Homicide (28 page)

“I don’t …”

“About how he’s like a gigolo living off …”

“Well,” says Ollie, a little embarrassed, “I know she bought that car for him and now he uses it to go out on the town. He’s gone every night.”

“Yeah? Do you know if he likes young girls?”

“Yeah, he likes young girls,” she says, disapproving.

“I mean, real young.”

“Well, that I can’t really say …”

“Okay, that’s all right,” Landsman says. “Where’s the car now? Do you know?”

“He say the repo man came an’ took it.”

Pellegrini and Edgerton look at each other. It’s almost too perfect.

“It was repossessed?” asks Landsman. “He told you that?”

“She told my husband that.”

“Your neighbor did? Andrew’s wife?”

“Yeah,” she says, wrapping her robe tight in the chill of the front hall. “She say Johnny’s Cars came an’ got it.”

“Johnny’s? Up on Harford Road?”

“I guess.”

The detectives thank the woman, then head straight to Johnny’s in Northeast Baltimore, where they walk the entire lot looking for the car that Andrew’s wife said had been repossessed. No Lincoln. Landsman is now completely convinced.

“This motherfucker dumps the body, gets rid of his car, and when people ask him, he says it got repo’d. Fuck it, we need to talk to this motherfucker tonight.”

It is after 11:00
P.M
. when they return to Newington Avenue and talk their way into 716. Andrew is a short, balding man with a face that is all hard angles. He is still awake, drinking warm beer and watching the local news in the basement. Three plainclothes detectives walking down the stairs do not seem to surprise him.

“Hey, Andrew, I’m Sergeant Landsman, this is Detective Edgerton and Detective Pellegrini. We’re working on the little girl’s murder. How you doin’ tonight?”

“Awright.”

“Listen, we want to ask you a couple questions about your car.”

“My car?” asks Andrew, curious.

“Yeah. The Lincoln.”

“They took that away,” he says, as if that should end any discussion.

“Who did?”

“The car dealer.”

“Johnny’s?”

“Yeah.’ Cause my wife, she didn’t make the payment on it,” he adds, a little put out.

Landsman steers the conversation toward the parking pad in the back alley. Andrew readily acknowledges his habit of keeping the car in the rear yard to prevent theft or vandalism, then further agrees that the car had been in the rear yard on the Tuesday night of the girl’s disappearance.

“I remember it ’cause I went out to the car for something and felt like someone was out there watching me.”

Landsman, startled, looks hard at the man.

“How’s that again?”

“I went out to the car that night to get something and I felt real nervous, like someone was out there watching me,” he repeats.

Landsman gives Pellegrini one of those did-I-hear-what-I-just-thought-I-heard stares. Three minutes into the conversation and the guy is already putting himself out in the alley on the night the child is abducted. Hell, he probably had reason to be nervous about being watched out there in the alley on Tuesday. Who the fuck wouldn’t be nervous carrying a little girl’s body from their back door to a car trunk?

“Why were you nervous?”

Andrew shrugs. “I just got a strange feeling, you know …”

Edgerton begins walking the length of the basement room, looking for red-brown stains or a child’s gold earring. The basement is a poor version of a bachelor’s lair, with a sofa and television in the center of the room and, against the long wall, five or six liquor bottles on top of an old dresser being used as a bar. Behind the sofa is a plastic laundry tub containing two to three inches of urine. What the hell is it about Newington Avenue that makes people piss into buckets?

“This is kind of your place down here, huh?” asks Edgerton.

“Yeah, this is where I hang.”

“Your wife don’t come down here much?”

“No, she leaves me be.”

Landsman brings Andrew back to the night in the alley: “What did you go out to the car for?”

“I can’t remember. Something in the glove compartment.”

“You didn’t go in the trunk?”

“The trunk? No, the glove compartment … I had the car doors open and I just felt like I was being watched. I was, you know, a little scared about it and said, well, damn, I’ll get whatever I need to get tomorrow morning. So I went back inside.”

Landsman looks at Pellegrini, then back at Andrew. “Did you know the little girl?”

“Me?” The question startles him. “The girl that got killed? I haven’t been here that long, you know. I don’t know most people around here.”

“What do you think they should do to the guy that killed her?” asks Landsman, smiling strangely.

