place is hardly soothing to the eye, it affords some shade, particularly the willow under which Henderson claimed to have deposited his adversary. If, as O'Hara determined the night before, the garden is a feasible spot to dispose a body, then the area around the tree is the most propitious spot to do it. Not only is it shrouded by the second layer of cover provided by the drapery of branches that extend like a long skirt nearly to the ground, but the ground beneath the tree is about the only vacant piece of dirt in the entire garden.

On a nearby bench, O'Hara unwraps her sandwich and cracks her beer. From her spot she can make out the small storefronts on the north side of Sixth Street. In the ground floors of neighboring tenements are a fortune-teller and a place offering Korean reflexology, the phony occult and the quasi therapeutic side by side. A sign on the curb in front of the Korean place proclaims
THE BEST FOOT MASSAGE IN THE CITY
, and O'Hara is not untempted. She daydreams about foot massages almost as often as men do about blow jobs.

Despite the heat, several gardeners are at work, including a woman in her mid-twenties who tends to the bed closest to the willow. She is as lovely as she is tall, but her self-consciousness suggests she is only aware of her height. O'Hara polishes off her beer, and steps out from under the willow.

“Do you mind if I take a look?” asks O'Hara.

“Of course not. I love showing off my garden,” replies the girl. “Would you like a tour?”

“Please.”

Stepping closer, O'Hara is startled by the variety of produce cultivated in such a circumscribed space, and despite her education in nouvelle from Jandorek, a lot of it is new to her. “This is called jalapeño heaven,” says the woman, pointing at a familiar jalapeño shape covered with tiny striations. “
Mucho caliente
. And this,” referring to a pepper as big and solid as an apple, “is an orange bell, a hybrid between a red and a yellow pepper. The next section is devoted to salad greens. My favorite is this guy over here with a stippling of red over a green background, called ‘Speckled Trout Back.' And here are my tomatoes, basil, and baby eggplant.” The color of the eggplant is dazzling, like a deep bruise.

“How long have you had the garden?” asks O'Hara.

“Forever. My father kept it originally. I took it over when I was eight or nine.”

“You got your green thumb from your dad?”

“I hope not. He's terrible at growing things. He's only good at making them.”

“By the way, I'm Darlene O'Hara.”

“Christina Malmströmer,” says the girl with an apologetic smile, as if she's as encumbered by her name as by her height.

 

CHAPTER 6

HENDERSON'S PLACE ON
East Third is a five-minute stroll from the garden. At the door of his basement apartment, O'Hara is greeted by a blast of ungodly heat and a nose full of spices, presumably Caribbean. When she left Riverdale the temperature was already approaching eighty. Now it's considerably warmer, and for some reason, despite the lack of AC, the large window looking up at the street is closed. But the coup de grâce is that furry aroma, and when O'Hara looks toward the kitchen, she sees the flames of the front burner licking the black bottom of a cast-iron pot. Henderson, who sits on a folding beach chair and stares at the
Post
through black plastic glasses, is dressed for the weather, if nothing else. He wears a wifebeater and boxers, his pale, acutely bowed legs ending in black tube socks and lace-up brogans. At least, thinks O'Hara gratefully, his unit is tucked out of sight. His jet-black hair notwithstanding, Henderson is as decrepit a sexagenarian as she has seen this side of the Rolling Stones. He looks more like eighty, but after forty-five years of heroin addiction, that only seems fair.

“Gus, my name is Darlene O'Hara. I'm a detective with NYPD.”

“Bully for you.”

“Paulette came and talked to me the other day.”

“Paulette?”

“Gus, I'm Paulette,” says Williamson, who sits three feet away.

Gus smiles at O'Hara. “They send some very nice girls,” he says. “Of course I got to watch them like a hawk, or they'd rob me blind. Particularly the dark ones.” Then in a whisper, “I used to have over twenty cars, you know.”

“All gone?” asks O'Hara.

