Homicide (100 page)

To properly credit the idea for this book, we journey back twenty years to a Christmas Eve I spent with Roger Nolan, Russ Carney, Donald Kincaid and Bill Lansey, observing some routine mayhem and preparing to write a brief feature article on the holiday observances of those charged with working murders. I, for one, enjoy the perversity of a silent, holy night punctuated by a double-cutting in Pimlico, and I thought there might be a few readers of the
Baltimore Sun
who might also be willing to appreciate the small wit of the thing.

So I brought a bottle up to headquarters, slipped past the security desk, and joined the homicide squad working overnight as they handled a street shooting, a drug overdose and the aforementioned knife fight. Later, with much of the work done and an early morning choral concert of holiday music playing on the office television, I sat with the detectives as Carney poured cheer.

The elevator doors rang and Kincaid appeared, back from the last shooting of the shift—a desultory affair that landed the victim in an emergency room bed with a gunshot wound to an upper leg. He would live to see New Year’s.

“Most people are getting up right now, going under the tree and finding some kinda gift. A tie, or a new wallet or something,” mused Kincaid. “This poor bastard gets a bullet for Christmas.”

We laughed. And then—I will never forget the moment—Bill Lansey said:

“The shit that goes on up here. If someone just wrote down what happens in this place for one year, they’d have a goddamn book.”

Two years later, Bill Lansey, bless him, was dead of a heart attack and I wasn’t feeling all that good about things myself. Despite record profits, my newspaper was challenging its labor union with a contract
of givebacks in medical coverage and provoking a strike—an economic stance that was to become thematic in journalism over the next couple decades. I hated my bosses just then, and being one to nurse a grudge I sensed it might be good to conjure a leave of absence, something that would hold my job at a daily newspaper but avoid the newsroom for a time.

Remembering Lansey’s remark, I wrote to the Baltimore police commissioner, Edward J. Tilghman. Would it be possible, I asked with feigned innocence, to observe his detectives for a year?

Yes, he replied, it would.

To this day, I have no direct explanation for his decision. The captain in charge of the homicide unit was opposed to the idea, as was the deputy commissioner for operations, the number two in the department. And a straw poll of detectives in the unit quickly revealed most thought it a terrible notion to allow a reporter into the unit. My good fortune was that a police department is a paramilitary organization with a rigid chain of command. It is not, in any sense, a democracy.

I never managed to ask Tilghman about his decision. He died before the book was published—indeed, before I’d finished my research. “You need to ask why he let you in?” Rich Garvey later offered. “The man had a brain tumor. What other explanation do you need?”

Maybe so. But years later the CID commander, Dick Lanham, told me there was something more subtle in play. In response to questions about my status, Tilghman said his own years as a homicide detective were the most enjoyable and gratifying of his career. I suppose I’d like to believe his motivation for letting me inside was as pure as that, though Garvey was probably onto something as well.

In any event, I entered the unit in January 1988 with the improbable rank of police intern, working New Year’s Day with the men—and all nineteen detectives and supervisors were male—of Lieutenant Gary D’Addario’s shift.

The rules were fairly straightforward. I could not communicate what I witnessed to my newspaper and I had to obey the orders of the supervisors and investigators I followed. I could not quote anyone by name unless they agreed to be so quoted. And when my manuscript was complete, it would be reviewed by the department’s legal affairs division—not to censor my work for general content but to assure that I did not reveal key pieces of evidence in cases still pending. As it turned out, no changes resulted from this review.

Shift after shift, with detectives looking on warily, I filled notepads with what seems to me now a frantic stream of quotes, case details, biographical data and general impressions. I read through all the detectives’ case files from the previous year, as well as the H-files on some of the biggest cases I had chased as a police reporter: the Warren House shootings, the Bronstein murders, the Barksdale warfare in the Murphy Homes back in ’82, the Harlem Park jacket slaying from ’83. I couldn’t believe I could just walk to the admin office and pull entire case files, then sit at a desk and read them at leisure. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t thrown off crime scenes, or out of interrogation rooms. I couldn’t believe the department brass wasn’t going to change its collective mind, confiscate my ID card and toss me onto Frederick Street.

