Homicide (52 page)

And now Corbin will serve as Pellegrini’s proxy in the pursuit of Kevin Lawrence, or at least for as long as it takes to confirm that the suspect is viable. “If this guy looks good,” Landsman assures the others in his squad, “we’re definitely going to give Tom a call at home.”

But the next day, no one thinks about calling Pellegrini when the detectives check with the principal at Eutaw-Marshburn Elementary and are told that Kevin Robert Lawrence was enrolled there from 1971 to 1978. Nor do they think of calling when the more comprehensive computer search produces nothing remotely resembling a criminal record. Nor do they think of bothering him when the Wallace family says that they know nothing of this Kevin Lawrence and cannot remember his having anything to do with the victim.

Eight days after a police computer took his name in vain, Kevin Lawrence is brought down to the homicide unit, where he tells detectives that he knows nothing about any girl named Latonya Wallace. He does, however, remember a book about black American heroes with the title of
Pioneers and Patriots
. Shown the text itself, he can even recall the school report he prepared long ago using that same book, which he had borrowed from the Eutaw-Marshburn school library. The paper was on great black Americans and, as the young man recalled, it earned him an A. But that, he says, was more than ten years ago. Why are they even asking about it?

The investigation that exonerates Kevin Lawrence is still wrapping up when Pellegrini returns to duty. But by luck or mercy or both, the primary investigator is allowed to watch from the periphery as other detectives slam into a wall. He is, in a very real sense, spared the anguish of seeing a precious piece of physical evidence reduced to fantastic coincidence—a fingerprint that sat undisturbed on a book for more than a decade, waiting for a million-dollar computer to give it life enough to taunt a few homicide detectives for a week and a half.

Instead of riding the print hit into another psychological trough, Pellegrini manages to come back to work a little stronger. The cough is still there, but the exhaustion, less so. Within a day or two of his return, the manila folder that contains the information gleaned on the Fish Man is back on his desk in the annex office. And at the same time that the detectives are busy returning a blissfully unaware Kevin Lawrence to freedom and anonymity, Pellegrini is back up on Whitelock Street, interviewing other merchants about the habits of the man who still remains his most promising suspect.

On the same day, in fact, that Lawrence is boring other detectives with his grade school adventures, Pellegrini grabs a set of Cavalier keys and a handful of plastic evidence bags and makes his way inside the burned-out Whitelock Street store where the Fish Man had made a living until perhaps a week before the murder. The detective had been through the derelict property several times before, looking for anything to indicate that the little girl—alive or dead—had ever been inside the place, but to his frustration, the building had always seemed nothing more than a blackened shell. Neighboring merchants had in fact told him that the Fish Man had cleaned most everything out in the day or two before the discovery of the little girl’s body.

Still, Pellegrini takes another look around before getting down to the business at hand. Satisfied that nothing in the wreckage has gone unnoticed, he sets about prying up blackened soot and debris from several locations. In places, the stuff is thick and oily and mixed, perhaps, with the tar from portions of the collapsed roof.

The thought had occurred to Pellegrini while he was out on leave and it was, he had to concede, something of a long shot, considering how little the trace lab had so far been able to learn about the black smudges on the dead girl’s pants. But what the hell, he tells himself, if they have something specific with which to compare those smudges, Van Gelder’s people may be able to make something happen.

Every now and then a long shot does come in, the detective muses, a little hopeful. But even if the samples from the store never amount to anything, they are important to Pellegrini for another reason: It is his idea. It is his own thinking that the stuff on the little girl’s pants may match the soot from the Fish Man’s store. Not Landsman’s. Not Edgerton’s. Not Corbin’s.

In all probability, Pellegrini tells himself, this will be another dead end in the maze, another single-page report in the folder. But even so, it would be his dead end, his report.

Pellegrini is the primary and he is thinking like the primary. He drives back from Reservoir Hill with the soot samples beside him on the passenger seat, feeling, for the first time in weeks, like a detective.

W
EDNESDAY
, J
UNE 22

Clayvon Jones lies face down in the courtyard of the housing project, his torso covering the loaded 9mm Colt he never had a chance to use. The gun is cocked, with a live round in the chamber. Someone was looking for
Clayvon and Clayvon was looking for someone, and Clayvon got rained on first.

