Homicide (41 page)

At the State Police barracks, the Fish Man proceeded to blow the box, sending the polygraph needle soaring on every key question about the murder. The polygraph result was not, of course, admissible as evidence, nor did every homicide detective believe in lie detection as an exact science. Still, the result added to Pellegrini’s suspicions.

So, too, did the arrival of an unexpected, if not entirely credible, witness. The man was a smokehound all right, as unbelievable a character as a detective might find. Arrested for assault in the Western District six days ago, he tried to make friends by assuring the booking officer that he knew who killed Latonya Wallace.

“And how do you know that?”

“He told me he did it.”

When Pellegrini got to the Western District that day, he heard a story about two old acquaintances drinking at a west side bar, about one acquaintance saying that he had recently been picked up and questioned for the murder of a little girl, about the other acquaintance asking whether he had committed the crime.

“No,” the first man said.

But later in the conversation the liquor got good to that man, who turned to his companion and said he would tell the truth. He did kill the child.

In the course of several interviews, the new witness related the same story to the detectives. He had known the man with whom he had been drinking for years. The man ran a store up on Whitelock Street, a fish store.

And so a second polygraph was scheduled for the day after tomorrow. Leaning back in his chair, Pellegrini reads the reports of the new witness’s interrogation with a mind balanced between serene hope and committed pessimism. In two days, he is sure, the man will also blow his box, failing the polygraph just as miserably as the Fish Man did. He will do this because his story is so perfect, so valuable, that it can’t possibly be true. A barroom confession, Pellegrini tells himself, is almost too easy for this case.

Pellegrini knows, too, that soon he will have a separate suspect file on the new witness as well. Not only because the willingness to implicate someone in a child killing is unusual behavior, but also because the new man himself knows the Reservoir Hill area and has a police record. For rape. With a knife. Nothing, Pellegrini tells himself again, is ever easy.

Closing the file with the office reports, Pellegrini reads through a draft report of his own, a four-page missive to the captain outlining the status of the case and arguing for a complete, prolonged review of the existing evidence. Without any primary crime scene or physical evidence, the report argued, there wasn’t much point in looking at any particular suspect and then attempting to connect him to the murder.

“This tactic might be successful in certain circumstances,” Pellegrini had written, “but not in a case where physical evidence is lacking.”

Instead, the memo urged a careful review of the entire file:

In simple terms, Pellegrini wants more time to work the case and he wants to work it alone. His report to the captain is clear, yet bureaucratic; generally succinct, yet written in the departmental prose that makes anyone with a rank higher than lieutenant feel warm and fuzzy all over. Still,
it could be better, and if he is going to get the time to review the case properly, the captain will have to be on board.

Pellegrini pulls the staple from the top page and spreads the draft on his desk, prepared to spend another hour or so at the typewriter. But Rick Requer has other ideas. On his way out of the annex office, he catches Pellegrini’s attention and cups his hand to his mouth in a repetitive, arclike motion—the international hand signal for uninhibited alcohol consumption.

“C’mon, bunk, let’s go have a couple.”

“You leaving?” asks Pellegrini, looking up from the file.

“Yeah, I’m out of here. Barrick’s squad is already in on four-to-twelve.”

Pellegrini shakes his head, then waves at the sea of paper on his desk. “I got some stuff here I wanted to go through.”

“You working over on that case?” asks Requer. “It’ll wait ’til tomorrow, won’t it?”

Pellegrini shrugs.

“C’mon, Tom, give it a night off.”

“I don’t know. Where you going to be?”

“At the Market. Eddie Brown and Dunnigan are already down there.”

Pellegrini nods, mulling it over. “If I get a few things done,” he says finally, “I might see you down there.”

No way, thinks Requer, walking toward the elevators. No way are we going to see Tom Pellegrini at the Market Bar when he could just as easily spend four hours beating himself up over Latonya Wallace. So when Pellegrini sidles up to the bar a half hour later, Requer is momentarily startled. Suddenly, without warning, Pellegrini has let go of the Case Without Pity and come up for a little air. By any reckoning, a drinking session at the Market Bar is a fine time and place for some back slapping and confidence building; Requer, already half-smoked on good Scotch, is just the man for the job.

