The Night Gardener (20 page)

A couple of textbooks sat on the top shelf. There were no papers wedged between the covers of the textbooks and no loose papers or anything else lying on the metal floor. Middle school kids typically taped photos of sports heroes, rappers, or movie stars on the inside of their locker doors. Asa had taped nothing to his.

“You done?” said the security guard.

“Lock it up,” said Ramone.

He had hoped to find the boy’s journal, but it was not here.

T
ERRANCE JOHNSON OPENED
his front door to let Ramone in. Johnson’s eyes were rimmed with red, and he reeked of hard liquor. Johnson shook Ramone’s hand and held it too long.

“Thanks for seeing me,” said Ramone, drawing back his hand.

“You know I’m gonna cooperate.”

“I need you to be just as cooperative with Detective Wilkins, Terrance. We’re all working together on this, and he has the lead.”

“If you say it, I’ll do it.”

The home was eerily quiet. There were no human voices or sounds from the television or radio.

“Helena in?”

Johnson shook his head. “She’s staying with her sister for the time being. Took Deanna with her, too. Helena can’t bear to be in this house right now. I don’t know when she gonna be right with it.”

“There are stages of grief. It’ll get better.”

“I know it,” said Johnson with an annoyed, careless wave of his hand. He stood staring straight ahead, his mouth slightly open, eyes clouded with a glaze of alcohol.

“You need to take care of yourself, too.”

“I’ll rest easier when you clear this up.”

“Can I have a look at Asa’s room?”

“Follow me.”

They went up the center-hall stairs to the second floor. It was a typical colonial for the neighborhood, three bedrooms and one full bath upstairs. Johnson led Ramone into Asa’s room.

“Who’s been in here since his death?”

“Me and Helena,” said Johnson. “Deanna, I expect. I did like you told me to. I didn’t let anyone else in.”

“Good. I’m also thinking about the days leading up to Asa’s death. Did he have any friends or acquaintances in his room that you can remember?”

Johnson considered the question. “I was at work during the daytime, of course. I’d have to ask Helena. But I can say almost certainly that the answer is no.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“The past six months or so, going back to the end of last school year, I guess, Asa wasn’t hangin with anyone special.”

“He wasn’t tight with anybody?”

“He’d drifted apart from the ones he used to hang with. You know how kids do.”

Girls do that more frequently, thought Ramone. Boys tend to hold on to friendships longer. But he knew that what Johnson was saying about his son was true. Diego and Asa had been friends once, to the degree that they saw each other almost every day. Diego had not even spoken about Asa, until he was killed, for a long time.

“You need me here?” said Johnson.

“That’s okay,” said Ramone. “I’ll be fine.”

Johnson exited, and Ramone had a look around as he removed his latex gloves from his jacket pocket and fitted them on his hands. The bedroom was cleaner than Diego’s had ever been. The bed had been made. One poster, the obligatory Michael Jordan in a Bulls uniform, hung on the wall. Asa’s few football trophies, sitting atop a freestanding shelf filled with a surprising number of books, had been awarded for team accomplishment, not for individual effort.

Ramone went through the dresser drawers. He looked in Asa’s closet and searched the pockets of his jackets and slacks. He ran his hand beneath the lower edge of the dresser and underneath the box spring of the bed. He did not find anything that Asa might have been concealing. He did not find anything that he thought would be pertinent to the investigation.

Ramone went through Asa’s book bag, a one-strap JanSport. Inside were a day planner, a young-adult novel, and an Algebra I textbook with no papers between its covers. Asa’s journal was not in the bag.

Ramone tried to put on a left-handed baseball mitt he found in the closet, but he could not fit it.

A computer monitor sat atop Asa’s desk. Ramone settled into the chair and pulled out a drawer on rollers that held a keyboard, mouse pad, and mouse. He moved the mouse across the pad, and the monitor’s screen lit up. The screen saver was a plain blue field, and the icons were numerous, with Microsoft Outlook, Word, and Internet Explorer among them. Ramone was not an expert with computers, but there were PCs in his home and office, and he was familiar with these programs.

