NINE HOURS LATER O’Hara is back in Tompkins Square. In the midday heat, the juicers on the benches sit as still as the leaves in the trees, and the jungle gym, handball and basketball courts are all on hiatus. From the skateboard park, however, comes listless grinding, and O’Hara is relieved to spot Ben, Jamie, and minions bogarting the shade of a large elm. Based on the strong smell of reefer, she’s arrived thirty seconds too late.
“I need you slackers to concentrate for five minutes,” she says. “We got a description of two perps with Herc when he was shot. I want to run them by you, see if they spark anything. One was in his early forties, Caucasian but really dark, at least six feet and over three hundred pounds. The other was half his size, about twenty-three, five-seven, and a hundred and thirty-five pounds. Wore diamond studs in both ears. They target old people, talk their way into their homes, and rob them. Remember either of these scumbags coming by the park?”
“I don’t see how we could have forgotten a pair like that,” says Ben.
“How about separately?”
“The smaller one,” says Jamie, “sounds like the one I told you about, the one Herc got along with.”
“I’ve seen him a couple times,” says a kid she doesn’t know by name. “Herc called him Bones or Sticks, something like that.”
“You said two women came by, and one was unattractive. Can you try again to remember what made you think that? Was she overweight?”
“It was her face,” says Ben.
“What about it? Her features? Her nose, her teeth?”
“She had bad skin.”
“Sure about that?” Asking a teenager, stoned by noon, if he was certain about something, seems absurd, but his description matches what she got from Sollie. Not only that, their memory of Herc’s affection for the smaller perp corroborates her own observations about the contradictory behavior in the van, with one perp trying to help the kid far more than the other.
“How about an old guy name Gus? Short, bowlegged, black hair, thick black glasses? Moves slow, thinks slow? Ever see him with Herc?”
These last questions fail to get a rise from any of them, and a scan of their faces indicates that their window of attention has closed. “If you remember anything, give me a call,” says O’Hara. “But try not to call me when you’re stoned. I’m a cop. Remember? . . . You know what? Nix that. You think of something, call me any time.”
“Darlene, you okay?” asks Ben.
“Just tired. Had a long night.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. But thanks.”
O’Hara traverses the park, passing a tree where she once spotted an owl the size of Bruno. South of the dog runs, she enters an elegant paved plaza where a tribe of bike messengers meet in the early evenings, their beloved single-gear bikes stacked at their feet. Today the Caribbean and African health-care workers from the old-age home on Fifth Street have wheeled out a dozen old-timers and aligned their chairs in a half crescent facing the sun. Side by side, they soak up vitamin D, their drooling, farting, and nodding off a modest last stab at camaraderie.
On her way downtown, O’Hara called Paulette and asked her and Gus to meet her at the garden. O’Hara spots them inside, beneath an arbor, Gus sitting at the end of a bench, and Paulette standing beside him, and as O’Hara watches through the gate, Gus reaches up and grabs Paulette’s ass. It reminds O’Hara of the previous evening. Still, she can’t help but smile, surprised to see that Gus has a little more game left than she thought. The audacity of hope, she thinks. Or is it the audacity of grope? Paulette takes her time before she loosens the old man’s grip, and even then she does it with a warm smile, which strikes O’Hara as well beyond the call of duty and the reasonable expectations of minimum wage.
“Hey, Johnny Depp,” says O’Hara when she reaches them, “I see you’re feeling your oats.”
“Why not? I ain’t dead yet.”
“Nowhere near, apparently.”
As O’Hara takes a seat beside Gus, she can see Christina Malmströmer tending to her salad greens and peppers.
“Gus, remember the big guy you told Paulette you killed?”
“The big white guy?”
“Now he’s white? You said he was black.”
“Did I? All I know, he went down like a sequoia.”
“Gus, no bullshit. Was he black or white?”
“What does it matter? The point is, he was a bastard, big as a house, and I killed him.”
“Oh, yeah. Why?”
“Because the bastard deserved it a hundred times over.”
O’Hara had hoped meeting in the garden might jar loose some memories, but this exceeds her hopes.
“What I hear, the big guy had a partner. A younger guy, much smaller fellow, about your size. Wore diamond studs in both ears. You kill him too?”
“No,” says Gus. “No, I didn’t.”
And then he starts to cry.
“Come on, Gus, don’t waste your tears over these guys. Save them for people who deserve it.”
“Maybe I got enough to go around?”
For the same reason that O’Hara arranged to meet in the garden, she has brought the catalogue from the show in Chelsea. When Gus recovers, she pulls it out of a plastic bag and opens it to the picture of Herc and the girl.
“Gus. You ever seen this boy? His friends called him Hercules.”
Gus runs a fingertip along the profile of the boy’s face and stares through the branches at Malmströmer weeding her plot. “Nice paper,” he says, “thick.” Then he turns the catalogue over and glances at the cover. “You shelled out two-fifty for this?”
“No way. I impounded it.”
O’Hara tries again to get Gus to focus on the photo, but it’s no use. Between the demented and the addled, O’Hara hasn’t gotten a straight answer all morning, and when her cell phone rings, she is relieved.
“Steve Baginski with the New York State Police. We found the stolen vehicle. It was right there at the service center, a hundred feet from the pumps.”