“My man Tom,” Requer says. “What are you drinking, bunk?”

“A beer.”

“Hey, Nick, gave this gentleman what he wants on me, man.”

“What’re you drinking there?” asks Pellegrini.

“Glenlivet. Good shit. You want one?”

“No. Beer’s fine.”

And so they settle down, one round after another, until other detectives arrive and the scene photos and witness statements and office reports seem a little less real, and Latonya Wallace becomes more cosmic
joke than tragedy. Sisyphus and his rock. De Leon and his fountain. Pellegrini and his little dead girl.

“I’ll tell you this,” says Requer, holding court and bringing the liquor to his lips. “When Tom first got up there, I thought he wasn’t any good at all. I mean that …”

“And now that you seen me work,” says Pellegrini, half serious, “you know you were right.”

“No, bunk,” says Requer, shaking his head, “I knew you were all right when you put down that case in the projects. What was that boy’s name?”

“Which case?”

“The one from high-rise. East side.”

“George Green,” says Pellegrini.

“Yeah, right, Green,” agrees Requer, waving the empty shot glass in a brief semaphore at Nicky the bartender. “Everyone told him that the case was a loser. I even told him that. I told him to …” Requer pauses as Nicky pours, downs half the shot and tries to continue. “What was I sayin’?”

Pellegrini shrugs, smiling.

“Oh yeah, this case was no fuckin’ good, no fuckin’ good at all. Drug murder up in the high-rises, right. Black kid over on Aisquith Street, so nobody’s gonna give a damn anyway. No witnesses, no nothing. I told him to forget the motherfucker and go on to something else. He doesn’t listen to me or anyone else. Stubborn motherfucker didn’t listen to Jay neither. He just goes out on his own and works the case for two days. Didn’t listen to none of us and guess what happened?”

“I dunno,” says Pellegrini sheepishly. “What happened?”

“You solved the motherfucker.”

“I did?”

“Stop fuckin’ with me,” says Requer, turning back to an audience of CID detectives. “He went out and solved the motherfucker on his own. That’s when I knew Tom was going to work out.”

Pellegrini says nothing, embarrassed.

Requer gives a quick glance over his shoulder and realizes that even with half a drink on, the younger detective isn’t buying any of it.

“No, seriously, Tom, seriously.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. Listen to me.”

Pellegrini sips his beer.

“Fuck it, I’m not sayin’ this ’cause you’re here, bunk. I’m sayin’ it for the truth. When you came up, I thought you were gonna be bad, I mean no good at all. But you’ve done a helluva job. Really.”

Pellegrini smiles and hails Nicky for one last one, pushing his empty across the bar and pointing to the shot glass in front of Requer. The other detectives turn to another conversation.

“I wouldn’t say the same thing about Fred,” says Requer quietly enough so that the comment goes no farther than Pellegrini. “I wouldn’t.”

Pellegrini nods, but he is suddenly uncomfortable. He and Fred Ceruti had transferred into Landsman’s squad together, filling vacancies that occurred within weeks of each other. Like Requer, Ceruti is black, but unlike Requer—who had six years’ seasoning in narcotics before the transfer to homicide—Ceruti is fresh from the Eastern District with only four years on the force. He has been pushed up to the sixth floor of headquarters by the captain, who saw him do good plainclothes work at the district level. But to Requer, those credentials aren’t enough.

“I mean I like Fred. I really do,” says Requer. “But he isn’t ready for homicide. We’ve walked him through cases and shown him what needs to be done but it doesn’t get through. He’s not ready yet.”

Pellegrini says nothing, aware that Requer is the veteran investigator in his squad and one of the most tenured black detectives in the homicide unit; he made his way up to CID at a time when black officers were still hearing racial jokes in the district roll call rooms. Pellegrini knows for a guy like that to sit here and punch the Italian kid’s dance card while letting Ceruti pass is not an easy thing.

“I’ll tell you this,” Requer tells the other CID men at the bar. “If someone in my family got killed, if I got killed, I’d want Tom to work it.” A detective’s compliment.

“You really must be drunk,” says Pellegrini.