But days became weeks and the detectives—even those cautious souls who would change their very tone when I walked up on their conversations—soon lost the will to perform, to pretend to be someone other than who they were.

I learned to drink. I dropped my Amex card now and then, whereupon the detectives more than matched me round for round, showing me I still had a lot to learn. Staggering from the Market Bar at closing one night, Donald Worden—who had allowed me to follow him on calls and through cases, but always with a certain veiled contempt—glared at me as if for the first time and drawled, “All right, Simon. What the hell do you wanna see? What the fuck do you think we’re gonna show you?”

I had no answer. Notepads were stacked on my desk, a dog-eared tower of random detail that confused and intimidated me. I tried to work six days a week, but my marriage was ending and sometimes I worked seven. If the detectives went drinking after work, I was often in tow.

On night shifts, I would work doubles, coming in at four and staying through the midnight shift until early morning. Sometimes, coming off midnight, we drank at dawn, and I would stagger home to sleep until night. I learned to my amazement that if you forced yourself to drink the morning after a bad drunk, it somehow felt better.

On one February morning, I was hungover and late for morning roll call when Worden phoned to wake me with the news that a dead girl had been found in a Reservoir Hill alley. I was at the crime scene ten minutes later, staring at the eviscerated body of Latonya Wallace and the beginning of an investigation that would become the spine of the book.

I began to focus on that case. On Pellegrini, the new man. On Edgerton, the lone-wolf secondary on the case, and on Worden, the gruff
conscience of the unit. I talked less, listened more and learned to pull out the pen and notepad discreetly, so as not to upset the delicate moments of ordinary squadroom life.

In time, because I read the casework voraciously and sat through multiple shifts to note the comings and goings of detectives, I became in some small way a clearinghouse of basic information:

“Where’s Barlow?”

“He’s in court. Part eighteen.”

“Is Kevin with him?”

“No, he’s at the bar.”

“With who?”

“Rick James and Linda. And Garvey went, too.”

“Who caught the one on Payson last night?”

“Edgerton. He went home after the morgue and he’s coming back at six.”

But mostly, I was comic to these men, an amusing twenty-something distraction— “a mouse tossed into a room full of cats,” by Terry McLarney’s description. “You’re lucky we’re so bored with each other.”

If I went to a morning autopsy, Donald Steinhice would throw his voice and watch me eye the cadavers warily, just as Dave Brown would drag me to the Penn Restaurant to eat that nasty chorizo-and-egg platter so as to measure the fortitude of a novice. If I sat through a successful interrogation, Rich Garvey would turn to me at the end to ask if I had questions of my own, then laugh at whatever reportorial impulse resulted. And if I feel asleep on midnight shift, I would wake to find Polaroid photos of myself, head back in a chair, mouth open, flanked by smiling detectives imitating fellatio, their thumbs stuck through open zippers.

McLarney wrote my green sheet, the semi-annual evaluation so detested by working police in Baltimore. “Professional kibbitzer,” he wrote in summation of my standing. “It’s unclear what Intern Simon’s actual responsibilities are, however his hygiene is satisfactory and he seems to know a good deal about our activities. His sexual appetites remain suspect, however.”

At home, with a mattress on the bedroom floor and most of the furnishings in the possession of my ex-wife, I spent hours filling a computer with stream-of-consciousness rambling, emptying the notepads, trying to organize what I was witnessing into separate casefiles, biographies and chronologies.

The Latonya Wallace murder stayed open. I was mortified by this—and not because a killer roamed free and the destruction of a child was unavenged. No, I was too overawed by the manuscript I would soon have to write to waste a moment thinking in moral terms. Instead, I worried that the book would have no climax, that its conclusion would be open and empty and flawed.

