Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets Part 53

"Loretta?" said Rosalind. "She's my ex-boyfriend's sister. We're good friends."

But Loretta Langley was not good friends with Eugene Dale; they had disliked each other from the very start, Rosalind explained. At that moment, Edgerton had little doubt that the unidentified caller was none other than Eugene Dale, attempting in the clumsiest fas.h.i.+on to blame his girl's best friend for a rapemurder.

Days later, to satisfy himself that he had been right not to pick up Loretta Langley for questioning on the strength of the anonymous call, Edgerton will interview Langley and tell her, for the first time, of the allegation that they had received in the earliest hours of the investigation. Asked if she would have thought of her best friend's boyfriend if told about the male caller, she will say no. If he'd talked to her three weeks ago, Loretta Langley would have been nothing more than another dead end; now she is yet another link between Eugene Dale and a child's murder.

Edgerton arrived at the homicide unit well before Nolan and began to go through the Southern district's paperwork on the rape report. Later that afternoon, well after Nolan had returned to the office from the raid, Eugene Dale sauntered up to the Gilmor Street address. Before he was grabbed by a waiting district operations unit, he had time to learn of the search-and-seizure warrant and to ask his girlfriend one very telling question: "Did they find the gun?"

He came to rest in the large interrogation room and remained there, ignored for hours, as Edgerton proceeded to interview Mich.e.l.le and Rosalind. He stayed there long after Kopera arrived and took the revolver-an H&R .32, serial number AB 18407, a weapon now caked in fingerprint dust-downstairs to his lab.

Long after Roger Nolan escorts him to the bathroom, Eugene Dale is still sitting in the box, bored and irritated. Enough time pa.s.ses so that when Edgerton finally enters the room, his suspect-true to the rule-is on the verge of sleep. As the interrogation begins just after 10:00 P.M P.M., there is no banter and salesmans.h.i.+p; indeed, Edgerton treats his suspect with undisguised contempt.

"You want to talk to me, I'll listen," the detective says, pus.h.i.+ng the rights form toward Dale. "You don't want to say anything, I just charge you with the murder and go home. I don't really care."

"What do you mean?" says Dale.

Edgerton blows cigarette smoke across the table. With any other murder, all this stupidity might be amusing. With Andrea Perry, it sticks in his throat.

"Look at me," says Edgerton, raising his voice. "You know that gun in your linen closet, right?"

Dale nods slowly.

"Where do you think that gun is right now?"

Dale says nothing.

"Where is it? Think hard, Eugene."

"You all got it."

"We got it," says Edgerton. "That's right. And right now, even as I'm talking to you, there are experts downstairs who are matching up that gun to the bullet we took out of that girl's head."

Eugene Dale shakes his head at the logic. Suddenly, both men feel a loud thump. A floor below, almost immediately beneath them, Joe Kopera is firing the .32 into a deep canister of water to produce the necessary slugs for comparison.

"That's your gun right there," says Edgerton. "Hear it? They're testing it right now."

"It's not my gun."

"It's in your f.u.c.king closet. Whose gun is it? Rosalind's? If we show that gun to the other little girl you messed with, she's going to say it was your gun, isn't she?"

"It's not my gun."

Edgerton stands up, his patience entirely leveled by five minutes in a room with this man. Dale looks up at the detective, his face a mixture of fright and sincerity.

"You're wasting my f.u.c.king time, Eugene."

"I didn't-"

"Who do you think you're f.u.c.king dealing with here?" asks Edgerton, his voice rising. "I don't have the time to listen to your stupid bulls.h.i.+t."

"Why are you yelling at me?"

Why am I yelling at you? Edgerton is tempted to tell the man the truth, to explain a little of the civilized world to a man living off its fringe. But that would be wasted breath.

"You don't like people yelling at you?"

Dale says nothing.

Edgerton walks out of the interrogation room with a small kernel of rage growing inside him, a heat that few murderers ever manage to spark inside a detective. Part of it is the stupidity of Dale's first attempt at a statement, part of it his childlike denial, but in the end what angers Harry Edgerton most is simply the magnitude of the crime. He sees Andrea Perry's school picture inside the binder and it stokes the rage; how could such a life be destroyed by the likes of Eugene Dale?

