Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets Part 15

Landsman pulls a leuco malachite kit from his pocket, treats a cotton swab with chemical and runs it across the stain. Dull gray.

Pellegrini finishes checking the back seat, then both men walk around to the trunk. Landsman turns the key, but hesitates for just a moment before opening the top.

"C'mon, you mother," he says, coming as close to genuine prayer as Jay Landsman ever does.

The trunk is clean. He treats seven or eight leuco swabs with chemical and drags them into every one of the trunk's indentations and crevices. Dull gray.

Pellegrini exhales slowly, his breath clouding in the frigid air. Then he walks to the Cavalier and sits in the driver's seat. He holds up the bracelet and looks carefully at the gold strand, sensing that it, too, leads nowhere, that within a day or two the family of Latonya Wallace will answer no, they have never seen the chain before. Pellegrini waits silently as Landsman sc.r.a.pes two more swabs along the interior before closing the trunk, sticking his hands deep into his jacket pockets and walking back to the Chevrolet.

"Let's go."

Suddenly, the exhaustion is overpowering, and both detectives are squinting in the morning light as the car rolls south on Harford Road and then west on Northern Parkway. For fifteen solid days, they have worked sixteen- and twenty-hour s.h.i.+fts, living on a roller-coaster ride from one suspect to another, bouncing wildly between moments of elation and hours of despair.

"I'll tell you what I think," says Landsman.

"What?"

"I think we need a day off. We gotta get some sleep, wake up and think on it."

Pellegrini nods.

Somewhere near the Jones Falls interchange, Landsman speaks again.

"Don't worry, Tom," he says, "it'll go down."

But Pellegrini is awash in fatigue and doubt, and he says nothing.

In Jay Landsman's office, the Latonya Wallace probe is spreading like a cancer. Crime scene photos, lab reports, diagrams, office reports, aerial photographs of Reservoir Hill taken from the police helicopter-the paper pours out of the case folder and marches across the sergeant's desk and file cabinets. A second column of doc.u.ments begins a flanking maneuver, attacking Pellegrini's work area in the annex office, then overwhelming a cardboard box behind the detective's chair. The case has become a world unto itself, spinning in an orbit of its own.

But for the rest of the homicide unit, it's business as usual. For much of the decade, homicide detectives in Baltimore have believed that the law of averages will guarantee somewhere between 200 and 250 murders a year, a total that shakes out to about two homicides every three days. The unit's inst.i.tutional memory includes a few 300-plus years in the early 1970s, but the rate declined abruptly when the state's shock-trauma medical system came on line and the emergency rooms at Hopkins and University started saving some of the bleeders. For the last two years, the body count has edged slightly higher, cresting at 226 in 1987, but the trend is nothing that makes the act of murder in Baltimore seem like anything more than a point on the probability curve. On Friday afternoons, the nights.h.i.+ft detectives can watch Kim and Linda, the admin secretaries, stamp case numbers on empty red binders-88041, 88042, 88043-and know with fat, happy confidence that somewhere on the streets of the city, several victims-to-be are stumbling toward oblivion. The veteran detectives will joke about it: h.e.l.l, the case numbers are probably tattooed on the backsides of doomed men in ultraviolet ink. If you put one through a postage meter, if you showed him the 88041 stenciled on his right cheek and told him what it meant, the poor f.u.c.k would change his name, lock himself in his bas.e.m.e.nt, or jump the first Greyhound to Akron or Oklahoma City or any other spot a thousand miles away. But they never do; the math remains absolute.

Of course, within the confines of the established rate, statistical fluctuation permits the slow weekend due to rain, snow or a pennant race in the American League East. Also permitted is the aberrant full-moon midnight s.h.i.+ft, when every other right-thinking Baltimorean reaches for a revolver, or those occasional and unexplained homicidal binges in which the city seems h.e.l.l-bent on depopulating itself in the briefest time span possible. In late February, as the Latonya Wallace detail stretches into its third week, the homicide unit begins one such period when detectives on both s.h.i.+fts are hit with fourteen murders in thirteen days.

It is two weeks of mayhem, with bodies stacked like firewood in the ME's freezer and detectives arguing over the office typewriters. On one particularly bad night, two men from McLarney's squad find themselves acting out a scene that could only occur in the emergency room of an urban American hospital. The green-smocked vanguard of medical science is at stage right, struggling to repair a man with holes in his body. At stage left is Donald Waltemeyer, playing the role of First Detective. Enter Dave Brown, the Second Detective, who has come to a.s.sist his partner in the investigation of a Crime of Violence.