He clicked on Outlook and got Asa’s e-mail site. Numerous messages appeared, but upon inspection, all of them appeared to be spam. He went into the Deleted and Sent files and found the boxes empty. He did the same with Journal, Notes, and Drafts, and got the same result. Ramone went online, got the Yahoo! opening screen, and clicked on Favorites. Asa had few sites listed in the column. Most were of the game and entertainment variety, and a few seemed to deal with the Civil War and local Civil War forts and cemeteries. Ramone went to Word and checked the files labeled “Asa’s Documents.” Everything saved appeared to be school related: essays and papers on science and history, and many dealing with the themes and characters of books.

It was odd that there was so much scholastic material and nothing of a personal nature on the computer of a teenage boy.

Ramone got out of the chair and stood in the center of the room. He removed his gloves as he looked at the walls, the bookshelves, and the top of the dresser. History told him that he had learned something here today, even if it had not yet come to him. But it was always frustrating to be at this stage of inertia in an investigation.

He went downstairs to a silent first floor. He found Terrance Johnson in the backyard, seated in a lawn chair, a can of beer in his hand. Ramone found a similar chair, folded and leaning against the house, and carried it over to where Johnson sat.

“You gonna join me?” said Johnson, holding up the can.

“I don’t think so, thanks. I’ve still got some work ahead of me.”

Ramone settled in.

“Talk to me,” said Johnson. His pointed white teeth peeked out below a sweaty lip.

“I don’t have anything solid to report yet. The positive news is there’s no reason to believe that Asa was involved in any kind of criminal activity.”

“I knew that. I kept that boy straight.”

“Did he have a cell phone? I’d like to get a look at his incoming and outgoing calls.”

“Nah. I already told Detective Wilkins, we didn’t think Asa was ready for the responsibility.”

“That’s how Regina and I keep track of Diego.”

“I didn’t need to look for him. I didn’t let him go to parties, sleepovers, or nothin like that. He was
home
at night. That’s how I knew where he was.”

Ramone loosened his tie at the neck. “Asa kept a journal, apparently. It would look like a notebook, or even a regular hardcover book without a title, with blank pages inside. It would be very helpful if I could locate it.”

“I don’t recall seeing anything like that. He did like to write, though. He liked to read a whole lot, too.”

“Lotta books in his room.”

“Too many, you ask me.”

How could there be too many books in a teenager’s room? thought Ramone. He would have been pleased if Diego had been interested in just one.

“I didn’t mind the boy reading,” said Johnson. “Don’t get me wrong. But I was a little worried about him, focusing on just that. A young man needs to be well-rounded, and that goes beyond being book smart or getting good grades in school.”

“You’re talking about athletics.”

“Yeah.”

“I heard he had dropped out of the football program.”

“I was upset with him when he quit it, I’m not gonna lie. If you’re competitive out on the playing field, you’re gonna be competitive in life. Plus, it’s a tough world out here now. I didn’t want that boy to turn soft. You got a son; you understand what I’m saying.”

“I guess it was doubly disappointing to you. I mean, you played a lot of football when you were coming up, didn’t you?”

“When I was a kid. I played here in the city. But I had an ankle that got broke and then kept breaking on me. By the time I got to high school, I couldn’t compete. I would have been a good player, too. My body betrayed me, is what it was.”

Ramone remembered Johnson at their sons’ football games. He was one of those fathers who frequently second-guessed the coaches and vocally berated the referees. He’d often see Johnson talking to Asa on the sidelines, telling him to find some heart, telling him to hit somebody. Always telling him what he was doing wrong. Ramone had seen the hurt in Asa’s eyes. No wonder the boy had lost his desire to play. His father was one of those guys who demanded his son be the athlete that he himself never was or could be.