Edgerton's usual response toward a guilty man was a mild contempt bordering on indifference. In most instances, he didn't go out of his way to ha.s.sle his suspects; h.e.l.l, they had enough problems. Like most detectives, Edgerton believed that you can talk to a murderer. You can share your cigarettes with him and walk him to the bathroom and laugh at his jokes when they're funny. You can even buy him a can of Pepsi if he's willing to initial each page of the statement.

But this is different. This time Edgerton didn't want to breathe the same air as his suspect. In truth, his anger ran deep enough to be called hate, a feeling that on this case could only come from a black detective. Edgerton was black, and Eugene Dale was black, and Andrea Perry, too: the usual barriers of race had been removed. Given that truth, it made sense that Edgerton could talk to people on the street and learn things, that he could go into the West Baltimore projects and come out knowing things that a white detective might never know. Even the best white cop feels the distance when he works with black victims and black suspects; to him they are otherworldly, as if their tragedy is the result of a ghetto pathology against which he is fully immunized. Working in a city where nearly 90 percent of all murder is black-on-black, a white detective might understand the nature of a black victim's tragedy, he might carefully differentiate between good people to be avenged and bad people to be pursued. But, ultimately, he never responds with the same intensity; his most innocent victims bring empathy, not anguish; his most ruthless suspects bring contempt, not rage. Edgerton, however, was not enc.u.mbered by such distinctions. Eugene Dale could be utterly real for him, just as Andrea Perry could be real; his rage at the crime could be personal.

Edgerton's response to Dale set him apart from the rest of his squad, but this time there was nothing unique about it: to be a black detective in homicide required a special sense of balance, a willingness to tolerate the excesses of many white colleagues, to ignore the cynical a.s.sessments and barbed humor of men for whom black-on-black violence represented a natural order. To them, the black middle cla.s.s was simply a myth. They had heard about it, they had read about it, but d.a.m.ned if they could find it in the city of Baltimore. Edgerton, Requer, Eddie Brown-they were black, they were essentially middle cla.s.s-but they proved nothing. They were cops and therefore, whether they knew it or not, they were all honorary Irishmen. That logic allowed the same detective who could comfortably partner with Eddie Brown to watch a black family move into the house next door, then go to the police computer the next day and run his new neighbors.

The prejudice ran deep. A man had only to stand in the coffee room and listen to a veteran white detective's scientific a.n.a.lysis of homeboy head shapes: "... Now your bullet head, he's a stone killer, he's dangerous. But your peanut heads, they're just dope dealers and sneak thieves. Now your swayback, he's generally a ..."

Black detectives lived and worked around those limitations, tacitly offering themselves as contradictions to the ghetto scenes that greeted their white colleagues every night. If a white guy still insisted on missing the point, then f.u.c.k him. What was a black police going to do? Call the NAACP? For Edgerton and the other black detectives, there was no way to win the argument, and consequently, no argument.

But Edgerton does have an argument with Eugene Dale, one that he knows he can win. And when he walks out of the interrogation room the first time, he is as eager to give himself a break as to let Dale stew before going after a second, full statement.

Downstairs in the ballistics lab, Joe "No Compare 'em" Kopera, the dean of Baltimore's firearms examiners, has both bullets under the microscope and is slowly turning each slug in the positioning clay, lining up the rifling marks and striations in the split screen viewer. From the most obvious gouges on each bullet, Kopera determines almost immediately that they are both from .32-caliber projectiles from the same cla.s.s of weapon, in this case a six with a left twist. This means that the rifling grooves on the inside of the barrel-which differ for each mode of firearm-carve a total of six deep channels around the back end of the projectile, each channel twisting to the left.

Knowing that much, Kopera can say that the bullet that killed Andrea Perry was fired from the same or similar make of .32 revolver seized in that afternoon's raid on Dale's house. But to say that the bullet was fired from that gun requires more; the striation marks-thin sc.r.a.pings caused by imperfections and debris inside the gun barrel-also have to be matched. Leaving the microscope on, Kopera walks upstairs for coffee and a conference with the detectives.

"What's the verdict?" asks Nolan.

"Same type of weapon, same ammo. But it's going to take me a little while to be sure."

