Homicide (83 page)

The old missing persons file contained no photographs, but a couple of days later Pellegrini drove over to the Baltimore Sun building and asked permission to check the newspaper’s photo morgue. The paper still had two pictures of the missing child, both black-and-white copies of her grade school portraits. Standing in the newspaper’s library, Pellegrini looked down at the photographs and felt the strangest sensation. From every angle, the child was a dead ringer for Latonya Wallace.

Maybe that uncanny resemblance was coincidence; maybe each apparently insignificant detail stood alone, unrelated to anything else. But the prolonged research into the Fish Man’s background was enough to convince Pellegrini that he needed to challenge the man one last time. After all, the old man had been given every opportunity to make himself less of a suspect, yet he had failed to do so. Pellegrini reasoned that he owed himself one more crack at the guy. Even as Pellegrini prepared himself for that last interrogation, a tiny paint chip materialized on the dead girl’s stocking, taunting him with another suspect and another direction.

The taunt grows louder when Pellegrini returns from Reservoir Hill and visits the trace evidence lab with fresh samples from the rear door of 716 Newington. Sure enough, Van Gelder has no trouble matching them to the chip found inside the hose. Suddenly, Andrew elbows the Fish Man aside.

A short talk that same afternoon with Andrew’s former wife yields the information that his suspect is still working with the city’s Bureau of Highways, so Pellegrini visits the Fallsway garage, arriving just as the suspect’s shift is ending. Asked if he would mind coming down to the
homicide office for further questioning, Andrew becomes visibly upset, almost hostile.

No, he tells Pellegrini. I want a lawyer.

Later that same week, the detective returns to Reservoir Hill with a lab technician for a three-hour search of 716 Newington, concentrating on the basement room where Andrew had his bar and his television and spent most of his free time. Nine months is a long time for evidence to stay put; in the end, Pellegrini leaves with nothing more than a carpet sample that may or may not have something resembling a bloodstain.

Still, Andrew has suddenly started behaving like a suspect with things to hide, and that paint chip seems to Pellegrini like a tiny shard of irrevocable truth: Somewhere along the line, Latonya Wallace got a little portion of Andrew’s back door wedged between her leg and her stocking.

For a brief time, it is hard not to be a little cheered by the developments. But less than a week later Pellegrini makes another trip to Newington Avenue and, as he once again walks that alley, he notices that there are red-orange paint chips from Andrew’s back door all over the adjacent yards. On the last visit, he had noticed right away that the paint on the door had been peeling badly, but now, looking carefully at the pavement behind 716 and 718 and 720 Newington, he sees red-orange chips scattered everywhere by the rain and wind, flashing up at him like fool’s gold. The chip from the tights must have already been on the ground when the little girl’s body was dumped behind 718 Newington. But Pellegrini isn’t quite ready to let go. How, he asks himself, did the chip get inside the stockings? How could it be between the leg and the hose unless it got there after the child had been undressed?

Van Gelder soon provides the answer. Checking the evidence yet again, the lab analyst notes that the stockings are now insideout, as they surely were during the recent examination by Landsman and Pellegrini. Chances are, the tights were rolled off the little girl’s body at the autopsy and had remained inside-out ever since. Though it seemed for a time otherwise, the paint chip had been on the outside of the hose all along.

Given Van Gelder’s explanation, Pellegrini immediately sees the rest of the story for what it is: Andrew became nervous, but who wouldn’t be nervous when questioned yet again by a homicide detective? As for the carpet sample, Pellegrini knows that it doesn’t have a prayer of a chance of coming back positive for human blood. To hell with Andrew, he thinks. He isn’t a suspect, he’s a wasted week.

The Fish Man, as durable a murder suspect as ever existed, once again returns to center stage.

F
RIDAY
, O
CTOBER 28

Donald Waltemeyer grabs the dead girl by both arms, feeling for any tension in the hands and fingers. The girl’s hands follow his freely, giving the appearance of a bizarre, horizontal dance.

“She’s wet,” he says.

Milton, the junkie on the sofa, nods.

“What’d you do? Put her in cold water?”

Milton nods again.

“Where? In the bath?”

“No. I just splashed her with water.”

“From where? That bathtub?”

