Buried on Avenue B Read online

  “We could talk to the nurses. He might have said something as they wheeled him in.”

  “It’s possible,” says Jandorek as he stares at his computer screen, “but let’s sit tight. Besides, there’s something I want to ask you. There’s this kid, maybe the best cop softball player in the country. I went to his Facebook page, and he’s posted a ten-minute video of himself working out. Does that strike you as gay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Me too. But my buddy who knows him insists he’s not, and swears he gets more tail than anyone.”

  “Okay, then. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he’s just a little off. Maybe he’s a scientologist.”

  Jandorek looks up from his screen and shoots O’Hara a quizzical look, and O’Hara knows she has to be careful. For Jandorek it’s all about cops, being part of the fraternity—that’s why he’s checking out the Web site for the NYPD softball team rather than the one for the Yankees or the Mets—and determining whether the best cop softball player in the country is gay is not something to be taken lightly.

  “I don’t think you are wrong, Dar.”

  “I don’t think I am either. But let me ask you something. Why do you give a fuck?”

  “That’s a very good question. But it’s a completely different question than the one I’m addressing right now. By the way, you might want to consider brushing your teeth.”

  “That bad?”

  “Yes.”

  As O’Hara fishes in her drawer for her toothbrush, Lauricella, the desk sergeant from downstairs, approaches her desk in the company of a tall black woman in her fifties.

  “Paulette Williamson,” he says, “this is Detective Darlene O’Hara. Ms. Williamson wants to report a possible homicide. She asked to talk to a woman.”

  Two potential hommies in one morning, thinks O’Hara. In Homicide Soft. What the hell?

  “Please,” says O’Hara and points to a chair.

  “I’m a home health aide,” says Williamson. “I take care of an elderly man on East Third named Gus Henderson. A couple weeks ago he caught the flu, and for a few days it looked bad.” Williamson is about fifty, pretty and well-spoken with a trace of Caribbean lilt. She exudes the patience needed for her line of work.

  “We thought he might pass, and I think he thought so too because one night he asked me to close the shades and light a candle. There was something he wanted to get off his chest.” O’Hara doesn’t have to look over at Jandorek to know he’s rolling his eyes.

  “Gus tells me that seventeen years ago he killed someone, stabbed him to death in a fight, then buried the body.”

  “He mention where?”

  “He said it was under a tree.”

  “He say anything else about the victim—his name, age, physical description?”

  “A big black guy,” says Williamson, “only he didn’t say it like that.”

  “He used the N-word?”

  “Correct.”

  “Your client, how old is he?”

  “Sixty-seven, but he seems older. He was a drug addict for a long time.”

  “How about mentally? Is he playing with a full deck?”

  “He has good days and bad days.”

  Was this a good one or a bad one? thinks O’Hara. At this point, she’s heard enough, but if Williamson could let Gus get it off his chest, O’Hara figures she can do the same for Williamson. It’s that or talk about softball.

  “I was going to ignore it, too,” says Williamson pointedly. “Thank goodness, Gus got better, and yesterday on our way back from the doctor, he stopped the cab at Sixth Street and Avenue B. He made us both get out, so he could point into the garden at a spot by a tree where he ‘buried the big black nigger.’ Since it would take you people about five minutes to find out if it’s true or not, I thought I should come forward.”

  As Williamson sits beside her, O’Hara types “Gus Henderson, 67” into the system, and in seconds calls up an endless rap sheet of low-level offenses. Talk about focus and endurance. As she scrolls the lowlights, she sees that his first arrest, for possession of narcotics, was at seventeen in Tompkins Square Park, and his last, for the same offense, barely two blocks away on Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place, was forty-five years later, at the age of sixty-two. In between were some hundred and fifty other arrests, the overwhelming majority in eight square blocks of the Lower East Side and East Village. If they gave a lifetime achievement award to junkies, thinks O’Hara, this guy would be tough to beat.

