Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets Part 63

You're about to become the property of that other one, too, the bear of a police with the white hair and the blue eyes. He hires on as a secondary, helps with the crime scene before wandering off to work the crowd. He's glad to be working murders, content to be back in the Northwest on a case. The Big Man began this year in a hole and then clawed his way out, so it's your bad luck to be on the wrong side of the curve.

And don't forget that sergeant, the joker in the leather jacket, who's been riding a streak since late October. He stalks all over your murder scene, sizing up your deeds and fitting together the first pieces of your sad little puzzle. He takes it personal, declaring that there is no way in h.e.l.l his squad will end the year with an open double.

Here's the morning line, bunk: The three of them have their hooks into you deep and they haven't even met you yet. By now, they've marked your blood trail out of the bathroom and down the second-floor stairs. They're already on a Northwest patrolman's radio, asking citywide to have area hospital admissions checked for stabbing and cutting victims. They're working back on the Fullard brothers, learning who they hang with and who hangs with them. They got your number good.

If you understood that, if you understood anything about how they work, you might have caught a cab and gone to a hospital out in the county. At the very least, you might have come up with some story a little better than that garbage you gave the admitting nurse. Cut your hand climbing a fence, you told her. One of those chain-link jobs over by the middle school off Park Heights. Yeah, right: You slipped.

But anyone can see that the cut didn't come from no fence. Not when it's that deep and that straight. You think that'll play? You think the police who has just walked up to the nurses station is going to believe such weak s.h.i.+t?

"Landsman, from homicide," the cop tells the charge nurse, looking your way. "Is this the one?"

You're not about to panic or anything. They still don't know s.h.i.+t: You made sure both those bad boys were dead. You ditched the knife. You didn't leave witnesses. You're good to go.

"Lemme see your hand," says the cop in the leather jacket.

"Cut it on a fence."

He checks your palm for a good ten seconds. Then he looks at the blood on your coat sleeve.

"The f.u.c.k you did."

"I ain't lyin'."

"You cut it on a fence?"

"Yeah."

"What fence?"

You tell him what fence. Motherf.u.c.ker, you think, he don't believe I got brains enough to think of a fence.

"Yeah," he says, looking right at you. "I know where that is. Let's go there and see."

See? See what?

"You're bleeding like a stuck pig," he tells you. "There better be some blood around the fence, right?"

Blood around the fence? You didn't think of that and he knows you didn't think of it.

"No," you hear yourself say. "Wait."

Yeah, he's waiting. He's standing there in the Sinai emergency room listening to your little world crumble. Now he's calling you a lying motherf.u.c.ker, telling you that it won't take but a couple hours before they match the blood stains on that stairwell to the blood staining the new bandage on your hand. You didn't think of that either, did you?

"Okay, I was there," you say. "But I didn't kill them."

"Oh yeah?" says the cop. "Who did?"

"A Jamaican."

"What's his name?"

Think it through, bunk. Think it through. "I don't know his name. But he cut me, too. He said he'd kill me too if I said anything about him."

"He told you that. When did he tell you that?"

"He drove me to the hospital."

"He drove you here?" he asks. "He kills them, but he only cuts you and then gives you a lift to the hospital."

"Yeah. I ran away at first, but ..."

He looks away, asking the resident if he's ready to discharge you. The cop looks back at you, smiling strangely. If you knew him, if you knew anything, then you'd know that he's already laughing at you. He's made you for a murdering little s.h.i.+tbird, tossing you into this year's pile with about a hundred others. The Fullard brothers, crimson and rigored in the morning light of their bedrooms, are already black names on Jay Landsman's section of the board.

You ride downtown to headquarters in a cage car, clinging to that story of yours, thinking that you can still pull this off. You're thinking-if it can be called thinking-that you can somehow get them to believe in a mystery Jake who cut your hand and drove you to Sinai.

"Tell me about this Jamaican," says the older, white-haired detective after dumping you in one of the lockboxes. "What's his name?"

He sits across the table from you, staring at you with those blue eyes like some kind of walrus.

"I only know his street name."

"So? What is it?"

