Buried on Avenue B Read Free

anyone.”
    â€œOkay, then. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he’s just a little off. Maybe he’s a scientologist.”
    Jandorek looks up from his screen and shoots O’Hara a quizzical look, and O’Hara knows she has to be careful. For Jandorek it’s all about cops, being part of the fraternity—that’s why he’s checking out the Web site for the NYPD softball team rather than the one for the Yankees or the Mets—and determining whether the best cop softball player in the country is gay is not something to be taken lightly.
    â€œI don’t think you are wrong, Dar.”
    â€œI don’t think I am either. But let me ask you something. Why do you give a fuck?”
    â€œThat’s a very good question. But it’s a completely different question than the one I’m addressing right now. By the way, you might want to consider brushing your teeth.”
    â€œThat bad?”
    â€œYes.”
    As O’Hara fishes in her drawer for her toothbrush, Lauricella, the desk sergeant from downstairs, approaches her desk in the company of a tall black woman in her fifties.
    â€œPaulette Williamson,” he says, “this is Detective Darlene O’Hara. Ms. Williamson wants to report a possible homicide. She asked to talk to a woman.”
    Two potential hommies in one morning, thinks O’Hara. In Homicide Soft. What the hell?
    â€œPlease,” says O’Hara and points to a chair.
    â€œI’m a home health aide,” says Williamson. “I take care of an elderly man on East Third named Gus Henderson. A couple weeks ago he caught the flu, and for a few days it looked bad.” Williamson is about fifty, pretty and well-spoken with a trace of Caribbean lilt. She exudes the patience needed for her line of work.
    â€œWe thought he might pass, and I think he thought so too because one night he asked me to close the shades and light a candle. There was something he wanted to get off his chest.” O’Hara doesn’t have to look over at Jandorek to know he’s rolling his eyes.
    â€œGus tells me that seventeen years ago he killed someone, stabbed him to death in a fight, then buried the body.”
    â€œHe mention where?”
    â€œHe said it was under a tree.”
    â€œHe say anything else about the victim—his name, age, physical description?”
    â€œA big black guy,” says Williamson, “only he didn’t say it like that.”
    â€œHe used the N-word?”
    â€œCorrect.”
    â€œYour client, how old is he?”
    â€œSixty-seven, but he seems older. He was a drug addict for a long time.”
    â€œHow about mentally? Is he playing with a full deck?”
    â€œHe has good days and bad days.”
    Was this a good one or a bad one? thinks O’Hara. At this point, she’s heard enough, but if Williamson could let Gus get it off his chest, O’Hara figures she can do the same for Williamson. It’s that or talk about softball.
    â€œI was going to ignore it, too,” says Williamson pointedly. “Thank goodness, Gus got better, and yesterday on our way back from the doctor, he stopped the cab at Sixth Street and Avenue B. He made us both get out, so he could point into the garden at a spot by a tree where he ‘buried the big black nigger.’ Since it would take you people about five minutes to find out if it’s true or not, I thought I should come forward.”
    As Williamson sits beside her, O’Hara types “Gus Henderson, 67” into the system, and in seconds calls up an endless rap sheet of low-level offenses. Talk about focus and endurance. As she scrolls the lowlights, she sees that his first arrest, for possession of narcotics, was at seventeen in Tompkins Square Park, and his last, for the same offense, barely two blocks away on Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place, was forty-five years later, at the age of sixty-two. In between were some hundred and fifty other