George Pelecanos - The Night Gardener

Diego Ramone and Shaka Brown walked south on Third Street. They had finished playing ball. Neither of them had been into it and they had only gone hard for one game. Afterward they had sat on the court with their backs against the chain-link fence and talked and reminisced about their friend, the secret he had lived with, and the way he had chosen to go out. Diego had promised his father that he would never talk about the gun, and he had honored his pledge by not speaking of it with Shaka. Mostly the two of them had stared out into the daylight or at the Spanish playing on the soccer field or the occasional neighborhood resident they recognized, using the park or walking by, because they could think of little to say.

'I better get home,' said Diego.

'Why? You ain't got no homework.'

'I'm startin back at my old school next week.'

'That's next week,' said Shaka. 'It's not like you're in the middle of something.'

'I been reading a book, believe it or not,' said Diego. 'It's called True Grit. My father gave it to me. It's pretty good.'

'Go ahead, Dago. You know, soon as you go home you're gonna fall on the sofa and watch the Redskins. It's Dallas day, boy.'

'True.'

They walked along the commercial strip. Down by the barbershop, they gave each other a pound.

'Later, dawg,' said Shaka.

'Later.'

Shaka went west, in the direction of his mother's place, dribbling his basketball with his left hand, his right hand behind his back, as his coach had told him to do. Diego walked up the rise of Rittenhouse, toward the pale yellow colonial that had always been his home.

His mother would be in the kitchen, planning dinner or having a nap, what she called resting her eyes, on the couch in the living room. Alana would be reading her picture book about rabbits or doing the voices to all her dolls up in her room. And, hopefully, his father had come back home. He'd be in his chair right now, watching the Skins-Cowboys game, pounding his fist on the padded arm of the chair, yelling stuff at the players on the screen. Pushing his hair off his forehead and stroking his black mustache.

Diego stopped halfway up the rise. His father's Tahoe was parked out on the street, and his mother's Volvo was in the driveway. Alana's purple bicycle, with the streamers coming out the handles, sat up on the porch.

Everything was as it should have been. Diego walked to his house and touched the knob of his front door, warm in the afternoon sun.

Detective Sergeant T.C. Cook took another look at the dead girl lying in the grass of a community garden near E Street, on the edge of Fort Dupont Park. Her eyes were fixed and reflected the strobing blues and reds coming from the light bars of the cruisers still on the scene. Cook closely examined the girl's braids, decorated with colorful beads, and saw that one was shorter than the others. There was no doubt now in Cook's mind. Truly, the decedent was one of them.

'I will find him, darling,' said Cook, very softly so that no one could hear.

Cook labored to his feet. More often than not, it was an effort to do so. Well into his middle age, and after years of crouching down over victims, his knees were beginning to betray him. He shook a Viceroy out of his deck and lit it. He felt the satisfaction of his addiction as the nicotine hit his lungs. Cook nodded to the ME and stepped out of the immediate vicinity so as not to foul the scene with his ashes.

Walking away, he noticed that the superintendent of detectives and Captain Bellows had gone back to their offices. Knowing he would not have to deal with the white shirts relaxed him. He called them the Spaghetti Lids because of those silly strands of nautical rope decorating the brims of their hats. He had no time for their kind.

Cook walked to the crime scene tape, where two white uniformed officers stood, keeping back the spectators, reporters, and cameras. One was tall, blond, and skinny and the other was of medium height and build and had a darker complexion and hair. Cook had been rough on them earlier, but there was no reason to apologize. He had dressed them down for a reason, and now they were doing fine.

'Keep these people back,' said Cook to the blond officer.

'Especially the media, you hear?'

'Yes, sir,' said Dan Holiday.

'Don't 'sir' me, son. I'm a sergeant.'

'We'll do it, Sergeant Cook.'

'I'm not playin. You let that girl through earlier, and she up and puked not ten feet from the decedent.'

'It won't happen again,' said Gus Ramone.

'You do your jobs right,' said Cook, 'someday you two are gonna be the police officers that you think you are today.'

'Right,' said Holiday.

Cook turned and studied the spectators on the other side of the yellow tape. There were several neighborhood kids, a couple of them on bicycles, and adults whose homes backed up to the community garden. An old lady in a housedress and an unbuttoned coat, her breasts sagging down to her belly. And a man in his twenties, dressed in a security guard's uniform, a Sam Browne belt around his waist and a red company patch on his sleeve, one hand in the pocket of his blue trousers. Cook looked them all over as he dragged deeply on his Viceroy, then dropped the cigarette to the damp ground and crushed it under his shoe.

'Carry on,' said Cook. He walked back to the corpse of Eve Drake, his fresh Stetson cocked just so on his bald head.

A young neighborhood lady with a high ass moving inside acid-washed jeans walked in front of Holiday, glancing at him playfully as she passed. He stood straight, and the corners of his ice blue eyes crinkled as he smiled.

'I'd murder that,' said Holiday.

'She's a little young, Doc.'

'You know what they say: 'Old enough to sit at the table, old enough to eat.'"

Ramone made no further comment. He had heard all of Holiday's nuggets of wisdom before.

Holiday began to imagine the young lady naked on his sheets. And then his mind drifted, as it tended to do, toward his aspirations. He wanted more than anything to earn the respect of a man like T.C. Cook. He wanted to be good police. And so he projected and fantasized about how his career would go. He saw commendations, medals, promotions. And to the victor, the spoils of war.

Ramone had no such ambitions. He was simply doing his job, keeping the civilians back from the tape. He stood there, his feet spread wide, and thought of a woman he'd seen standing on the edge of the academy pool in a blue bathing suit. Her figure and her warm smile had haunted him since he'd touched her hand. He planned to call her very soon.

As holiday and Ramone worked and dreamed in Ward 6, Washingtonians and suburbanites on the other side of town spent their disposable income in restaurants and bars, eating prime-cut steaks and drinking single-malt scotch, the men in charcoal suits and red power ties, the women in padded-shoulder dresses, high-heeled pumps, and teased hairdos they had seen on Krystle Carrington. In the bathrooms of these restaurants and bars, Republicans and Democrats put aside their differences and came together to do many blasts of cocaine. 'Money for Nothing' played from every radio, and Simple Minds were scheduled to perform in town. It was rumored that Prince would be shopping in Georgetown that weekend, and the wealthy 'punk' kids at Commander Salamander were anticipating his arrival. Artistic types caught a double feature of A Passage to India and Heat and Dust at the Circle Theatre. At the Capital Centre, basketball fans watched Jeff Ruland, Jeff Malone, and Manute Bol take it to the Detroit Pistons. The applause in the auditorium and the laughter in the bars were raucous and deafening, and blinding, too. AIDS jokes were told at parties, and there was talk of a new drug that was coming to town, like cocaine, except that it got smoked and was meant for blacks. Outside of newsrooms and among local law enforcement professionals, the violent deaths of three black teenagers in Southeast were hardly discussed.