Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets Part 33

In the end, it is not Landsman who brings the empty case file into the captain's office; he is on vacation at the time and Roger Nolan is the supervisor a.s.signed to handle the woman's complaint. For that reason, Landsman will later insist to anyone who will listen that he played no part in Ceruti's misfortune. That is true in only the strictest sense, of course. In fact, Landsman sent him out alone on those murders with an air of practiced noncommitment, waiting to see if his detective would stand or fall. Ceruti may have been wrong to think that his sergeant was out to screw him, but he was right to believe that, in the end, Landsman did little to save him from being screwed.

It is altogether sad and painful, particularly because Ceruti is a decent guy, an intelligent, good-humored addition to the homicide unit's camaraderie. But by summer's end, the complaints about the Stokes case will reach a natural resolution. The captain and D'Addario will keep Ceruti on the sixth floor, of course; they owe him that much, though such considerations are of small consolation to Ceruti. By September, he will be a vice detective, honing himself on wh.o.r.es and pimps and numbers runners in an office three doors down the hall from homicide. And the proximity alone will make for hard moments.

A week after the transfer, Ceruti is standing with another vice detective in the sixth-floor lobby when an elevator suddenly disgorges Landsman, who looks blankly at the detective.

"Hey, Fred, how's it going?"

Ceruti stares angrily and Landsman moves past him, seemingly oblivious.

"You tell me," asks Ceruti, turning to his companion. "How cold was that?"

THURSDAY, JUNE 30.

"I hear what you're saying," Terry McLarney tells him. "I just don't believe you really mean it."

Worden shrugs.

"You don't want to leave like this, Donald. You'd f.u.c.king hate it. You know you would."

"Watch me."

"No, you're just p.i.s.sed off. Give it time."

"I've given it a lot of time. I've given it twenty-six years."

"That's what I mean."

Worden looks at him.

"What else are you gonna do with yourself? You'd be bored s.h.i.+tless."

Worden says nothing for a moment, then pulls out the keys to his pickup. "It's getting late, Terry. Time to be heading down the road."

"Wait a minute," says McLarney, turning toward a brick wall at the edge of the lot. "I gotta take a leak. Don't leave yet."

Don't leave yet. Don't give up on a long, dangling conversation between two white men in rumpled suits, two refugees who have been standing in an empty parking lot off the 200 block of West Madison Street for more than an hour. It is three in the morning, and the two-story Formstone structure on the opposite side of the street, an establishment that trades as Kavanaugh's Irish Tavern, sits dark and empty, having expectorated four or five homicide detectives more than an hour ago. The two white men are the only remaining patrons, and they have but one can of warm beer remaining. Why in the world would anyone even think of leaving?

"Listen to me, Donald," says McLarney, returning. "This is your job. This is what you do."

Worden shakes his head. "This is what I do now," he says. "I can always change jobs."

"You can't change."

Worden glares at his sergeant.

"I mean you don't want to change. Why would you want to change? How many other people can do what you do?"

McLarney pauses, hoping that some of this-any of it-will touch a nerve. G.o.d knows he means every word of it. Worden was struggling, true, but even the man's most mediocre year is worth any aggravation. For a squad sergeant, having Worden working for you was like having s.e.x: When it was good it was great, and even when it wasn't so hot, it was still pretty d.a.m.n good.

In the last week alone, Worden proved as much by clearing two murders on nothing less than instinct and talent. He made it all look effortless and elegant, even as the stink of the Larry Young debacle was still hanging in the air.

Six days ago, Worden and Rick James caught a stabbing up on Jasper Street, a twenty-three-year-old black kid half-naked under b.l.o.o.d.y sheets in a second-floor bedroom. The two detectives took one look at their victim and knew immediately that they were dealing with a dispute between h.o.m.os.e.xual lovers. The depth and number of the stab wounds told them that much; no motive other than s.e.x produces that kind of overkill, and no woman can make those kinds of holes in a man.

