Homicide (88 page)

“Harry, was your guy a junior? Was his name Eugene Dale, Jr., or Eugene Dale the third, or something like that?”

The other detective nods, listening to the answer. Without hearing a word, Waltemeyer can imagine Edgerton’s confusion.

“And did Dale’s father die recently … Yeah, like February or so … Yeah, right … Well guess what, Harry, you’re not gonna believe this, but Waltemeyer just dug up your suspect’s father and had the guys at the morgue cut him open … Yeah, I’m serious.”

Enough, thinks Waltemeyer, walking out of the coffee room. I’m not about to sit around here all day listening to this crap. Never mind that Edgerton is on the other end of the phone line absorbing this bizarre coincidence and fantasizing about a fresh trip to the city jail. Never mind that Edgerton imagines himself confronting the younger Dale with the information that the Baltimore Police Department dug up his father and played with him for no reason other than his son killed a little girl and lied about it. Never mind that Stanton’s detective will be running over to Mark Tomlin’s desk at the shift change, telling Tomlin about Waltemeyer’s morning so Tomlin can draw one of his cartoons that every so often grace the coffee room wall. Never mind all that.

This, to Waltemeyer, is not funny.

Leaving the other detective on the phone with Edgerton, Waltemeyer borrows a Cavalier and takes another ride to Mount Zion.

“You back?” asks a gravedigger at the Hollins Ferry entrance.

“I’m back,” says Waltemeyer. “Where’s Mr. Brown right now?”

“He’s in the office.”

Waltemeyer walks across the driveway toward a small, one-room caretaker’s shack. The cemetery manager, on his way out the door, meets him halfway.

“Mr. Brown, you and me got some talking to do,” says Waltemeyer, looking at the ground.

“Why’s that?”

“Because that body you dug up and gave us this morning…”

“What about it?”

“That was the wrong man.”

The manager doesn’t miss a beat. “Wrong man?” he says. “How could they tell?”

Waltemeyer hears that and thinks about grabbing the old man by his throat. How could they tell? Obviously, the manager figures that after lying in the ground ten months, one corpse looks a lot like another. Just so long as you pull the lid off and it ain’t wearing a dress, right?

“He had an ID bracelet from the hospital,” says Waltemeyer, fighting his temper. “It says he’s Eugene Dale, not Rayfield Gilliard.”

“Jesus,” says the manager, shaking his head.

“Let’s go inside and have a look at whatever records you got.”

Waltemeyer follows the old man into the shack, then watches as he pulls three sets of 3-by-5 cards from a metal file drawer—January, February and March burials—and begins thumbing through them.

“What you say the name was?”

“Dale. D-A-L-E.”

“Not in February,” says the manager. He begins checking the March burials, stopping at the fourth card in the pile. Eugene Dale. Died March 10. Buried March 14. Section DD, Row 83, Grave 11. Waltemeyer picks up the February cards and finds Rayfield Gilliard. Died February 2. Buried February 8. Section DD, Row 78, Grave 17.

Not even close. Waltemeyer gives the manager a hard stare.

“You were five rows away.”

“Well, he ain’t in the right place.”

“I know that,” says Waltemeyer, his voice rising.

“I mean, we was at the right place, but he wasn’t where he was supposed to be.”

Waltemeyer looks at the floor.

“I didn’t work that day,” says the old man. “Someone else messed up.”

“Someone else?”

“Yeah.”

“You think if we dig where Eugene Dale is supposed to be, we’re gonna find Gilliard?”

“Maybe.”

“Why? They’re buried a month apart.”

“Maybe not,” the manager agrees.

Waltemeyer picks up the burial cards and begins sorting through the lot, looking for burials on or near the eighth of February. To his amazement, the names are strangely familiar. Every other card seems to correspond to a 24-hour report.

Here is James Brown, Gilbert’s murder, that kid who got stabbed to death on New Year’s. And Barney Erely, the old drunk Pellegrini found bludgeoned in the alley off Clay Street a few weeks after Latonya Wallace, the derelict killed when he chose the wrong place to defecate. And Orlando Felton, that decomp from North Calvert Street, the overdose that McAllister and McLarney handled back in January. And Keller’s drug killing from March, that homeboy with the unlikely last name of Ireland who made a bucket of money selling east side dope. Christ, all that cash and his family just dumps him in a potter’s field. Dunnigan’s drug murder from the Lafayette Court projects … the three little babies killed in Steinhice’s arson case … Eddie Brown’s fatal shooting from Vine Street. Waltemeyer reads on, both awed and amused. This one was Dave Brown’s, this one was Shea’s. Tomlin handled this one …

“You really don’t know where he is,” says Waltemeyer, putting down the cards, “do you, Mr. Brown?”