And you give it up. A real street name for a real Jake, a homeboy in his late twenties who you know lives maybe a block or so from the Fullards. Yeah, you're thinking now, bunk. You're giving them just enough to be real, not enough for them to work with.

"Hey, Tom," says the white-haired detective, talking to the younger cop who came into the box with him. "Let me get with you for a second."

You can see their shadows on the other side of the one-way window in the interrogation room, watch them talking in the corridor outside. The old walrus walks away. The doork.n.o.b turns and the younger police, the Italian, comes back with pen and paper.

"I'm going to take your statement," he says. "But first, I need to advise you of these rights ..."

The cop talks and writes slowly, giving you time to get the story straight. You were over there getting high with Ronnie and his brother, you tell him. Then they invited the Jamaican in, and a little later there was an argument. No one saw the Jake go into the kitchen and come out with a knife. But you saw him use that knife to kill Ronnie, then Ronnie's brother. You tried to grab the knife but got cut and ran away. Later, when you were walking home, the Jamaican drove up and told you to get in his car. He told you his beef was with the other two, that he wouldn't mess with you as long as you kept your mouth shut.

"That's why I lied about the fence at first," you tell him, looking at the floor.

"Hmmm," the young cop says, still writing.

And then the white-haired walrus is back in the room, carrying a black-and-white mug shot-a photograph of the Jamaican kid whose street name you gave up not ten minutes earlier.

"Is this the guy?" he asks you.

Christ. G.o.dd.a.m.n. You can't believe it.

"That's him, ain't it?"

"No."

"You're a lying piece of s.h.i.+t," says the walrus. "That's the guy you described and he lives right at the corner house you described. You're p.i.s.sing up my leg here."

"No, that's not him. It's another guy looks like him ..."

"You thought we wouldn't even know who you were talking about, didn't you?" he says. "But I used to work that area. I've known the family you're talking about for years."

The man gets a street name and comes back ten minutes later with a f.u.c.king photograph. You can't believe it, but you don't know about the walrus, about the memory he carries around like a weapon. You don't know or you wouldn't have said a word.

Months from now, when an a.s.sistant state's attorney gets her hands on this case, she'll be told by the head of her trial team that it's a sure loser, that it's a circ.u.mstantial prospect. Which might give you a little hope if the names on the prosecution report were anything other than Worden and Landsman and Pellegrini. Because Worden will pull rank to make a direct appeal to the head of the trial division, and Pellegrini will brief the ASA on just how this case can be won. And in the end it will be Landsman on the stand in Bothe's court, sliding everything but the kitchen sink past your public defender, packing every answer with so much background and speculation and hearsay that at one point you'll actually turn and look at your own lawyer in dismay. In the end, it won't matter that the trace lab let every blood sample putrefy before the trial, and it won't matter that the prosecutors argued against taking the case, and it won't matter when you take the stand to tell the jury that horses.h.i.+t about your murdering Jamaican. It won't matter, because from the very moment you picked up that kitchen knife, they owned you. And if you don't know that now, then you'll know it when your lawyer snaps his briefcase shut and tells you to stand and swallow double-life consecutive from an irritated Elsbeth Bothe.

But now, right now, you're still fighting it; you're working hard to remain the very picture of tormented innocence in that lockbox. You didn't kill them, you plead when the wagon man comes with the cuffs, the Jamaican did it. He killed them both; he cut your hand. On the way to the elevators, you scan the hallway and the office inside, staring at the men who are doing this to you: the white-haired cop; the younger, dark-haired one; the sergeant who leaned on you at the hospital-all three of them now certain and sure. You're still shaking your head, pleading, trying hard to look like a victim. But what could you possibly know about being a victim?

In four months, you'll be a trivia question to these men. In four months, when the carbon-sheet court notices show up in their mailboxes, the men who took your freedom will look down at your name in computer-embossed type and wonder who the h.e.l.l you are: Wilson, David. Jury trial in part six. Christ, they'll think, which one is Wilson? Oh yeah, the double from Pimlico. Yeah, that brain-dead with the story about the Jake.

