The Detective's Garden. Janyce Stefan-Cole

      Unbridled Books

      © 2016 by Janyce Stefan-Cole

      All Rights Reserved

      An excerpt from The Detective’s Garden appeared in

      WG News+Arts as “Emil’s Williamsburg”

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Stefan-Cole, Janyce, author

      Title: The detective's garden : a love story and meditation on murder : a

      novel / by Janyce Stefan-Cole

      Description: Lakewood, CO : Unbridled Books, [2016]

      Identifiers: LCCN 2016011030 | ISBN 9781609531331 (alk paper)

      Subjects: LCSH: Widowers--Fiction | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective /

      General | GSAFD: Mystery fiction

      Classification: LCC PS3619T4455 D48 2016 | DDC 813/6--dc23

      LC record available at https://lccnlocgov/2016011030

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      For Brandon. Definitely.

      Teach me, and I will be silent;

      make me understand how I have erred.

       BOOK OF JOB

       Brooklyn NY, 1995

      Everyone likes to believe there once was a garden where all things were pure.

      Life’s a humbling lesson, Emil thought, facing his own gun. The intruder lit a cigarette with one hand, using a beat up old Zippo lighter sporting a Lucky Strike logo, but smoking a Gauloise, inhaled hard, exhaled slowly while demanding the deed to Emil’s house. In the other hand was the Smith & Wesson .38 Special. Emil didn’t care about losing the house; one was as good as another; a roof, running water, heat. But to take the garden—that was punishing.

      He’d faced a gun before, on another summer night long ago, in Slovenia. With him then was a girl he hardly knew, Elena. They’d been lovers only a few days and would soon part—forever, he’d assumed. The man with the gun called her a thieving betrayer, and Emil, in the briefest of glances, saw his lover’s fear. It ran across her face like the shadow of dark birds, a flock of evil black birds.

      Guns make a lot of noise. Bang! The Big Bang theory; scientists say it happened very fast. There was a pinprick of something—matter, antimatter, dark matter?—and it popped, blew massively and the universe was born. Science would want to know what blew. The religious would say who made it blow. But Emil would ask why.

      Thou shalt not kill, the Sixth Commandment, behind honoring mother and father. The first commandment is in regard to no other gods. Emil found it odd that murder was so low on the list, but he was an ex-homicide detective and would have put not taking life at the top. The question was whether he was facing a killer now, or an amateur bent on getting even. Either way, at such close range, Emil would be dead if a bullet left the chamber.

      He was told to sit. The one with the firepower gives the orders; Emil walked slowly to the other side of the marble table and sat. The garden was quiet all around them, only the crickets with their obsessive rubbing, on and on, and the suffocating heat. It was going to be a long night.

       And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the East; and there he put the man

       whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree

       that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the

       garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

       Book of Genesis

      PART ONE

       SHOOTING PEPPERS

      Sunday night, June 18th, Emil Milosec sat alone in the dark. He felt secure in the leafy haven of his garden, an oasis he and Elena had created: a twenty by eighty foot hedge against the cheerless urban surround.

      He hadn’t yet fired his revolver. Hadn’t yet, his former partner Detective Mike Dunn might say, gotten pissed off at God. Sitting with a glass of a full-bodied pinot noir, he innocently thought about original sin: Adam and Eve, the first fornication; a garden, Eden, no zip code. It was a topic Emil rolled over like worry beads repeatedly massaged. He had his own ideas of Eve’s shape and Adam’s manhood. He had his own ideas about everything, his wife said; everything but himself.

      Even his mother had warned against his arrogant questioning. “Only God can know,” she’d say, wagging a finger in his face. “Too many ideas fill that head of yours, my Emiloshka.” She’d threatened to drill a hole on top so all the questions would pass out of him. Young Emil imagined steam, like from a kettle, whistling out of the hole in his head, forming words in the air. He began to think anyone could read his mind and for a time tried to think in code.

      Was that first coupling transcendent? He would like to know. Did Adam perform—not too fast, not too slow? Did Eve respond with all she had? First times are usually a disappointment, he reflected. His was, with a whore he paid twenty-five hard-earned dollars to break him in. The Bible is prudish on details; how the first sin went off that we’re supposed to regret for all time. No, he didn’t buy it, not one single word of the Genesis story. As for regrets, he figured each and every one of us did a good job creating our own.

      Emil leaned forward, hearing a rustling sound toward the rear of the garden. He thought he’d seen a possum the other day by the back wall and wondered if they were nocturnal and what they ate. Or it could be Mrs. Noily’s cat Sam nosing around. He took another sip of wine.

      Why not make Eve the same way as Adam, out of dirt mixed with God’s spit? Or like the giraffes or strawberries or ice, the way they came about? Why take Eve out of Adam’s rib? That all but guaranteed a form of incest, didn’t it? Was that the snag in the story that led to the first calculated criminal, Cain? Was murder written into the DNA all that long time ago? Or was the chaos of humankind the result of a blurry law laid down in secret behind closed doors: No touching! Just to keep the demon semen in check? Then why not make the first couple neutered?

      He remembered it was Father’s Day. Earlier he’d heard giggling children on the street out front. Elena hadn’t wanted kids; she’d said not every woman did. She’d joked, said breeding was too Darwinian. Emil had wanted her: her body, her sex, her. The other cops on the force had families, but his life was not the same as theirs. He inhabited two separate worlds, one colored by violent death, the other by Elena, and he thought he’d kept the two carefully apart. Elena once said, “You can be a perfectly good mother without having children.”

      Emil’s meandering thoughts were cut short by the noise of drunken rummaging from next door. The clash of cheap aluminum chairs, a swear word in Spanish, a belch. Emil tensed. Some nights his neighbor Franco called out, saying what the liquor made him say.

      Tonight, very drunk, he jeered, “Amigo! You there? Sí, I can smell you! Digame, how do the peppers grow, hah?”