"Yo, Donald."

"David."

"Yo, brother, what's up? Is this our boy here?"

"This is the shooting."

"That's what we've got, right?"

"You got the stabbing, right?"

"I came up here looking for you. McLarney thought you might want help."

"Well, I got the shooting."

"Okay. Great."

"Well, who's gonna take the stabbing?"

"Whoa. The shooting and stabbing are separate?"

"Yeah. I got the shooting."

"So where's the stabbing?"

"Next room over, I think."

The Second Detective moves stage right, where another team of green-smocked technicians is now visible, struggling to repair another man with even larger holes.

"Okay, bunk," says the Second Detective impa.s.sively. "I'll take it."

A night after Waltemeyer and Dave Brown trade bleeders at the Hopkins trauma unit, Donald Worden and Rick James catch their first fresh murder since Monroe Street, a picture-perfect domestic from the kitchen of a South Baltimore townhouse: a thirty-two-year-old husband is stretched across the linoleum, blood leaking from .22-caliber holes in his chest, undigested rum and cola leaking from his open mouth. It started with an argument that progressed to a point where the wife called police just after midnight, and the responding uniform graciously drove the very drunk husband to his mother's house and told him to sleep it off. This meddlesome action, of course, violates the inalienable right of every drunken South Baltimore redneck to beat his estranged wife at one in the morning, and the husband responds by shaking off his stupor, calling a taxi and kicking down the kitchen door, whereupon he is shot dead by his sixteen-year-old stepson. Called at home that morning, the state's attorney on duty asks for manslaughter charges in juvenile court.

Two days later, Dave Brown picks up a drug murder from the open-air market at North and Longwood, and when it shakes out three days later, Roddy Milligan is credited with another notch on his gun. At the tender age of nineteen, Roderick James Milligan has become something of a pest to the homicide unit, what with his penchant for shooting every competing street dealer in the Southwestern. A small, elfin thing, Milligan had previously been sought on two 1987 murder warrants and was a suspect in a fourth slaying. His whereabouts unknown, young Roderick was beginning to irritate the detectives; Terry McLarney, in particular, takes as an insult the youthful offender's decision to shoot more people rather than surrender.

"Can you believe a little s.h.i.+thead like this is able to stay on the run for so long?" McLarney declares, returning from yet another unsuccessful turn-up of a Milligan hideout. "You shoot a guy, hey," the sergeant adds with a shrug. "You shoot another guy-well, okay, this is Baltimore. You shoot three guys, it's time to admit you have a problem."

Although Milligan has taken a line from Cagney, telling relatives he'll never be taken alive, he's eventually picked up in a raid a month later, caught dirty at a girlfriend's house with heroin still in his pocket. His reputation suffers when it later gets out that after being tossed into an interrogation room, he cries uncontrollably.

For Stanton's s.h.i.+ft, there is the thirty-nine-year-old Highlandtown native who goes with a friend to buy PCP in a blighted section of Southeast Was.h.i.+ngton, where he is instead robbed and shot in the head by a street dealer. The friend then takes the wheel of the car and drives the thirty-five miles back up the Baltimore-Was.h.i.+ngton Expressway with the victim a b.l.o.o.d.y, dying wreck in the pa.s.senger seat. He takes the corpse to an east side hospital, claiming to have been attacked and robbed by a hitchhiker on nearby Dundalk Avenue.

There is the argument at a West Baltimore bar that begins with words, then escalates to fists and baseball bats until a thirty-eight-year-old man is lingering in a hospital bed, where three weeks later he rolls the Big Seven. The argument is between two Vietnam veterans, one declaring that the 1st Air Cavalry was the war's premier fighting unit, the other advocating for the 1st Marine Division. In this particular instance, the Air Cav carries the day.