In time, your tragedy will be consigned to an admin office file drawer, and later to a strip of microfilm somewhere in the bowels of the headquarters building. In time, you will be nothing more than a 3-by-5 index card in the suspect name file, packed into the T-Z drawer with about ten thousand others. In time, you will mean nothing.

But today, as the wagon man checks your cuffs and checks his paperwork, you are the precious spoils of one day's war, the Holy Grail of one more ghetto crusade. To the detectives watching you leave, you are living, breathing testimony to a devotion that the world never sees. To them, you are validation for honorable lives spent in service of a lost cause. On this fading December afternoon, you are pride itself.

If the s.h.i.+ft had been quiet, they might have gone straight home, eaten a little supper and slept until morning. But now it won't be an early night; you've killed two people and lied about it, proving to Donald Worden that he was born into this life to be nothing more or less than a homicide detective. You're the first step in Tom Pellegrini's long road back, the first opportunity for a young detective's redemption. You've become two black names beneath Jay Landsman's nameplate, the last entries of the year for a veteran sergeant who once again has the best rate on his s.h.i.+ft.

And now, with the paperwork done, they might just head for Kavanaugh's or the Market Bar or some other hole where a cop can drink a murder down. It's New Year's Eve and they might raise a gla.s.s or two and toast themselves, or each other, or whatever remains of the one true brotherhood. But they won't raise a gla.s.s for you tonight. You're a murdering piece of s.h.i.+t; why would they want to drink to that? And yet they will think of you. They'll think about how perfectly they read the crime scene, how they had you backing up on your story at the hospital, how they even came up with the photo of the Jake you tried to put it on and how they made you eat that story too. They'll think of you and know, as only a detective can, that police work done well can be a fine and beautiful thing. They'll think of you and drink a little more, maybe laugh a little louder when Landsman tells the stories about his oatmeal box radar gun or Phyllis Pellegrini on Riker's Island.

h.e.l.l, they might even close Kavanaugh's and spend the rest of the night out on the parking lot, matching war stories, trying to sober themselves before daybreak and the drive home to a wife already up and putting on her makeup, to the sound of kids already bouncing around the house. Home to the smell of breakfast in the kitchen, to a bedroom with the shades pulled tight and the sheets disturbed by someone else's night. Another morning when the world spins along without them, another day of another year, measured for those who walk in light and deal with the living.

They sleep until dark.

EPILOGUE.

The boundaries of this narrative-January 1, 1988, and December 31, 1988-are necessarily arbitrary, an artificial grid of days, weeks and months imposed on the long and true arc of men's lives. The homicide detectives of Gary D'Addario's s.h.i.+ft were traveling their collective arc when this account began; they are traveling it still. The names, the faces, the scenes, the case files, the verdicts-these change. Yet the daily violence in any large American city provides a constant background against which a homicide detective seems to labor with timeless defiance. A few men transfer, a few retire, a few latch on to an extended investigation, but the homicide unit remains essentially the same.

The bodies still fall. The phone still bleats. The boys in the back office fill out the daily run sheets and argue about overtime. The admin lieutenant still calculates the clearance rate daily. The board still oozes red and black names. Long after the cases blur or fade entirely from a detective's memory, the job itself somehow retains a special l.u.s.ter.

Every year, the Baltimore homicide unit stages an alumni dinner at the firefighters' union hall in Canton, where a hundred or more current and former homicide detectives eat, drink and carouse with one another in celebration and remembrance of everything seen and done and said by men who spend the best part of their lives working murders. Jimmy Oz, Howard Corbin, Rod Brandner, Jake Coleman-every year the auditorium is filled with men who cling to memories of the hardest job they'll ever have. Not that all of those gathered were great detectives; in fact, some were pretty mediocre in their day. But even the worst of them belongs to a special brotherhood, has a special standing for having lived for a time in the darkest corner of the American experience.

Strangely, they don't talk much about the cases, and when they do, the murders themselves are little more than scenery. Instead, the stories they tell are about each other-about jokes cracked at crime scenes and things seen through the winds.h.i.+elds of unmarked cars; about this asinine colonel, or that legendary, never-say-die prosecutor, or some long-legged blonde nursing supervisor at Hopkins, the young one who had this thing for police. What the h.e.l.l ever happened to her anyway?

