They Picked the Wrong Gardener

Chapter 17

I drove back from the Lakeview Hotel with the gasoline cap back in my coat pocket and Victor's last question riding beside me on the bench seat. The county trucks and the yellow excavator were already gone from Hollyhock Lane when I turned the corner. Mrs. Abernathy was back on the Chens' front porch with her biscuit boxes, and Mr. Delgado was sitting by his gate with his cherrywood cane across his knees, crossing the deputy cruiser numbers off his active page with a neat red line.

By Sunday night I was back in my own dark kitchen, the kerosene lamp lit on the table, and it was past nine o'clock.

The sound came from the utility drawer beside the dry sink.

It was a cheap, flat electronic buzz, vibrating against the wooden dividers between the twine and the spare faucet washers. In the fourth week of the trouble—the Saturday night a man had come over my back fence and bitten down on a capsule in my flower bed—I had taken a black disposable telephone out of his coat. Its address book held one number, and its drafts folder held a photograph of Noah's bedroom window and the single word Confirm? For seven weeks that plastic rectangle had sat dead at the back of my drawer. Now its small green screen was lighting up the inside of the cabinet.

I pulled the drawer open with my right hand, lifted the phone out, and pressed the green key.

"You're holding my telephone, Mr. Cole. My name is Silas. I closed your file."

The voice on the line was dry and unhurried.

"Evelyn was here last night," I said, standing by the unlit stove. "You people are burning a lot of shoe leather on a dead man."

"Evelyn is sentimental because she remembers the founder," Silas said. "I remember the paperwork. You have been looking at a draft message on that screen for seven weeks, Mr. Cole. My scout was not asking permission to shoot the child. We do not waste rounds on ten-year-olds without a contract. He was answering an audit question from my desk. Every open file requires a current leverage entry. We like to know what a man would kill for. Now we know: a boy with a dinosaur."

I looked up at the refrigerator door, where the red crayon roses sat taped beside my wife's face in the yellow light of the kerosene lamp.

"And the fountain photograph Marco bought?" I asked. "Victor told me this morning he didn't sell it. He paid for it."

"I lent it to a broker I knew Kane's people used," Silas said, without a trace of apology. "A copy from the archive, with the date trimmed off. Victor Kane has been looking for his ghost for a decade, and I wanted to see what you would do when a local bully pushed you into a corner. I confess I expected a shorter week. Five men in a garden, twenty in a freight shed, a nurse in a parking garage, and still not one body for the coroner."

"I retired," I said.

"You left an untidy column in my ledger," Silas replied. "Evelyn told you the rule. I am calling to offer you the practical reading of it. Kill Victor Kane. The state will call it self-defense, the street will bring you casseroles, and you and I will both know what you are. Then I can write your file in ink and sleep."

"You want a precedent erased."

"A man walked out of my building and lived. Others have noticed."

"Then they should notice this: I've put a telephone in a drawer for ten years and never once called you back."

I pressed the red end key with my thumb before he could answer. I did not smash the phone or drop it in the well bucket. A man who tells you what he wants is useful later. I set the black plastic handset back in the drawer beside the garden twine and closed the wood.

Half an hour later, when the lane was quiet, I went out to the tool shed behind the greenhouse and lifted out the heavy bundle wrapped in oiled canvas.

On Monday morning I left the lane before seven, steering the pickup onto the state highway with my right hand on the wheel and my left arm strapped tight in its sling. The capital was a two-hour drive north through flat autumn farmland. By nine-fifteen I was walking up the granite steps of the state annex building with a canvas hardware bag slung over my good shoulder.

The organized-crime unit of the state Attorney General's office occupied the fourth floor. Ines Marchetti met me at the metal detector with a visitor's badge. Ray Dolan had given her my name on Friday night.

She did not offer coffee or small talk. She led me into a windowless interview room with a steel table and closed the door.

"Ray said you don't waste words, Mr. Cole," she said, sitting down opposite me and opening a fresh legal pad. "Show me what you brought two hours up the road."

I set the canvas bag on the table and took the items out with my right hand, laying them across the gray steel one by one in the order they had been paid for.

First, Ray Dolan's cardboard folder—a copy of the original I had made at the library copier—with the Fresno street sign on top, the Reno trailer park fire report beneath it, and the photograph of the witness on the county courthouse steps.

Second, a manila envelope containing the full set of printed photographs from Marco's freight office: the shipping manifests, the laboratory equipment, and every page of the yellow legal paper listing fourteen children's names, ages, and Thursday-night collection points.

Third, the cream envelope that had been slid under my front door after the water stopped, still bearing the water ring from my glass above the neat, expensive handwriting: Three days.

Fourth, the blackened metal screw cap from the five-gallon gasoline can, stamped with the crowned snake eating its own tail.

Fifth, a small plastic flash drive holding the copied audio files from Danny Cruz's telephone—every call Marco had made ordering the jobs on the street and the boy on the school trip. Danny's telephone itself stayed in my truck; I was not finished with it.

Last, I reached into the bottom of the bag, lifted out the heavy square wrapped in dark oilcloth, and set it at the end of the row. I folded back the four corners of the cloth with my thumb, exposing the dull black steel of the nine-millimeter pistol and its empty magazine.

"This has not seen daylight in ten years. I'd like it logged. I won't be needing it, and I'd like that written down somewhere a judge can read."

Ines Marchetti did not touch the gun. She put on a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, read Ray's folder, compared the handwriting on the three-day letter with the photographed yellow sheet, and looked up at me.

"We'll log the firearm into safekeeping and give you a receipt with a timestamp," she said evenly. "And I will take the copies of the manifest and Detective Dolan's file. What about the other twelve on the yellow sheet?"

"The pickup route on the margin was scheduled for Thursday night," I said. "The story ran Saturday morning before the trucks rolled. Unless Victor moved a week early, they are still in their beds. My neighbor's boy sits next to number eleven."

She wrote a line on her pad, then laid the pen flat across the paper.

"You want Victor Kane," she said. "Not the warehouse boss."

"Marco is the bell," I said. "Victor's own word for him."

Ines tapped the row of items with the back of her fingers. "Everything here points at Marco, at a dead man's paint, and at a man who writes a pretty hand. For Kane I need a living voice from inside. Bring me one and I'll open a file nobody can close."

I drove back down the highway in the early afternoon. When I turned onto Hollyhock Lane at four o'clock, Ray Dolan was standing beside my front gate in his tweed coat, holding the early evening edition of the county Gazette.

He handed me the paper without a word. Below the fold on the front page was the court docket notice for Tuesday morning: Marco's arraignment at nine o'clock in County Superior Court. Listed on the last line as counsel of record for the defense was Lionel Garrick.

It was the tall man in the charcoal suit who had handed me Victor's lawsuit on the gymnasium steps.

"Then Victor's lawyer is in that room to make sure Marco never says a word. I'll get there first."