by Maria Walton
The Gardener
By Maria Walton
Copyright © 2016 by Wahba Publishing House
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Printed in Canada
First Printing, 2016
Wahba Publishing House
2345 Argyle Street
Regina, Saskatchewan
S4T 3T4
The story didn’t begin with a body, although murders always start with a body. Instead the story began with two glasses of cabernet sauvignon, two candles, a table with two chairs and a man and a woman. They, of course, were on a date. What do men and women do otherwise when they are together?
They’d progressed past lust, to actually being interested in each other. Lips had collided, mouths had mashed, and what had initially been full of the heat of passion, was now changing into something different. Katie’s voice wasn’t just used for moans it was used to tell Vi something but, of course, like all dates it started off a bit awkwardly.
“How was your day,” Vi said. He was dressed in a polo shirt. Yellow stripes ran around his biceps. His chinos were cut comfortably tight to his body and his black belt was made of leather. His black hair swooped to the side, held in place with pomade. His eyes were as black as a starless night.
“Good… good,” Katie replied. She smoothed her dress, letting her fingers cascade down the fabric that drew a shapely outline of her body. “Ummm… what about you?” Her blue green eyes matched well with her turquoise dress.
“Oh, okay. One of the mechanics at work hurt his finger on the car jack. I ended up having to stay and finish his work on the axel of this VW. I’ve been having to do a lot of extra work lately… Even been driving uber. That’s why I’m late. I’m sorry,” Vi told her.
“It’s no problem,” she replied. Her face said otherwise but Katie was brought up to present a decorum of politeness, and to wrap her emotions into little boxes with bows. “Have you been here before?”
“No. Have you?”
“No.”
“So why did you suggest it? How do you even know if it’s gonna be good? Did a friend tell you about it?”
“I just saw it. I wanted to try it out. I thought it would be interesting. Do any of the choices look interesting to you?”
“I think I need another glass of wine,” Katie said.
“You aren’t even,” Vi said. He lifted his eyes from the menu and saw her empty glass. Legs of alcohol slipped down the insides of the glass the aftermath of her quick consumption. “Done.”
Vi took an internal survey of Katie trying to remember what he knew of her. They’d met at a bar. She said that she was waiting for someone when he’d approached her although, she’d been waiting for him. She’d followed him for a few days to get a sense of his routine and then conveniently showed up when he was there. It didn’t take much for him to get off his bar stool and go out with her. They’d left together. He didn’t ask who she’d been waiting for. He hoped that she’d been waiting for him. She’d paid for her own tab and said it would be a company expense. They’d gone to his place, she said that her apartment was her office as well and she needed to get away from work so they went to his. After they were done she stayed nestled against him. He liked the way she smelled and her light auburn hair. She spooned her body with his and fell to sleep quickly. The sounds of her snores were light, almost inaudible but Vi heard them and he thought they were cute. In the morning he’d made coffee. She took hers black. She’d taken out her phone and scowled and then she gulped her liquid caffeine in one gulp and left without a word. Later, he remembered he’d gotten her phone number to text her directions to his house. They’d driven separately. He’d asked her out. She said yes but it would take a few days until they met.
“It’s been a hard day.”
“Why?”
“I’m stuck on a case.”
“A case?”
“A woman died,” Katie said. She looked away from Vi not wanting to meet his eyes.
“Are you a cop,” his voice’s pitch rose with his question straining to it’s limit.
“No. I’m a PI.”
“Like a private investigator?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.”
“That isn’t a deal breaker is it?”
“No… it’s just, I’ve never dated a PI before.”
“Dated, it’s past tense already? Is this going to be a problem?”
Vi looked down at the menu.
“I’m joking, lighten up,” Katie said. She let her finger glide down her wine glass from the lipsticks marks that she’d made to the cup’s stem.
Vi looked back up with a smile. “Do you catch everyone off guard?”
“That’s what I’m best at.”
“So the case. What happened?”
“Well, a woman died.”
“Past tense.”
“Yes, past tense.”
“And you are looking for her killer...” Vi said. He took a moment and looked at the menu. It was California cuisine and small plates. There were a litany of salads and appetizers, the restaurant ran off of a tapas model with a few entrees. He’d picked the place because of it’s high ceilings and the modern art that covered the walls. The paintings were reminiscent of Jackson Pollock, the canvases splashed with difficult colors of paint.
“Yes, but it didn’t start like that. First the body was found,” Katie said. She took a deep breath and began her story.
“It was four hours old when the police came into the house in Walnut Creek. The corpse was sprawled out on the floor of two-bedroom house. It was the type of place with a little front yard and a white picket fence. There was an apple tree in front. It was the type of place that neither you nor I could afford.
There were no abrasions on the 33-year-old Melanie Richardson. However, her body was littered with bruises. Contusions all over. The normal white of her skin had been rendered jaundice and purple. She’d been beaten to death- next to her, a bag of blood oranges. Some of the oranges had broken open and the purple flesh had oozed out onto the woman’s body making the scene bloody and graphic. She was laying in the living room with her arms and legs akimbo. She didn’t have any defensive wounds. It looked like she just submitted to the beating. There were no signs of force entry and nothing, other than her body was damaged in the house.