“Hey,” says Andrew, “do what you have to do. Make sure it’s the right guy and then you don’t even need a trial. I have a daughter, and if it were her, I’d take care of it myself … I have friends who would help me take care of it.”

Edgerton takes Pellegrini out of earshot to ask if the detectives and detail officers doing the consent searches on Newington Avenue have
checked the basements. Pellegrini doesn’t know. That was the trouble with a sprawling red ball; between five detectives and a dozen detail officers, progress is dependent on too many people.

“Andrew,” says Landsman, “we’re gonna need to talk to you downtown.”

“Tonight?”

“Yeah. We’ll bring you back up when we’re done.”

“I been sick. I can’t really leave the house.”

“We really need to talk to you. It could help us out with the little girl’s murder.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know nothing about that, you know. I’m sick …”

Landsman ignores the protestations. Short of arrest, which requires both a crime and probable cause, there is no law that can make a man go against his will to an interrogation room in the middle of the night. It’s one of the small joys of American police work that few people ever argue the point.

Andrew comes to rest in the large interrogation room fifteen minutes later, with Landsman standing on the other side of the door in the sixth-floor corridor, telling Pellegrini and Edgerton to find that Lincoln.

“I’ll take a long statement and keep him here,” says the sergeant. “We gotta know if his car was really repo’d.”

Pellegrini’s call to old Johnny wakes him up. It’s now the middle of the night, but the detective asks the auto dealer to go down to the sales office and dig out the paperwork. Johnny and Mrs. Johnny are already there when the two detectives get to Harford Road. The dealer finds a record of the sale and the payment schedule, but nothing to indicate a repossession order. Maybe, he suggests, the paperwork hasn’t yet come from the finance company.

“If it was repossessed, where would they tow it?”

“They got one lot over on Belair Road.”

“Can you show us?”

Johnny and Mrs. Johnny pile back into their Cadillac Brougham and pull out of the lot. The detectives follow them to a fenced impound lot near the city’s northeastern edge. The car isn’t there. Nor is it at a second lot out in Rosedale, in eastern Baltimore County. And at 3:00
A.M
., when the two detectives learn of a third lot in the northeast county near the Parkville police precinct, they head north with growing confidence that no one has towed Andrew’s shit-brown Lincoln Continental anywhere, that the lying bastard ditched the car somewhere on his own.

The third impound lot is protected by a ten-foot chain-link fence.
Pellegrini walks up to one corner and stares through the metal mesh at a row of cars parked along the far end, hopeful that Andrew’s car isn’t among them. But the next to the last car in the row is a Lincoln Continental.

“There it is,” he says, his voice flat with disappointment.

“Where?” asks Edgerton.

“Near the end there. The brown one.”

“Is that it?”

“Well, it’s a brown Lincoln.”

Pellegrini scans the lot for any sign of life. They do not need a warrant for the car; Andrew no longer has any claim to ownership. But the front gate is chained and padlocked.

“Well,” says Pellegrini, “here goes nothing.” The detective digs the tip of one black Florsheim into the metal links and begins pushing himself up the front of the fence. Two large Dobermans race the length of the impound lot, yelping and growling and baring their teeth. Pellegrini jumps down.

“Go on, Tom,” says Edgerton, laughing. “You can take ’em.”

“No, that’s all right.”

“They’re just animals. You’re a man with a gun.”

Pellegrini smiles.

“Go on. Show ’em your badge.”

“I think we can wait,” says Pellegrini, walking back to the car.

Four hours later, Pellegrini is headed back toward the lot with Landsman, who finished taking Andrew’s statement a little before 6:00
A.M
. Although neither detective has slept in twenty-eight hours, there is little sign of fatigue when they roll out Perring Parkway toward the county, or when they follow a bored attendant across the dirt lot to the Lincoln. So it really was repo’d, thinks Pellegrini, so what. Maybe Andrew gave up the car figuring that it was clean, that there was nothing to link him to the murder.

“This the one?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

The two detectives check the car’s interior first, searching the upholstery and carpeting for red-brown stains, hairs or fibers. Landsman finds a piece of imitation gold chain, a woman’s bracelet, above the dashboard. Pellegrini points to a small dark brown stain on the passenger seat.

“Blood?”

“Nah. I don’t think so.”

Landsman pulls a leuco malachite kit from his pocket, treats a cotton swab with chemical and runs it across the stain. Dull gray.

