Homicide (62 page)

Probably so, although everyone watching Geraldine Parrish’s performance is now utterly convinced of her sanity. This writhing-on-the-floor nonsense is a calculated and naive version of the real thing, an altogether embarrassing performance, particularly when everything else about her suggests a woman vying for a special advantage, a manipulator measuring every angle. Her relatives have already told detectives how she would boast about being untouchable, about being able to kill with impunity because four doctors would testify toher insanity if need be. The musings of a sociopath? Perhaps. The mind of a child? Probably so. But a mind genuinely unhinged?

A week ago, before the search warrants were even typed, someone showed Waltemeyer an FBI psychological profile of the classic black widow serial killer. Prepared by the behavioral sciences unit at the Quantico Academy, the profile suggested that the woman would be thirty years
or older, would not necessarily be attractive, yet at the same time would make great efforts to exaggerate her sexual prowess and manipulate her physical appearance. The woman would probably be a hypochondriac and would more likely than not enjoy portraying herself as a victim. She would expect special treatment, then pout if it was not forthcoming. She would greatly overestimate her ability to sway other people, men in particular. Measured against the profile, Geraldine Parrish seemed to be the product of Central Casting.

After the interrogation, Roger Nolan and Terry McLarney are both escorting Geraldine Parrish to the City Jail, following her down the sixth-floor hallway, with Nolan walking directly behind the woman.

“Just before the elevators, she stops suddenly and bends over,” Nolan later tells the other detectives, “as if she’s trying to make me run into her fat ass. I tell you, that’s what she’s really about … In her mind, she really believes that if I get a good feel of her ass, I’m gonna fall in love with her and shoot Terry McLarney with his own gun and ride off into the sunset in an unmarked Chevrolet.”

Nolan’s psychoanalysis may be sufficient to the occasion, but for Waltemeyer, the long journey into the mind and soul of Geraldine Parrish is just beginning. And while every other detective in the room is content to believe that they already know everything there is to know about this woman, it is now up to Waltemeyer to determine just how many people she killed, how she killed them and how many of those cases can be successfully prosecuted in court.

For Waltemeyer, it will be an investigation unlike any other, a career case that only a seasoned detective could contemplate. Bank statements, insurance records, grand jury proceedings, exhumations—these are things that no patrolman ever worries about. A street cop rarely takes the work beyond a single shift; one night’s calls have nothing to do with those of the next. And even in homicide, a detective never has to worry the cases beyond the point of arrest. But in this investigation, the arrest is just the beginning of a long, labored effort.

Two weeks from now, Donald Waltemeyer, Corey Belt and Marc Cohen, an assistant state’s attorney, will be in Plainfield, New Jersey, interviewing the friends and relatives of Albert Robinson, finding one of Geraldine’s surviving husbands and delivering subpoenas for bank and insurance records. Much of the evidence involves an interstate paper trail, the kind of detail work that usually inspires a street cop to nothing more than tedium. But the three men will return to Baltimore with the
explanation for the migration of Albert Robinson to East Baltimore and his subsequent murder.

Brought once again to the interrogation room from her jail cell, Miss Geraldine will once again confront a detective who lays the insurance policies in front of her and once again explains the truth about criminal culpability.

“You not makin’ any sense,” Geraldine will tell Waltemeyer. “I didn’t shoot no one.”

“Fine with me, Geraldine,” the detective says. “It doesn’t matter to me whether you tell the truth or not. We just brought you here to charge you with another murder. Albert Robinson.”

“Who’s he?”

“He’s the man from New Jersey you had killed for ten thousand dollars of insurance money.”

“I didn’t murder no one.”

“Okay, Geraldine. Fine.”

Once again, Geraldine Parrish leaves the homicide unit in handcuffs and, once again, Waltemeyer goes back to working the case, expanding it further, searching this time for answers in the death of the Reverend Gilliard. It is a deliberate, often tedious process, this prolonged investigation of a woman who has already been arrested and charged with four murders. More than a string of fresh street shootings, it demands a professional investigator. A detective.

