Homicide (90 page)

In the dry heat of the crowded room, Garvey watches McAllister launch into his standard exposition on what the grieving family should and shouldn’t do in this, Their Time of Loss. Garvey never stops marveling at Mac’s artistry with the families: Head tilted slightly, hands folded together at the waist, he’s a parish priest, expressing his most heartfelt sorrow in slow, measured tones. Mac’s even got a slight, endearing stutter that kicks in during moments of stress and adds a hint of vulnerability. At the scene an hour earlier, standing over the dead man, McAllister was as quick with a joke as any of them. Now, with the dead man’s mother, he’s Mr. Sharing and Caring. Phil fucking Donahue in a trenchcoat.

“Now there’s absolutely no need for you to go down to the medical examiner’s office. In fact, even if you wanted to go down there, they wouldn’t let you in …”

“Where’s that?” says the mother.

“At the medical examiner’s,” says McAllister slowly. “But you don’t need to worry about that. All you have to do is contact the funeral home of your choice and tell them that the body is at the medical examiner’s office at Penn and Lombard streets. They’ll know exactly what to do. Okay?”

The mother nods.

“Now, we’re going to try to find out who did this, but we’re going to need the family’s help … That’s what we’ve come here to ask for …”

The sales pitch. McAllister gives it his best shot, his you-can’t-bring-him-back-but-you-can-avenge-him soliloquy that leaves the mother nodding in agreement. Garvey looks around the room for some sign from the multitude, some small discomfort exhibited by a family member carrying a little bit of knowledge. The younger men and women seem distant, detached, but a few take the business cards, assuring the detectives that they know nothing but will call if there is so much as a rumor in the neighborhood.

“Again,” says McAllister at the door, “let us express our condolences for your loss …”

Garvey looks at a room full of blank faces. Mother, brothers, sisters, cousins, friends—all of them seem to be ignorant of any reason for the murder. The phone in the homicide office won’t exactly be lighting up on this one, he concedes.

“Again, don’t hesitate to call us if you have any questions or any information at all,” says McAllister, winding up.

Garvey moves toward the front door, leading the way out of the rowhouse. As the two detectives step outside, Garvey turns to his partner and prepares to explain why McAllister ought to become the primary investigator in this lost campaign. But he says nothing; instead, he looks over Mac’s shoulder at a young man, a cousin of the victim, who has furtively pursued them out the door.

“Excuse me, officer …”

McAllister turns as well, increasing the cousin’s apparent discomfort. The young man has something to say and he will not be denied.

“Excuse me,” he says, his voice a whisper.

“Yes?” says Garvey.

“Can I … um …”

Here it comes, thinks Garvey. Here comes the moment when a grieving relative steps away from the rest of the family and bravely imparts a little truth. The cousin extends his hand and McAllister takes it first. Garvey follows suit, warming to the knowledge that he is truly golden, that he has somehow transcended reality and become the Midas of ghetto homicides.

“Can I …”

Yes, thinks Garvey, you can. You most certainly can tell us everything, every last little thing you know about your cousin Anthony. Tell us about the drugs he was firing, or the drugs he was dealing, or the beef he had with a customer last night. Tell us about some money problem that left a supplier handing out wolf tickets, swearing to get even. Tell us about the girls he was fooling with or the other boyfriends who threatened to light him up. Tell us what you heard on the street after the murder, or maybe even the name of the guy you heard bragging about the murder in some bar. You can tell us everything.

“Can I … um … ask a question?”

A question? Of course you can. I’ll bet you want to remain anonymous. Hell, unless you’re an eyewitness or something, you can even stay
monogamous if you really want. We’re your friends. We like you. We’ll take you downtown for free coffee and doughnuts. We’re cops. Trust us. Tell us everything.

“What is it?” asks McAllister.

“Is what you tryin’ to tell me …”

“Yes?”

“Is what you tryin’ to tell me that my cousin Anthony is dead?”

Garvey looks at McAllister, and McAllister looks at his shoes to keep from laughing aloud.

“Um, yes,” says McAllister. “I’m afraid he’s been fatally wounded. That’s what we were talking about inside …”

“Damn,” says the cousin, truly amazed.

“Anything else you wanted to tell us?”

“No,” says the cousin. “Not really.”

