The Devil_s Garden

FIFTEEN

People’s Legal Services was on the second floor of a sooty brick building on 31st Street, near Newtown Avenue. On one side was a Russian market; on the other a twenty-four-hour bail bondsman.

This day there was yellow crime-scene tape strung out onto the sidewalk, wrapped around two parking meters, and back. The sidewalk was blocked, much to the inconvenience and consternation of the people walking up 31st Street. Profanity in an assortment of languages floated just below the maddeningly enticing aroma of borscht coming from the market.

Michael had driven to the Ardsley-on-Hudson station in Irvington, and taken the Metro North train. He got off at Grand Central and took the uptown 5 train to the 59th Street/Lexington station, then caught the R to Astoria. For New Yorkers, life was a series of numbers and letters, the alphabet-soup language of riding the subway. It seemed you spent half your time discussing the best and alternate routes to get where you were trying to go, and the other half stuck on trains, lamenting the fact that you didn’t take another path. Today, Michael did it all by rote. He almost missed his stop.

As he walked up Ditmars Boulevard, he found that the buildings and people and pavement had melted away, replaced by a single mental image:

His father, smiling, handing a loaf of brown bread to old Mrs Hartstein, antique even then, her rouge a deep scarlet sunburst on paper-white skin.

Ghosts walk here, Michael Roman thought. He did not glance at the building at number 64.

In the years following the murder of his parents, the bakery and the apartment above sat vacant. A few tenants tried to make a go of the downstairs space, but most prospective tenants, after learning of the horrors that had taken placeat 64 Ditmars Boulevard, moved on. The upstairs apartment had never been rented again.

Four years earlier, on their first wedding anniversary, the first phase of Abby’s trust fund kicked in, and at dinner that night she presented Michael with the deed to the building. If Abby’s parents had not initially been enamored with Abby marrying Michael, their reaction to Abby taking the bulk of her check for $750,000 – one of two she would receive, the other to be given on her thirty-second birthday – and buying an ugly brick building on a struggling block in Astoria, had all but caused them apoplexy.

Michael had no idea if and when they would ever do anything with the property. At first he wasn’t sure how he even felt about the gesture. Over time he came to understand that it somehow kept his parents closer, and for that he could never thank his wife enough. It was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever done for him.

To this day, he had not been back inside.

Tommy was waiting for him in front of Angelo’s. He had on his court face.

“Hey,” Tommy said.

“Hey.”

“Fucking city.”

“Fucking city.”

Tommy told him what he knew about the case, which was not much. The 911 call had come in at 4 AM that morning.

All 911 calls for the entire city of New York were routed to a central Manhattan-based location. After the location of the call was determined, the call was routed to the local precinct and sector therein. In Astoria, it would be the 114th precinct.

The detective assigned to the case would be the one next “up” for the assignment, which was, by tradition, selected by rotation throughout the squad. Michael had never been a fan of the system, which was deeply entrenched in the NYPD, because it sometimes led to the most challenging cases being assigned to the detective with the least imagination and initiative. Detectives were 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade, with 1st being the highest. Promotion of grade was based on another tradition, a combination of time-in-grade, seniority, office politics, performance and timing. Injustice was sadly the all-too-frequent result.

When Michael saw the tall, regal figure standing in the doorway leading up to People’s Legal Services, it was good news and bad news. The fact that Detective First Grade Desiree Powell was the lead investigator into the suspicious death of Viktor Harkov was good news for the friends, family, and loved ones of the deceased, among whom Michael Roman could be probably be counted. It was bad news for anyone who had anything to hide, anyone who had even the most peripherally shady dealings with the lawyer, of whom Michael Roman might also well be grouped. If it was there, Desiree Powell would find it. She was relentless.

The scene was crawling with uniforms, suits, forensic investigators, brass. It wasn’t that Viktor Harkov was a celebrity victim, or that this case was necessarily going to make headlines for more than a day, but Harkov knew a lot of people, on both sides of the law, and whenever a defense attorney was killed, the ripples went far and wide. The NYPD wanted a ring around this potential circus as soon as possible.

As Michael and Tommy crossed the street, toward the building that housed Viktor Harkov’s office, Powell looked up from a report at which she was glancing. She gave a slight dip to her chin, acknowledging Michael. Michael waved back, knowing that in the next few minutes he would talk to Powell and everything he said would become part of the record, part of the maelstrom surrounding this place where evil had visited, and once again left its indelible mark.