Homicide (85 page)

Edgerton’s usual response toward a guilty man was a mild contempt bordering on indifference. In most instances, he didn’t go out of his way
to hassle his suspects; hell, they had enough problems. Like most detectives, Edgerton believed that you can talk to a murderer. You can share your cigarettes with him and walk him to the bathroom and laugh at his jokes when they’re funny. You can even buy him a can of Pepsi if he’s willing to initial each page of the statement.

But this is different. This time Edgerton didn’t want to breathe the same air as his suspect. In truth, his anger ran deep enough to be called hate, a feeling that on this case could only come from a black detective. Edgerton was black, and Eugene Dale was black, and Andrea Perry, too: the usual barriers of race had been removed. Given that truth, it made sense that Edgerton could talk to people on the street and learn things, that he could go into the West Baltimore projects and come out knowing things that a white detective might never know. Even the best white cop feels the distance when he works with black victims and black suspects; to him they are otherworldly, as if their tragedy is the result of a ghetto pathology against which he is fully immunized. Working in a city where nearly 90 percent of all murder is black-on-black, a white detective might understand the nature of a black victim’s tragedy, he might carefully differentiate between good people to be avenged and bad people to be pursued. But, ultimately, he never responds with the same intensity; his most innocent victims bring empathy, not anguish; his most ruthless suspects bring contempt, not rage. Edgerton, however, was not encumbered by such distinctions. Eugene Dale could be utterly real for him, just as Andrea Perry could be real; his rage at the crime could be personal.

Edgerton’s response to Dale set him apart from the rest of his squad, but this time there was nothing unique about it: to be a black detective in homicide required a special sense of balance, a willingness to tolerate the excesses of many white colleagues, to ignore the cynical assessments and barbed humor of men for whom black-on-black violence represented a natural order. To them, the black middle class was simply a myth. They had heard about it, they had read about it, but damned if they could find it in the city of Baltimore. Edgerton, Requer, Eddie Brown—they were black, they were essentially middle class—but they proved nothing. They were cops and therefore, whether they knew it or not, they were all honorary Irishmen. That logic allowed the same detective who could comfortably partner with Eddie Brown to watch a black family move into the house next door, then go to the police computer the next day and run his new neighbors.

The prejudice ran deep. A man had only to stand in the coffee room and listen to a veteran white detective’s scientific analysis of homeboy head shapes: “… Now your bullet head, he’s a stone killer, he’s dangerous. But your peanut heads, they’re just dope dealers and sneak thieves. Now your swayback, he’s generally a …”

Black detectives lived and worked around those limitations, tacitly offering themselves as contradictions to the ghetto scenes that greeted their white colleagues every night. If a white guy still insisted on missing the point, then fuck him. What was a black police going to do? Call the NAACP? For Edgerton and the other black detectives, there was no way to win the argument, and consequently, no argument.

But Edgerton does have an argument with Eugene Dale, one that he knows he can win. And when he walks out of the interrogation room the first time, he is as eager to give himself a break as to let Dale stew before going after a second, full statement.

Downstairs in the ballistics lab, Joe “No Compare ’em” Kopera, the dean of Baltimore’s firearms examiners, has both bullets under the microscope and is slowly turning each slug in the positioning clay, lining up the rifling marks and striations in the split screen viewer. From the most obvious gouges on each bullet, Kopera determines almost immediately that they are both from .32-caliber projectiles from the same class of weapon, in this case a six with a left twist. This means that the rifling grooves on the inside of the barrel—which differ for each mode of firearm—carve a total of six deep channels around the back end of the projectile, each channel twisting to the left.

Knowing that much, Kopera can say that the bullet that killed Andrea Perry was fired from the same or similar make of .32 revolver seized in that afternoon’s raid on Dale’s house. But to say that the bullet was fired from that gun requires more; the striation marks—thin scrapings caused by imperfections and debris inside the gun barrel—also have to be matched. Leaving the microscope on, Kopera walks upstairs for coffee and a conference with the detectives.

“What’s the verdict?” asks Nolan.

“Same type of weapon, same ammo. But it’s going to take me a little while to be sure.”