Months into the Parrish investigation, McLarney will walk by Waltemeyer’s desk and overhear a lecture that the detective is delivering with calm sincerity. The beneficiary of Waltemeyer’s newfound wisdom will be Corey Belt, the prodigy from the districts whose detail to homicide was extended for the Parrish investigation. At that moment, Belt wants very much to respond to a lying, recalcitrant witness in the Western District way.

“Back in the Western,” Belt tells Waltemeyer, “we’d just throw the asshole against a wall and put some sense into him.”

“No, listen to me. This isn’t patrol. That kind of stuff doesn’t work up here.”

“That stuff always works.”

“No, I’m telling you. Up here you got to be patient. You got to use your head.”

And McLarney will stand there, listen a little longer, and then move on, delighted and amused at the notion of Donald Waltemeyer telling another man to shake off the lessons of the street. If there was nothing else
to her credit, the Black Widow had at least taken a patrolman and turned him into a detective.

T
UESDAY
, A
UGUST 2

It’s a summer afternoon in the Woodland Avenue drug market, and suddenly, with a body on the ground, race becomes the dominant theme. The dead kid is decidedly black and the police, standing over their daylight scene, are decidedly white. The crowd grows restless.

“This could get out of hand in a hurry,” says a young lieutenant, scanning the sea of angry faces on the other side of the police line. “I’d like to get that body outta here as soon as possible.”

“Don’t even worry about it,” says Rich Garvey.

“I only got about six guys here,” the lieutenant says. “I’d call for more, but I don’t want to empty the other sector.”

Garvey rolls his eyes. “Fuck them,” he says softly. “They’re not going to do shit.”

They never do. And after a few hundred crime scenes, Garvey doesn’t even hear the trash that gets thrown out from the crowd. The way a detective sees it, you just let the assholes run their mouths as long as they keep out of your way. And if one actually jumps into your scene, you throw his ass against a radio car and call for the wagon. No problem whatsoever.

“Why don’t you cover that boy up and show some respect for the dead,” shouts a fat girl on the other side of the Cavalier.

The crowd shouts its approval and the girl, encouraged, presses the point. “He just another dead nigger to you, right?”

Garvey turns to Bob McAllister, glowering, as a uniform pulls a white plastic sheet over the head and torso.

“Now, now,” says McAllister, anticipating his partner’s anger. “Let’s have a little decorum here.”

The body stays on the pavement, stranded there by the delayed arrival of a lab tech, who is rushing from another call on the other side of the city. A hot summer day in August and only four techs are working, one consequence of a municipal pay scale that doesn’t exactly encourage careers in the fast-growing field of evidentiary processing. And though this fifty-minute delay is being regarded as yet another public display of the white racist police conspiracy that runs rampant on the streets of Baltimore, Garvey is somehow unrepentant. Fuck them all, he thinks. The kid
is dead and he ain’t getting any better and that’s all there is to it. And if they think a trained homicide detective is going to dismantle a crime scene to satisfy a half a block’s worth of agitated Pimlico squirrels, they don’t know the game.

“How long you gonna leave a black man out in the street?” shouts an older resident. “You don’t care who sees him like that, do you?”

The young lieutenant listens to all of this nervously, checking his watch, but Garvey says nothing. He takes his eyeglasses off, rubs both eyes and walks over to the body, slowly lifting the white sheet from the dead man’s face. He stares down for half a minute or so, then drops the cloth and walks away. A proprietary act.

“Where the hell is the crime lab?” says the lieutenant, fingering his radio mike.

“Fuck these assholes,” says Garvey, irritated that this is even being mistaken for an issue. “This is our scene.”

And not much of a scene at that. A young drug dealer by the name of Cornelius Langley has been gunned down in a daylight shooting on the sidewalk in the 3100 block of Woodland, and no one in this crowd is rushing forward to provide any information. Nonetheless, it’s the only crime scene around, and as such, it’s real estate that now belongs to Garvey and McAllister. What the hell else does anyone need to be told?

The lab tech is another twenty minutes in arriving, but true to form, the crowd eventually loses interest in the confrontation well before that. By the time the tech gets busy taking photos and bagging spent .32 auto casings, the locals on Woodland Avenue are back to signifying, staring down the proceedings with nothing more than casual curiosity.