And there can be no forgetting the Westport mother who shoots her boyfriend, then tells her teenage daughter to confess to the crime, arguing that she would be charged only as a juvenile. And the young drug dealer from the Lafayette Courts projects who is abducted and shot by a compet.i.tor, then dumped in a Pimlico gutter, where he is mistaken for a dead dog by pa.s.sersby. And the twenty-five-year-old East Baltimore entrepreneur who is shot in the back of the head as he weighs and dilutes heroin at a kitchen table. And the is-this-a-great-city-or-what homicide that Fred Ceruti handles in a Cathedral Street apartment, where one prost.i.tute plunges a knife into the chest of another for a $10 cap of heroin, then fires the drugs before the police arrive. The key witness to the crime, a businessman from the Was.h.i.+ngton suburbs who fled to his wife and children at the first sign of blood, is chagrined to be called at 4:00 A.M A.M. by a detective who learns his ident.i.ty from credit card slips left behind on Baltimore's Block, the downtown erogenous zone where he met the wh.o.r.es.

"Is Frank home?"

"Yes," says a woman's voice, "who is this?"

"Tell him it's his friend Fred," says Ceruti with genuine charity, adding, a few seconds later, "Frank, this is Detective Ceruti from the Baltimore Police Department's homicide unit. We have a problem here, don't we?"

In contrast, there is a rare, refres.h.i.+ng moment of civic responsibility displayed by one James M. Baskerville, who flees after shooting his young girlfriend in her Northwest Baltimore home, then calls the crime scene an hour later and asks to talk with the detective.

"Who am I talking to?"

"This is Detective Tomlin."

"Detective Tomlin?"

"Yeah, who's this?"

"This is James Baskerville. I'm calling to surrender to you for killing Lucille."

"G.o.ddammit Constantine, you bald-headed motherf.u.c.ker, I'm up here trying to do a crime scene and all you can find to do is f.u.c.k with me. Either come up here and help or-"

Click. Mark Tomlin listens to a dead phone line for a moment, then turns to a family member. "What did you say was the name of Lucille's boyfriend?"

"Baskerville. James Baskerville."

When the second call comes, Tomlin catches it on the first ring. "Mr. Baskerville, listen, I'm real sorry about that. I thought you were someone else ... Where are you now?"

Later that night, in the large interrogation room, James Baskerville-who would later agree to life plus twenty years at his arraignment-offers no excuses and readily initials each page of his statement of confession. "I've committed a serious crime and I should be punished," he says.

"Mr. Baskerville," asks Tomlin, "are there any more like you at home?"

And like Latonya Wallace, there are those rare victims for whom death is not the inevitable consequence of a long-running domestic feud or a stunted pharmaceutical career. Poor souls like Henry Coleman, a forty-year-old cab driver who picks up the wrong fare at Broadway and Chase; and Mary Irons, age nineteen, who leaves a downtown dance club with the wrong escort and is found cut up behind an elementary school; and Edgar Henson, thirty-seven, who is leaving an east side 7-Eleven when a group of teenagers announce a robbery and then, without warning, begin blasting away. The gang takes two dollars in food stamps, leaving behind a quart of milk and a can of Dinty Moore stew.

And Charles Frederick Lehman, fifty-one, a Church Home hospital employee whose last moments on earth are consumed by the carry-out purchase of a two-piece extra crispy dinner from the Kentucky Fried outlet on Fayette Street. Lehman doesn't make the twenty feet between the restaurant door and his Plymouth; he is found spread-eagled on the rain-soaked parking lot, his wallet gone, the contents of one pocket spread across the asphalt, the chicken dinner lying in a puddle near his head. From inside the restaurant, another customer watched the brief struggle with three teenagers, heard the gunshot and saw the victim fall. He stared as one kid leaned over the stricken man, methodically rifled his pants pockets, then raced his two companions across Fayette Street into the Dougla.s.s Homes project. But the sixty-seven-year-old witness is nearsighted, and he can provide no description better than three black males. The dead man's car is towed to headquarters for processing in the hope that one of the three kids touched the car and left a clear print. When that fails, there is only the anonymous caller with a white male's voice who tells Donald Kincaid that a black co-worker had talked about watching three kids-one of whom he knew by name-running through the Dougla.s.s Homes after the shooting. But the co-worker doesn't want to be a witness. Neither, for that matter, does the caller.

"He doesn't have to give his name. He can just talk to me like you're talking to me now," pleads Kincaid. "You got to get him to call because I'll tell you the truth, this is the only clue I got." The voice on the other end promises to try, but Kincaid has been in homicide for a dozen years, and he drops the receiver into its cradle knowing that in all probability, he is waiting for a call that will never come.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21.