“Well, sorry again.”

“Okay.”

“We’ll be in touch.”

“Okay.”

It’s over. It’s history. It was a helluva run—ten cases in a row beginning with Lena Lucas and old man Booker back in February. But now, with every fiber of his being, Garvey understands that the rocket scientist on the porch is nothing if not a messenger—a walking, talking presignification of all that is true to a murder police.

The words from the wayward cousin’s mouth were all thickness and incoherence, but to Garvey they confirm every rule in the book. He didn’t have a suspect, so of course his victim didn’t survive. And with no suspect, there isn’t likely to be any lab evidence or any chance of the victim surviving his wounds. And if Garvey ever does locate a witness to this crime, the witness will lie because everyone lies. And if he ever does get his hands on a suspect, that man will undoubtedly sleep in the interrogation room. And if this weak case ever manages to get within arm’s length of a jury panel, every doubt will seem reasonable. And most especially: It’s good to be good, but it’s better to be lucky.

The brain-dead on the porch is an unmistakable divination, a reminder that the rules still apply—even for the likes of Rich Garvey. Never mind that ten days from now he’ll be working a fresh drug murder on the east side, charging through a rowhouse door to grab the shooter beneath the colored lights of a decorated Christmas tree. Never mind that next
year will be a crusade as successful as any other. Now, at this moment, Garvey can watch Anthony Morris’s cousin slip back indoors and know, with the faith and certainty of a religion, that there is nothing coming back on this one—no telephone calls to the homicide office, no snitching from the city jail, no talk on the streets of the Western. The case will never go black; it will be open long after Garvey is soaking in his pension.

“Mac, did I imagine that conversation?” he asks, laughing, on the return trip to the office. “Or did it really happen?”

“No, no,” says McAllister. “You must’ve imagined it. Put it out of your mind.”

“Dee-tective,” says Garvey, in bad imitation. “Is what you tryin’ to say is that my cousin is dead?”

McAllister laughs.

“Next case,” says Garvey.

In any man’s work, perfection is an elusive, ethereal goal, an idea that does constant battle with the daily grind. But to a homicide detective, perfection is not even a possibility. On the streets of a city, the Perfect Year is a mere wisp of a thing, a dying fragment of hope, pale and starved and weak.

The Perfect Murder will kick its ass every time.

S
UNDAY
, D
ECEMBER 11

“Look,” says Terry McLarney, watching the Bloom Street corners with mock innocence. “There’s a criminal.”

Half a block ahead of them, the kid on the corner seems to hear him say it. He turns abruptly from the Cavalier’s headlights, moving down the street, one hand reaching back to pull a rolled newspaper from his pants pocket. McLarney and Dave Brown can both see the newspaper fall softly into the gutter.

“Patrol was so easy,” says McLarney wistfully. “You know?”

Dave Brown knows. If the unmarked Chevy were a radio car, if they were wearing uniforms, if Bloom and Division was in their sector, they’d have a lockup just that easy. Throw the weasel against a wall, cuff him up good, then walk his ass back to that little stick of newsprint, that homemade sheath wrapped around a knife or a syringe or both.

“There used to be these two guys in my squad when I was in the Western,” says McLarney, nostalgic. “They had this running bet over who could go out and get a lockup in the shortest time possible.”

“In the Western,” says Brown, “five minutes.”

“Less,” says McLarney. “After a while, I told them that they ought to make it more challenging. You know, something better than a Part Two arrest. But they didn’t like that … too much work.”

Brown turns onto Bloom and then turns again at Etting. They watch more corner boys drop glassine packets or run into rowhouses.

“See that house there,” says McLarney, pointing to a two-story pile of painted brick. “I got thumped in there. Right in the hallway … Did I ever tell you that story?”

“I don’t think so,” says Brown, polite.

“It was a call for a man with a knife, and when I pulled up this guy just takes one look at me and runs into the house …”

“PC in my book,” says Brown, turning right and cruising back toward Pennsylvania Avenue.

“So I run in after him and there’s this convention of healthy black males in the living room. It was bizarre; we all just kinda looked at each other for a second.”

Dave Brown laughs.

“So then I grab hold of my guy and they’re all over me. Like five or six of ’em.”

“What’d you do?”