But just as the detectives are putting the finishing touches on the scene, the crowd on the far side of the street parts for the hysterical mother, who is already wailing inconsolably even before glimpsing her son’s body. Her arrival ends the truce and gets the crowd going again.

“Why you got to make her watch?”

“Hey, that the mother, yo.”

“They don’t care. That’s some cold poh-leece shit there, yo.”

McAllister gets to the woman first, blocking her view of the street and imploring the relatives with her to go back home.

“There’s nothing you can do here, really,” he says over the mother’s screams. “As soon as we can, we’ll be down to the house.”

“He was shot?” asks an uncle.

McAllister nods.

“Dead?”

McAllister nods again and the mother goes into a half-faint, leaning heavily against another woman, who helps her back into the family’s double-parked Pontiac.

“Take her home,” McAllister says again. “That’s really the best thing right now.”

At the other end of Woodland, closer to Park Heights, the spectators provide even more dramatics. A young kid points to a tall, gangly bystander and blurts out a vague accusation.

“He was there,” the kid tells a friend, loud enough for a uniform to overhear. “He was right there and broke running when they shot the boy.”

The uniform takes half a step toward the man, who turns and runs down the sidewalk. Two other uniforms join the chase and catch up to their quarry at the corner of Park Heights. A body search produces a small amount of heroin and a wagon is called.

Half a block away, Garvey is told of the arrest and shrugs. No, not the shooter, he reasons. Why would the shooter be hanging around an hour after the body hits the pavement? A witness, perhaps. Or maybe just a bystander after all.

“Yeah, okay, have the wagon take him on down to our office,” says the detective. “Thanks.”

Ordinarily, the routine lockup of a drug addict on Woodland Avenue—Pimlico’s grand boulevard of drug addicts—would mean nothing to a detective’s case. Ordinarily, Garvey would have every reason to stand over his latest body feeling a little like a lost ball in tall grass. But in the context of his summer, a sudden shout and a foot chase and a little bit of dope in a glassine bag are all it takes. It’s everything required to make even the weakest sister get up and dance.

It began with the Lena Lucas case back in February and continued with a couple of misdemeanor homicides in April—one whodunit, two dunkers, but all of them cleared by arrest within a week or two. No deeper meanings there; every detective can expect a run of good luck now and then. But when the Winchester Street killing went down in late June, a pattern began to emerge.

Winchester Street was nothing more than a couple of blood smears and a mutilated bullet when Garvey and McAllister reached the scene, and undoubtedly there would have been little else if the first uniform there hadn’t been Bobby Biemiller, McLarney’s drinking buddy from the Western.

“I sent two down to your office,” Biemiller told the arriving detectives.

“Witnesses?”

“I dunno. They were here when I showed up, so I fuckin’ grabbed ’em.”

Bob Biemiller, friend of the little man, hero to the unwashed masses, and the patrolman voted Most Desirable First Officer for a Ghetto Shooting by three out of five Baltimore homicide detectives. That cabbie slaying on School Street a few years back—Garvey’s first case as a primary—also starred Biemiller as first officer. A happy memory for Garvey, too, because the case went down. Good man, Biemiller.

“So tell me,” said McAllister, amused, “who are these unfortunate citizens that you’ve managed to deprive of their liberty?”

“One is your guy’s girlfriend, I think.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. She was hysterical.”

“Well, that’s a start,” said Garvey, a man of faint praise. “So where’s our boy?”

“University.”

Down at the emergency room entrance, the ambo was still backed up to the door. Garvey looked inside and nodded to a black medic who was washing blood from the floor of Medic 15.

“How we doing?”

“I’m fine,” said the medic.

“I know you’re fine. How’s he?”

The medic shook his head, smiling.

“You ain’t makin’ my night.”

Dead on arrival, but the surgeons had cracked the chest anyway in an attempt to massage a spark or two into the guy’s heart. Garvey stayed long enough to watch an intern yell for a charge nurse to move the dead man from the triage area.

“Right now,” yelled the doctor. “We got a guy coming in eviscerated.”

Saturday night in Bawlmer.