"Would it help if we tell you he's guilty?"

Kopera smiles and wanders into the coffee room. Edgerton is already back inside the large box, suffering through Dale's second statement. This time Edgerton mentions the possibility of fingerprints on the weapon, though in fact the lab tech couldn't lift any latents before the gun went downstairs to Kopera.

"If it's not your gun, then what will you say when we find your fingerprints all over it?"

"It is my gun," says Dale.

"It is your gun."

"Uh-huh."

Edgerton can almost hear the sound of Dale's brain lurching around in the dark. The Out. The Out. Where's my Out? Edgerton already knows which window his suspect will reach for.

"I mean it's my gun. But I didn't kill anyone."

"It's your gun but you didn't kill anyone."

"No. I let a couple guys borrow it that night. They said they needed it to scare someone."

"You let a couple guys borrow it. I had a feeling you were going to say that."

"I didn't know what they needed it for ..."

"And these guys went out and raped this little girl," says Edgerton, glaring at the suspect, "and then they took her down the alley and shot her in the head, right?"

Dale shrugs. "I don't know what they did with it."

Edgerton looks at him coldly. "What's your friends' names?"

"Names?"

"Yeah. They've got names, right? You lent them your gun, so you had to at least know who they were."

"If I tell you that, then they're in trouble."

"f.u.c.k yeah, they're in trouble. They're going to be charged with the murder, aren't they? But it's either them or you, Eugene, so what's the names?"

"I can't tell you."

Edgerton's had enough. "You're about to be charged in a death penalty murder case," he says in a voice rising with anger, "but you're not going to tell me the names of the mysterious friends who borrowed your gun 'cause it might get them in trouble. That's your story?"

"I can't tell."

"Because they don't exist."

"No."

"You don't have any friends. You don't have a friend in the f.u.c.king world."

"If I tell you, he'll kill me."

"If you don't tell me," shouts Edgerton, "I'm going to put you on Death Row. Your choice ..."

Eugene Dale looks down at the table, then back at the detective. He shakes his head and raises his arms, a gesture of surrender, a plaintive appeal.

"f.u.c.k it," says Edgerton, getting up again. "I don't even know why I'm bothering with you."

Edgerton slams the door to the large interrogation room, then greets his sergeant with a half-smile. "He's innocent."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. Some friends borrowed the gun and then forgot to tell him they'd raped and killed a girl."

Nolan laughs. "Don't you just hate when that happens?"

"I swear I'm ready to hit this guy."

"That bad, huh?"

Edgerton wanders into the coffee room for a fresh cup, but after five minutes, Eugene Dale has something more to say. He bangs loudly on the door, but Edgerton ignores him. Eventually, Jay Landsman comes out of his office to check on the racket.

"Detective, sir, can I have a word with you?"

"With me?"

"Yes, sir. That other officer won't listen to me and I ..."

Landsman shakes his head. "You don't want to talk to me," he says. "The only thing I want to do is kick the living s.h.i.+t out of you for what you did to that girl. You don't-"

"But I didn't-"

"Hey," says Landsman. "If you want to talk to me you're gonna do it without teeth, you understand that? You're better off with the other detective."

Dale retreats into the interrogation room as Landsman slams the door and walks back to his office, his day now considerably brighter than it had been.

Five minutes later, Edgerton returns to the hallway outside the interrogation room, now cool enough for one more sortie. As he opens the metal door, Kopera brushes past him on his way from the stairwell.

"It's a winner, Harry."

"Way to be, Dr. K."

"The striation is a little light, but I don't have any real problem."

"Okay. Thanks."

Edgerton slams the door behind him and lays it down for Eugene Dale one last time: A living rape victim who will identify him as well as the gun. A ballistics match to the murder weapon. And, oh yeah, those fingerprints all over the gun ...

"I'd like to tell you my friend's name."

"Okay," says Edgerton. "Tell me."

"But I don't know his name."

"You don't know his name."

"No. He told me but I forgot. But his nickname is Lips. He lives in West Baltimore."

"You don't know his name, but you let him borrow your gun."

"Uh-huh."

"Lips, from West Baltimore."

"That's what they call him."

"What's the other guy's name."

Dale shrugs.