“I got hit,” says McLarney, laughing. “But I didn’t let go of my guy either. By the time my bunkies answered the thirteen, everyone had run out the back except for my guy, who ended up getting beat for all his missing friends. I kinda felt sorry for him.”

“What about you?” asks Brown.

“Stitches in my head.”

“Was this before or after you got shot?”

“Before,” says McLarney. “This was when I was in the Central.”

One story after another spills from Terry McLarney’s brain, his mood lightened by a night on the West Baltimore streets. A car ride through the west side never fails to have that effect on McLarney, who can roll through the ghetto remembering a strange thing that happened on this corner, a funny comment overheard down that street. On the surface, it all resembles a nightmare, but dig a little deeper and McLarney can show you the perverse eloquence of the thing, the unending inner-city comedy of crime and punishment.

That corner there, for instance, the one where Snot Boogie got shot.

“Snot Boogie?” asks Brown, disbelieving.

“Yeah,” says McLarney. “And that’s what his friends called him.”

“Nice.”

McLarney laughs, then leaps into the parable of Snot Boogie, who joined the neighborhood crap game, waited for the pot to thicken, then grabbed the cash and bolted down the street only to be shot dead by one of the irate players.

“So we’re interviewing the witnesses down at the office and they’re saying how Snot Boogie would always join the crap game, then run away with the pot, and that they’d finally gotten sick of it …”

Dave Brown drives in silence, barely tracking this historical digression.

“And I asked one of them, you know, I asked him why they even let Snot Boogie into the game if he always tried to run away with the money.”

McLarney pauses for effect.

“And?” asks Brown.

“He just looked at me real bizarre,” says McLarney. “And then he says, ‘You gotta let him play … This is America.’”

Brown laughs loudly.

“I love that,” says McLarney.

“Great story. Did it really happen?”

“Fuck yes.”

Brown laughs again. McLarney’s mood is contagious, even if the reason for tonight’s jaunt was wearing thin.

“I don’t think she’s out tonight,” says Brown, coasting up Pennsylvania Avenue for the fifth or sixth time.

“She’s never out,” says McLarney.

“Fuck this cocksucking bitch,” says Brown, slamming a hand on the steering wheel. “I’m tired of this fucking shit.”

McLarney looks at his detective with newfound delight, as if to encourage this sudden rant.

“I mean, we’re the homicide unit, the murder police, the highly trained investigative elite who always get their man …”

“Careful,” says McLarney. “You’re giving me an erection.”

“And who the fuck is she? She’s a disease-ridden twenty-dollar-a-fuck junkie from Pennsylvania Avenue who’s managed to elude us for three goddamn months. It’s fucking embarrassing is what it is …”

Lenore, the Mystery Whore. The lone witness to Worden’s September stabbing on Pennsylvania Avenue; the woman who can close the file by declaring that her now-dead boyfriend killed her then-dead boyfriend in a dispute over her affections. To Brown and Worden and everyone else in
the squad, it is getting a bit embarrassing, this charging up and down the Avenue every other night, jacking up whores and addicts and coming nowhere near the elusive Miss Nore, who is always just beyond a detective’s reach. By now, they’ve heard every line:

“She was out walking last night …”

“Nore? She down on Division Street not a while ago …”

“She came out the carryout and went that way …”

Christ, thinks Brown. It isn’t bad enough that this junkie bitch doesn’t have a permanent address. No, she’s gotta move like the fucking wind. How in the hell do her customers find her?

“Maybe she’s not real,” says McLarney. “Maybe it’s a hoax and all the derelicts out here made her up. It’s a test to see how long we’ll ride around looking.”

McLarney smiles, warm with the thought of a $20 cockhound defying every law of metaphysics. A translucent wraith, she walks the streets of West Baltimore immune to the forces of authority. Some paid their $20 and swear her to be real, but to generations of homicide detectives, she is but the stuff of dreams, destined to be Baltimore’s contribution to the treasure chest of American folklore: Paul Bunyan, the Headless Horseman of Tarrytown, the ghost ship
Mary Celeste
; Lenore, the Mystery Whore.

“So why does James have her sheet in the file?” counters Brown. “And why do I have her B of I photo in my pocket?”

“Whoa,” says McLarney. “A clever hoax at that.”