“Yeah.”

Waltemeyer walks into the bathroom, where he satisfies himself that the tub is still covered with droplets. It is an old wives’ tale among the junkies: Overdoses can be brought back by putting them in cold water, as if a bath can somehow rid them of whatever they’ve put in their veins.

“Lemme ask you this, Milton,” says Waltemeyer. “Did you and her use the same works or did you fire your shit using something else?”

Milton gets up and moves toward the closet.

“Don’t fucking show it to me,” says Waltemeyer. “If you show it to me, I gotta lock you up.”

“Oh.”

“Just answer the question. Did you use the same needle?”

“No. I got my own.”

“Okay then. Sit down and tell me again what happened.”

Milton runs down the tale again, leaving nothing out. Waltemeyer hears again about how the white girl came by to fire up, about how she often came up here to shoot because her husband didn’t like her using.

“Like I said, she brought me that box of noodles ’cause she used some last time she was here.”

“This macaroni here?”

“Yeah. She brought that with her.”

“She had her own dope?”

“Yeah. I had mine and then she came with hers.”

“Where was she sitting when she fired?”

“This chair here. She fired up and then fell asleep. I looked over after a while and she wasn’t breathing.”

Waltemeyer nods. The call is straight up, and for that reason alone he
feels good. After three months of tracking Geraldine Parrish and her missing relatives, even a simple overdose can be something of a reprieve. Waltemeyer had told himself that if he didn’t get back into the rotation on this midnight shift, he would lose his mind. McLarney had agreed.

“Your run sheets have been getting messier and messier,” the sergeant told him a week ago. “It’s like a cry for help.”

Maybe so. Waltemeyer had taken the Parrish case as far as he could, though there would be more work to come as trial preparation got under way. And he still hadn’t figured out exactly what had happened to Geraldine’s last husband, the aged Reverend Rayfield Gilliard, who died after a few weeks of marriage. A relative was now telling them that Miss Geraldine had ground two dozen Valium into the Reverend Gilliard’s tuna salad, then watched as the old man slowly succumbed to a seizure. The story was solid enough that Doc Smialek and Marc Cohen, the assistant state’s attorney handling the case, were willing to try for an exhumation order. Some days, Waltemeyer truly believed that the case had no end.

All of which makes this little overdose quite pleasing. One body, one witness, one page of a 24-hour report on the admin lieutenant’s desk—police work as Waltemeyer remembers it. The lab tech is hard at work and the ME is on the way. The witness is even cooperative and apparently truthful. All is flowing gracefully toward a resolution until the first officer appears in the doorway to say that the dead girl’s husband is downstairs.

“Do we need him for an ID?” asks the uniform.

“Yeah,” says Waltemeyer, “but not if he’s going to come up here and lose it. I don’t want that.”

“I’ll warn him about that.”

The husband comes to the bottom of the stairs, wearing an expression of incredible grief. He is a good-looking man, thirty or so, tall with long sandy brown hair.

“If you’re going to go up there, you have to be calm,” says the officer.

“I understand.”

Hearing footsteps on the stairs, Waltemeyer turns back toward the young woman and notices that the left bra strap and part of the cup are exposed, with the sweater pulled back down the arm in the search for the fresh track. Leaning over at the last second, he pulls the sweater gently over her shoulder.

For a detective, it is a small but extraordinary act—extraordinary because the notion of privacy loses most of its meaning after a few months of working murders. What, after all, could be less private than a stranger,
an interloper, evaluating a human being’s last moments on earth? What could be less private than a body taken apart at autopsy, or a bedroom emptied of its contents by a search warrant, or a suicide note read and Xeroxed and stapled to the face sheet of a police incident report? After a year or two in the trenches, privacy is something that every detective learns to mock. More than compassion or sincerity or empathy, it is the first casualty of police work.

