George Pelecanos: The Night Gardener

'They ain't at my apartment no more.'

'Where are they?'

'I put 'em in a bag with some other stuff.'

'What other stuff?'

'The jeans and T-shirt I was wearin yesterday.'

'The jeans and T-shirt you had on when you visited your ex-wife?'

'Uh-huh.'

'What kind of bag?'

'One of those bags from Safeway.'

'A grocery bag, says Safeway on it?'

Tyree nodded his head. 'One of those plastic ones they got.'

'You put anything else in that bag?'

'Besides my clothes and sneaks?'

'Yes, William.'

'I put a knife in there, too.'

Detective Anthony Antonelli, seated beside an impassive Ramone in the video monitor room, leaned forward. Bo Green, in the box, did the same. William Tyree did not pull back from the space that Green was invading. He had been sharing the box with Green for several hours now, and he had grown comfortable with his presence.

Green had started slowly, small-talking Tyree but dancing around the murder of Jacqueline Taylor. Green and Tyree had gone to the same high school, Ballou, though not at the same time. Green had known Tyree's older brother, Jason, a pretty fair Interhigh baseball player, now with the post office. They had talked about the old neighborhood, and where the best fish sandwich could be gotten in the 1980s, and how the music had been more positive, and how parents watched their kids more closely, and if they couldn't, how the neighbors chipped in and helped.

Green, a bearish man with gentle eyes, always took his time and, through his familiarity with the area and the many families he had come to know over the years, endeared himself, eventually, to many of the suspects in the interrogation room, especially those of a certain generation. He became their friend and confidant. Ramone was the primary on the Jacqueline Taylor case, but he had allowed Green to conduct the crucial interview. It appeared that Green was about to close this now.

'What kind of knife, William?'

'A big knife I had in my kitchen. You know, for cutting meat.'

'Like a butcher knife?'

'Somethin like that.'

'And you put the knife and the clothing in the bag…'

"Cause the knife had blood on it,' said Tyree, like he was explaining the obvious to a child.

'And your clothing and shoes?'

'They had blood on 'em, too.'

'Where'd you put the bag?'

'You know that Popeyes down there on Pennsylvania, near where Minnesota comes in?'

'Uh-huh?'

'There's a liquor store across the street from it…'

'Penn Liquors.'

'Nah, farther down. The one got a Jewish name to it.'

'You talking about Saul's?'

'Yeah, that one. I put the bag in the Dumpster they got out back in the alley.'

'Out back of Saul's?'

'Uh-huh. Last night.'

Green nodded casually, as if someone had just told him the score of a ball game or that he had left the lights on in his car.

In the video room, Ramone opened the door and shouted to Detective Eugene Hornsby, his ass parked against a desk, half-seated, half-standing beside Detective Rhonda Willis, both of them in the big office area of VCB.

'We got it,' said Ramone, and both Hornsby and Rhonda Willis straightened their postures. 'Gene, you know that liquor store, Saul's, on Pennsylvania?'

'Over there by Minnesota?' said Hornsby, a completely average-looking man of thirty-eight years who had come up in the infamous part of Northeast known as Simple City.

'Yeah. Mr Tyree says he dumped a butcher knife and his clothes in the Dumpster out back. And he put a pair of white-and-blue Nike Twenties in there, too, size nine and a half. It's all in a Safeway bag.'

'Paper or plastic?' said Hornsby with a barely detectable grin.

'Plastic,' said Ramone. 'It should be there.'

'If Sanitation didn't pick up the trash yet,' said Rhonda.

'I heard that ,' said Ramone.

'I'll get some uniforms down there straight away,' said Hornsby, snatching a set of keys off his desk. 'And I'll make sure them rookies don't fuck it up.'

'Thanks, Gene,' said Ramone. 'How's that warrant coming, Rhonda?'

'It's comin,' said Rhonda. 'Ain't nobody going in and out of Tyree's apartment until we get it. Got a patrol car parked right out front as we speak.'

'All right.'

'Nice one, Gus,' said Rhonda.

'That was all Bo,' said Ramone.

In the box, Bo Green got out of his seat. He looked at Tyree, who had sat up some in his chair. Tyree looked like he'd had a fever that had broken.

'I'm thirsty, William. You thirsty?'

'I could use another soda.'

'What you want, same thing?'

'Can I get a Slice this time?'

'We don't have it. All's we got like it is Mountain Dew.'

'That'll work.'

'You got enough cigarettes?'

'I'm good.'

Detective Green looked at his watch, then straight up into the camera mounted high on the wall. 'Three forty-two,' he said before leaving the room.

The light over the door of the interrogation room remained green, indicating that the tape was still rolling. Inside the video room, Antonelli read the sports page of the Post and glanced occasionally at the monitor.

Bo Green was greeted by Ramone and Rhonda Willis.

'Good one,' said Ramone.

'He wanted to talk,' said Green.

'Lieutenant said to come on back when you had something,' said Rhonda. 'Prosecutor wants to, what's that word, interface.'

'Rhonda says we drew Littleton,' said Ramone.

'Little man,' said Green.

Gus Ramone stroked his black mustache.

Dan Holiday signaled the bartender, making a grand circular motion with his index finger over glasses that were not quite empty but empty enough.

'The same way,' said Holiday. 'For me and my friends.'

The men at the bar were three rounds deep into a discussion that had gone from Angelina Jolie to Santana Moss to the new Mustang GT, their points argued with vehemence, but all of it, in the end, about nothing at all. The conversation was something to hang the alcohol on. You couldn't just sit there and drink.

On the stools sat carpet-and-floor salesman Jerry Fink, freelance writer Bradley West, a residential contractor named Bob Bonano, and Holiday. None of them had bosses. All had the kind of jobs that allowed them to drink off a workday without guilt.

They met, informally, several times a week at Leo's, a tavern on Georgia Avenue, between Geranium and Floral, in Shepherd Park. It was a simple rectangular room with an oak bar going front to back, twelve stools and a few four-tops, and a jukebox holding obscure soul singles. The walls were freshly painted and unadorned with beer posters, pennants, or mirrors, instead showing photographs of Leo's parents in D.C. and grandparents in their Greek village. The bar was a neighborhood watering hole, neither a bucket of blood nor a home for gentrifiers. It was simply an efficient place to get a pleasant load on in the middle of the afternoon.

'Jesus, you stink,' said Jerry Fink, sitting beside Holiday, rattling the rocks in his cocktail glass.

'It's called Axe,' said Holiday. 'The kids wear it.'

'You ain't no kid, hombre.' Jerry Fink, raised off River Road and a graduate of Walt Whitman High, one of the finest and whitest public schools in the country, often spoke in double negatives. He felt it made him more street. He was short, had a gut, wore glasses with tinted lenses indoors, and sported a perm, which he called 'my Jewfro.' Fink was forty-eight years old.

'Tell me something I don't know.'

'I'm just askin you why you're wearing that swill.'

'Very simple. Where I woke up this morning, I didn't have my own toiletries close by, if you catch my drift.'

'Here we go,' said West.

Holiday grinned and squared his shoulders. He was as rail thin as he had been in his twenties. The only indicator of his forty-one years was the small belly he had acquired from years of drinking. His acquaintances called it 'the Holiday Hump.'