Pellegrini finishes checking the back seat, then both men walk around
to the trunk. Landsman turns the key, but hesitates for just a moment before opening the top.

“C’mon, you mother,” he says, coming as close to genuine prayer as Jay Landsman ever does.

The trunk is clean. He treats seven or eight leuco swabs with chemical and drags them into every one of the trunk’s indentations and crevices. Dull gray.

Pellegrini exhales slowly, his breath clouding in the frigid air. Then he walks to the Cavalier and sits in the driver’s seat. He holds up the bracelet and looks carefully at the gold strand, sensing that it, too, leads nowhere, that within a day or two the family of Latonya Wallace will answer no, they have never seen the chain before. Pellegrini waits silently as Landsman scrapes two more swabs along the interior before closing the trunk, sticking his hands deep into his jacket pockets and walking back to the Chevrolet.

“Let’s go.”

Suddenly, the exhaustion is overpowering, and both detectives are squinting in the morning light as the car rolls south on Harford Road and then west on Northern Parkway. For fifteen solid days, they have worked sixteen- and twenty-hour shifts, living on a roller-coaster ride from one suspect to another, bouncing wildly between moments of elation and hours of despair.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” says Landsman.

“What?”

“I think we need a day off. We gotta get some sleep, wake up and think on it.”

Pellegrini nods.

Somewhere near the Jones Falls interchange, Landsman speaks again.

“Don’t worry, Tom,” he says, “it’ll go down.”

But Pellegrini is awash in fatigue and doubt, and he says nothing.

In Jay Landsman’s office, the Latonya Wallace probe is spreading like a cancer. Crime scene photos, lab reports, diagrams, office reports, aerial photographs of Reservoir Hill taken from the police helicopter—the paper pours out of the case folder and marches across the sergeant’s desk and file cabinets. A second column of documents begins a flanking maneuver, attacking Pellegrini’s work area in the annex office, then overwhelming a cardboard box behind the detective’s chair. The case has become a world unto itself, spinning in an orbit of its own.

But for the rest of the homicide unit, it’s business as usual. For much of the decade, homicide detectives in Baltimore have believed that the law of averages will guarantee somewhere between 200 and 250 murders a year, a total that shakes out to about two homicides every three days. The unit’s institutional memory includes a few 300-plus years in the early 1970s, but the rate declined abruptly when the state’s shock-trauma medical system came on line and the emergency rooms at Hopkins and University started saving some of the bleeders. For the last two years, the body count has edged slightly higher, cresting at 226 in 1987, but the trend is nothing that makes the act of murder in Baltimore seem like anything more than a point on the probability curve. On Friday afternoons, the nightshift detectives can watch Kim and Linda, the admin secretaries, stamp case numbers on empty red binders—88041, 88042, 88043—and know with fat, happy confidence that somewhere on the streets of the city, several victims-to-be are stumbling toward oblivion. The veteran detectives will joke about it: Hell, the case numbers are probably tattooed on the backsides of doomed men in ultraviolet ink. If you put one through a postage meter, if you showed him the 88041 stenciled on his right cheek and told him what it meant, the poor fuck would change his name, lock himself in his basement, or jump the first Greyhound to Akron or Oklahoma City or any other spot a thousand miles away. But they never do; the math remains absolute.

Of course, within the confines of the established rate, statistical fluctuation permits the slow weekend due to rain, snow or a pennant race in the American League East. Also permitted is the aberrant full-moon midnight shift, when every other right-thinking Baltimorean reaches for a revolver, or those occasional and unexplained homicidal binges in which the city seems hell-bent on depopulating itself in the briefest time span possible. In late February, as the Latonya Wallace detail stretches into its third week, the homicide unit begins one such period when detectives on both shifts are hit with fourteen murders in thirteen days.

It is two weeks of mayhem, with bodies stacked like firewood in the ME’s freezer and detectives arguing over the office typewriters. On one particularly bad night, two men from McLarney’s squad find themselves acting out a scene that could only occur in the emergency room of an urban American hospital. The green-smocked vanguard of medical science is at stage right, struggling to repair a man with holes in his body. At stage left is Donald Waltemeyer, playing the role of First Detective. Enter Dave Brown, the Second Detective, who has come to assist his partner in the investigation of a Crime of Violence.