Two months ago, Mark Tomlin caught the year’s first and only autoerotic death. It was an engineer in his late thirties, trussed up on his bed in leather underwear, suffocated by a plastic bag that the victim had placed on his own head. There were pulleys and levers that controlled the cords by which the victim was bound, and by moving an arm in a certain direction, the man could have freed himself. But long before he could do that, he passed out from lack of oxygen—a consequence of the plastic bag, which he had used to induce hypoxia, an ethereal, oxygen-deprived state in which masturbation supposedly becomes more erotic. That bedroom was a strange sight, and Tomlin, of course, couldn’t help but show Polaroids to a few thousand other cops. After all, the poor guy looked damned silly decomposing in his leather shorts, arms trussed up over his head, toes clamped together by thumbcuffs, bondage magazines scattered across the dresser. Bizarre stuff, and no one would have believed it without the photographs. Neither privacy nor dignity had much of a chance on that one.

Almost every detective has encountered two or three scenes where some relative tried, for reasons of propriety more than deception, to dress a dead body. Likewise, almost every detective has handled a dozen overdoses in which mothers and fathers had felt compelled to hide the needle and cooker before the ambulance arrived. One suicide prompted a parent to painstakingly rewrite the victim’s note in the desire to exclude one especially embarrassing admission. The world never stops insisting on values and standards, although such things no longer matter to the dead. The world never stops calling for a little dignity, a little propriety, but the cops never stop calling for the morgue wagon; between the two lies an abyss that can never be bridged.

In the Baltimore homicide office, privacy is a stillborn idea. The unit, after all, is a locker room of sorts, a male-dominated purgatory in which thirty-six detectives and detective sergeants wander in and out of each other’s lives, cracking jokes as this detective’s marriage implodes and that detective shows the unmistakable signs of alcohol addiction.

A homicide detective isn’t any more or less degenerate than any other middle-aged American male, but since he spends his life prying up other men’s secrets, he has little regard for his own. And in a world where the act of premeditated murder becomes routine, any more subtle sin has trouble competing. Any man can drink too much and wreck his station wagon on an upcounty road, but a homicide detective can tell the rest of his squad the story in a voice that betrays equal shares of bravado and embarrassment. Any man can pick up a woman in a downtown bar, but a homicide detective will later entertain his partner with a comedic soliloquy that describes in detail all the later action at the motel. Any man can lie to his wife, but a homicide detective will sit in the middle of the coffee room yelling into a phone extension that he has to work late on a case and if she doesn’t believe that, she can go to hell. And then, after convincing her, he will slam down the receiver and stalk over to the coat rack.

“I’m down at the Market Bar,” he will tell five other detectives, all of whom are fighting back laughter. “But if she calls back, I’m on the street.”

A detective understands that another world is out there, another universe in which discretion and privacy still have meaning. Somewhere far from Baltimore, he knows, there are taxpayers who hold dear the idea of a good and secret death—a well-lived life, becalmed at its end, extinguished in some private, comfortable place with equal measures of grace and solitude. They’ve heard a lot about that kind of death, but they rarely see it. To them, death is violence and miscalculation, mindlessness and cruelty. And what, a detective can ask, does privacy matter amid that kind of carnage?

Several months ago, Danny Shea from Stanton’s shift drove to a high-rise apartment house near the Hopkins campus for an unattended death. She was an elderly music teacher, fully rigored on her daybed, with the score of a Mozart concerto still open on the piano. The FM radio was playing quietly in the living room, tuned to a classical station at the end of the dial. Shea recognized the piece.

“You know what that is?” he asked a uniform, a young man writing his report at the kitchen table.

“What’s what?”

“The piece on the radio.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Ravel,” said Shea. “‘Pavane to a Dead Princess.’”

It was a beautiful, natural death, quite startling in its perfection. Shea
suddenly felt himself an intruder in the old woman’s apartment, a violator of a genuinely private act.

A similar feeling now comes over Donald Waltemeyer when he looks at a dead addict and listens to her husband walking up the stairs. There is nothing beautiful or poignant in the death of Lisa Turner: Waltemeyer knows that she was twenty-eight years old, that she was from North Carolina and that she was married. And for reasons beyond his comprehension, she came up to this second-floor shithole to fire heroin until it killed her. End of story.

And still, something clicks for just a moment, some long-lost switch in Waltemeyer’s brain is suddenly thrown to overload. Perhaps it’s because she was young, perhaps because she looks pretty in the light blue sweater. Perhaps it’s because a price must be paid for all this privacy, because you can only be a bystander for so long without paying some of the cost yourself.