“Would it help if we tell you he’s guilty?”

Kopera smiles and wanders into the coffee room. Edgerton is already back inside the large box, suffering through Dale’s second statement. This time Edgerton mentions the possibility of fingerprints on the weapon,
though in fact the lab tech couldn’t lift any latents before the gun went downstairs to Kopera.

“If it’s not your gun, then what will you say when we find your fingerprints all over it?”

“It is my gun,” says Dale.

“It is your gun.”

“Uh-huh.”

Edgerton can almost hear the sound of Dale’s brain lurching around in the dark. The Out. The Out. Where’s my Out? Edgerton already knows which window his suspect will reach for.

“I mean it’s my gun. But I didn’t kill anyone.”

“It’s your gun but you didn’t kill anyone.”

“No. I let a couple guys borrow it that night. They said they needed it to scare someone.”

“You let a couple guys borrow it. I had a feeling you were going to say that.”

“I didn’t know what they needed it for …”

“And these guys went out and raped this little girl,” says Edgerton, glaring at the suspect, “and then they took her down the alley and shot her in the head, right?”

Dale shrugs. “I don’t know what they did with it.”

Edgerton looks at him coldly. “What’s your friends’ names?”

“Names?”

“Yeah. They’ve got names, right? You lent them your gun, so you had to at least know who they were.”

“If I tell you that, then they’re in trouble.”

“Fuck yeah, they’re in trouble. They’re going to be charged with the murder, aren’t they? But it’s either them or you, Eugene, so what’s the names?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Edgerton’s had enough. “You’re about to be charged in a death penalty murder case,” he says in a voice rising with anger, “but you’re not going to tell me the names of the mysterious friends who borrowed your gun ’cause it might get them in trouble. That’s your story?”

“I can’t tell.”

“Because they don’t exist.”

“No.”

“You don’t have any friends. You don’t have a friend in the fucking world.”

“If I tell you, he’ll kill me.”

“If you don’t tell me,” shouts Edgerton, “I’m going to put you on Death Row. Your choice …”

Eugene Dale looks down at the table, then back at the detective. He shakes his head and raises his arms, a gesture of surrender, a plaintive appeal.

“Fuck it,” says Edgerton, getting up again. “I don’t even know why I’m bothering with you.”

Edgerton slams the door to the large interrogation room, then greets his sergeant with a half-smile. “He’s innocent.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Some friends borrowed the gun and then forgot to tell him they’d raped and killed a girl.”

Nolan laughs. “Don’t you just hate when that happens?”

“I swear I’m ready to hit this guy.”

“That bad, huh?”

Edgerton wanders into the coffee room for a fresh cup, but after five minutes, Eugene Dale has something more to say. He bangs loudly on the door, but Edgerton ignores him. Eventually, Jay Landsman comes out of his office to check on the racket.

“Detective, sir, can I have a word with you?”

“With me?”

“Yes, sir. That other officer won’t listen to me and I …”

Landsman shakes his head. “You don’t want to talk to me,” he says. “The only thing I want to do is kick the living shit out of you for what you did to that girl. You don’t—”

“But I didn’t—”

“Hey,” says Landsman. “If you want to talk to me you’re gonna do it without teeth, you understand that? You’re better off with the other detective.”

Dale retreats into the interrogation room as Landsman slams the door and walks back to his office, his day now considerably brighter than it had been.

Five minutes later, Edgerton returns to the hallway outside the interrogation room, now cool enough for one more sortie. As he opens the metal door, Kopera brushes past him on his way from the stairwell.

“It’s a winner, Harry.”

“Way to be, Dr. K.”

“The striation is a little light, but I don’t have any real problem.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Edgerton slams the door behind him and lays it down for Eugene
Dale one last time: A living rape victim who will identify him as well as the gun. A ballistics match to the murder weapon. And, oh yeah, those fingerprints all over the gun …

“I’d like to tell you my friend’s name.”

“Okay,” says Edgerton. “Tell me.”

“But I don’t know his name.”

“You don’t know his name.”

