Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets Part 32

The senator took the offer for what it was, but asked a few questions to be sure. If he told them that no crime had occurred, that would end the investigation, correct? And if he told them here and now that there was no crime, that admission would not be used against him, correct?

"Not by me," Worden told him.

"Then," the senator replied, "there was no abduction. I would prefer that the matter be dealt with privately."

Worden told the senator that he could regard the police department's investigation as a closed file. The original abduction report had been written up as a police-information-only report, as was the case with all threat cases involving public officials. And because there is no incident report, there should be nothing in the newspapers.

"Our part in this is over," Worden said.

Worden and Nolan shook hands with the senator, concluding the bargain. There would be no grand jury probe, no red-ball moneymaker for which a squad of homicide detectives could clock overtime, no awkward questions about the senator's private life, no public revelations about a politician's bungled attempt to fabricate a counterweight to his own a.s.sault and battery. Instead, the homicide unit would go back to the more parochial task of working murders. Worden returned to headquarters and typed the requisite report of the meeting for the captain, believing he had done the right thing.

But on June 14, a week and a half after his journey to the senator's office, Worden's quiet solution to the whole sordid affair was shattered by a news leak of the incident to a television reporter for the local CBS affiliate. From the amount of information about the case in the reporter's broadcast, Worden and James both suspected that the leak had come from within the department. That scenario made sense; not everyone in the chain of command could be considered the senator's political ally and the bizarre abduction report made for a pretty embarra.s.sing picture.

Of course, once the confidential information was revealed, police officials and prosecutors alike were suddenly tripping over one another in an attempt to avoid the appearance of covert deals and cover-ups. Confronted by the reporter, the mayor himself got into the act, ordering the department to make public its incident report for the original abduction complaint. With the press suddenly baying outside City Hall, the original priorities were all immediately inverted. A week earlier, the bra.s.s had been content to have Worden end the probe of a nonexistent crime with some discretion, allowing the homicide detectives to return to their primary responsibilities; now, these same bosses were being asked in public why an influential West Baltimore senator who had admitted to making a false report had not himself been charged. Was some sort of deal cut? Was the incident kept secret to protect the senator? What kind of influence was used on behalf of the senator?

A steady deluge of newspaper headlines and TV broadcasts prompted city officials to begin a full review by the state's attorney's office, followed by a grand jury investigation. For the next week, there were meetings between prosecutors and police officials, followed by more meetings between prosecutors and an influential trial attorney retained by the senator. One particular afternoon, when Worden and James were leaving a meeting between prosecutors and the senator's attorney at a private law office, they walked out of the building only to be confronted by the same television reporter who had been leaked the story.

"I wonder who even told her there was a meeting," said James, amazed. "She f.u.c.king knows what's going to happen even before we do ..."

Everything that Worden had tried to avoid instead came to pa.s.s. He had wanted to work murders; now murders were not the priority. He had wanted to avoid spending time and effort wandering around in a public man's private life for no valuable reason; now he and three or four other detectives would waste even more time prying up large pieces of the man's privacy. Worden, James, Nolan-they were all p.a.w.ns in a ridiculous game of brinksmans.h.i.+p as the bureaucrats tossed Larry Young's political future around like a hot potato. And to what end? On the day that he had convinced the senator to recant his story, Worden had two open murders and was still actively involved in the grand jury probe of the Monroe Street shooting. Now, none of that meant a d.a.m.n thing. Now, the bosses wanted nothing more than a complete investigation of state Senator Larry Young and his recantation of an alleged abduction. The department would be sending some of its best investigators out on the street to prove a negative, to show that a state legislator had not been abducted by three men in a mystery van. Then the senator would be charged with filing a false report-a paltry misdemeanor-in preparation for a court trial that the prosecutor's office and police department had no real interest in winning. By tacit agreement, the trial would be nothing more than a public display, a show to appease public opinion. And Worden's word-given honestly in the solitude of a beleaguered man's office-now meant nothing. To the department, it was an utterly expendable commodity.

In a brief conversation that occurred a few days after the Larry Young imbroglio broke in the press, the captain mentioned Worden's plight to Gary D'Addario and Jay Landsman. "You know," he remarked, "I'd hate to see a good detective like Worden get jammed up over this Larry Young thing ..."

Hate to see it? You'd hate to see it? What the h.e.l.l does that mean? D'Addario wondered. The captain had signed off on the back door approach to Larry Young; they all had. How could this thing fall on Worden? D'Addario wondered whether the captain was trying to send a message or merely talking off the top of his head. With Landsman listening, D'Addario spoke up cautiously, trying to give the captain the benefit of the doubt.

