Buried on Avenue B Read Free Page B

detective in the city who hasn’t been promoted to first grade and probably never will be.
    Finally the head ICU nurse, Evelyn Priestly, deigns to brief them. Like Williamson, she is a tall, handsome Caribbean, and compared to the chalky complexions of the men and women slumped nearby, her cheeks and forehead glisten.
    â€œDetectives, I assume you’re here to check on the condition of Ted McBeth,” she says, “who was admitted to the hospital early this morning. I have good news, although from your point of view it might not be. The young man came through his second surgery extremely well and is no longer in danger.”
    â€œCan we talk to him?” asks O’Hara. “Even if he didn’t succeed, someone did his best to kill him.”
    â€œHe asked not to be disturbed.”
    â€œMaybe tomorrow, then.”
    â€œHe told us he doesn’t want to talk to the police while he’s in the hospital. And I don’t have to remind you about the HIPPA rules, which mandate that his wishes be respected.”
    â€œThanks,” says Jandorek. “We appreciate it, particularly the attitude.”
    Two blocks from St. Vincent’s, Jandorek stops at a Rite Aid and comes out carrying an over-the-counter elixir called Sambucus. When he gets into the car, he rips off the packaging and takes a long swig directly from the bottle. “Immune syrup,” he says, “made with elderberries and echinacea. My buddy in Brooklyn Homicide, he swears by this stuff.”

 
    CHAPTER 4
    WHEN O’HARA PARKS her old Jetta in front of a hydrant on Sixth Street, there’s less than ten minutes of light left in the summer sky. She drops her NYPD placard on the dash and walks across the street toward a tall gate that runs half the length of the block along the west side of Avenue B between Fifth and Sixth Streets. The entrance is locked, but there’s enough light to read the sign—“The Sixth Street and Avenue B Community Garden”—and make out at the top the decorative pattern of children’s hands stamped out of the green steel. At waist level, near where an iridescent yellow-green bike has been bolted to the gate, another decorative piece of metalwork bears the year the garden was founded, 1983. At least the garden existed when the old man claims to have turned it into a burial ground.
    In the thickening dusk, O’Hara walks the perimeter and peers through the untrimmed bushes and evergreens that push out against the gate from inside, as if trying to escape. What little she can see of the garden is not nearly as lovely as the gate that surrounds it. Crowded into a quarter square block are scores of individual wood-framed plots the approximate dimensions of a queen-size bed. Everything else—over, around, and in between—is visual and vegetative chaos. The damp night is pungent with urban rot, the smell of everything growing, sprouting, and dying all at once. In the past couple weeks, a malty nausea-inducing odor has wafted over lower Manhattan, and she wonders if it started here.
    The night is dropping quickly. O’Hara can’t see with any detail more than twenty feet. In the dim space she can penetrate, the horticultural free-for-all suggests a Montessori cemetery. Stone walkways start promisingly, then stall or disappear, as if the pavers lost interest, suffered a falling-out, or stopped to smoke a joint, and stuck into the ground between two trees is a broken ladder leading nowhere—four rungs and then nothing. It’s such a tangled mess, a person could wander in and never find their way out.
    In the center of the garden, there’s just enough light for O’Hara to make out some tables, an archway, and a bigger structure of some kind. For a second she thinks she spots a figure in the shadows. He or she resembles a garden gnome, but O’ Hara can’t tell if it’s human or inanimate. When she rubs her eyes and squints,