“No. Not exactly. Not right now.”

“I didn’t think so.”

At that moment, Waltemeyer is ready to cut his losses and give up on Rayfield Gilliard; the medical examiners, however, are still insistent. They have a probable homicide and an exhumation order signed by a Baltimore County judge, and therefore Mount Zion is obligated to find the body.

Three weeks later they try again, digging down into the mud a full six rows from the spot where the state reburied Eugene Dale, Sr., in a better box than the one it tore apart. This time Waltemeyer does not ask for the logic behind the manager’s insistence on the new location, in part for fear that there is no logic. They use the same backhoe, the same gravediggers, the same ME’s attendants, who haul the second, heavier corpse to the surface, then check the wrists carefully for any identification.

“This one looks more like him,” Waltemeyer says with hope, checking the photograph.

“Told you so,” the manager says proudly.

Then the ME’s man pulls a sock from the left foot to reveal half of a hospital toe tag. W-I-L are the only visible letters. Wilson? Williams? Wilmer? Who knows and who the hell cares if it isn’t Rayfield Gilliard?

“Mr. Brown,” Waltemeyer says to the manager, shaking his head in genuine amazement, “you are a piece of work.”

The manager shrugs, saying that it looks like the right man to him. “Maybe the tag is wrong,” he adds.

“Jesus Christ,” says Waltemeyer. “Get me away from here before I lose my mind.”

Leaving the cemetery grounds, Waltemeyer finds himself walking with a gravedigger. The workman quietly confirms his worst fears, explaining that back in February, when the ground was frozen and the snow deep, the manager had them dig a mass grave down by the creek; they could get the backhoe down there without getting it stuck. Then they dumped eight or nine coffins into that same hole. Easier this way, the manager told them.

Waltemeyer squints in the morning sunlight as the gravedigger finishes his story, his eyes narrowing across the bleak landscape. From the cemetery entrance at the top of the hill, a good part of the city skyline can be seen: the trade center, the USF&G building, the Maryland bank tower. The spires of mobtown, the harbor city, the land of pleasant living. The natives like to tell one another that if you can’t live in Bawlmer, you can’t live anywhere.

So where does that leave Barney Erely? And Orlando Felton? And Maurice Ireland? What was so wrong, so irrelevant, about them that they could end here beneath this wretched patch of county mud, wasted souls, with their city’s gleaming skyscrapers just close enough to mock them? Drunks, addicts, dope peddlers, numbers men, children born to the wrong parents, battered wives, hated husbands, robbery victims, an innocent bystander or two, sons of Cain, victims of Cain—these were the lives lost by the city in a single year, the men and women who cluttered crime scenes and filled Penn Street freezers, leaving little more than red or black ink on a police department tally board. Birth, poverty, violent death, then an anonymous burial in the mud of Mount Zion. In life, the city could muster no purpose for these wasted souls; in death, the city had lost them entirely.

Gilliard and Dale and Erely and Ireland—they were all beyond reach. Even if someone wanted to rescue a loved one and preserve the memory with a real headstone, in a real cemetery, it was no longer possible. The unmarked graves and the manager’s pathetic card file had seen to that. By rights, the city ought to build some kind of monument to its own indifference—Tomb of the Unknown Victim, it could be called. Set it up at Gold and Etting with a police honor guard. Drop a few shell casings in front of it and then chalk off a fresh human silhouette every half hour. Get the Edmondson High School band to play taps and charge the tourists a buck and a quarter.

Lost in life, lost in death. The brain-deads running Mount Zion had pretty much seen to that, thinks Waltemeyer, giving the muddy slope a last look. For $200 a pop, this alleged manager was willing to use any hole he could find, because what the hell, it was ridiculous to think that anyone was ever going to ask for one of them back. Waltemeyer thinks of their first encounter with the cemetery manager. The poor bastard probably shit blue when we showed up with that exhumation order.

