Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets Part 34

"Up on Madison."

"I'll walk you."

"What're you? My date?"

McLarney laughs. "You could do worse."

"Not really."

"Listen, Donald," says McLarney abruptly. "Just give it some time. You're p.i.s.sed off now and I don't blame you, but things will change. You know this is what you want to do, right? You don't want to do anything else."

Worden listens.

"You know you're the best man I've got."

Worden shoots him a look.

"Really, you are. And I'd hate like h.e.l.l to lose you, but that's not why I'm saying this. Really."

Worden shoots him another look.

"Okay, okay, maybe that is why I'm saying it. Maybe I'm full of s.h.i.+t here and I just don't want to be alone in the office with a mental case like Waltemeyer. But you know what I'm saying. You really should give it some time ..."

"I'm tired," says Worden. "I've had enough."

"You've had a terrible year. Monroe Street and the cases you got ... You definitely haven't caught the breaks, but that will change. It'll definitely change. And this Larry Young thing, I mean, who the f.u.c.k cares?"

Worden listens.

"You're a cop, Donald. f.u.c.k the bosses, don't even think about the bosses. They're always going to be f.u.c.ked up and that's all there is to it. So what? So f.u.c.k them. But where else are you going to go and be a cop?"

"Careful driving home," says Worden.

"Donald, listen to me."

"I heard you, Terry."

"Just promise me this. Promise me you won't do anything without coming to me first."

"I'll tell you first," says Worden.

"Okay," says McLarney. "Then we can have this discussion a second time. I get another chance to practice my speech."

Worden smiles.

"You're off tomorrow, right?" asks McLarney.

"For ten days. My vacation."

"Oh yeah. Have a good one. You planning on going anywhere?"

Worden shakes his head.

"Staying around the house, huh?"

"I'm doing some work on the bas.e.m.e.nt."

McLarney nods, suddenly speechless. Power tools, drywall and all other facets of home improvement have always been a mystery to him.

"Careful driving home, Terry."

"I'm fine," says McLarney.

"Okay then."

Worden climbs in the cab, pumps the ignition and edges the truck into the empty lanes of Madison Street. McLarney walks back to his own car, hoping against hope, wondering whether anything said tonight will make even the least bit of difference.

SEVEN.

Summertime and the living is easy, says Gershwin. But he never had to work murders in Baltimore, where summer steams and swelters and splits open wide like a mile of the devil's sidewalk. From Milton to Poplar Grove, visible heat wriggles up from the asphalt in waves, and by noon, the brick and Formstone is hot to the touch. No lawn chairs, no sprinklers, no pina coladas in a ten-speed Waring; summer in the city is sweat and stink and $29 box fans slapping bad air from the second-floor windows of every other rowhouse. Baltimore is a swamp of a city, too, built on a Chesapeake Bay backwater by G.o.d-fearing Catholic refugees who should have thought twice after the first Patapsco River mosquito began chewing on the first pale patch of European skin. Summer in Baltimore is its own unyielding argument, its own critical ma.s.s.

The season is an endless street parade, with half the city out fanning itself on marble and stone stoops, waiting for a harbor breeze that never seems to make it across town. Summer is a four-to-twelve s.h.i.+ft of night-sticks and Western District wagon runs, with three hundred hard cases on the Edmondson Avenue sidewalk between Payson and Pulaski, eyef.u.c.king each other and every pa.s.sing radio car. Summer is a ninety-minute backup in the Hopkins emergency room, an animal chorus of curses and pleas from the denizens of every district lockup, a nightly promise of yet another pool of blood on the dirty linoleum in yet another Federal Street carryout. Summer is a barroom cutting up on Druid Hill, a ten-minute gun battle in the Terrace, a daylong domestic dispute that ends with the husband and wife both fighting the cops. Summer is the season of motiveless murder, of broken-blade steak knives and bent tire irons; it's the time for truly dangerous living, the season of ma.s.sive and immediate retaliation, the 96-degree natural habitat of the Argument That Will Be Won. A drunk switches off the Orioles game in a Pigtown bar; a west side kid dances with an east-sider's girl at the rec center off Aisquith Street; a fourteen-year-old b.u.mps an older kid getting on the number 2 bus-every one of them becomes a life in the balance.