"Why would Worden get jammed, captain?" he asked pointedly. "He was only following orders."

It would be unfair, the captain agreed. He didn't want to see it happen. At that moment, D'Addario was unsure what to believe and he held his tongue behind his teeth. If the captain's comment was a grant of immunity-a suggestion that they could both skate any controversy by sacrificing Worden-then D'Addario hoped that his own response was enough to sink the plan. If the captain was just spouting off and not thinking about the implications, better to just let it pa.s.s.

Landsman and D'Addario both left the captain's office confused. Perhaps the idea of Worden as a scapegoat was coming from the captain, perhaps from someone higher up. Perhaps they were misreading the comment. There was no way for D'Addario to know, but he and Landsman agreed that if the idea of burning Worden ever took solid form, they would have to go to war with the captain and burn every last bridge. Even to someone as jaded by command staff ethics as D'Addario, the idea of Worden as a sacrificial lamb was unbelievable. Worden was one of the best men in the unit, yet in a crisis, he was being considered as fodder.

The defense of Donald Worden in the captain's office was a subdued affair, but D'Addario's quiet refusal to burn a detective was soon known to the entire s.h.i.+ft. It was, the detectives agreed, one of LTD's finer moments and proof positive that he was a man that other men could follow.

It had been one thing, after all, for D'Addario to cater a bit to the chain of command when the clearance rate was low; that cost nothing and allowed his detectives to do their work with only a minimum of interference from the bosses. Besides, the same clearance rate that had made D'Addario seem vulnerable earlier in the year was now his ally. Even with the summer homicide deluge on them, the rate was now hovering at 70 percent, and the lieutenant's leaders.h.i.+p, which had earlier been open to question, was once again of some value to the bosses. For D'Addario, the worm had turned.

But even if the rate had been low, D'Addario would have felt obligated to speak up in the captain's office. Worden in a jackpot? Donald Worden? The Big Man? What the h.e.l.l could the bosses be thinking? However seriously the idea had been considered, if it had really been considered at all, there was no further mention of it after D'Addario's conversation with the captain. And yet the lieutenant knew that his defense of Worden could only go so far; in the end, Worden might not be abused for his part in the Larry Young fiasco, but the detective was most certainly correct in believing that he had already been badly used.

Worden had given another man-a politician, of course, but a man nonetheless-his promise. And now, for the sake of its own public image, the police department and the mayor's office were proving just how much such a promise was worth.

Still, even a badly used detective has to eat, and on this summer morning, Worden mixes his anger with a little patience as he waits for Eddie and Dave Brown to return from their murder scene. When Dave Brown finally returns to the office, he glides gently into the coffee room, conscious of Worden's week-long anger. Wordless, he lays the egg sandwich directly in front of the Big Man, then swings back toward his own desk.

"What do I owe you?" asks Worden.

"I covered it."

"No. What do I owe you?"

"That's okay, bunk. I'll get you next time."

Worden shrugs, then sits back to pick at his breakfast. McLarney was off last night, and as senior man, Worden had worked the midnight s.h.i.+ft as the acting supervisor. It had been miserable and now Worden can look forward to another full s.h.i.+ft of shepherding witnesses to and from the grand jury that is hearing the Larry Young case. The whole fiasco would probably consume the rest of the week.

"What did you have out there?" Worden asks Dave Brown.

"Stone f.u.c.king whodunit."

"Hmmm."

"Dead yo in a low-rise courtyard. When we rolled him, he still had his own gun in his pants. That bad boy was c.o.c.ked, too, with one in the chamber."

"Someone was quicker on the draw, huh?" offers Rick James from the other end of the room. "Where's he shot?"

"Top of the head. Like the shooter was above him or maybe caught him when he was ducking down."

"Ouch."

"He's got an exit wound in the neck and we got the bullet, but it's all f.u.c.ked up, pancaked like. No good for comparison."

James nods.

"I need a car for the morgue," says Brown.

"Take this one," says James, tossing the keys. "We can walk over to the courthouse."

"I don't know about that, Rick," says Worden with bitter sarcasm. "I don't know if we can give him a car to do real police work. If he was investigating a senator or something like that, it would be one thing. But I don't think he gets a car for a murder ..."

James shakes his head. "Hey, they can do whatever they want," he tells Worden. "I'm just happy to be making money again."

"Oh h.e.l.l yeah," says Dave Brown. "More money than I'm gonna make on this murder, I'll bet."