At the homicide reunion of 1988, the stories were about Joe Segretti, who at a crime scene in the east side projects of Waddy Court once pulled a b.l.o.o.d.y rag from a victim's head and, noticing an impression of the dead man's face, declared it the Shroud of Waddy: "A miracle for Baltimore," he a.s.sured his partner. "We gotta call the pope."

There were stories about Ed Halligan, once Terry McLarney's partner, who on one occasion got so drunk he dropped a pending case file into a rain-soaked gutter while walking home. When McLarney went to rescue him the following morning, he found the entire file laid out in perfect order on Halligan's living room floor, each page drying slowly. And everybody remembered the legendary Jimmy Ozazewski- "Jimmy Oz"-a true character, who once solved a red-ball case and proceeded to give television interviews from his own den while wearing a smoking jacket and puffing on an imported pipe.

And they remembered, too, the men no longer there, like John Kurinij, the mad Ukrainian who never did learn to curse properly, calling his suspects "sons-of-b.i.t.c.h-b.i.t.c.h" and bemoaning his "f.u.c.k-f.u.c.k" job. It was Jay Landsman and Gary D'Addario who got the call to go to Kurinij's house in the county, where they found his badge and holster arranged neatly on the table. Kurinij was in the bathroom, kneeling over the tub with the bath mat doubled beneath him, his blood seeping into the drain. A detective's suicide, clean and methodical: Landsman needed only to turn the spigot for the water to wash away the blood, leaving the bullet.

"f.u.c.k him," said D'Addario, when Landsman began to lose control. "He knew when he did it that we'd find him like this."

Tales from the sanctum of the station house, back pages from a Book of Mayhem that has no beginning or end. In 1988, thirty detectives, six sergeants and two lieutenants wrote a few fresh stories of their own-comedy, tragedy, melodrama, satire-stories to be heard at many a reunion to come.

The jump in the clearance rate ended any substantive threat to Gary D'Addario's tenure as a homicide s.h.i.+ft lieutenant, but the political intrigue in 1988 still took a toll. To save himself and his men from any real damage, he swallowed just enough to please the bosses. He squeezed out a little overtime, he pressed a few detectives to work more cases, he wrote some memos calling for follow-ups in several files. Most of that could be cla.s.sified under the heading of necessary and normal evil.

True, D'Addario's relations.h.i.+p with the captain had never been close, but the events of 1988 left both men with few illusions. To D'Addario, it seemed that the captain was looking for unequivocal loyalty in his subordinates while offering little of the same. He hinted at an unwillingness to protect Donald Worden during the Larry Young mess, and he was unwilling to protect D'Addario when every fresh murder was coming in open. In the lieutenant's mind, the pattern had become all too familiar.

D'Addario survived it: Eight years as a homicide commander makes any man a connoisseur of survival. Along the way, he managed to get good and sometimes superb police work from his men. But D'Addario was a proud man, and the cost of remaining in homicide was finally too high. One night in 1989, when D'Addario was called downtown in the early morning hours for a police shooting, he heard about an opening for a lieutenant in vice enforcement, and the longer he thought about the idea, the better he liked it. Vice would give him nine-to-five hours, his own car, his own command. He went to the colonel that same week and the transfer was immediately approved. A month later, the homicide unit had a new s.h.i.+ft lieutenant-a decent guy, too, fair and sympathetic to the men. But he had a tough act to follow. As one detective put it succinctly, "He ain't no Dee."

At this writing, D'Addario is the commander of the BPD's vice enforcement section. One of his best detectives there is Fred Ceruti, who still harbors some resentment about the events of 1988, but promises that he will be returning to homicide. "Hey," he says, smiling. "I'm still young."

Technically, Harry Edgerton remains a homicide detective, although the last two years might suggest otherwise.

