Richard Montanari: The Devil_s Garden

Powell did her best to keep up with Marco Fontova and the rest of the team, but she knew she would be lagging far behind. The first person she talked to was a man standing in front of a pager store. Black, sixties, salt-and-pepper goatee, silver hoops in both ears. He may have been a player once, right around when the Chi-Lites had hits.

“How you doing?” Powell asked.

The man looked her up and down, smiled lasciviously. Real dreamboat. Powell wanted to shoot him in the ribs, see how he liked it.

“It’s all good, baby,” the man said.

Powell no longer had her badge, but she did have her NYPD ID. She took it out and clipped it to her pocket. Suddenly, it was no good, baby. The man was now afflicted with blindness, deafness, muteness, and amnesia. Powell asked the questions anyway, moved on.

The sixth time was a charm. A pair of skateboard rats, skinny white kids, about fourteen, idling in front of a corner smoothie shop. One had on a T-shirt that read Alien Workshop. The other wore a lime-green Mizuno bicycle jersey. Powell held forth a photograph of Michael Roman.

“Have either of you seen this man?”

They both looked at the photo. “Hard to say,” said lime green.

“He might be with a girl,” Powell said. “A little blond girl.”

“Oh yeah, yeah,” Alien Workshop said. “He just ran by here a little while ago.” He squinted at the photo. “He’s a lot older than that, though.”

“Which way?”

He pointed toward the park.

“The little girl was with him?”

“Yeah.”

Powell got on her two-way, dispatched four officers to Astoria Park. She continued down the street, each step a fresh stiletto in her side. She walked past bagel shops, unisex salons, an open fruit-and-vegetable stand, past a trade fair, a laundromat. The massive police presence in the neighborhood had drawn attention, but it had not shut down commerce.

Between 32nd and 33rd Streets, about a block from the Astoria Ditmars subway stop, Powell stopped. Two reasons. The fact that she couldn’t walk anymore was the main. The other was that something was nagging her, besides her aching torso, something that walked the edge of her recall like a rearranged melody. She stood on the street, scanning the buildings, the windows, the people. She had walked a beat on these streets a long time ago, an area that stretched from the park all the way to Steinway, back in the day when community policing meant shoe leather and Pepsodent.

Across the street was a Greek travel agency, a Jackson Hewitt office, a nail salon.

What the hell was nagging her about this stretch of Ditmars?

She held her ID high, limped across the street. Thankfully, traffic slowed. Some people actually came to a full stop.

Powell walked into the nail salon. A girl behind the counter looked up from a magazine.

“Help you?”

The girl was about twenty, with blunt-cut, multicolored hair, a set of dazzlingly bright spangled nails. There were no customers in the shop.

“Have you got Internet access?” Powell asked.

Nothing. Powell tapped the ID on her chest. The girl looked from the ID to Powell’s eyes. Powell asked again, this time speaking a little more slowly, enunciating every word.

“Have… you… got… Internet access?”

Now the girl looked at her as if she were from another planet. Maybe the Alien Workshop. “Of course.” She turned the LCD monitor on the counter to face Powell, then slid the keyboard and mouse forward.

“Have you got a stool, something I can sit on?”

Another pause. Powell was beginning to wonder if there was some sort of drug-induced time delay in here, one caused by a long-term exposure to nail-salon chemicals. The girl caught on, slid off her stool, picked it up, and walked it around the counter.

“Thank you,” Powell said. She eased onto the stool, opened a web browser. She searched again for the New York article on Michael Roman. Her eyes blazed down the page. She found the paragraph she had been looking for, and finally located the itch. She got on her two-way, raising Fontova. A few minutes later he walked into the nail shop. By that time, Powell had navigated to an overhead map of the surrounding ten-block area.

Powell briefed her partner. Fontova looked at the map.

“Okay,” Powell began. “We have the initial crime scene here.” She put a virtual pushpin in the building that housed Viktor Harkov’s office. “We have the Ford Contour last seen in Roman’s possession here, which is also where our cutter attacked two police officers. And lastly we find the H2 in which our alleged psycho made his temporary escape abandoned here.”

Powell leaned back, looked at the locations. “Now, I love this part of the city. Don’t get me wrong. But what the fuck is so special about Astoria, and especially this here little slice of heaven around Ditmars?”

She slipped a dollar into Fontova’s hand. He took it without comment.

“I don’t know.”

“I think I do.”

Powell maximized the other browser window, the one displaying the New York article. She pointed to the screen, at the paragraph that mentioned Michael Roman’s childhood, about how his parents were murdered in their place of business, a place called the Pikk Street Bakery, a place that Michael Roman and his wife had purchased a few years earlier.

A place located at 64 Ditmars Boulevard.

The old feelings rushed over him in a dizzying flourish. It wasn’t just a remembrance of his time spent here, a recollection of carefree childhood, a home movie unspooling in his mind, but rather a feeling that he was once again nine years old, still running down this hallway to help his father accept deliveries of flour and sugar, large boxes of bottled molasses, dried fruits and fresh-roasted nuts. The aroma of just-baked bread still lived in the air.

Since the Pikk Street Bakery had closed only a few retail tenants had tried to make a go of the space. Michael knew that, for a short while, a company offering orthotic and prosthetic services rented the first floor. After that, a natural foods store. Neither enterprise flourished.

The back hallway was just as Michael remembered it, its hardwood flooring worn in the center, a pair of Sixties-era light fixtures overhead. He proceeded down the hallway by feel, hugging the wall. A nail protruding from the plaster caught his sweatshirt, tearing the fabric, scratching his skin.

When he reached the doorway before the front room he stopped. He tried to calm himself, quiet his breathing. He slowly peered around the corner, into the room that once held the bakery’s office. As a child he had been forbidden to play in this room, only entering when his mother was doing the books, the mysterious paperwork that seemed to hold adults in its dark thrall once a month. He recalled once being punished for leaving a lemon ice to melt on the desk. Now the room was musty, abandoned. In the dim light he could make out shapes. A pair of dun-colored file cabinets, an old metal desk on its side, a pair of packing crates.

He continued a few feet down the hallway into the front room. When they purchased the building, Abby visited with the realtor, and told Michael that the previous tenants had removed most of their furniture, had even made a half-hearted attempt at cleaning. Michael looked across the room. The front windows were soaped, making the translucent light otherworldly. Dust motes hazed the room.

Michael eased his way up the steps, each tread echoing that horrible day, the dry wood protesting his presence, the sounds and smells vaulting him back in time. He could all but hear the noise of firecrackers going off in the street outside, some of them, he learned, the sounds of the gunfire that had shattered his family.