In a detective's mind, the beginning of the summer can be marked with precision by the year's first warm weather disrespect murder. Respect being the rarest of commodities in the inner city, its defense by homicidal a.s.sault on an 85-degree-or-better day can suddenly seem required. This year, summer begins on a warm Sunday night in May, when a sixteen-year-old Walbrook High School student dies of a gunshot wound to the stomach, sustained during a fight that began when his friend was punched and forced to relinquish a 15-cent cherry Popsicle.

"This had nothing to do with drugs," says Dave Hollingsworth, one of Stanton's detectives, in a statement meant to rea.s.sure reporters and, through them, the sweltering ma.s.ses. "This was over an ice cream."

Summertime.

True, the statistics show only a mild increase in the homicide rate during the hot months, at least if you consider a 10 or 20 percent jump worthy of the term mild. But in the mind of any homicide detective, the statistics can't say a G.o.dd.a.m.n thing until they get out in an Eastern District radio car for a Fourth of July weekend. Out in the streets, summer is something to be reckoned with no matter how much meat the shock-trauma units manage to salvage. To h.e.l.l with the ones who die, a veteran detective will tell you, it's the a.s.sault-by-shootings and cuttings and beatings that can keep a squad running all summer long. Beyond that there are the suicides and overdoses and unattended deaths-routine garbage detail duty that suddenly becomes unbearable when the cadavers are going ripe in 90-degree weather. Don't even bother showing a homicide detective the charts and graphs because he'll shake them off. Summer is a war.

Just ask Eddie Brown on a hot July afternoon in Pimlico as the neighborhood girls dance with each other on rowhouse porches while lab techs and detectives clean up a crime scene. A young man is dead, shot while sitting in the pa.s.senger seat of a stolen car as he rode down Pimlico toward Greenspring in search of another homeboy who managed to find him first. A daylight murder on a main drag, but the driver of the car has fled and no one else saw a thing. Brown pulls a loaded .32 from the wrecked car as the girls move to a beat that has been brought to distortion by unlimited volume.

First a high wail: "It takes two to make a thing go right ..." ..."

Then the ba.s.s lick and another soprano shout: "... it takes two to it takes two to make it outta sight make it outta sight."

Number 1 with a bullet. The song is this summer's hands-down winner for Sound of the Ghetto, with that deep-bottom ba.s.s line and those high-pitched screams on the quarter beat. Thick drum track, def rhythm and some sweet-voiced yoette wailing out the same two-line lyric. East side, west side, and all around the town, the corner boys of Baltimore are fighting and dying to the same soundtrack.

You think summer's just another season? Then ask Rich Garvey about the Fourth of July shooting on Madeira Street in the Eastern, where a thirty-five-year-old woman ends a running dispute with her neighbor by firing one shot from a .32 at close range, then walks back to her rowhouse as the other woman lies dying.

"It takes two to make a thing go right ..." ..."

Ask Kevin Davis about Ernestine Parker, a middle-aged Pimlico resident who decides that it's not the heat but the humidity, then puts a shotgun to the back of her husband's head on a July night. And when Davis gets back to the office and punches Ernestine into the computer, he learns it's her second bite of the apple; she had killed another man twenty years ago.

"It takes two to make it outta sight ..." ..."

Ask Rick James after a summer morning in the Hollander Ridge housing project, where a resident lies dead on a bloodsoaked mattress, having calmly gone upstairs and put himself to bed after being cut by a ladyfriend the night before. Or ask Constantine at his scene down on Jack Street, half a block from the Brooklyn Homes projects, where the wreck of a ninety-year-old woman waits for him in a bedroom with blood spatter on every wall. Beaten, raped and sodomized, the old woman was then forced to breathe into a pillow, finally ending the ordeal.

"It takes two ..." ..."

Ask Rick Requer or Gary Dunnigan about that domestic from the Northeast, the one where the dead man has a hole in his throat so deep you can see the whole thorax, and his girlfriend claims that he routinely asked her to come at him with kitchen knives, the better to show off his martial arts skill. Or ask Worden and James about the loser who tries to break into an East Baltimore rowhouse only to have his own pistol used against him by the surprised but otherwise athletic male occupant. A single shot is fired during the struggle and the dying man sits down suddenly on the living room sofa.

"Get out of here before I blow your head off," the homeowner shouts, clutching the gun.

"You already did," says his a.s.sailant, losing consciousness.