I drank some more, though by summer the detectives, feeling sorry for me perhaps, were buying as many rounds as they put to my credit card. To avoid the heart of the matter—actually writing—I wasted a week or two interviewing the detectives at length with a tape recorder, producing the kind of interviews in which people who have for months been candid and open suddenly talk into a microphone with the certain knowledge that posterity is at stake.

Edgerton caught a second child-murder and solved it, and, without knowing it, I met in the mother of the dead girl one of the central characters of my next book,
The Corner
. Ella Thompson began for me at the door of her Fayette Street rowhouse, a mother’s face contorted in grief. Four years later, I would wander into the recreation center on Vincent Street and encounter her again—by accident—as I began reporting a different narrative, one that even the best detectives can only glimpse.

During that year in the homicide unit, I never actually felt I’d gone native. Not in any way that seemed to matter. Not in my own mind, anyway. I dressed the part, and at crime scenes and in courtrooms I did what the supervisors and investigators told me to do. Ultimately, I enjoyed myself and the company of the detectives immensely. For four years I had written city murders in a cramped, two-dimensional way—filling the back columns of the metro section with the kind of journalism that reduces all human tragedy, especially those with black or brown victims, to bland, bite-sized morsels:

Suddenly, I had been granted access to a world hidden, if not willfully ignored, by all of that dispassionate journalism. These weren’t murders as benchmarks of a day’s events. Nor were they the stuff of
pristine, perfectly rendered morality plays. By summer, with the body count rising in the Baltimore heat, I came to realize that I was standing on the factory floor. This was death investigation as an assembly-line process, a growth industry for a rust-belt America that had long ceased to mass manufacture much of anything, save for heartbreak itself. Perhaps, I told myself, it was the ordinariness of it all that made it, well, extraordinary.

They went after the Fish Man for the last time in December. He didn’t break. Latonya Wallace would not be avenged. But by then I had seen enough to know that the empty, ambiguous ending was the correct one. I called John Sterling, my editor in New York, and told him it was better this way.

“It’s real,” I said. “It’s how the world works, or doesn’t.”

He agreed. In fact, he’d seen it before I did. He told me to start writing, and after staring at the computer screen for a couple weeks, wondering how you type the first fucking sentence of a fucking book, I found myself back at the Market Bar with McLarney, who swayed to the rhythm of a ninth Miller Lite and eyed me, much amused at my predicament.

“Isn’t this what you actually do for a living?”

Sort of. Except not something so big as a book.

“I know what you’re gonna write.”

Do tell.

“It’s not about the cases. The murders. I mean, you’ll write about the murders so you have stuff to write about. But that’s all just the bullshit.”

I listened. Carefully.

“You’re gonna write about us. About the guys. About how we act and the shit we say to each other, about how pissed off we get and how funny we are sometimes and the shit that goes on in that office.”

I nodded. As if I’d known it all along.

“I’ve seen you taking notes when we were just bullshitting, when we’re just sitting around with nothing to do but jerk each other around. We piss and moan and there you are writing. We tell a dirty joke and you’re writing. We say anything or do anything and you’re there with your pen and your notepad and a weird look on your face. And fuck if we didn’t let you do it.”

And then he laughed. At me, or with me—I’ve never quite been sure.

The book sold some copies. Not enough to make any bestseller lists, but enough that Sterling was willing to pay me if I could manage another
idea for another tome. Roger Nolan confiscated my police intern ID and I went back to the
Sun
. The detectives went back to having their world unexamined. And save for an immediate, panicked reaction by the department brass in which there were threats to charge the entire unit with conduct unbecoming an officer—the raw wit and rampant profanity of their underlings left colonels and deputy commissioners shocked, shocked, I tell you—the general response to
Homicide: A Year on the
Killing Streets
seemed to be no less muted than that which greets most narrative nonfiction.

Certainly, it didn’t help that the tale came from Baltimore. The editor of the
New York Times Book Review
declined initially to review the work, declaring it to be a regional book. A few police reporters at other newspapers said nice things. One evening, when I was working rewrite, plugging out-of-town temperatures into the weather chart, William Friedkin called from Los Angeles to say how much he enjoyed the book.