David Thayer

The Night Gardener

Headline: God is Crying

George Pelecanos writes his stories from the ground up. Setting is more than background in THE NIGHT GARDENER, where the neighborhoods of Washington DC are as integral to the storyline as the characters. The novel covers the decades between the Reagan era and now, an informal history of powder cocaine’s progression to crack, and the violence that has destroyed a generation of black families in the process.

Pelecanos’ latest novel is a procedural with a twist. The novel opens at a crime scene in 1985, a scene that involves a veteran detective and two rookie cops. The veteran, TC Cooke, is black; the rookies white; Cooke begins to realize the murders are part of a series of killings and vows to find the man responsible.

The opening paragraph is vintage Pelecanos: The crime scene was in the low 30s around E, on the edge of Fort Dupont Park, in a neighborhood known as Greenway, in the 6^th District of Southeast DC. A girl of fourteen lay in the grass on the side of a community vegetable garden that was blind to the residents whose yards backed up to the nearby woods.

No doubt about it, you’re in Pelecanos country.

Twenty years later on those rookie cops from the opening scene works in the VCD, the violent crimes unit of the DC police. Gus Ramone is assisting the primary detective in an investigation into the death of Asa Johnson, a teenager gunned down in a community garden. The murder shares characteristics with the unsolved homicides known as the Palindrome murders.

Dan “Doc” Holiday is an ex-cop fired from the force after an investigation linked him to a prostitute. Gus Ramone led the IAD team that busted Holiday. Holiday discovers Asa Johnson’s body and reaches out to TC Cooke, the man who worked the murder case twenty years earlier. Though retired and suffering the effects of a stroke, Cooke remains determined to solve the Palindrome case, and believes he knows who did it.

The NIGHT GARDENER is a novel whose back-story is the story. The unsolved murders from the past expose the fault lines running through the DC Police, and the unresolved issues among the principal characters. Gus Ramone is wary when Dan Holiday owns up to discovering Asa’s body; the mistrust is mutual and there are plenty of active cases for Ramone to handle.

Mayhem is occurring in real time, courtesy of Romeo Brock, a young gun who sees what he wants and takes it. Romeo has robbed a drug dealer of his money and his woman. Romeo wants more. His older cousin, Conrad Gaskins, has vowed to keep an eye on Romeo. Gaskins is living on paper, parole, and he knows where Romeo is headed, to prison or the morgue. Gaskins wants to walk away, to lead a normal life. This excerpt with his cousin exposes the flaw in Romeo’s thinking:

“You shouldn’t go anymore. We got money.”

Gaskins shook his head. “You missin my point, Ro.”

“Cousin, we are rich.”

“And how you think that story’s gonna end?”

“Huh?”

“Every story’s got an ending,” Gaskins said.

Romeo Brock doesn’t how to quit while he’s ahead. His crimes keep the VCU detectives hopping, but Gus Ramone is fixated on the death of the teenager, Asa Johnson.

Asa was a friend of Gus Ramone’s son, Diego, a student in the same school. Ramone is investigating more than a murder; he’s trying to get inside the life of a teenager, his teenager, while getting through the day as a Violent Crimes detective. He’s enrolled Diego at a suburban school in the hopes of protecting him, but his good intentions have unforeseen consequences.

Gus is struck by a remark made by Terrance Johnson, the dead boy’s father. Standing in the drizzle, Johnson says, “God’s crying.”

Gus Ramone does the heavy lifting for the first half of the book. Ramone’s personality is low key, he’s a systematic detective, and Pelecanos devotes considerable time to the details of the squad’s routine. The precision with which this aspect of the story is described is both a strength and weakness in the narrative. Gus is not as interesting as Dan Holiday or Romeo Brock, and despite all the cameos by the others, this is Gus Ramone’s book.

Musical references are a Pelecanos signature. A standout in this book is Freda Payne’s BRING THE BOYS HOME. The song’s refrain is “bring them back alive,” something every mother in the District wishes whenever their child leaves for school or hits the street. The details that infuse the story, songs on the jukebox, the bars people frequent, the brand of cigarettes they smoke, are nuances that reveal the characters’ place in the scheme of things. Romeo Brock pays homage to another era by smoking Kools, while an enforcer for a dealer tips his ball cap at an angle that says he’s strapped.

Pelecanos maintains a strong narrative presence, mapping his turf with an explorer’s eye. House by house, block by block, he knows where his characters are, and wants the reader to know when eye contact will get them killed, how to read body language, the swagger, the dip and the roll.

Once Dan Holiday reenters the story, Pelecanos kicks it up a notch. The pace of the novel quickens, resembling a thriller rather than a procedural, as Pelecanos rolls out a series of scenes designed to create tension and suspense, the things you’d expect in a crime novel. Romeo Brock gets his due in one of the few violent scenes in the book; his undoing exposes a crooked cop, and a connection to the Palindrome murders.

Without spoiling the ending, it’s fair to say that THE NIGHT GARDENER takes a different path to resolution than many commercial novels would dare. The author has ambitions beyond the genre, ambition that invokes the tradition of the social novel and what it reveals about society. What we learn is more than a history lesson about the impact of crack cocaine’s arrival in DC. Contrary to what his character has to say about every story having an ending, Pelecanos shows us that the opposite is true. This is a story that has no end in sight, only fresh faces and new names, following a well-worn path to oblivion.

David Thayer is a freelance writer and author of the blog ONE MORE BITE OF THE APPLE. He’s a published poet whose work has appeared in an anthology as well as literary magazines. He has recently completed a crime novel, one of a series about cops in the NYPD’s Intelligence Division. He lives in Seattle with his wife, Diane, and can be reached for comment at: davidwthayer@msn.com.