Dave Brown rolls the body and Clayvon stares up at him, white foam at the edges of his mouth.

“Damn,” says Dave Brown. “That’s a nice gun.”

“Hey, that is pretty,” says Eddie Brown. “What is that? A forty-five?”

“No, I think it’s one of those Colt replicas. They’re making nine-millimeters with that classic forty-five mold.”

“That’s a nine-millimeter?”

“Either that or a three-eighty. I saw an ad for one of these bad boys in the FBI magazine.”

“Uh-huh,” says Eddie Brown, giving the gun a last look. “She does look nice.”

It is daylight now, a little before six on a day that promises to be hot. In addition to having been the proud owner of a 9mm Colt replica, the dead man is a twenty-two-year-old east-sider with a thin, athletic frame. The corpse has already got a decent rigor to it, with the lone gunshot wound visible at the top of the head.

“Like he was duckin’ down and didn’t get low enough,” says Eddie Brown, a little bored.

A crowd has already gathered at both ends of the courtyard, and though a canvass of the neighboring rowhouses will produce not a single witness, half the neighborhood seems to be out bright and early for a glimpse of the body. Within hours there will be four anonymous calls—“I want to remain monogamous,” one caller will insist—as well as a report from one of Harry Edgerton’s paid informants on the east side. Together they will provide a full chronicle of the death of Clayvon Jones. Classify it as scenario number 34 in the catalogue of life-and-death ghetto drama: an argument between two dopers over a girl; a fistfight in the street; threats back and forth; young kid paid in cocaine to go shoot Clayvon in the head.

To Dave Brown’s amusement, three of the callers will insist that the shooter placed a white flower on Clayvon’s mouth after the murder. The flower, Brown will realize, was nothing more than the foam at the corners of the dead man’s mouth, which was undoubtedly visible to the crowd that greeted the detectives on their arrival at the scene.

At this moment, however, all of that is still to come. At this moment, Clayvon Jones is simply a dead yo with a quality weapon he never got to use. No witnesses, no motive, no suspects—the standard whodunit mantra.

“Hey, guy.”

Dave Brown turns around to see a familiar face on one of the Eastern uniforms. Martini, isn’t that it? Yeah, the kid who took a bullet for the company in a drug raid at the Perkins Homes last year. Good man, Martini.

“Hey, how you doing, bunk?”

“Okay,” says Martini, pointing to another uniform. “My buddy here needs a sequence number for his report.”

“You’re Detective Brown, right?” asks the other uniform.

“We both be Detective Brown,” says Dave Brown, wrapping his arm around Eddie Brown’s shoulder. “This here’s my daddy.”

Eddie Brown smiles, his gold tooth shining in the morning sun. Smiling back, the uniform takes in the salt-and-pepper family portrait.

“He looks like me, don’t he?” says Eddie Brown.

“A little bit,” says the uniform, laughing now. “What’s your sequence?”

“B as in boy, nine-six-nine.”

The patrolman nods and steps away as the ME’s van pulls to the edge of the courtyard.

“We done here?” asks Dave Brown.

Eddie Brown nods.

“Okay,” says Dave Brown, walking back toward the Cavalier. “But we can’t forget the most important thing about this case.”

“What’s that?” says Eddie Brown, following.

“The most important thing about this case is that when we left the office, the Big Man told us to bring him back an egg sandwich.”

“Oh yeah.”

Back in the homicide unit’s coffee room. Donald Worden waits for his sandwich in a cloud of Backwoods cigar smoke, nursing a rage that has been his for a week and a half. He does this silently, stoically, but with such energy and determination that no other man dares approach him with so much as a platitude during the morning shift change.

And what, in truth, can anyone really say? What do you tell a man who has tailored a career to his own sense of honor, his own code, when that honor is being bartered back and forth by politicians? What do you say to a man for whom institutional loyalty is a way of life when the police department in which he has spent twenty-five years is now offering fresh lessons in betrayal?

Three weeks ago, the brass had gone first to Rich Garvey. They went to him with a 24-hour report and some notes and a manila folder with
out a name or case number. State senator, they explain. Threats. Mysterious assailants. A possible abduction.