“No, bunk.”

“Well, Rick,” says Pellegrini, “thank you for that vote of confidence. I might not solve your murder, but I’d definitely make some overtime on it.”

Requer laughs, then calls for Nicky. The bartender pours one last shot, on the house, and the detective sends the Scotch sailing down his throat in one fluid, practiced motion.

The two men leave the bar, walking through the restaurant and out the double doors on the Water Street side. In three months, the Market Bar and Seafood Restaurant will become Dominique’s, a French restau
rant of considerable means. The clientele will be dressed better, the food more expensive, the menu a little less comprehensible to the average homicide detective. Nicky will be gone, the price of a drink will climb into the four-dollar range and the departmental crowd that frequents the bar will be told that their patronage no longer suits the restaurant’s image. But for now, the Market Bar is as much BPD territory as Kavanaugh’s or the FOP lodge.

Pellegrini and Requer turn on Frederick Street and saunter down the same stretch of pavement where Bob Bowman made his legendary midnight ride. No homicide detective can pass the spot without smiling at the thought of a drunken Bowman, borrowing a mounted man’s horse long enough to parade back and forth in front of the Market Bar’s plate glass windows, through which a half-dozen other detectives could be seen losing control. On a good day, Bo was five-foot-six. Perched on that stallion, he looked like a cross between Napoleon Bonaparte and Willie Shoemaker.

“You all right to drive?” asks Pellegrini.

“Yeah, bunk, I’m good.”

“You sure?”

“Fuck yes.”

“Okay then.”

“Hey, Tom,” says Requer before crossing to the Hamilton Street lot, “if the case is gonna go, then it’s gonna go. Don’t let it get you down.”

Pellegrini smiles.

“I mean that,” says Requer.

“Okay, Rick.”

“Really.”

Pellegrini smiles again, but with the look of a drowning man no longer willing to fight against the current.

“Really, bunk. You do what you can do and that’s it. If the evidence ain’t there, you know, it ain’t there. You do what you can …”

Requer hits the younger detective’s shoulder with an open hand, then fishes in a pants pocket for his car keys. “You know what I mean, bunk.”

Pellegrini nods, smiles, then nods again. But he keeps his silence.

F
RIDAY
, A
PRIL 8

“Brown, you piece of shit.”

“Sir?”

“I called you a piece of shit.”

Dave Brown looks up from the current issue of
Rolling Stone
and sighs. Donald Worden is on a tear, and nothing good can come from that.

“Gimme a quarter,” says Worden, palm open.

“Let me understand this,” says Brown. “I’m here at my desk reading a magazine—”

“One of them art school magazines,” Worden interjects.

Brown shakes his head wearily. Although his most recent creations have been limited to renderings of dead stickmen in his crime scene sketches, David John Brown is indeed the product of the Maryland Institute of Art. In Worden’s mind, this fact alone makes suspect his credentials as a homicide detective.

“Reading a magazine of rock ’n’ roll and popular culture,” Brown continues, “interfering with no one, and you walk through the door and address me as fecal matter.”

“Fecal matter. What the hell is that? I didn’t go to college. I’m just a poor dumb white boy from Hampden.”

Brown rolls his eyes.

“Gimme a quarter, bitch.”

This has been going on ever since Dave Brown arrived in homicide. Time and time again, Worden demands 25-cent pieces from younger detectives, then simply pockets the money. No trip to the Macke machines downstairs, no donation to the coffee fund—the money is taken as tribute, plain and simple. Brown digs in his pocket, then tosses a quarter at the older detective.

“What a piece of shit,” Worden repeats, catching the coin. “Why don’t you start handling some calls, Brown?”

“I just handled a murder.”

“Yeah?” says Worden, strutting over to Brown’s desk. “Well, handle this.”

The Big Man leans over Brown’s chair, his crotch even with the younger detective’s mouth. Brown screams in mock hysteria, bringing Terry McLarney into the room.

“Sergeant McLarney, sir,” shouts Brown, with Worden now almost on top of him. “Detective Worden is forcing me to engage in sexual acts prohibited by law. As my immediate supervisor, I appeal to your …”