"... to make a thing go right to make a thing go right ..." ..."

Summer needs no motive; it's a reason unto itself. Just ask Eddie Brown about the fifteen-year-old who shoots his friend with a defective.22 on Preakness Sat.u.r.day night in Cherry Hill, then smugly refuses any statement to police, a.s.sured in his mind and in fact that he will only be charged as a juvenile. Then ask Donald Kincaid about Joseph Adams, who bled to death on the way to University Hospital after picking a fight with a fourteen-year-old and getting pushed through a convenience store window, the broken sheet gla.s.s falling on his neck like a guillotine.

"It takes two ..." ..."

Bodies everywhere as June bleeds into July, and even among men for whom a studied indifference to human weakness and misery is a necessary survival skill, summer produces its own special strain of the disease. This is CID homicide, mister, and neither heat nor rain nor gloom of night will stay these men from their rendezvous with callousness. Cruel jokes? The cruelest. Sick humor? The sickest. And, you ask, how can they possibly do it? Volume. That's right, volume. They won't be outsold, they won't be undersold; they will solve no crime before its time.

Picture Garvey and Worden sharing a smoke outside a second-floor apartment on Lanvale, where an aging alcoholic lies dead on the floor, his bottle empty, his neck cleanly broken. Chances are he was alive when he fell to the floor drunk, but was then killed accidentally by his equally intoxicated wife, who forced the door against his neck as she tried to enter the room.

"You want to make it a murder?" deadpans Worden, inspecting and then lighting his cigar.

"We could use the stat," jokes Garvey, equally dry.

"Then make it a murder. What do I know? I'm just an ignorant white boy from Hampden."

"It's a dunker ..."

"I don't think she's strong enough to kill him."

"What the h.e.l.l," says Garvey, as if sizing up a trout. "We'll throw this one back."

Or Jay Landsman doing another stand-up routine in lower Wyman Park, where the elderly occupant of a senior citizens' high-rise has done a header from a twentieth-floor balcony. From the look of things, the old woman stayed pretty much intact until she glanced off a second-floor landing, her head and torso staying upstairs, legs and rump falling to street level.

"She went her separate ways," Landsman tells the uniform at the scene. "So you'd better write separate incident reports."

"Sir?"

"Never mind."

"One guy on the sixth floor said he actually looked out his window and saw her falling," the patrolman says, reading from his notes.

"Oh yeah?" says Landsman. "Did she say anything?"

"Uh, no. I mean maybe. I mean I didn't ask."

"Right," says Landsman, "but have you found the pogo stick yet?"

"Pogo stick?" asks the fl.u.s.tered uniform.

"Pogo stick," says Landsman firmly. "I think it's pretty obvious this woman took a bad bounce."

Blame it on the heat, because what else can explain that rollercoaster midnight s.h.i.+ft in August, when Harry Edgerton takes an unattended death call from a young Southwest uniform, listens for a minute or two, then tells the kid he doesn't have time to visit the scene.

"Listen, we're kinda busy right now," he says, cradling the phone on his shoulder. "Why don't you throw the body in the back of your car and bring him on downtown so we can take a look at him?"

"Right," says the kid, hanging up.

"Oh s.h.i.+t," says Edgerton, fumbling through a directory for the Southwest dispatch phone number. "He actually believed me."

A h.e.l.lacious night it was, too, with a murder, two cuttings and a police-involved shooting. But two nights later, McLarney's detectives are again tempting fate. Waiting for the first call of the night, Worden, James, and Dave Brown gather around the coffee room desk, concentrating their psychic powers on the phone extensions, trying to will into existence something more than a ghetto homicide, something that will bring unlimited overtime.

"I feel it."

"Shut up. Concentrate."

"I feel it."

"Yeah, it's coming."

"A big one."

"A double," says Dave Brown.

"No, a triple," adds James.

"Stone whodunit."

"At a major tourist attraction ..."

"Fort McHenry!"

"Memorial Stadium!"

"No," says Brown, reaching for the motherlode, "the Harborplace Pavilion."

"During lunch hour," adds Worden.

"Ooooooh," says Rick James. "A moneymaker."

Bad craziness.

Or picture Landsman and Pellegrini a week or so later in the Pennington Hotel in Curtis Bay, where refinery storage tanks tower above a battered working-cla.s.s neighborhood at the harbor's southern approach.