“I bought him that new North Face coat he was wearing,” said Johnson, looking at the weedy patch of grass at his feet, his voice gone low. “Two hundred dollars and seventy-five. I made a deal with him, told him that if I bought him that new coat, he was gonna have to go out for football the next season. Summer tryouts came and he had some excuse for why he didn’t want to play. Too hot, he wasn’t feeling up for it… all that. Boy, I gave him hell. Told him how ashamed I was of him.” Johnson’s lip trembled slightly. “I said to him, you gonna sit up in your room like some kinda faggot while other boys gonna be out there on that football field, turning into men?”

Ramone, embarrassed and also a bit angry, did not look at Johnson.

“When was the last time you saw him?” said Ramone.

“I work a seven-to-three, so I’m back here around the time the boy gets home from school. He was headed out and I asked him where. He said, ‘I’m going for a walk.’ I said, ‘It’s too warm out for you to be wearin that coat. And you know you shouldn’t be wearing it anyway, ’cause you broke an agreement we had.’ ”

“And?”

“He said, ‘I love you, Dad.’ ” A tear broke loose from Johnson’s eye and rolled down his cheek. “That’s all he said. Asa left out the house right after that. The next time I saw him, he was cold. Someone had put a bullet in my boy’s head.”

Ramone looked at the sky and the shadows lengthening on the grass. There were few hours of light remaining. He rose from his seat.

DIEGO RAMONE HAD BEEN
kicked out of the fake 7-Eleven in Montgomery County that afternoon by a guy, looked like some kind of Punjabi to him, who worked behind the counter. He could have been a Pakistani or even one of those Shiites. Dude had a turban on his head, was all Diego knew.

“Get out,” the man had said. “I don’t want you in here.”

Diego had been with his friend Toby. Toby was topped by a black skully, and both wore their jeans low and had drawstring-style bags on their backs. Diego had wanted to get a Sierra Mist before he got on the bus headed back to the District.

“Wanna buy a soda,” said Diego.

“I don’t want your money,” said the man, pointing to the door. “Out!”

Diego and Toby had hard-eyed the man for a moment and left the store.

Out on the sidewalk, on the avenue lined with apartment houses, Toby held up both of his fists and affected a boxer’s stance. “I shoulda introduced him to thunder and lightning.”

“You notice he didn’t come around the counter.”

“He was a bitch,” said Toby.

It wasn’t the first time Diego had been tossed from a store for being young and black. He’d been rousted by the police here, too. This city had its own force, and they were known to break hard on kids who lived or hung down by the apartments. One weekend night Diego and Shaka were walking home from a party when a couple of squad cars came up on them. The officers inside the cars jumped out and shook the two of them down. They were put up against one of the cars and searched. Their pockets were turned inside out. One of the officers, a young white dude named O’Shea, had taunted Shaka, telling him to go ahead and say one thing out of line, just one thing. O’Shea said that he’d really like it if Shaka would lip off to him, but he figured he wouldn’t, because Shaka was soft. Diego knew that Shaka, who could go with his hands for real, could have taken this man in a fight. But they kept their words to themselves, as Diego’s father had told them to do when dealing with police, and let it pass.

The next morning, when Regina went to the station to complain, she was told that Diego and Shaka had fit the description of two young men who had stolen a car earlier that night. “The exact description?” said Regina. “Or was it just two black youths?”

That night, Diego heard his parents discussing the incident.

“They’re scarecrows,” said Ramone, his term for fake police.

“I do not like that neighborhood,” said Regina. “With the bumper stickers on their cars.”

“ ‘Celebrate Diversity,’ ” said Ramone. “Unless diversity is walking down your street on a Saturday night.”

Diego and Toby went along the strip near Toby’s building.

“They gonna talk to you tomorrow,” said Toby.

“Who is?” said Diego.

“Miss Brewster, I guess,” said Toby. “Mr. Guy said they doin an investigation. They prob’ly lookin to throw me out of school, ’cause the parents of that boy I stole are making all kinds of noise. I might get expelled this time or sent up that school they got for problem kids.”

“That was a fair fight.”

“I know it. But they lookin for evidence so they can toss my ass. My father’s Kirkin out over that bullshit. He wants to sue the school.”