The Devil's Garden (37 page)

Michael put his ear to the door, listened. Nothing.

Since Abby had bought the building, they’d had all the locks changed and upgraded, putting deadbolts on every door, bars on all the basement and first-story windows.

Michael turned the knob, bumped the door with his shoulder. Solid. He would not be breaking down the door, nor would he be defeating the new lock. He scanned the area for something with which he could break the window pane, saw a broken umbrella sticking out a trashcan. He took it out, fed it through the narrow bars on the door, tapped the pane twice. On three he hit the glass. It smashed. Michael listened to the interior of the space. He was met with a thick brown silence. After a few moments he reached in, scraping his hand on the too-narrow opening, cutting his palm on the broken glass. He turned the lock.

Michael looked both ways and, seeing he was alone, pushed open the door. He stepped into the abandoned bakery, into the dark dominion of his past.

F
or Detective Desiree Powell it was a long shot. She hated long shots. If all her players were still in New York City, it would only leave five boroughs, hundreds of neighborhoods, tens of thousands of streets, and a hundred thousand buildings to search. Not to mention the world that existed underground – subways, basements, tunnels, catacombs. So she made a command decision. She had to put herself and her team somewhere.

This was why she made the big money, just enough to keep her in subway tokens and Jimmy Choo knock-offs.

She parked at the corner of Steinway Street and 21st Avenue, scanned the block, the long row of red-brick row houses, the small stores interspersed between, each with a colorful sign trumpeting their wares and services. There was a drama unfolding in each one of them, she thought, life-altering comedies and tragedies and farces that, to the outside world, would proceed unexamined, unknown. Until some unexpected horror descended, and they called the police.

Was the theater of Michael Roman’s tragedy unfolding in one of these buildings? Or had the curtain already fallen?

She shifted in her seat. Her ribs were getting worse. She had taken six Tylenol already. She would need the hard stuff before the day was over.

When she looked in her side-mirror she saw Fontova come running up, out of breath. Bracing herself against a fresh sword of agony, Powell opened the door, gently slid out of the car.

“You hear about the two cops on Roosevelt?” Fontova asked.

An “officer needs assistance” call had gone out over the radio twenty minutes ago. Powell had not heard the details. “What about them?”

Fontova bent over, catching his wind. Sufficiently recovered, he continued. “Uniformed officer was directing traffic around an accident on 98th Street. A car stalled, and when they were just about to push it, a guy jumped out a car behind the stalled car. He pulled a knife and cut two cops.”

“Jesus Christ. How bad?”

“Both are on the way to the hospital. One of the officers got a shot off, but he missed.”

“They have the cutter?”

Fontova shook his head. “Took off. There’s a BOLO on the vehicle and the doer. White male, thirties, tall. Driving a black H2.”

“Shouldn’t be too hard to spot.”

“It gets better.”

“Doesn’t it always?”

Fontova reached into the inside pocket of his suit coat, took out the composite sketch of the man who had broken into the Arsenault house.

“You’re shitting me,” Powell said.

“Not,” Fontova said. “And two witnesses put a woman and a little blond girl in the H2 with the cutter. And dig this.”

Powell just listened.

“The stalled car was a blue Ford Contour.”

Powell’s head began to spin. “
Our
BOLO? The one Michael Roman drove away from that motel?”

“Yep. Other wits said they saw another man and another little girl running from the scene.”

“Did we get a description on the man?”

“Not a good one.”

“Got to be Roman, right?”

“This is what I’m thinking.”

“What happened to the car?”

“The 114 has it. Still on the scene.”

Powell glanced down the road, towards Ditmars Boulevard, back at her partner.

“Where?”

He thumbed over his shoulder. “Two blocks up. They also found an H2 behind a building off Lefferts.”

“This is the center of the world today.”

Fontova nodded.

Powell closed her eyes for a moment, began to connect the dots. A few moments later she opened her cellphone, called it in. They would set up a perimeter.

T
HIS SECTION OF
Queens, near Astoria Park, was made up of row houses and small retail establishments. There was a large contingent of Greek immigrants in the neighborhood, but over the years Italians, Poles, and eastern European immigrants had moved into the area, and their influence could be seen on the variety of awnings and flags and stores.

By the time Powell and Fontova pulled onto the block there were a half-dozen sector cars in position, a dozen or so uniformed officers fanning out. They began to knock on doors, talk to people on the street. Powell and Fontova split up. It was a warm, early evening, and the sidewalks were congested.

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.

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.

T
he 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.

He reached the top of the stairs, looked down the hallway. The door to the bathroom had been removed. Scant light came in through the barred window. He turned to his parents’ bedroom. He recalled the day his father and Solomon painted the room, a hot summer day in July, the sound of a Mets game in the background, fading in and out on old transistor radio. Solomon had gotten drunk that Sunday afternoon, and rolled paint over half the window before Peeter had been able to stop him. The glazing was still flecked with blue.

Sweat slid down Michael’s back, his skin pimpled with gooseflesh. The air was close and damp and silent. He crossed the hallway to the space that was once his bedroom. He pushed open the door, the old hinge giving a squeal of complaint. He could not believe how small the room was, how it had, at one time, in the fictional world of his child’s mind, been his tundra, his castle, his western plains, his fathomless ocean. There was no bed, no dresser, no chair. Against one wall were a pair of cardboard boxes, coated with years of filth.