"That's right," says Worden. "For purposes of the Larry Young investigation, the overtime cap has been lifted. From now on, I won't be working murders anymore. There's just no money in it ..."

Worden lights another Backwoods and leans back against the green bulkhead, thinking that the joke is both funny and unfunny.

Three weeks ago, the officer who discovered the body of John Randolph Scott in the alley off Monroe Street went before the same grand jury and refused to answer any questions about the unexplained death of a man whom he had been pursuing. Sergeant John Wiley read a brief statement to the grand jury, complaining about having been treated like a suspect in the murder, then invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Wiley was not offered immunity by the prosecutors and he subsequently walked out of the grand jury, effectively sending the Monroe Street investigation into a long, final stall. In the absence of any other definitive evidence, Tim Doory, the lead prosecutor, did not ask the grand jury for any indictment. In fact, Doory had to do some fast talking to keep the grand jurors from issuing any indictments; after hearing Worden and James testify about the contradictory statements made by officers involved in the pursuit of John Scott, several members of the panel were more than ready to hand up a charge until Doory convinced them that the case could not be successfully prosecuted. Indict it now and we'll lose it on the merits, he told them. And then, even if we get fresh evidence a year from now, we've played our hand. Double jeopardy says a man can't be tried twice for the same crime.

Doory's speech effectively closed the Monroe Street investigation, leaving both Worden and James with a bad taste. Doory was a good lawyer, a careful prosecutor, but both detectives were tempted to second-guess the decision not to indict: "If the suspect was Joe the Rag Man," James declared at one point, "he'd have been charged."

Instead, the Monroe Street investigation was consigned to a separate file drawer in the admin lieutenant's office-a burial apart from the other open cases, an interment that befitted the only unsolved police-involved shooting in the department's history.

After months of work, that outcome was hard enough for Worden to swallow. And on the board, meanwhile, the names of two March murder victims were still written in red next to Worden's initial. Sylvester Merriman waited for the Big Man to find that missing witness, the teenage runaway from the group home; Dwayne d.i.c.kerson waited for Worden to shake something loose from the neighborhood around Ellamont Avenue. And for the rest of this week as well, McLarney's squad would be working a midnight s.h.i.+ft, virtually a.s.suring Worden that he would catch a fresh one before Sat.u.r.day. The last six months had left him with a full, heaping plate of bone and gristle. Yet the city of Baltimore was paying him unlimited OT to chew on a wounded politician's leg.

"I'll tell you this," the Big Man tells Rick James in between bites of the sandwich. "This is the last time I let myself be used. I'm not here to do their dirty work."

James says nothing.

"I don't give a d.a.m.n about Larry Young, but you give a man your word ..."

Worden's word. It was a rock in the Northwest District, and it was good as gold when he was back in the old escape and apprehension unit. h.e.l.l, if you found yourself in a room with a CID robbery detective by the name of Worden, you took anything said to you there as fact. But this was the homicide unit-land of the forgotten promise-and Worden is again being made to understand that at any given moment, the bosses own the rulebook.

"No matter what happens," he tells James, blowing cigar smoke toward the window. "They can't take your EOD away from you."

James nods; the comment is anything but a non sequitur. Worden's Entrance On Duty date is 1962. He's got the mandatory twenty-five plus one for good measure; Worden can go out on a full pension in the time it takes to type up the forms.

"I can always make money building decks and putting up drywall ..."

The last natural police detective in America slinging s.p.a.ckle. It's a depressing image, and James says nothing.

"... or delivering furs. There's a lot of money in furs."

Worden finishes breakfast with another cup of black coffee, followed by another cigar. Then he cleans the desk and waits for the 9:00 A.M. A.M. s.h.i.+ft at the courthouse in cold, empty silence. s.h.i.+ft at the courthouse in cold, empty silence.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29.

Fred Ceruti knows it's a bad one when he turns the corner on Whittier and sees the ambulance. Time of call was 0343 and that was a half an hour ago, he calculates, so what the h.e.l.l is the guy still doing in the ambo?

The detective edges the Cavalier up behind the red glow of the medic unit's emergency lights, then stares for a moment at the frenzied paramedics in the rear of the ambulance. Standing on the ambo's rear running board, a Western uniform looks back at Ceruti and gives a quick thumb's down.

"He don't look so hot," says the uniform as Ceruti gets out of his car and steps toward the red strobes. "They've been here twenty minutes and he still ain't stable."

"Where's he hit?"

"Head shot. One in the arm too."

