Buried on Avenue B by Peter de Jonge

Author:Peter de Jonge [Jonge, Peter de]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780062097125
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-08-01T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 33

JUST INSIDE THE door of the Longboat Key Public Library is a wooden phone booth that must be forty years old. When O’Hara pushes the hinged door shut behind her, a tiny ventilating fan goes on with the light. From the hush of the booth, she looks out at the nearly-as-quiet room, where a male volunteer pushes a cart up and down the short rows. Every few feet, he stops to lift a book from the cart to its old spot on the shelf. He looks like a farmer unpicking fruit and returning it to the tree.

When O’Hara stepped out of Di Nunzio’s apartment and back into the scalding light, she was in need of a quiet place to mull things over alone, and remembered the little library next to the post office behind Publix. Di Nunzio is the most encouraging representative of her demographic O’Hara has encountered since Paulette walked into the precinct and the drumbeat of senescence and dementia began. If Di Nunzio’s recollection of a second gunshot is accurate, it’s the first major break in the case. From the moment O’Hara got the call from Sarasota about the ballistic report, she has been trying to connect the old man and the kid. If two shots were fired that morning in Levin’s condo, it essentially puts the two victims side by side.

But how much stock can O’Hara put in the memory, eyesight, and most of all hearing of a ninety-year-old woman who by her own admission is just about deaf, rarely wears her hearing aid, and when she does is often besieged by rogue sonic blasts? O’Hara can imagine the reaction if it gets out she tried to build a case on something a deaf person heard.

Open on her lap is a sketch pad, purchased from Publix the night before. On the first pristine page she writes:

s. di nunzio: 2 gunshots, a couple minutes apart

green van, black letters

Sarasota Water Authority

O’Hara takes another look through the porthole-sized window. In the center of the room, in front of the librarian’s desk, is an old-school wooden card catalogue. Beside it on a stand is a well-thumbed medical dictionary, and above it, on the wall, the Plaque of Honor, inscribed with the names of volunteers who died in the line of library duty. What does it mean, she wonders, that she now delights in silence as much as the twang of a beat-up Stratocaster and that libraries are up there next to dive bars on her list of favorite places? She knows exactly what it means. She’s getting old.

A fat phone book, as much of an anachronism as the booth itself, dangles from a chain by O’Hara’s knee, and she opens it to the section in front listing municipal agencies. When she can’t find anything close to the Sarasota Water Authority, she uses her cell to call the city’s main information number and asks what agency handles water issues for condos on Longboat Key.

“Sarasota doesn’t handle Longboat,” says the receptionist, “that’s Manatee County.

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