Buried on Avenue B Page 3

  “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.”

  CHAPTER 7

  COMPARED TO GUS’S apartment, the squad room is an oasis of comfort and calm. O’Hara slips the photograph from her bag and drops it on her desk. Based on the tree’s foliage and the plants and flowers visible in the background, the picture was taken in the summer, but how many summers ago is impossible to know.

  “It was taken with a Polaroid Swinger,” says Jandorek over her shoulder. “My uncle gave me one for my twelfth birthday. In the sixties, they were cool and cost about twenty bucks. Now guys with tats and hats collect them in Williamsburg.”

  “I found it in a cigar box at Henderson’s place,” says O’Hara, “right before he pissed himself. The whole visit was a preview of what we have to look forward to in the golden years, a trailer of coming attractions. Kind of interesting, though, that Henderson has a picture of the tree. And if this camera was around seventeen years ago, it fits the time frame.”

  “It was around way before that,” says Jandorek. “Not that it matters.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s a complete waste of time. No way in hell Kelso approves homicide dollars for a backhoe because
a junkie with Alzheimer’s told his health aide he killed a black guy. Please. And by the way, you missed a nice piece of fish—cod, roasted, over heirloom tomatoes.”

  Jandorek is right, of course, but Gus and Paulette and the frigging willow have taken root in her brain. So has that quagmire of a garden. And now three distinct bits support the possibility that a body is under the tree: Henderson’s original candlelit confession when he thought the end was near; his pointing at the spot two weeks later when he was better; and this photo found among a handful of meds and old keepsakes.

  O’Hara Googles “Polaroid Swinger,” and discovers that Jandorek got it pretty much exactly right, as usual. If the guy cared half as much about solving homicides as the location of his next piece of fish, he could shame Sherlock Holmes. The cameras were made from 1965 to 1970, went for $19.95, and became one of the best-selling cameras of all time. According to Wikipedia, “The Swinger was especially successful with the youth market due to its low price, stylish appearance, and catchy ‘Meet the Swinger’ jingle sung by Barry Manilow in a television advertisement featuring a young Ali MacGraw.”

  While the computer is on, O’Hara decides to take another look at Henderson’s rap sheet and marvels again at his stamina. Here was a man who found his vocation early and never wavered. He did what he wanted as long as he could, and then stopped, and in her visit, O’Hara didn’t detect a trace of self-pity or regret. Between his first arrest in ’57 and his last in ’02, is an endless roll call of picayune offenses—panhandling, loitering, turnstile jumping, shoplifting, public intoxication, public urination—tell me about it, thinks O’Hara—possession of stolen property, possession of burglary tools. And then there’s the shit that’s so stupid it’s almost inspired, like when he got arrested twenty years ago, trying to pawn three full-length furs on Canal Street in the middle of July.

  In his twenties, thirties, and forties, Henderson was like a slugger a manager could pencil in for thirty homers every year, only in his case it was thirty arrests. His consistency was so remarkable that what catches her attention is the three-year gap in his résumé between 1988 and 1991. A little more research, and she learns the reason. He spent twenty-eight of those thirty-six months in Attica, his first and only real stretch of jail time, for a mugging in Washington Square, which got elevated to armed robbery because either he or his accomplice wielded a screwdriver.

  When the shift ends at four, Jandorek is out the door, O’Hara pulls a Red Bull out of her drawer and continues to pore over the junkie rap sheet like a railbird studies a racing form, and if the fact that she has been known to start her day with a grapefruit juice and vodka makes her fascination with Henderson’s epic addiction more than strictly professional, so be it. She is particularly intrigued by the fact that he was able to stay clean for six months after his release from jail, that he showed the discipline to sit tight and wait out his probation, not out of a desire to go straight but because he knew if he violated and got sent back, the beautiful affair between him and dope could be over. After his release from jail in the middle of 1990, it took almost a year for the arrests to start again, and from that point on, he was more careful, the arrests were fewer, and he never truly put his addiction at risk.

  AT 7:30, O’HARA takes a short walk to Second Avenue and picks up some beef and broccoli from the place on Twenty-Second. She didn’t think she could miss bad Chinese, but she does. Grease, sugar, and MSG has never tasted this good. She devours the carton’s contents at her desk, and as she lingers over the last dripping stalk of broccoli, the date of Henderson’s release from Attica catches her eye—August 15, 1990. That is seventeen years ago, almost to the day, and Henderson told Williamson he killed someone seventeen years ago.

  O’Hara is onto something. There are no coincidences in homicide. If his confession was accurate, and O’Hara is becoming increasingly convinced it was, than he killed someone right after he got out. Maybe, thinks O’Hara, the killing stemmed from something that happened inside. O’Hara logs into a separate database for the Department of Corrections to see what she can learn about how Gus did his time. As it turns out, he did it very well. There are no red flags, no disciplinary actions, no evidence of a dispute. Henderson sat himself down and did his little stint like an adult. Even Kelso would have been impressed. He was such a good inmate, they let him out a couple months early.