After the second attempt, there will be no further excavations for the lost Reverend Gilliard. With a spate of murder charges already filed under Miss Geraldine’s name, this one will have to slip away. The pathologists, the lawyers, the cops—no one has the stomach to risk disturbing any more graves. For Waltemeyer, however, such sentiments come too late. True, the Geraldine Parrish investigation has been his career case, and his unstinting pursuit of it has secured his reputation as one of the homicide unit’s seasoned veterans. Nonetheless, his adventures in Mount Zion mark him with repute of an altogether different kind.

As if disinterring the odd, innocent body isn’t hard enough for a Catholic conscience, he will return to the office one day in January to find a new nameplate on his desk, the kind of thing you can order from any office supply store.

“Det. Digger Waltemeyer,” it reads.

M
ONDAY
, D
ECEMBER 5

“I don’t like the way he’s laying,” says Donald Worden, leaning over the bed. “Up on his side like that … like somebody rolled him.”

Waltemeyer nods in agreement.

“I think,” adds Worden, looking over the rest of the room, “that this one’s gonna come back from the medical examiner as a murder.”

“I think you’re right,” says Waltemeyer.

There is no overt trauma to the body, no bulletholes, no knife wounds, no bruises or contusions. A little bit of dried blood is visible around the mouth, but that could be the result of decomp. There is also no sign of struggle or ransacking in the motel room. But the old man is on his right side beneath the sheets, his back arched at an awkward angle, as if someone had pushed him into that strange position to check for signs of life.

He was sixty-five and white, a Southern Maryland man well known to the employees at the Eastgate Motel, a $25-a-night collection of double
beds and bad wall prints on old Route 40 in East Baltimore. Once a week, Robert Wallace Yergin would drive to Baltimore from his home in Leonardtown, check into the Eastgate for a night, then spend the evening bringing young boys to and from the room.

For that purpose, at least, the Eastgate was situated perfectly. A few blocks from where Pulaski dead-ends into East Fayette Street, the motel is only blocks from the edges of Patterson Park, where $20 will pay for the services of a blond-haired billy kid anywhere from twelve to eighteen years old. The pedophile trade along Eastern Avenue is an old phenomenon, known to men up and down the East Coast. A few years back, when the vice squad wrote a warrant on a child pornography ring, they actually recovered some guidebooks to homosexual prostitution in major American cities. In Baltimore, the guides noted, the most promising locales were Wilkens near Monroe Street and Patterson Park along Eastern Avenue.

Not only is Robert Yergin’s affinity for boys under the age of majority known to the desk men and cleaning crew at the Eastgate, but the employees are able to identify and describe the sixteen-year-old who has been Yergin’s constant companion for the last several months. The kid is a Baltimore boy, the employees tell Worden, a street waif who for a pound or two of flesh had found a home with the old pervert down in the country. When Yergin came to Baltimore to troll for teenagers, he’d bring the kid, who would spend his time visiting friends from the old neighborhood.

“Maybe the boy is the one who took the car,” says the twenty-five-year-old employee from housecleaning who found the body. “He might have just borrowed it or something.”

“Maybe,” says Worden.

“When you came in here and found him,” asks Waltemeyer, “did you touch him or roll him over or anything to see if he was okay?”

“No way,” says the employee. “I saw he was dead right away and just left him be.”

“Did you touch anything in the room?” asks Worden. “Anything at all?”

“No, sir.”

Worden gestures to the young man, drawing him across the room for a private conversation. Quietly, and in a way that the employee immediately recognizes as truthful, Worden explains that this death is going to be a murder. Worden tries to reassure him: We only care about the murder.

“Don’t be offended,” the detective says, “but if you touched anything
from the room, if you took anything from the room, tell us now and it won’t go any further …”

The employee understands. “No,” he says. “I didn’t steal nothin’.”

“Okay, then,” says Worden.

Waltemeyer waits for the young man to leave, then looks at Worden. “Well, if he didn’t get the wallet,” says Waltemeyer, “then someone else must’ve.”

That’s what it’s beginning to look like: Man meets boy, man gets undressed, boy strangles man, steals cash, credit cards and Ford Thunderbird and drives off into the Baltimore sunset. Unless, of course, the kid who lived with him did it. Then it’s man meets boy, man lives with boy, boy finally gets sick of playing grabass and chokes the living shit out of the landlord. That would play, too, thinks Worden.