The victim is writhing on his litter, moaning, with his legs buckling back and forth in slow repet.i.tion-outward at the knees, inward at the toes-an involuntary movement that tells a homicide detective to post the vacancy sign. When a head-shot victim starts dancing on his ambo litter-"doing the Funky Chicken," Jay Landsman calls it-you can write it down as a murder.

Ceruti watches the paramedics struggle as they begin working a pair of pressure pants around the victim's legs. Fully inflated with air, the device greatly constricts blood flow to the lower extremities, thereby maintaining blood pressure in the head and torso. In Ceruti's mind, the pressure pants are as much of a threat as anything else; the d.a.m.n things can keep a man alive until he arrives at an emergency room, but the trauma team eventually has to deflate those bad boys, and at that point, blood pressure takes a nose dive and all h.e.l.l breaks loose.

"Where's he going?" Ceruti asks.

"Shock-Trauma, if we can stabilize him," says the ambo driver. "But I mean, s.h.i.+t, we haven't been able to get him leveled out."

Ceruti looks up and down Whittier Avenue and reads the scene like a short grocery list. Dark side street. Ambush. No witnesses. No physical evidence. Probable drug murder. Don't die on me, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Don't you dare go and die on me.

"Are you the first officer?"

"Yeah. Seven-A-thirty-four unit."

Ceruti begins collecting the particulars in his notebook, then follows the uniform to an alleyway between the rowhouses at 2300 and 2302.

"We got the call as shots fired and found him lying right there, head to the wall. He still had this in his waistband when we rolled him."

The patrolman holds up a .38 five-shot.

No good, thinks Ceruti, no good at all. His last case was also a drug murder from the Western. Boy by the name of Stokes shot down in an alley off Carrollton, skinny kid who turned out to be HIV-positive when they got him down to the ME's office. That case, too, is still open.

Ceruti fills a couple of pages in his notepad, then walks a block and a half east to a corner pay phone to call for reinforcements. Landsman answers the phone on the first ring.

"Hey, Jay," says the detective, "this guy didn't look good in the ambo."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. He's shot in the head and it's gonna be a murder. You better wake Dunnigan up ..."

No, Landsman tells him. Not this time.

"Whoa, Jay. I had the last one ..."

"It's your call, Fred. Do what you got to do. Are you sending anyone down here?"

"There's no one to send. There aren't any witnesses or anything close."

"Okay, Fred. Gimme a call when you finish up at the scene."

Ceruti slams the receiver into its cradle, cursing his sergeant bitterly. The brief conversation has left him with no doubt that Landsman is trying to f.u.c.k him, sending him out on calls alone and holding back when he calls for help. It was the same thing on the Stokes homicide last month and on the beating in the Southwest back in April. Those are the last two homicides handled by Landsman's squad and Ceruti was the primary on both; this guy here on Whittier makes three in a row. Landsman reads the board, Ceruti tells himself. He knows what's up. So why the h.e.l.l doesn't he get on Dunnigan and send his a.s.s out here to pick up this murder?

Ceruti knows the answer. At least he thinks he does. He isn't the golden boy of Landsman's squad, not by a long shot. He and Pellegrini arrived at the same time, but it was Pellegrini who caught the interest of the sergeant, Pellegrini with whom Landsman preferred to handle calls. Tom is not only a prospect but a sidekick for his sergeant, a straight man for the situation comedy in which Landsman lives. Two or three good cases and Tom is suddenly a prodigy, a candidate for rookie of the year. Ceruti is simply the other one, the dime-a-dozen new kid from the districts. And now he is alone.

Ceruti makes his way back from the pay phone just as the ambo is pulling away. He tries to forget the conversation with Landsman and do what he needs to do, working what little there is of this murder-to-be. One of the uniforms manages to find a spent bullet on a nearby stoop, a .38 or .32 from the look of it, but too badly mutilated to be of any use in a ballistics comparison. A lab tech arrives a few minutes later to bag the bullet and take scene photos. Ceruti wanders back to the pay phone to tell Landsman that he's on his way in.

That's his intention, anyway, until he spots a heavyset woman on an Orem Avenue porch, watching him strangely as he walks toward the phone. He changes direction and saunters up to the house as casually as possible, given that it's four in the morning.

Incredibly, she saw them. More incredible still, she is willing to tell Ceruti what she saw. There were three of them running after the sound of shots, sprinting down the street toward one of the houses at the other end of Orem. No, she didn't recognize them, but she saw them. Ceruti asks several more questions and the woman becomes nervous-understandably, since she still has to live in this neighborhood. If he takes her off the porch now, Ceruti tells the whole street that she's a witness. Instead, he leaves with a name and phone number.