Coroners on the scene didn’t need to go to the lab. They pointed at the fruit. They pointed at the body and then they pointed at the Latino landscaper.
His name was Esteban. He’d been doing maintenance on the yard work for the last year. A pair of gloves were found at the scene. Threads from the gloves were found on the bag of oranges. He was brought in and when the screws were turned he confessed. The screws were turned hard too as Mr. Richardson was a cop. He’d been with the LAPD for a hot minute. I knew him. He knew me. We both knew Tony, that was who got me into PI work. Mr. Richardson was a real bastard but all signs pointed at the handyman.”
Katie took a sip of her wine and let the memories come back to her. The image of Melanie’s body broken, shattered, and dead on the floor sharpened and came into focus like a polaroid picture developing. She’d seen the autopsy photos. The public defender had shown them to her. “Open and Shut,” he’d said. The public defender was one of those thin-lipped types more worried about yelp reviews than prison sentences.
He’d also shown Katie pictures of the gloves. They were brown and still had dirt on them. The gloves were expensive for gardening gloves, twenty-three dollars for a pair. She’d look them up later on amazon. The gloves had goatskin palms and protected against most of the minor nui
sances of shrubs and thorns.
The public defender didn’t show her much else. He pushed papers around waiting for Katie too leave when she had gone to his small office in downtown Oakland. The office was in the basement and was guarded by an old man with thick eye brows who made Katie wait an hour to see paperwork that was worthless. The public defender, after her sixty-minute wait, offered no help besides tossing the photos at her along with a copy of the ten-page confession.
The confession was nonsensical. It was a transcription of dialogue between the police officers and Esteban. He stated that he had gone to the house at 3 pm in the afternoon. He’d worked for her in her garden planting roses, tulips, and weeding.
“So, that was it? Case solved? I don’t get it, where did you come in,” Vi asked. He looked intently at her. Vi gazed at her face letting his eyes soften on her button nose and then her mouth, which was perfect to him with its two plumb pink lips.
“Anita lived next to me. That’s Esteban’s wife. They lived next door to me in East Oakland. I’d been born and raised in the neighborhood. Everyone knew everyone. From Hector, the young Cholo, who was also, related to Anita, to Javier the guy that owned the burrito truck in downtown, to Anita and Esteban. Everyone knew everyone and everyone knew everyone’s business. Oakland is a big town but in Fruitvale it seemed real small. Anita also works at a nail salon. She does everyone’s nails in the neighborhood, she’s really good too. Even the men go see her. She called me to go see her.“
The nail shop was always bustling but when Katie arrived there was no one. Anita had called Katie crying and when Katie got to the shop she was still crying into her hands. Long red nails and tanned palms covered her face as Anita’s shoulder rose and sank. Anita’s eyes were rimmed with red and her mascara ran black threads down her face.
Robotic clumps circled on her back and legs as Anita cried. Katie meanwhile closed her eyes and listened.
“You, you, you have to help,” Anita said. “He’s everything to me.”
Anita talked about how they met in high school. How he had invited her to the prom. How she had helped him start his landscaping and gardening business as Anita’s brothers were landscapers, they knew the trade and taught Esteban. The two had been together forever. The gardener and the manicurist. He, growing things with his hands she, making people’s hands beautiful. Most of the nail salons in the bay were owned by the Vietnamese but Anita’s shop in East Oakland had stood out. It served as much of a gathering space for the locals as the burrito trucks, and the late night salsa bars. Anita was proud of the life she had made for herself and Esteban. They had both come from Mexico when they were just teenagers and had fought hard to get their green cards. Esteban had stood outside of Home Depots for days on end to just get a little work. Anita had worked the flea markets peddling home made tamales. She’d worked for hours putting together the masa and wrapping the dough in banana leaves.
“Anyways, they knew Tony and so they knew me. When Esteban was picked up for the crime Anita didn’t go to a lawyer, she came to me. A good thing too. The public defender didn’t even bother considering the coercion factor of the statement. Esteban was just another case, another spic that had murdered a white woman. He was just lucky that Trump and his friends hadn’t built gallows along with a wall.
Anita and I went to visit Esteban in jail. I’d been to the prison out in Santa Rita a few times. Picking up and dropping off people for Tony while he was still alive, “ Katie said.
Anita cried the entire ride to the jail. It was 30 minutes of tears in the car then another 30 minutes of tears waiting to see Esteban. Anita didn’t say much in the actual jail. She looked at her husband with the lost broken eyes of a puppy dog. She wanted him back that was for sure.
He couldn’t talk, neither in English nor in his native Spanish, as his jaw was broke. He wrote notes to the two of them. “I love you Anita said one,” the other “I am innocent.”
Katie didn’t say much at the visit. She just watched as Anita cried and Esteban looked forlorn. The meeting was a quick thirty minutes. The guards pushed them out almost as soon as they got in.