The body was already coming out of rigor. It was a humid night, and the temperature in that rowhouse had to be 110 on the upper floors: still, the two men refused to rush their scene. Several times, when the heat became too much for him, Worden stepped out onto the street and sat for a moment on the corner bench, sipping quietly on a convenience store soda. They stayed with that scene for hours, with James working the second floor and the area immediately surrounding the body. Worden wandered through the rest of the house, looking for anything out of place. In the third-floor bedroom, the killer had apparently yanked a VCR off its table and pushed the appliance halfway into a plastic garbage bag before giving up on the theft and fleeing. Was it really a robbery? Or was someone trying to make it look like a robbery?

Eventually, Worden got down to the kitchen, where he found the sink half-filled with dirty water. Reaching down gingerly, he pulled the drain and the sink emptied slowly, revealing a cutting knife with its blade broken. Lying next to the murder weapon was a hand towel still pink from the blood; the killer had washed up before leaving. Worden looked down the kitchen counter at a dozen or so unwashed dishes, gla.s.ses and utensils-jetsam, it seemed, from the previous night's dinner. One gla.s.s, however, stood on the far edge of the counter, alone and distinct. Worden called the lab tech over and told him to check that gla.s.s in particular for prints. Hot as it was, Worden figured the killer might have wanted a drink of water before leaving.

The Jasper Street scene took five hours, after which James headed for the morgue and Worden locked himself in an interrogation room with the roommate of the victim, who also owned the house. The roommate had discovered the body after returning from his night job and told Worden that when he left to go to work, the victim was entertaining a friend he had met at a bar. He had never seen the guy before and didn't know his name.

Worden rode the roommate hard, seizing on the fact that he was out working while his bunky was lazing around the house with some new man.

"You didn't like that, did you?"

"I didn't care."

"You didn't care?"

"No."

"I know that would make me angry."

"I wasn't angry."

The man held firm to his story and Worden was left with nothing, or so it seemed until later that afternoon, when the Printrak got a solid hit off the drinking gla.s.s. The latent print matched that of a twenty-three-year-old west-sider with a long sheet of priors. With considerable reluctance, the owner of the house returned once again to the homicide unit and made the ID of the suspect from a photo array. For that clearance, Worden's eye-his ability to see that separate drinking gla.s.s as precious evidence-got the credit.

Four nights later, his remarkable memory sent another murder into the black when a tactical section officer locked up two east side men on auto theft charges and found that one of them, Anthony Cunningham, was wanted on a murder warrant written by Worden a month earlier. The warrant had been typed and signed shortly after detectives from the robbery unit locked up a crew of east-siders for a series of holdups centered around the Dougla.s.s Homes. Lew Davis, a long-time colleague of Worden's in robbery, had wandered across the hall with the news.

"We've got one of them in there now going for a whole bunch of holdups," Davis asked Worden. "You all have anything up there that might match up to these guys?"

Standing in front of the board, Worden needed exactly fifteen seconds before his elephantine memory settled on one name among fifty: Charles Lehman, the fifty-one-year-old killed on Fayette Street as he walked to his car with a Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner. Kincaid's whodunit from February.

"I got one right in that area," said Worden. "You're talking to this guy now?"

"Yeah, he's in the big interrogation room. Christ, Donald, he's already gone for about a dozen robberies."

After a brief parley with the kid in the large box, Worden knew that the kid could indeed put the Lehman murder down. The duty prosecutor that night, Don Giblin, was called down and the negotiations began. The prosecutor's bottom-line offer: for identifying and testifying against the shooter on the Lehman murder, eleven years on one of the robberies and no immunity if you're linked to any other murders or shootings.

Worden watched the kid mull over the deal, then attempt a counteroffer: "Five years."

"You're no good to me with five years," the prosecutor told the kid. "A jury won't believe you unless you get at least ten."

"Too much," said the kid.

"Oh, you don't think you should get any time," said Worden, disgusted. "What about all them people you robbed? What about that old lady you all shot on Monument Street?"

"We're not talkin' about them," the kid snapped. "This is me we're talkin' about."

Worden shook his head and walked from the room, leaving Giblin to cement the deal. It was ugly, all right, but the warrant for twenty-five-year-old Anthony Cunningham went to a court commissioner that same night. Now, with Cunningham locked up, that case, too, was down.

Four nights, two murders. McLarney has to wonder how many other detectives would have noticed that one drinking gla.s.s was a little too far from the others? And how many detectives would have made the connection between the Lehman case and the other east side robberies? h.e.l.l, McLarney tells himself, most detectives can't remember the cases worked by their own squad, much less those handled by some other squad five months back.