“No. He told me but I forgot. But his nickname is Lips. He lives in West Baltimore.”

“You don’t know his name, but you let him borrow your gun.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Lips, from West Baltimore.”

“That’s what they call him.”

“What’s the other guy’s name.”

Dale shrugs.

“Eugene, do you know what I think?”

Dale looks at him, the picture of earnest cooperation.

“I think you’re going back to prison.”

Nonetheless, Edgerton works through the nonsensical story, emerging in the early morning hours with an eleven-page statement in which Dale, in a near-final version of events, lends the murder weapon to Lips and another east side man whom Dale actually names. Presumably, the second man is someone who has done wrong by Eugene Dale somewhere in his past. Dale admits to seeing Andrea Perry playing with his cousin, and he admits to being out on the street and hearing the gunshot from the alley. He even goes so far as to suggest that although his friends returned the gun with one shell spent, and although he believed that they had raped and killed the girl, he didn’t go to the police because he couldn’t get involved.

“I’m on parole,” he reminds Edgerton.

As dawn arrives in the homicide office, Edgerton is at an admin office typewriter, working up the two-page charging documents for his suspect. But when he takes the papers into the interrogation room to show Dale, the suspect reads them quickly and then tears them to pieces, further endearing himself to Edgerton, whose typing skills are less than stellar.

“You don’t need this,” Dale says, “because I’m going to tell you the truth. I didn’t kill that girl. In fact, I don’t know who it was that killed her.”

Edgerton listens to version number three.

“I don’t know who really killed her. The reason I told you the other
things was to protect my girlfriend and her family. I work every day while her relatives are always in and out of the apartment all hours. All of her sisters and brothers use the apartment while I’m sleeping in the bedroom.”

Edgerton says nothing. At this point, why bother to say anything at all?

“One of them must have kept the gun in the linen closet. One of them must have killed that girl.”

“Did you know the gun was kept in your linen closet?” asks Edgerton, almost bored.

“No I didn’t. I know you can get five years for having a gun. I don’t know who had that gun in the house. I really don’t.”

Edgerton nods, then walks out of the interrogation room and back to the admin office typewriter.

“Hey, Roger, look at what this asshole did,” he says, holding up the shreds of the charging papers. “This took me forty minutes.”

“He did that?”

“Yeah,” says Edgerton, laughing. “He said I didn’t need them ’cause he was going to tell me the truth.”

Nolan shakes his head. “That’s what you get for letting him hold on to the paperwork.”

“Maybe I can tape it together,” says Edgerton, more tired than hopeful.

The last statement by Eugene Dale concludes as the dayshift detectives are taking roll call in the main office, and many of those men are out on the street before Edgerton can retype the arrest sheets.

The Southern District wagon arrives an hour or so later, and Dale is cuffed for the ride back to the district bail hearing. Walking down the corridor, he asks again for Edgerton and the chance to make another statement. This time he is ignored.

But there will be one last encounter. A week or so after the arrest, Edgerton checks his gun at the Eager Street entrance of the Baltimore City Jail and follows a guard to the second-floor hellhole that prison administrators call an infirmary. It is a long walk up a set of metal stairs and down a hall cluttered with human failure. The inmates fall silent, staring as Edgerton passes through to the medical unit’s administrative area.

A heavyset nurse waves him down. “He’s on the way up from the tier.”

Edgerton shows her the warrant, but she barely bothers to look at it. “Head hairs, chest hairs, pubic hairs and blood,” he says. “I guess you’ve done this before.”

“Mmm-hmmm.”

Eugene Dale rounds the corner slowly, then stops at the sight of Edgerton. As the nurse waves the inmate toward an examination room, Dale moves close enough for Edgerton to notice the bruises and contusions, obvious signs of a bad beating. Even inside the city jail, the man’s crimes merit special attention.

Edgerton follows his suspect into the examination room and watches as the nurse prepares a needle.

Dale looks at the syringe, then back at Edgerton. “What’s this for?”

“A search-and-seizure warrant for your person,” says Edgerton. “We’re going to match your blood and hairs to semen and hairs we got from the girl.”

“I already gave them blood.”