  With nothing coming out of his prison experience, O’Hara refocuses on Henderson’s time on the streets and scrolls again through the breakdown of offenses and arrests. She notices that in many of his shenanigans, Henderson was operating in concert with a hapless accomplice and soul mate named Charles Faulk. From 1983 to 1988, Henderson and Faulk were taken away in handcuffs nineteen times, a streak that ended with the mugging that sent Henderson to jail.

  Henderson told Williamson that seventeen years ago, he’d killed a large black man. Faulk’s description: “African American, six-four, three hundred twenty pounds.”

  Faulk is large and black. But is he dead? Now O’Hara runs Faulk’s name. Faulk’s rap is similar and often identical to Henderson’s. The only substantial difference is that Faulk’s career in petty crime ended ten years before age slowed Henderson. His last arrest for possession or anything else was on August 11, 1990, four days before Henderson got out of jail. O’Hara takes a deep breath and reminds herself that just because Faulk hasn’t been arrested for seventeen years, that doesn’t mean he’s dead. Perhaps he finally saw the folly of his ways, accepted Jesus as his personal savior, and is running a small ministry for wayward youth in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Or maybe he’s spent the last seventeen years rotting under a willow in the East Village.

  O’Hara runs Faulk through Missing Persons and finds that on November 13, 1990, his mother, Marie Scott of Monroe, South Carolina, filed a missing person report for her son and the case is still open. Again, O’Hara tells herself to chill. The missing person file could be out of date. It’s been seventeen years; maybe Faulk has resurfaced. She Googles “Marie Scott, mother of Charles Faulk, Monroe, South Carolina.” She gets an address and phone number, and makes the call. A woman answers.

  “Mrs. Scott?”

  “Speaking.”

  “My name is Darlene O’Hara. I’m a detective for the NYPD. I’m very sorry to trouble you about this matter. I saw that you reported your son missing in 1990. Has your son been found since then, or was there any progress in the attempt to find him?”

  “What do you think?” asks Scott. “A junkie disappears, who’s going to care? You’re with NYPD, you know that better than me. For a couple years, I made calls to a detective in the Ninth Precinct, but eventually I gave up after I heard my son had jumped off the Staten Island Ferry. Charles had a history of mental problems and depression, and he’d tried to kill himself once before. So it could be true.”

  “May I ask who told you your son had committed suicide?”

  “An old friend of his.”

  “You don’t remember his name by any chance?”

  “Gus Henderson. My son was gay, and I always assumed he and Charlie were lovers. Why this sudden interest in my son after all these years?”

  “I’m a homicide detective, Mrs. Scott. I was just given a file on a cold case of someone who may have been associated with your son. I was hoping your son had been found and I could talk to him.”

  “Really? Well, he wasn’t, because no one ever looked for him. Good night, Detective,” says Scott and hangs up.

  A couple hours ago, all O’Hara had was the alleged confession of a demented ex-junkie. Now she has the body to go with it, a body that fits the description and disappeared at the right time. To get Kelso to rent a backhoe, she still needs one more piece, a persuasive reason for Henderson to turn on his old partner: she needs a motive. Minutes later, after opening both men’s files side by side on her screen, she finds it. Five weeks after Faulk and Henderson were arrested for the mugging in Washington Square, Faulk was ar
rested again for public intoxication. In other words, while Henderson did twenty-four months, Faulk didn’t do a minute. O’Hara already knows why, but to be sure she verifies it in the transcripts from The State of New York versus Gus Henderson. Listed first among the witnesses for the prosecution is Charles Faulk. Henderson’s old running mate flipped, turned state’s witness, and ratted him out. That’s all very understandable and happens every day, but sometimes payback is a bitch, in which case it’s probably no coincidence that four days after Henderson is released from jail, Charles Faulk commits his last crime and, sometime very soon thereafter, takes his last breath. Now O’Hara has a confession, a missing body, and a motive, not to mention a really nice picture of a willow tree. A pretty good day’s work in Homicide Soft. It still might not be enough for Kelso, but she doesn’t have time to worry about that now.

  CHAPTER 8

  AN HOUR AFTER O’Hara leaves her desk, the Flat Screens storm the stage of the second-floor ballroom of the Ukrainian Center on Second Avenue. If all goes according to script, rock historians and MTV specials will note ad nauseam that the band’s maiden performance was witnessed by only seventeen people, and that four of them, including the lead singer’s mother, were current or former detectives from the Seventh Precinct. With its tiny and barely elevated stage, rimmed by plastic plants, and tables and chairs pushed against the side wall, the space evokes the best and worst of junior high, a time when it still seemed like everyone was in the same leaky boat. The band got the show through the drummer’s mother who works at the center three days a week. Axl wears a white button-down shirt, lederhosen spray-painted orange, and flip-flops. He grabs the mike and growls a cappella:

  Let’s get the fuck out of Dodge!

  Let’s get the fuck out of Dodge!

  Let’s get the fuck out of Dodge!

  Then he adds an elegant last line, whose logic is unassailable.

  Because Dodge . . .

  Is the place . . .

  We want to get the fuck . . . out of!