"You can't leave," McLarney tells Worden, renewing his appeal.

Worden shakes his head.

"You can't," says McLarney, laughing. "I won't let you."

"You're just talking like this 'cause you're losing a detective. That's what you're worried about, right? You just don't want to have to spend the time to break in a new guy."

McLarney laughs again and leans back against the front of his car. He reaches into the paper bag for the last can. "If you leave, there'll be no one around to f.u.c.k with Dave Brown and he'll go all derelict."

Worden gives back a half-smile.

"If you quit, Donald, he'll start thinking he knows what he's doing. It'll be dangerous. I'll be writing long reports for the captain every other week."

"Waltemeyer will keep on him."

McLarney shakes his head. "I can't believe we're even talking about this ..."

Worden shrugs. "You're the one talking."

"Donald, you ..." says McLarney, pausing to stare down the cross street toward Monument. Worden fidgets, rolling the keys to his truck back and forth on their ring.

"You see him?" asks McLarney suddenly.

"The boy in the gray?"

"Yeah, the sweats.h.i.+rt."

"Yeah I seen him. He's only walked by here four times now."

"He's marking us."

"Yeah, he is."

McLarney stares back up the cross street. The kid is wiry and dark-skinned, sixteen or seventeen, wearing spandex bike shorts and a hooded sweats.h.i.+rt. It's still eighty degrees or better and the kid has both hands in his pockets and the hoody zipped tight.

"He thinks we're victims," says McLarney, laughing under his breath.

"Two old white guys hanging in an empty lot at this hour," snorts Worden. "I'm not surprised."

"We're not old," says McLarney, objecting. "I'm not old anyway."

Worden smiles, tosses the key ring and catches it with the other hand. He told himself that he would be going straight home after the four-to-twelve s.h.i.+ft; instead, he spent two hours on a Kavanaugh's barstool, hurting himself with Jack Black. But the last hour's temperance-Worden had no taste for the Miller Lite that McLarney bought carryout-was bringing him back down to earth.

"I got to get up early," he says.

McLarney shakes his head. "I don't want to hear this, Donald. You've had a bad year, all right, so what? So you get back in the saddle on another case and things change. You know how it is."

"I don't like being used."

"You weren't used."

"Yes," says Worden. "I was."

"You're still angry about Monroe Street, right? We disagreed about that and that's okay, but that's-"

"No. This isn't about Monroe Street."

"Then what?"

Worden grimaces.

"This Larry Young thing?"

"That's part of it," says Worden. "That's definitely part of it."

"Well, that was f.u.c.ked, I have to admit."

"They used me," Worden repeats. "They used me to do their dirty work. I don't need that."

"They used you," McLarney agrees reluctantly.

Worden turns his head slightly, catching the kid in the gray hoody out of one eye. Like a shark circling the raft, the kid is once again edging down the opposite side of the cross street, hands still deep in his pockets, watching the two men without seeming to watch them.

"Enough is enough," says McLarney. He drains the can in one fluid motion, then reaches into his jacket pocket while starting across the lot. The kid has changed directions again, moving toward the detectives from the other side of the street.

"Don't go and shoot him, Terry," says Worden, mildly amused. "I don't wanna spend the first day of my vacation writing."

At McLarney's approach, the kid slows, suddenly confused. The sergeant pulls the silver s.h.i.+eld out and waves it once in a way that suggests nothing more than irritation. "We're cops," he yells at the kid. "Go rob someone else."

One flash of silver and the kid is off on a new vector, bounding back to the other side of the street. He throws his hands in the air, palms open, as if to surrender.

"I ain't about robbin' n.o.body," the kid yells over his shoulder. "You got it wrong."

McLarney waits long enough for the kid to disappear onto Madison, then walks back to the conversation.

"We're cops and you're not," says Worden, amused. "That was good, Terry."

"I guess we pretty much f.u.c.ked up his night," says McLarney. "He wasted half an hour on us."

Worden yawns. "Awright, sergeant. I think it's about time to be heading down the road here ..."

"Guess so," says McLarney. "I'm outta beer."

Worden gives his sergeant a light chuck on the arm and begins sorting through the key ring.

"Where'd you park?"