  Then O’Hara turns to Williamson. “Paulette, I’m going to run your name too. Before I do, is there anything I ought to know about?”

  Williamson stares hard at O’Hara, then wearily shakes her head, as if telling herself she should have known that this would be her thanks for walking fifteen blocks on her own time.

  “At one point, Detective O’Hara, I had a drug problem myself. Eight years ago, I cashed two stolen checks. Since then I’ve been clean. A year ago I made full restitution, every last cent.”

  O’Hara runs her name, and what comes up corroborates her story. Her last arrest was in ’99.

  “Those checks totaled almost eleven thousand,” says O’Hara, looking at the screen. “That’s a lot of money. How’d you pay it back?”

  “I worked,” says Williamson, although it sounds more like “Fuck you.” “Are you going to look into this?”

  “I doubt it,” says O’Hara, “but thanks for coming in.”

  Williamson gets up to leave, then hovers over her chair and looks down at O’Hara. “I had a problem, Detective. It’s true. But at least I dealt with mine.”

  MCBETH MAKES IT through his first surgery, and two hours later he is wheeled back in for a second. When O’Hara and Jandorek step into St. Vincent’s ER, it’s almost 7:00 p.m. The office of the admissions nurse has a glass window overlooking the dreaded waiting room. Above it is a sign informing arrivals that patients will be treated based on the seriousness of their condition, not the order in which they arrived. Jandorek refers O’Hara to the second sign, which reads, “Don’t Spread Germs! Please cover your mouth when you cough.”

  “You think these motherfuckers cover their mouths when they cough? Not a chance in hell.”

  They are informed that the nurse in charge of the intensive care unit is on her way down, but twenty minutes later she still hasn’t arrived. Being in a hospital with Jandorek reminds O’Hara of the events that made him a legend among fellow detectives. A dozen years ago, Jandorek was working in homicide in Queens when he was appointed to be a union rep, a full-time position that supplants all your responsibilities as a detective. Careerwise, a stint with the union can work for or against you, but if you’re already in homicide and essentially guaranteed to make grade, there’s not much upside. Nevertheless, Jandorek took the job, and proved to be an effective rep, but one incident elevated him to the pantheon. About ten years ago a Brooklyn detective, after a long night of drinking, ran a stop sign and broadsided another car. Although the detective had only suffered minor injuries, a couple broken ribs, both passengers in the other car—a kindergarten teacher and her husband—were killed. Jandorek got the call in the middle of the night. He told the detective not to say a word before he got there, and more importantly, not to blow a Breathalyzer. “Tell them you’re in too much pain,” he said, “that you can’t breathe.” Both Jandorek and the DA arrived at the scene within minutes. The DA wanted the detective bad, which was understandable—he drove drunk and killed two human beings. But Jandorek refused to let the detective blow a test, said he’d got three cracked ribs, he could barely breathe, claimed it was unconscionable to even ask an officer in his condition to blow, that it was jeopardizing his life. Without the failed test, the only thing they got him for was running a stop sign, and a year later, the detective retired with a full pension. But brass was pissed, and now Jandorek is the only longtime homicide detective in the cit
y who hasn’t been promoted to first grade and probably never will be.

  Finally the head ICU nurse, Evelyn Priestly, deigns to brief them. Like Williamson, she is a tall, handsome Caribbean, and compared to the chalky complexions of the men and women slumped nearby, her cheeks and forehead glisten.

  “Detectives, I assume you’re here to check on the condition of Ted McBeth,” she says, “who was admitted to the hospital early this morning. I have good news, although from your point of view it might not be. The young man came through his second surgery extremely well and is no longer in danger.”

  “Can we talk to him?” asks O’Hara. “Even if he didn’t succeed, someone did his best to kill him.”

  “He asked not to be disturbed.”

  “Maybe tomorrow, then.”

  “He told us he doesn’t want to talk to the police while he’s in the hospital. And I don’t have to remind you about the HIPPA rules, which mandate that his wishes be respected.”

  “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.