They take a page from the book written by the FBI's psychological a.n.a.lysts, with Pellegrini and Landsman bringing the Fish Man down to the homicide office in the early morning-a time when a supposedly nocturnal suspect would be least comfortable. Then they do everything conceivable to make him believe that he is not in control, that their precision, their persistence, the sheer weight of their technologies, are certain to wear him down.

On the way upstairs to the interrogation, they walk him past the trace evidence lab. Normally locked on a Sunday morning, the fifth-floor laboratory has been opened and the equipment turned on by the detectives themselves. An elaborate show has been prepared to intimidate the suspect, to break him down before he even reaches the interrogation room. On one counter, the little girl's bloodied clothes have been carefully laid out in a graphic display; on another table, her school books and satchel.

Hovering over the dead girl's clothes, Terry McLarney and Dave Brown are dressed in white lab coats, their faces bathed in studious, professorial intensity. They seem to be ama.s.sing a collection of microscopic clues as they putter back and forth between the clothing and the lab equipment.

As Pellegrini marches the suspect past the lab windows, he watches the Fish Man intently. The old man seems to be taking it all in, but he offers no reaction. The detective ushers the suspect into the back stairwell and up one flight to the homicide office, through the aquarium and into the greater authority of the captain's office. With its expansive desk and high-backed chair, its sweeping view of the Baltimore skyline, the office seems to add even more prestige to the process. Before beginning with the Miranda, Pellegrini and Edgerton make sure the Fish Man gets a good long look at the maps and the aerial photos and the impersonal, black-and-white shots of the dead girl's face, taken by the overhead camera at the ME's office-all of it arrayed on the bulletin boards and blackboards that clutter the room. They let him see his own face, an ident photograph, affixed to the same board as the child's picture. They do every conceivable thing to make this, their best suspect in the death of Latonya Wallace, believe that they have or will soon have the physical evidence, that they are dealing from a position of strength, that exposure and punishment are inevitable.

Then they go at him. First Pellegrini, then Edgerton. Talking loud and fast, then whispering, then droning on laconically, then shouting, then asking questions, then asking the same questions again. Just outside the door, Landsman and the others listen to the a.s.sault, waiting for something to provoke the grizzled old man, something that will strike a chord and bring the beginning of the story up out of the Fish Man's throat. One at a time the detectives leave the room, return, leave again, then come back again, each time bringing new questions, new tactics, suggested by those listening in silence just outside.

The confrontation is perfectly ch.o.r.eographed, so much so that many of the detectives allow themselves to believe that for once, the entire s.h.i.+ft has pulled together around a single red ball, doing everything humanly and legally possible to squeeze a murder confession from a suspect. Yet the old man in the captain's office remains unimpressed. He is a stone, a solid, stoic ma.s.s without fear, without any sense of distress, without any rage at being made a suspect in the molestation and murder of a child. He meets every argument with only abject denial and provides nothing more than the vague outline of his earlier statements. He will give no alibi for Tuesday. He will admit nothing.

In the early hours of the interrogation, Pellegrini defers once again to Edgerton, who has done this so many times before. With a certain unease, he listens to Edgerton lay everything they have in front of their suspect. Trying to convince him of their omniscience, Edgerton tells the Fish Man that they know about the little girls, that they told us how you could be fresh. We know about the old rape charge, Edgerton a.s.sures him. We know why you still don't have an alibi.

Pellegrini listens to the veteran detective shovel his best stuff onto the old man's lap with little effect and realizes, too late, that it isn't enough. Hour after hour, Edgerton is spitting out words and phrases in that double-time New York cadence, but Pellegrini can almost feel the old man's indifference growing. The detectives have their suspicions, they have probabilities, they have the mere beginnings of a circ.u.mstantial case. What they do not have is evidence: raw evidence, real evidence. The kind that breaks a man down to his smallest parts and makes him admit to that which no man will ever willingly admit. They're in the room, firing their guns, and they don't have it.

If they are right-if the Fish Man molested and killed Latonya Wallace-then they have only one or two chances to break him, one or two sessions to bring the man to a confession. Last Sat.u.r.day was the first bite of the apple and now, with nothing else on their plate, they are wasting the rest of the meal.