Ed Burns, the only detective Edgerton was ever willing to call a partner, briefly returned to the homicide unit in early 1989 after completing his two-year FBI probe of the Warren Boardley drug organization in the Lexington Terrace projects. As chief protagonists in a b.l.o.o.d.y 1986 turf war in the projects, Boardley and his lieutenants were believed responsible for seven unsolved homicides and fourteen shootings. The federal probe eventually sent the key players to prison for terms ranging from double life to eighteen years without the possibility of parole. Edgerton, who had been removed from the probe because of a budget dispute between federal and local agencies, marked the November 1988 arrest of Boardley and his men by joining Burns and other agents in the raiding parties.

Almost immediately after the Boardley case was closed, Burns and Edgerton were both detailed to the Drug Enforcement Administration for a probe of yet another violent narcotics trafficker. Linwood "Rudy" Williams had already beaten two murder charges, a machine-gun possession charge and two drug charges in state courts, when the DEA began its investigation in mid-1989; he was also suspected in four Baltimore-area homicides in 1989 and 1990 alone. In March 1991, Williams and six codefendants were convicted in U.S. District Court as part of a federal drug conspiracy indictment. The primary investigator in the yearlong probe was Ed Burns; Edgerton was one of two chief prosecution witnesses.

The success of the Williams investigation, which involved wiretaps, room mikes, a.s.sets probes and the extensive use of a federal grand jury, was such that even Harry Edgerton's critics in the homicide unit had to sit up and take notice. The general opinion was that with Rudy Williams in federal detention, city homicide detectives were being spared three or four case files a year. But within the Baltimore department, a debate over the value of protracted investigation continues; both Edgerton and Burns have been told that after the Williams trial, they are to return to the homicide unit and the regular rotation.

Edgerton did get some satisfaction from the Andrea Perry case. His suspect in the rape-murder, Eugene Dale, became the only one of two hundred homicide defendants in 1988 to be tried under the death penalty statute in Baltimore. (Prosecutors made the decision to pursue capital punishment when the results of DNA testing on Dale's blood confirmed that the s.e.m.e.n found inside the twelve-year-old's body was his own.) Although the effort to pursue the death penalty failed, Dale was convicted of first-degree murder and second-degree rape, and he has been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

If and when Edgerton does return to the homicide unit, his a.s.signment is uncertain; the squad he left in 1989-Roger Nolan's-no longer exists.

The squad began to dissolve in early 1989, beginning with the loss of Edgerton to the Williams probe. Soon afterward, Donald Kincaid departed in a four-squad trade that brought two of Stanton's men to Nolan's crew. Kincaid then went to work for Jay Landsman, and for a time, at least, he was content-and Landsman was pleased enough to have acquired an experienced detective. But within months Kincaid had a fresh argument going-this time with the new lieutenant, who tried to hold some of the unit's veterans, Kincaid included, to a shorter leash. Kincaid's anger finally won out, and in the summer of 1990 he took his pension and retired after twenty-four years with the department.

His war with Edgerton, and then with the lieutenant, points to one of the real truths about life in any police department. For a detective or street police, the only real satisfaction is the work itself; when a cop spends more and more time getting aggravated with the details, he's finished. The att.i.tude of co-workers, the indifference of superiors, the poor quality of the equipment-all of it pales if you still love the job; all of it matters if you don't.

The murder of Latonya Kim Wallace-the Angel of Reservoir Hill, as she became known in Baltimore-remains unsolved. The case folders have been returned to a file drawer; detectives in Landsman's squad are no longer actively investigating the death, though they continue to pursue any fresh information that comes in.

For Tom Pellegrini, the case left a legacy of frustration and doubt that took another year to overcome. Well into 1989, he continued to work around the edges of the file at the expense of other cases. In the end, he found little solace in the fact that the investigation had been pursued with greater diligence and perseverance than any other in recent memory; the greater the effort, in fact, the greater his frustration.

Months after his last interrogation of the Fish Man, Pellegrini came back to the file once more, scanning the existing evidence, compiling information, then typing an elaborate memorandum to the state's attorney's office. In it he argued that a circ.u.mstantial case existed against the old store owner-a case strong enough to put before a grand jury. But it didn't surprise Pellegrini when Tim Doory declined to prosecute the case. The little girl's murder was far too prominent, far too newsworthy, to risk a court trial on a thin web of evidence, or to bluff by charging a suspect in the hope of provoking a confession. And several detectives who had also worked on the case still didn't believe the old man was the killer. If he was truly guilty, they reasoned, three long interrogations would have, at the very least, punched some larger holes in his story.