“Business has been slow for me lately. All the new tech money comes with problems but it doesn’t come with problems that like to be solved with the hard work of a PI like me. In case you haven’t figured it out I’m a bit on the fringe for this sort of work,” Katie said.
Katie pointed at her breasts and pursed her lips. Vi laughed. He waved the waiter over.
“What would you like?”
“You can order for me,” Katie said.
“I’ve never been here though.”
“I’m feeling adventurous.”
The waiter came over and Vi ordered. He decided on the salmon and the duck breast. The first would be served on a salad with bacon, red onions and cherry tomatoes. The latter with toasted almond shreds on a bed of lettuce.
“I’m sure it will be good,” Katie said. She blew a kiss at Vi.
He laughed.
“So how did you get into it?”
“Into PI work?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I grew up here in Oakland. I wasn’t in Fruitvale. I lived in north Oakland, over by where Emeryville is. My parents had lived there for ages. Tony, I mentioned him before, he was my next-door neighbor. He was a crotchety old white man. He used to be on the force but he quit.”
“Really why?”
“He said that being a cop changed him too much. He began to think that everyone was a suspect. He didn’t live in the neighborhoods that he worked in and treated everyone like a criminal… because they were. He only interacted with lawbreakers.”
“Sounds like the Stanford prison experiment.”
Katie raised her eyebrow.
“You’ve never heard of it,” Vi asked. He took a sip of his wine. The tannins of the red liquid drying out his mouth. “All these college students took part in it. Half were prisoners, half were guards. Everyone ended up internalizing their roles. The prisoners stayed in the experiment even though they were being tortured by the guards. Some of the guards even attacked the prisoners with fire extinguishers. Everyone was just a student though, they were doing the experiment for a little extra money.”
“Yeah. I guess that’s sort of how Tony felt. He was just policing too much. He quit. People in the neighborhood would come by and ask him for advice though. Where to find their missing brother, if their wife or husband was cheating on them… A lot of time he would go after missing pets.”
Tony had been generous with the locals. The generosity endeared him in the neighborhood. He would sit for hours casing out a house trying to find a missing relative. The tall white man would have looked out of place in most of Oakland if he hadn’t driven a beat up car and dressed poorly. He didn’t get busy much and since Katie had taken over his business neither had she. Occasionally she would get a caller but things had slowed down. It was easier to track people with phone apps, infidelity wasn’t an issue as everyone had become adulterous, and people were more concerned about paying for their rent than finding their lost pussy cats. A missing cat, a missing dog, meant saved money in dog food.
“And that’s where you come in, you were the best at finding lost cats,” Vi said with a chuckle.
“Yeah,” Katie said. “I’m a real pussy hound.”
“We have a lot in common then.”
Katie laughed and her eyes danced along Vi’s body. “Tony hired me to sit in places and watch then tell him what happened. He would make me take notes. Who was driving what car, what people looked like, then he would drill me with questions. He said half of solving a case was is looking at the details and the other half was getting the suspect drunk and have them confess. He always said that justice was something you have to wait on. A good detective knows how to have patience.”
“Do people confess a lot?”
“Everyone confesses if they are put to it. Even if they have nothing to tell. They keep talking and talking and talking until they
say what you want to hear, if you are putting it to them enough.”
“Putting it to them enough?”
“We should change the subject to something a little nicer.”
“Katie, do you play rough? Is that what you are implying?”
“I’m saying that people will say whatever they think you want to hear if they are getting beaten.”
“Like Esteban?”
“Yes. Just like Esteban.”
“So you went and saw him in jail?”
“He was being held at Santa Rita. It has a two and a half star rating on yelp. Although it is ‘environmentally friendly.’ In 2002 the prison had solar panels installed that provide half the energy during the day. It is a bay area prison for sure.”
“It also has that hit song – ‘Santa Rita Weekend.’”
“Yeah. So you know the jail?”
“Not intimately. But I do know the Coup.”
“I went to the jail to see Esteban. It’s not the best of places to be and for the accused murderer of a cop’s wife. Things did not look good for Esteban. He was a bit of a hero with the other prisoners but they had no say about how the guards treated him. He’d been worked over when we saw him. His tan skin had dark bruises everywhere. His jaw was a mess. The punches and kicks the cops had given him left marks the same color as bruised plums. He put out his hands immediately for Anita. His nails though, they were dirty. Soil and dirt were lodged under his fingernails and his index finger had a slight nick on it.”
“But didn’t he wear gloves?”
“Exactly,” Katie said pointing at Vi. “When you get your nails done as often as Esteban did, you wouldn’t have dirty nails.”
“So you asked him about the gloves right?”
“Of course I did. He said that he’d left the gloves at the Richardson’s house the day before. The last time he had been there. The day of the murder. He had to have worked on a garden in the morning.”
“When did she die?”
“The autopsy said that she died in the late afternoon.”
“Well, he still had time to go and murder her after his morning job.”