Garvey listened patiently. Then he looked at the initial report from two detectives on Stanton’s shift. It was not pretty.

“Just one question,” asked Garvey. “Can I polygraph the senator?”

No, the supervisors told themselves, perhaps Rich Garvey isn’t the best man for this case. They excused themselves quickly, taking the report and the manila folder to Worden.

The Big Man let them talk, then arrayed the facts in his mind: State senator Larry Young. A Democrat from West Baltimore’s 39th legislative district. A product of the Mitchell family’s west side political machine and the chairman of the General Assembly’s influential House Environmental Matters Committee. A leader of the Black Legislative Caucus with ties to City Hall as well as some of the police department’s ranking blacks. A forty-two-year-old bachelor living alone on McCulloh Street.

That much made sense, the rest was bizarre. Senator Young had called a friend, a highly respected black physician, and told of being abducted by three men. He had been leaving McCulloh Street alone and they had a van, he explained. He was forced inside, blindfolded, threatened. Stay away from Michael and his fiancée, they told him, referring to a longtime political aide who was planning to marry. Then these unnamed assailants dumped him out of the rear doors, up near Druid Hill Park. He had hitched a ride back home.

Outrageous, the friend had told him. You have to call the police. No need, Larry Young assured him. Why involve the police department? I can deal with this on my own but I just wanted to tell you about it, he explained to the friend, who nonetheless remained insistent, arranging for a conference call with Eddie Woods, the deputy commissioner for services and a political ally of the senator. Deputy Woods listened to the tale, then rightly insisted that an abduction of a state senator had to be investigated. Homicide was called.

“Will you take it?” they asked again.

Worden calculated the unspoken facts: powerful legislator, powerful friends. A reluctance to report a crime. A ridiculous story. Nervous bosses. The selection of an aging white homicide detective, a cop with a clean performance sheet and enough time on to take a pension should the thing get nasty.

Okay, Worden told them. I’ll eat it.

After all, someone had to take the file, and Worden reasoned that a
younger man would have more to lose. The detectives on Stanton’s shift who originally took the call wanted nothing whatsoever to do with it. Nor was Garvey looking to lean into any punches. But what could they do to Worden? It made sense, and yet when Worden talked like that it sounded as though he was trying to convince himself more than anyone else.

Closer to the point, Worden was truly the product of the department’s old school: Give him an assignment and he works it. And if some believed that loyalty to command had burned Worden in the Monroe Street investigation, everyone understood that he would never duck a request from a superior even if it meant getting burned again.

With Rick James in tow, Worden went first to the home of the political aide in Northeast Baltimore, where he spoke with the aide’s parents, a gracious, elderly couple fairly mystified at their playing host to a homicide detective. They told Worden that they knew nothing about any abduction. In fact, earlier on the evening of the alleged incident, the senator had come by the house to visit their son, who had not been home at the time. Mr. Young waited, chatting amiably with the couple, until their son returned. Then the two younger men walked out the back door and into the yard to discuss a private matter. A short time later, their son came back into the house without the senator, who had left. Then their son said he had hurt his arm and needed a lift to the emergency room.

Worden nodded, listening carefully. With each additional fact, the senator’s story was becoming both a little more ridiculous and a little more understandable. The ensuing interview with the aide confirmed the scenario that had already taken shape in Worden’s mind. Yes, the aide admitted, the senator had become angry during that discussion in the yard. At one point, he picked up a tree branch and struck the aide across the arm. Then he had fled.

“I guess the argument between you and the senator was over a personal matter,” said Worden, speaking with great care, “one that you would rather keep private.”

“That’s right.”

“And I take it you don’t want to press charges on the assault.”

“No. I don’t want that.”

The two men exchanged glances and a handshake. Worden and James drove back to the office, discussing the alternatives left to them. First option: They could spend days or even weeks investigating an abduction that had never occurred. Second option: They could confront the senator,
perhaps with the implied threat of a grand jury investigation or maybe even a charge of false report, yet that would be dangerous because things would get ugly in a hurry. There was a third option, however, and Worden pushed it back and forth in his brain, weighing the risks and benefits. And when the two men and Lieutenant D’Addario were called into the captain’s office for a review of the case, Worden offered the third choice as the most sensible alternative.