Back at the homicide office, Landsman is watching the overnight news channel when Ceruti returns and throws the notepad down on a desk.

"Hey, Fred," says Landsman coolly. "How'd it go out there?"

Ceruti glares at him, then shrugs.

Landsman turns back to the television. "Maybe you'll get a call on it."

"Yeah. Maybe."

From Ceruti's point of view, his sergeant is being senselessly cruel. But for Landsman, the equation is simple. A new man comes up and you show him the ropes, carrying him along on a few cases until he knows the game. If you can, you may even throw him a few dunkers to feed his confidence. But up in homicide, that's about it for the orientation program. After that, it's sink or swim.

It is true that Landsman thinks the world of Pellegrini; it is also true that he would rather work a murder with Pellegrini than with anyone else in the squad. But Ceruti has had a year of handling calls with Dunnigan or Requer watching over him; he isn't exactly being thrown naked to the wolves here. In that sense, he is right to find meaning in the fact that he has worked the squad's last three murders and worked them alone. They were homicides and he's a homicide detective and, in Landsman's mind, now is the time to see if Ceruti can find the meaning in that.

Fred Ceruti is a good cop, brought to homicide by the captain after four years' experience in the Eastern District. He did some respectable plainclothes work in the ops unit there, and in a department where affirmative action is a standing policy, a good black plainclothesman is going to get noticed. But still, CID homicide after only four years of experience is a hard road for anyone to walk, and the other sixth-floor units were littered with detectives who had been bounced from the Crimes Against Persons section. At crime scenes and during interrogations, things that could never slip past a more experienced investigator could still elude Ceruti. Such limitations weren't immediately noticeable when he was working cases as a secondary investigator with Dunnigan or Requer. Nor did they become immediately apparent when Landsman began sending him out alone on calls four months ago.

Many of Ceruti's first solo flights were successes, but those cases were largely stone dunkers-the February stabbing death of a Block prost.i.tute came complete with three witnesses, and the suspect in the April bludgeoning from the Southwest was identified by patrol officers well before any detective's arrival.

But a double murder from January, a pair of drug killings at an east side stash house, had been cleared only after some acrimony between Ceruti and his sergeant. In that case, Ceruti had been reluctant to charge a suspect with a case that consisted of one reluctant witness. Landsman, however, needed to get those two murders off the board, and when Dunnigan was later able to pressure the witness into a full statement, the case was sent to the grand jury over Ceruti's objections. Substantively, Ceruti had been right-the weak case was ultimately dismissed before trial by prosecutors-but in practical, political terms, the late clearance made the new detective appear unaggressive. Likewise, the Stokes case, the back alley drug slaying from the Western, did not go well either. There, too, Ceruti had to his credit found a woman who had seen the fleeing gunmen, but he elected not to bring her downtown at the time. Considering the risk to a known witness, this was not the worst decision; Edgerton, for example, left his witness at the scene of that Payson Street shooting last month. The difference was that Edgerton put his case in the black, and in the real world, a detective can do anything he wants as long as the cases go down.

The fact that a new detective such as Ceruti was now looking at two consecutive open murders did not in itself const.i.tute a threat. After all, neither Joseph Stokes nor Raymond Hawkins, the dying man on Whittier Street, was going to be mistaken for a taxpayer, and in practice, a homicide detective could go a fairly long time without typing a prosecution report so long as none of the cases was a red ball. In the end, therefore, Ceruti's sin would not be that two drug murders stayed open. The sin was more basic. Ceruti would be brought down by willful neglect of the police department's First Commandment: Cover Thine a.s.s.

A little more than a month from now, Ceruti will be down on the captain's carpet for the Stokes murder, in particular. Taxpayer or no, the thirty-two-year-old victim in that case turns out to be the brother of a civilian communications clerk for the department. By virtue of that position, she knows enough about the police department to find the homicide unit and make repeated inquiries about the status of the investigation. In truth, the status of the investigation is that it has no status. There are no fresh leads and the woman who witnessed the flight of the shooters can identify no one. Ceruti puts the clerk off for a time, but eventually the woman directs a complaint to his superiors. And when those superiors pull the case file, they find nothing. No office report, no follow-ups, no paper trail doc.u.menting either progress or lack of it. And when the captain learns that Ceruti left breathing witnesses at his last two murder scenes, things go from bad to worse.

"That's the first thing you're supposed to learn up here," Eddie Brown later tells Ceruti. "No matter what, you always cover yourself in the case file. You write up everything so that no one can come back and second-guess what you did."