Pellegrini learned to live with the ambiguity. Two years after walking into that rear yard on Newington Avenue, he could finally say that he had put the worst part of the Latonya Wallace case behind him-and it didn't hurt. He began 1990 with eight straight clearances.

Early this year, he undertook a small but telling task. Slowly, methodically, he began organizing the contents of the Latonya Wallace files, making them more accessible and understandable to any detective who may later have use for them. It was a quiet but necessary acknowledgment that Tom Pellegrini might be years gone before the truth is known, if indeed it is ever known.

Rich Garvey remains Rich Garvey, a detective for whom one year is much the same as the last. His 1989 campaign was as successful as his 1988 effort, and his clearance rate in 1990 was top-of-the-line.

But a look back at the 1988 case files reveals that the Perfect Year was an illusion in more ways than one. For example, the summer murder of the bartender in Fairfield, the robbery case that began when one patron remembered the license tag of the getaway car, ended disastrously. Despite the testimony of two codefendants, who confessed and accepted pleas of twenty and thirty years, the remaining two defendants were acquitted by a jury after two mistrials. The accused shooter, Westley Branch, was acquitted even though his fingerprint had been recovered from a Colt 45 can near the register. Garvey wasn't in the courtroom the day the jury verdict was read, which was just as well: The acquitted defendants marked the occasion with cheers and high-fives.

It was Garvey's first loss to a trial verdict, and other frustrations followed. Another murder case that he had worked with Bob Bowman in December 1988 suddenly collapsed in court when a member of the victim's own family took the stand to exonerate the killer; Garvey later learned that the family had been in contact with the defendant before the trial and some money had changed hands. Likewise, the death of Cornelius Langley, the victim of the daylight drug shooting on Woodland Avenue in August, was also unavenged. That case was dropped after Michael Langley, the state's chief witness and brother of the victim, was himself killed in an unrelated 1989 drug murder.

But there were victories, too. The conviction of Robert Frazier for the murder of Lena Lucas resulted in a life-without-parole sentence; so did the prosecution of Jerry Jackson, the east-sider who murdered Henry Plumer, then left the body in his bas.e.m.e.nt. Perhaps the most gratifying outcome came in the case of Carlton Robinson, the young construction worker gunned down as he left the house to go to work on an icy November morning, killed because his friend and co-worker, Warren Waddell, had been called a d.i.c.khead at work the day before. The centerpiece of that prosecution was Robinson's dying words to the first officers at the scene, his final declaration in which he named Waddell as the shooter. And yet it was unclear whether Robinson believed that he was dying or whether the officers or paramedics had told him so-throwing the legal validity of the declaration into doubt.

Garvey had asked for a quality prosecutor in that case and he got one. Bill McCollum, an experienced attorney with the career criminals unit of the state's attorney's office, reinterviewed the paramedics who handled the call and learned that Carlton Robinson, on the way to the hospital, had openly acknowledged that he was dying. Months later, the paramedics remembered the November 9 shooting call because of the date-they, too, noted that it occurred on the day that the state's vaunted handgun law took effect.

In the end, a jury in Judge Bothe's court found Warren Waddell guilty of first-degree murder, a verdict that resulted in a life-without-parole term predicated on the fact that Waddell had only recently been paroled on a charge of homicide. At this writing, however, the verdict has been overturned by a Maryland appeals court because of prejudicial comments made by Judge Bothe in the presence of the jury; a new trial date has yet to be scheduled.

Still, the case against Waddell remains a viable prosecution, a victory s.n.a.t.c.hed from the jaws of defeat by good legal work, and Garvey, for one, allowed himself some measure of satisfaction at the end of the first trial.

As a sheriff 's deputy led Warren Waddell down the marble stairs to the bas.e.m.e.nt lockup, the defendant stared sullenly at the detective for a second too long. Garvey responded by leaning over the railing and calling to the convicted man in a stage whisper: "See you later, d.i.c.khead."