Gus nods sadly. “Every one.”

“You don't think Paulette took them?”

“She has three Caddies hidden in her snatch.” A three-car snatch, thinks O'Hara, like a McMansion
.
“You hungry?” asks Henderson. “We got a nice stew on.”

“I just ate, Gus, thanks. You mind if I sit?”

“Knock yourself out.”

“Gus, Paulette told me you wanted to talk about something that happened a long time ago in the garden around the corner.”

“What good would talking do?”

“Talking can help. Get it off your chest, you feel a whole lot better.”

“I feel fine now.”

“You told Paulette you stabbed a man in a fight, and a couple days ago pointed out the spot where you buried him under a big tree.”

“Paulette's a nice girl, but I don't know what you're talking about.”

Sitting in Henderson's airless apartment, with its murky alternative realities and noxious odors, not all of which can be laid on the simmering pot, O'Hara feels less like a detective than a social worker trying to assess a client's mental competence. A lot of Gus's brain seems to be history, but there's a fair amount left, along with some sly wit. Although he denies it now, Paulette claims he talked about the killing on two different occasions a couple weeks apart. Maybe his current fogginess has nothing to do with Alzheimer's and everything to do with the fact that O'Hara is a homicide detective, in which case his behavior is the opposite of senility. O'Hara feels like she's jumped down a rabbit hole.

“Gus, okay if I get myself a glass of water?”

“Knock yourself out.” O'Hara retreats to the sink, washes out a glass, and fills it from the tap. She can feel the heat of the pot on her arm, but is no more tempted to look inside it than she would be to peer into the abyss. O'Hara brings the water back to her seat and tries again.

“Nice place, Gus. How long you had it?”

“Thirty years. Inherited the lease from my mom. You want to know what I pay?”

“Probably not.”

“Seventy-eight dollars a month.” Maybe that's what Paulette is after, thinks O'Hara, the cheapest apartment in Manhattan.

“The guy upstairs pays twenty-five hundred.”

“Gus, you telling me you don't remember your fight with a large black man in the garden? Paulette said you two had quite a brawl. He was a lot bigger than you, and you stabbed him.”

“Paulette?”

O'Hara thinks about what happened at Rocco's two nights before and how often the smaller man pulls the knife. “What you reading about, Gus?” she asks, referring to the
Post
.

“Our asshole president.”

“You think he's worse than his father?”

“All I know is he doesn't look like he does in the movies.”

“Who do you think is president, Gus?”

“Who do I think is president? I know who the president of this country is. Arnold. With the big muscles and the accent.”

I've heard enough of this crap, thinks O'Hara. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Big Arnold. Schwartze Nigger. The motherfucker thinks he killed the Terminator.

As O'Hara takes a last sip and prepares to leave, Williamson points at the colorful cigar box on the end table by Gus's chair. “Pretty, isn't it?” she says.

“I get them for free from a place on University,” says Gus, “before they throw them out. Go ahead, knock yourself out.” In fact, the box is lovely—white with elaborate green trim, built by a brand called Montesino from the Dominican Republic. O'Hara opens it and finds Henderson's meds—Flomax, Lipitor, and two other prescriptions, Aricept and Namenda, which O'Hara is lucky enough not to have sat through a commercial for. There's also loose change, mostly American, but some foreign coins too, an old tie clasp and a couple subway tokens. Facedown in the corner is a photograph, and O'Hara can tell from the film that it was taken on a Polaroid. O'Hara flips it over. It's a picture of a tree. Then she realizes it's the willow in the garden.

“Hey, Gus, this is a beautiful picture.”

“You act surprised.”

“You mind if I take it?”

“I guess not. Why?”

“It's so pretty.”

“Knock yourself out, then.”

“Do you know where this tree is growing?”

“Of course,” says Gus.

“Where?”

Henderson responds with a look of anguish.

“What's the matter, Gus?”

“I forgot something.”

“What?”

“To go to the bathroom.”