As Edgerton begins to tire, Pellegrini picks up what few threads remain untouched. He asks the old man open-ended questions, hoping to arouse something other than monosyllabic answers. He tries to probe the old man's feelings for the dead girl. But they are random questions, a few shots in the dark delivered independent of any plan or science. Pellegrini watches the old man's unchanging face and curses himself. He is locked in this room with his best, most enduring suspect, and yet he has no trump card, no tool with which to pry into the man's soul.

Once again, Pellegrini feels that insistent regret, that same unnerving notion that his case is running away from him. When it came to this, the investigation's most critical confrontation thus far, he had given the helm to Edgerton. But Edgerton had no plan; h.e.l.l, none of them did.

Everything had rested on the forlorn hope that the Fish Man would fear their expertise, their knowledge and their authority-fear all of it enough to give up his darkest secrets. Pellegrini wonders whether their suspect even understands enough to feel that kind of fear. The walk by the lab didn't even faze him; neither had the morgue photos. The Fish Man was either a true innocent or a true sociopath.

After eight hours, they call for a Central District radio car as first Pellegrini, then Edgerton, surrenders to both frustration and exhaustion. The store owner waits quietly on the green vinyl sofa in the aquarium until a uniform arrives to shuttle him back to Whitelock Street. Then the Fish Man collects himself slowly and shuffles down the sixth-floor corridor, once again a free man.

Two nights later, Pellegrini shows up for a midnight s.h.i.+ft, checks the roll book, and learns he's the only detective on active duty. Fahlteich's on vacation, Dunnigan and Ceruti are off, and Rick Requer, just off medical from a broken arm, is still working light duty.

"You all can head out," he tells Kincaid and the others on the four-to-twelve crew after getting a cup of coffee.

"Where's the rest of the relief?" asks Kincaid.

"I'm it."

"Just you?"

"Hey," says Pellegrini. "One city, one detective."

"s.h.i.+t, Tom," says Kincaid. "I sure hope that f.u.c.kin' phone don't ring."

But ring it does. And at 5:00 A.M A.M., Pellegrini finds himself standing in the p.i.s.s stench of a small, dark pa.s.sageway between two downtown buildings on Clay Street, looking at the earthly remains of a street person, a homeless derelict with his head crushed and his pants pulled below his knees. He wanted nothing more than a warm place to defecate and got beaten to death for that simple ambition. A more meaningless murder cannot be committed.

Later that morning, the admin lieutenant makes it clear to Pellegrini that he's the primary investigator on Latonya Wallace and orders him to dump 88033, the murder of Barney Erely, age forty-five, of no fixed address, on Roger Nolan's squad. This decision somehow fails to make Nolan the most contented sergeant in homicide.

Transferring the case solves nothing. This is a world with more murders than detectives, a city in which time will not stand still, not even for Latonya Wallace. One week later, Pellegrini and Gary Dunnigan are alone in the office on a midnight s.h.i.+ft when the phone rings with a fatal stabbing from the Southeast.

And Pellegrini goes back in the rotation.

FOUR.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 22.

No witnesses, no motive, and a forty-year-old woman stabbed, stabbed some more, and then, it would seem, shot once in the head at close range. At least, Rich Garvey tells himself, she's dead in a house.

Wilson, the lab tech, stops flas.h.i.+ng pictures long enough to reload his camera and Garvey uses the respite to walk through the bedroom one more time, running through mental lists. You can almost hear file cards turning inside his head.

"Hey, where's your buddy?" Wilson asks.

The detective looks up, distracted. "Who's my buddy?"

"You know, your partner, McAllister."

"He's off tonight."

"Left you all alone, huh?"

"That's right, stick ol' Garvo with the tough ones ... You got a shot of the clothes, right here by the door?"

"I took a few."

Garvey nods.

Charlene Lucas was found by a neighbor, a middle-aged man who lives in the upstairs apartment. On leaving for work at 5:00 A.M., A.M., he noticed that the door to her apartment was ajar, and when he came back from work, just after 4:00 he noticed that the door to her apartment was ajar, and when he came back from work, just after 4:00 P.M., P.M., the door to the second-floor apartment was still open. Calling his neighbor's name, he wandered far enough into the back bedroom to see the woman's legs stretched across the floor. the door to the second-floor apartment was still open. Calling his neighbor's name, he wandered far enough into the back bedroom to see the woman's legs stretched across the floor.